Lamees was in her third year of university, and soon she would become a doctor and have the world at her feet! No problem if she was a little late in getting married, since marriage later in life was common in medical circles. In fact, it was so commonplace that one might even hear murmurs of disapproval about the “early” marriage of a female medical student. If a girl wanted to stay single without being labeled a spinster, all she had to do was go into medicine or dentistry. It had a magic ability to turn away prying eyes. But for girls in liberal arts colleges or two-year diploma programs, not to mention those who didn’t even go to a university, those eyes started staring and the fingers started pointing the moment they turned twenty.
Even more, Gamrah thought, Lamees is so lucky with her mother, God protect her! Her mother is very smart and cultivated and she often sits and talks with Lamees, and with Tamadur, too, and they spill their hearts out to her freely because she’s understanding. My poor little mama is so old-fashioned and unsophisticated. Every time we asked anything of her, all she ever answered was no! We shouldn’t do this, we shouldn’t say that! She always criticized everything. Like that day when Shahla went and bought a few thongs and sexy pajamas, saying all her friends had some. Mama really gave it to her. She grabbed it all and threw it in the garbage, screaming, “This is the last straw! You want to dress like a hussy and you haven’t even gotten married!” She went straight to the old outdoors shops of Taiba and Owais*and bought her a dozen old-fashioned, matronly nightgowns and brought them home, insisting that Shahla was going to like them! She handed them over and said, “This is it for you, missy, and those other things you can have only when you’re a married woman.”
Even Michelle, after Faisal dropped her, was luckier than I was, Gamrah thought. Michelle’s family had let her study in America, while Gamrah wasn’t even allowed to leave the house by herself. And in her rare visits to Sadeem’s house, her mother insisted that one of her brothers deliver her in person and bring her back even though the driver was always around. You’re so lucky, Michelle. You can relax and live your life the way you want to! There’s no one shadowing you and breathing down your neck, asking every minute where you’re going and where you’ve been! You’re free and you don’t have to hear people’s relentless gossip.
Whenever she was with her three friends, Gamrah sensed an enormous gap that separated her from them, now that they had entered the university. What had happened to Lamees? She had changed. Why would she sign up for courses in self-defense and yoga? Ever since joining the lousy College of Medicine, she had been acting weird and had grown away from her old friends, especially in her way of thinking.
Meanwhile, Michelle had become truly frightening lately, the way she talked about freedom and women’s rights, the bonds of religion, conventions imposed by society and her philosophy on relations between the sexes. She was continually advising Gamrah to become tougher and meaner in asserting herself and not to give an inch when it came to defending her own rights.
Sadeem was the one Gamrah felt closest to. She seemed to have gotten more mature since spending her summer break in England. Her self-confidence had been bolstered by traveling alone and working and reading, it seemed. Or, more likely, it came from being loved by a man with the status of Firas.
Gamrah felt that she was the only one who hadn’t really changed since high school. Her concerns and interests were pretty much the same. Her ideas had not evolved and her old dreams had not given way to new ones. Her sole aspiration was still marriage to a man who would snatch her away from her solitude and make up for the hard times she had seen. How much she wished that she could draw strength from Michelle, intelligence from Sadeem and a measure of boldness from Lamees! How much she wanted to transform herself over into a personality as magnificent and vivacious as her friends. But, she despaired, as always she was just not able to keep up with them. God had created her with this weak personality, a character she herself scorned. She would always be a few steps behind. All her life.
She went in to have a quick look at Saleh before bed. Entering the room, walking toward his little crib, which lay next to his babysitter’s bed. She crept up quietly so that she wouldn’t wake either of them. And there were the baby’s big brown eyes, wide open, turning innocently toward the source of the sound and light, gleaming at her from the darkness. She put her hands out to him and he clutched at them, as if to ask her to pick him up and hold him. Gathering him up, she felt his wet clothes and his moist thighs. She smelled a piercing odor coming from his tiny diaper. She took him into the bathroom. His bottom was completely wet and covered in diaper rash. Gamrah didn’t know what she was supposed to do. Should she awaken her mother or Shahla? How much would Shahla know about babies, if she herself didn’t know what to do? Should she rouse the babysitter? “God rid me of her!” Gamrah muttered. “It’s all her fault. Look at her—she goes on sleeping while my son drowns in his own pee!” Washing his bottom under warm running water, she handed the baby his yellow rubber ducky and he played with it. He didn’t show any sign of being upset or bothered. For Gamrah, though, this seemed more than a mere skin irritation and it was harder to bear.
Everything was hard on her. Rashid, her mother, her sister Hessah, Hessah’s husband, Mudi, and even her best friends—all of them thought she was stupid and weak and ineffectual. Even the Filipina babysitter had begun to neglect her son after noticing how little the mother seemed to know. Life had taken everything from her and given nothing in return. It had robbed her of her youth and joy, replacing them with an emptiness and a child whose only sustenance in life was her—when she needed sustenance more than he did.
The rubber ducky fell from Saleh’s hand when weeping Gamrah embraced him fiercely, with the force of all the oppression and regret and suffering that lay inside of her.
31.
To: [email protected]
From: “seerehwenfadha7et”
Date: September 10, 2004
Subject: Gossiping About MEN!
This story has become my life. Friday has become more sacred than ever. The PC room is now my home, the only place I feel safe. Now I just laugh whenever I feel annoyed by some stupid thing a professor or some girl in class says. These people make my blood boil but who cares! None of it means a thing compared to what I am doing. After all, those bossy teachers and arrogant classmates are glued to their computer screens every Friday just so they won’t miss a syllable of what I write. So what if they annoy me every now and then? I’m plenty satisfied by the joy and pride I feel inside!
The four friends met at Gamrah’s house on the last day of summer vacation. Each brought Saleh a toy or a piece of candy, dangling them in front of him as bait, trying to get him to walk toward them with his little stumbling steps and his cute plump legs.
Gamrah didn’t waste any time, scolding Lamees for the bronzed skin she had acquired in the chalets of Jeddah.
“I swear by God, you are insane! These days, when everyone is going with whitening lotions, you have to go and burn yourself under the sun?”
“Oh, c’mon, guys! You don’t appreciate a good tan! I find it so attractive!”
“Girls! Say something to her—this nut!” said Gamrah.
Michelle, home from San Francisco for the summer, had become accustomed to the healthy look of all the tan, sporty California girls.” Actually, I think it looks great,” she said.
Gamrah erupted. She tried to get Sadeem to back her up. “Sadeem! Just look at these insane girls and what they are saying. Have you ever heard of any mother who wanted to find her son a black bride?”
“Oh, whatever! Everyone to their own tastes. How long are we going to keep doing whatever pleases these old ladies and their darling little boys? I say keep that up, Lamees—just do whatever you want to. And if you ever want to pour kerosene on your hair and set it on fire, go right ahead!”
Gamrah was left spluttering. “Thanks for the help, girl!”
“I mean, seriously,” continued Sadeem
, “I’m sick of how we let everyone else control us and lead us through this life. We can never do anything without the fear of being judged holding us back. Everyone steers us along according to what they want. What kind of life is that? We don’t have a say about our own lives!”
“Saddoomah!” her friends all turned toward her and exclaimed. “What’s the matter? Who has been bothering you?”
“Obviously, she’s had a fight with Firas. It can’t be anything else.”
“What did that monkey do to you?”
“Did you see him in Paris?”
Sadeem tried to keep her voice calm, since her outburst had shocked her friends. Slowly, she began telling them what was bothering her. “I saw him once. I mean, he came to Paris for one day just to see me, and of course I couldn’t say no. Okay. I’m not going to lie to you. Frankly, I was dying to see him, too! This whole entire year, I hadn’t laid eyes on him because of my studies and his work, and because the two of us had an agreement not to meet in Riyadh. It’s just too difficult, dangerous and awkward. It wouldn’t be relaxing like it would be if we were abroad. Outside the country, you can loosen up, you can breathe without worrying who’s watching you. Abroad I could meet him anywhere, in any public place, but here, no. In Paris, I met him at a cozy restaurant and we just sat there talking. It was nice.”
“So far, so good,” said Gamrah. “So where’s the problem?”
“Of course,” Michelle broke in, “right after it, right away, he asked you, ‘How come you feel so comfortable and relaxed about going out with me?’ Or he doesn’t even ask; he just starts doubting you immediately, and by the next day he’s already treating you differently. Different from when you had never agreed to meet him. After you meet a Saudi guy behind your family’s back, behind the society’s back, he loses his respect for you instead of appreciating your move! I know this stupid business really well; these hang-ups are built automatically into the messed-up heads of our guys. They are mentally twisted! Why do you think I left this country to live somewhere else?”
“No, not at all,” replied Sadeem. “He’s never treated me like that. Sure, I’ve noticed sometimes that he seems to have a little bit of this suspicion thing when he talks about girls in general. But he has never doubted me. Firas knows me really well and he trusts me very much.”
“A guy’s nature doesn’t change,” asserted Gamrah. “If he has that suspicion thing in him, then you will suffer from that one day, even if he tries to hide it in the beginning of your relationship.”
“No, believe me, there wasn’t any problem like this. The problem is that for a while now I’ve been noticing that he gives me these really strange hints about our relationship. One day he says to me that his family has found him a good bride, and another day he says, ‘If a well-matched groom shows up for you, don’t send him away!’
“How can his heart allow him to say things like that when he knows I love him so much? At first I figured he was joking, just to torment me a bit. When I saw him in Paris, though, I told him that a friend of Papa’s wants to marry me to his son. Really and truly, I wasn’t lying about that. I figured that he would get upset and worried and would knock on my father’s door the very same day. But what happened instead was that he gave me a smile as cold as the nighttime desert and asked me if the man was a good fellow. He said, ‘Make sure your father asks around about him, and if he turns out to be okay, then put your trust in God and go ahead!’”
“He really said that?” asked Gamrah, her tone disbelieving.
“So what did you say when he said that?” asked Lamees impatiently.
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?” All the girls spoke at once.
“My brain seized up! I couldn’t get what he was saying! I just sat there staring at him. I couldn’t say a word and I must have looked like a complete idiot. My eyes teared up and then I said, ‘Sorry, I have to go.’”
“So what did he say?”
“He said, ‘Don’t be angry,’ and he made me swear that I wouldn’t leave! He said, ‘Look, if you go now, I am not going to speak to you ever again.’”
“So you stayed?”
“Ya, I sat there until he finished eating and then we both got up and left the restaurant together. He then fetched me a taxi to the hotel.”
“So are you guys still together?”
“Together, but nothing has improved since then. He is playing with my nerves and I don’t know what to do to change him back to what he was before. Why is it always like this with me? Why do guys always change totally after they’ve been with me for a little while? There must be something about me! What seems clear is that the minute I start feeling comfortable with them they start getting really uncomfortable with me.”
Men’s insistence on calling the shots, Lamees believed, didn’t just come about in a vacuum. It happened after a guy stumbled on a woman who really liked that kind of domineering behavior and encouraged it.
“I believe that men aren’t scheming to tell lies or to deceive us,” she said. “It’s, like, they don’t intentionally do that. It comes from their nature. They’re just kind of wicked. A guy will begin backing off from a girl and even trying to escape as soon as she seems available. Because then he feels, Okay, I don’t have to do anything to get her. She is no longer a challenge. He doesn’t say this to her face. He doesn’t let her figure out that he is in the wrong, no way! He makes her believe that she is the one who has problems, not him. Some of them give the girl hints, hoping she will end the relationship herself, but we stupid girls never pick up on them. We go on working on the relationship until it kills us, even if we’re pretty sure from the start that it’s a total disaster. That’s why in the end we make fools of ourselves. We’re the ones who don’t hold on to our pride from the start to get out with our honor intact.”
Next, Michelle gave Sadeem her own logical analysis of the situation. “Sweetie, this is the escape strategy of an immature little boy. You find that he has given it some thought and then tells himself, So why should I take someone who is divorced when I haven’t ever been married? Even divorced men are looking for girls who haven’t been married, so why would I end up with a woman who has been previously married? You’ll find him weighing her in his mind and saying, If I want to become a government minister or some other high official later on, I need to find a woman who will give me some standing, a woman to help me with her family name and her looks and her genealogy and her social position and wealth! I’m not going to take one who’s flawed from the start cause she’s been divorced, and then watch people devour me with their waspish tongues. This is the way our men think, unfortunately. No matter how impressive he is or how refined his thinking is or how much in love he is, he still considers love something that can only happen in novels and films. He doesn’t get it, he doesn’t conceive of love as a foundation that builds a family. Maybe he’s even a really cultured and highly educated guy who’s been around. Maybe he knows deep down that love is a basic human need, that it isn’t shameful for a man to choose his partner in life himself, as long as he’s completely sure she’s the right one. But he is still afraid. It worries him to even think about following a path different from the path his father followed, and his uncle, and his grandfather before them. And anyway, he’ll think, Those old men are still living with those shut-up women of theirs. So something must have gone right. What they did was successful. It’s got to work because everyone else has done it. So he follows their steps and doesn’t go against their way of doing things. That way, no one can come along someday and rub it in that he failed because he strayed from the path of his ancestors. Our men are just too scared to pay for their own decisions in life. They want others to follow, others to blame.”
Not one of the three other women had any idea where Michelle obtained her theories of how guys think. But they felt that her words evoked strong echoes in all of them. They didn’t know how she had reached her conclusions, but they knew, in their hearts, that she was right.
32.
To: [email protected]
From: “seerehwenfadha7et”
Date: September 17, 2004
Subject: The Migrating Bird
To those who have totally annoyed me by declaring that I do not represent the girls of Saudi Arabia, I say: How many times do I have to repeat myself? I am not writing anything incredible or bizarre or so weird that you people absolutely do not relate to it or can say it’s not true! Everything I say, the girls in my society know very well. Every week, every single one of them reads my e-mail and exclaims, “This is me!” And since I am writing to give a voice to those girls, I ask those who have nothing to do with what I say to quit sticking their snouts into what’s not their business. And then, if they are so eager to offer a perspective other than mine, they’re welcome to write their own e-mails. But don’t ask ME to write only what YOU approve of!
Michelle discovered that the epidemic of contradictions in her country had gotten so out of control that it had even infected her parents. Her father, whom she had regarded as a rare symbol of the freedom in Saudi Arabia, had (himself!) now smashed the pedestal she had put him on, thereby proving the truth of the proverb: Anyone who lives with a people becomes one of them!
Her father exploded in a way she never would have anticipated, when he heard her suggest how much she liked her cousin Matti. Even her mother, who had only the one brother, Matti’s father, and loved him devotedly, and considered his children as precious as her own limbs—even this woman was totally, shockingly upset by her daughter’s unmistakable words.
Girls of Riyadh Page 17