Authors: Mona Simpson
My mother had always followed the career of Cleopatra. We knew that she made a bed of rose petals for herself and Mark Antony and that she bathed in milk. I once asked my mother why she didn’t name me that, Cleopatra. She shrugged. “I guess I thought you were a boy,” she said. We both believed that the greatest career a man could have on the earth was to be something royal or a genius or the president. For a woman, it was to be a beauty.
Most of the names in the encyclopedia meant little to me, except they sounded something like Atassi. I read once about a Palestinian
terrorist named Abu Leila, which meant Father of Night, and I wondered if my father could have been like that. He could have gone back. Maybe he did. When I was a child, he told me once, “Mayan, if I’d stayed there, I’d be running the country now. I had everything there for me, a great career waiting. One of the best families. Connections, everything.” That was before he left us in Wisconsin.
I gazed out the window again, into the gauzy nothing. The encyclopedia was all fact, things hard to picture. The Ottomans built three major railways and paved roads just before World War One. Tuberculosis is prevalent amongst the Bedouins in the desert and in city slums. The Suez Canal construction began by peasants using spikes and baskets, peasants who were drafted into service. Under “Culture,” they listed the Egyptian National Library, Egyptian Museum, Institut d’Egypte. I read about Misr studios and Egyptian General Cinema Corporation. A radio program
Voice of the Arabs
. Under the other Arab countries all they could mention was that Jordan had had a resurgence of folk dancing in recent years and that in Damascus there was a waxwork museum.
I loved the names: Port Said, Port Wish, the Big Bitter Lakes, Small Bitter Lakes.
“Hardly a day passed during 1975 and 1976 without a battle somewhere in Lebanon.” I was in college then, working for the food service. My father was already gone from Montana.
Islam means Surrender.
Vodka made me drifty. Outside the plane was battened in white. It swerved and bumped. I didn’t trust enough to sleep. The metal seemed fragilely hinged.
Once in a school Christmas play I had to read a part from the Bible and I said Syria wrong, I said it like diarrhea. My mother and grandmother were both sitting in the audience and my mother winced.
“Why did you get that wrong? You know how to pronounce Syria, you’ve heard it all your life. Syria.”
I shrugged to her but the reason was because Carl Otter, who was Joseph, had read first and he’d said it that way. That was the same year my mother wanted to forget about making me a costume to be Mary and just send me in a long white muslin caftan she had from Egypt. “For Mary?” my aunt accused. My grandmother and aunt had planned for me to be in royal blue velvet. “Well, that’s what they wear over there,” my mother said. “Might as well be realistic for once.”
Even though this was all against my mother, the whole trip, I hadn’t thought about her until now. Then I felt terrible then for not calling her. What if I died? She’d never know, she’d put together the few facts, geography, and make it all worse than it was. I was taking off on a lark, flying on money I didn’t have, a baffling, staggered self-indulgent search that would benefit no one probably, not the poor, not the damaged, only me at best, and so far I was worse for it. But it was something I had to do, anyhow, the way people become addicted to an abiding pain. The way my grandmother, once she’d laid out the cards for solitaire, had to play the game out and finish.
M
Y COUSINS AND
I had been taken to see
Lawrence of Arabia
when it came to Racine at the Coliseum Cinema. Tickets were sold in advance for the matinee and Gish, in a long dress with a stylish jacket, ushered us to front seats. During those years, Gish was still trying to meet someone. “Where better than the movies?” she’d say. We reserved those seats with our coats, then ran back to the lobby for popcorn and candy. We stared at the bigger-than-us posters.
“She’s part whatever he is, isn’t she?” Gish asked my grandmother. Gish had never had children and she didn’t fully believe that we could understand English, being the size we were. When she spoke to us directly, she used the minimal vocabulary she used with her cat.
My grandmother shook her head, “Yah-sure, from the dad.”
“Does she feel part from over there?”
“I don’t know,” my grandmother said, looking down at us. “Do you feel any of that, Egyptian?”
I shrugged. “No,” I said.
“Well, watch and see if you think this fellow looks like your dad any. I think he’s a real handsome fellow, this Sharif.”
“And see I like the other one, the Englishman,” my grandmother said.
“We’re never the same,” Gish said.
“Well, it’s a good thing we’re not.”
We shared a big paper pail of buttered popcorn and an orange drink with crushed ice. Some other children had to be taken home, they cried of boredom. My grandmother and I sat, transfixed, the moment we saw Omar Sharif, and camels and the desert wind of fine sand. I knew it was supposed to pertain to me somehow, it seemed
important and solemn, a glimpse behind a veil of something that was always there and I didn’t know. It was my one-afternoon chance to see and judge whether it was good or bad, this being Arab.
Maybe my father did look like Omar Sharif. I couldn’t really remember.
Years later, I saw
Funny Lady
in California with my mother and we both took Omar Sharif’s side, against her.
We felt badly, later, when his career fell apart. “I even wonder if he’s still alive,” my mother said once. He was never in anything anymore.
Most of being Arab I learned from the movies. I taught myself what morality I own, brick by brick. There was no rule book bible to hand me. We were nothing. My parents thought everyone else in Wisconsin was old-fashioned. They slept late, tangled under huge white sheets, Sunday mornings while church bells pealed into our bare, wooden-floored apartment. I was allowed to eat oranges from the refrigerator.
And my grandmother never taught me how to think. I was someone else’s child. What she did mostly was show me things. That was how she spent her life herself. Seeing, as she would say, what there was to see. Even the things she grew in her garden, half were wild like rhubarb. She cried easily, she paid attention to children, asked whether our shoes were too tight or whether our teeth hurt or whether we were warm enough at night or needed another quilt. My grandmother had several pairs of rubber boots and was always happy to give me one. But I never saw any thread of sex in her. Her husband was dead and buried before I was born.
Maybe that was what I was flying here for. For sex or the seed of that in me, darker confidences. All I remember of my parents together was that apartment—the billowing curtains, dirt scattered from a potted plant by the floor of their bed, the taste of citrus peel on my gums. I was coming here for legs and for feet bold and unashamed of themself, the flurry of hands before faces near veils, the strike of gold in a nose, lashing a neck from an ear, that music I didn’t yet understand. Something.
My mother was sick. She knew things but they were mixed in her, like bees or plaster letters of an alphabet strewn in drawers. She was not ordered enough to spread her apron over her lap and teach me. She owned a mouth of sex in her but it frightened me. I had seen it open in her too early in bad ways.
I went to the bathroom. Airplanes, like woods and I supposed the desert, made you aware what it was to be a woman and not a man. In woods, you hovered and crouched over a tangle of panties. There seemed something strong and proud about a man peeing in a ditch, singular, statuesque, unafraid. I rinsed my face. I looked bad. Sometimes I remembered what I was doing and I felt like a wan stretched girl, searching the world grimly for her father who kept eluding her, while he lounged somewhere, Persian, tasting, lips curled up petallike to receive some imagined sweetness, like a cloudberry.
Maybe by the time you find the person, they are beside the point. You’re not even sure you still want to anymore.
When my father was a boy in Egypt, during World War II, local papers flubbed. “They stayed”—he smiled all knowing when he told me this—“too local.” He told me these things at my grandmother’s linoleum kitchen table before he left. “The only real news,” he said, “came from London.” But my father was the youngest son of a rich man and so, at age eleven, he owned his own transistor radio. Huna London, the announcer said, in important tones and my father said those two words, Huna London, on all the momentous occasions of his life.
Huna London, he remembered saying to his bride the day he married my mother. “Huna London,” he whispered to her again the night of my birth.
“Can I get a transistor radio?” I asked him that evening at the table, but my mother told me hush. It was still light out there often, when we sat down for supper, just dusk on the tops of the fields.
There were three really good families in Alexandria, my father said. The Rifais, the Higazis and us. We are Atassis. Not only were we Atassis, but my grandfather was the richest of all. At one time, he owned more than half of Alexandria. He controlled the price of wheat in all of Egypt. “He’d get up in the morning and decide, ten, fifteen, eight, and that would be it,” my father said, his hand high in the air, one finger pointing. “And he really did bury pots of gold under the ground, in the dirt, somewhere on his land.” He told me that same night that we were descended from the great prophet Mohammed.
“You are Mohammed,” I said.
They had all laughed at that.
And now I was flying to the Land of Atassis with a passport that called me Stevenson. I imagined a pale pink ribbed desert strewn with
huge silk slippers with toes that curled and pointed up, light green, yellow, minty blue, faded red.
I wondered what my father had made of that poor kitchen table in Wisconsin, the plastic napkin holder, the plates given away free, one with each tankful at the gas station, the rumble of the highway at the edge of our land. I was used to being poor. I grew up there. I grew up a way I’d by now learned to call poor, though at the time we never believed ourselves that, only that the table was our table, the plates our plates, what we ate, our supper. And we knew the land was ours.
Now the notion of a rich grandfather didn’t exactly thrill me. Once, when I was little, I talked to that grandfather through the black telephone in the corner of my grandmother’s kitchen and he promised to send me a sheep. I didn’t know how the sheep would arrive. In a crate? In a box? Would he have holes to breathe through and hay to sleep on and feathery grass for him to eat? Years peeled by and my sheep never arrived. I’d forget him for a while, but never completely. “Oh, lookit here, comere, Mayan,” my grandmother called once, years later. I was curled over the kitchen table making my magnet, studying the library book already years out of date, but we didn’t know that then. I got up and went to the living room where she stood by the window, holding the curtain. There was a full storm, snow-flakes dense in every inch of air. We watched the tiny mail cart jetting through the snow like a motorboat and the small man in his cap, standing out for just a minute to snap open the jaws of our mailbox, stick the mail in and lift a mittened hand to my grandmother—and for all I knew to all the others on the street who spent the storm day at their windows just waiting for someone to appear on their lonely road. It seemed the people there owned endless time, time to wait and wait. It never occurred to me that my grandmother watched for the mail like that for any reason but the arrival of my sheep.
My father remembered sleeping among sheep on summer nights, his head on their sides, their hearts knocking close beneath the skin, their deep animal smell, the reverberations of their baaing, ten times, no, one hundred times stronger than a cat’s, he said. He rode out into the desert on camels with his father and they slept on the sand in tents pitched by the Bedouins. For breakfast, they made him, the boss’s son, his favorite food. A kind of thin fresh bread, cooked like a pancake on what looked like an upside-down Chinese wok. These they would spread with good rich camel butter and then sugar and then another layer of the same until it was high as a wedding cake and
they’d cut you a wedge and you could see all the layers like rings inside a tree.
But that’s probably all gone now, I thought. I doubted the Bedouins, whoever they were, did that anymore. Like the encyclopedia said, they probably lived in city slums, which was too bad for me. I’d always wanted to taste that bread.
Even at the time my father told me, I wanted to know more. “But dad, what is a Bedouin?” I asked, at the kitchen table.
“Shh,” my mother said. She nodded with her chin. “Listen to him. Don’t interrupt with your voice so loud. They’re like Gypsies,” she said.
I asked the question again louder, almost shrieking.
My father turned to me nice, as if it were the first time he noticed anything. My grandmother moved silently through all this, by the stove. When he was there, she hardly ever talked.
“Oh, sweetie, Bedouin is like a job description. They’re nomads. They go from place to place on the desert, following sheep.”
That was, of course, before he left. He leaned his face down close to me that night. “So remember your dad was a big shot in Egypt, Mayan,” he whispered, flashing the smile he was, at least to me, famous for.
I had not seen my father for sixteen years, maybe seventeen. For some reason I went back and forth between those two numbers like rocking on heels, is it sixteen or seventeen, as if that would make some huge difference.
Childhood nights sleeping under a deep sky, rich with stars, his ear resting on the warm jiggle of a sheep’s sheer belly, the moving mass, an occasional low tremolo sound, the sharp dark smell. Those were my father’s nights. He had had time in his life. I had had my nights, too. I slept outside once with my cousin, biting the white ends of long weeds, the first time we admitted his family and all the families we knew were different from my mother. Later, I slept outside with Stevie Howard. I had my nights and days. Our whole family did—only they weren’t together with each other, and the people we lived them with were ghosts now. We each kept our own memories privately.