Naked in Cairo

Mom is a glimmer during most of this time. Between visits I don't remember much about actually being with her, maybe a smile, a card, the way her laugh stays with me. I think of her when I fall asleep in some foreign city or when we live in the middle of nowhere on ranches, and I hold her close, trying to remember her smell, how her hair feels, how she paints her nails.

My brother Aaron and I try to fit the puzzle pieces together of where we live and where we travel as children. We almost always get the order wrong but can recall all of the luxury. We are never rich. Sometimes in the years that follow there is barely enough cash in our step-mother's purse for my brothers and I to steal, leaving us chronically short of cigarette money. I am told that flying first class throughout my time with Adam and Laura is possible because our dad has a judge let him take control of some money our grandfather puts aside for us. That's what our grandmother says. It feels true whether or not it is. Plus Adam supposedly stiffs American Express for something like a hundred grand. That must have helped keep us in four-star hotels. But the money always runs out since it seems he never has a real job and rarely earns any kind of living. There are businesses sometimes, and ranches, but no jobs, and no steady money. We don't usually do much as a family on our travels.

I am taken out of the first grade in Blanco, Texas and we move to Cairo, Egypt. We are fairly atypical Jewish visitors since we are there before peace is declared and Adam may or may not be selling arms and ammunition to the Palestinians. There are propaganda films in the theaters that show Israelis using napalm to burn innocent Egyptian children to death, and I watch in rapt wonder as skin peels off the victims, bloody, scabbed, on fire. There are blackouts. It is not for a decade that I think to note that I am quivering in the dark, frightened, numb from the terror of being bombed by My Own People.

Lots of times upon hearing how much we move around people ask if my father is in the military. I tell them he is a pirate. Bluebeard in blue jeans. Propelling me down the plank with words that tear me apart at a volume that shatters glass. He is brutishly attractive in a skinny, Alec Baldwin-punching-photographers way. I watch him as he stalks around in the nude, wondering what it would feel like to touch his dick. Instead of doing that I wait until I am spending the night with an Egyptian man and his family, a guy my Dad has befriended. I am six. The man sleeps alone, without his wife, and asks me if I want to sleep in his bed with him. I reach into his pants and hold his penis, its warmth sending a strange sort of shock into my fingertips. It is all my idea. He is going along with it but clearly confused. I start to cry and ask to go home.