So many things we know not of.
I want to change the subject.
“Why not just invent your own cool handbags and sell them?”
He looks sad. “I am not a designer. I am a counterfeiter.”
My driver who isn’t really a driver and isn’t really a purse maker, either, has a Middle Eastern accent, which also makes me sad. Does the Middle East need any more bad hype? I can’t remember any of my Middle Eastern relatives even carrying purses. My Arab grandmother stuck Kleenexes and money into the open flap of pocket under the embroidery on her chest. My cousin carried money in her bra.
“How did you even get into purses?” Silence. Then, “Where are you from?” I add, “I’m half Arab,” knowing some people don’t admit to being Arabs anymore unless they feel comfortable with you.
He stays silent for a few seconds, then says, “Egypt. You been there?”
“Sure. Many times. Love it. Love the taxis. They drive like nuts.”
He grins. “Why do you love it?”
“Well, I just love everything about it—the people, food, art, history, the Nile, Alexandria, the pyramids, the writers and music, the marketplaces, even the baskets sold on corners. I’ve had some great experiences in Egypt.” We’re passing old-fashioned diners and bridges and flower shops and wrought-iron railings, so I say, “It’s as rich and mixed as New York City is, don’t you think?” Again he doesn’t answer, so I keep chattering. “Also I was there for a really bad dust storm once, working with a lot of kids in a library, and the trees started blowing over and hitting the building, and it was scary but exciting. The kids weren’t scared at all. Red dust came into our hotel room where we were staying and coated all our clothes. We had to shake them outside from our balcony the next day. But it seemed so…elemental and…real, you know. Weather seems real.” I don’t tell him about sitting in the same booth in a café in Alexandria where the poet Cavafy used to sit, just by accident, and looking up to find a Cavafy poem scrawled on a napkin and framed on the wall. He might not know who Cavafy is.
My driver has been silent for a long time. Maybe I made him homesick. And why did I bring up “real” when he was talking “counterfeit”? It must have been unconscious.
Finally he says, “Baskets sold on corners?”
“You know, those straw baskets people put bread and onions in. Some of them have lids? They smell really fresh, like wheat?” He is quiet. “You know those friendly men in long, woven, deserty robes who walk around with a hundred baskets tied to their bodies?”
I took two of their baskets home and put bananas and apples in them on the table.
“I remember them,” he says quietly. Then he says, “Those baskets cost about ten cents.”
“Yeah, they’re very cheap.” Another long silence, so I say, “Do you think you’ll move back to Egypt someday?”
He says, “Maybe. I’m going to have to make a lot of money first. This is the land of money. When I was in jail, it cost a lot of money to bail me out. My fine was seven thousand dollars. I have to pay the bail money back to our partners now. Our handbag partners.”
“They’re not in jail?”
“No. They hid. One hid in a Dumpster. I don’t think I could do that. Only I went to jail. But as soon as a few more months pass, I’m going back into handbags.”
“Please don’t.”
“Why?”
“You’ll get caught again. Maybe you’ll go to jail for a long time. It’s not worth it!”
“It is a great business. You just don’t understand.”
“No! It is a terrible business! There are plenty of legal ways to make money.”
“Not fast like handbags.”
“Do the people who buy the handbags know they are fake?”
“Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Some don’t care. They just want the designer look.”
“That is so sad.”
“Sad?”
“To want something fake for a look.”
He says loudly, “This is the land of the fake!”
“I thought it was the land of the money?”
“Land of the fake and land of the money both.”
“And also the land of laws and it’s not worth breaking them if it messes up your life, man! Also, it is not all fake. No, it is not.” The next thing I see out the window is a tree. “Trees are not fake.”
Silence.
What do I care about this handsome Egyptian and his bank account? I wonder if his mother is wrapping flat loaves of bread in a scarf at that moment and walking home through a crowded street. Does she have any idea what her sons are up to? Oh, the pain of mothers in this world!
I take a plunge and say something I know he’ll find strange. “You could be a model, you know. You could model for the real designers. Have you ever thought about that?”
He snorts like a horse.
“No way. Stupid job!”
“Yes, there’s a way. Did you ever try it?”
“No chance. I’d be ashamed.”
I change the subject myself.
“Uh, do the Chinese go to jail, too? Is the production of the handbags in their own country illegal?”
“I think so. I mean, obviously the designers don’t want us stealing their looks. I think there’s a big investigation of it right now, and it’s going to be on TV.”
“Thank goodness you’re driving a taxi at the moment. Please reconsider your destiny.”
He pulls up in front of a pinkish hotel with a curlicue name similar to the name of the hotel I requested, but it’s not the one I want.
“Hey,” I say. “This is not it! This has Plaza in the name of it, but it is not the Plaza I want.”
“Are you sure?”
“Very sure! Mine is by Central Park! The big old fancy one. I’m not paying for it, by the way. Someone else is paying. It’s legal, though.”
“You say Plaza, I think Plaza this one.” He pulls back into the traffic reluctantly. He really wanted me to get out of his vehicle.
I’m thinking, he took me to the wrong hotel with a spin-off name, but we wouldn’t call it counterfeit.
All evening I’m staring at everything a little differently, thinking fake hair, real hair, fake fur, real golden and yellow flowers gleaming from a giant silver urn in the lobby. Is it real silver? Does the hotel worry about someone stealing it? Meeting one person can really change us. I can’t stop staring at the rich businessman in a real suit that probably cost a thousand dollars snapping his fingers for a taxi, looking so irritated when it picks up a glamorous young woman clutching a lizardy-looking handbag, wearing a tight black sweater dress, instead of him.
Too Many Cars
MY FATHER HAS NEVER LIKED THE STREET where he and my mother live in Dallas. He says it is too wide, too crowded, too fast. My mother, on the other hand, very much likes their personal boulevard, with swift access to grocery stores, cafés, and banks. “Listen to the cars,” my father says sadly when they sit together in the living room to watch TV in the evenings. “Listen to how many cars there are.”
“I like them,” my mother says. “They’re going places. What’s wrong with that? Action is interesting!”
On the night the first car crashed into their home, they were both sleeping. My father leaped up, thinking the house had been struck by a tornado. “Or possibly an earthquake,” he said later. “But I didn’t really know what an earthquake would sound like.” He stumbled groggily into the living room, flicking the light switches in the hallway and the dining room, but no lights came on.
He grabbed a flashlight and beamed it into the living room, moving it around like a searchlight. He could see into his office, with its nice paneled wooden walls, baskets of family photographs, bookshelves, and Oriental rug. He could see the front end of a vehicle in there, too. It had crashed right through the brick wall of his office and come to a stop in front of the Middle Eastern brass tray table.
“Call Emergency!” he yelled to my mother. “Get out of bed and call
them right away!”
My mother said, “Why?”
Emergency said, “What should we send?”
My mother spoke groggily into the phone. “I don’t know. Send everything!”
By this time my father was in his office with the flashlight, beaming it all over the crushed front end of a gray sedan.
My mother stepped into the living room in her raggedy flannel nightgown, but no farther, afraid she might trip over something. She kept calling out to my father in the dark, “What happened?” and he could only say, “There’s a car in our house!”
She asked him, “Why won’t the lights go on?”
The front door of the wrecked car opened and a middle-aged man got out. He was wearing a rumpled white shirt and black dress pants. He shook himself and stretched, looked curiously around the toppled room and said, “’Allo” with a European accent.
My father stared at him. “Are you hurt?”
The man said, “I’m okay. You sound nice.” My father has a sweet little accent, too, from his early days of learning English by working for BBC radio in Jerusalem. He especially has an accent when excited or upset. “Where are you from?” my father asked.
The man said, “Croatia.”
My father could smell liquor. The man stumbled toward him. My mother said, “I hear sirens. They’re coming.” She opened the front door. A police car, a fire truck, and an ambulance pulled up in front of their house. She said, “They’re here!”
My father said to the man, “Hey friend, you’re not a very good driver. Do you even know where you are?”
The man fell to his knees and wrapped his arms around my father’s legs. He looked up at him and said hopefully, “Home?”
The emergency attendants entered the living room with their kits and hatchets, and my mother pointed at the man.
“No, buddy,” said my father. “No sirree. You are not at home. I think you are in the twilight zone.”
After the man was examined and discovered to be completely intact in a physical sense (his drunkenness had made him supple and pliant), after a tow truck joined the party and dragged the vehicle out of my father’s office, after the reports had been scrawled in the sharp circle of the policemen’s high-beam flashlight, after my mother had announced, “I was having such a good dream when this happened!” and after it was learned that before driving into the house, the man had driven through the giant voltage pole that transmitted electricity in all directions, which was the reason none of the lights would go on, the man, who was being hauled down to the police station for driving while intoxicated, invited my parents out to dinner. Yes, he did. In his cozy European accent, he said it would be his greatest pleasure if they would, in the future, at some later, calmer date, be his guests at the restaurant of their choice.
My parents, being who they are, considered accepting his invitation, but after discussion, did not.
My dad had wanted a new office window for a long time anyway.
The second person who crashed into my parents’ property drove through the chain-link fence into their backyard and flipped upside down, right beyond my mother’s clotheslines. His black SUV overturned, spilling a vast CD collection of Mexican cumbia music into the grass.
My parents didn’t wake up for this one. A policeman pounded on their back door, which seemed very creepy to my father when he finally woke up. He shouted, “Hey! Whoever you are, go away! I’m calling the police!”
“I am the police!”
The policeman had been chasing the guy for miles for running a stoplight.
My parents went outside in their pajamas. “This is getting old,” said my dad to my mom. “I told you we should move.”
The driver, also intoxicated, spoke no English. He offered no homecoming claims or dinner invitations. Much younger than the wayward Croatian, he kept his eyes turned down to the ground. My mom said he seemed embarrassed, as if he was expecting my parents to yell at him. But they didn’t yell. They were too sleepy.
The policeman demanded the guy’s car papers, which were hard to obtain from the glove box of an upside-down smashed vehicle. A tow truck came, flipped the car back over and dragged it away, leaving the music, receipts, cigarettes, and cigarette lighter in the dirt. The policemen hauled off the driver.
My parents were not happy about so many deep tire tracks in their yard. They were not happy about their crushed fence or being awakened so abruptly. My father gave more speeches about moving to the country. But a man they knew in the country flipped over on his tractor, was pinned under it, and died. Vehicular disasters could happen anywhere.
Visiting my parents a month later, I saw the lonesome stack of Mexican CDs sitting on a side table. The driver’s name, Antonio, was listed on one of his receipts. His place of employment seemed to be written on another piece of paper. It was a Mexican restaurant in a strip mall. I called to see if he still worked there. The manager seemed reluctant to give out the information. “But I have something that belongs to him,” I said. “He lost it. I want to return it.”
“What is it?”
“Music.”
The manager put the guy on the phone and I stumbled along in my pedestrian Spanish. I found out how long he would be there that day and got my father to drive me over to the restaurant. “I can’t see why you are doing this,” my dad said at a stoplight. “Why do you have to get involved? You do the strangest things.”
“I am a poet,” I said. “It is my destiny to do strange things. But think about it! Your car is wrecked, you’re living in a different country from where you grew up, and you need your music! Anyway, you’re not listening to these CDs, and you never will. Why should they go to waste?”
My father gripped the wheel of his car. “I am the chauffeur for foolishness.”
We said no more.
At the restaurant, I asked for Antonio casually, as if we were old friends. The manager looked me up and down and pointed to a guy dropping off a bus tub of dirty dishes in the hallway between the dining room and the kitchen. Antonio came out wiping his hands on his white apron and staring worriedly at me. He was thin and elegant looking, someone I would have had a crush on in college. Maybe he thought I was going to punch him or lecture him about driving and civic responsibility, but all I did was smile, hand him the CDs, and say “Be careful, okay? Please don’t drink and drive.”
He looked at me without blinking. He looked at his music. He seemed a little stunned. Unexpectedly a small good thing had happened in his day. “Adios,” I said, and he said, “Mil gracias” in a soft voice.
My father and I drove home in complete silence, to his house on the bustling boulevard. A car had broken down at the corner and was blocking the turn lane. My father sighed, punched his blinker, and said, “God, I hate this traffic.”
I said, “He seemed surprised when I didn’t yell at him or anything,” and my father said, “I don’t want to talk about it.”
After All That Walking
PEACE PILGRIM DIED IN A CAR ACCIDENT. Somewhere like Wisconsin. And for years she wouldn’t even get into a car between towns. Very strange. A man was driving—I think he had offered her a ride—and he died, too. I don’t think she knew him before their fateful journey. So, I guess it is not always true that we’ll be fine when we entrust our lives to strangers. I guess nothing is always, perfectly true. But we’re better off if we don’t worry about it too much. If we do, we’ll never be able to do much or go many places.
Our own small gray and nearly new car was totaled on a freeway in a bizarre pileup when our baby was three months old. Someone in front of us was fixing a flat tire and had stopped in the right-hand lane. Everyone behind him had to stop, too. A reckless driver behind us all didn’t notice we were stopped and hit the whole lineup. What a mess. Luckily our baby was in his car seat in the backseat turned around facing the rear the way he was supposed to be. He ended up with glass in his diaper, but entirely unhurt. We ended up bruised and shaken and not afraid of flying, ever again. If this
could happen on a highway only a mile from home…
Gifts
JUST PLAYING AROUND, I SING “LA LA LA” from the stage of a nice medium-size theater in mid-Manhattan. My voice blossoms widely in the space as if it belongs to someone else.
A group of Arab Americans is rehearsing for an evening event which will include drumming, speaking, singing, poetry, awards and honors, pretty clothes, jokes, and more music.
All I have to do is say a few poems and talk, but how do I get into these things?
It is the question I ask every day of my life.
Stage managers are snacking on falafel sandwiches in corners.
September eleventh hasn’t happened yet. The second war in Iraq hasn’t happened yet. Many bad things have happened, however—many bad things in other countries which people consider the United States at least partially responsible for. American school rarely stresses these sorrows, though. We’re the good guys, and we like to be. Arabs still immigrate to the United States fairly easily, and Americans visit the Middle East more comfortably than they will in a few short years.
Mostly the Arab Americans are a pretty happy group. We’re drinking tea. We’re wishing there could be justice for everyone who needs justice. We believe in culture and art and education more than in politics. We believe in books and music. We pray for no more violence against innocent citizens in any country. Okay then.
Some of the presenters are going back to their hotels to change clothes and take naps before the show starts, but I’m going to Greenwich Village to eat dinner with friends in a Lebanese café. I have a purple and black Palestinian hand-stitched jacket in my canvas bag—that’s all I ever need to make me feel dressed up. A stage manager hands me two free tickets for the evening and says, “Give these to friends if you like.”
It’s exciting. Having free tickets to use or give away—that’s the only kind of power I care about.
A yellow taxi rolls neatly over to the curb to let me in. The driver tips an ear to the small theater I’ve just exited. “I thought I heard music,” he says. “Arabic music.”
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