Him, Me, Muhammad Ali. Randa Jarrar
and new people arrive, I sometimes imagine that the little princesses stepping out of the back seats are Perihan, even though she must be thirty by now. A gray Peugeot pulled up this June, and a Perihan impostor, eight years old and wearing an American outfit, appeared. I wanted to rush to her in glee, my old body slowly catching up with my excitement. I heard someone call my name, lilting and pealing its letters like a brand-new bicycle bell. In time, I realized the little Peri was her daughter, with the real Perihan in tow.
At first, we exchanged kisses and hugs, and my father and mother came to greet her. Shadia stayed by my candy-and-chips stand outside the building; she was shy and still. Perihan’s daughter, Anna, went to Shadia; the little girl spoke not a word of Arabic but was charading wildly and making Shadia laugh. They played together; Shadia showed her our home, and Perihan and I took their suitcases up to the apartment. Halfway up, on the third floor, Perihan’s breath was running ahead of her and she had to slow down. We talked for a while; I told her about Shadia’s father, the ass, and she told me about her daughter’s father, also an ass. I asked her what she needed from the market, and she turned red and said she could shop for herself. “Oh, you’re tired,” I said. “Let me. I have a bike now. I like riding it.” She reluctantly agreed and gave me some money, and I was off to buy her groceries, just like I did for her mother twenty years ago.
I like being at the market; people push past you and men wink. I love watching the summer crowds and their dealings. Girls wear tight denim and let their straightened hair spill across their shoulders. (My hair is always in a bun or under a kerchief.) Men follow them and hurl sweet praise their way, and the girls pretend to hate it or not to hear. The shops stand close to each other, nothing but thin walls to separate them: cheese here, bread there, toys here, mattresses there, dresses here, kerchiefs there, books here, books there. A nasty-smelling fish shop sits at one end of the market and a shiny silver jeweler on the other: in that sense, even the market has a top and a bottom floor. I rode by the bookseller’s and quickly scanned the covers and titles; all books about a man who goes far away for school, comes back to the homeland, and decides that this is where he belongs. In winter, I read them out of boredom and, to be completely honest, I prefer planting flowers or watering the banana tree or even being sweet-talked by toothless men to reading these kinds of books. After I filled my cloth sack with cheese, yogurt, eggs, tea, mint, toilet paper, a newspaper, and bread, I mounted my bike and rode off, the smell from the fish shop at the opposite side of the market wafting over me. The smell was like Shadia’s father, foul and persistent, so I pedaled my bike faster.
When I arrived at Perihan’s, she had all the windows closed and the air conditioner in the corner humming. She asked me if the mosquito truck had gone by yet, and I said it hadn’t, so we emptied her suitcase together. I asked about her daughter Anna’s father; he was American and they were divorced. Anna was darker-skinned than Perihan, and Perihan told me that not all Americans were blonde and white. I was confused and asked if she was lying, and she swore on the holy book she was not. “Anna’s father was brown-skinned, like an Egyptian,” she winked and I laughed. We made tea and she asked me to sit out on the balcony and drink with her but she wouldn’t let Anna come out with us. She said the mosquito truck emitted fumes that were cancerous and she didn’t want to expose Anna. I nodded silently and drank my tea, even though it now felt like mud on my tongue and in my throat. I wanted to ask if she’d forgotten how we used to ride on our bicycles behind the truck at night, and inhale the big white cloud until we felt like we were in the sky itself. I wanted to ask if she now thought I would get cancer, or if Shadia or my father or all of us that were left behind here in the beach town would get it. When the truck pulled up she covered her nose like a snob and I couldn’t bear it, so I pretended I had to go bathe Shadia, dumped the contents of my teacup and went down the stairs two steps at a time. That night, the image of Perihan with her nose pinched burned through my eyelids. I rubbed my eyes and turned to my side.
The girls played in the street or fed the chickens in the dump, and Peri sat on her balcony and read or watched the beach. I asked her why she was in Egypt, and she told me she was here doing research for her PhD. I wasn’t sure how sunning herself on a balcony would get her a doctorate, but I said nothing. Sometimes she came down and sat next to me where the entrance of the building met the street. I crouched beside my candy-and-chips stand, my soda cooler and my umbrella, and whenever someone walked by, we would hassle them to buy something. Perihan was the best hustler; she’d tell people they looked parched or pick on the skinny summer-girls and try to get them to buy chips. She was a great saleslady and I told her that. When business was slow we walked around the building and I showed her my plants, her mouth open in amazement the whole time. She kept repeating, “You planted this tree? These flowers? These herbs?” She loved the garden, and some evenings after the dusk prayer, she asked if she could water too. I always said yes and watched as she leapt around the garden with the water hose, completely content.
One morning, after she’d come with me to the market and the girls had begged us for countless toys, she asked if Shadia’s father ever visited her. “Him?” I feigned disgust and told her he hadn’t seen her in years. “Abu Anna visits,” she said, after a long pause.
“When?” I wanted to know.
“On Wednesdays between five and eight, and every other Saturday,” she said. I laughed hard then, because Perihan could be so funny when she wanted to be, and her specific brand of humor was based on giving exact measurements for things that cannot be measured. She laughed with me, but swore it was true.
The girls played in the dump by the building, and declined whenever the girls from the mirror floor tried to play with them. When Peri and I were their age, we used to accept these offers only to regret them later: someone bossed us around or stole our treasures or flounced around us and made us cry. It was as though our daughters had learned that lesson through us, and seeing this made me happy.
I was convinced that we should go to the bazaar, and I rounded up the girls and we all walked out to the tent by the carnival. I love the flea market; it comes through every July, rows and rows of rings and rocks and skirts and necklaces, dozens of vendors. I like the way everything looks, colorful and loud, like a circus. Perihan bought some dresses and a ring, and I pawed a pair of earrings until she made me try them on. They were round and big and made of brass with fake garnets in them, and in the mirror—with the carnival tent behind me and the earrings hanging by my face—I looked like someone else entirely. It felt good to pretend to be someone else, so I asked the Malaysian man at the counter how much they were and haggled until he agreed to half his initial price. Perihan insisted on paying. I thought that was kind so I let her, and afterwards she slapped my palm and giggled and told me I should teach negotiations at universities around the world.
Sometimes, Perihan’s friends visited from downtown and she sat with them on the balcony far into the night, telling them stories in Arabic and English. It was understood that I would not join in these gatherings, the same way a person does not bring a car into their house. They all giggled and drank Stella and smoked cigarettes, and Mother shook her head in their direction because she did not approve. In the morning, which began at around 2:00 P.M. for them, they walked to the shore carrying beach chairs and umbrellas. By then I would have already shopped for the first and second floors, watered the plants, done the wash, cooked for my family, and cleaned the building’s entrance with rags. I jealously watched Peri and her friends walk down the street, then went to my garden and sat in the shade and daydreamed. The honeymooning women shouted down at me from the third- and fourth-floor balconies, and I ran up for their grocery lists. They paid the total and usually tipped me around 20 percent for the delivery. At the end of the summer they’d also give me a bulk tip. These tips and end-of-summer gifts provided enough money to tide me over until the next summer.
Whenever I thought of winter, I pictured it dark and long like night, like Madame Manaal’s apartment, or my eyes when I close them against the light. I dreaded the town’s emptiness, how residents would leave like ants being flung from a vast, billowing blanket. I put the wash on the clothesline, pants and undergarments and shirts and shawls, and as I fastened them with wooden pegs to the bright-yellow line, I wondered about love, if I would ever be blessed with it, or ever be married again. I wanted that, but I told Mother and everyone else that I didn’t, pretended that I hated men and their wiles, and that I