Because I Said So (48 page)

My girls are appalled by women my age who try to look like their own Extreme Makeover. They shake their heads at the moth-332

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ers who wear false eyelashes to the store, who have obviously enhanced busts spilling out of shelf-bra tanks, who wear Candies shoes (another seventies revival!) and hot pants to pick up their kids from school, revealing crescents of flesh not usually seen.

I watched the mothers at a school assembly recently, and I watched the kids’ reactions to us, and I believe that children want us to look like mothers. That doesn’t mean shabby and resentful and uncaring, but it doesn’t mean a leopard-print thong and a sun tattoo around the navel and a shirt that says PORN STAR.

We are animals, with many body parts. But mothers have produced offspring, and when mothers are actively trying to attract men, even their own husbands, with constant displays of overt sex, I think baby and even adolescent animals feel threatened, or at least uneasy.

There is unease at the sight of our sexualized, public bellies.

Most of the girls I know don’t want their mothers wearing JUICY

or SWEET across their butts, or dolphins or hearts rising from the nether regions. Daughters do not want to think about our nether regions.

Which is what the belly is all about. In a recent issue of
Redbook
, in an entire section devoted to depilation, women are admonished not to forget to remove “your goodie trail.” Goodie trail? I squinted at the explanation: “The line of hairs that leads to, well, your goods.” That would be the hair on the belly that people didn’t used to see. The hair that’s sexy on men who wear their jeans down low, showing their boxers.

So it’s all about the goods. The swath of flesh between the hipbones, the groin itself, that is the actual repository of our species. Under that decorated skin is the receptacle of uterus and ovaries, the place where the baby will lie curled and waiting.

Then the baby will grow into a child who certainly doesn’t want to see her mother’s belly, or cleavage, high or low.

My friend, who walked beside me at Disneyland, also has three kids, the same ages as mine. I studied myself in her sunglasses. We have marks. Lots of them. We wear capris from Target and colorful tees and flat shoes. We have soft stomachs
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because, well, babies were in there. We have fans of fine lines around our eyes because it’s sunny and we squint when we watch kids practice or wait for them outside the classroom or the ortho-dontist. We have not-snowy teeth because we drink coffee and tea to keep us awake in the morning while we make lunches and get ready for work or housework or dirty work—what women do.

As I watched all the girls walking the asphalt trails of Disneyland with thousands of other animals—none of whom, I will guess, wanting to see their mother’s belly on display—what I saw were their burnished lower backs, their trembling too-pale bellies, their fake tattoos peeling off disconsolately from the lower spines, or their elaborate real tattoos pointing the way into their jeans, toward goodies they may not fully understand, and dangers for which they may not be ready. And I thought,
I feel the same
way about you
. I see your hipbones like little goal posts poking through your skin, and I see in my memory the sketches of the reproductive organs from school lessons mapping you, and I see in my imagination the flaws and scars, the resignation and knowledge that will eventually leave their marks, and I see the delicacy of that belly skin, the elasticity that will allow you to become me, someday.

Mother of the World

K a t e M o s e s

Mother of the World

I arrived at three o’clock in the morning, but even then Cairo’s notoriously polluted air was thick with lingering heat. Though the city’s lights glittered against the desert’s distant darkness, it was far too early to go to my hotel. As we drove on empty highways, the taxi driver, who spoke some English, said he would take me to a café where I could have tea and wait. “In Cairo, you will be treated as a man,” he reassured me. I had heard this before: Western women are typically relegated to the status of “honorary men.” I wasn’t convinced; being treated as sexually invisible seemed closer to the truth.

Left on a corner with my luggage, dressed in modest, baggy clothing, I was at the edge of the labyrinthine Khan al-Khalili, a fourteenth-century neighborhood famous for its historic, bustling market sprawling over a square mile of medieval streets and alleyways. Beyond the corner sidewalk café, the thousand-year-old Al-Azhar University and the Al-Husayn mosque—holiest of all in Cairo—rose behind walls on either side. Even that early, many people were wandering about, mostly men but also some women and children. The women I saw sat in family groups at the café, veils carefully pinned close to their heads as they sipped spicy, fragrant
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Egyptian coffee or hot, scarlet tea—
karkaday
, made from steeped hibiscus flowers—while the men smoked flavored tobacco from
sheeshas,
ornate, brass-fitted water pipes. Or they strolled slowly with their families through the crowds, mildly looking around, sleeping babies draped limply over their shoulders.

Pulling my suitcase along as discreetly as I could, I turned down an alley lined with market stalls, lights blazing. There were tourist-trap bazaars crammed with faux Egyptiana and gaudy belly-dancing outfits alongside craftsman’s shops selling hand-embroidered tribal tents and rugs woven of camel hair. There were huge rush baskets brimming with spices, donkey carts loaded with burlap sacks of roasted nuts, tired salesmen with piles of cheap plastic toys laid out on blankets in the street. I looked at everything and everyone surreptitiously, obliquely, not wanting to make eye contact, not wanting to be noticed. I felt a tug behind me and heard laughter. I turned around: A group of beggar children, barefoot and wearing shreds of clothing, were skipping away, giggling, having just touched my uncovered hair.

Behind them was a man with no legs, only bare, black-encrusted feet, using his hands to walk. Along the sacred mosque’s high crenulated wall, a merchant had stacked cages of restless, hissing wild animals, their tails brushing the wire bars, and on top of the cages, dead animals—taxidermied, grimacing creatures I couldn’t identify, their glass eyes soulless.

I hurried back to the corner where the taxi had dropped me. I sat at one of the café tables surrounded by men smoking
sheesha
, the sickeningly sweet smoke from their apple-scented tobacco making me dizzy and ill. For the first time I admitted to myself that this trip might be fruitless, a bad idea. I’d never before in my life gone anywhere alone, ever. I had always managed to bypass any chance I’d ever had to move independently through the world; the truth is that my identity had always been largely dependent on others—my parents, my family, my friends, ultimately my husband and my children, motherhood being my self-hood’s galvanizing force. I felt confident and solid as long as I was the caretaker or the mother, the provider of comfort or the solver
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of problems. During the spring of 2004, though, my self had become someone I found unreliable.

A few days before Christmas, at the age of forty-one, I lost my third baby.

Five weeks later, a dear friend was diagnosed with a rare form of metastasized cancer. She is the fourth of my beloved, trusted friends—all women, all mothers—to face a cancer diagnosis in three years.

Now in summer, trying to remember the Arabic words the taxi driver had taught me, awkwardly ordering another scalding cup of mint tea when my last one had cooled, I was not entirely sure I was up to this. For months I’d lived as if skinless, utterly vulnerable. Overwhelmed by human frailties, especially my own, I didn’t know what to do, but I had to do
something
. I had come to Egypt to see a painting, a portrait of a woman whose face haunted and consoled me.

With each sip of tea, my fingers trembling around the glass, I tried to coax myself back from the ledge of panic. I tried to focus on something I’d read in a novel by Egypt’s Nobel laureate, Naguib Mahfouz, who had grown up in this neighborhood.

Mahfouz wrote several of his books in the “Closed Treasure Room” at el-Fishawi’s café, a Khan al-Khalili institution for hundreds of years. The line I remembered was one I loved for its ambiguity, its multiple layers of meaning and possibility: Cairo, wrote Mahfouz, was “like meeting one’s beloved in old age.” It was almost a riddle. Did “meeting” mean for the first time, or after a lifetime’s separation? Is it the beloved or the lover who is old? Or both? In my head, I mentally fingered the variable answers.

Cairo itself embodies contradiction, a city widely acknowledged as bewildering, seductive, filthy, operatic, vast, decadent, glorious.

The prehistoric mythology of the ancient Egyptians says that life began at the spot that is now Cairo, born out of universal nothing-ness by the creator god, a radiant orb whose tears became mankind—though Cairo is known in Arabic as
Misr um al-dunya
,

“Mother of the World.” The creator god’s wife was the resourceful
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goddess Mut, protectress of the innocent, righter of wrongs, and patroness of women, especially mothers. The hieroglyphic form of the word
mut
is the huge, powerful vulture of the African desert. In Egyptian,
mut
means both “mother” and “death.”

From my sidewalk table at the café I watched the sky, deep indigo when I arrived. As the sun’s rising light bled up through the shadows, minarets and domes materialized before me in high, gilded relief. At five o’clock, the recorded voices of the
muezzins
broke the morning’s relative silence as loudspeakers came on at mosques all over the city, calling the faithful to prayers.

The Fayum Portraits

Her name was Demos, a word meaning “the people”; she was twenty-four years old. She lived and died in Egypt in the first century A.D. Her portrait was painted to decorate her mummified body after her death, for two reasons: to give her
ka
, her life force, a symbolic portal into eternity; and to give her loved ones a tangible focus for their grief. The mummy of the baby girl found with her was almost certainly her daughter. Both had died shortly after their portraits were painted. A scarlet ribbon edged in gold had been laid across Demos’s mummified breast by the people who loved her; written in Greek, the common language of her time, was her name, her age, and a single phrase:
always to be
remembered
.

Despite my letters and e-mails and calls, the Egyptian Museum had never confirmed that the portraits of Demos and her baby, two of the masterpieces in the museum’s collection of so-called Fayum portraits, would be on display when I arrived. The portraits had been restored, then shown in a special exhibit at another Cairo venue a year before; since then, they had disappeared.

The thousand or so Fayum portraits scattered through museums around the world are the only significant body of painting to survive from classical antiquity. Most of them were found in the late eighteenth century in Egypt’s Fayum oasis region, unearthed in Roman-era cemeteries where they had been buried in shallow
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sand graves, the thin wooden panels and wax encaustic medium of the fragile portraits preserved thanks to Egypt’s dry climate and burial customs. Amazingly, the colors and luminosity of the portraits are said to be just as fresh today as they were in the first four centuries A.D., when they were created as memorials to capture the unique individuality of their subjects.

Most of the portraits were painted quickly from life and displayed in the home until the subject’s death; the portrait was then removed from its frame, cut down, and affixed to the mummified body, a pictorial representation of the deceased meant to ensure their body’s journey from life to immortality, in keeping with the highly ritualized Egyptian religious beliefs. A majority of the portraits are of people in what we would consider the early stages of life; some have the hunted look of illness, their skin sallow or their eyes sunken in dark circles, or their faces disfigured by unknowable maladies. Since life expectancy during Egypt’s Greco-Roman period was dismal for children and less than thirty years for women—

childbearing being a commonly lethal risk—most of the portraits were painted in anticipation of an expected death.

The Greek painter and art historian Euphrosyne Doxiadis, who spent ten years documenting the portraits, has called them

“great monuments to mourning.” I came across Doxiadis’s book when I was also in mourning—for my baby, my friends’ uncertain futures, the competent, effective self I used to trust. I needed distraction and solace. The immediacy of the portraits, the candor and elegiac dignity of their moving, numinous faces, were mesmerizing. They were paintings of the long-dead, but they continued, as André Malraux wrote, to “glow with the flame of eternal life.” They were as vivid, as life-affirming, as anything I’d ever seen—as the faces of my children.

There were faces more breathtaking, more beautiful than Demos’s. There were handsome, shirtless young men going off to join the Roman army, their loved ones knowing they would likely never return. There were women whose dazzling portraits were embellished with gold leaf. But humble Demos immediately possessed me. She looks back at the artist from the slightest angle,
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over her left shoulder, her face girlishly rounded, its youthful soft-ness betraying her age despite the intricate styling of her dark hair. Her lips are slightly parted, as if she were about to speak, but hesitates. Demos’s somber-faced baby, who shares her dark, questioning eyes and poignantly tender double chin, is impossible to mistake as anyone but Demos’s child.