The day of the wedding, Hilal completed his rocket and hauled it out to the square by Qamar’s house. It was Ramadan, and people were breaking their fasts indoors, so virtually no one saw him. If they did, they rushed home and told their wives: “Tsaddai ya sitt—can you believe it, woman? I just saw a white rocket on the back of a truck. I’m that damn hungry.”
The wedding was at home; her uncles and aunts, cousins and grandparents, and future in-laws arrived early. They danced and sang and ate, then waited for the ma’zun to come and officially marry her to Omar, the man they had chosen.
Qamar looked at Omar, who stared hungrily at her upon his arrival. She tried to crack a smile. His eyes bored into hers, and her arms went numb. Qamar realized then that this man made her feel like a Mouled doll, as if there were millions of ants chewing her body from the inside out. Wanting some air, she reached over to the window and saw Hilal standing near the obelisk. Then, beside it, another “obelisk.” She yelled, “Ah, the man wasn’t kidding.”
“Who?” Omar said. He panicked at the mention of another man.
She stood up and walked toward the balcony.
She climbed over the railings. Her family stopped eating, and all eyes were fixed on Qamar as she jumped down to the yellow clothesline. Hilal saw her then, and a bright smile stretched across his dark face like jet stream in a clear sky.
He started the rocket engine.
She walked the line all the way to the end and jumped onto a lower clothesline. The People in the street looked up at her and heaved a collective “here she goes again.” They informed the bawab, but he was too afraid to climb any clotheslines, so he yelled from his post at the front of the building, “What’s with you, Qamar?”
“I want the moon,” she yelled back. The People began to say something, but Qamar did a backflip onto another line dotted with a fat woman’s underwear, and told them, “And I don’t need your advice this time.”
BUILDING GIRLS
They come to Egypt in the summer; they come in their rented cars and bring their families and buy umbrellas and beach chairs; they bring swimsuits and towels and creams for their skin so it won’t burn. They make me laugh. They come in June, sometimes as late as July, and stay until September, when their children return to school and they return to their jobs. It’s hard for me to imagine leaving work for an entire season; I suppose when no one is here from September to June, that is my small vacation. On my vacation I still have to wash walls and plant plants and paint and water and clean. On top of all that I have Shadia to take care of, my little Shadia who looks just like her father, the bastard. Him, I have a permanent vacation from. Thank the lord!
I was born here, at the bottom of the building on Seventh Street, in this small beach town, at the lower tip of the Middle Sea, between the cities of Alexandria and Abu Qir. My mother and father have been married thirty-five years; in that time my mother lost many of her teeth, lost her small figure and some of her hair, and my father remains almost exactly the same, skin black like the street where the summer children play soccer, teeth white and gleaming, with occasional cavities, so they look like tiny soccer balls. He runs errands for the women whose husbands stayed in the city, or for the widows, or for those whose husbands are lazy. I sometimes see the women blush when Father talks to them, because he is unbearably handsome. I look a lot like him, except my skin is black and I am a woman, so I am not considered unbearably beautiful.
I have been working for my parents and for the owners of the building all my life—thirty-four years, if you want an exact number. I took a break when I married the devil, Shadia’s father, whose name I cannot bear to utter. I was never in love with him; he was twelve years my senior and Mother thought he’d make a good match when she heard from my cousin that he was looking for a wife. He lied and stole and broke my heart, which wasn’t his to break. And when he put his hands on me, I’d shudder. I hated his sex, his skin, and his smell. He had a nasty temper and struck my face and kicked my bottom more often than I cared for, and when I went home, dragging Shadia behind me, Mother spat on me and told me to go home to my husband. I cried and told her what happened, but she didn’t blink. Father intervened on my behalf and declared that his house was my house, and Mother slapped her own cheeks and wailed. I smiled with relief, entering the little bottom-floor apartment, the fabric on all its walls scented with every meal I had ever prepared or eaten there.
My real bosses are the families of this four-story building. In my building are two apartments on each floor—one on the left, another on the right—and four floors. I call the first floor the mirror floor: the family on the left has three daughters and one son, and the family on the right has three sons and one daughter. You’d think they would have naturally paired off after spending every summer together, but they never did. The boys played soccer every day and the girls played alone or split off into age groups. Their mothers adored one another and the husbands despised each other—one was an intellectual and spent his summers at the building reading on the balcony, and the other spent his summers buying watermelons and watching soccer games on a television he wheeled out to the balcony every night. I loved observing them from the street, the intellectual flipping his pages after each burst of applause coming from the watermelon-lover’s screen.
The owners of the second floor’s left unit live downtown and rent their apartment out to honeymooners. I like to watch the new brides stroll down the street awkwardly, in that newly deflowered way, their gait hesitant and their palms pressed into their husbands’. On the other side lives Madame Manaal; she has lived there for thirty-four years. When she moved in, my mother was pregnant with me, and I floated inside her belly, squinting in its darkness. My father says Madame Manaal moved in after the deaths of her husband and her eldest son; she asked my father, upon her arrival, to shutter all her windows, and he complied. When I was a child, Madame called me up to give me her grocery list; in contrast with the brightness of the street, the blackness that cloaked her greeted me like a chasm on the other side of the doorframe. Sometimes, when I am feeling strange, I imagine Madame Manaal is my old self, still floating in my mother’s belly.
The third-floor apartments were joined together when their owners, who live in the Arabian Gulf, knocked down the wall in the middle (I was a witness to this marriage and covered my ears when I heard the ceremony commence). They visit every three years and the rest of the time their furniture is covered in white sheets. Sometimes, I go up there and listen to their records or take naps on their beds. Sometimes, I imagine the white sheets are hiding people, an idea that arouses me, and I practice my secret habit on the biggest bed.
The fourth-floor apartments are also frequently empty. The one on the left belongs to an elderly man, an ex-officer who took part in the 1952 revolution. When he visits he brings all his grandchildren and his daughters. He wears a small hat and sandals and goes for walks very early in the morning, his hands daintily hanging at his sides. I try to imagine him holding a rifle in those hands or pulling a string on a cannon, but I cannot.
The apartment on the right is where Perihan, my summer best friend, used to stay; she visited the building with her family every year for fifteen years; we used to play together in the dump next door. Now, my family tends to chickens there. Back then it was filled with trash, and Perihan and I would dig through it to find shiny tins and pots which we tapped with sticks and made into drums. Perihan wore her dresses, shiny pink and silver things, and crimpled hats. I wore the same nighties I slept in and put big perfumed flowers in my hair. She liked that my hats were from nature, and that I didn’t have to change just because the sky had turned from night to light or vice versa, and as the summers progressed, she’d become less a rich girl on the top floor of the building and more one of our sisters at the bottom of it; she wore her galabiyya and her plastic torn-up sandals, and we wreathed flowers, pink and fat, into strands of her brown hair which shone red in the sun.
When we swam she wore a swimsuit and I wore my clothes; I didn’t understand why you had to wear special clothes just for the water which really didn’t care how dressed up you were when you came to meet it. Out of modesty, too, I have never revealed my arms or legs outside my home.
Although