and ran her hand against their surface.
“I saw them install this floor,” I said. “Burly men carried the slabs up on their shoulders.”
Perihan sat back, her body stretched out against the floor. I sat next to her.
“Do you ever bring men here?” she said.
I spat in my chest. “Of course not.”
“Why not?” she insisted.
“Someone would see them. Mother or Father, even Shadia. It’s too risky. And I haven’t met anyone to do that with.”
“If you met someone, would you? You could easily disguise the man as a friend of a family here. You’re the eyes and ears of the neighborhood, so you can sneak in anyone you wanted. There are rich girls all over Egypt who wish they could do the same.”
She was right. “Sometimes,” I divulged, “I see men beautiful enough to invite here. But I don’t, I just come here by myself and imagine them touching me.”
“You come here to masturbate?”
My face flushed and I looked away.
“Don’t, Aisha. Don’t be embarrassed,” she said, and took my face in her hands. I felt strange and still warm. She kissed my cheek. “Don’t be embarrassed,” she said and stroked my face. “Don’t be embarrassed,” she said and kissed my eyelids. “Don’t be embarrassed,” she whispered and pecked my lips. “Don’t be embarrassed,” she said, her tongue sliding into my mouth. I hadn’t kissed anyone in a long time. I knew what we were doing was wrong, but I didn’t know why. I imagined my mother finding us, spitting on me, her mouth grimacing in disgust, and I pulled away. Perihan put her hands on my waist and said again, “Don’t be embarrassed,” and slowly wedged her knee between my legs. I let out a sharp cry and smelled her hair. It was sweet and salty at once. She slid her hands over me, then kissed my neck, my shoulders, my breasts, my stomach, my hips, all the while whispering for me not to be embarrassed. I couldn’t help it. Soon, her hair was caressing the inside of my thighs, and her tongue was on the ridge of my sex. She darted it over me and hummed and groaned, and I looked at the white sheets all around me and sighed. Then she slid a finger inside me and thrust it upwards, as though pressing the timed light-switch. My light clicked on, shone for a while, then went out again. I curled up next to her and closed my eyes.
“Is this what you meant when you told accordion-neck you didn’t like men?” I said. She pulled herself up on one elbow, looked at me, then smiled.
“Yes,” she said. “It is.”
“Have you done this to many women?”
“No. But I was scared at first that there was something wrong with me. I went to many imams and they all said the same thing: what I felt was haram and I should control it. Then I found an imam who told me that nothing in the Koran says a woman can’t love a woman. There’s one verse that says if two women are found together they should be locked up in the house. Then the imam told me that two women locked up in a house could only lead to one thing.” We both laughed. I smelled myself on her breath and hugged her close.
In the following days, I averted my eyes when Mother looked at me. I was ashamed and confused, but then I would hear Peri chanting, “Don’t be embarrassed,” her voice like a phantom-white sheet, and I would feel better. I wondered if she seduced women all over Egypt and then told them the story about the imam to make them feel better. I decided that if she did, it worked. As I pedaled my bike to the market, I looked at men’s bottoms and stared at their hands. Peri had reminded me of so much I’d thought I needed to leave behind, and I was grateful to her for that.
In the afternoons, Perihan and Anna went to Alexandria, to the new library where Peri was doing her research. I searched her eyes for a sign, a way I should behave toward her, but there was nothing, and Perihan simply treated me the way she always had. It was not as though she was pretending nothing had happened between us, only that it would not change the way she saw me or thought of me. It was a bit of a relief, to sense that, though I was still confused about how to feel. One afternoon, she invited me and Shadia to go to the beach. I said I couldn’t go; I was washing the army officer’s car and was not yet done with the windows. She seemed embarrassed for not knowing this—that I was obliged to wash cars. I told her I could go when I was finished.
We spread a few chairs and plowed the sharp wooden end of an umbrella into the sand. A few kids walked up and down the sidewalk holding a crab on a leash. The crab danced and pulled and tugged, facing the shore. While Shadia and Anna swam, Perihan asked me if I ever wanted to leave the building. I said I was like everyone else: I lived where I’d grown up and would probably die there. I told her this gave me comfort on most days, and I faced the blue sea. Perihan said this was an alien idea to her, that she wouldn’t know where home was, even if she wanted to go back. She said that when she came to Egypt, she knew where to go, but that if I ever came to America, she would never know that I was there. “America’s enormous,” she said. The sky was dotted with plastic kites and I watched them float and thought of what she meant. I thought of the kite ripping from the thread and flying away, disappearing into the immeasurable sky. Perihan was like that. I was like the crab on the sidewalk.
The day Peri and Anna left, I made them mulokhiya, picked and dried the mallow leaves myself, and Peri told me I had to eat it with them. We devoured it on the balcony, then the girls went down to play until Perihan’s aunt came to get her. Perihan sat close to me and I saw a couple of eyelashes on her chin. I bent to brush them off but they wouldn’t move. She blushed and said she was hairy-chinned. I told her not to be ashamed, and she rose and began searching for her tweezers. I laughed, then watched the girls drum on tin cans in the street and was saddened that they would not be able to communicate once they got older, once language separated them and play was no longer an option.
“You should teach Anna Arabic,” I said.
“You should teach Shadia English,” she joked, tweezing at a small hand mirror.
“Peri. How will they talk when they get older?” I watched them bang on the drums harder, the suitcases big and bulky on the side of the road. I wondered if Peri would ever come back.
“They’ll find a way,” she said. “Believe me, they’ll still have the language they have now.”
I nodded to be polite, but I didn’t believe it.
LOST IN FREAKIN’ YONKERS
New York, during the summer of ’96, sees some of its highest temperatures on record, and it is toward the end of this summer that I sit, my enormous pregnant belly to accompany me, on an 80 percent acrylic, 20 percent wool covered futon. I look over the tag again, and under the materials it says, Made in ASU. So I’m sitting on the futon, sweating—we have neither an air conditioner nor a fan, and our window is held up by an embarrassingly huge copy of Dirtiest Jokes Volume III—and wondering: should I marry my boyfriend? And: was the tag-maker dyslexic? I quit worrying and start to masturbate, reminding myself that the pregnancy book says in the last trimester the mother is at her sexual peak, and that each strong orgasm brings her closer to real contractions. How totally unfair this is, considering I can hardly reach my own crotch.
The phone rings, and it’s my mother calling from a pay phone, wondering if she should make the Ninety-Sixth Street imam wait much longer.
“Don’t
