Because I Said So (52 page)

Again nothing happened. No flash.

“Oh well,” I said, taking the camera back. I hid behind the lens, my heart racing. I took a photo of the little boy, another of the shop. Franco didn’t move from his spot near the door, next to me. He was assessing my bags.

“You can’t carry all of this,” he said. He nodded toward the boy. “He’s a good boy. He’s in school. I’ll give him a pound to carry your bags. He’ll be happy.” He looked, smiling, at the boy.

“Tell Madame Kate how old you are.”

“Eleven and one,” said the boy.

“No!” Franco said, roughing the boy’s thick black hair.

“You’re twelve!”

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The little boy’s face erupted into a gorgeous dimpled grin, and he ducked away from us, gathering my bags.

I turned toward the front door, open now. Franco reached into his pocket and got out his own wallet. “If your husband ever wants to talk politics with an Egyptian, give him this,” he said, slowly handing me his business card, handing me, with diplo-matic grace, back to my life.

“Thank you,” I said, “I’ll tell him.”

He stepped away, toward the neatly stacked piles in the shop.

“Take this as a gift,” he said, holding the Bedouin blouse lightly by the shoulders. He shrugged. “My last one,” he said, “I couldn’t sell it anyway. Not now.”

The boy had all of my bags in his hands. I took a couple back from him and held the blouse. Franco was admonishing the boy to take me straight to the taxi stand, not to dawdle or make me late for my plane, and I pulled the door shut behind us. We walked down the steep steps, out to the Badestan Gate, where the canary was still singing its random song. The boy led and I followed, blood beating in my ears.

“You’re in school,” I said, making conversation, feigning nor-malcy. “What studies do you like?”

“I like history,” he said, beaming his dimpled smile. We were passing shops and merchants, all of them calling out “Madame, madame!” or “I make you a deal!” The boy used his narrow shoulders to block their entreaties, protecting me, maneuvering my bags through the alleys and slow-moving crowds as I trailed behind.

“We’re a good team,” I said to the boy, whose name I still did not know. “You make me homesick for my children.” The boy smiled again, then settled his face, serious now, all business.

All at once I recognized the street where we walked, near the same corner where my taxi had dropped me on my first morning in Cairo. Around us, beyond the hanging festoons of leather sandals and stuffed camel toys, people were sitting at café tables out in an alley, the
sheesha
smoke rising around them. As I passed an unoccupied wooden bench with striped pillows on the seat and an
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361

ornately framed, horizontal mirror hung on the wall behind it, I looked up and saw the sign over the carved alleyway arch: el-Fishawi’s.

“I’ll stop here,” I said quickly to the boy. “This is good. We can set the bags here,” I added, dropping my own load on the empty bench. Hesitating, he set my bags down. He didn’t want to disappoint Franco. I watched his brow knit.

“It’s okay,” I said. “Really.” I knew that Franco had already slipped him a pound as we left the shop. But I reached into my purse and pulled a ten-pound note from my wallet. When I handed it to him he took it in both hands, his entire face lighting once more with that unforgettable smile before he skittered away, folding back into the crowds.

Still racing, my heart. I needed to sit. I could hardly breathe.

A waiter approached me, instantaneously bringing me hot mint tea in a chipped enamel pot. What had happened to me? All around me laughter, voices, water bubbling in the bowls of the
sheeshas
, music, shouts. I tried to focus on my tea. The large crystals of sugar made a deafening sound as the little spoon scraped through the bowl. Another spoonful,
ziyada
, sweet, and I stirred the sugar in, the leaves of mint swirling in the glass. Every table around me was full, the café spilling out from the yellow-walled room I could see through the
mashrafiyya
lattice windows.

Couples were sitting close together, their foreheads nearly touching, talking and smoking. Waiters leaned against the walls watching the tables, arms folded, relaxed but attentive. Groups of tourists sat in sweaty abandon at tables pushed together, loads of overfilled bags like mine slumped on the ground at their feet, taking photographs of one another; like the Egyptians around them they greeted friends newly arrived, or called and waved as others left. I reached into my purse for my camera and turned it on, scrolling back through the digital images. There was the shop, the boy, the photos I’d taken all afternoon and morning . . . that was all. My body pulsed, alive, urgent, under the sweat-damp cotton I wore. I tried to drink from my burning cup. I could see his green eyes, still, seeing me.

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K a t e M o s e s

It really was, I knew, time for me to go. I had to go back to the hotel to pack, I had to go—I wanted to go—home. I ached for my family. I waved for the waiter and paid my bill.
Shukran
, I said, “thank you.” I picked up the Bedouin blouse and folded it neatly, pressing it smooth with my hands before I put it inside one of the bags. The attar of roses and sweet pea perfumes I tested had warmed on my skin; my arms were saffron yellow, dusted with cinnamon and cloves. I was fragrant with perfume, with spice, wearing jewels and flowers, like a bride.
Like meeting one’s
beloved in old age
, I thought again, rising to leave. I turned around to gather all of my gifts in their wrappings and stood, face to face now, with the mirror. I saw her there, her hair long and loose, the sun shining down on it, and all the people behind, drinking their tea, saying their hellos and good-byes, living and dying.

CONTRIBUTORS’ NOTES

Jennifer Allen
is the author of
Fifth Quarter: The Scrimmage of a
Football Coach’s Daughter
, a memoir of life as the youngest child and only daughter of legendary NFL coach George Allen, and the short story collection
Better Get Your Angel On.
Allen’s work has appeared in the
New York Times Magazine, New Republic, Rolling Stone, Men’s
Journal
, ESPN.com, NFL.com, and
George
. In 2002, she was a writer on the HBO series
ARLI$$
. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and their three sons.

Cecelie S. Berry
is a freelance writer and a former lawyer. She is the editor of
Rise Up Singing: Black Women Writers on Motherhood,
and her essays have appeared in the
New York Times
, the
Washington
Post, Newsweek, Child, O—the Oprah Magazine
, and
Salon
. Her commentaries have been broadcast on National Public Radio’s
Morning Edition.
She lives in New Jersey with her husband and sons.

Rosellen Brown
is the author of ten books, most recently the novels
Half a Heart
and
Before and After
. She has been married to teacher/educator Marv Hoffman since (gulp!) 1963, and has two grown daughters and one calico cat. Having lived in too many places, she has come to ground (for now) in Chicago.

Ana Castillo,
one of the original contributors to the online Mothers Who Think, is a novelist and poet who divides her time between teaching in Chicago, where she shares a duplex with her twenty-one-year-old son (and their dog), and her desert home in New Mexico, where she writes, paints, and runs around “nekid” to her heart’s desire.

364

C o n t r i b u t o r s ’ N o t e s

Mari Leonardo
is the pseudonym for a woman who immigrated to San Francisco from Guatemala in 2001. She has three children, sixteen, fourteen, and thirteen years old.

Janet Fitch
’s first novel,
White Oleander
, has been translated into twenty-eight languages. She is the mother of a now fourteen-year-old, who in the end chose to attend a liberal, Catholic girls’ high school a short six-minute drive from their home in Los Angeles. Fitch is currently finishing a second novel. Her daughter does not intend to be a writer.

Charo Gonzalez
was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina. She is a journalist and writer whose interviews and articles have appeared in Latin American publications, and a former producer, editor, and reporter for an international Spanish-language television news network in New York. She lives in San Francisco with her husband and two children, Camilla and Nico. Gonzalez is currently working on her first novel.

Ariel Gore
(www.arielgore.com) is the editor and publisher of
Hip
Mama: The Parenting Zine (
www.hipmamazine.com) and the author of three parenting books—
The Hip Mama Survival Guide, The
Mother Trip
, and
Whatever, Mom
—as well as a novel/memoir,
Atlas of
the Human Heart
. She is a contributor to the
Mothers Who Think
anthology. She lives with her family in Portland, Oregon.

Andrea Lawson Gray
is a native New Yorker who moved to San Francisco in 1989. She has three children, Andre Gabriel Gray, eighteen; Armand Alexis Gray, twelve; and Cienna Georgia Gray, seven.

Ann Hulbert
, a senior editor at the
New Republic
for many years, is the author of
The Interior Castle: The Art and Life of Jean Stafford
and
Raising America: Experts, Parents, and a Century of Advice About
Children
. Her writing has appeared in various publications, including
Slate,
the
New York Times Magazine
and the
New York Times Book
Review
, the
New York Review of Books
, and the
New Yorker
. She lives in Washington, D.C., with her husband and two children.

C o n t r i b u t o r s ’ N o t e s

365

Nora Okja Keller
, a contributor to the
Mothers Who Think
anthology, is the author of the novels
Fox Girl
and
Comfort Woman
, which won an American Book Award in 1998. She is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize for the short story “Mother Tongue,” a portion of
Comfort Woman
. She lives in Hawaii with her husband and two daughters.

Beth Kephart
is the award-winning author of five nonfiction books; her most recent is
Ghosts in the Garden
. Her first book,
A
Slant of Sun
, was a 1998 National Book Award finalist and a Salon.com Best Book of the Year. Her second,
Into the Tangle of
Frienship
, earned an NEA grant. Frequently anthologized, Kephart’s essays have appeared in the
New York Times,
the
Washington Post
Book World,
the
Chicago Tribune, Real Simple
, and elsewhere. She is a partner in a marketing communications firm. A contributor to the
Mothers Who Think
anthology, she lives in Devon, Pennsylvania, with her husband and teenage son.

Christina Koenig
, formerly a print, radio, and television journalist, is now director of communications and media relations for Y-ME

National Breast Cancer Organization, which provides information and support for breast cancer patients and their families. She lives in Chicago with her eight-year-old daughter, Rebecca . . . and husband Bill, whom she met at a bar over a margarita.

Jean Hanff Korelitz
is the author of three novels,
The White
Rose, The Sabbathday River
, and
A Jury of Her Peers
, as well as a novel for children,
Interference Powder
, and a collection of poems,
The Properties of Breath
. She is one of the original contributors to the online Mothers Who Think. Korelitz lives in Princeton, New Jersey, with her husband, Paul Muldoon, and their two children.

Constance Matthiessen
, one of the original contributors to the online Mothers Who Think, is a journalist and writer who lives with her three children in San Francisco.

366

C o n t r i b u t o r s ’ N o t e s

Denise Minor
is a doctoral candidate in Spanish Linguistics at the University of California, Davis, where she also teaches Spanish compo-sition. As a news reporter and freelance writer, she wrote for the
San
Francisco Examiner, Pacific News Service
, and
Image
magazine, among others. She lives in Davis, California, with her husband, Alex Milgram, and her sons, Max and Nathan. Her essay, “There’s No Being Sad Here,” is dedicated to her mother, Pat Minor.

Mary Morris
is the author of twelve books, including the novels
Revenge
,
Acts of God, The Night Sky
, and
House Arrest
; the story collection
The Lifeguard
; and the travel memoirs
Nothing to Declare:
Memoirs of a Woman Traveling Alone
and
Angels and Aliens: A Journey
West
. She and her husband, Larry O’Connor, are coeditors of
Maiden
Voyages
, an anthology of women’s travel literature. Morris’s short stories and travel essays have appeared in the
Paris Review,
the
New York
Times, Travel & Leisure
, and
Vogue
. The recipient of a Guggenheim fel-lowship and the Rome Prize in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, she teaches writing at Sarah Lawrence College and lives in Brooklyn with her husband and daughter.