Catherine?
The bespectacled lady leafed through the ticket stubs and papers, stopped at one, adjusted her glasses, sighed, shook her head, announced to the room in an obstreperous tone, Here are the stubs, where are the fucking memories?
Jacob’s Journals
How I Learned to Read
I saw a man open a book on the bus, the title was Middle Easterny, maybe
Jihad in the Desert
or
Terrorist in Our Midst,
something exciting, because the cover was the color of what we imagine blood to be, a lush vermilion, which is a lush word that rolls off the tongue exotically, verr-mill-yon. The mass-market paperback had endured many readers, a thumbing too many, it was falling apart just like the first book I was given to learn reading and writing back in Cairo. I was too young, my aunties kept insisting, too young to read, quite a few of them including my mother couldn’t even write their names, but I wanted to, I wanted to desperately.
There was a girl in the house, maybe four or five years older, I was supposed to call her sister, but she didn’t care for me, not that she abused me like the kids later on, she didn’t hate me, just did not care and did not wish to engage.She faced life, and me, silently. I can’t remember her uttering a word, and I can’t remember her name now, she was the daughter of an auntie from Morocco’s southern city of Agadir, I envied her so much. She attended school, left the house six mornings every week, covered her body with a beige dress, the school uniform. I would have loved to wear that beige dress and become a schoolgirl like my not-sister. She returned through the kitchen door in the afternoon—everyone who lived in the house came and went through the kitchen door, the clients used the front—and placed her book bag on the long table. I would be sitting at the table, enraptured. Yes, Doc, that was the inspiration for my Halloween costume that year I wore a headscarf with two pink pigtails sprouting out of it. As thick as those pink pigtails were, they were nowhere near as lush as hers. Her hair was difficult to tame, though less so than mine, and her tails looked like the arms of a flocculent mohair sweater. I wanted them so much, wanted to wrap myself in them. She would sit at the table and begin her homework. Even then I knew that I could not have what I longed for, her hair or her dress, so I longed to read like her.
The chair I sat on was much too high, my feet had no chance of touching the uneven stone floor, and the long dark oak table stood high as well. I was always short. I could not stand on the chair because each stone below was hand-carved, no two alike, filled with grooves and indentations that were older than Cairo itself. The reading book may have been over-thumbed but it was weighty, bulky, and unwieldy, so I could not bring it toward me off the table. Auntie Badeea and my mother had to improvise, fixing a wooden coffee tray as a bridge between the table and myseat. In essence, I learned to read and write on a highchair. I have to say, Doc, that floor lives on for me to this day in the way each of my feet sometimes lands differently on the curbs of San Francisco, where a tree and its roots raise the cement. Years ago, when Lou suffered from peripheral neuropathy and his feet would go numb, he would walk slowly, always looking down at the ground like a pigeon around bread crumbs, to make sure he didn’t stumble and fall. I used to walk that kitchen floor always looking down at the stones, at the atlases of countries and their borders, at the geography of rivers and steppes and great deserts, at the topography of hills and valleys, the flesh of my soles wrapped around each round protrusion, sinking into each shallow crevice. But most of all, I remember that my feet never landed at the exact same angle or faced the same way, no one’s did on that floor, as if each foot had sprouted wings and could travel in any direction it wished.
My right hand covered my ear as I learned to read
The bespectacled lady leafed through the ticket stubs and papers, stopped at one, adjusted her glasses, sighed, shook her head, announced to the room in an obstreperous tone, Here are the stubs, where are the fucking memories?
Jacob’s Journals
How I Learned to Read
I saw a man open a book on the bus, the title was Middle Easterny, maybe
Jihad in the Desert
or
Terrorist in Our Midst,
something exciting, because the cover was the color of what we imagine blood to be, a lush vermilion, which is a lush word that rolls off the tongue exotically, verr-mill-yon. The mass-market paperback had endured many readers, a thumbing too many, it was falling apart just like the first book I was given to learn reading and writing back in Cairo. I was too young, my aunties kept insisting, too young to read, quite a few of them including my mother couldn’t even write their names, but I wanted to, I wanted to desperately.
There was a girl in the house, maybe four or five years older, I was supposed to call her sister, but she didn’t care for me, not that she abused me like the kids later on, she didn’t hate me, just did not care and did not wish to engage.She faced life, and me, silently. I can’t remember her uttering a word, and I can’t remember her name now, she was the daughter of an auntie from Morocco’s southern city of Agadir, I envied her so much. She attended school, left the house six mornings every week, covered her body with a beige dress, the school uniform. I would have loved to wear that beige dress and become a schoolgirl like my not-sister. She returned through the kitchen door in the afternoon—everyone who lived in the house came and went through the kitchen door, the clients used the front—and placed her book bag on the long table. I would be sitting at the table, enraptured. Yes, Doc, that was the inspiration for my Halloween costume that year I wore a headscarf with two pink pigtails sprouting out of it. As thick as those pink pigtails were, they were nowhere near as lush as hers. Her hair was difficult to tame, though less so than mine, and her tails looked like the arms of a flocculent mohair sweater. I wanted them so much, wanted to wrap myself in them. She would sit at the table and begin her homework. Even then I knew that I could not have what I longed for, her hair or her dress, so I longed to read like her.
The chair I sat on was much too high, my feet had no chance of touching the uneven stone floor, and the long dark oak table stood high as well. I was always short. I could not stand on the chair because each stone below was hand-carved, no two alike, filled with grooves and indentations that were older than Cairo itself. The reading book may have been over-thumbed but it was weighty, bulky, and unwieldy, so I could not bring it toward me off the table. Auntie Badeea and my mother had to improvise, fixing a wooden coffee tray as a bridge between the table and myseat. In essence, I learned to read and write on a highchair. I have to say, Doc, that floor lives on for me to this day in the way each of my feet sometimes lands differently on the curbs of San Francisco, where a tree and its roots raise the cement. Years ago, when Lou suffered from peripheral neuropathy and his feet would go numb, he would walk slowly, always looking down at the ground like a pigeon around bread crumbs, to make sure he didn’t stumble and fall. I used to walk that kitchen floor always looking down at the stones, at the atlases of countries and their borders, at the geography of rivers and steppes and great deserts, at the topography of hills and valleys, the flesh of my soles wrapped around each round protrusion, sinking into each shallow crevice. But most of all, I remember that my feet never landed at the exact same angle or faced the same way, no one’s did on that floor, as if each foot had sprouted wings and could travel in any direction it wished.
My right hand covered my ear as I learned to read
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