Out of Place: A Memoir (11 page)

During the GPS years my two oldest younger sisters, Rosy and Jean, and I began slowly, almost imperceptibly, to develop a contestatory relationship that played or was made to play in to my mother’s skills at managing and manipulating us. I had felt protective of Rosy: I helped her along, since she was somewhat younger and less physically adept than I; I cherished her and would frequently embrace her as we played on the balcony; I kept up a constant stream of chatter, to which she responded with smiles and chuckles. We went off to GPS together in the morning, but we separated once we got there since she was in a younger class. She had lots of giggling little girlfriends—Shahira, Nazli, Nadia, Vivette—and I, my “fighting” classmates like Dickie Cooper or Guy Mosseri. Quickly she established herself as a “good” girl, while I lurked about the school with a growing sense of discomfort, rebelliousness, drift, and loneliness.

After school the troubles began between us. They were accompanied by our enforced physical separation: no baths together, no wrestling or hugging, separate rooms, separate regimens, mine more physical and disciplined than hers. When Mother came home she would discuss my performance in contrast to my younger sister’s. “Look at Rosy. All the teachers say she’s doing very well.” Soon
enough, Jean—exceptionally pretty in her thick, auburn pigtails—changed from a tagalong younger version of Rosy into another “good” girl, with her own circle of apparently like-minded girlfriends. And she also was complimented by the GPS authorities, while I continued to sink into protracted “disgrace,” an English word that hovered around me from the time I was seven. Rosy and Jean occupied the same room; I was down the corridor; my parents in between; Joyce and Grace (eight and eleven years younger than I) had their bedrooms moved from the glassed-in balcony to one or another of the other rooms as the apartment was modified to accommodate the growing children.

The closed door of Rosy and Jean’s room signified the definitive physical as well as emotional gulf that slowly opened between us. There was once even an absolute commandment against my entering the room, forcefully pronounced and occasionally administered by my father, who now openly sided with them, as their defender and patron; I gradually assumed the part of their dubiously intentioned brother, a role of course pioneered (in my father’s eyes) by my maternal uncles. “Protect them,” I was always being told, to no effect whatever. For Rosy especially I was a sort of prowling predator-target, to be taunted or cajoled into straying into their room, only to be pelted with erasers, hit over the head with pillows, and shrieked at with terror and dangerous enjoyment. They seemed eager to study and learn at school and home, whereas I kept putting off such activities in order to torment them or otherwise fritter the time away until my mother returned home to a cacophony of charges and countercharges buttressed by real bruises to show and real bites to be cried over.

There was never complete estrangement though, since the three of us did at some level enjoy the interaction of competing, but rarely totally hostile, siblings. My sisters could display their quickness or specialized skill in hopscotch, and I could try to emulate them; in memorable games of blind man’s buff, ring-around-the-rosy, or clumsy football in a very confined space, I might exploit my height or relative strength. After we attended the Circo Togni, whose lion tamer especially impressed me with his authoritative presence and braggadoccio, I replicated his act in the girls’ room, shouting commands like
“A posto, Camelia”
at them while waving an imaginary whip and grandly thrusting a chair in their direction. They seemed quite pleased at the charade,
and even managed a dainty roar as they clambered onto bed or dresser with not quite feline grace.

But we never embraced each other, as brothers and sisters might ordinarily have: for it was exactly at this subliminal level that I felt a withdrawal on all sides, of me from them, and them from me. The physical distance is still there between us, I feel, perhaps deepened over the years by my mother. When she returned from her afternoons at the Cairo Women’s Club she invariably interjected herself between us. With greater and greater frequency my delinquency exposed me to her angry reprobation: “Can’t I ever leave you with your sisters without your making trouble?” was the refrain, often succeeded by the dreaded appendix, “Wait till your father gets home.” Precisely because there was an unstated prohibition on physical contact between us, my infractions took the form of attacks that included punching, hair-pulling, pushing, and the occasional vicious pinch. Invariably I was “reported” and then “disgraced”—in English—and some stringent punishment (a further prohibition on going to the movies, being sent to bed without dinner, a steep reduction in my allowance and, at the limit, a beating from my father) was administered.

All this heightened our sense of the body’s peculiar, and problematic, status. There was an abyss—never discussed, nor examined, nor even mentioned during the crucial period of puberty—separating a boy’s body from a girl’s. Until I was twelve I had no idea at all what sex between men and women entailed, nor did I know very much at all about the relevant anatomy. Suddenly, however, words like “pants” and “panties” became italicized: “I can see your pants,” said my sisters tauntingly to me, and I responded, heady with danger, “I can see
your
panties.” I quite clearly recall that bathroom doors had to be bolted shut against marauders of the opposite sex, although my mother was present for both my dressing and undressing, as well as for theirs. I think she must have understood sibling rivalry very well and the temptations of polymorphous perversity all around us. But I also suspect that she played and worked on these impulses and drives: she kept us apart by highlighting our differences, she dramatized our shortcomings to each other, she made us feel that she alone was our reference point, our most trusted friend, our most precious love—as, paradoxically, I still believe she was. Everything between me and my sisters had to pass through her,
and everything I said to them was steeped in her ideas, her feelings, her sense of what was right or wrong.

None of us of course ever knew what she really thought of us, except fleetingly, enigmatically, alienatingly (as when she told me about our all being a disappointment). It was only much later in my life that I understood how unfulfilled and angry she must have felt about our life in Cairo and, retrospectively, its busy conventionality, its forced rigors and the absence (in her and in her children) of openness, its limitless manipulations, and its peculiar lack of authenticity. A lot of this had to do with her fabulous capacity for letting you trust and believe in her, even though you knew that a moment later she could either turn on you with incomparable anger and scorn or draw you in with her radiant charm. “Come and sit next to me, Edward,” she would say, thereby letting you into her confidence, and allowing you an amazing sense of assurance; of course you also felt that by doing this she was also keeping out Rosy and Jean, even my father. There was a kind of demonic possessiveness and, at the same time, an infinitely modulated responsiveness that accepted you not just as a son but as a prince. I once confessed to her my belief in myself as someone both gifted and unusual, despite the almost comic lineup of failures and endless troubles I found myself in at school, and everywhere else. It was a very timidly volunteered affirmation of a force, perhaps even another identity underneath “Edward.” “I know,” she said softly to me, in the most confidential and reassuring of fugitive
sotto voces
.

But who was she really? Unlike my father, whose general solidity and lapidary pronouncements were a known and stable quantity, my mother was energy itself, in everything, all over the house and our lives, ceaselessly probing, judging, sweeping all of us, plus our clothes, rooms, hidden vices, achievements, and problems into her always expanding orbit. But there was no common emotional space. Instead there were bilateral relationships with my mother, as colony to metropole, a constellation only she could see as a whole. What she said to me about herself, for instance, she also said to my sisters, and this characterization formed the basis of her operating persona: she was simple, she was a good person who always did the right things, she loved us all unconditionally, she wanted us to tell her everything, which only she could keep hidden from everyone else. I believed this unquestioningly. There
was nothing so satisfying in the outside world, a merry-go-round of changing schools (and hence friends and acquaintances), numerous lives, being a non-Egyptian of uncertain, not to say suspicious, composite identity habitually out of place, and representing a person with no recognizable profile and no particular direction. My mother seemed to take in and sympathize with my general predicament. And that was enough for me. It worked as a provisional support, which I cherished tremendously.

It was through my mother that my awareness of my body as incredibly fraught and problematic developed, first because in her intimate knowledge of it she seemed better able to understand its capacity for wrongdoing, and second because she would never speak openly about it, but approached the subject either with indirect hints or, more troublingly, by means of my father and maternal uncles, through whom she spoke like a ventriloquist. When I was about fourteen I said something she thought was tremendously funny; I did not realize at the time how unknowingly astute I was. I had left the bathroom door unlocked (a telling inadvertence, since I had gained some privacy as an adolescent, but for some reason wanted it occasionally infringed upon), and she suddenly entered. For a second she didn’t close the door, but stood there surveying her naked son as he hastily dried himself with a small towel. “Please leave,” I said testily, “and stop trying to catch up where you left off.” This injunction carried the day, since she burst out laughing, quickly closed the door, and walked briskly away. Had she ever really left off?

I knew much earlier that my body and my sisters’ were inexplicably taboo. My mother’s radical ambivalence expressed itself in her extraordinary physical embrace of her children—covering us with kisses, caresses, and hugs, cooing, making expostulations of delight about our beauty and physical endowments—and at the same time offering a great deal of devastating negative commentary on our appearance. Fatness became a dangerous and constant subject when I was nine and Rosy was seven. As my sister gained weight it became a point of discussion for us throughout childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood. Along with that went an amazingly detailed consciousness of “fattening” foods, plus endless prohibitions. I was quite skinny, tall, coordinated; Rosy didn’t seem to be, and this contrast between us, to which was
added the contrast between her cleverness at school and my shabby performance there, my father’s special regard for her versus my mother’s for me (they always denied any favoritism), her greater savoir faire when it came to organizing her time, and her capacity for pacing herself, talents I did not at all possess—all this deepened the estrangement between us, and intensified my discomfort with our bodies.

It was my father who gradually took the lead in trying to reform, perhaps even to remake, my body, but my mother rarely demurred, and regularly brought my body to a doctor’s attention. As I look back on my sense of my body from age eight on, I can see it locked in a demanding set of repeated corrections, all of them ordered by my parents, most of them having the effect of turning me against myself. “Edward” was enclosed in an ugly, recalcitrant shape with nearly everything wrong with it. Until the end of 1947, when we left Palestine for the last time, our pediatrician was a Dr. Grünfelder, like Madame Baer, the midwife, a German Jew, and known to be the finest in Palestine. His office was in a quiet, clean, orderly, and leafy area of the parched city that seemed distinctly foreign to my young eyes. He spoke to us in English, although there was a good deal of confidential whispering between him and my mother that I was rarely able to overhear. Three persistent problems were referred to him, for which he provided his own, idiosyncratic solutions; the problems themselves indicate the extent to which certain parts of my body came in for an almost microscopic, and needlessly intense, supervision.

One concerned my feet, which were pronounced flat early in my life. Grünfelder prescribed the metal arches that I wore with my first pair of shoes; they were finally discarded in 1948, when an aggressive clerk in a Dr. Scholl’s store in Manhattan dissuaded my mother from their use. A second was my odd habit of shuddering convulsively for a brief moment every time I urinated. Of course I was asked to perform the shudder for the doctor, but just as certainly was unable either to urinate or to shudder. My mother observed me for a couple of weeks, then brought the case to the world-renowned “child specialist.” Grünfelder shrugged his shoulders. “It is nothing,” he pronounced, “probably psychological”—a phrase I didn’t understand but could see worried my mother just a little more, or was at least to worry
me
until I was well into my teens, after which the issue was dropped.

The third problem was my stomach, the source of numerous ills and
pains all my life. It began with Grünfelder’s skepticism about my mother’s habit of wrapping and tightly pinning a small blanket around my midsection in both summer and winter. She thought this protected me against illness, the night air, perhaps even the evil eye; later, hearing about it from different friends, I realized it was common practice in Palestine and Syria. She once told Grünfelder about this strange prophylactic in my presence, his response to which I distinctly remember was a knitted, skeptical brow. “I don’t see the need,” he said, whereupon she pressed on with a rehearsal of all sorts of advantages (most of them preventive) that accrued to me. I was nine or ten at the time. The issue was also debated with Wadie Baz Haddad, our family GP in Cairo, and he too tried to dissuade her. It took another year for the silly thing to be removed once and for all; Hilda later told me that still another doctor had warned her against sensitizing my midsection so much, since it then became vulnerable to all sorts of other problems.