Like a Mule Bringing Ice Cream to the Sun Read Free Page A

the other to snatch. ‘One dollar seventy-nine,’ he says, ringing up the chocolate – one eye on the till and the other on the suspect.
    The woman takes the change and drops it, all of it, into his box for Palestinian orphans.
    ‘Thank you, honey,’ he smiles. Okay, so maybe he misjudged? But more likely, the only reason she didn’t steal was because she saw him paying attention. She was probably thinking that $3.21 made a good investment if it meant that next time he wouldn’t pay attention. But he’s not that stupid. You don’t take a man uprooted from Jaffa and forced to walk with his family across the desert and expect him to know nothing. No. You can’t fool a man like him. He knows what people are like, which is why his sister ought to listen when he tells her that a chain of falafel stores is what they should be doing. He knows these things. He senses them. They could make it here in San Francisco just like the French restaurants in RussianHill, the Mexican restaurants in the Mission, or the Italian ones all over the place. Why not Palestinian? They could call it Jaffa, or Falafel Meister, or whatever sounded good to Amirah. It would be cheap, good, healthy, and even organic. Low fat, vegan, raw, paleo, whatever people wanted, they could do it – cheap, easy, fresh. And once they made it in San Francisco then Oakland and then to LA and then to New York. To everywhere! But instead, what did Amirah want? Who the hell was gonna buy cakes in this neighbourhood? Expensive cakes, forget it. Cheap cakes maybe. But expensive cakes, no way. Why? Because women in this country were always dieting, and real men, like real men everywhere, didn’t eat cake. Falafel yes, but not cake. Maybe birthday cakes for kids. But even then, think about it, Amirah. One kid would want a train cake, then another the clown cake, and then another’s gonna start crying for a cake in the shape of a ballerina. And who’s gonna make those sort of cakes? Not Amirah. She wanted the fancy ones with honey and pistachios like back home, but the problem was that Americans don’t like those cakes. Too many nuts. Nuts, he kept reminding her. It made no difference that this was the home of peanut butter. Americans had a problem with nuts, and God forbid that one day some kid decided to have an allergic reaction to one of Amirah’s cakes, then what? Then the business would be finished, that’s what. He shakes his head and sighs as he returns to the bucket of flowers where the African still stands.
    ‘For you, honey,’ he says, handing her a second cutting.
    Dawud’s flower, when I brought it to my nose, smelled strongly of his aftershave, and this was what reminded meof Walid. In the early 1950s, before I was sent away to an English boarding school, we lived close to a Lebanese family. None of the family’s children went to my father’s church, but a few attended the church school, one of which was Walid. He had bright green eyes, just like Dawud’s, and whenever it was his turn to lead morning devotionals he would do so with gusto, reading always from the Song of Songs. So of course I fell in love, and because Walid conveniently lived next door it was easy for me to meet him after school without my parents knowing. Once, I accompanied him to the room in his house known as ‘the men’s room’, with low couches and heavy carpets hanging from the walls. The older men eyed the two of us through puffs of cigarette smoke. No doubt they were wondering, as I would later, how it came to be that a young African girl, attached in some manner to one of their young pubescent sons, came to be in their midst listening to the sing-song of their Arabic language and breathing deeply from the mingle of sweet cologne and tobacco. Or perhaps they didn’t care. Perhaps they took it for granted that one of theirs would sow his wild oats with a black girl. In any case, as for Dawud, he ought to understand that for all his sweet talk and pleasing scent, it