by Maggie Downs
“Oh my, very nice,” she says, nodding in approval.
She applies concealer to the mosquito bites on my face and slathers on several layers of foundation meant for olive complexions, a stark contrast to my pale skin. The rest of the makeover looks like the kind of makeup I applied at my mother’s vanity as a small girl. Penciled eyebrows. Streaks of magenta blush. Layers of shiny blue eye shadow that rain sparkly dust onto my cheeks. Lips fat and pink. I am Raina’s life-sized American Girl doll.
“Now you look so pretty,” she says. “Ah yes. Very good.”
For the final touch, she decorates me with costume jewelry. Purple-studded bracelets. Necklaces of green plastic beads, cut to look like diamonds. A tarnished metal ring with a stone like a Ping-Pong ball.
Raina steps back and appraises her work. “I cannot take you outside,” she decides. “All the mens will be looking.”
By now, the rest of the family has returned to the house. I hear a symphony of sounds from the kitchen, the next room over, where the mother is working with the other women. The thud of a knife against wood. A rattle from a heavy, boiling pot. The scrape of pestle against mortar. A strange man arrives and hands paper-wrapped packages to the mother, who disappears into the kitchen once again.
When it is time to eat, there is no table. Instead Raina shows me how to spread a layer of newspapers on the floor. The entire family gathers and squats around the paper. The mother—one plump, bare foot bent under her body, the other sticking straight out, resting against a platter of salad—nods with approval at my makeover.
They fill my plate until it is heavy, heaped with white rice, fava beans, chopped cucumber salad, and the bitter, soupy greens of mulukhiyah. In the center of it all is a thick ball of grilled meat, bigger than my hand, slick with hot, hissing juice. I realize I never told them I am a vegetarian.
I politely nibble around the meat. “Oh, I am not so hungry. I cannot eat all this,” I say, and I rub my belly with one hand. I offer it to Rami. “Maybe you would like my meat?”
But this is New Year’s Eve. Even though this Bedouin family doesn’t celebrate the holiday, they know it is a special day for my culture, and I am their guest.
“Very special for you,” Rami says.
He says the family slaughtered their uncle’s camel and saved the liver for me. It’s a delicacy.
“Eat, eat,” the mother urges.
This family offers me sustenance on a platter, even as the woman who nourished me lies starving. At this moment it is my decision to devour the food or to deny it, but I realize my mom has no choice.
All eyes look to me with anticipation. I take a bite. I close my eyes. I chew. The camel tastes like a punch in the face. Dark and heavy, metal and blood. It is both primal and complex. Something like life itself.
Brittle Stars
AFTER I LEAVE RAMI’S HOUSE, I MAKE MY WAY BACK TO Dahab. My intention is to rent a place for a little while, hunker down, let my broken spirit and tired body heal. Maybe I’ll do some writing.
I am in desperate need of a place to call home when I stumble across a temporary private room at a little yoga camp, which is where I become friends with Katie. I’m there when I receive an email from my dad that shocks me. My grandmother in Germany—my mom’s mom, and the only grandparent I’ve ever known—has passed away.
My dad’s messages are like him, rigid and no-nonsense, and he doesn’t offer any details about her death. Even so, it sends me reeling, so the people at the yoga camp envelop me with kindness and tenderly guide me through my loss. Within just a couple of days, I abandon my search for an apartment and decide to stay.
El Salam, the camp is called. Peace.
“Float with me,” Katie calls from half a football field away.
We are snorkeling in the Red Sea. Well, Katie is, anyway. She dunks her head below the surface of the water. Her dreadlocks balance on the surface like tangled yellow yarn. Just when I think Katie has drowned, she pops back up again.
“Float with me!” she insists.
I cross my arms over my chest, hands holding on to my own sides, a rented snorkel mask hanging from my icy fingers. I am up to my knees in salty water.
“This water is freezing. The coral is cutting my feet. And god knows who used this snorkel before me,” I say, gesturing with the chewed plastic mouthpiece.
Katie moves with the current, drifting forward and floating back again, a slender blonde scrap of seaweed on the tide. I understand why she has fish scales tattooed like a sleeve down her left arm.
“The water is clear and gorgeous. The coral is a marvel of nature. And someday you’ll be far away from the Red Sea, and you’ll regret not snorkeling with me,” she laughs. “Come on. Last chance.”
Before I can say anything, Katie submerges herself, legs kicking into the air. With toes pointed like a dancer, she snaps her ankles, and the rest of her body ripples like a cracked whip. She is gone.
I wait a few seconds before I call her name. I don’t see any sign of her white snorkel tip or her ridiculously bright neon bathing suit.
I would head for the shore, but I don’t want to be alone. I have no choice but to follow her.
I’ve always been terrible at judging distances, so I don’t know how far I swim until I locate my friend again. Once reconnected, we swim a few dozen meters. Or maybe a few hundred. I don’t know. The water is buoyant with salt, and even though I’m not a strong swimmer, I float easily.
We stop at a shallow reef, a popular dive site called Eel Garden. There the eels poke up through the sand, their curved shapes creating a field of underwater commas as they wait for the next meal to swim by.
“Let’s give the eels a show,” Katie says.
We giggle and take off our swimsuits, wrapping them around our wrists. Katie’s bottoms float away and she kicks like mad to get to them before the waves abduct them forever. We imagine the bikini would wash up on the beach in Saudi Arabia, just across from us, where hardly anyone would know what it was. They might study it, build a glass case for it in a museum, make it the subject of a doctoral thesis.
“Swimming naked is the best,” Katie says.
“It feels like I was just born,” I say.
“Like nobody else exists,” she says.
“Like nobody else ever existed,” I add.
“Like the beginning of the world.”
“Like the beginning of time.”
We tread water for a few minutes then wade to the rocky beach, where I give Katie my towel to wrap around her waist. It is a clear evening. We see the lights turn on in Saudi Arabia.
Katie picks up stones and shows me how to grab brittle stars, long-limbed starfish about the size of our hands, from the shallow waters. Sometimes I scare them, and the legs fall off their starry button bodies.
My camera is in my bag, and I take photos of the sky emptying into the water, scoops of orange sherbet topped with petals of purple hyacinth. The colors unravel as we watch. This is the moment. The sunset is thick and ripe. A red streak slashes through the sky with a vivid gash. Salt water runs down my face.
I sit on the shore, knees curled to my chest, my shirt pulled over my legs. I cry, and Katie puts her head on my shoulder. Her hair tickles my sunburned neck.
“She’s going right now,” I whisper. “I just know it.”
“You’re probably right,” Katie says. “And there’s nothing you can do about it except wave goodbye.”
She is correct. There is so much I want to do. There is nothing I can do.
I think about all those starfish I scared limbless. They’re so vulnerable now. They don’t even have the arms to flounder. It’s enough to make me start crying again.
Katie grabs my hand and tugs me toward the boardwalk, which is lined with teahouses and Bedouin cafés. We can smell roasted chickens, sautéed garlic, boiled chickpeas laced with sumac. There are people everywhere. None of them are my mom.
Katie says she is so hungry she feels empty inside. I tell her to get used
to it.
EGYPTIAN INTERNET SUCKS. I HAVE LITTLE ONLINE ACCESS at the yoga camp, and the Wi-Fi hotspots throughout Dahab are lukewarm at best.
I also don’t have the cash to spend at a coffee shop if the free Wi-Fi isn’t working. Instead I lean against a brick wall in an alley and piggyback on nearby unsecured networks with my iPhone. This has become my ritual, and I do it a few times a day.
Tonight I am more desperate than ever.
One connection lasts long enough to check my email, and I light a cigarette while I wait. Ever since my dad’s message about my mom’s declining health, I’ve been smoking, one of the dumbest things I can do with my asthma, but there’s nobody to tell me to stop.
Connecting … loading …
I don’t have any messages. I try to call, but nobody answers. My dad, my sister, my brother. All my calls head straight to voicemail. I don’t want to leave a message.
That night I go to bed not knowing if my mom is alive or dead.
It is so cold; I pull my wool chullo hat from Peru over my ears. I stare at the white space of a yoga poster on the wall. I wait. The minutes are stretchy, hollow, and endless. The night is always longest for those who don’t find sleep.
El Salam
IN THE MORNING, I FOREGO MY TYPICAL BACKPACKER breakfast of Nescafé, dry toast, and a plastic package of jam.
Today is special. Today I decide to eat at a real café, Bamboo House, a hangout for travelers thanks to the solid Wi-Fi connection. I walk past this place several times a day every day, often enough that the waiters greet me with local prices and a hearty “Sabah el kheer!”
The sweeping patio butts up against the craggy shoreline of the Red Sea, which this morning is placid and a cornflower blue. The café tables are inviting, and the smell of pastries is too good to ignore following such a long and lonely night.
I splurge on an Americano and lemon pancakes. The waiter, who also speaks English, is patient while I attempt to order in Arabic and fiercely butcher his language. As my order is prepared, I clear a space on the patio and plug in my netbook. The connection is quick and solid.
An email pops into my inbox swiftly. It’s from my dad, and true to form, it’s brief: “Margaret, I don’t know if you know this, but mom passed away last night.”
The pancakes are delivered. I burst into tears.
The waiter looks concerned. “Did you want honey pancakes? I thought you said lemon.” I shake my head and wave him away.
It’s all so stupid. The water is so blue. The sun is so bright. The lemon pancakes so sweet. Why hasn’t the world stopped yet? Doesn’t everybody know?
One thing that surprises me is how the news wounds me in an instant. After a decade of suffering alongside my mother, I assumed this end would come as a relief. It is supposed to be closure. That is the promise of an extended illness: it is a blessing when it ends.
Only now, here, in the eye of the moment, it is worse than I imagined. For all those years she was just out of reach, I carried a seed of hope. Now that hope will never grow into anything more.
I look around the Bamboo House patio, crowded with tourists from Europe and Russia. People with blond hair just like my mom. I know it’s impossible that she would be here, but what if she came to me? What if she wanted to see me one last time? That sunset last night—was that it?
A weird cat with an astute gaze hops into my lap, and I ache for it to be some kind of sign, even though I’m sure it’s not. My mom had two blue eyes, and this cat has one blue, one green.
I stroke the kitten, name him David Bowie, and feed him some of my pancakes. It’s a win-win situation: I’m having trouble choking down food, and he is clearly hungry. His ribs heave as he chews.
“That cat’s been hanging around forever,” says one of the waiters. “His name is Ginger.”
“But why? He’s not ginger at all.”
“It just is.”
I want this to be meaningful, but I’m not sure how. I say this over and over again in my head: It just is.
I pay and leave. My instinct pushes me to wander, and I walk with no destination.
The man on the boardwalk who makes pictures of layered sand in bottles waves hello. I ignore him. I pass by Ghazala grocery store, a koshary stall, incense shops, jewelry stores, a dozen shisha bars, and a souvenir hut called Hump the Camel. There is a vendor who always points at my flip-flops and says, “Nice socks!” I usually play along with him. Today I flip him off. What a stupid fucking joke.
My mom is dead. My mom is dead. My mom is dead. I want to blast it from the megaphones that broadcast prayers at the mosques. I want everybody to know.
I pass by a snorkeler waddling toward the water.
“My mom is dead!” I shout.
He nods his head in response.
I yell again, “I hope you drown!”
He smiles and waves.
It’s difficult to go anywhere in Dahab without ending up back at the Red Sea, so that’s where I find myself again. I’m drawn to the edge, where sea meets sand, and for a moment I think about walking straight in, letting the water fill my pockets and tug me into the deep, testing how precarious life can be. It is tempting in the way driving into oncoming traffic occasionally seems tempting, not that I want to die, but I want to feel something different.
Eventually I turn away from the shore.
After some time my path leads me back to the yoga camp. The woman who runs the place, an American named Dakini Runningbear, knows what happened before I say anything. She’s perceptive like that. Her arms open, and I collapse into her brown hair, a tangle of sea salt and sand.
If you’re going to have a mother who dies, El Salam is probably the best place in the world to be when it happens. Word of my mother’s death spreads quickly through the dozen or so long-term residents, and they rush to take on some of my pain.
Amy from England gets stoned and rubs my feet for an hour. Patrick from Ireland gives me a package of black-market Valium. “You might need this,” he says, tucking the pills into my small backpack. Thomas from Denmark puts a sleepy kitten in my lap.
Dakini creates a makeshift latte by brewing espresso in a steel pot over a fire. She gingerly stirs the shot of caffeine into boiled camel milk and honey. It tastes fatty and salty sliding down my throat.
A German woman who calls herself The Gypsy Queen offers to do a tarot reading. We sit cross-legged on her bed, in a room that smells like smoke and cumin, sheer scarves hanging from the ceiling above. I don’t remember most of what she says, but the reading lasts for what feels like hours.
Finally The Gypsy Queen instructs me to make a selection from a deck of “energy cards.” I draw one that says “closure.”
“Fuck you,” I say to the card, and I leave her smelly room. The world has already given me closure, and it means my heart has been carved right out of my chest.
With nothing left to say, Katie and I set up a slackline between two palm trees. We take turns walking the tight rope and falling off, over and over again.
IT WAS A COLD DAY IN OHIO. THE SCHOOLS WERE CLOSED for snow. Swollen, pregnant clouds birthed gray into more gray. The wheat fields seemed flatter than usual. Ice hung from the skeletal trees.
A nurse called my dad at home and told him to come to the nursing home—it was the day. He and my sister each made the surreal drive down Interstate 675 toward a bland yellow room to watch a wife and mother die.
My mom’s hair was long. Her cheeks were sunken. This woman who weighed 180 pounds in life didn’t weigh more than 120 pounds at her death. She would have killed for that.
“She’s going right now,” the nurse told my dad.
My dad held my mother’s hand. He looked to the floor and repeated, “Poor Heide. Poor, poor Heide.” My sister stood behind the bed and stroked our mom’s forehead, smoothing the hair from her face. A minister was a quiet shadow in the corner of the room.
Mom inhaled sharply for a few minutes, a hollow and raspy sound that shook the bones of everybod
y in the room.
“How long can we do this?” my sister asked.
Then mom quieted. Her body shuddered. She took a shallow breath and exhaled and then—
And then she was nothing anymore.
And then I no longer had a mom.
“That’s it?” my dad said.
My dad and my sister thanked the minister. They packed up my mom’s things, erasing every sign of her from the nursing home room. They drove home the same way they arrived. Separately.
THE KING CHICKEN DELIVERY BOY ARRIVES AT THE YOGA camp at night carrying two bags of dog food. The sacks weigh about ten kilos each and contain the restaurant’s dinner scraps—chicken bones and skin, fat and cartilage, potato peels and greasy napkins, even the occasional plastic fork.
The delivery boy is a baby-faced teen named Ali. Sometimes he brings lunch, sometimes he brings dog food, and the bags look identical. I’ve been a resident at the yoga camp long enough that he and I are familiar.
Tonight Ali slings the bags over the camp’s fence, then empties them into heaps on the floor near the kitchen. While a dozen dogs fight over chicken bones, Ali sinks into one of the outdoor couches where my makeshift yoga family drinks watery Egyptian beer and lights a hookah filled with apple-flavored tobacco.
I don’t return Ali’s smile. He asks why. I tell him my mom died, and I explain she suffered from a terrible disease for many years.
“She was very old?” he says.
“Seventy.”
“Ah, long life,” Ali nods.
“Not long enough.”
Ali says in Egypt, people are lucky to reach such an admirable old age. That might be true. But when Ali says she went to a better place, I disagree. I don’t know if I believe there is a better place.
“It doesn’t matter what you believe,” he says. “Inna lillah hi wa inna ilaihi rajioon. To him we belong and to him we shall return.”
“But I don’t want her to return,” I say. I slide my blue plastic flip-flop off my foot and draw lines in the dirt with my toes. “I’m selfish.”
I suppose I imagined my mom would disappear from my life with swiftness. A car accident. A heart attack. Something understandable, something I could wrap my head around. But having her taken this way, in a prolonged state of grief, has been overwhelming. She was an elegant woman claimed by something completely undignified. There is no reason for it. Certainly no god would do this.