Wanderlust by Elisabeth Eaves Read Free Book Online

inconvenience, but I was willing to be inconvenienced in exchange for comfort and safety. I thought clothing could protect me the way guardrails prevent falls, or seat belts cut down on death. Problem, solution. But it didn’t work that way. I could drape my body in fabric, but I remained visibly female and foreign. I couldn’t eliminate my height, my light skin and blond hair, or all the little things I took so for granted that I forgot they marked me: the backpack for my books, the natural fabrics, the engineered shoes.
    As it sunk in that the deluge wouldn’t stop, my initial energy dissipated and panic set in. People followed me, sometimes closely and muttering, sometimes at a distance; I became paranoid and wondered if I was followed all the time. We experimented with tactics: We tried grabbing the hands of our male friends, thinking a faux boyfriend might defray it all, but American college boys were not seen as deterrents—indeed, their friendship with foreign girls increased their popularity. We tried fake wedding bands and stories of fake husbands. We tried shaming them: yelling “Hey, what are you doing,” when a hand grazed our behinds. Shouting vented my building anger, but that was all it did. Nothing worked.

    My reactions changed. Like in an Impressionist painting, discrete elements of the barrage came in and out of focus. Sometimes it was a wall of sound, whereas sometimes a comment caught my attention and lodged in my mind, to be mulled over at length and never forgotten. Someone shouted “arousa” from a passing truck; I thought the word meant “bride.” I tried to decipher this; an Egyptian friend explained that the word for “bride” also meant “doll.” I understood that I was a generic object, that the shouts and whispers were sprayed out on anyone of my kind, and yet I couldn’t help but take them personally. This is the trauma inflicted by categorization.
    A foreign woman in a public place wasn’t a person in Cairo. As for other women, I knew only anecdotes. Every now and then a story spread of a groping or a rape on a public bus. Cairo’s shiny new subway included an exclusive women’s car, to help prevent such events. The rich women, like our classmates at AUC, had their ways of coping. They avoided public space. They rode in cars. They hung out on campus, where the gardens and courtyards were enclosed by high walls, or in their sheltered homes in Zamalek or Maadi or Heliopolis, or at the private country clubs where they could run, swim, and dine away from the prying eyes of the fellaheen . They didn’t wear Mormon frocks. On our first day of class I realized yet another way in which my dresses were a mistake. AUC was studded with boys and girls in real designer jeans and sunglasses. The girls wore heels. They hung out on the broad platform in front of the library gossiping about holidays in France; they’d studied Sartre in high school. Mostly they smoked Marlboro Reds, distinguishing them from the hoi polloi outside the gates who smoked Cleopatras. One or two boys, cool enough to get away with it, went fashionably slumming and smoked the people’s cigarette, held between silverringed fingers. I vaguely wished for entrée into their milieu but
sensed I didn’t have the background for it; no year-abroad student was known to have pulled this off.
    I sent the Mormon dresses and the rest of my carefully planned, intentionally drab wardrobe to the back of the closet, for use on nonschool days. This left me with jeans. An American friend took me to the Benetton store in Maadi, where a sweater cost a month’s food. I blended in a little more on campus; this was the best I could hope for. Michelle, to my exasperation, kept wearing her Birkenstocks to school.
    The rich Egyptians could go behind high walls, but outside of campus we foreigners didn’t have access to private places to do the things we thought of as