Out of Place: A Memoir (15 page)

I was assigned to the sixth grade in a second-floor classroom whose plants and window flower boxes gave it the atmosphere of a family room. The class was ruled by the first great martinet and sadist of my life, a Miss Clark, whose single-minded persecution of me crippled my already uncertain sense of self. Miss Clark’s demeanor was extremely restrained, quiet, and composed to the point of unpleasantness. She was in her mid-thirties and seemed, as I thought about her over the years, to be a WASP from the Northeast, very much a creature of that world’s fully paid up citizens—morally righteous, confident, generally patronizing. I never knew what it was about me that so gripped her, but it only took a week or ten days for her to declare herself my enemy in a class that contained no more than a dozen boys and girls.

After the hierarchical and rigid English system, the American school was informal in every sense. In the classrooms chairs and tables were scattered about, whereas at GPS we had sat in military rows of cramped little desks and benches. Except for the French, Arabic, and art teachers, the instruction was by American women (heavily made up in loud, colored dresses, totally different from the scrubbed plain faces and sensible skirts affected by Mrs. Wilson and her cohorts) and one man, a Mark Wannick, who also doubled as softball and basketball coach. On one occasion he donned a bright yellow Ohio State basketball uniform to play with us: in the torrid Cairo afternoon, surrounded by brown fields with brown peasants in
galabiyahs
leading donkeys and water buffaloes round as they have done for millennia, Mr. Wannick cut a surrealistic sight in his overpoweringly colored uniform, hairy arms and legs, military crew cut, black sneakers, and delicate rimless glasses.

I encountered American education as a regimen designed to be attractive, homey, and tailored down to the level of growing children.
Books at GPS were uniformly in small print, without illustrations, unrelentingly dry in tone; history and literature, for instance, were presented as matter-of-factly as possible, making each page a challenging task just to read through. No concessions were made in arithmetic to the world of lived experience: we were given rows of figures to add, subtract, divide, and multiply, plus a large number of rules and tables (multiplication, weights and measures, distances, meters, yards, and inches) to memorize. The goal of all this was to do “sums,” a task whose difficulty for us was commensurate with its programmatic dullness. At CSAC we were all given “workbooks,” in marked contrast to the GPS’s “copybooks,” which were lined exercise books as anonymous as bus tickets; workbooks had charming, chatty questions, illustrations, pictures to be appreciated, enjoyed, and, when relevant, filled in. To write in one of our GPS textbooks was a serious misdemeanor; in American workbooks, the
idea
was to write in them.

More attractive still were the textbooks handed out by Miss Clark at the beginning of each day. At the core of each subject there seemed to be a family to whom one was introduced at the outset: there was always a Sis, a Mom and a Dad, plus assorted family and household members, including a large black woman housekeeper with an extremely exaggerated expression of either sadness or delight on her face. Through the family one learned about adding and subtracting, or civics, or American history (literature was treated separately). The idea seemed to be to make learning a painless process, on a par with getting through the day on a farm or in a suburb of St. Louis or Los Angeles. References to the drugstore, the hardware or dime stores, mystified me completely but did not need explaining to my classmates, all of whom had actually lived in places like St. Louis or LA. For me, however, such locations corresponded to nothing in my experience, which was barren of soda fountains and soda jerks, the two items that intrigued me the most.

I was meant to find this “fun,” and for a month I did. But I was never left alone by Miss Clark nor by the other children, with whom I quickly became quite antagonistic; after that first pleasurable month I found myself longing for the GPS, with its clear lines of authority, its cut and dried lessons, its very strict rules of deportment. Teachers at CSAC never used or threatened violence, but male students were extremely rough with each other, since the boys were quite big and were willing to use their strength against each other in contests of will and
turf. By Christmastime, every day at the school was an ordeal in which I had to make my way through a gauntlet of flailing arms and fists on the bus, followed by the chilly put-downs and severe scoldings I received from Miss Clark in the classroom.

The most humiliating moment in my first year came the day after the class had been on a field trip—for me the concept was an entirely novel one—to a large sugar refinery across the Nile from Maadi. I admit that after the first twenty minutes the excursion was simply too boring to warrant much of my attention, but I had no choice but to stick with the group, steered from boiling vat to storehouse to cutting room, to the accompaniment of our guide’s voluble enjoyment—thirty-minute explanations where only one minute would have been sufficient, an overabundance of technical language, an extraordinary air of self-satisfaction—to make matters even less compelling. He was a middle-aged gentleman wearing a tarbush who was seconded to us from one of the ministries expressly for this trip. Miss Clark was there of course. I paid very little attention to her, a great mistake. When she entered my field of vision I saw her nodding (was it agreement, or understanding, or satisfaction at the torrent of information about sugar cane, its history and structure, the chemistry of sugar, etc.?) but I gave her no other heed. The whole trip was so bizarrely unlike anything my English colonial schools were likely to mount that I had not even begun to dwell on the differences between the authoritarian Brits and the benevolent Americans, who were so much more eager to give the Egyptians a democratic chance to be themselves.

The next day we convened as usual in the classroom. Miss Clark was already behind her desk and seemed as composed and as inscrutable as ever. “Let’s spend some time talking about yesterday’s field trip,” she began, then turned immediately to B.J., a short-haired girl whose clipped tone and businesslike manner quickly established her as the class touchstone. B.J. provided a detailed appreciation of the day’s events. “How about you, Ernst?” she asked Ernst Brandt, the class’s somewhat inarticulate but biggest and strongest boy. There was little more anyone could add to B.J.’s strenuous recital, and Ernst scarcely made the effort. “It was okay,” was all he said. I sat there slowly drifting off into some idle daydream, once again paying Miss Clark’s predatory instincts insufficient attention. “You were all very well behaved yesterday: I’m proud of you,” she said, and I thought she would then press on with our
English assignment. “All except one person, that is. One person only paid no heed to Ibrahim Effendi’s very helpful and fascinating commentary. One person only always lagged behind the rest of the group. One person only fidgeted the entire time. One person only never looked at all the machines and vats. One person only bit his nails. One person alone disgraced the entire class.” She paused, even as I wondered who that person might be.

“You, Edward. You behaved abominably. I have never seen anyone so unable to concentrate, so inconsiderate, so careless and sloppy. What you did yesterday made me very angry. I watched you every minute of the time, and there was nothing you did that could possibly redeem you. I am going to speak to Miss Willis [the headmistress] about you, and I shall ask her to call your parents in for a conference.” She stopped, looking at me with unconcealed distaste. “Had you been one of the good students in this class,” she began again, “I would have perhaps forgiven your conduct. Had you been someone like B.J., for instance. But since you are undoubtedly the worst student in this class, what you did yesterday is simply unforgivable.” The emphases were delivered with definitive italicized dispassion.

Miss Clark had purposely, deliberately, even fastidiously, defined me, caught me, as it were, from within, had seen me as I could or would not see myself, and she had made her findings extremely public. I was riveted to my chair, blushing, trying to look both sorry and strong at the same time, hating the by now thoroughly concentrating class, each one of them, I felt, looking at me with justified dislike and curiosity. “Who is this person?” I imagined them saying, “a little Arab boy, and what is he doing in a school for American children? Where did he come from?” Meanwhile, Miss Clark was moving her books and pencils around on her desk. Then we returned to our recitation, as if nothing had happened. Although I glanced at her ten minutes later to see if there might have been a relenting look for me, she remained as unshaken and as imperviously unforgiving as ever.

The power of what Miss Clark said about me was that it collected all the negative and critical comments that had loosely surrounded me at home and at GPS, and concentrated the whole lot into one unpleasant steel container, into which I was placed, like Jell-O poured into a mold. I felt as if I had no history to shield me from Miss Clark’s judgment
or to resist my public disgrace. Even more than that passive exposure, I have always hated and feared the sudden delivery of bad news that allows me no chance to respond, to separate “Edward” in all his well-known infirmities and sins from the inner being I generally consider my real or best self (undefined, free, curious, quick, young, sensitive, even likable). Now I could no longer do this, being confronted with a single inescapable devalued and doomed self, not, no never quite right, and indeed very wrong and out of place.

I came to detest this identity, but as yet I had no alternative for it. So objectionable had I become that of course I was compelled to go and see Miss Willis, a white-haired, unforceful, late-middle-aged Middle Western woman who seemed more puzzled than angry at my malfeasance. Miss Clark was not present at the interview, but there was no comparison at all between Miss Clark’s ontological condemnation of me and Miss Willis’s ramblingly vague lecture on the virtues of good citizenship, an unthinkable phrase in the British colonial context I had just left, where we were subjects at most, and obedient as well as unquestioning ones. My parents also came by in due course; they saw Miss Clark and Miss Willis. The former made an extremely pronounced impression on my mother, who heard in the woman’s penetrating accents a more well-sculpted and delivered account of her son’s weakness than had ever been given before. What exactly was said about me I never knew, but it resonated in my mother’s speeches to me for years and years. “Remember what Miss Clark said” was the refrain used to explain both my lack of proper focus and concentration and my chronic inability to do the right thing. So in effect Miss Clark’s awful opinion of me was prolonged and given additional reach by my mother. It never occurred to me to ask my mother why she allied herself so unskeptically with someone who seemed to be moved not by pedagogical but by sadistic, instinctual imperatives.

I was supposed to be among my own kind at CSAC, but found it my lot to be even more the stranger than I had been at GPS. There was much bonhomie—“Good morning” ’s and “Hi” ’s were de rigueur among us, as they never were at GPS—and a good deal of emphasis was placed on who sat next to whom on the bus, in class, and at lunch. Yet there was a hidden but unanimously agreed-upon hierarchy of boys based not on seniority or position but on strength, will, and athletic
prowess. The school leader was Stan Henry, a ninth-grader whose sister Paddy was a year behind me; they were the children of a senior Standard Oil executive. Stan was over six feet, radiated confidence and intelligence, and was a superb swimmer and all-round athlete. He had a horselike laugh that belied the keen competitive wit he used to dominate our frequent breaks in the garden. His only rival in size was Ernst Brandt, whom I once saw Stan humiliate by grabbing his hands and then squeezing him by the knuckles so as to force him to the ground. Ernst then stood up, and remained immobile with tears streaming down his face. Since Stan was also a “leader” (a word I learned at CSAC) it did not take very long for the rest of us to shake down around him, although that space remained a hotly contested one, with Stan unchallenged in his preeminence, the rest of us in constant flux.

I was in perpetual combat with two boys in particular. Alex Miller (the son of embassy parents, I think) and Claude Brancart, a Belgian-American whose father represented Caltex in Egypt. Both had attractive older sisters—brunette Amaryllis and blonde Monique—who seemed to me more like women than sixteen- or seventeen-year-olds. Amaryllis occasionally sat next to me on the bus, was always amiable if not actually friendly, and stunned me when I saw her wearing a two-piece bathing suit at a school outing to the Maadi pool; this was the first time in my closeted life I had ever seen that much of the female body so exposed, but I felt paradoxically that it increased the distance between us. Monique had a vague, dreamy manner about her, and floated around the school very fetchingly. Both girls had little to do with their younger brothers, who were not involved with me as friends at all, but as opponents in a ceaseless round of wrestling and boasting sessions whose object seemed both obscure and undiscussed. I remember being impressed at how one time Alex traded blows with me on the bus, standing on the other side of a seat, patiently, methodically, even slowly, delivering punches at my head and stomach while I, ever the impetuous and relatively uncontrolled fighter, pummeled him with the crosses and roundhouse upper cuts—most of them off target—I had learned from my YMCA boxing instructor, Sayed. It is bizarre indeed how such a scene, both pointless and extremely energetic, stays in my memory for such a long time, like a series of Muybridge photographs: what was I all about then, I keep asking myself, and why was I so driven and so prone to such intense antagonisms?

Unlike GPS, where there was no chance that a fight would last more than ten seconds before being broken up by several teachers, CSAC adopted a radically different philosophy, which was to provide a sanctioned space for fighting, and other boyish expenditures of excess energy. I can remember neither a single moment of peace during the lunch break, nor a pleasurable moment of camaraderie.