by Maggie Downs
We’ve played maybe six or seven rounds when the rain begins. It’s only a light drizzle at first, just enough to make the table get slick, the dirt smell mossy, my curly red hair go boing. By the time Francoise stacks the Uno cards together and shoves them inside her pocket, we’re sitting in a full-fledged storm.
The restaurant is already crammed with people—there’s no way we can squeeze inside. Claudette tugs my hand and pulls me beneath a small blue awning near the building. Liberé and Francoise pile around me.
The harder the rain falls, the more physically uncomfortable I become. I need to use the restroom in the worst way.
“Toilet is there,” Liberé says, and she points to a small shelter made from scraps of metal hammered together. It has no roof. At first I think she’s joking, but the other students also cast their eyes downward and shake their heads.
The sky shows no sign of clearing, and there are no other buildings nearby. And using the toilet has become the most important thing in the world.
Liberé pushes her way inside the restaurant and emerges with three different umbrellas. She hands one to Claudette and one to Francoise and keeps one for herself. She jerks her head toward the toilet. “We go,” she says.
These women encircle me, forming a wall with their bodies, and we move across the muddy lot as one creature. The mud squishes between my feet and my flip-flops, and I almost slip. My students squeeze me so tight, they never let me fall.
At the metal building, I use the small flashlight from my purse to peer inside. One side is completely exposed where there should have been a door. The ground is a slurry of muck. I still want to use the toilet, but it looks treacherous, and I don’t know if I can hold myself upright.
Claudette leans over the top of the structure and holds her umbrella there to form a roof. Francoise blocks part of the open door space with her body, allowing me privacy, even though there’s nobody around. Liberé faces me and extends her hand.
“Hold me,” she says.
I am so exposed—my khaki pants pulled down my thighs, my underwear down, perched on the edge of a sludgy slope, raindrops sliding down the side of my face. I think about my girlfriends in California, how we scurry to the bathroom in groups to gossip and touch up our makeup. We preen in front of shiny mirrors and share secrets. It’s not so different, these fleeting moments of intimacy.
I hold my hand out to grasp Liberé’s, and she ropes her fingers tightly through mine.
If these women want to hurt me, this is the perfect opportunity. They could abandon me at this restaurant, far from the places I know. They could do anything—let me get soaked, mock me, taunt me. Instead Liberé gives my hand a squeeze. She’s got me.
Heaven and Earth Meet Halfway
IT TAKES ONE FULL DAY OF TRAVEL BY BUS, PLANE, AND taxi to arrive at my next destination: a hostel near Tahrir Square, the major public space in downtown Cairo.
The hostel is located five stories up in a gritty building. Inside, the ground level looks like rubble, with broken stone, brick, and rubbish piled against the walls, which are decorated with spurts of graffiti. It looks like the place has been hit by artillery. The stairs are blocked by tape, so I’m forced to use the elevator, which looks to be about 150 years old. It’s a cage of black wrought iron, a rickety old thing that screeches as it moves. I close my eyes as I am slowly and loudly lifted to the proper floor.
The door of the hostel looks like a prop from a film noir, something more suited to a hard-boiled detective’s office. It’s a wooden half-light door with pebbled glass, but where it might say “Sam Spade” in gold letters, there is a sign with Arabic words. Underneath that, in black marker, is scrawled “HOTLE.”
Inside the door is a tall wooden desk, like that of a bank teller, manned by a plump guy in a brown robe. When I give my name, the man raises an eyebrow. My reservation is for two, but I’m clearly alone.
“My husband will be joining me later,” I say, and I thrill at the sound of those words. It’s been six long months since I’ve seen Jason, and I can’t remember the last time I used the phrase “my husband” to describe him. At this point, we’ve spent more of our marriage apart than together.
With some financial assistance from my family, Jason gathered enough money to visit me for Christmas, and we agreed upon Cairo for our rendezvous. As a teacher, he has almost two weeks off for the winter holidays. Minus flying time and a couple days for jet lag, we have just over one week together, and I’m ecstatic.
I reserved a room with a queen-sized bed, but when I unlock the door I see two twin beds.
I return to the front desk. “There must be a mistake,” I say, and the man in the robe follows me to the room.
“No, no mistake,” he says. “Two beds make queen.”
It’s not the same, I explain. “I haven’t seen my husband in many months.”
“Eh, I understand,” the man laughs lasciviously, then gives me a firm slap on the back. “You want … ,” he pauses, then makes a circle with the fingers of his left hand, which he penetrates with the index finger of his other hand. “Poke poke, yes?”
I roll my eyes, but my face burns red.
“No problem,” the man says, gesturing to the beds. “Push together.”
The man gums his cigarette while he pushes the two twin beds together, and ashes sprinkle down upon the thin maroon bedspreads. This situation dashes my hopes for a romantic reunion—cuddling in a big, luxurious bed, falling asleep with our limbs tangled together, waking in each other’s arms. Instead, Jason and I will be tucked in to separate spaces with separate sheets, a definitive line cutting our bed right down the middle. But it beats sleeping on the airport floor, like we did in Peru.
Once the man leaves, I have some time to look around. The walls of the room have been painted to resemble the inside of a pyramid. From the window, I have a good view of the city, which already looks far more chaotic than when I arrived. What was once four lanes of traffic has now become seven, all trying to merge together. The streets shoot off each other at bizarre angles, and they are crowded with street carts, people, cars, donkeys, and buses. It’s almost 7 p.m., and it seems like everyone in Cairo has someplace to be.
That includes me. I didn’t realize I was hungry until I look down and see a line of people purchasing freshly fried falafel from a street vendor. I rush to join them—holding my breath as the creaky elevator lowers me back to earth.
When I take a deep breath outside, the air is clogged and dirty and smells of burning tires. It is loud and messy, but also lively and exciting. I can’t squelch the feeling that something big is going to happen here.
IT IS JUST AFTER 4 A.M. WHEN I WAKE.
The sheet has been pulled away from my body, and a man skims his fingertips over me. It’s a light touch, like a butterfly wing or a feather, but the strangeness of it makes me stiffen.
“I’ve missed you,” Jason says; then he bends over to give me a kiss.
I don’t know how to react. It’s been six months since my lips have kissed someone back. Six months since I’ve savored the scent of a man’s neck. Six months since I’ve been held. Jason eases himself into the twin bed next to mine.
“I’m sorry about the bed,” I say. I feel nervous and shy, like we’ve just met. “I tried to …”
“Shhh,” Jason says. “I’m just happy to see you.”
He tugs on a lock of my hair and curls it around his finger. He’s just looking at me. I stare back, like I’m trying to interpret the hidden meaning of an abstract painting.
“Hi.” I can’t stop saying hi. I once heard that goldfish only have two-second memories, so they just swim around in their fishbowl, reintroducing themselves over and over again. I feel like that now.
The moonlight illuminates his smile, and my insides go warm. The line the beds make between us is definitive, but the distance is not insurmountable.
IT TAKES A FEW DAYS FOR MY BODY TO REGAIN THE MUSCLE memory of Jason, but when I do, it’s like we haven’t spen
t any time apart.
We make a small loop around the country, starting with Cairo, where we wander the long, rambling hallways of the Egyptian Museum. There are few information cards posted with the exhibitions; sometimes there’s just a yellowed index card with a typewritten name or date. Some of the pieces have no display at all. We lose ourselves among tables of unidentified mummies, stone panels of hieroglyphs on the floor, broken statues shoved in the corner. Wooden cargo boxes are stacked high nearby. It makes me feel like I’m an Egyptologist in the 1920s, sifting through these artifacts for the first time. Clouds of dust make me sneeze.
I run my finger along a stone carving made by someone thousands of years ago, and I recall the first time I learned that Egypt was a real place: when I was a child in church.
My mom has always been a devout Lutheran, and she carried a fancy study Bible, the kind with a pebbled leather cover, embossed gold words, and thumb indexes for each chapter. Her Bible also contained a maps insert with a 30,000-foot aerial view of biblical lands, the terrain filled with arrows depicting possible routes where Moses traveled and Jesus walked, annotated with Bible verses.
Those were stories, though, and I’d heard plenty of stories. A talking snake. A burning bush. People raised from the dead.
But the photographs in the insert were real. That included an image of the pyramids of Giza—a backdrop of barren, gold desert; colossal, perfectly symmetrical pyramids rising toward the pale sky; camels in the foreground, small dots in comparison to the monuments. I had many questions.
“They’re the Great Pyramids, and they’re a wonder of the world,” my mom explained. “I’ll take you there someday.”
When Jason and I spend a day in Giza, I know I’m doing something my mother wanted to do—and wanted to do with me.
Giza, however, unsettles me. The pyramids themselves are grand, arranged on a carpet of the finest sand. They were built to withstand time, and that’s what they’ve done, though the structures look incongruous surrounded by urban development and modern litter.
It strikes me as strange to honor my mother by walking through enormous tombs. That’s why the pyramids were created, after all. The pharaohs expected to become gods in the afterlife, and they erected massive tombs that contained everything they needed to rule. And here I am, paying to walk around in their necropolis.
What I can appreciate is the shape of the pyramid itself, supposed to represent the physical body leaving earth and ascending toward the sun. I don’t even know if I believe in an afterlife, but I like the continuity that exists within that idea, the concept that the spirit will be engaged in something mightier than this realm.
When I first moved to California, I got a life coach. She was a gray-haired grandmotherly type, as likely to send me off with a linty butterscotch candy from her pocket as a piece of quartz and a bundle of sage. She believed life was as pliable as Play-Doh, and it was a person’s responsibility to sculpt his or her life into what he or she wanted. During our sessions, I told her how my mom’s suffering was making me suffer, how badly I wanted her pain to end.
“It’s time,” the coach said. “It’s time for your mom to go, but she doesn’t realize it yet. Her body is lingering on this plane because she has no clear path out. You have to be the one to tell her. She needs your permission to leave. Tell her it’s okay to go.”
She insisted that these words needed to be whispered in my mom’s ear, and that they would inspire her spirit to move forward to the next phase.
“Only when this pain ends will you be your most authentic self,” the life coach said.
It would be months before I was back in Ohio, and my authentic self couldn’t wait that long. I called my sister and told her exactly what the life coach said. The idea was that these words would slice through the disease and connect with Mom’s spirit. I imagined her like a cicada, shedding this unnecessary shell and taking flight. My sister agreed that she would say the words to our mom the next time she was at the nursing home.
“It’s time to go,” my sister told Mom. “It’s okay. We’ll be fine. You can go.”
My mom didn’t answer. That was four years ago, and only the life coach has departed my realm, because I fired her.
Inside the pyramids, Jason and I scramble through narrow corridors and airless rooms. It is hot. So cramped. To see the Sphinx, the famed monument with the head of a pharaoh on the body of a lion, we walk past lines of vendors shoving postcards and souvenirs in our faces. We are offered twenty-seven camel rides. Policemen speak to us in whispers—they can take us into the closed pyramids for a special price. Just five dollars to climb all over these priceless structures. For ten dollars, they will take our picture.
Jason is overwhelmed by the aggressiveness, the way the touts look at us and see money, how people follow us and beg. I try to make it easier on him, and when I see vendors approach, I give them a firm “No.” Sometimes it works.
I buy our bus tickets, haggle at the market, hail taxis, navigate the Metro. I locate food, figure out directions, quickly calculate currency conversions in my head.
Jason is amazed. “Where did you learn to do this?” he says. “I’ve never seen you so in control.”
I shrug, but I’m secretly proud. These six months have made me more confident and assertive. If my mom were still aware of the world around her, and if she passed me on the street, what would she think?
Jason and I take the night train to Luxor in a private compartment with bunk beds. When we wake in the morning, we notice a small bullet hole in our window. The cracks that radiate from it make a beautiful pattern, an intricate spiderweb.
“Do you think we’re in danger?” Jason asks. He’s read too many travel books with warnings about attacks on American tourists.
I’m not concerned. If there was any danger, we’ve long ago passed it in the night. “Just pretend this is an Agatha Christie novel,” I say.
Over the course of a few days, we sightsee our way down the Nile—Luxor, Esna, Edfu, Aswan, Abu Simbel. Finally, on Christmas, we catch a short flight to Sharm el-Sheikh, then take a taxi to Dahab, a sleepy village on the Red Sea.
It is only once we reach Dahab that I truly relax into Jason again, rediscovering the part of my identity that is his partner, not just a tour guide. We hold hands the way we used to, and once again it feels comfortable to have someone by my side. It’s taken a few days, but we are no longer strangers.
Dahab is a hippie town, located on a small crescent of the Sinai Peninsula, where the desert mountains run out of momentum and give way to sand. The blue water is lit up with teal swaths of coral reef, and the weather is warm almost all year long.
“I’m already happy here,” Jason says.
“Me too.” I give his hand a squeeze.
Though some are dressed modestly, most are not. Many men are in shorts and T-shirts, while the women wear swimsuits, sarongs, or gauzy sundresses. This is the first place in Egypt where I feel comfortable removing the head scarf I’ve worn since Cairo.
Signs on the beach prohibit camels and horses, though I see both on the boardwalk nearby. Ladies in brightly colored bikinis tan themselves on sun-bleached blankets and cushions. Groups of scuba divers, about eight to twelve in each pack, waddle from dive shops into the sea and disappear into its depths. A few strings of tinsel are the only visual nods to the holiday.
Christmas was always a big deal for my mom, who threw herself into the preparations with the enthusiasm and dedication of a military commander. I, however, had to be coerced to help. Arranging the branches on the artificial tree made me itchy, the ornaments were ugly and old, the treetop angel was losing her hair. And the bane of my childhood existence? Strands of silver icicles that my mom wanted placed on the tree, one by one.
Then we decorated the house. There were ribbons and candles, nativity scenes and Advent calendars, holly-shaped candy dishes and special tablecloths trimmed in red and green. The centerpiece involved enormous pinecones that my mom collected and adorned wi
th glitter. She sprayed the windowpanes with fake snow. She thought it was fun; I thought it was tacky.
She was happiest on Christmas Eve, and my most vivid holiday memories live in that space, contained in a snow globe of time. Every year we attended church together, the late service, just her and me. Each congregant was given a small, unlit candle, about the size of a dry-erase marker, which we held on to throughout the entire service in a darkened sanctuary. Then during the final hymn, “Silent Night,” the pastor plucked a candle from the altar and used it to light the candle of someone in the front row. That person used his or her candle to light another, and so on, until the entire church pulsed with flickering light.
I can shake that snow globe and see that moment fall into place again and again: My mom bending toward me, soft cheeks and red lips radiant and illuminated, gently tipping her candle to avoid spilling wax. I hold my breath. Her fire ignites mine. She tells me to wait until my flame is strong before I pass it on.
In Dahab, Jason and I settle into a small café with a wooden patio overlooking the water, where we prop ourselves up on fat pillows. The waiter welcomes us with a hearty “Merry Christmas!” followed up with something that sounds like a dyslexic Santa, “Oh oh oh!” He brings us pita bread, hummus, falafel, slices of cucumber, and squat mugs of coffee. A stray cat, orange and scrawny, settles at my feet. I sneak him pieces of pita bread, and he purrs so forcefully that my legs vibrate.
In the afternoon, Jason and I visit an internet café to call our families over Skype. Today my dad is at my sister’s house, where her husband sets up the computer so the whole family can see me. My college-aged nephews stand in the background, and my brother-in-law offers a quick wave. My sister and I catch up; she’s jealous of my Egyptian tan. Finally, my dad pulls an armchair up to the computer.
My dad doesn’t know how to operate the camera on his computer, so even though I’ve talked to him over the phone, this is the first time I’ve seen his face in months. His eyes are hooded, and his cheeks are sunken and drawn. I am alarmed.