The Lost Father (80 page)

My mother was a different kind of person. She was very social. She had a high voice and the sound of her laughter annoyed him. She spent most of her energy watching three daughters and looking for husbands for them.

I always felt sorry for my sisters. They were intelligent and attractive, but their destinies were settled before they were born. They couldn’t go away to university the way I could, and most of their lives at home were very limited, very watched. This was like jail. They could never go out and taste life on their own. Marriage was their only way out.

My oldest sister, Amina, married her first cousin who lived next door. Zohra married an Atassi from Cairo, who was feebleminded. She didn’t want him, but it was not her choice. Cleopatra, the youngest of the sisters, was always my favorite. She and I grew up together. Cleopatra had everything. She was beautiful, tall, smart, gracious. She loved people, was a kind person. If she had been born here, she could have been anything. But there she was married to a bureaucrat, a relative—older, conventional, boring.

It’s like another life, really. Here I do my job, I get up at around nine or ten, I go to the restaurant, check on the morning shopping the sous chef did, I supervise his preparations for lunch. Then I work out at the gym for a few hours. I lift the weights. I’m working on my aerobics for our hiking next time. I’m just a guy working in a restaurant, trying to keep the food coming out looking like something and to avoid the bad cholesterol myself.

I’m going to give you a gorgeous wedding when the time comes. I know just how to do it. It’s my business. I’ve given nine hundred, maybe a thousand weddings.

So you do your part now and find the guy.

You asked about money for your mother. I can’t help you with that, darling. It wouldn’t be fair to Uta. I have to think of her and of my own retirement. But Adele’s probably not so bad off. I wouldn’t worry about her so much. She’s probably all right.

I can’t do a lot of what you ask me. You’re my daughter and I
always loved you but I can’t tell you much more than that. I can’t stand all this confrontation.

Now if we were still in Egypt, everything would be different. I could give you whatever you want. You want a house for your mother. Sure, okay, no problem. If I’d have stayed I’d be running the country now. I really could have, with my connections, my family.

I’m telling you Mayan—I was the John F. Kennedy of Egypt.

Epilogue

I
T’S OUT OF THE SKY
.

What happened next is hard to explain because I became a different person.

Nothing begins absolutely in one instant. Beginnings renew themselves again and again, and what we remember as the beginning—helping the blind man—might only have been the first moment we understood what had already happened to us. But an ending can be instant and absolute, as small as the last match blown out by a breath.

The year I was twenty-eight I found my father. I hadn’t seen him since I was a child, in grammar school. I did not know that he was alive.

And this was the end of many things.

For a long time before, I’d tried to figure out silly things. I had problems with my boyfriends and I knew that was somehow because of my father. In college, my boyfriend and I fought all the time. He blamed me and it was probably my fault. Once, it got so bad, we walked around the block again and again and when we came to his door, he wouldn’t let me in. I fought to force his arms. Later, I felt terrible and wrote him a letter. I said I thought it was because my father had left on a Tuesday.

“Leave your father out of this,” he said.

T
HERE ARE CERTAIN
mysteries that should never be solved. Because they cannot be, they can only seem to be.

I don’t know, honey, he said, his lip lifting a little and eyes crossed in consternation. I really don’t know myself.

Why you are unwanted: that is the only question. In the end, you understand, that is always the question you came here to ask, you crossed the globe for, spent years of your life, and at the same time
as you see his face hearing those words in your voice, you understand too, like something falling, that this is the one question no one can ever answer you.

They will talk. There is so much around the thing. Ruining castles, gardens, cities, work in a restaurant where all the night long fountains spoke the sound of hands running through coin.

But there is no answer. Never. You recognize what he tells you for what it is: the truth. He does not know. At that moment, you understand every time you have been lied to and every time a man told you this truth.

Once, in exasperation, Stevie broke out about Bud Edison. “He’s not in love with you, no matter what he’s saying, he’s not in love. That’s not the way somebody acts when they’re in love.”

I understood now, that is true.

“W
HAT ANSWERS DO YOU WANT
?” Stevie said. “What would make you happy?”

Something that sounded true, I said. But that wasn’t it only. He wants to step in now. He has visions of walking me down the aisle at my wedding. You’d think I’d want that. I think when I dreamed of having a father, I wanted that. I wanted to just sort of have a father. As if you could just have a father.

I’ve got a life and he’s in it. I think I feel the same things other girls with fathers feel, but in miniature. If you would have told me two years before I found him that you’re going to find your father and he’s going to want to spend a week with you on vacation, and you can only find two and a half days for him, I would have said, no way, any time my father would have for me I’d love.

M
AYBE YOU’RE BETTER OFF
, my grandmother said.

W
HEN
I
FIRST RETURNED
home it was spring. I took my bike out in the warm night and rode and rode. My tires were soft and wobbly from the winter inside. And air at the closed gas station was free. The wind, when it touched through my clothes, was still warm.

I was beginning at love. More than ever, I felt behind.

Was this or not? It was more fragile than the mission I’d thought was love. It hovered, on and around like a moth to a blossom, never exactly still. There’s a certain way you feel in a nightgown with just panties on underneath, walking in the breeze. The tree leaves were ferny, light green and delicate against the sky.

Love can stun you still, I knew, but it was not that kind of bond. This was more fallen, of the earth, full of practicalities and chatter.

I began to see the underworld of night. Everyone else was there too, my friends, in the walls and corners.

But it is always a surrender.

I
WOULD ALWAYS WONDER
, how to love. And sometimes I felt, So this is it. This afternoon. We are sunburned from the beach and so it hurts to touch many places and the whole car smells of oil and crumbs, we are in the back seat, him behind me. My head on his chest, my knees bent up against the door. He had an arm around my front, the way you do, a kind of ornament of protection. His skin was a dark olive, changed from the sun to something redder, gold, and his hairs all over it, were black. He had, even a dark-skinned man, seven spaced freckles, and then over the bone by his wrist, the raised pink incline of a bite. His veins were pronounced beneath the skin running into his hands that I used to think too small but which were right now, strong, and the light caught the fingernail of his thumb as light does on fingernails so they shine, not shiny but mat light, the gleam of clouds with a moon behind.

I thought, we are still young. There is one minute left and then we will be dead.

Mai linn was in the front, driving, with her roommate. The car kept moving, we were near home, full of chores and obligations and whines of all kinds. There might be a message on the phone from my father. But I did not know him. His name would go on the list with the others. And now there is no more time.

The problem with forgiveness is there is never enough time.

I’
LL NEVER REGRET
finding him.

I had to find him to stop waiting. And as long as you look for them, you’re looking in the wrong place.

M
Y MOTHER AND
I only talked on the phone now. One day, she called and left a message on my machine. “I’m calling because I’m moving and I want to give you the post office-box number. I don’t know where I’m moving yet. Maybe in my car.” With an accusing cry, she hung up. The next time we talked, she was all optimism. “I’m going on a trip all over the country,” she told me. “I’ve saved up seventy thousand dollars and I’m going to visit Tallahassee, and an island off of Seattle, Washington, and Petoskey, Michigan, all these places I have friends.”

I mailed her letters, one every week. I was too old now to write letters I wouldn’t send.

Finding him has once again left my mother and me alone. A thousand times in my life I have pictured her death. And now it is in a different way. A hospital room lit with floods. We laugh. We are altogether there.

He gave us ourselves back in real light.

Does anyone ever love a person again the way they loved their mother?

S
OMETIMES
I
THOUGHT
that anyone who can do it will and that the only point is to get started as soon as possible because time, all our time, is running out, and the depth of love is only known at the end, from the other side of life.

I
WAS FLYING AROUND
the kitchen making a pie. I could do that. The air had the soft polleny quality of fine white flour dust. I was rolling. I’d rummaged through my pockets for all the dollars and bought the expensive kind of champagne I knew. This was my way of apology. I’d done something wrong and I was trying to make up.

Emily sat cross-legged, watching me, brushing her hair. Jordan was over too. I was teaching him how to bake.

“Do you think it’ll work?”

“It’s look-what-you-get-when-I-hurt-you,” Jordan said. “But you get the pleasure of knowing you can hurt him. The profound pleasure. The exquisite pleasure.”

It was true. I had plenty of energy for the makeup. My mother made up to me all my life. We had no rules. My mother meant to. It was like a lover exactly. The same way a child folds their arms and their lover reaches in and takes them apart, opens the limbs up to the world again.

Sometimes I was dumb in love.

I’
M GLAD
I
FOUND HIM
. I’ll never regret that. But I know nothing I ever do in my life will be that hard again.

Light a match.

Blow it out.

It’s hard to remember, after the end. This all happened very recently. Perhaps I will understand it better later.

I needed to stop looking. I’d lost time. I wanted other things in the world now.

Now I just thought of it less. Everyone had secrets. Everyone owned shame. While I was wincing over
What does your father do?
, Emory suffered from
Where’d you go to college
?, a question I inflicted, I suppose, as many times as the next person.

W
HEN PEOPLE ASK ME
, I say right away I’m half Arab.

“Which half?” people ask.

“Father.”

I
RAN INTO
B
UD
E
DISON
at a party. I was talking about something and I said, my father. “Your father? You found your father?”

“Oh, yeah,” I said. “I guess you knew me before all that, before I was looking for him. You knew me when my family was still almost normal.”

“First, there was no before you started looking for your father. And second, normal, you and your mother normal? It was a fucking opera, Mayan.”

I shrugged.

“Where’d you find him?”

“Modesto, California.”

“What’s he doing?”

“Running a restaurant.”

“Middle Eastern?”

I smiled. He sent me a new menu a few months back, all excited because he’d added an Egyptian dish. It was tabouli. “No,” I said. “Just a restaurant.”

I received three more letters in Arabic from Ramadan that I never answered. Finally, at Christmas, I got a card in English. “I wish to see you again as soon as its posible did you Remember me who was help you for to buy carpet.”

I
HAD A LIST OF PEOPLE TO THANK
. Venise King, Duke Kemp, Marion Werth, Timothy. More. Everyone wrote back but the old man upstairs. He started playing his television loud again. I moved out a year later and started a new life in building. But that whole time, he never spoke to me again. I guess some things, involving strangers, are too much to forgive.

“Remember how hard you looked?” Mai linn asked.

I do remember. But I’m still looking, just not there. I used to think, before I found him, that the sun or the moon had to be my father. And now I’m kind of back to that.

I still haven’t found what I’m looking for. But I am more like anybody else.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the Guggenheim Foundation, the Whiting Prize, the Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University, Leon Botstein and the Bard Center Fellowship at Bard College, Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony, for support, both material and moral, during the writing of this book.