Dinarzad's Children: An Anthology of Contemporary Arab American Fiction

The Fifty-Foot Woman

THE FIFTY-FOOT WOMAN
NABEEL ABRAHAM My earliest encounter with a girl my own age occurred in kindergarten. She was playing with a miniature toy house that had caught my fancy. The house consisted of three floors of exposed cross-section. I extended my hand toward the tiny sofa on the second floor. The girl snapped at me. I didn’t understand what she said, but her tone startled me just the same. She then interposed herself between me and the toy house. A test of wills was about to commence when the girl called the teacher, saying something to her. Hobbled by my unfamiliarity with English, I remained mute as I was led by the hand to another play area. When I told my mother about the encounter, she smiled and said the girl probably wanted to play alone. “Girls like to play house,” she said in Arabic. A wisp of a smile came over her face, as if she were letting me in on one of life’s inner secrets. “She’s a girl; girls don’t want to play with boys,” she said in a somewhat somber tone. “You should find something else to play with.” The next day when no one was looking I sidled up to the forbidden structure, and with all the anxiety of an accidental trespasser I poked my hand into the Lilliputian domicile. I moved a table here, wiggled a chair there, relocated the family dog to another floor. I picked up the refrigerator with my index finger and thumb, King Kong–like, lifting it to eye level. There was something magical about the reversal of size and scale. Satisfied, I moved on. In time I found different toys to play with, 367 1KALDAS_pages:1KALDAS pages i-72.qxd 8/3/09 2:36 PM Page 367 learned to speak English as fluently as the other kids, and found playmates , who, with the brief interlude of one tomboy, were all boys. It was just as well, for my conversation with my mother would be the last time she would have anything good to say about girls, especially American girls. In the eighth year of life, my best friend was a kid named John Brady. John was from Tennessee. In Mother’s parlance that made him a hilly-billy. She nevertheless found John tolerable since he seemed muadab (well mannered) and, I would add, well scrubbed. One day out of the blue John invited me to go with him to see The Attack of the Fifty Foot Woman at the Rio Theater. Now, the Rio was a short walk from my house, yet no one from the family had ever been there. Mother had declared the place a hangout for the zut wa nawwar (riff-raff). John’s invitation sent a surge of excitement mixed with panic through me. It’s not that I was a goody-two-shoes, I wasn’t. But there were some things that I just never dared contemplate at eight years of age, like skipping school, smoking a cigarette, or kissing a girl. Sneaking off to the Rio was well beyond the ken of my imagination, right up there with shoplifting and stabbing someone. “Do you wanna go?” John asked. “What’s it about?” “It’s about a woman who becomes fifty-feet tall! . . . Fifty feet of breasts, legs, butt. Fifty feet!” As John giggled at his own words, I heard my mother’s stern voice in the back of my head. At the same time, I tried to picture the body of a fifty-foot woman and felt an amorphous sensation rippling through me. “I don’t know,” I stammered back. “How long will it take?” “There’s a 3:30 show.” I explained to John that my mother wouldn’t approve, but she had gone to downtown Detroit shopping and wouldn’t be back until evening, so I might be able to sneak away. Still, we would have to be careful because the Baker bus coming from downtown stopped right in front of the Rio. Never having been to a movie house other than the makeshift 368
NABEEL ABRAHAM 1KALDAS_pages:1KALDAS pages i-72.qxd 8/3/09 2:36 PM Page 368 Arabic community movie theater on Sunday nights, I didn’t have a clue as to how long a Hollywood feature film would run. “OK, but when will we be out?” my...