That Other Me (2 page)

The stone flies high into the air. Then there's a deafening crack at the second-story window and muffled squeals from inside the girls'
sakan
, the dormitory of the Emirati college students in Cairo.

I had raised my fist high and thrown blindly. I had not expected my aim to be so perfect. All I wanted was to get Mariam's attention so she would sneak out and meet me. I stand in place, stupefied. A girl—not Mariam—rushes to the window. She is in her nightgown, her head wrapped in a polka-dot head scarf. She would have spotted me had Azza not yanked me out of the glare of the streetlight. We squat down behind a dusty hedge as the window is pushed open.

“
Ehh!
What's going on down there?” That's the voice of the
abla
, one of the matrons responsible for the sakan girls. I try to stay still, but Azza's perfume, a sharp bouquet that is an insult to any flower, shoots up my nostrils. I sneeze, and that gets the matron hollering out into the night again. “I can hear you down there, you mangy hooligans. This is a respectable building with decent people living in it, you hear me? Show me your faces, you cowards.” She is a barrel of a woman,
blocking my view of the group of girls now huddled tightly around her. “I'm going to call the police. I'm going to call them right now.”

I hear a girl suggest that it might be thieves. “Or murderers,” a silly one adds. The abla retreats and shoos the girls away. Once she slams shut the broken window we straighten up, and Azza clicks her tongue. “What you go through for your cousin,” she says. “What's wrong with just showing up at the door and asking to see her?”

“It's after nine,” I reply, brushing the dust off my jeans and silky purple blouse. “You know she can't leave after nine.” I gaze at the entrance of the building. I'll have to bribe the doorman. Not willing to part with my money so easily, I'd kept this as a last option. “They're grown women in there,” I grumble, “and they treat them like children.” Suddenly I'm struck by the importance of this mission. “I will demand that they treat those students—so clever that they are studying law, medicine, engineering—with respect. ‘Stop treating them like prisoners!' That's what I'll say. ‘Give them the freedom to come and go as they please, to have some fun!' ”

“But what if they don't want any of that?” Azza asks. “Maybe they're just here to study and leave with degrees. Don't forget, you're talking about Emirati girls.”

“Young women,” I correct her. “Seventeen years old, like me. Nineteen, like my cousin Mariam. And older, too.”

“But they're Emiratis.”

“And what am I?”

“Well . . . yes . . . But your mother is Egyptian, thank God.” She raises her arms to the sky. “You've got that Egyptian mischief in you.” She starts giggling for no reason. I give her a nasty look, which she ignores. I turn my back to her and start walking away. “Sometimes I think you do things without thinking,” she persists as she hurries after me.

“Sometimes you make the stupidest comments. Now will you stop it?” I swing around to face her. There's just a ribbon of moon on this
January night, but I know she can see my glower. She may have brought the car, her father's battered maroon Fiat, but she knows that she is in the company of future promise. Yes, that's how I visualize myself, ever since I found out today that I have a confirmed appointment to meet with the famous composer Sherif Nasr. “Look,” I tell her. “All I want is for Mariam to be with me right now, to celebrate my good news.”

She points at the doorman. “But what about him?”

“Leave him to me,” I say. “Just go and get the car and meet me a few buildings down, at the corner of the street.”

“But how will you get past him?”

“Just go, pretty one,” I say, even though she's the opposite of pretty, and I march to the entrance of the sakan.

“How did you manage to get me out?” Mariam asks me as soon as we've walked out of the doorman's hearing range. Her eyes are long and slightly hooded; they widen as she searches my face for an explanation.

“He told me to sign and just go, to enjoy the night, not to worry.”

“But what about the permission? I didn't get one.”

I greet her with a kiss on the cheek and say, “I've made a special arrangement with him.”

“What arrangement?” She crinkles up her nose, slightly raising the upper lip of her broad mouth. She is darker than I am, but there's a dazzle to her because of the strange mix of tones in her face. That attractive coppery shine in her complexion is brought out by her bright eyes, which are the color of pale honey, and her auburn hair, which is many shades lighter than her skin.

I blow out air with impatience. Must I explain everything? She should know that I paid him—simple as that. At first the doorman held his fist lightly over his heart in a show of honesty, but then those
wily fingers loosened and tapped his chest. It didn't take long for his hand to open, indicating his readiness to bend a rule or two. “I jiggled my breasts and shook my hips at him.” I chuckle at the predictability of the gasp that comes out of my dear cousin.

“You think it's just him in there?” she says, fixing her shayla loosely around her head in a way that reveals the full breadth of her glossy bangs. They sit neat and straight, just above her crescent-shaped eyebrows. Like many other Emirati girls studying in Cairo, Mariam does not wear an abaya, a voluminous black robe, but she still dresses conservatively. Her pale-green shirt, decorated with tiny creeping vines, is buttoned at the cuffs. Her ankle-length skirt has the right amount of looseness so as not to cling to her figure. “There's also the night security guard and the abla. If she finds out I'm missing she'll send a letter to the cultural attaché, who will surely call my uncle—
Ammi
Majed will not be happy—and then I could be expelled.”

I decide right away that the more books Mariam studies, the slower her mind works. She should know that I gave the doorman enough for him to share. “All taken care of,” I say. “Don't worry.”

“How can I not?” she says. “You know what it'll mean if I'm found out. No chance for a degree. And then what would I do? My life would be ruined.”

“Ruined!” I exaggerate the whine in Mariam's voice. My features freeze into the classic look of desperation that Egyptian actresses put on when faced with the inevitable heartbreak woven so predictably into every drama's script. Tragedies are always hurled at women. I slap my chest and repeat, “Ruined!”

“Stop it,” Mariam says, giggling and scolding me while she hugs me. “You are terrible.” I relish her scent, the incense on her clothes blending with the clean smell of her skin and that dot behind the ears of
oudh
essence. “So?” she says, pulling back. There's a spark of curiosity in her eyes. To drag her out of the sakan after-hours: of course she knows I have important news to share.

I let out a half hum, half sigh. “Well, nothing. I just thought I would pull you out of your prison for a bit. And when you did not respond to my signal at the window, I had to get you out another way.”

“That was you?” Mariam's stunned squeal delights me. So easy to shock, always so proper, that Mariam! She has to be; it's the way she was molded in that household, obligated to follow the stifling rules my father—her uncle—has drawn up to preserve our family's reputation in Dubai's conservative society. I thought she would have loosened up by now, with exposure to Cairo. Always so reserved, so Emirati, so unlike myself: the rebel flame of that same prosperous family, Al-Naseemy. “You know you hit the wrong window, don't you? I'm above, on the third floor.”

I reach out for a plush jasmine bush nearby and loosen the blossoms into my palm. After I take a deep breath of their sweet smell, I look back at Mariam's flushed face and declare, “It's happening.”

“What is happening?”

“I'm finally going to be a star!” I exclaim.

“What? When?”

She knows how much I've struggled these past ten months to find a composer who would create a winning song for me, but she doesn't know the details. I consider starting from the beginning: all the facilitators and mediators my mother and I kept relying on, all the promises that led to nothing, all the futile appointments. But none of that matters anymore. So I skip it all and fling the jasmine flowers high, bending back my neck so they fall on my upturned face. “Today!” I say, blowing away a bloom that sticks between my lips, “I got an appointment to see Sherif Nasr.”

Her lips round to pronounce a soft “
Ahh.
”

“He's famous and distinguished, and when he meets me I know he will recognize my talent straightaway.” I grab Mariam's wrists, and together we laugh and hop in a circle.

“You did it! You did it!”

“
We
did it,” I correct her. “All those years, you and I, imagining something like this, planning how we could make it happen, plotting our revenge on my father.” I let her go and hug my chest. “It won't be long now before I start making my own money, so much money that I won't need anyone anymore. I won't have to rely on my father to take pity on me.” A breeze embraces my hot face and fills my nose with the sweet scent of jasmine. I twirl my arms up into the air and let my waist follow. I don't need music; it's already in my head.

Mariam's soft face grows sharp as her grin lifts those cheekbones, which shine like sword blades caught in light. She looks over her shoulder to make sure the street is empty before joining me in my silent dance. I click a rhythm with my tongue and follow it, my belly turning and twisting like a lazy river, the current traveling from my shoulders to my arms and fingers, which twirl like vines, climbing high above my head.

Mariam tries to do the same, and I encourage her with a lift of my eyebrow, thinking all the time how hopeless she looks. I can make out her hip bones jerking back and forth as she struggles to bring some fluidity into her dance. What a waste it is that she can't put to use that slender build and enviable height, made less through her tendency to cave in her shoulders. There is no femininity in her movements. Poor thing, she is as stiff as a wooden doll. Still, it is brave of my sweet cousin to share my mood, my joy.

A honk startles us out of our night dance. As Mariam shies away from the headlights, I tell her, “It's all right. It's for us.”

“Who's driving the car?”

“It's just my friend Azza.”

She groans, and I can tell she wants it to be just us. “It's just that I haven't seen you,” she says, “and there's something I want to talk to you about . . . It's a sensitive . . .”

She's growing moody, while all I'm interested in is celebrating my good news. “Look,” I say. “She's not staying. So let's enjoy ourselves, okay? Just don't be difficult.”

Difficult
? What did Dalal mean by that?

She wanted me with her tonight and here I am, fully aware of the consequences of sneaking out of the sakan. I could have refused, but I didn't.

Difficult? Hardly!

All I want is for us to be together, alone, so I can build up the courage to tell her about Adel. Where would I begin? What would she say if I told her about all these months that I have spent observing him from a distance, memorizing his every gesture and expression?

Sometimes he'd smile at me in passing and say, “Good morning.” It should have been easy to do the same, but it felt impossible to issue this simple greeting. Always, my courage drained like water down a bathtub. I could almost hear the gurgle and slurp of it as my mouth turned dry. The best I could manage was to frown and walk away quickly, silently cursing whatever it was that made me so self-conscious.

But last week, we spoke for longer—or, I should say, he spoke to me. My cheeks grow hot whenever I think of it. Like me, Adel Al-
Shimouli is an Emirati dentistry student, but he's a year ahead. Naturally, I was surprised when he approached me on campus and asked for help going over some lectures he had missed. I still don't quite know how I agreed so quickly. I'd nodded with the serious face of a disciplinarian to mask my attraction toward him. I regret that I didn't smile. I should have smiled, made it look casual by adding a shrug, perhaps. That would have been best.

Adel had suggested we meet over the weekend at the Emirati Students' Club. I had arrived early to make sure I occupied one of the two private rooms on the first floor of the three-story villa. He was late. Twenty minutes was expected; thirty minutes marked heavy traffic and was forgivable. Forty minutes: well, that's when I began to wonder whether I'd misunderstood the time of our appointment.

As I waited, my fretfulness grew until I chewed the eraser off the end of my pencil. I was giving up my weekend. I was giving up valuable study time. I wanted to move, but I didn't dare walk out of the room. The club was filling up with grim-faced students looking for a quiet space to study. I took a deep breath and put on a serious face, too, staring hard at the notes I'd spread on the desk in front of me and the three textbooks filled with diagrams of teeth, gums, and bridges.

Strangely, by the time he arrived, nearly an hour late, I wasn't ill-tempered, just relieved that he'd come at all. Wearing a red-checkered shirt pushed into dark-blue jeans, he burst into the room with the freshness of a summer's shower. He kept apologizing, and although I wanted to pretend I was so busy studying that I hadn't noticed the time, I mumbled that it was all right, with a smile that came out exaggerated.

The pink that tinged Adel's eyes and the plump crescents beneath them were proof of the late night he'd had. It made me wonder where he had been, and with whom. All silly, of course, but my mind was flitting about. It was an awkward study session, too formal, too quiet. I kept my eyes diverted from his. There was no trusting them, so easy to read, often revealing too much in their clarity.

“Come on, get in,” says Dalal, pulling me back into the present. “We can't wait all night.”

I mumble a halfhearted hello to Azza, which she returns through a gum-filled grin. I am about to slide in behind her when I spot a browned apple core on the seat. What a pig! I pull a tissue out of my handbag, pick up the core, and throw it out of the car, then wipe down the dusty seat. Dalal snickers at my fastidious behavior. The sleepy right eye she was born with narrows when she laughs.

I say nothing and sit down, curling my arms tight around my waist. The car groans, and we are off. I stare out at the street as if waiting for something really important to happen, while Dalal and Azza chat away like a couple of parrots about to be rewarded with handfuls of pumpkin seeds. Every now and then, Azza lets out a vulgar laugh that convinces me she's nothing but a girl of lowly upbringing who was never taught good manners. The thought makes me feel superior, and my temper cools as the car turns onto a broad, traffic-choked road.

Azza drops us off at the entrance to the Marriott Hotel in Zamalek. Since the half-term vacation has ended, I was convinced that the Khaleejis would have packed up and flown home by now. But here they are, visitors from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, and the Emirates, filling the hotel's café, an oblong arrangement with a broad walkway that runs from one end of the garden's patio to the other.

Waiters in green aprons flit between the round tables, carrying
shisha
or balancing trays crowded with cups of tea and coffee, and long glasses filled to the brim with ruby-red hibiscus punch or saffron-colored
qamar el-din
, a thick juice made of apricot paste. The light is atmospheric, casting pockets of shadows over the sections of the café bordered by hedges, making them look like little rooms with four to six tables. That's where I want to be, but I follow Dalal. There's a nat
ural sultry swing to her gait that comes with being shaped like that: the perfect symmetry of the crescents of her waist, the dip just above her tailbone that slides out just so, giving the impression of an invisible string holding up her plum-shaped buttocks. What man would not look at her? She struts down the amply lit walkway and I tag along behind her, awkward and too aware of all the eyes following us: a lazy gaze here, a sharp stare a little farther down, furtive glances to take note of what is there and what is not there.

I'd felt a sense of security, but it evaporates as panic builds up in me. What if someone sees me and word gets back to Ammi Majed? He would not approve of my being out at night, and certainly not with Dalal. But I keep my thoughts to myself because there's no point nagging.

I am suspicious of every gaze that lingers too long on us. A middle-aged man, hawkeyed, ambles up and down the walkway. He seems to be a regular, because the waiters keep greeting him by name. He holds a string of emerald-colored worry beads and is doing exactly what I am: scrutinizing faces in the Marriott garden.

I turn my head as we pass two young, smooth-haired Khaleejis sitting on the right. They wear jeans and tight T-shirts, so it's hard to tell which Gulf country they come from. Farther down, three middle-aged men look up at us (at Dalal, really). There is a silent and special recognition—deep, intense, welcoming: that
I-know-you're-a-Khaleeji
look. I toss a sharp glance back at them. No fear of word getting back to my uncle from this lot. Although they wear the same white
kandoras
as Emiratis would wear—loose white ankle-length robes—their headdresses are bound with ropes too thick to belong to Emiratis. I decide they must be Saudis.

Dalal makes a popping sound with her lips, smooth as rose petals, as she looks around. She has deer eyes, beautiful and empty of complicated thought. Just like her mother's, her skin has the evenness of porcelain, with an attractive luminosity that makes it look as though
it shines, even in dim light. “So,” she says, fixing her palms to her hips. “Where should we sit?”

I don't give her a chance to choose. She yips as I grip her waist; I maneuver her into one of the more shadowy hedged-in areas and settle to the left of one of the many large marble statues on plinths.

“What's this place?” Dalal objects as soon as I sink into the bamboo chair, hunched low, with my back to the statue. “No one will see us here.”

“Yes,” I say, looking at the menu so we can order something and get out as soon as possible. “It's better that way. You can afford to be risky, but I can't. You don't have anything to lose, but I do. So, just . . .”

“All right, all right,” she says. “Stop getting all paranoid.”

“Did you know this is a historical royal palace?” I say, pushing back in my chair, trying to blend into the hedge to my right. “It was built by Khedive Ismail for the Suez Canal inauguration celebrations in 1869.” I pretend I don't notice the disgruntled expression on her face and indicate a nearby statue. “And apparently, these are all antiques.” I slide the menu toward her so she can read the information printed on it.

Dalal snaps her fingers in front of my nose. “We're here to have fun, and all you can do is give me a history lesson. Look at you, stuck to the bush like that. People will think you're mad. What are you pretending to be, some sort of spy, or a caterpillar?”

I straighten up and giggle. I do look ridiculous. With a vow to loosen up (after all, we are here together to celebrate her breaking into the world of music, her passion), I take a deep breath. The air is filled with the scent of the honey- and apple-flavored tobacco wafting out of the shishas. My gaze drifts over the lavish garden with its high palms and stout bushes, the foliage neatly trimmed and shaped into pyramids and squares, some with strips of tiny lights. I spot a hibiscus (also known as the “Rose of China,” because of where it originates) and a cassia tree (fast-growing; from tropical America, yet thriving in Egypt's rich soil).
How is it that I can still remember such details? My father gave me a plant encyclopedia a long time ago, and I treasured it, making sure it stayed next to my bed (where is it now?). What started as a little girl's attempt to please her father turned into genuine interest, a passion even, that for some reason was abandoned with his death.

“So, here we are,” says Dalal in a dreamy voice, “having a good time, you know, joking . . .” She flings her head back and rakes her fingers through her curls, a satiny chocolate-brown mass, before turning to survey the walkway. “Flirting . . .” Someone has caught her eye, and I frown to discourage her just as she drags her gaze back to me and says, “All right, say something, quick.”

I've seen enough flirting to know where this is leading. She is setting a trap for the boy. She will probably giggle, and he will take it as an invitation. If he approaches us and she decides she's not interested, she can deny having flirted with him because she was doing nothing more than chatting with her friend. I say, “The waiter's here.”

She gasps, as if I had just made the funniest comment. Her shoulders quiver as she pretends to stifle a laugh. “Ah, you are too much!”

The games—Dalal is playing her games. “The waiter is behind you,” I repeat.

Instead of getting embarrassed (the waiter has been standing behind us, watching), Dalal aims a hard stare at him. He is grinning. “Spied enough?” she says.

He is young, with eyes set close together and a rocket-shaped nose. “Madam? I wasn't . . .”

I give my order quickly. “Pineapple juice.”

“I can't bring you that,” he says, “but I can bring you a delicious orange juice, as fresh as if I plucked the oranges out of the tree myself.”

“If she wanted orange juice,” Dalal retorts, “she would have asked for orange juice. If you don't have pineapple juice, just say you don't have it.”

“But it's all sweet, it's all fruit. I promise you it's just as good.”

“Is this what they pay you for, to snoop and argue with clients? Do you want me to call your manager?”

“I'm just here to take your order, madam.”

“Then take it!”

“Forget the juice, get me a Turkish coffee,” I say. “Medium sweetness.”

The waiter tells me, “Maybe you can explain to your friend that I wasn't being rude, just waiting to take your order.”

“She's my cousin,” says Dalal.

“It's okay, no harm done,” I say, hurrying to defuse a situation that could call unwanted attention to us. “Give him your order, Dalal.”

“The problem with the help is that they think that just because they work in a five-star hotel filled with tourists, they can
yak-yak-yak
away with the clients.”

I frown at her. “Tell him what you want!”

“A beer!”

“Right away,” he stammers, and escapes to fetch our order.

“A beer? Since when do you drink?”

“Sometimes I do,” says Dalal.

“But it's
haram
.”

“Lots of things are forbidden,” she says, fixing her eyes to my face, suddenly seeming eager for a quarrel. It is pointless to talk to her when she is like this. So I shrug and ask her about her meeting with the composer. “Haven't you been listening? I haven't met Sherif Nasr yet. But when I do, I know he will be so taken with my voice that he won't be able to resist signing me on.” She looks up at the sky as if she owns it. “A perfect voice, yes, and a body to match.”

I wince when she traces the exaggerated curves of that perfect body in the air. “Yes, yes,” I hurry her on, “so what happens next, once you meet him, I mean?”

“Well, he arranges for a performance, I think.”

“Where?”

She doesn't answer, just lifts an eyebrow to mock my sheltered upbringing.

“A nightclub!” The thought fills me with trepidation. I use all my power to imagine her rising to stardom in a respectable way, but the images that flash in my head are grotesque: smoke-filled rooms with big-bellied men, dimmed red lights, and groping drunks.