by Becky Aikman
Steam blinded me when I stepped inside the hammam door. I began to make out a kaleidoscope of green and blue tiles on the floor and walls, and a large basin of running water, like a public well, when an indistinct shape appeared in the mist, gradually coming into focus as a Moroccan woman, her black hair tied in a loose topknot.
“Off!” she ordered, rapping the sleeve of my robe like the head nun at a Catholic school, only she was disconcertingly naked except for a pair of red cotton bikini underpants. Hysterical laughter broke out all around me, and through the fog I made out human forms, some of them sprawled on stone slabs, some on the floor, each one naked as the day she was born.
“Nobody here but us rotisserie chickens,” said Dawn.
“When in Rome …” I whipped off my robe and tossed it outside the door. I know women are supposed to aspire to utmost thinness, but I was relieved that Bob’s cooking had put a little flesh on me by now. I hoped I looked less pinched, more like one of Matisse’s Moroccan odalisques.
“Down!” the headmistress commanded.
I dropped to my knees, arms in the air, in the international posture of “Don’t shoot!” but she wasn’t satisfied. “Down,” she repeated, her breasts dangling in front of my face, so I stretched out on the floor.
Next thing I knew, her hands were all over me, and I mean all over me, under my arms, behind my ears and—“Open!”—between my legs, rubbing in some kind of black soap that smelled of eucalyptus and olives. She let me sit up and marinate while she rushed from one to another of the Blossoms, scrubbing and polishing like the employee of the month at a car wash, while we got more and more raucous in turn. This was nothing like the sissy spa experience my girly-girls were used to. It was a bachelorette party without the booze, not an event for anyone who took herself, or her friends, too seriously.
“What is going on here?” I asked. But before anyone could answer, the headmistress advanced on me with a bucket of water and dumped it right over my head. I was still sputtering when she refilled it and smacked me with gallons of water in the face, from the side, the back, while the Blossoms howled. “Down,” she ordered again, and this time she spread a scratchy paste all over me, leaving it to form a crust.
Saida had headed off alone to some kind of whirlpool bath in another room, but before she left she had told the others fond memories of the hammam from her childhood, when friends would spend the day ululating and turning buckets upside down to beat them like drums, a ritual of pleasure and escape. The mud I was steeping in right now, made of clay and roses and chamomile and lavender, was the same brew she remembered from those halcyon days.
The others left to take a breather from the steam, and the attendant zeroed in on me again, scrubbing the mud with a glove that felt like a Brillo pad, as sheets of outer skin peeled off me. Unable to communicate in Arabic, I begged for mercy in rudimentary French. “Pas trop fort?”
It was then, through the fog, that I saw a stunning sight. It was Marcia, pale and shiny, squinting through the steam as she crept into the hammam like a bond trader balancing on a ledge on Black Friday, her face still glowering from the fight on the phone. The headmistress, arms akimbo, wasted no time. “Down!” she barked. I waited for Marcia to explode, to pull alpha-female rank on this martinet and say, “No, you get down!”
“Down!” the mistress ordered again. To my shock, and no doubt hers, Marcia hit the floor and submitted to the black soap treatment. I was sucking in my breath at the thought of the outraged objections this indignity would set off, when Marcia opened her mouth wide and emitted the most surprised and hysterical laughter I have heard in my life. I knew what was coming when I saw buckets being filled, but Marcia didn’t until she took a shot full in the face. More water rained down on her head until the laughing stopped, and I grew concerned. Had a line finally been crossed? Would an enraged Marcia touch off a cross-cultural dispute with only me, clad in a layer of mud, to mediate? I heard nothing but the hissing of steam and the trickling of spigots.
Finally, I got up my nerve and asked: “Are you okay over there?”
Marcia spat out, “Of course I’m okay. I was laughing so hard I swallowed clay!”
It was my turn for another splashdown, and the two of us soared into new flights of laughter.
We met the others in their robes under the palms. After much recounting of our latest adventure and much comparison of our rosy, gleaming flesh, Lesley got serious. “How safe we feel with each other,” she said. “It’s sacred.”
And how far we had come. Eleven months into our year together, all the masks were finally off. Venturing deeper and deeper into Morocco, we had removed ourselves from familiarity of place. Now we’d stripped away something of our everyday selves, as well—modesty, privacy, a couple layers of skin. We would approach the end of our journey stripped and cleansed, with skin like newborn babies, everything washed away but each other.
“Do you ever feel when we’re all together,” Dawn posed, “that none of the bad stuff happened to us? Even though we gathered for that purpose, I forget it sometimes. It’s not such a part of us as it was a year ago.”
“We’ve seen it lift,” I said.
“There are times when it feels like we’re together,” Dawn said, “just because we’re together.”
“WELL, BECKY, you finally got what you wanted,” Marcia said, not pleased, not pleased at all. “We’re in the middle of nowhere.”
And it wasn’t promising. The van had dropped us off at the very edge of the Sahara, in the far east of Morocco near the Algerian border, where we waited for Range Rovers to pick us up and continue. The earth was flatter, the color paler, even more neutral than we’d seen before, the ground nothing but cracked, hard-packed clay, too dry even for dust. A lone man buzzed by on a motor scooter, balancing a goat on his lap. We’d left behind us the last oasis, Rissani, a stop on caravan routes since the seventh century, populated by women covered completely but for their eyes and tall men in turbans and robes the color of the sky.
“I was seeing an acupuncturist before we left,” Denise said. He’d been helping to relieve some stress-related pains she’d been having. “He told me that the most distinctive thing about the desert is that there is no smell.”
“What about the camels?” said Marcia.
“Marcia, I’m trying to say something serious here. I was telling him about how I needed to get out of the past and get on with the rest of my life, how hard that is to do. He said the desert is the perfect place for me to be, because one of the main reasons people stay connected to the past is that they associate smells with people or places or events.” We nodded, remembering how we had saved our husbands’ worn T-shirts, how the scent of leaves burning in the fall or flowers budding in the spring reminded us of unwelcome anniversaries. “The desert is the perfect place to disconnect from the past and be in the present.”
“I’d like to leave behind the feelings I don’t want to have anymore,” said Dawn. The rest of us agreed.
“We should have a ceremony when we get there,” said Tara. We decided on a ritual we’d seen at the camp for grieving children where we’d volunteered. Each of us would write down what we’d like to say to our departed husbands, and we’d place our notes in the fire at the desert camp. “I’d better start now,” Tara said. “I’ll need five pages.”
But two Range Rovers arrived, piloted by Blue Men, members of a nomadic tribe of Berbers who had traversed the Sahara in peacock-blue robes since the third century BC. They seemed unapproachable, nodding a quick greeting, their faces half obscured by scarves and mirrored sunglasses. We bumped farther east across the stony desert floor, lulled by monotony in the still heat. A shimmer to the north turned out to be a mirage. In the distance before us, mountains gradually appeared, but they were mountains unlike any I had ever seen, mountains the color of gold. “What are those?” I called to Saida in the backseat.
“Those are no mountains,” she replied. “They are the famous dunes, the Erg Chebbi.”
/> I’d seen sand dunes at the beach before, but nothing like these, majestic tidal waves sweeping toward us, dunes that rose eight or nine hundred feet in height. We gasped with astonishment as we drew closer, finally skidding to a stop at the base. This was the place we’d been searching for: a place unlike any other.
Saida showed us how to wrap scarves around our heads and faces to protect us from the sun, and it was time to go. After all the anxious buildup about camels, we took to them right away. There was a fair amount of squealing on our part when Ali, our Berber guide, helped us in turn with the awkward mounting, the camels whipping us forward, then back as they stood first on their back legs, then their front, but the camels themselves took our silliness in stride. Marcia squeezed her legs into the saddle to the point of bruising, but she stayed on board with teeth-gritting determination interspersed with laughter of the sort she’d unleashed in the hammam. Everyone felt the vertiginous rush of adventure.
The camels, tethered end to end, swayed silently beneath us into the dunes, and we patted them with unexpected affection. They were male, but their demeanor had a subversive feminine side, thanks to tender lips, big dreamy eyes, and long lashes, not to mention soft camel toes padding gently forward. The sky was huge, and the sun began to settle into scattered bands of wispy clouds, gilding the sand to a high burnish, highlighting every ripple. The camels’ rocking gait made us feel like sailors on a patchy sea, where the dunes, seemingly permanent at first, were shifting imperceptibly around us.
Ali stopped us at the foot of an enormous peak and helped us dismount, indicating that we should shuck our boots and clamber barefoot to the summit in the yielding sand. Breathless, we perched at the lip of the towering wave, clasping each other for balance, although if we had tumbled no harm would come to us as we sank into the most forgiving of landings.
“It’s like nothing … nothing I’ve ever experienced,” said Lesley, and no one disagreed. We stretched our arms over our heads toward the sky. Ali spread blankets on the sand and gave us privacy by moving away.
“Sit, quickly,” Saida said. “The sun will be setting soon.”
Shafts of pink and orange pierced the clouds, lighting up the sky like the aurora borealis, as sand in every direction began to turn from gold to orange. The atmosphere itself took on a sudden wash of color, imparting the suggestion that we were suspended between earth and air, nothing but pure radiance above and below. I had wanted time and distance from our everyday world, and here it was, a place out of space, out of time, where the past and future couldn’t touch us.
I thought of Bob, my new love, far away. I thought of Bernie, forever out of reach. Both would have loved this place. For the first time, I could imagine both of them present together, in this place where space and time had no meaning. I thought of everything I wanted Bernie to know, everything he had missed. How much I missed him. How much I loved him still. How sorry I was for what he had suffered. How happy I was with Bob, and how I treasured Lily. I felt the presence of them all in the absence of the desert. They filled this empty place.
Here in this place out of space and time, I realized that it was possible to love two men at once, one who was present and one who lived only in memory. They were both very much with me now, and I was the better for them both. I looked at the sweeping dunes, unconnected from everything familiar, and realized that I had failed at my misguided goal of a life detached, that my attachments surrounded me, even here. Yes, I still knew, attachment can be suffering. Attachment can be scary. Attachment can be messy. But attachment is life.
The pigment that surrounded us deepened into reds and purples, like a Rothko painting, seemingly spare, but practically vibrating with intense color and meaning. I remembered my other attachment, my newest attachment, to the Blossoms, and looked at them, all of them—transfixed. The desert silence didn’t stifle our communion. I knew their thoughts. Tara, with her eyes shut, was seeking peace. Denise repeated Here we are in her head like a mantra. Dawn prayed to her God. Lesley vowed always to look ahead. Marcia seized the fleeting opportunity, calculating aperture settings and shutter speeds, greedily capturing pictures before the light was gone.
Denise touched her fingers to her throat, where Steve’s wedding band dangled from a leather cord. I knew that Steve was here along with Bernie, and David and Andries and Kevin and Martin. They would never be gone entirely as long as they were here in memory, as long as we created new memories that included them. Bob and Will and even Collins were here, and children, too, and stepchildren, moms and dads. Quite a turnout.
After nearly a year during which the number of times any of the Blossoms cried when we were together could be counted on the fingers of a single hand, everyone cried now. Except perhaps Marcia—I couldn’t tell with the camera in front of her eyes. But I could see that she finally had ditched the crooked ambivalent grin and fully committed to a smile, spread clear across her face.
Finally, as twilight fell, we ran down the dune to our camels, who carried us to camp. Colorful kilims covered the sand between a cluster of tents made of rough fabrics in primitive patterns. A fire burned in the center to ward off a fast encroaching chill from the vastness on every side. We surveyed the layout.
“Well, Marcia, are you going to survive?” I asked.
“I have to say, this is one of the highlights of my life,” she admitted. “I’d come back in a minute.”
Everyone threw back their heads to ululate.
Once again, it was Saturday night. Our night, as it had been all year long. Three Blue Men picked up instruments—a lute, a castanet, and a drum made of goatskin—to play traditional music by the fire. The musicians earned their pay that night, if only for keeping straight faces while we improvised dorky dance moves, ejected any lingering genies, and let loose with our patented harbor-seal madrigals. The stars overhead? You can only imagine. After polishing off a rustic lamb tagine by lantern light, we retired to our tents and slept like babes. Denise dreamed that her camel tucked its head inside her tent to nuzzle her and make her feel safe.
Before sunrise, everyone mounted the camels in the dark, eager to go on one more trek. Atop another truly big kahuna, we nestled together under blankets for warmth until the sun shot up quickly, bathing our faces. The wordless exchange at sunset had given way to our usual clowning and talk. “I’d like to dream about something more than camels,” Dawn said.
“Oh,” Denise cried, “we forgot to put our notes in the fire!”
“It doesn’t matter,” Tara said. “I got the feeling we all took care of what we needed to do at sunset.”
It was true. I caught Lesley watching me. “I tend to forget that this whole group started with you and your experience,” she said. “I think you put a lot of things to rest here.”
“Yes,” I answered. “I feel far away from where I’d ever imagined, yet exactly where I should be.”
“Sometimes,” Lesley said, “all we need is a little perspective.”
I waited at the pinnacle, reluctant to leave, while everyone dashed to the base of the dune, their light steps leaving footprints in the sand. A faint wind began to fill them in. Tomorrow, they would be gone. By the next week or the next month or certainly the next year, the dunes themselves would flow into new surging and receding shapes. Nothing lasts, except in memory. I ran down the dune, following the tracks. The tribe moves on.
chapter
THIRTY
endings are also beginnings. Nobody knew that better than the Blossoms, which may be why emotions were all over the map at our last official meeting.
I arrived at Marcia’s bearing a covered dish and none of the trepidation I’d felt on a Saturday night in January exactly one year earlier. There wasn’t any question that our utterly amateur widows’ support group was a smash, that our theory of companionship without gloom had flowered into friendship, that everyone had thrived along with it.
“Becky, this guacamole is over the top,” Dawn declared.
We clustered by the
window, where the pulsing Manhattan vista was as changeable as the desert. Everyone, it turned out, was wearing black, our chicest black, and what Lesley would call kick-ass boots. We looked forward to an evening of fond reminiscence, all those shared memories we’d racked up while scrupulously ignoring the five bogus stages of grief. When suddenly: waterworks. Tara read aloud a note she’d written to me just after we met, full of hope and anxiety about what was next for her. “My new life is taking shape … rather like a hurricane … after years of dark days,” she read. “For some, the weight of unfilled hopes and accumulated responsibilities could be crushing. For others, thank goodness, this could be a moment to reconnect with an earlier, younger, less compromised self.”
We all got weepy along with her. A release, a year’s worth of emotions, several years, really. Tonight was an ending. Another ending.
“Look how far you’ve come since you wrote that,” I said.
“How far we’ve all come,” Tara said. “We all lost our footing for a time. But we found our footing together.”
Denise and I put salad and chicken and couscous on the dining table. It was time to eat again, but as usual, the others were too caught up in conversation to take a seat.
“Marcia! Down!” I ordered. A year ago, she might have shot me a look like I was one of her lackeys, but her face cracked into laughter along with everyone else’s. “Well, it worked in Morocco,” I said.
“I never laughed my ass off like I did in that hammam,” Dawn marveled.
“The amount of time we’ve spent laughing—it’s ridiculous,” Lesley said. “And the stuff we talk about.”