Keti Shea: From the Land of Pharaohs
The girl knew the club’s true treasures were the lizards, those rapturous beasts that scrabbled the walls, and the honey-colored men who waved them away. The grownups would say it was the azure ocean they never swam in, the brighter-than-blue Floridian sun they shielded their skin from, the lunchtime spread of rippling foods they didn’t eat: spinach molds, tomato aspic, Welsh rarebit. Mostly, the grownups drank iced coffees clouded with cream and read in the shade. At lunch the girl ate a papaya split in half or fish on a bed of lemon. Lunch was an excuse for dessert, and there were endless choices. Perfect scoops of ice cream or coconut cake the color of fresh snow. The girl was old enough to understand that food was either heavy with calories or light with restriction. She saw how the ladies with red smudges for lips picked at salads, which they pulverized into compost with a machine that sat at the salad station. For now the girl was young enough for sugar, but she knew that wouldn’t last.
“They’re all Egyptian,” the girl’s grandmother said one day at lunch, her face alive with amusement, as she watched the girl watching the uniformed waiters. As if a single word—Egyptian—could explain the entire history of the waiters, those silent shadows who served the ladies browned from tennis, the men browned from golf, the towheaded children trailing foreign au pairs. The girl knew the Egyptians required many words to describe them, not just one; no single word could describe them. She watched people over the edges of her books, so she knew many things, like how freely the Egyptians smiled at her when they caught her looking.
Each afternoon the girl swam laps in the club’s crown jewel, an Olympic-sized saltwater pool, her thin arms slicing water, her feet spitting wake. Afterwards she licked salt from her arm and sucked brine from the ends of her hair. “Come swim with us,” the other girls her age catcalled from the pool. “In a minute,” the girl said as she stood and walked underneath buttery awnings that shaded cabanas, as she heard the girls’ laughter behind her, biting her back. Even here, or was it especially here, she wasn’t wanted. At the club she tried to pass as a girl who belonged, a performance that always fell short. The other girls’ rejection stung like salt in an open wound.
The girl hid in a cabana away from everyone, away from the other girls with their flashy suits and lightning eyes, and she daydreamed about the Egyptians returning to colorful apartments at the day’s end, apartments where songbirds warbled music from cages. The Egyptians were performers too, straddling two worlds with their quiet eyes. They must come from a world of color and life, a world apart from the club. Having peeled off their starched uniforms, the Egyptians, the girl imagined, smiled and danced, and everything they touched crackled with light. At the club the Egyptians were everywhere and nowhere, gliding without sound, whisking glasses and dirty forks and damp bathing suits. Before the girl even thought to leave the pool, they had left her a fresh towel, warm from the dryer, beside the steps. When she lay on the beach under the sun, they hot-stepped over sand to bring her bone-cold water with fruit floating in it, and the girl, an orange slice against her tongue, realized her thirst only after the glass was offered. One Egyptian, the strongest one, carried blue canvas beach chairs and yellow umbrellas to the sand each morning, then tucked them all away at the end of the day. He unfurled the girl’s umbrella each morning and positioned her chair under its shade. He smiled at her where she stood clutching her book, and the white of his teeth rivaled the sand.
“My dear,” he said. Or maybe he said nothing.
There was only one club member whose given skin was darker than skim milk: the Domino Sugar Man. He was said to be Dominican, or Cuban. Wealth, the girl understood, could sometimes supersede the ironclad rules of overbred WASPs. The Domino Sugar Man belonged to the club because his fingers bulged with rings; he was fat with money. That didn’t stop the talk. So what if his money paid for the saltwater pool. So what if he controlled a vast sugar empire. It doesn’t make it right. Words hissed through tight lips in the ladies’ powder room, where the girl went to eavesdrop and spray perfume in the air while her feet cooled on the tile floor. The powder room smelled of gardenia and lilac, which made the girl’s head go swimmy, but it had a chaise longue that the girl liked to nap on when the day grew too bright. Someone, most likely an Egyptian, covered her in a blanket while she napped. Behind the club, a path led to green tennis courts, a humid atrium bursting with plants, a kids club with games and toys, all of which the girl avoided. She preferred roaming the shoreline where she scratched her shoulder blades in dry sand and scraped her nails on pebbles in search of sea glass.
Once, the girl swam out alone in the ocean, warm as sweat, and an ocean creature danced with her feet, tickling her toes. She laughed in fear, and saltwater glugged down her throat, choking her. The strongest Egyptian swam out and carried her to shore in his muscled arms. The girl breathed in his scent, breathing out her loneliness. With surprise she noted the lifeguard on the jetty and the ladies under sun hats lining the shore, a place they never visited for fear of getting wet sand on their toes. The flag waving furiously from the lifeguard post—No Swimming. A tiger shark was nosing the rocks and sniffing for bathers. No one had noticed the girl in the water. Only the Egyptian, the strongest one with the brightest smile, had seen the girl, had dumped the beach chairs in his hands, had alerted the lifeguard, had run through the sand to save her. The girl’s grandmother laughed into her hand on seeing her granddaughter in the arms of a caramel-hued man, and the girl’s mother scowled with disapproval. It wasn’t her fault a shark tried to eat her, the girl thought as she buried her face in her book so no one would notice the pinch around her eyes. No crying was an unbreakable rule.
Later that day an Egyptian, a different one from her rescuer, brought her a virgin piña colada by the pool even though she hadn’t ordered it, and she sucked the straw until she sloshed with coconut. She understood the piña colada was consolation for an unfeeling mother. The Egyptians must talk quietly about the club members while they worked—in the kitchen, in sweltering laundry rooms where they washed and dried mountains of towels; they would have talked of the sad little girl whose nose was a constellation of freckles and whose family had laughed when a tiger shark nearly gobbled her.
In the powder room where the girl applied aloe to her sunburn, the girl imagined her rescuer returning home in the waning light: a place of music, a tumble of spices, exalted dancing. She didn’t need to know where he lived to see it. She imagined how he felt each morning as he left his home behind and entered the club’s fortress-like walls, the bitter knife of escape and reentry. He shed one cloak of skin for another when he stepped into his uniform. The girl wore a uniform of sorts too. She had a mother who turned away from her in scorn, a father whose lopsided smile hinted at drink. At the club the girl wore lacy dresses that itched her neck as she tried to forget that her family hated her. Though her grandmother’s wealth and fine breeding permitted the girl’s presence, it was a privilege tinged with the specter of fear, for it could be revoked at any moment. So, the girl washed and washed in the ladies’ room showers, fearful the club’s rightful members might notice the rot on her skin, a miasma of unbelonging.
Many years later the girl would grow into a woman wild with anger, felling men with her tongue, then with her fists. She would carry a pocketknife and wave it at anyone who threatened her. When a man flirted with her, she would bark at him like a rabid dog. That all came later, much later. Back at the club as a girl, she still performed. She shape-shifted. She wore crisp jumpers and wetted her hair before combing it to keep the fly-aways down. She kicked her feet when she swam in the ocean so that sharks didn’t eat her. She learned to restrict her calories to keep her waist thin. She lived as if on borrowed time, gliding between worlds, her feet cooling on tile in the scent of gardenia, her thoughts fading to songbirds in cages.
One day over lunch the girl’s mother straightened her collar and scolded her for not using her napkin and for chasing the beautiful lizards and for having skinned knees and for a million other tiny little things, and the girl’s rescuer had seen it all, had seen the mother’s unkindness, and he had winked at the girl when he bent to clear the table. She had seen it, she thought she had seen it, she was certain she had seen it, that wink of complicity meant to buoy her spirits. Such was her compensation, the girl understood, for having to bear the cruelty of her family, a family, she concluded, that must have taken the wrong baby home from the hospital on the day she was born. She belonged to another family, one that sang before dinner and read poetry aloud and kept songbirds for their sweet joy.
At night the girl dreamed of her rescuer, his caramel skin a backdrop for blinding teeth. In her dreams he winked at her to remind her. He had saved her from spiny jaws; quenched her thirst; shaded her eyes; brought ice cream for her delight. He had recognized her in the ocean, had swallowed her in his arms, and he had saved her from certain death. After all, he came from the land of pharaohs, so she expected no less.
Keti Shea is a public health lawyer and writer. Her writing appears in Reverie Mag, Swim Press, Oranges Journal, Inside Voice, Twenty Bellows, Tension Literary, Libre Lit, Wildroof Journal, and elsewhere. Her CNF piece, “Bad Dick,” was a 2024 Best of the Net nominee. Keti also has a forthcoming novel to be published by Saltmine in 2026. She lives with her husband and daughter in a former nunnery in Northern Colorado.