The Lost Father (77 page)

“But of course you’ll ask for more,” Mai linn said.

“What do you mean?” I said. “I’m going to try and pick them out here and somehow suggest to him what I want.” I looked at Emily.

“We’ll go to Chanel this afternoon.” Emily had been giving me the full range of choices. The large South Sea pearls were in the ten thousands, that I knew was further than I could push him. Anyway, I wanted him to give the big money to my mom. But Emily said for the price of good small pearls you could get Chanel, which weren’t real, but I should see because they were beautiful anyway.

I looked at Mai linn kind of guiltily. I hadn’t really wanted her to know I was following Emily through all these stores.

“I’ve priced them anyway,” I said.

“How much are they?” Mai linn asked.

“Well, they start at about five hundred.”

“But you don’t want those. They’re too small,” Emily said. “They look like a child’s pearls.”

“The ones I want are a thousand. I think he’ll do that.”

“He should,” Mai linn said. “But then what?”

Emily said, “You mean she’ll ask for more and more?”

“The fight will come,” Mai linn said.

I nodded. “And maybe I want that.”

“So you’re kind of upping the ante. Testing his limit. But whatever it is, I don’t think you’ll be satisfied. Pearls aren’t going to make up for it.”

“But I still want pearls. I think I’d just like to have some.”

My friends’ fathers gave them to their wives. Or my friends got them at graduation. One mother I knew bought her daughter pearls on an installment plan, paying on time every month. I never wanted such things in Wisconsin. I had them. In abundance. My grandmother’s house was full of mysteries, you opened a drawer and it was there, the big colored chalk, pearls, a little dish of hand-cut nails. None of it was real, but it didn’t matter. It was real enough for us.

But I didn’t just want pearls. I wanted them to be hard for him to afford.

And if we don’t find something, we’ll fake it. I’ll fake it
.

E
VENTUALLY
, we pushed up from the café table and went outside. Mai linn said, “So Emily, whatever happened to Boom-boom-boom?”

Emily shrugged. “He doesn’t talk to me anymore. He sent a bonded messenger to pick up his ring.”

“And what about your little lawyer?” she asked me.

“He’s around. We’re friends.”

“He’s a nice guy. I don’t know why you didn’t go for him.”

I shrugged. I didn’t know either. You never really know.

These are the beauty years for me, I was thinking. The best was probably over, or else it was right now. I’d written my mother and asked her if I could have one of her old suits.

She’d called me up on the telephone, furious. “You’re just take, take, take,” she said. “That’s all I have to wear, do you think I ever get anything new! I wear things five years, ten years old to work every day.” She was still yelling when I set down the phone.

There was nothing else I was waiting for and I was behind. I made Emily take me shopping and give me lessons.

And she was a happy tour guide. That day she led us to a small store with large communal dressing rooms. We took blouses and jeans and slacks and jackets and dresses and skirts into the room and all started trying them on.

I never wore skirts. I couldn’t because of my legs.

Emily said, “Both of you I think would look really good in this. Let me go see if there’s another one.”

We each slipped on the matching skirts. They were a black fabric, short, well over our knees. Mai linn looked right, the way a person is supposed to. My knees looked loose, like a fried egg on top of bone.

“No,” I said. I unzipped it and I was stepping out, it was around my ankles.

“Put it on again.” Emily pulled it up, zipped, ran her hands over my hips and down the outside of my legs, smoothing the fabric.

“My legs, I can’t. They’re too short.”

Mai linn pushed her calf up next to mine. “They’re exactly the same,” she said, and in the mirror, they were.

We left with our shopping bags. I was spending all the money I had in the bank. But after my grandmother’s money, other money was easy to spend. Then we went to the library so I could show them old typefaces I found. I was looking at typefaces for the inscription on my fountain.

I
STARTED TO WORRY
that he’d get my pearls at Macy’s. The other jewelry he’d sent me had come from there. I wanted nice ones, good quality.

I was going to see him around my birthday. I wanted to pick out the pearls myself.

I don’t know which came first.

I wasn’t that direct about it. It had been a year, a little more. We’d talked on the phone but I hadn’t seen my father, since that first time. I was going to be in California anyway so we planned a trip in the wine country, for two days.

It wasn’t until then that I remembered all the things I’d saved for him. Well, I’d taken that little add-a-pearl chain to show him, the two pearls like tiny baby teeth. But there were pictures of my childhood. All my altars and shrines. I threw them out, but then I took my favorite, made of butterfly wings and my baby teeth, back from the garbage. I wanted to keep it for myself. I’d saved the roses he’d bought me from the grocery store a year ago and they were dead and dry now. He’d given me pictures of himself.

Of my mother and me in our life?

He never asked.

I called him to say, don’t get anything for me for my birthday, I wanted us to go shopping together.

S
TEVIE
H
OWARD DROVE ME
at seven in the morning to the place I was going to meet my father.

“Why is it,” he said on the way, “that women, basically law-abiding women, want to steal men’s clothes?”

I thought of Mai linn. When Mai linn first left Racine and moved to North Dakota, she used to sleep with Ben’s shirt. I had sweaters and too-long-footed socks from old boyfriends. Eventually, I threw the stuff away. It made you feel safe for a while but they didn’t really fit. Later, when you had to go out into the world on your own again, they didn’t work at all.

“Remember how I used to wish I had a shirt or an old sweater of my father’s?”

“You could get one now, huh?”

“I don’t want one now. Now I want pearls.”

W
E MET MY FATHER
at a café in Berkeley. We all had coffee and then I threw my backpack in the trunk of my father’s Cadillac. Before we left, my father invited Stevie to join us the next night in San Francisco for dinner. Driving at fifty miles an hour towards the Napa Valley, he asked me if I’d ever been there before. I lied and said no but I had gone there once with my mother.

My father was wearing new green and gray suede hiking boots. He had a map with instructions to a place we could hike. “I am prepared,” he said, showing me the canteens of water. “People all told me that hiking would be an enjoyable way to spend some hours.”

Fine with me. I’d hiked for years in college and I knew Napa was pretty flat. I didn’t need anything but the stuff I was wearing.

He had a tape of Arabic music he slipped in the car’s stereo. It sounded like the kind of thing you heard in Greek restaurants.

“This is Om Kulthum. She’s the Frank Sinatra of the Arab World.”

“Where is she from?”

“Cairo.”

“What’s her name again?”

“Om Kulthum. That means, technically, Mother of Kulthum. See
when you have a son you take the name of your oldest son. So my father’s real name was Azziz but he went by the name of Abu Mohammed. But you’d never say, Abu Mayan, in the Arab world. Call it sexist, call it what you want.”

Then I remembered something I’d learned from Ramadan. The word “tarboosh.” It meant a tall hat, a fez. And my father when I was little used to play a game where he lay on the floor and pushed me up in the air on the bottoms of his feet. I always thought he was saying Kaboosh, just a sound, but maybe I was high up like a hat. I asked him.

“I don’t know.” He shrugged. “I don’t remember. Could have been.”

“I
HAVE BEEN THINKING
about your wedding,” he said. His bottom lip curled open in concentration. I suppose to him I was pretty old.

I tried to divert him by asking about Egyptian weddings.

“Oh, well, I don’t know what they’re like now, honey, I suppose they’re just about like here now.”

“But when you were growing up?”

“Oh, well, when I was growing up, the traditional Arabic wedding was in the home of the bride. And first of all it was only women.”

“No men? What about the groom?”

“He comes later. But it starts out all women. See, the women of the family have been cooking for days and days preparing the food and the cakes and the sweets and so on and they throw an enormous feast. And the bride sits in her dress on her little throne and they eat. They dance a little. If they’re rich, they may even hire a eunuch to dance in the middle. And this is all non-alcoholic, remember.”

In his house in Alexandria, there were wedding pictures of a girl on a fancy throne.

“And then, after a little while, the bride will go into the house and she will change clothes into her next outfit and she’ll keep doing that all night. To get married in Egypt, the girl has to have nine or ten dresses and not only the dress but the whole thing. You know the shoes and stockings and accessories. And if it’s a wealthy family like mine, they would go—”

“Paris.”

“Well I suppose now they’d go to Paris but then we would all go and shop in Beirut. Beirut, Lebanon.”

I remembered the pictures of the girl in the different dresses.

“So they’d have music and the meal. She’d go and change, and then she’d stay on her throne. And the women eat and drink, just soft drinks, and dance. Then the groom will come a little before midnight and he takes her to the bedroom. They leave them alone for a while. And then after an hour, I don’t know, two hours, the mother of the bride will go in and she’ll come back out and bring—this sounds barbaric but it is that way—she brings out the bloody hankie and they all dance around it. And then the marriage is consummated. If there’s no blood there’s trouble. My brother-in-law Tarik was kind of a timid guy and he was in there with Amina until ten in the morning.”

“Do people ever fake it?”

“Oh, you mean like kill a chicken and use that. I have heard of it, but I’ve never known it to happen, personally. The mothers there watch their daughters pretty carefully. It’s part of the mother’s pride, that her daughter is perfect and untouched.”

Now I looked at the road and let it go awhile. There was nothing I could really say to that. We passed one town, then another. It was hot but the air-conditioning was on. It was an old enough car so that all the controls seemed plastic, not old enough to get better with age. I snuck a look at him sideways.

He was wearing hiking clothes, brand new. Shorts, shirt, the suede boots. He had carefully fitted sunglasses over his ears.

“If you open the glove compartment, Mayan, you’ll see some pictures I brought for you.”

They were of himself, young. He was standing with a group of other students, all Egyptian. A microphone stood in the picture for no apparent reason. I’d take that suit in the picture, I was thinking. It was double-breasted, long, you could tell it was a great suit even now. Almost all of the girls in the picture, one hair-back studious type, two heavy girls, one stray-haired, a voluptuary, were glancing at him.

“Nice suit,” I said. “When was this?”

“At the American University in Beirut. I used to go to Beirut and spend a fortune on suits. I’d buy all Italian, all French suits, and just charge it to my dad. I’d spend eight hundred, a thousand dollars on a suit. Now I spend two hundred. And it makes no difference to me. It doesn’t matter to me anymore.”

Yeah, good for you, I was thinking, you had your turn. He had his
turn, but when would be mine? And when my mother’s? When are most people’s turns but in heaven or in their dreams or in their chests, the first hard run of childhood.

“Now I fly coach and it makes no difference to me. We used to fly around the world first class and never think about it.” On Uta’s money, I was pretty sure. Or on the tour groups’.

When he talked like that I wanted to kill him. There was no guilt. He didn’t look at me nervous or hide it or anything as if what he was saying could have any effect on me. My mother and I, most of those years, were living in Los Angeles, on thirteen thousand dollars.

He spoke as if he were speaking to a stranger, which I guess he was, not to a person he owed anything. Maybe enormous guilt—like that for killing life or the giving away of children—is impossible to bear or maybe it doesn’t exist. The people who feel and live great amounts of guilt are the only faintly guilty. Those who have never been strong enough to do anything.

“See, if my father had put his money in the banks. You know, Mayan, he kept gold coins hidden in pots under the ground, can you believe that?”

“Yeah,” I said. The last time he’d told me it was in banks.

“But if he hadn’t,” he laughed, “we’d all be a lot better off, financially.”

I doubted I would be.

“When they nationalized everything, it destroyed him.”

“I grew up poor, Dad,” I said. I allowed myself some truth. “Those people should be lined up and shot.”

“Honey, he was your grandfather.”

“I never met him.”

“I know that, Mayan.”

Compared to us, my mother and me, he was so mild.

I
F MY MOTHER
hadn’t been crazy, I was thinking, I don’t know if I could have kept believing.

But my mother lied. She still lies all the time, she is a person altogether without spine or erectness. She bent to anyone’s will and so I would look to the sky and believe it was possible, it was just scarcely possible, that he could be good and have a reason.

I tried to give him reasons. All my life I collected them. The man
who told me that in India parents were too busy to raise children because they were building the New India.

But I doubted my father was making the New Egypt. Those people’s names were in the paper.