Out of Place: A Memoir Read Online Free PDF Page B

infallibility she compelled the American teachers (also spinsters) to conform to her way, rather than she to theirs. Through half a century at the college—she lived there as well, ruling her floor like a queen—no one ever got the better of her. She stopped teaching before I was born and became “director” of the college, a position created in deference to her ability to rule Egyptian students and staff as no American could.
    Auntie Melia took Hilda in hand, showed her where to shop, where to send her children to school, whom to talk to when she needed something. She supplied her with maids, piano teachers, tutors, names of ballet schools, dressmakers, and, of course, endless, very quietly stated advice. She always appeared for lunch on Tuesday, a habit begun before I was born and continued until she left Egypt in 1953 for her brief period of retirement in Lebanon, where she died in 1956. I was particularly fascinated by two things about her. One was her way of eating. Perhaps because of defects in her molars, tiny morsels of food were carefully deposited between her gums and her front teeth; they did not make their way back to where they could be chewed and then swallowed. Instead she worked on the food in the front part of her mouth by pressing it down with her tongue and then sucking from it a minuscule portion of juice and, say, a grain of rice, or a tiny chunk of meat, which she abruptly and almost imperceptibly gulped down. Then with her fork she extracted what was left—which always looked pretty intact to me—and laid it down precisely on the plate’s far corner. By the end of the meal, which she was always the last to finish, her plate contained seven or eight little mounds of food, neatly ringing the surface, as if they had been put there by a guileful chef.
    The second thing that transfixed me were her hands, always encased in black or white lace gloves, depending on the season. She wore bracelets but not rings. Her left hand always held a small rolled-up handkerchief in the palm next to the thumb, where she could open and reroll it all day. Whenever she offered me candy
—bastilia
, she called it—it always emerged from the hankie, always smelling of lavender cologne, always covered in cellophane, always of some gentle, unassertiveflavor like quince or tamarind. Her right hand either carried her bag or rested on it.
    Auntie Melia’s relationship with my father was very correct, respectful, even at times cordial; it was quite unlike his attitude toward her sister, the kind and patient and hopelessly good Munira, whom he called
mart
mmi
, mother-in-law (literally, “my paternal uncle’s wife”), and whom he always treated with a sort of playful condescension. As for his four brothers-in-law, he seemed to have qualified affection, and a great deal of criticism, for them. Hilda’s brothers—Munir, Alif, Rayik, and Emile—lived in Palestine, and we would visit them there with some regularity; after 1948 they flowed in and out of Cairo, refugees mostly, variously “hard up,” as my father would say, in need of help. They were more numerous than my father’s relatives, especially if to their Palestinian number were added a whole host of Hilda’s Lebanese relatives. One of my father’s ironclad rules was never to discuss the Said family at all; he often told me that a man’s family is his honor. But he had no qualms about discussing his wife’s family, for whom (this must have greatly complicated my mother’s life) he seemed to be, according to him, an unending source of loans. He was always wealthy, whereas Hilda’s brothers were not. One of them borrowed money from my father to get married. The others borrowed sums for various unsuccessful business enterprises, and I was led to believe that these sums were never returned. My father told me all these things with distaste, and because of that information I must have subliminally developed a sense of discomfort and mild disapproval that made my