Honeybee (8 page)

I never heard his name. Does he have a name?

 

Right before I rose to give a public lecture in Cairo, in a room far too fancy for a simple person like myself—ornate carvings in the ceiling, Oriental rugs, fine intricate windows—a white cat walked confidently down the center aisle of the hall and stepped onto the platform at the front, where I was being introduced. He looked at me, with an “Ah, there you are!” look and sat right beside me while I gave my talk. I had looked up the word “lecture” in the dictionary beforehand and discovered the source of the quiver in my stomach—“lecture” means something stern someone gives you, a life lesson sort of thing. Also, a formal reproof, a reprimand.

No thanks.

I didn't have that. I had scrambled bits and pieces, poems, quotes, a weird outfit, bits of paper written on by 8-year-olds, and a vagrant white cat. Somehow the cat—most pure discourse offered that afternoon—never entered the comments I made to the audience, which in retrospect seems strange. It is so easy to make a joke out of something right next to you. But there was a sanctity about him. There was also the chance I was
the only one seeing him. He seemed ghostly and I felt quite disembodied and no one else
was looking at him
. He just sat there, then left at the end of the talk, stepping neatly out of the room. I did not see him for the next week. Dodging all over Cairo in wild taxicabs and the underground Metro, riding a
fellucca
sailboat on the Nile at sundown, stomping here and there, I saw many other cats (Cairo is famous for cats) but not that one. Till I was preparing to leave the school campus where I had worked—over by one of the security stations (where only days before I had a slight fracas with a security agent who wanted to hold on to my passport, which I did not like—
What if he took off with it? What if I needed identification while on campus?
), the same white cat rose out of some low bushes, sleepily, and stepped over the cobblestones daintily to press against my legs.

 

In two simple acts of movement, he welcomed me to campus and told me farewell. It is difficult to predict what our finest moments will be, but we know when they happen.

I held it on my lap on the plane in Cairo while other passengers were boarding. It seemed like a good book to read, finally, on such a long flight. I'd had it since it came out, but now the time felt right. Two men from Yemen across the aisle, who had been snoozing when the Egypt passengers first boarded, pointed and said, “Good book! Good book!” Some women from Germany patted my head and said, “We loved that book.” An American man with his wife leaned over and said, “It opened our eyes.” What a surprise! Everyone on the plane seemed to have read it before me. And they were all my friends simply because I was holding it!

 

Maybe we should just wander around other countries carrying books.

The long yellow pencils with promising pointed tips, shrunken to nubs. Trash cans overflow. We've turned in the thick books, though we know there was a lot we skimmed over quickly. Those final chapters, the modern days. We're feeling fond of the grumpy teacher, the smoky chalk groove along the blackboard's rim. Running our fingers along everything we can—nicks in the wooden tops of our desks, snappy rings of a crowded notebook, as we stuff the final papers in, the cool edge of the metal chair. Our many minor mistakes erased the high hopes of far-gone September. We were going to be perfect. We were going to make all
A
s. Today someone who didn't speak to us all year—Freddy? Steve?—speaks suddenly, comfortably, and it is so clear—we could have been friends. We were here all along. The black and white marquee at the edge of the schoolyard says
LAST DAY OF SCHOOL JUNE
2. We pin things to that date. A deeper breath, gulp of finer air, extended evenings in the back lot playing Lost in the Forest, or Gone from Here. I'm fond of the game called
Families Getting Along. Soft light, peach cobbler, fireflies, a colander of fresh-picked cherries. Our school paintings return to us slightly battered. We smooth their corners. The classroom walls grow emptier by the hour. Someone agrees to take the turtle home.

There are moments we stand back from our classmates and teacher and familiar territory as if trying to contain the details of the scene precisely, in case we need to find our ways here again. Central School, you will remain central in my compass, your red-brick certitude, your polished ancient halls. I have marched and circled and bent my head inside you. I have wandered and lost my way. I have been proud, been locked in, been shy, been wounded by a vagrant strip of metal in a doorway, and stitched back together, been punished. In second grade I spoke into the recently installed intercom, to say my first published poem to the whole school at once, and this phenomenon was more exciting than seeing the poem in the magazine. If my lips touched the silver microphone I might be electrocuted. I was never invited to speak into it again though there were many other things I might have said. I pray to Central School as much as I pray to any God or gods.
I believe in the tall windows, the rounded porcelain drinking trough. I love eating on a tray. When my parents fight, when my mother locks herself in her bedroom for hours, sobbing, and I press my ear to the door to make sure she is still alive, when my father disappears into the city, I know the school building five blocks from our house has not changed a bit. It would still comfort me if I stepped into it.

It is true I have little interest in the future. When teachers speak of ambition, college, goals, careers, success, my eyes are trailing dust motes in a beam of sun. I want everyone to leave the room so I can go through the trash. Maybe there is something in there I could use right now.

Kindergarten through sixth grade, the school knows us. The school is our stable and we are little horses dashing up the hill to beat the bell every morning. My father is the only Arab father, but he runs for PTA president and is elected. The French Canadian and Italian parents vote for him. He runs for school board later and loses. “I think that was pushing it,” says my mother. What does “pushing it” mean? Thinking about the future is pushing it. I would hold us here even
when Here hurts, but nothing gives me that power. Only in words on a page can it still be yesterday. Still Walt Whitman, still Abraham Lincoln, Susan B. Anthony, only in words. There were more chapters in that book, I'm sure of it. More tribes and countries we had not discussed.

What I cannot dream then is how I will come back to Central School on the day after the Last Day, 40 years later. The custodian pausing in the same front doorway with his wide broom, a dreamy relaxed look on his face. He says, Go right in, it's still there. Look around. Don't tell anyone I haven't emptied the trash cans yet.

I take my time. It's summer, so that's all there is. Because Central School is a historic monument to more people than me, nothing really has changed. Same drinking trough. Same banister and wide stairs. I paw through the trash can in my second grade classroom and claim
My Personal Dictionary
by Eric—the “L” page lists “Light, Love, Laugh, Lift, Lose, Little, Loose, Labor.” Okay Eric, I say out Loud. A+, man. Everything you'll need for the Life, man, right there on one page. I stick his dictionary in my waistband under my T-shirt, feel
ing like a pirate, press my forehead against the white bathroom wall tile, down low, where I would have reached in third grade. I did not mean to break John's nose or drive Miss Dreon crazy. I should never
ever
have told Karen to pull down her underpants on the playground. In the gymnasium, the same stage I stood on, could it be, the same burgundy draperies? I shoot a few free throws and make them. I never made them back then. A ring of ghostly girls dances a Gypsy dance. Didn't we wear our grandmothers' scarves? And didn't we pledge, pledge, pledge, palms on our chests, every day we lived, pledge to the one nation, the freedom we believed in, didn't we? Fat lot of good.

Forty years later I want to be true to that oddball in a golden gunny-sack dress with purple sleeves. What history taught us, we promised to learn. We would be braver, wiser, than ones who came before. We pledged, and felt proud in the pledging. There would be no more war because the world had seen war, it was terrible and now we knew better things. We would always be rich in our knowing, even if our velvet sacks of quarters gave out, and our mothers' sorrow turned to anger, and our principal went to jail. There were extra red bricks
stacked in the corners of our yard, same color as the school. There could still be a project. We would do better this time.

Slow time rapidly passing, watch it, the time we can't believe till a few years after my return to Central School, we're sitting in another auditorium clapping for our own boy crossing a stage on his high school graduation day. He could not find the red tassel for his flat hat, so he is wearing my old black one, the only graduate with a black one. Tomorrow I will find the red tassel in the trash, still in the plastic, at home. Care in the details, I always told him. It didn't take. I was a better student than mother, maybe. And now it is too late for new habits. And the headlines count the boys, the men, the women, fallen every day for stupid reasons, cycles of falling, the headlines count and they do not count, and I despise them. Pledging to nothing but what can't be said, to Lost Labor and the Light we smother, for what? We're pushing it.

 

A thousand miles from the first city, and the parents still fighting in the foyer of my boy's graduation hall, who could believe it? The parents still fighting, like
history I guess, old repetitions unresolved, and the books still closing and history's oiled engine clicking and spinning. All over the city of my grown-up years, marquees announcing farewell at every front gate and playground, wishing us well, wishing us a good summer even though you have to look really hard for a firefly now. I blow kisses to every one of them, tears in my eyes and throat and nose, I was a fool, and I will always be a fool, and there will never, never, be a last day of school.