My Mother and the Can Opener

My mother arrived in Beirut a young country girl, barely able to read and write, having never strayed more than a donkey ride from her village. She would remake herself within a short period of time and kept doing so for as long as I could remember. She emerged from one cocoon after another, and each butterfly wanted nothing to do with the caterpillar she’d once been. My father was not well-off, particularly when they were first married, but she spent whatever extra money she had on clothes and, more important, accessories. She could wear the same dress for an entire week and make it look different each day. I inherited none of that talent.

A number of her dresses were markers of my childhood. Instructing my sister on boiling rice while wearing a red dress with small blue lilacs spattered across it as if she had tumbled into a bushel of flowers, yelling at me for trying on her precious pillbox hat in a white high-neck number, a sophisticated cut that highlighted her slim figure. For the slap, she had on her popover purple dress. A few days after my ninth birthday, I stood before the full mirror after a bath, drying my hair, noticing that the towel around my head made me look less boy. I wrapped it like a turban, held it high atop my head. I was an African village woman going to market, a desert maiden visiting the well. Naked before that mirror, I moved one thigh in front of the other and disappeared my penis in flesh not yet fully plump. Mazen accidentally opened the door. Stunned, he didn’t shut it quickly enough. My mother in purple passed by. She rushed in, smote my African-cum-desert-maiden hairdo without a single word, and slapped me hard. In my late fifties, I could still feel my cheek burning.

I idolized her as a child—well, early on I did. She exemplified the word “fabulous.” She used to gesture dramatically with her hands while talking. I used to think that I didn’t need to hear her words because her hands explained everything, that those hands of hers were the last practitioners of a lost Babylonian language. Then her gestures matured, became grander, with more flourish, more panache. They no longer illustrated her narrative, were more about style than a need to be understood. I would get lost trying to reinterpret them.

Francine insisted that women like her should not have children, that we only served as garnish. In her own way, my mother loved her children—loved us with a lofty, magnanimous detachment. She air-kissed us goodnight. If any of us achieved anything of consequence, she’d pat us on the head. My brother Firas at seventeen ran the fastest 400 meter in the school district. He received a pat on the head. I had such high scores on the baccalaureate that a Lebanese organization offered to pay my way through Harvard, a pat on the head.

Most of the clothes she bought for us were neutral, blacks and whites and grays and browns, whereas she preferred bright colors. Wherever we showed up as a family, our subdued hues made her shine. It wasn’t just us. The walls of our home were a dead white, the furniture beige. Even the carpets were muted. Everything in the apartment had a function: to make her appear striking.

I have one remaining photograph of her in my chest of secrets, from the late sixties, the colors tinted an aging orange. Draped around her shoulders is a white cardigan with red piping. She is going for Vogue kitchen elegance on a restricted budget. Her hair is high in the style of the era, an elaborate chignon that required gallons of hairspray; my eyes stung looking at the picture. In front of her, on the Formica kitchen table, mustard yellow, lie a number of kitchen utensils, three bowls, and her newest acquisition at the time, the reason the camera was brought out of its case: an electric can opener. Her hands magically appear from beneath the floating cardigan to direct the viewer’s eyes toward her prize. My mother’s smile is that of a winner.

Her joy wasn’t everlasting, of course. It was a year at most before the electric can opener earned its place at the back of the pantry next to the sealed jars of pickled turnips.

When cans infested Beiruti consciousness, it was about moving up in the world, giving up pesky traditions. My mother desperately wanted to be lifted by the calloused hands of modernity. Nothing spoke to her better then. Look, every single asparagus the same size, not like the idiosyncratic stalks of nature. We were all duly, if briefly, impressed. Canned mushrooms were a particular favorite. The end arrived when in high summer my mother made a compote of canned fruits. I remember looking at the dish before me while smelling the freshly picked peaches atop the sideboard. I wasn’t the only one. My father stared wistfully at the overflowing bowl. Mazen held up pieces of the slimy, syrupy fruit one by one. He curled his upper lip and put a slice of mandarin there as a mustache.

Like her pillbox hat and my brothers’ psychedelic prints, the novelty ran its course, and we returned to picking fruits off trees. Some years later a forgotten can spontaneously exploded, detritus of botulism and string beans covering everything in the pantry.