Why I Want to Ride the Pink Rocket

car rides, class anxiety, hypergamy, kitsch, refined bigotries, and other ramblings

Have you ever tried not to notice that someone has three phones? Two is fine and expected, even. One for work and one for life. Practical, maybe even admirable. But three? Three is a confession. A man with three phones is either very important, very dishonest, or both. Usually both. This was something I trained myself not to see during the entirety of my relationship with Ben. I never snooped or touched. Never tried to lean in when one buzzed facedown beside his fork. Sometimes messages popped up, and I’d glance, reflexively, but then quickly look away. I found the idea of snooping contemptible, prying open someone else’s device to desperately find the truth as if the truth hadn’t already spoken for itself. If you need to dig, you’re already beneath it, and you’ve told God that you’ve forsaken your greater instincts.

Three phones: one for business, one for the sacred, and one for the profane. I never asked which was which. I already knew. He was staring at one of them as we sat in the back of the Uber he’d ordered without checking the price. He couldn’t drive. Too busy consulting three phones and, occasionally, his MacBook, drafting and sending emails. It would be my first and last time seeing my parents in person since The Incident. The biweekly calls had continued, sure, but reduced to logistics and pleasantries. Ben said he wanted to meet them. Said it would be strange if he didn’t. I agreed, morbidly curious to see how it would all unfold, so we went. And my parents, those barometers of social order, were eager to meet the man I’d disappeared with.

The drive to Fayetteville began at 10:04 a.m. from Trinity Park, the Uber a 2013 Toyota Corolla with tan cloth seats and a cracked dashboard mount, the center console containing a pack of Orbit peppermint gum, the front cupholders holding two empty Dasani bottles, the air conditioning turned to its lowest setting but slanted away, the driver silent, the GPS already set, the roads preselected, no further instruction required, and the first stretch through the neighborhood showed lawns cut to consistent height, bricks pressure-washed, porches vacated but recently used, blankets draped over gliders, coffee rings tainting powder-coated aluminum tables, citronella buckets with charred wax near the base, houses in foursquare or revival style with porch fans operating slowly, galvanized tubs beside steps planted with hydrangeas and creeping jenny, door colors confirmed as Benjamin Moore “Hale Navy” and “Palladian Blue” with close imitations from Farrow & Ball, and most front windows featured “In This House We Believe” signage, hand-lettered and placed behind glass, some with Pride flags attached to posts or window frames, slightly frayed or bleached from the sun, sidewalks covered with chalk illustrations, partial rainbows, half-finished baseball diamonds, an incomplete alphabet trailing off at the letter P, possibly Q, possibly not yet started, driveways containing Subaru Outbacks, Volvo XC60s, and at least one S60, Hillary 2016 decals peeling at the corners, a woman wearing an Outdoor Voices dress placing a compost bin into a black lidded container, a man in Allbirds allowing a black Labrador to relieve itself on a Japanese maple, a child strapped into a UPPAbaby stroller eating banana slices from a pink Sistema bento box, Teslas coated in pine pollen parked with generic plates, garages revealing backup fridges containing oat milk cartons and Cutwater Paloma cans stacked behind LaCroix, saunas constructed by former roommates now in graduate school, some pursuing low-residency MFAs, others offering services as sleep consultants or executive function coaches, nearly all in therapy, most unable to secure new appointment slots until Q3 or Q4 depending on provider networks and insurance availability, the drive continuing along Club Boulevard toward the 147 ramp, East Campus to the right with manicured lawns cut to regulation length, patches of limestone visible through shaved turf, students moving in clumps of three or four, many wearing oversized Duke sweatshirts with shorts or bare legs and Hokas, phones in hand but unused, one girl in tears leaning against another, a champagne Saab 9-3 in front with the sunroof open and a faded Bernie Sanders sticker curling on the trunk lid, the merge onto 147 South smooth, the asphalt freshly laid, lane markers clean, the shoulder holding only a rusted license plate and one crushed Monster can, the vehicle accelerating toward I-40 East where lanes widened and the flow of cars increased, Research Triangle Park visible through glass curtain walls and boxy signage, biotech firms with repeated fonts and minimal logos, parking decks displaying digital counters with numbers in the low hundreds, the Southpoint exit approaching fast, recognizable by the Cheesecake Factory awning and the Old Navy banner snapping against two silver SUVs idling near the entrance, the road shoulder deteriorating after mile marker 281, tire shreds coiled like discarded belts, a green U-Haul parked without flashers and its hood propped open, the first series of billboards repeating across intervals of a few miles, some advertising Medicaid dental coverage, some promising low-down-payment braces, one with a cartoon child in a superhero cape, colors washed out, expression frozen, trees thinning along the highway, Walgreens stores with sketchy lots, Target shopping carts accumulated near storm drains, one Ulta boarded over with raw plywood, a Zaxby’s drive-thru with eight vehicles, two bearing South Carolina tags, I-95 South taking over after Exit 79, no landscaping beyond grass and gravel, no azaleas, pavement faded to gray, the shoulder broadening again, fast food signage multiplying, Waffle House lights flickering inconsistently, McDonald's arches covered in bug stains, Sonic order boards sun-faded to off-white, no protected bike lanes, no raised crosswalks, no espresso shops with sidewalk chalk menus, only fuel stations offering food on plastic banners, a strip mall with no anchor store, containing a mattress liquidation outlet, a phone repair storefront, a vape shop with the neon turned off during posted hours, a lawn care pickup parked beside a gas station with the driver asleep, head tilted against the side window, the area devoid of pedestrians, absent of sidewalks or benches, the landscape flat after Exit 328A, semis traveling in the rightmost lanes, a black pickup weaving between vehicles, a maroon minivan with Alabama plates missing its rear wiper, another orthodontics billboard showing a different smile but the same brand, McGee’s Crossroads not marked but evident by the tan Baptist church and the gravel cemetery with fake flowers installed in compact grid rows, a gas station with a flaking red ICE sticker on the door, a closed diner with blinds lowered halfway, no signage present, no real estate notices, just abandonment, Benson approaching rapidly, an overpass with fresh guardrails, two motels in view, one with the “O” missing from the sign, a strip mall with a pawn shop, a vape outlet, and a salon titled “Tips 2 Toes,” more flags—American, North Carolina, and a black-and-blue one with a white star in the center, the grass in the median browning at the roots, a Department of Transportation vehicle parked with lights on but unoccupied, Erwin visible next, a narrow bridge crossing a low canal, a pickup truck positioned under a tent selling squash, tomatoes, and boiled peanuts, a cardboard sign reading “Cash Only” nailed to a wooden crate, a sheriff’s SUV parked crooked beside a fan rental business, a large portable unit with “PORTACOOL” spelled in black lettering on the casing, Dunn arriving next, a water tower on the left, a warehouse missing part of its roof, graffiti visible on the exposed wall, three children circling a drainage ditch on undersized bicycles, smoke rising from behind the industrial lots but no active flame visible, a Food Lion to the right of a Cricket Wireless, a church displaying “HE STILL SAVES” in red lettering on a white changeable board, gas priced at $3.37, the sun positioned above but the light lessening, the hour advancing, Exit 58 appearing with minimal signage, a merge onto US-13 interrupted by a Kia Soul swerving across the lanes, license plate bracket labeled “SANDHILLS STRONG,” I-295 S entering with clean asphalt and reflective barriers, no vehicles in front or behind for several miles, zoning signs stuck into empty dirt patches reading “Build to Suit,” two German Shepherds pacing behind a wire fence with no enclosure on the far side, grass faded to yellow, the ramp to 401 South appearing past mile marker 37, the merge seamless, Ramsey Street unfolding into six wide lanes bordered by an Advance Auto Parts and the shell of a K&W Cafeteria with one side of the sign removed, an apartment development behind a Sonic with beige vinyl siding and white balconies, a man selling pine straw from the bed of a truck, bundles tied in twine, tarp folded to one side, no foot traffic anywhere in the area, no visible bicycles, bowing power lines overhead, a Marathon gas station offering 2-for-$4 Red Bull cans and free air from an oxidized compressor, cell coverage dropping below usable levels, signal bars disappearing, a cluster behind the Circle K containing a taqueria operating out of a trailer, a bail bonds office with no visible staff, and a closed drive-thru espresso kiosk with the ordering window latched.

Then Greystone Farms appeared, the name carved in beveled stone, gates open but intact, houses spaced widely with facades of stacked stone, synthetic stucco, and fiber cement board, sharply sloped roofs, most with dual gables, driveways long and marked for basketball, water sprinklers spraying in crossing arcs, shrubs shaped by professional landscapers, lawns evenly trimmed, trash bins recessed in custom alcoves, no visible parked vehicles along the curb, the central cul-de-sac containing a circular pond with a running fountain, all homes with matching flagpole installations angled at forty-five degrees, garages shut, interiors likely containing open kitchens and granite surfaces, flooring probably engineered hardwood, some lots extended farther back with outbuildings, two with visible white-fenced paddocks housing horses, multiple brick colonials with attached double garages, others combining board siding and artificial stone, the area mapped to a high-income demographic, school district rated above average, housing prices indexed for household stability, followed immediately by Ascot, no gate, the entrance sign obscured by overgrown boxwoods, no water elements, houses spaced closer together, styles mixed—ranches and split-levels, some with original aluminum siding streaked with mildew, others painted inconsistently, driveways short and uneven, many garages converted into rooms or storage, basketball hoops leaning or broken, playsets faded from UV exposure, fencing mismatched, with sagging white vinyl in some yards, and rusted chain-link in others, mailboxes tilted from their base mounts, satellite dishes attached without uniformity, visible vehicles included early 2000s sedans, scratched minivans, a Civic with a broken taillight, oil stains marking each driveway, house colors muted and weathered, Zestimate median at $258,000, market rent near $1,950, some porch lights still active mid-morning, some windows without coverings, road slope changing gradually, stormwater cuts running deeper with each block.

And then, without fanfare, King’s Grant, split by a golf course, bypassing the original section marked by brick exteriors, circular drives, and lake access, turning instead into King’s Grant II, where lot widths narrowed, materials cheapened, vinyl dominated, mailboxes were molded plastic, houses clustered, not much brick in sight, recurring features included trampolines, above-ground pools, and plastic playhouses, one backyard with a small kennel painted to match the main home’s trim, flag display varied, one residence flew a Gadsden flag, another the American flag, one had a rainbow banner near the carport, in front of a 2003 Ford Expedition with all windows lowered, a Hyundai Sonata missing its front passenger-side hubcap parked beside it, and from there, no further markers of change, just road, more houses, and the accumulated certainty of arrival.

It’s not the worst place. But it’s not where people like Ben are from. I think he knew that immediately. I could tell by the slight change in his expression, the way his mouth tightened, how he looked at the surroundings without looking too long. He didn’t need to say anything. I knew what he was doing. We all knew. He was trying to figure out where I came from. Trying to assess my origins. Confirmation bias, maybe.

I didn’t recount my childhood neighborhood to Ben. He didn’t ask, and I didn’t volunteer, out of discretion, out of pride, out of the vague and gnawing sense that to describe it would be to diminish it, or worse, to convert something intimate and unlovely into fodder for his anthropological curiosity. Still, he understood the broad strokes. My parents were among that discreet, over-educated trickle out of Cairo, Copts, doubly self-exiled, first from their country and then, in America, from relevance. Each trained in medicine, each equipped with the requisite degrees and professional decorum to function among the native-born, at least most of the time, though only one of them still found purpose in practice. The other, a doctorate yellowing in some file, time stretching into an insult, had grown sullen in their obsolescence, quietly hoarding resentment.

At some point I must’ve let slip their penchant for austerity. “Frugal” was the word I used, though it scarcely does justice to the asceticism they practiced. It was an ethos, a kind of Calvinist severity. The furniture may as well have been covered. Luxury, even in its most diluted American forms, was suspect. To me, as a child, it was an invisible but ever-present ledger tracking excess and punishing desire. Later, of course, I would come to understand it differently, recognize it as part of a broader phenomenon, a pathology endemic to the displaced professional class: the physicians and engineers from Alexandria or Ahmedabad who exchanged their status for solvency, their languages for silence, and settled, inevitably, inexplicably, in the most characterless outposts of American suburbia. Shitty yet stable suburbs devoid of full life. Not nearly as vitalist as the shitholes they hailed from. They were the stubborn holdouts against ruin, those unsung, indispensable nobodies, subhumanities, who kept the so-called Third World, the Global South (the politically correct term), from tumbling headfirst into oblivion.

Levittown dreck. My parents, like so many of their cohort, lived surrounded by the banality of middle-class consumerism while quietly accumulating portfolios that would outlive them. Blue-chip stocks and retirement accounts plotted with precision. But no proper art. No books, unless medical. No music, unless it reminded them of the Cairo of their youth or the music they listened to when they first stumbled onto American soil, now sanctified by distance and selective amnesia. They were interested in becoming American but also were not interested in becoming American, not really. They were interested in surviving America, and if possible, outlasting it.

I grew up on the tailend of a cul-de-sac on top of a hill. King’s Grant II is full of cul-de-sacs. Hills I was prevented from biking on and quite frankly almost not suited for biking on. The sunlight singed the grass. The lawn was naked. The house itself had aspirations, but it was a failed debutante. A stretch of yellow siding clung to the frame like a department store girdle, trying nobly, but failing, to cinch together the confusion beneath. A sliver of brick, crimson as a skinned knee, tried to lend gravitas to the entryway, but it only made the place look embarrassed.

Ben and I stepped out of the Uber. He asked if the driver would wait, as though we had any right to that kind of patience. Then Ben offered him a substantial sum, a bribe disguised as unalloyed generosity. I joked, “Not sure how long we’ll be here.” Ben nodded, his agreement almost mechanical. We dismissed the driver. “I hope we’ll be able to get another one,” I said.

Ben barely looked at me. “We’ll be fine.”

The pit had been there for hours, it started the night before, maybe longer, maybe days, maybe it never left and only sharpened in proximity to this house, to the doorbell that stuck if you pressed it too hard, which I did, once, then again, two short pushes like a tap on the wrist, Ben behind me with his polite smile and his cautious eyes already reading the layout of the front yard like it was a crime scene or the beginning of one, and then the door opened, too quickly, as if she’d been waiting behind it all morning, which of course she had, my mother, still small and neat and unbothered by time, the green jersey wrap dress clinging to her like it had been fitted yesterday, the espadrilles raising her just enough to pretend she hadn’t shrunk, the emerald studs winking in ears so tiny it was hard to believe they’d ever heard anything they didn’t want to, and her eyes, they were the only thing out of place, the wrong blue, something from a Halloween bin or a teenager’s Snapchat filter, unnatural and opaque, a blue that doesn’t let anything in or out, certainly not the truth, not from someone like her, someone who had never needed surgery, never needed work, and still she moved forward with the choreography she had rehearsed her whole life, the open arms, the breathy hello, “Vou are Benjeeman? Velcome, Velcome,” and he smiled, well-bred, soft-spoken, he hadn’t seen the rooms yet, hadn’t heard the echoes, hadn’t been corrected for nothing or made to apologize for existing in the wrong posture, and then she turned to me, hugged me like I was someone returning from war, someone missed, someone maybe mourned just a little, smelled like Juicy Couture and the same rosewater she used when I was ten, when I first realized her vanity had a specific scent, and I let her do it, I let her touch me, I let her hold on just a beat too long, and then she stepped back and said, “Vou need to eat, Sandura,” and the way she said it, tender, maybe even worried, filled me with something I didn’t want to name, because yes, I was thinner now, though I was always thin. Yes, my arms were smaller, my face more defined, my body drawn inward in a way she couldn’t critique, only observe, and I knew what it gave me, I knew what it took from her, and I liked it, not the hunger, not the bones, but the silence it brought to her mouth, the way she had to notice without being able to scold, without saying I looked sick, or tired, or less than, so I gave her something else, I looked her in the face and said, “You really shouldn’t wear those colored contacts, Mama, they look fake, they make your eyes look flat,” and there was a beat, just one, where she looked at me and didn’t speak, just blinked, slow, thick lashes brushing the wrong blue of her irises, and then she said, “Vat do vou mean, zey are my real eyes,” with that same laugh, the one that always came before a door slammed or a dinner plate was cleared too quickly or someone was told to go upstairs and not come down until they were ready to be decent, and I said, “No they’re not, your real eyes are better, they’re brown, they’re warm, these look medically stupid,” and she blinked again, not slower this time but harder, like she was resetting, like she needed to recalibrate the script, and then from behind her my father made that sound, that half-cough, half-comment that meant it was time to move on, nothing would be resolved at the threshold, nothing ever was, and he said, “HELLO, COME INSIDE,” not kindly, not rudely, and there he was, unchanged in all the ways that mattered, the maroon polo synthetic and overwashed, tucked militarily into his worn jeans, the leather belt curled at the end, the sandals the same ones he wore the day I left, or the day before that, or maybe every day for the last nineteen years, the gray at his temples betraying the bottle-black dye he still insisted was “NATOOORALL,” and his face, still ruddy, still impossible to read unless you knew what to look for, the signs, the gestures, the little shifts that meant danger, that meant it was time to shut up, to nod, to disappear without leaving the room, and I remembered all of it, every room, every rule, and I remembered that I had survived it.

We stepped inside, and Ben’s eyes, almost involuntarily, rose to the chandelier, a rococo sunburst, far too grand for the modest vestibule.

My parents sat waiting in the living room, stiff-backed and ready, but Ben, with the opportunism of a curious guest or a seasoned interloper, detoured into my father’s study. He eyed the Jesus in a crown of thorns portrait, gold-framed, plasticine, bleeding, and the outdated yet stately Arabic-English dictionaries. There were cracked-spine editions of the New England Journal of Medicine and nine Bibles lined up: vernacular Egyptian Arabic beside a Sharif bible in standard Arabic beside King James beside NIV beside other translations, as if all these combined might summon salvation. There was no other literature.

He lingered on a reproduction of some nautical misery, a bootleg Turner, a schooner mid-tempest in yet another plastic frame. I couldn’t begin to guess what he was thinking, but I could feel him thinking. My childhood home was not his home. A testament to upper-middle-class “fresh off the boat” kitschiness.

Doilies, lace sediment, were laid across every available surface, while mahogany waged war against teak. Marble tables clashed with mottled granite that looked like aquarium sludge. Operatic velvet curtains, arterial in hue, swayed theatrically. Crystal chandeliers dangled in the foyer and dining rooms, each room boasting gaudy, unapologetically brown renditions of Louis XVI furniture, interspersed with blue-and-white Chinese ceramics and Thomas Kinkade knockoffs.

Roman column vase stands, fake Greco columns, alabaster lamps from Giza, and conch shells from Myrtle Beach tourist traps. Tutankhamun’s bust beside a cherub holding a cornucopia. Crucifixes and Coptic Pantocrators watching you piss. Cherubs everywhere, cherubs holding harps, cherubs frozen mid-giggle. All of it scrubbed within an inch of its life. A ritualistic, defensive clean. Fifteen-year-old-gypsy-child-bride clean. Honestly, I would’ve appreciated the gaudiness of it all if it wasn’t so intimately associated with unnecessary abuse.

We were ushered to the living room and served an autopsy of fruit: persimmons, lychees, pittayas. Tea was poured, violently sweet, with bouquets of mint leaves crushed into the corners of our glasses. My father began his ritual pleasantries: “HOW IZ ZE WEZZER?” he asked, and Ben responded in kind. I don’t remember what they were talking about, only that no one asked Ben what he did for a living. Not a single question about degrees, titles, certifications. And I don’t think it’s because they researched him. No cyberstalking required. It was self-evident. The bearing. The vowels. The Norwood 3.5. The antiperspirant halo under the arms of his pressed shirt. He smelled like money, or at least close enough to it to suffice.

My parents looked at him and thought, So this is what our broken daughter brought home. Not a doctor, maybe, but certainly not a waiter. Not the future we envisioned, but not a catastrophe either. They were surprised, maybe, that their seemingly petulant, infantile, formerly ugly daughter had managed to snag a man with status, or at least the odor of it.

What did my daughter even talk about with this man? They must’ve wondered. A fair question. Under their roof, I tended to linguistically regress. Not into baby talk exactly, like I often did with men in more amorous contexts, but into simplified vocabulary, shorter sentences. My father talked Costco and municipal bonds. My mother giggled, let loose her rosewater cloud, and disappeared into the kitchen.

And I sat there, blinking at the shelf by the television. The Three Stooges. Seinfeld. Dusty VHS tapes and DVDs that told you why they came to this country. To laugh in real time. To get the joke without subtitles. They came for Bloomingdale’s and Trojan condoms and Snapple and Google and CBS and the Coen brothers and Bette Midler and Lou Reed. For Friends and Good Times and The Wire and The Daily Show. For Gerber Scientific Instruments and Oracle and Starbucks and Viacom and DreamWorks. For Levi’s and Etch A Sketch and Mattel and Dell and Facebook and Victoria’s Secret. They came for Larry David and the New Yorker and the Weather Channel and Carole King and Steven Spielberg. They came for Jewish media and Christmas carols written by Jews. The America they migrated for was founded by WASPs but maintained, narrated, and sublimated by the twentieth-century transitory Jew. America is a Jewish country. Or at least was. A WASP’s idea, operated by Bronx-born sons of tailors.

What was my father thinking as he watched Ben sip tea too slowly? I can’t say for sure. But I’ll try. Maybe he thought: She’s still a slut, but at least she’s a strategic slut. Although, if a girl is strategic slut that probably makes her a whore. Yes, my daughter is a whore. My daughter is lazy in that monumental, almost awe-inspiring way. School means nothing to her. She’s floated along, untouched, unimpressed, and entirely unburdened by ambition. This is not the brilliant premed we imagined, not the prodigy we thought we were cultivating. But she’s not a catastrophe either, just a baffling deviation from the plan. Not what we hoped for, but in this world, it could’ve been worse. At least she didn’t bring home white trash or a black.

Of course, my father couldn’t have said any of this in English because he usually barked in a Madrasi pidgin of Arabic and English, but I’m certain this was exactly what he was thinking.

I asked about Danny. My little brother. Three years younger, exponentially smarter. “OH HE JUST TOOK ZE ESSSSSS—AAAAAAAAYYYYY—TEEEE,” my father said. “HE GOT A TWENTY ZREE ZEVENTY FIIIVE. HE VILL TAKE ZE TEST AGAIN BROBABLY BECAUSE HE IS MAD ZAT HE DID NOT GET A BERFECT SCORE.” I asked where he was. “A TENNIS TOURNAMENT AND ZEN HE HAS MODEL UN. HE IS ZIMBABWE.”

Ben touched the tea but didn’t eat the fruit. Neither did I.

We moved to the dining room, another chandelier too grand for the room, and sat at the table laid with the blue willow china my parents reserved for people they wanted to impress. My mother asked if we were staying the night.

“Vou are more zan velcome to eeesstay in zee bonus room,” she said.

Bonus room. What was I supposed to say? Ben, there’s a bonus room. Surprise. It’s over the garage.

I cringed, though I tried not to show it, the very words sounding false and downwardly suburban, like a consolation prize for a life that had not gone according to plan, and in hearing her say it I was instantly returned to all those years of her grading papers in that very room, after running six miles on the treadmill in the “bonus room,” trying to erase her own body, grading the essays and quizzes of nursing assistant trainees who couldn’t find the pancreas on a diagram if it were the only thing labeled, women with the thighs of dray horses. Her students were the sort you prayed never to be alone with in a hospital. Future nurse assistants with swollen ankles and drawstring scrubs and hoop earrings when they failed anatomy and physiology for the third time. My mother, burning the treadmill an hour before, always running from something, then sitting, still, red-marking the future caretakers of America’s dying poor, and my mother, who had memorized the nervous system by the age of sixteen, was failing them one by one, red pen in hand, as if she were single-handedly holding the floodgates shut on idiocy and neglect, and after the grading there was the couch, ugly and cloth-covered, olive green, the same couch I used to straddle as a child, not for any reason, only because it vibrated and rubbed me the right way when I turned on the treadmill, and the bonus room, of course, was above the garage, and whenever the garage door opened from beneath I would stop whatever I was doing, always stop, whether I was drawing, reading, listening to music, lying on the floor doing nothing, it didn’t matter, my father’s arrival was a moment of judgment and I awaited it with a tight chest, and now to imagine Ben in that room or my bedroom, yes my bedroom. No Lolita games, no schoolgirl seduction, just the twin bed with its old mattress that stopped fitting me at twelve, the Jesus portrait above my desk, Tweety Bird on the pillowcase, and nowhere in sight a bookshelf with real literature, only pamphlets, Bibles, school flyers, the only beloved books I read I had checked out discreetly or downloaded from libgen, and the clothes, yes, the clothes, my mother’s three walk-in closets, overflowing with fashion she bought in defiance of the small town we lived in, and the clothes she chose for me, intentionally unflattering, low budget, loose in all the wrong places, a wardrobe built to discourage the male gaze or any gaze at all, but by adolescence we wore the same size I stole from her, her heels especially, until my feet outgrew hers and I shot up in height and the only thing I could take were dresses, coats, the skirts, lingerie even, and so I looked at her and said, “We’re just here for the afternoon. Heading back to the Triangle tonight.”

She smiled with her mouth but not her eyes, and I thought, very briefly but not unseriously, of staying the night after all and making off with a few of her mink coats and stoles, the jewelry she kept in the drawer by the mirror, the tanzanite, the rubies, the emeralds, the pearls sell them online under an alias, turn the whole thing into a minor inheritance acquired through stealth, because if she wouldn’t give me a legacy I’d take one, and I wondered then if Ben would judge me or simply not notice, which might be best.

When my mother first served us her roasted beet and citrus salad with ricotta and pistachio vinaigrette, Ben, halfway through his first bite, declared, “I see where your daughter learned how to cook. This is a great salad.”

My mother, without looking up, answered flatly, “She knows how to cook? Really?”

And I said, perhaps more casually than I meant to, “Yeah, when you weren’t yelling at me to get out of the kitchen, or correcting the angle at which I sliced a zucchini, I was watching you.”

Which, decoded, meant: Every movement, every reprimand, imprinted. You were the map and I, inevitably, the cartographer of your moods, your rituals, your quiet dominion.

Cleaning is neither a science nor an art, and she seemed to know this instinctively, that it belonged to a separate order altogether, a daily sacrament passed down along maternal lines, a scripture written not in ink but in bleach and steam, closer in nature to childbirth, yes, childbirth, though far more frequent and nearly invisible in its repetition, and while she never offered instruction in any formal sense, rarely lectured or outlined a method, each brisk motion a lesson, each tightened jaw a footnote, and I, standing there at the threshold, neither helper nor intruder, learned it all by watching.

It matters not if you are an empress of old Hollywood or a sybarite swathed in Balenciaga, eventually you find yourself conscripted to the basin, cloth in hand, or if not hand, then at least mind, for even the filthy rich women are not absolved of scrutiny, and domesticity, though outsourced, remains a locus of judgment, a mise en scène in which women are perpetually evaluated, for devotion, even if they slave away for shareholders, for some ineffable metric of virtue, and no, this is not polemic, it is simply the ontology of the feminine as it is lived, and always, always without applause.

By keeping me out of those rooms, by demanding perfection and giving nothing less, my mother preserved something of my innocence, my girlhood. She was also doing that thing many women do: over-cleaning, taking on unnecessary burdens, and spiraling over things no one asked them to handle. There’s no need to create that much domestic work for yourself and then turn yourself into a martyr over it. But I get it, cleaning was one of the few ways she expressed control over her life.

Eventually, my father inserted himself into the conversation.

“SO BENJEEMAN—VOU ARE EHH JEWISH YES? SANDRRRAA ALVAYS LIKED ZE BOAAZZZ FAMILEEE.”

Ben froze, fork hovering mid-air. He blinked slowly.

“Who’s the Boaz family?”

A fair question. Why would he know who the Boaz family was?

“They lived on the corner,” I said. “Bottom of the cul-de-sac. They moved to Boone during my freshman year of high school.”

Turned to my mother. “Who lives there now?”

She shrugged. “Vee don’t know.”

Frowned. “What do you mean you don’t know?”

“No vone knows zer neighbors anymore,” she said, as if quoting some long-held proverb. “Zer is no need for zat. Who cares about zat now?”

Looked at both of them. “What do you two even do for fun?”

My mother answered without hesitation.

“Vee go to ze Costco. And I get my nails done every ozzer week.”

That was it. That was the sum of it. Bulk produce and French manicures.

My father, not to be outdone, added, “SOMETIMES VEE GO TO HARRIS TEETER.”

And my mother, in saying what she said, sealed herself off from some older shape of living, or the idea of it anyway, what we’ve inherited as a sketch of neighborhood, if such a thing can be said to exist anymore, the potlucks, the spare keys left under planters, the flour borrowed and never returned but somehow always available, and whether that was ever real or just something we invented after the fact to feel less unmoored in the present is beside the point, or maybe it is the point, who can say, because nostalgia, yes, nostalgia has this tendency to masquerade as truth, when in fact it’s something else entirely, a collective indulgence, a willing confusion of comfort with clarity, and so we tell ourselves, all of us, that it used to be better, and maybe it did, or maybe it didn’t, but the old neighborhood was vibrant, wasn’t it, or so we say, people waved, fathers fixed things, mothers laughed, and maybe that’s on purpose, maybe we need to remember selectively, the way we pretend the lightbulbs we salvage from the rubble still shine when in truth they’ve long gone cold, and this is the trouble with memory, or storytelling, which may be the same thing, they are both rearrangements pretending to be restorations, I remember the things that pierced me, not the things that healed, I remember her Indian burning me for burning the onions, I rarely recall the way she folded my shirts without complaint, I really remember my father’s voice when it whipped the hallway, but I often forget his silence when he stood in the cold filling the tank because he didn’t want me to, and what’s worse is I know this, I know the inventory is wrong, and yet I keep it anyway, I keep writing not to preserve anything but to bury it under prettier lies, and now I sit across from them, these people who contain parts of me I never asked for, and I ask them, stupidly, naively, what does joy look like to you now, and they answer with strip malls and shellac, and I nod, or maybe I don’t, maybe I just sit there, because what would be the point of answering back, what would be the point of telling them, no, that’s not it, joy was never that.

And so, at this juncture, I find myself asking, what’s the use of clinging to the ghosts of your past? Why bother? Grow up, move forward. What are you really doing, holding on to it for posterity? Perhaps it’s for others, perhaps it’s for some imagined future audience. But why bother? Why is much of my memory a black box? Why was I mute? Peurile? Why can I not access certain memories? Is it not a quiet surrender to perpetuate those memories, those half-forgotten stories? It sounds almost defeatist, doesn’t it? But maybe the telling of it all is escape. Still, when you get down to it, the only true escape, the only final out, is death. And for God’s sake, don’t scramble toward it; it’s pathetic, really. You may have only thirty thousand days, if you’re lucky enough to possess the longevity of some mythical Blue Zone resident. But to end it yourself—how terribly unoriginal, how futile. You’ll die regardless. People will grieve, yes, but they’ll mourn for a moment, then go back to their own absurd routines. I don’t know much about suicide because I’ve never committed it before, but I do know that shooting yourself is over dramatic, and hanging yourself is for poor people. If you do insist on killing yourself, then overdosing is the most dignified route, or carbon monoxide poisoning.

“Since I’m financially emancipated,” I said, turning to my parents, “why not try ecstasy, or take a flight somewhere, somewhere far? Bora Bora, maybe. You’re sitting on a heap of money, after all, and you’re not passing any of it on generationally.”

“But vee hate flying,” my mother replied.

“So how do you travel?” Ben asked, intrigued.

“VEE DRRIIIIVE,” my father said, clearing his throat. “AND VEE LIKE CUHROOOSES.”

“What kind of cruises?” Ben pressed, leaning in.

“CARNEEVAAHL MOSTLY. ROYAL CAREEBEAN TOO BUT MOSTLY CARNEEVAL,” my father admitted. And there, across Ben’s face, I saw it, an expression, imperceptible to my parents, but there nonetheless. Not a hint of Princess, not Norwegian, let alone some semi-refined Viking River affair. Just Carnival. I know that Ben pictured folks in matching neon shirts emblazoned in tie-dye “Family Vacation,” waddling in flip-flops toward the seafood buffet, heaping shrimp towers, voices loud with tales of side hustles and how they’d “put their people on.” I winced. Why? It was silly, this reflexive class anxiety. Everyone at that table had lived better than nearly anyone in human history.

By this point, my mother had brought out the Cornish hens, stuffed tight with freekeh and pine nuts and lamb, rich with spice and that faintly gamey sweetness that lamb always carries. She’d made this before, many times, and I’d argue it was one of her best dishes, maybe the best. She laid them on the mahogany table as if setting down some ceremonial object. With loving hands, she began to carve, the blade catching on crisped skin and soft grain, releasing a small puff of steam.

She turned to Ben and said, brightly, “I got so many Cornish hens because zese vurr esssmall. Even for Cornish hens. Zey are organeec. Zat is basically ze same zing as kosher, right? I made sure zere is no dairy eizzer, because I know zat is not allowed.”

Ben shook his head, gently but firmly. “No, it’s not,” he said. “Organic isn’t kosher. Thank you for the food, Mrs. Soliman, but I don’t eat non-kosher meat.”

“Call me Gigi,” my mother insisted, with a sense of hospitality and pleading. “Just call me Gigi.”

“Is this your second, third, or fifth attempt at becoming baal teshuva?” I asked him, my tone light but unmistakably edged. I was thinking of all the rules Ben liked to resurrect when it suited him— rules about food, and sex, and Sabbath candles—and how often they were followed by the inevitable backslide. I remembered the stranger meals and the even stranger women. There was always a cycle.

Ben ignored me, as he often did when it was more convenient to pretend I wasn’t there. He turned back to my mother with the saccharine courtesy he wielded like a butter knife. “Gigi, thank you so much for this meal. You’re a treat and a half. It’s just that I don’t eat non-kosher meat, and Sandra and I actually have plans tonight in Raleigh, dinner plans, and I don’t want to be too full. I’ll just keep eating your delicious salad.”

“It’s okay mama, nothing here is kosher. Not the hen, not the salad, not the cutlery. But it all tastes great. People love cherry picking though.”

My mother was clearly crestfallen because food was one of the biggest ways she showed her love. Furthermore, my parents had always hated waste, but couldn’t help themselves from producing it. I remembered one time, as a kid, when I left some meat on a shawarma wing and they dug it out of the trash and made me eat the rest, down to the bone. Food was never just food in our house.

And here was Ben, suddenly observant again, using kashrut as a weapon depending on the occasion. Nothing in this meal was kosher. Not the birds, not the lamb, and not the salad, where ricotta lay and where shrazim may have lurked. But in the world Ben came from, the retard bongo shul, rainbow tallis crowd, meat was worse. Treyf had weight. Dairy and pareve could slide.

I don’t know. My dear, absent friend A, maybe it’s petty, but I found the whole thing incredibly rude. I don’t think my mother ever quite registered the rudeness, not the obvious kind, but that rarified, upper-class discourtesy cloaked in exaggerated politeness, where every courtesy is lined with quiet disdain. His manners were issued, as naturally as breath, from the altitude of his social standing. For class, in the end, is not merely a matter of income, but of cultivated instincts—of how one speaks, pauses, defers, dismisses; of what one believes is owed, and to whom.

Ben then continued from that awkward conversation, but luckily my parents were prudent enough not to tell Ben any mortifying childhood anecdotes, “So, Sandra told me the two of you met through a friend.”

“Yes, my friend Sherry. I vas in Ain Shams for ze medical school, and zen she told me about a man who moved to ze Essstates who also attended Ain Shams back in zee day,” my mother said.

“Oh, and did you two meet up in person?” Ben asked.

“EVENTUALLY,” my father admitted, “VEE SPOKE ON THE PHONE FOR A FEW MONZS ZEN VE VERR ENGAGED FOR ONLY ZREE MONZS. ZEN GOT MARRIED.”

“You guys were long distance?”

“YES I SAW GIGI’S BICTURE IN ZE MAIL AND I LIKED VAT I SAW. ZEN GIGI CAME TO ZE STATES.”

…by the time it was dessert

“Hmm, so when did Sandra last visit Egypt?” Ben asked.

“Ven she vas very leetle.”

“Like how little?”

“Very leetle, a baby. She visited Masr ven she vas a baby.”

“Yes, I spent more time in Israel than where my parents are from,” I admitted solemnly.

And Ben tucked into his tiramisu, and there was a sense of guilt on my end because I could tell that he bristled. He most certainly bristled because I lied by omission, a pathological omission, really. I made it seem like I had been to Egypt recently, but the truth is I never really went to Egypt, and certainly not recently, and the only time I went Masr was when I was baby. I’ve never been to Egypt at all.

I suspect the omission had less to do with dishonesty than with a quietly rooted shame. My parents, despite their financial stability, disliked flying. They had no appetite for the disorientation of transit, the intrusion of itineraries, the suspended anonymity of airports. Furthermore, they were extremely cheap. Flying during my adolescence, to me at least, wasn’t just about a mode of transport because it represented a world beyond the familiar. My parents had the means to travel, to engage more fully with the world, but for reasons that seemed to be rooted in running away, they chose not to. My omission was a way to smooth over the discrepancy between what my family could do and how they chose to live.

I shouldn’t have carried that shame for so long. There is, after all, a rare and uncorrupted beauty in witnessing someone encounter the world for the first time. It’s really easy to forget that. On a flight to El Salvador, it came to me in the shape of a young man, short, broad-shouldered, Latino guy wearing a brown Coogi hoodie with frayed cuffs and a black Kangol cap pulled low, speaking into a cracked Samsung, the screen spidered but functional, he held his passport delicately, with both hands.

“I’ve never done this before,” he said, three times, to no one in particular, maybe to the person on the other end of the call, maybe to himself, and he didn’t clarify what this was, but I suspected, and then we passed through security, and we ended up at the same gate in terminal four, and eventually on the same plane, he in seat 14A, I in 16C, and when the plane lifted off the tarmac, I glanced forward and saw him lean slightly toward the window, his face turned not with awe, exactly, but with the attention you give to something you know you’ll need to remember. And that was when I understood, or remembered, that it was his first flight. He was encountering what the rest of us had stopped seeing, and I thought then that people have children for selfish reasons, for mistaken ones, for reasons they don’t understand until long after the fact, but one of the few quiet compensations, the almost unspoken gifts of it, is that you get to see the world refracted through someone else’s first time.

Awww, so cheesy.

So yes, they were running from Masr, and Masr was indeed their Mitzrayim, and I remember this with absurd clarity, one afternoon after church in Raleigh, we were at Uncle Medhat and Tant Yva’s, probably our closest family friends and if they were family friends, they were family, full stop, I was fifteen and Medhat with his unibrow and snaggle teeth and wide, satisfied belly laugh, eating raclette and pouring glasses for the French expats he always seemed to attract like lint, he and Yva having lived in Quebec for a few years before immigrating to North Carolina, engineers both, and unabashed Francophiles, especially Yva, who offered my mother a slice of clafoutis with such grace that my mother could only say, “Merci,” and of course that’s the thing, Third World mothers, especially Arabized ones who consider themselves cultured, they have a thing for saying “Merci” while drinking bitter black coffee and accepting continental desserts, they believe it lends them an air of composure, of worldliness, and so Medhat, ever the host, turned to his guests and said, smiling, that he admired Marie Le Pen, he said she was doing great things for France, and he meant it, he wasn’t joking, and maybe that’s where the trouble began, because he wasn’t being provocative or contrarian, he was being sincere, he was simply a Copt who feared Muslims and couldn’t stomach the idea of France becoming a second Cairo, Eurabia and all that, and even my father, shared those sentiments quietly and in private, because he knew you weren’t supposed to say that in front of the French, not these kinds of French anyway, the liberal ones, the frogs with soft scarves and degrees in anthropology and too much fashionable sympathy for the banlieue, and the room tightened when one of them said, “She’s dangerous,” and another, “She’s racist,” and Medhat just looked puzzled, maybe even a little betrayed, and it was hilarious that he was scandalizing these insufferable expats, and then Yva, always quick on her feet, pivoted and said we should all go to Egypt together, and Medhat, regaining his confidence, turned to my parents and said in Arabic, “Safi, she needs to know her land, her history, she should see the pyramids,” and listed everyone who should come: me, my parents, Yva, his boys, him, all of us as one big family, like it was the easiest thing in the world to merely visit the place you spent decades trying to escape, and my father, in Masri, said he’d think about it, and Medhat, full of conviction, in Masri, said, “My brother, she is Egyptian,” and my father, louder now, switched to English and said, “SHE IS AMEERREECAHHN,” and the frogs all looked up, the room briefly silenced by the clash of pride and denial, and me, I wanted to go, I did, even if it was just to be around the Metrys a little longer, to see the pyramids through their eyes, to understand something of who they were before they became who they are, but we never did go, and the truth is, my parents, like the Metrys, did everything they could to get out, definitely not as refugees but not comfortably either, and they didn’t like to talk about the bureaucratic games, the humiliations, the quotas or abductions or white slave trade, and I know, I know they fled and that I inherited that, the need to run, to evacuate the place I grew up in, stuck in between an American military base and a fourth rate golf course, to abandon what doesn’t suit, which is why I’ve always wanted to drop my last and middle name, which is my father’s name, and take someone else’s last name, someone permanent, ideally Ashkenazi, someone I could vanish into, ride the pink rocket, become his, because that is what I do, I disappear, I evacuate, just as my family did, and furthermore, I would deport any brown parent who throws a sandal or worse at their kid, and I do not want to carry that legacy forward, not in blood and not in name.

My dearest former friend, A, let’s not pretend I haven’t thought about it. I’ve thought about it too much. I could write a whole book, a searing, self-immolating book, merely for the satisfaction of saying it plainly: my parents beat the shit out of me for silly things. They dropped me off in parking lots and on street corners like defective merchandise. They threatened to disfigure me, my face, my actual face, if I dared iron a shirt incorrectly. Acrylic shirts, mind you. And jeans. Who irons jeans? Who demands pressed denim with the threat of a hot iron waved like a branding rod millimeters from the skin? And when I brought it up? When I confronted them as an adult, who just wanted acknowledgement, not even a sorry?

“Hey, do you remember when?…”

They blinked. They smiled. They denied. “Gaslighting”—I hate the word. But that’s what it was, wasn’t it? And here’s the part that eats away at me in the shower, in the subway, in line at the bank: none of this was exceptional. This was parenting, standard-issue, in the great proud tradition of what passes for family among the brown and broken. This was “discipline” imported from nations so riddled with cousin-marriage and malnutrition that you’re lucky if your baby is born with a full set of chromosomes and no taste for violence.

Then, stupid brown kids turn around and joke that “white kids weren’t beaten enough.”

No. No, you idiotic traitor to logic. It’s not that middle class white kids weren’t beaten enough. It’s that you were beaten at all. Your parents should have been sterilized at customs. Deported with a fruit basket and a thank-you note. Those middle class white families you mock? The ones with bedtime stories and family therapists and consequences instead of lashes? They brought you plumbing. Infrastructure. Financial markets. They were doing it right. Or at least better.

I can’t quite remember how we arrived at that point in the conversation. I was still internally recoiling from the earlier disclosure about my lack of exposure to Egypt. But somehow, my father began telling Ben about where he and my mother had come from. He expressed an admiration for the Jews, praising their tenacity, and began drawing parallels. First, he said, the Muslims had turned on the “Saturday people,” el Yehud, driving them out almost entirely. Then came the “Sunday people,” el Messihiyyin, who were similarly targeted. Yet he conveniently omitted complicated episodes like the Lavon Affair and the Suez Crisis along with the previously explained nascent Islamism. All of this made me feel an urge to recount to Ben the digital spaces I once lurked on, where self-styled theorists aligned with the Muslim Brotherhood constructed baroque conspiracies in which Pope Tawadros emerged as a kind of regional George Soros, allegedly counting ghennae in backrooms and rubbing his hands with al-Sisi, who, in their telling, was not only complicit but also a crypto-Jew. Not to mention the comments under any post regarding Naguib Sawiris. But I didn’t point this out because why would I? What a lot of people don’t realize is that when a significant number of Copts left Egypt, especially during the Nasser era, they arrived in the U.S. and became socially conservative Blue Dog Democrats who admired Bill Clinton and steered clear of blacks, or they became Republicans. Either way, they were at last spared the need to feign rabid hatred for Jews and Israel, or to genuflect before the cross and crescent in the old pantomime of dhimmitude. Many from that wave carried with them a wary dislike of Islam and Muslims. And so, they remained largely indifferent to the demons of pan-Arabism or, in some cases, developed a mild, often private, even occasionally admiring regard for the Jews, not quite zogging out with the fervor of Maronites or Kataeb phalangists, but something quieter, more Coptic: reserved and less fruity (even the cedar on phalangist flag looks like a butt plug). After all, the Jews, too, had stood their ground against the very forces these emigrés had fled. That Israel might bomb churches in Gaza was, to them, incidental, not ideal, but not disqualifying. After all, Israel wasn’t exactly championing Armenia either, and no one expects Tel Aviv to be a stronghold of Oriental Orthodoxy. People reach for the simplest moral math available: the enemy of my enemy is, if not my friend, then at least a tolerable neighbor. It is a very human and sad and funny thing to witness.

I don’t know what Ben made of it. He remained quiet, not out of agreement or opposition, but because he was unsure of the terms, unsure of what role he had been given in the exchange, unsure of what, if anything, he was supposed to carry away from it. I didn’t ask him, later or at any other time. I didn’t want to know. And I’m reluctant even now to put this down, my dearest former friend, A, to record it, because the entire category into which it would be filed repels me. Immigrant literature. Not literature by immigrants, which is simply literature, but the curated, overburdened, politically convenient section in most bookstores where the stories follow a familiar emotional trajectory, where suffering is ornamental, and resolution is structured for maximum accessibility. I do not connect with those stories. I do not trust them. Most are written with a deliberate sentimentality by individuals who have not been excluded but elevated, who speak of exile while enjoying appointments, fellowships, access. They use their platforms to admonish the societies that absorbed them, to advertise their disenchantment with wan profiles and celebrated essays.

It makes me want to remigrate migrants, and colonize my bookshelf, and I know that if I ever do publish anything, especially something epistolary, it will inevitably be placed on an “immigrant literature” shelf, alongside the works of, say, a bisexual Vietnamese twink or someone equally fashionable in the eyes of a certain readership.

Look all I’m saying is, if I write about my life, about “My Third World background,” it will get lumped in with the books where women almost hybristophilically wax poetic about “My rapist.”

Yes, “my rapist”— it’s never “the man who raped me.” There was always something faintly absurd, even pitiable, about the phrase “my rapist,” a formulation that felt too intimate, too domesticated, as if one were referring to a dentist, an ex-boyfriend, or some recurring antagonist from the high school cafeteria. “My rapist”: as though he were assigned at birth, a member of one’s inner circle, rather than a man, yes, a man who raped me, whose violence occurred once, unmistakably, and not as an ongoing role in a private psychodrama. The possessive shrinks the crime to a character in your narrative, a grim but familiar presence, rather than the jarring moral rupture it was. Worse, it centers him lamely. The phrase, flattened by the patter of therapy talk and meme-speak. My this, my that, my trauma pet turns the crime into a punchline. By contrast, “the man who raped me” places the act at the forefront, where it belongs. It names him as a perpetrator, a human being who committed a violation. There’s a moral clarity in the definite article. “My rapist” implies a closeness you didn’t choose, a possession you can’t return. “The man who raped me” is, if nothing else, an exorcism.

Yeah, sue me, I don’t want to be placed on the same bookshelf as the “my rapist” and “decolonize your bookshelf” and “girlhood” crowd.

Forgive the digression, my dearest former friend, A. The lunch was drawing to a merciful close. Ben had receded into the dining room with my father, discussing who knows what, while I stood with my mother in the kitchen, the dishes clattering like punctuation to her disapproval. “Sandura,” she chided, “it vas nice meeting vuyyyur boyfriend, bas vou need to eesstop viz ze boyfriend esstuff and get married. Vy is he not married to vou? It’s a broblem.” And I tried, futilely, to explain, how dating in America is stretched like taffy, indulged like adolescence, and proposals arrive only after long, murky cohabitations. She knew, of course, had read the room of American modernity, had watched enough, but stubbornness made her cling to the clarity of old logic. “If a man is not solving your problems,” she said in Arabic, “then he is the problem.” Brutal. Beautiful. Undeniable. In its way, it distilled her entire worldview: pragmatic, unsentimental, and sharper than any of us wanted to admit. And it’s rubbed off. I see now that anything I’ve pursued purely out of romance has collapsed spectacularly. Have you ever looked at an extremely elegant woman and thought to yourself, “Wow, her medicine cabinet must be crazy?” Or met a woman and thought she elevates vapidity to the ultimate art form? That’s part of why I’m so taken with the idea of the Bimbo Übermensch, though I’m too serious to be a bimbo and too conflicted to be an Übermensch. My mother was neither, and both. She was the first to warn me off Egyptian men—“Vou vood clash viz zem”—and the first to teach me that most men are losers, and that “losers” was not an insult but a category: expansive, damning, and largely accurate. Her advice was often mean, but not always wrong. She was my first and most enduring hypergamous role model.

Let this be a quiet word to any bright-eyed new parents: if you are overly critical of your daughter, if you withhold warmth, and cannot bear to love her without condition, she will, in time, seek affection in dark, carnivorous places. If you are stingy emotionally or financially, and refer to her, half-joking, as ugly or dim, while denying her the modest means to soften her reflection in the mirror, then do not be surprised when she cleaves to the first man who offers her security.

I remember when my dad told me, back when I was a teenager, that I needed to do well in school because I wasn’t exactly American pie or Christie Brinkley, that I wasn’t good-looking, that I looked like a capuchin monkey. He told me the beauty of America is that a woman can be a girl boss if she’s a teacher’s pet, goes to grad school, maybe does a doctorate. And yes, compared to the old country, that’s true. You can be an unattractive woman and not have to rely on the tutelage of a man who’ll eventually scorn you. Both of my parents agreed that it’s important to always have a job.

But I also thought, what a load of crock. We see how the extremely attractive fare every day. And the richest women in the world? Not the most attractive, but most either inherited their wealth or earned it on their backs helping a man build their career. Being a whore or marrying well, which is basically being a whore with one long-term client, or sliding out of the right snatch is still a woman’s best bet at serious money. No fake email job, sinecure in finance, or high-status nonprofit gig is going to change that. Consider the roll call: Alice Walton, Françoise Bettencourt, Julia Koch, Savitri Jindal, Melinda Gates, Gina Rinehart. In their manicured hands rests the fiscal fate of dynasties. I admire them, unironically. In a country where class mobility has the odds of a coin lost in a couch cushion, I offer a standing ovation to Lauren Sanchez. Spare me the feminist or manosphere laments about “spiritual poverty.” Gold diggers are the most honorable of parvenus.

Besides, most women narrate their lives in the third person anyway. Even their fiercest attempts to decenter men, every girlhood thing, still revolves around them. So if men must be the axis, let them at least be the paycheck.

And since, as I said earlier, America in the twentieth century was, unmistakably, a Jewish country, and the smartest thing, the most adaptive, survival-of-the-fittest move a girl could make was to convert. To Judaism, of course. Especially if she liked the men. And especially if she wanted one to marry her, which, let’s be honest, is no small feat. Back then it was all about the blonde shiksa. The ultimate conquest, the Aryan get. To shtup Hitler’s fantasy and bring her back to Teaneck for Friday night dinner. But now? It’s the Shanghai siren. The Seoul seductress. The manicured, whip-smart, daddy’s-favorite Asian girl who double-majors in Econ and violin. Asian pussy is the new frontier. Or rather, it was. Because even that, even that, has become cliché. No, the real taboo, the white whale of Jewish male longing in this strange, over-therapized twenty-first century is this: the high-maintenance Arab woman. That’s right. She’s proud. She’s loud. She crosses the line, with conviction, like Ruth the Moabite or Batya scooping Moses from the Nile.

There are, it seems, two kinds of intellectual Jewish men: those who are drawn to the Far East, and those who are fascinated by the Middle East. Those who learn Chinese and those who learn Arabic. My mother, of course, understood this division perfectly, though she lacked the language to describe it. Now, whether America can still be called a Jew-ish country in the twenty-first century is, I suppose, an open question, one whose answer will be determined by a generation not yet born. Most American liberal Jews, it seems, are little more than Americans of Ashkenazi descent increasingly absorbed into the American Secular Blob. Best religion ever. If anything substantial endures, it will likely be the Haredim. The future, if it has a map, seems to indicate a world presided over by a Judeo-hapa mischling Brahmin metropolitan overclass, with a broad and increasingly disenfranchised underclass, Scots-Irish-Wanglo-Wigger-Mulatto-Mestizo helots. And as for the Israel-Palestine situation, well, that’s a knot too tight for even the sharpest minds to untangle, and I can’t say who will own the media, though I suspect it won’t be me or anyone I know. That’s the Chinese’s problem.

My hypergamy is so advanced it bleeds into bigotry. People ask, Why do you know so much about Zoroastrians in India? Assyrians and Chaldeans? Hokkiens and Cantonese? Igbo? Gujarati and Sindhi diaspora? Why did you convert to Judaism, you psycho? Why are you pushing me to marry an Ismaili guy I found on Hinge?

The answer is simple: I’m a hypergamous bigot, a cultured globalist. It’s important to educate yourself. First, adopt the camouflage: learn to pronounce surnames develop an almost erotic reverence for dinner etiquette, dietary laws, or Lebanese-Armenian pastry hierarchies. Memorize the caste-clan cocktails. Know your Maronites from your Melkites, your Parsis from your Patels, and feign nostalgic affection for an ancestor who definitely never fled Aleppo with a gold coin sewn into their hem. Lurk at fundraisers, art auctions, and charity balls like a sentient endowment fund in vintage YSL; say things like “my godfather’s family used to do textiles in Rangoon” with a faraway smile. Date strategically: begin with the marginally disowned cousin or the divorced heir with emotional eczema, then maneuver your way toward the quiet sibling with a trust fund and asthma. Ultimately, you must suggest that marrying you is not just romantic, it’s good portfolio diversification.

My mother kept harping on me to get Ben to marry me, which was irritating because, really, you can’t make a man marry you unless you have a shotgun, and we didn’t. Plus, I had no intention of forcing anyone into that. She wrapped a Cornish hen in tinfoil for me, since Ben had none, and I said I’d eat it later. As she spoke, I caught sight of yet another Thomas Kinkade print on the kitchen wall, next to an icon of St. George, and I thought about America again. The glossy packaging and kitsch of it— hiding debts, bankruptcies, affairs, lawsuits, licensing wars, addiction, and public urination.I thought about Kinkade’s rot beneath his paintings and Ben’s rot beneath his manners. We bid adieu, and then Ben ordered an Uber which took twenty minutes to get to us, and it was a silent car ride. I think he hated meeting my parents and I think he was disgusted by me. We passed by a golden doodle, and I said, “Aww look how cute that puppy is” and then he averted his gaze. Men hate small dogs, and yes while small dogs are shivering and sniveling, the real reason men hate small dogs is because they’re weak and yappy, like women, but they can’t fuck them. You can fuck women even if you hate them. You can’t punish a dog with your cock. That would be gross, and you could go to prison for that. Men love to punish women with their cocks. Men want to be frustrated with you and taunted by you as they impale you with their cocks. Somewhere along the way, Ben told me that he’d once wondered what it would be like to sleep with both me and my mother. I told him that was disgusting, which it was. But it was also, in some bizarre way, pleasing. They say women become their mothers. They, meaning any woman with a shred of sense, also say that men will sleep with anyone who makes them feel like someone. That includes women they don’t like, women they don’t respect, women they find ugly, even repulsive. Especially them. Power, or rather, the unrelenting desire for admiration. All men crave it the way all women want adoration.

Ben and I finally found ourselves in Raleigh, at Brewery Bhavana, a place that felt more like a bookstore than a restaurant, where dim sum meets craft beer. And Ben, looking at my foil-wrapped Cornish hen could not disguise his disgust, for it was not refrigerated and had no place here. We sat at a table with some lady exec from the Bay Area, someone who knew Ben back from his Duke days and his life in San Francisco, and we were there to eat dumplings, though I would have rather been anywhere else. Ben, with his gaze fixed on the hen, shook his head, and while the lady exec left briefly to retrieve something from her car rental, I decided to deal with the matter of the hen myself. I went to the restroom, intending to discard it, but then I couldn't bring myself to do it, and so, standing over the sink, I began to eat it, alone in that restroom, the orange juice from the meat trickling down my chin as I chewed. It was better than any dumplings, my mother’s cooking. I couldn’t help it. Eventually, I tossed what remained and washed my face.

Disclaimer:
None of this is true, or maybe all of it is. It doesn’t really matter. If you’ve read this far, something’s wrong with you, and you should become a paid sub. These are rough drafts, serialized chapters.

Addendum:
Writing it all this shit down is a kind of exit ramp. The page is a kill switch. This whole bimbo-ubermensch avatar. I will bury her. Kill the e-girl! If my mother were born into this age, she would’ve been swallowed whole by the internet: filtered, flattened, hashtagged to death. Being a “girl” on the intenet pushing thirty is like being a scene queen haunting the back pages of FetLife or Feeld. It’s haram.

Yet another addendum: Unless you’re wiring me seven figures, I don’t need your feedback. Like, share, and subscribe (gross, I can’t believe I said that)!