“Comb you hair. Thank Allah. Find your brother. Your skirt should not be above your knees.” These are Nevene’s mother’s ritual commands before every Saturday lunch, still ringing in her ears as her family makes its way, member by member, into our car for the journey to her great grandmother’s apartment.

Sitting in the back of the 1962 Cadillac, Nevene shifts around in her seat, trying to catch a drift of the AC’s cool air in the swamp of stale June heat. As the cracked leather of the backseat singes her bare thighs, her ten year old brother releases a shrill scream and a flailing of his arms the second my shifting brings me too close to his territory. Nobody stirs up front, as Malik’s commonly short-fused fit fails to attract either of our parents’ attention. Her mother and father stare ahead silently, their vision fixed on the same young girl selling bottled waters in the tightly woven lanes of Cairo traffic, yet their thoughts, she is quite certain, are completely estranged from one another.

The family car is a divided landmine, as the drive to the weekly Saturday lunch is a silent, individual journey. Nevene’s thoughts turn restlessly through Saturday lunches past, through the toothy smiles and arrangement of jewel-tone attire, through the overcooked zucchini held in chipped china dishes falling off the cusp of regality, as the family engages in light conversation in low voices to the sound of restless fingers on the dashboard. She hears the noon time call to prayer out the window, it’s deep melody moving through her like the waves of heat that force their way through the dense white sky burying heavy pollution. She closes her eyes, and prays with each elongated note that today’s kisses and questions will end without incident, and their departure will arrive swiftly. 

Maghda arrives promptly to Saturday lunch at 1:34 pm. With white wine, squirming young ones, and plates of fresh gullash attached to her arm, Maghda enters the kitchen, extending distracted hugs to her siblings and her mother, the lunch’s host, and acknowledging glances to the staff. Shadia lifts her eye from dicing cucumbers for a table of fifteen and is met by a fragile gaze that has routinely addressed her each Saturday afternoon.  Like most women in this home, Maghda holds a well-known position, somewhere between loyalty to domestic duties and loyalty to her appropriately feminine image that is as transparent as the mosquito nets in the summer home.

Maghda quickly slips her shawl into the dark, rough palms of her mother’s maid behind her as she slips into the role of kitchen captain, distracting herself with the ceremonial bustle of Saturday lunch. The arresting click of her heels on the cold tile floor turn the heads of valiant cooks working on the counter beside Shadia, a sound foreign to the ears of a staff whose soles have been worn into silence. Maghda catches the flash of her pearls in the tarnished frying pans hanging above the stove as she paces through the kitchen, inspecting the quantity of molokheya and the size of the parsley clovers in the salad.

Shadia’s back hunches over as she recognizes Maghda’s scent of orange blossoms caught with cigarette smoke and sees her shadow hovering over her cooking, calling into question the quality of craft. Sweat gathers on Shadia’s palms as she feels Maghda’s presence next to her, yet Shadia tries to remind myself that wealth is not strength. Maghda’s fair skin and green eyes, her strings of pearls and seasonal drivers are not strength. Maghda has never been trapped under the cold light of an insulated kitchen, and she has never been reduced to the shadow of her complexion, Shadia repeats to herself. Yet Shadia’s dark, rough palms continue to sweat anyway.

Great Grandmother sits on the edge of her bed holding her fragile hands, heavy with Egyptian emeralds and years of overwhelming hospitality. She watches patiently as her maid diligently pulls untouched Dolce and Gabbana suits from the back of her closet into the hands of her nurse. Great Grandmother shakes her head softly each time her nurse, with encouragement and tired eyes, presents a new suit to her, only to reach for the next option and try again. The factory line of Saturday lunch attire makes another round: maid to nurse, rejection to closet. 

Great Grandmother’s room is flooded with light reflected off of the Nile’s water and with the potent scent of yellow rose petals and aged perfume. She listens to the controlled chaos of Saturday lunch from behind her closed door, as her children and grandchildren begin to arrive, and the staff begins to set the table for twelve. She hears Arabic from the kitchen and English from the living room, as the oddly sad tick of her clock informs her that it is 1:52 pm. Redirecting her attention to her nurse, she agrees to wear the navy pinstripe dress currently being presented, despite being more interested in the beige suit she just dismissed.

Sharif enters the gaudy living room, measuring each of the steps that he makes. Sitting on the edge of a floral embroidered seat, Sharif glows with uncertainty in the home that, for the past six years, he has been lovingly conditioned to understand as his own. He rolls his foreign tongue around in his mouth, searching for the sounds that he needs to interact with those laughing on the couch across from him. Sharif hesitates before reciting a meticulously formulated statement, as he tells himself: Egypt, not Iran. Arabic, not Farsi. Their home, not mine. He takes up less space than the other men, his knees pressed together in a tight embrace and his back slightly hunched over.

He knows that he cannot pull off the bravado of the fellow husbands, brothers, and uncles around him, as he is hesitant to spread his legs and speak with the guttural tones of Arabic that command a room’s attention. He could never send business emails or excuse himself to take a call from the London office as the other men do, while his wife details their daughter’s school performance to her sisters. He checks his watch methodically to distract himself from the pervasive discomfort, and to keep track of the minutes until it is time to relocate to the Saturday lunch table. His watch informs him that it is 2:43 pm, leaving only seventeen minutes until he can escape the unease of his living room seat and foster a new sense of displacement in his dining room seat.

At 3 pm, Saturday lunch begins. The silverware has been shined, the napkins ironed, and the chairs polished. The table is bathed in sunlight, and a fusion of dishes- roast beef and baba ganoush, pasta and molokheya- cover its expanse as trophies of the West and the Middle East. Cousins, aunts, and brothers arrive into the room’s inviting aroma and holy arrangement. With everyone seated, the meal begins.

Upon their arrival, Nevene is escorted to the table in a frenzy of hugs, triple kisses, and empty phrases of affection. “You’ve grown so much!” “Habibti, what a beautiful girl you will be!” Nevene finds herself pulling out a seat at the dining room table between her mother’s second cousin and a jittery young boy to whom she cannot figure out her relation. She tugs at her deep violet dress as she sits down, unsure of how to let it rest comfortably over her legs. Mother asked her to change at least three times, never content with the black pants and Radiohead t-shirt she insisted on wearing. There were no pleading eyes or detailed compromises, as Nevene knew never to question the crystal rules of Saturday lunch. Her mother’s second cousin turned to Nevene with a plate of baba ganoush and an interest in how her 6th grade year was progressing, to which she responded with a reluctant smile and an overwhelming serving of beef stew.

Saturday lunch seems to content its audience. Nevene spots her aunt’s husband, Sharif, across the table, a soft-spoken man who seems receptive to Malik’s monologue describing his latest Lego kit. On his other side sits Nevene’s great grandmother, eating with grace and purpose while avoiding the beaming enthusiasm of her daughter-in-law to her right. Aunt Maghda never seems to sit for more than five minutes, pacing to the kitchen with equal parts anger and self-indulgence, as she demands the staff for something they forgot to lay out. Nevene listens to the multitude of conversations circulating the table, unsure where to find space within their rotation.

Excusing herself to the ladies’ room, she heads to the back guest room for a moment of solitude. The room’s window looks out on the Nile and the Cairo traffic she was nestled in only moments ago. Somewhere in the chain hotels and midday call to prayer, she finds a kind of beauty in Cairo that does not rest in shoeboxes or gala invitations. She hears the bargains for stale bread from a girl not much older than herself in the open market below and the shrill complaints about her aunt’s new manicurist, who will simply never live up to her predecessor, resonating from the dining room.

Closing her eyes, she lets the polluted sunrays and the light reflected through the crystal chandelier wrap her in warmth, although the AC’s cold wind still lurks in the sun’s clutch.