by Zaina Arafat
Our relationship began its full descent over a winter break spent in the South of France. We had dinner at a seafood place in Antibes one evening. When my fish arrived, the garçon unveiled it, and Kate practically clapped with excitement. “Look!” she said. “It’s so nutritious! Citrus fruits and julienned vegetables. And it’s all grilled! Isn’t that good? Something you can finally eat!”
I smiled as my eyes filled with tears. One escaped onto my tilapia. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t know what’s happening to me.”
“Please don’t cry.” Her voice turned bitter as she shook her head. “Please don’t fucking cry. Please stop fucking crying!” She slammed her palm on the table, wine leaped from her glass.
I sniffled and snorted and tried to suck back snot and tears, which only made me cry harder. I’m aware I can be exhausting—“you exist too much,” my mother often told me.
“I’m sorry,” I said to Kate, “I’ll stop, I’m stopping.” Deep breath, throat clear. Wobbling smile. “Okay. I’m better.”
When we got back from France I took a medical leave of absence and applied to another university. By some devastating miracle—miracle because I’d dropped out twice in three years, devastating because I’d be leaving her—I got in. I would transfer right before what should’ve been my senior year, and I’d need to spend two more years in college to get my degree.
As for Kate, I filled out applications so she could study abroad, and waited until she’d committed to spending the coming fall in Florence before telling her that I was transferring schools. It was my way of saying sorry. Her apology came more directly. “I’m sorry I ruined your life,” she said before leaving, her condescension excused only when imagining the guilt that must’ve spawned it.
“You didn’t,” I said. You couldn’t, I thought, though I may’ve wanted it to seem that way at the time. I may’ve wanted to believe it was all her fault.
As Kate left for Florence, I headed to a new college town, one that was even more preppy, Greek, and white. A junior again with two years to go, I soon began obliterating my mind with rum and cocaine, and by Homecoming weekend I’d landed my first night in jail. At around four a.m. the warden tossed some brown bag lunches into the women’s cell. Mine was stolen by a stringy-haired inmate who spent most of her time on the cell’s toilet or yelling at me to stop crying and wipe the blood from my nose. I ended up confiding to the entire cell about Kate. “She sounds like a fucking bitch,” the sandwich thief said, biting off a fingernail to chew. “You should find yourself a new broad.” When I was released the next morning I begged them to keep me.
Eventually I got a job at a restaurant, in the hope that serving subpar pizza and watered-down beers might keep me from thinking of her. “Aren’t you in my ethics class?” a customer asked as I refilled her fountain Dr Pepper.
“I am,” I said, her acknowledgment of my existence a lifesaver.
“I’m Renata,” she said. “A group of us are meeting at the library tonight, to study for that test. You should come.”
When I got to the library after my shift, Renata waved me over to a long wooden table where she sat with a few others from our ethics class, Swedish Fish and Hershey Kisses spilling out of plastic bags. When we left at around midnight, she offered me a ride home. On the drive she mentioned that a room was opening up in her apartment for the spring—one of her roommates was graduating early. “It’s definitely the smallest room, and the loudest,” she said, “but who knows, maybe you’ll get a boyfriend with his own place and never have to be in it!”
I told her I’d come by the next day to look, though I already knew I would take it.
I moved in the following week. On our first night as roommates, after we’d unloaded the few bags I had from the car, we opened a bottle of prosecco to celebrate. Renata told me about Thomas, a Sigma Chi she’d just started hooking up with, who wasn’t ready for a relationship. I observed her hazelnut skin, her green eyes dotted with black flecks. Though she was beautiful, I couldn’t tell if I was attracted to her. Still, I listened for any sign of dissatisfaction, any note of curiosity, any hint of an invitation. It came just after we’d poured the last of the bubbly. “I swear,” she said, “sometimes I think I’m done with men altogether.”
She shut off the living room lights and we walked toward our catty-corner bedrooms. I lingered in her doorway. She stood in front of me, then reached forth to hug me. I held her close. Her nose grazed my neck and she pecked my cheek. As she pulled away I leaned forward and kissed her, pressing my mouth to hers. She jumped back. “What are you doing?”
“I, I’m sorry, I thought . . .” I didn’t know what to say. I stood there, horrified. What the hell was I doing? Had I just messed everything up?
“It’s okay.” She shrugged. “We drank a lot.”
Eventually I would come to recognize her refrains of abstinence, of swearing off men, of committing to her vibrator, as wounded declarations of a boy-crazy woman with no plans to give up on her boyfriend, who chose to value herself in proportion to his estimation of her. I would always envy that: her unambiguous craving for men.
As I turned toward my bedroom feeling like I had ruined my one chance to escape isolation and loneliness, she called out, “I usually brew a pot of coffee in the morning.” I turned back toward her, keeping my eyes on the patch of floor between us. She continued, “So if I’m gone before you’re up, obviously have at it.”
“Cool,” I said, half smiling as I met her eyes. “Thanks a lot.”
She nodded in a way that seemed forgiving, then turned toward her room and switched on the light. “And you should probably chug some water before you get in bed,” she said, her back to me. “That prosecco was like the cheapest shit ever.”
I took her advice and went to the kitchen, where I searched the cupboards for a glass. I reached for one, held it under the faucet, and gulped it down. I took a deep breath, then exhaled. Finally, I had a friend.
10
ON DAY 13, THE GROUP TURNED ON ME. THEY’D BEEN EXCHANGING glances across our semicircle all morning. “Something feels off,” I said. “Is everything okay?”
Again the group exchanged looks; Greg nodded in Molly’s direction and she was silently deemed the spokeswoman. “We’re tired of your condescending attitude,” she said, crossing her arms with forced conviction.
“What condescending attitude?”
“You know, how you get all frustrated when we don’t know something, like about the Middle East.”
The night before, the van driver had agreed to let us stop at Pizza Hut on the way back to the Ledge after the meeting. We’d all piled into a red vinyl booth and grabbed for slices when the pie arrived. “Now,” Greg said, folding a pepperoni slice in half, “the Palestinians have no legitimate claim on Jerusalem, right? Because that’s what Alex says.”
It turned out that after we went back to our rooms at night, Alex had been giving Greg lectures in Arab-Israeli affairs. A self-proclaimed Zionist, he came at the issue from a different vantage point than I did, to say the least. A few days earlier he’d asked if I was planning to do an H.I.T. list on Israel. “I thought about it,” I told him, though really I hadn’t. “But I’ve got too many people I’d like to do first.”
“Alex says that you’re so pissed off all the time because you think you’re entitled to the land,” Greg continued, “but that the Torah promised it to his people.”
I could tell Greg was being extra incendiary just to get a reaction. And possibly because a day earlier I’d told him I wouldn’t be offering any more blow jobs—I was going to start following the rules, I was paying enough to be here, after all. Either way, his effort to annoy me was working. Then Molly jumped in. “Wait, so where’s Palestine, again? Is it next to Afghanistan?”
I admit that in the years since 2003, I’ve begun to expect significantly more when it comes to knowledge about the Middle East. I’m troubled by the number of people who lump all Arabs and Muslims into one large, threateni
ng category, support U.S. intervention in the region under the guise of “spreading democracy,” without any contextual understanding of the situation on the ground, and vote for xenophobic, uninformed candidates who also have limited knowledge of the region. My expectation is in some ways hypocritical, as I myself have displayed a great lack of political and cultural knowledge in the Middle East. In moments of fury my mother has suggested I write a book called The Way It Should Be for Everybody but Me. I’ve fumbled in Arab countries many times, and in Egypt I once inadvertently bought a one-humped camel.
I was visiting Cairo with my mother at the time. For all the summers that I’d spent in the Middle East, I hadn’t really visited any of the landmarks that people travel specifically to see. Every year I said I would sightsee the next year, I would visit Petra, Wadi Rum, Ba’albek, until it became clear that I would spend my summers in the same hotel visiting the same relatives. But that summer in Egypt I would finally be a tourist. Naturally, any Egyptian sightseeing expedition entailed a trip to the pyramids, and I went with my mother’s friend’s daughter, Farah. She seemed friendly enough and I didn’t mind having company. Plus, Farah was from Cairo, so I assumed her native knowledge would come in handy.
The sky in Giza that morning was untainted; an interrupted expanse of blue. I climbed up a few rows of the Great Pyramid, dipping into the openings between the weathered limestones, as Farah stood at the base and snapped pictures with my camera. I inched my way back down and we waited in line to see the Sphinx, batting flies and taking in the cacophony of mostly Scandinavian languages around us, blond people in hiking boots carrying large backpacks and clutching guidebooks. We got up close to the mythical cat and walked along her perimeter without ever actually touching her. Once I’d had my fill, we headed back to the parking lot to find a taxi. As we approached a cluster of cabs I heard a voice call out behind me, in English, “Ride the camel?”
I turned around to see a very old man with burnt-rubber skin pointing to a camel draped in a red carpet and flanked by furry, multicolored puffballs, its lips moving methodically as though it were chewing gum. A little boy stood on the other side of the animal, holding a rope as its rein.
I’d ridden a camel once before, in Jerusalem, when I was a kid. As I dismounted, the camel began to pee with such vigor that the piss ricocheted off the earth and all over my jeans. I wasn’t too enthused about climbing onto one again. But if this was going to be an “authentic” tourist experience, then surely I had to take the customary camel ride. “Okay, yeah,” I said, attempting to sound spirited. “Why not.”
The old man smiled, revealing several missing teeth. He nodded at the boy, who then tapped the camel’s knuckled knee and pulled on the rein, bringing the camel toward the ground. Witnessing the process was like watching a marble zigzag through a maze. First the camel sloped backward, then forward, then backward again, until its legs were folded neatly beneath it. I grabbed the pommel and swung my right leg over the hump, placing my feet into the stirrups. I was afraid I might tumble forward as the camel began to stand up, jerking me back and forth until it was entirely upright.
At ten feet off the ground the air seemed cleaner, free from the smog enveloping Cairo. I straightened my back and indulged in a feeling of grandeur. The boy led the camel along and the three of us hobbled forward, a slow, steady dance, my hips rotating each time we took a step.
Four minutes later we were back at the point where we started. Farah and the old man were still standing there, both smoking. Once again the boy tugged the camel’s rein and it began to descend. And again I felt myself falling forward, then backward, then forward again, until the camel was kneeling. I slid off and stood up, brushing pieces of carpet off my pants. I then turned to the old man and asked, “How much?”
He dropped his cigarette into the sand and buried it with his bare toe. “Normally the price is one hundred dollars. But for you”—he exhaled, and smoke he’d been holding in his throat came forth—“because you’re special, it’s fifty.”
I stared at him for a few seconds, certain I’d misunderstood. “Fifty U.S. dollars?”
“Yes. Down from one hundred.”
I looked at Farah, who simply shrugged. True, there was no price sheet to consult, but it seemed impossible that a hundred-foot walk—camel or no camel—could cost that much. Then again, Farah was Egyptian, so wouldn’t she know if this guy was swindling us? And if fifty dollars was the going rate, then I didn’t want to seem cheap by haggling over it. I pushed past my doubt and pulled out my wallet, depositing a ten and two twenties into the old man’s hand. He made a fist around the bills and smiled. “Salaam alaikum.” Peace be with you.
Later that night my mother and I had dinner at a seafood restaurant along the Nile. Ferry boats drifted by, blaring Arab music and casting bright lights onto the water. Despite the unseasonably cool temperature and jovial atmosphere, my mother could tell I was distraught. “Shoo?” she asked. What’s up?
“How much does a camel ride around the pyramids normally cost?”
She reached for a pumpkin seed and cracked it open with her teeth. “Two, three guinea.” Approximately eighteen cents. “Why?” she asked, spitting out the shell. “How much did you pay?”
I passed my napkin in front of my mouth as I answered. “Fifty dollars.”
“Fifty U.S. dollars? Was it a turbo-powered camel?”
“No, but the guy said—”
“Of course the guy said! Do you believe everything everyone tells you?”
I’d been swindled, of course. Why hadn’t Farah said anything? Unless she’d been in on the deal, I saw no excuse for her ignorance. She was Egyptian—shouldn’t she know better?
Of course the problem was that I should’ve known better. Though I’d been enjoying the role, I wasn’t actually a tourist. The fact that I grew up outside the Middle East doesn’t make me feel less Arab. I speak the language, albeit cautiously and brokenly, often failing to get the correct pronunciation and inflection. Fairuz, Oum Kalthoum, Abdel Halim Hafez—classic Arab singers, as important to the musical landscape in the Middle East as the Beatles are in the West—I can sing their songs by heart. I’ve spent long, seemingly endless nights in Nablus, in un-air-conditioned homes in dry August heat, sleeping on feather-stuffed mattresses and pillows as rough as the hair on a camel’s back. I’ve marched and protested on the Washington Mall in support of ending government funding for foreign occupations in the Middle East.
Yet it’s the idiosyncrasies of culture that keep me an outsider, and leave me with a persistent and pervasive sense of otherness, of non-belonging. Basic but nuanced knowledge; the stuff that no one really teaches you. That an invitation for eight o’clock really means nine thirty. In Beirut, I once arrived at a rehearsal dinner on time, and the restaurant’s staff was still cleaning up from the night before. That no one wears flip-flops outside the house except to the pool. That noting one’s weight gain is an expression of love, and that every price, rule, and border can and must be negotiated.
And yet, in the U.S. I’m just as much of an outsider. Even though America is built upon the idea of assimilation, a so-called melting pot, we Arabs stand out. As a child I was made starkly aware of our nonconformity when my friends would come over and ask why my parents were going out to dinner at nine p.m.—on a Tuesday. Why wasn’t my mother wearing mom jeans, but rather, formfitting leather Moschinos? Why did my father call me “daddy” and speak to me half in English, half in Arabic? At the time, they found it funny and harmless to tease me about my otherness; they’d even call me “the terrorist,” which I laughed along with, not fully processing nor having the courage to resist the insidious danger of such “jokes,” ones that just a few years later would be deemed microaggressions or else blatant hate speech. Back then, to be different was simply a bad thing; diversity wasn’t yet something to celebrated, and being white was necessary if not sufficient for coolness. The white girls basked in the light while the rest of us suffered quietly in the lunchroom co
rners and bore our lot. The best we could hope to achieve was camaraderie among ourselves, united in our outcast status. It is a bizarre and unsettling feeling, to exist in a liminal state between two realms, unable to attain full access to one or the other.
“Fifty dollars is the price of the camel itself,” my mother said.
“So, technically, I own the camel.”
“Technically, yes,” she said. “Make sure you declare it at customs!”
•
I felt flustered by the group’s accusation. I told them that I wasn’t trying to be condescending, that I didn’t think I was better than anyone. “Besides, why do you care what I think?” I asked.
“Great question!” Richard said, and winked at me. “Why do you care? Do you always need everyone’s approval?”
Sometimes his explicit assessments were annoyingly astute.
IN COLLEGE, AFTER THINGS ENDED WITH KATE, I couldn’t make myself straight no matter how hard I tried. And I tried. I slept with as many Lambda Chis as possible, and as they drilled away on top of me, my boredom ever-increasing, I’d close my eyes and picture Kate.
I eventually gave up, and in resignation I spent the summer between my second junior year and my senior year of college in Boston, attending outpatient eating-disorder treatment and attempting to come out. At the end of each day I would leave the treatment center in Cambridge and head directly to a gay dive bar in Jamaica Plain. I’d walk in alone with my iPod blaring courage into my ears, choose a stool toward the end of the bar, and hover over a vodka soda. After being force-fed three balanced meals at the center, I had already reached my daily calorie allotment. If a woman approached and tried to flirt with me, my heart would jump and I would waver. “I’m straight,” I would protest, too ashamed of myself to accept the advance. I would watch her order a drink, then clench my eyes shut and wince at my own cowardice, hoping she would see my desire through my stated opposition and do the work of pushing past it. As she’d walk away, I would hesitate and call out, “Wait, actually, I’m not!” But by that point it was usually too late. The pattern persisted until I finally learned to take several shots of tequila upon sitting down. Once I started getting too drunk to worry about everyone’s judgment, especially my own, I slept with New England dykes to my queer heart’s content. Each time, I refused to ask for their names or offer mine. I would always accompany them to their places, never to my shared sublet, to guarantee that I could leave before dawn, with no risk of intimacy or even sober interaction.