By Sarah White

Lately I’ve been writing about small events in the past that continue to baffle me–moments when I didn’t understand what was happening, tried over time to untangle, and never arrived at a satisfying conclusion. This is one of those essays.

The object is made of blond wood, spherical, an inch and a quarter in diameter, slightly smaller than a ping pong ball. I hold it in my hand now. The wood is slightly dimpled from use. I’ve kept it with my jewelry and miscellanea for nearly five decades.

This object arced toward me from a window high in the eastern wall of the boy’s dorm, unnoticed until it struck the side of my face. “What was that!” I barked. Halim bent over to pick up what had fallen to the sidewalk. “Babyfoot ball,” he said.

“What’s babyfoot?” But he didn’t speak enough English to tell me. We did all our communicating in French, not my first language or his.

It was Thursday, July 20, 1978. I know this because there was a full moon rising, and the Internet can tell you things like when were the full moons of 1978.

When the little ball hit me, Halim and I were on our way to the cafeteria in the boy’s dorm for supper, which was our routine before doing some café-sitting, where he would talk communism with his friends, while I drank red wine and he drank tiny black coffees. Every night this was followed by sneaking me into his dorm room for quick, thrusting sex accompanied by Arab pop songs from his boombox. Nightly, I worked on training him to slow down, be gentle, enjoy.

We were both students in a language program in Dijon that summer—he was studying English, I French, but neither of us spoke well. He was Moroccan by birth, Lebanese by passport, a college student whose college in Beirut had closed in the Lebanese Civil War.

His communist revolutionary cell had sided with the PLO. Two years of fighting convinced him to become a doctor—to save lives, not take them. He’d applied to medical schools in both the U.S. and U.S.S.R., then come to France to improve his English on the hunch that the U.S. would accept him sooner.

I had come with no such lofty goals. I only wanted to be free of my Hoosier bounds. Finding a foreign lover had been my first goal for my summer abroad and now, despite the improvable lovemaking, I was happy with my beautiful smoke-eyed terrorist. Even if he made me walk a pace behind him. Even if his Arab friends sneered at me.

Babyfoot is the French word for foosball. The babyfoot ball had come from the lounge where the Arab boys hung out together. Whoever threw it was expressing his opinion of the slut Halim was hooking up with.

Returning from the café, we found that the Arab boys had built a fire in a metal barrel out on the quad beside the boy’s dorm. They were celebrating the full moon by drumming on buckets and barrels, the music complex and polyrhythmic, like that we rehearsed to in my belly dancing class back in Bloomington, where I’d attended Indiana University. Now, we stopped to watch. A few of the boys were dancing, feed stamping and hands clapping above their dark heads.

Which one of them had thrown the babyfoot ball at me? Why? Teasing, or something more sinister?

These boys were not Halim’s friends. He did have friends here; just the other day the Moroccan couple had invited me to join a party. It was thrilling to sit around a table full of couscous and lamb stew in their student apartment. I actually followed a conversation in French, even contributed a little in answer to their questions. No French person had allowed me to get past “où est” or “peut’être”. My Hoosier accent was too barbaric.

That warm welcome from Dijon’s Middle Eastern community had led me to dream that maybe I could stay on with Halim after the language program ended.

But now, under the full moon, the dream wavered like the superheated air rising from the barrel of burning trash. A little wooden ball had shown me that I wasn’t welcome here.

I pulled on Halim’s sleeve. “Dans ta chambre?” I whispered. “Allons-y” he replied.

The moon unrolled a white carpet from where the men danced around the barrel down the sidewalk toward Halim’s room.

© 2025 Sarah White

To read a previous essay I wrote about my summer love affair with Halim, read “Make Love, Not War.”