Hiding Under Glass Tables

My older brother used to terrorize me with his big toe. He’d chase me around the house before pinning me to the ground and stick his big toe in my face while I’d squeal and try to get out from underneath him. He used to get disciplined a lot, time-outs in his room or tongue lashings from my father.

When I was five and he was nine, he convinced me to play doctor and that I would be his patient. I laughed and giggled while he took a pair of nail scissors to half of my eyebrow. He told me to be still. When my mother discovered us, with me lying on the floor and he carefully cutting a strip of my eyebrow off, he was swiftly reprimanded and disciplined, but I wasn’t.

*

It was not the end of the world when my mother met my father. In fact, it was the beginning of many worlds to come. The first was love. She loved him from afar and by infatuation. He was handsome and tall with a lot of hair. He would stomp grapes in Switzerland to make wine and made enough money to buy a Volkswagen Bug.

But he was poor from a poor family. That did not sit well with her parents. They were kind and gentle with her as she went out with him in his gold VW Bug. My parents would go and have drinks by the Nile, and she would be in awe of this splendid, handsome, but poor god that was irresistible. Then my mother, before she knew what a mother could be, was interrupted by her mother.

He picked my mother up for a night out on the town, and right behind her was her mother. My grandmother got in the back seat and said, “Choose. It’s him or me.” She chose him.

*

Growing up and hearing these things and when people asked about my parents I often said, “Think of Romeo and Juliet, except they don’t kill themselves at the end, and they have kids.”

That is the second love; it’s a love not between two people but a love to thrive and move forward together. A tribe.

My father studied medicine day and night to the point where his father would ask him, “Isn’t that enough studying for today?” He couldn’t. My father had to get out. My mother just wanted to be with him.

And when they were married, my mother would sit and write on a typewriter alongside my father to residency programs in the United States. There were hundreds of letters, and there were hundreds of rejections. All of it was to get into a program to get out of Egypt in order to leave the world of difficulty that saw him sleep on a twin bed with his wife and a newborn child in his parent’s apartment. He was not what she had thought he was, but she stood by him and loved him.

When my father was accepted to a program in Buffalo, New York, and broke the news to his father, his father said to him, “You’re very selfish.” The man was hurt; his son was leaving him. And although that moment was before my time, I think of a poem that I would write many years later:

Lo, that I would never say goodbye,

What strange and decadent Heaven that would be,

For though I leave you behind,

I know what lies ahead will be for Us in time.

*

The third love is a memory reshaped. I was born in a swamp where my father’s parents looked after the first two while I was being birthed. I obviously I don’t remember that moment the way my mother does. But I do remember seeing that same grandfather for the first time five years later.

He was old and freckled, his teeth yellowed, and I was afraid of him. He took out a sack of marbles in the living room of my mother’s parents’ apartment in Cairo. He chuckled and laughed as I tried to understand the game of marbles. But I was too afraid.

I did not know him.

I love him now.

Clay is what we are,

Easily shaped,

Easily molded,

And altogether changeable,

But with enough water and enough will,

It can be for the better.

*

My mother used to threaten us when there were too many of us with the familiar phrase, “I’m going to tell your father when he comes home.” He would be out being a doctor, feeling the stress of having to work to feed us, put braces on our teeth, make us feel safe, make us not want.

My older brother had been terrorizing me with his big toe when my father got home. After he grunted us off each other and flipped on the television, we were quiet. At a certain point my father looked at my face and his eyes went wide with shock. My mother realized he’d noticed a patch of my eyebrow missing. I smiled and chuckled because I thought it was funny.

My brother was told to sit in his room after a good yelling and after my father made sure no permanent damage was done to me.

Later, my brother and I would be chasing each other around the house. For some reason we had an indoor hot tub room with sliding doors; it was the 90’s. As my brother chased me threatening me with his big toe, I got a good distance between us. I shut the sliding door. My brother slammed into the glass face first. Then came the roar.

I broke my brother’s braces. He was yelled at and sent to his room.

My father came out yelling and searching for me to discipline me.

I remember peering at this tall, angry, daunting figure from under the glass dining room table. I was watching him thinking he wouldn’t be able to find me. I remember giggling.

I saw his face, angry and bewildered, and then I saw his face change. Softened. He smiled and let out a small chuckle as he spotted me hiding under a glass table in the dark.

My brother was disciplined. I was not.

My brother is a surgeon.

I write stories for a living.

None of us knows how the story ends.

"If you can look into the seeds of time and say which grain will grow and which will not, speak then unto me." – The Bard