Free Evel Knievel Days by Pauls Toutonghi Page B

witnessed the tiger prowling in the underbrush, and then they’d shot the tiger, conquering it themselves, then they might have sent it home to be stuffed and displayed in their solarium. But that evening, the acrid scent of gunpowder still sticky on their palms, they would have ordered steak and potatoes and washed it down with a sunny California chardonnay. They were just visiting, after all; it was all very lovely, but they weren’t planning on staying.
    They eschewed my mom’s contributions to Thanksgiving dinner. Their idea of Egypt was half Tutankhamen and half Ten Commandments.They’d raised my mother in an austere, moneyed household—and she’d embraced anything that seemed like it might offend their austere, moneyed sensibilities. Hence the commitment to radical politics, the marriage to my father, the unrelenting pursuit of Middle Eastern cuisine.
    Third: I think that the meals she cooked reminded her of the beginning of the relationship, of the world that my father had opened for her, of a time when she had so much hope for a shared future. The food was an elemental reminder of that.
    Fourth, and perhaps most important, I think it was a challenge. She was not going to fold, to give up, to let a sudden betrayal obliterate the life she’d imagined for herself. Yes, half of that life was missing. But she wasn’t going to let herself be destroyed by that. She was just going to revise, to reenvision, to reimagine. She would reorient the narrative with a different center.
    Or maybe it was because after she closed the restaurant, the orders never stopped coming in over the phone? The business started slowly, but it grew larger and larger and—I think—took up the vacancy that my father had left behind. And so, I think at least in part because of these things, I found myself every Saturday morning sitting in the passenger seat of Tante Wada’s 1973 Ford Maverick, listening to Arabic music on her cheap in-dash CD player and driving to Billings, Montana, where the Islamic Center convened a weekly Arabic Saturday school. My mother insisted I go.
    “It’ll get you in touch with your broader culture,” she said on the first day I accompanied Wada on the three-and-a-half-hour drive, departing at five in the morning. “It will heighten your understanding of the size and scope of the world.”
    I was six years old.
    “I want to connect you to where you came from,” she added.
    “I came from Butte, Montana,” I said.
    “I know, sweetie. But it’s more complicated than that.”
    “Why can’t you drive me?” I said.
    “Mom needs a day off, sweetie,” she said.
    “From what?” I said.
    “That’s not important, darling. All you need to know is that Tante Wada is happy to take you there.”
    I began what would be a ten-year immersion in Middle Eastern politics and religion and the Arabic language. Of course, my father had been a Christian—and not a particularly religious Christian at that. I’d had no religious guidance from any quarter. For her part, Tante Wada had a pragmatic attitude about poaching language lessons for me from the Islamic Center.
    “The praying is good for your muscles,” she said. “Kneel and stand, kneel and stand. You’ll be a better soccer player.”
    I had a different agenda. “You realize, Wada, that I’m missing Saturday-morning cartoons.”
    “Be quiet,
habibi
,” she said, “and listen to Amr Diab.”
    When I was a teenager, I’d change our musical selection to Floyd Ming and his Pep Steppers or Uncle Dave Macon or Ernest Phipps and His Holiness Singers. But when I was a kid, Wada translated the lyrics as they pumped through the rattling interior of the little two-door Ford.
    Habibi, ya nour el-ain
, Diab sang, and Wada translated in a deadpan, tuneless monotone: “Dear one, you are the light in my eyes.”
Ya sakin khayali
. “You live in my imagination.”
A’ashek bakali sneen owala ghayrak bibali
. I curled myself in the bucket seat and put my head on my knees