Cairo in White, page 13
“They won’t release me without a guardian,” Francine explained. “I’m seventy-two, and they tell me I need a guardian. Can you believe it? They claim it’s for my own good.”
Seventy-two… Someday soon, very soon, Zahra’s parents would reach that age. Who would care for them when the nurses told them to call someone to pick them up? Who would feed them green JELL-O, the color of grass but sweeter than baklava, with a thick layer of sugar on top that shook like the hips of a dancer? Who would change their clothes and wash their powdery bodies, their arms and upper body as lifeless as the sphinx’s sandy torso, with a piece of yellow sponge? Her worst nightmare was that they would find out the truth about her. The second worst was that the truth would prevent her from being with them in those final days when they mumbled about lost relatives and the protective dogs they had once owned in South Egypt, when they could not tell the difference between her and a nurse, and that they would die alone. Then again, without a lover or spouse, perhaps she should have feared the same for herself.
“Francine, what here belongs to you? Let’s gather your stuff, disconnect you from this contraption, and then I’m going to take you home with me.”
* * * *
Aisha was strangely interested in the new visitor sleeping in her bedroom and insisted on bringing Francine all of her meals on a bamboo tray with a flower from the balcony plants tucked beneath her silverware. She was only nine but had the sensitivity of someone much older. She sat with Francine and told her stories of school while the old woman floated in and out of consciousness like a hot air balloon between clouds. When Zahra arrived home at eight one night, her work hours stretched from Francine’s absence, she found Aisha dancing around her bedroom with a belly dancer’s scarf tied to her waist and a second one draped over Francine’s arms. Aisha clapped and clinked to the Egyptian tunes blasting from the pink plastic CD player. As a child, Aisha had loved watching the belly dancer VHS tapes Zahra bought at the Arabic grocery, smiling and tottering around on her unstable legs, and somehow she had absorbed some of the moves. Her daughter twisted her torso at an angle to create a tink-tink-tink sound, then rotated around and shimmied her waist from side to side to create a tat-tat tat-tat tat-tat beat. Zahra had never seen Aisha practice before, but the dance moves seemed as natural as play. With her long hair whipping around her face and her arms circling her head and then returning to her hips, Aisha looked so Egyptian—more Egyptian than Zahra had ever felt as an outcast, if not an acknowledged one—that it took her mother’s breath away.
A few days went by, entertaining days filled with visits from friends and Aisha’s reenactments of events at school, and then Zahra was forced to tell Aisha not to bother Francine as she cried out in pain or dozed with fresh tears still wet on her face.
“What’s happening to her, Mama?” Aisha asked as they quietly ate dinner in the dining room, careful not to clank their silverware against the ceramic plates.
“She’s dying, like I told you she would when she first moved in with us. She’s going to go to heaven, to be with Allah.”
“Why don’t they fix her?”
“Francine’s been sick for a long time, and there’s no way to fix her now. All we can do is wait.”
The doctor prescribed new pain medicines that made Francine loopy. During her last coherent night, she handed Zahra a binder packed into her overnight bag, raising it like it was the Holy Grail, and then popped another pill into her dry mouth.
“These are instructions for all of the jobs I do at work.” She patted the black plastic cover. “I’ve left them instructions to make you director when I pass, and these notes will help you keep the office running.”
“Oh, Francine, I can’t…”
“Don’t be silly, I’ve been training you for this moment since you first started. You are much more capable than you give yourself credit for.”
The next day, Francine slowly began the descent into quiet darkness that ended the following morning when Zahra walked in to wake her and found her unmoving body instead. She cried from the moment she touched the cool, thin wrist, both from the shock and from how much she had cared for Francine. Even as she mourned, she knew she had to prepare the body in case Aisha walked in. Slowly, carefully, Zahra closed Francine’s eyes, laid both of her hands neatly by her sides, and rested her head on the pillow.
That morning, Aisha barely spoke or ate a bite of breakfast. Zahra took a day off from work and let Aisha stay home with her, a rare treat, and they spent most of it on the porch drinking cold lemonades and watching the birds rest on and take off from the balcony railing. The whole neighborhood felt empty with the boys who played football behind their balcony away at school and the parents who raced around in their fancy cars busy at work. The only sounds were the tweet of the birds or an occasional car passing on Wisconsin Avenue.
“I’m glad she came,” Aisha finally said.
She sat on Zahra’s lap, something she hadn’t done since she was a little girl, and Zahra put her arms around Aisha’s waist and squeezed her tight. Soon she would be too tall for her lap, too old for cuddling, and Zahra would turn into Francine, working late at the office because there was no one and nothing to come home to. Perhaps this was why Francine had chosen her, after all—she knew Zahra would be dedicated, but more than that, she knew she would be alone.
“Me too.” Zahra pushed her thoughts aside. There would be plenty of time for them later on, in the years to come. “You took good care of her, and she was much happier here than she would have been in the hospital.”
Aisha nodded and settled back into her mother’s chest, almost too tall to fit under Zahra’s chin. “No one should be alone when that happens.”
Nor, Zahra thought as she petted Aisha’s hair and let her daughter cry the desperate tears she’d been holding back all day. She did all of this for Nor. If only she could have told her daughter the truth, explained what she had done and why, but she could not reconcile it even to herself. During the long nights when sleep eluded her, she prayed not to forgive herself for letting her son go, that would have been asking too much, but at least to forget. Perhaps it was better that Aisha didn’t know. She mourned her brother like she would mourn Francine, without responsibility or regret. Eventually, they would fade like paintings in the sun, just an outline and a wash of color against an ever-expanding white background.
* * * *
To cheer her up, Malena and Charlotte insisted that Zahra come with them to Malena’s spoken word poetry and performance event at The White Dove on Friday night.
“Is this another setup?” Zahra was not in the mood for another failed first date.
“No, not at all. This is just a group of women who love women reading poetry,” Charlotte said in her typical, persuasive voice. “Nothing to be afraid of. Trust me, it’ll do you good to get out of the house and spend some time with ladies your own age.”
Aisha spent the night with a friend, Betsy, who used to tease Aisha but now invited her to birthday parties and cupcake-making sessions at her white picket fenced house. Zahra took a cab to an indie club downtown that hosted ’80s dance nights, alternative punk rock concerts, and of course, feminist events. Zahra had thus far avoided most of those open forums for discussions on sex, the angry voices and bitter rhymes, the dancing cheek-to-cheek so close she could feel the other woman’s heartbeat. Even the idea of being in a room full of silent women gave her jitters. Charlotte and Malena, on the other hand, lived for the chance to voice their politics or make new friends. Every week they tried to bribe Zahra out of her hermitlike state and into the bright, thriving city where drunk strangers greeted her on the street with such familiarity she mistook them for Egyptians.
At the club—a small, rundown building with graffiti art painted all over the front door and alleyways—the overweight bouncer with pudgy cheeks covered in tattoos of tombstones and crosses inspected her ID. Never mind that she had early gray hairs in her long, black braid and worry lines across her forehead. He waved her into the packed entranceway where feminists of all ages and orientations chatted over the loud rock music. And now Zahra, in a nondescript black dress, waiting for Charlotte or Malena to rescue her as she sipped soda so no one would offer to buy her a drink.
“I’ve never seen someone look so uncomfortable at one of these,” a woman’s voice said next to her.
Zahra turned in her bar stool to see a thin black woman in a shiny gold dress sipping some kind of electric-blue cocktail. “We haven’t even started the reading yet, so you may want to leave while you can.”
Her dress was strapless and accented her beautiful shoulders and arms, so perfectly slender that Zahra guessed she had been a model a few years ago, and it ended right at her thighs. She wore gold heels, despite her height, which snaked up her ankles and tied in little bows behind her calves.
“Is it that obvious?”
“Yes.” The woman laughed and held out her hand.
Zahra shook it while trying to keep her own hand steady.
“My name’s Mia, what’s yours?” Her hand lingered on Zahra’s an extra second longer than normal. Her skin felt cool in the body-heated bar.
“Zahra.”
“Beautiful name, said in a beautiful accent. Where are you from?”
“Egypt.”
“Ah, then you and I are neighbors. I’m from Sudan, though I’ve been in this country for over twenty years. Who convinced you to come here tonight?”
Did Mia really want to find out whether she was dating one of the women or men in the crowd? “My two friends, Charlotte and Malena. Malena will be reading tonight, so I didn’t really have the option of missing it this time.”
“Of course, I know Malena. We’re in the same writing group. I’ll actually be reading tonight as well, so I guess I should go practice. Promise you’ll get a seat in the front?”
“Okay, and I promise to wait until after you read to sneak out the back door.” What are you doing? she thought. Are you flirting with her? Zahra liked Mia’s laugh, deep and thick like the cream skimmed off heated milk and eaten later as a treat, and she liked being the cause of it just as much.
“Come find me afterwards. Then you’ll have to stay for the whole show.” Mia threw a bunch of one-dollar bills on the bar and swiveled off the stool.
As Mia walked away, Charlotte jumped up into the empty seat she left behind and gave Zahra a pleased grin. She was wearing a see-through white T-shirt with neon print that stated, in bold this time, THIS IS WHAT A FEMINIST LOOKS LIKE—the same one she had bought Zahra for Christmas the year before, which lay, with the tags intact, in the bottom of her jeans drawer.
“I see someone has a crush.” Charlotte motioned for the bartender to bring her a summer pale ale.
“Oh, no, she was just being friendly since she’s performing tonight.”
Zahra thought of the little tattoo she had noticed on the back of Mia’s wrist, a tribal sign of some kind that brought back memories of the old Sudanese women wandering the Cairo markets selling henna tattoos to tourists. Permanent body alterations like tattoos were forbidden in Islam, as were hair dyes and nail polish, but the Quran said nothing about the intricate designs that washed off in a week or temporary hair dyes that turned black hair red or purple. The more she thought of Mia’s marking, a daily reminder of where she came from and what she left behind, the more Zahra realized she was probably not the only one there who felt out of place against the whiteness of all of the other patrons. Mia, and other Africans and Arabs like her, were a small part of Charlotte and Malena’s movement, too. Perhaps Mia even saw the Sudan superimposed on the U.S. like a screen door, turning every experience into one of both action and memory, the way Zahra did.
“I didn’t mean her, silly. I haven’t seen you look this excited since the time you found out they sold butter cookies at the grocery store.”
“Need I remind you that you ate ten of those butter cookies when I brought them home, just shoved them in your mouth like a seagull with a piece of hamburger bun?”
“They were pretty good…but don’t change the subject, I’m not done interrogating you.”
“Isn’t it time to go in and reserve seats?” Zahra motioned to the bar, empty except for rows of discarded shot glasses and napkins drowned in beer sweat.
“Fine, we’ll continue this later, but don’t think I’ve forgotten about you.”
They entered the reading space, a black box with vertical ladders set up for another stage production and lined with chairs. Charlotte pushed her way through the crowd to steal seats in the first row.
“My girlfriend’s performing tonight,” she told one woman wearing leather pants and a wife beater.
The woman moved over to accommodate Charlotte and Zahra’s two seats.
The lights dimmed, and the organizer, who looked like she had just graduated from high school, explained the importance of art in the war on gender inequality before introducing the first performer, Malena, who stepped on stage to a sea of applause. Zahra, safe in the anonymous dark of the theater, felt her own heart speed up and palms begin to sweat as Malena adjusted the microphone under the heat of the spotlight. She undressed down to a skintight tan leotard and ballet slippers, making her gangly legs and torso look even thinner and her red hair look even redder in the bright light. She made baby noises that reverberated through the room.
“When I was born,” Malena said softly, “I did not know the difference between man and woman. All I knew was child and mother, womb and wonder, followed by a cold, dangerous world. As a young girl, I was attracted to other young girls down the block, always wanting to play doctor,” she waited for a laugh from the audience, “or a knight in armor, rescuing my damsel in distress. And they played along. After all, what little girl doesn’t want to play princess? Until my ma started getting calls.” She raised her voice to imitate a New Yorker. “Hello, Jane? This is Sue. You know your daughter keeps kissing all the other girls, I mean right on the lips—on the playground, behind the bleachers, in the middle of my driveway for heaven’s sake—and you need to make her stop. After all, they might get the wrong idea.” Her chuckle echoed through the audience. “And we wouldn’t want that.”
Malena painted a picture of her life in New York City, an experience so very different from Zahra’s own: a slew of crushes, a coming out to her parents and friends, straight girls who wanted to try out being a lesbian with her, and finally, acceptance. How strange to just assimilate into a community of similar woman, one fish among a school, learning how to stand out proudly instead of how to lie. Zahra was in awe of her friend’s performance, not only because this was the most she had ever heard Malena speak, but because she described the birth of the society Zahra hoped her daughter would grow up in. Once Malena finished, the crowd went wild, clapping, whistling, and cheering for their own daughter, the product of their protests and struggles, who thanked them for their hard work through her art.
A few other women followed Malena, their performances lackluster compared to her passion and talent for imitation, and then Mia took the stage as the final act. Her gold dress sparkled like the moon over an ocean, glimmering so brightly that Zahra closed her eyes to avoid the glow, and her curly brown hair formed a halo that made her look even more angelic. She surprised Zahra with a wave, a little twirl of the fingers by her side, then lost her smile as she started to speak.
“I was born in Sudan, a country most of you would not be able to identify on a map, which sits between Egypt and Eritrea on the border of the Red Sea. You talk about turmoil, about personal identity and the desire to fit in or stand out, but my country is built on turmoil: deserts and rain forests, Muslims and Christians and traditional religions, so many languages that no two people seem to be able to communicate. In such conditions, all we have is our family and our beliefs, our small communities, which work like lines of ants that cannot be disrupted or altered. In such conditions, there is no coming out, only losing all.”
This was the bedtime story Zahra knew, the alternate reality she had played out over and over again in her head, when instead of acquiescing she turned to her mother and father that day and said, “No, I will not marry Ali, nor any other man.”
As Mia spoke, Zahra projected her characters onto Mia’s tale: her mother, weeping; her father, angry; her sister, cast out from society as an unwed mother. Eventually, they all rejected her, either kept her locked in the apartment or kicked her out when she made trouble, and she never saw Jamila again.
She could feel the first tears on her face, hot and salty like those she had cried ten years ago and just as painful. She wiped them away with her palm and ducked out of the theater before Charlotte could ask her what was wrong or try to stop her.
Mia’s last words followed her out the door. “I know who I am. Now I’m just looking for home.”
Zahra barely made it into the nearby bathroom before the rest of the tears came. What am I doing in this bar in the city? She dabbed at her cheeks with the rough toilet paper. I don’t belong here.
“Zahra?” a voice asked.
She looked through the crack between the wall and door, and saw Mia kick off her heels and then walk barefoot to the stall where Zahra stood, watching her. “Zahra, will you let me in? I’m sorry, I should have realized. It’s been a long time since anyone’s sat in the audience who understands.”
Zahra hesitantly unlocked the latch. Instead of coaxing her out, Mia slipped in and then relocked the door. She collected the tissues and flushed them down the toilet, then handed Zahra a glass of sparking water she had brought from the bar.
“Better?”
“Much, thank you.” Zahra was conscious of Mia’s body close to hers, the jasmine and honey scented oils the younger woman used as perfume, the sweat across her naked shoulders left over from her performance. Amazing how Zahra moved through hundreds of people a day without pause, one leaf hanging from a rustling tree, yet now that she was attracted to one, she caught every blink, every twitch of a finger, every step forward.
“You’re a very beautiful woman, Zahra, perhaps the most effortlessly beautiful woman I have ever seen. I want to touch you now, but I want you to make sure that’s what you want, too.”
