Girls of Riyadh (16 page)

To: [email protected]

From: “seerehwenfadha7et”

Date: August 27, 2004

Subject: Firas Is Different

Nasser Al-Clubs wrote, inviting me to write for the magazine the
Diamond,
of the son of Al-Spades, whose editor-in-chief is Dr. Sharifa Al-Hearts.
*

Now that I have discovered that the beggar may actually get what she wants when she sets her own conditions, I shall wait until I get an offer to anchor my own TV show just like Oprah or Barbara Walters!

And keep in mind that the better offers you have for me, the happier you make me, the longer e-mails you will be getting from me every week! So, what do you think?

U
m Nuwayyir set down a platter of Kuwaiti tahini halvah
**
and a pot of tea in front of Sadeem, who poured them each a cup. They sipped their tea and nibbled pieces of the rich sesame dessert.

“Can you believe it, Auntie, I didn’t realize Waleed wasn’t Mr. Right until I got to know Firas.”

“I just hope the day doesn’t come when you realize that Firas isn’t Mr. Right until after you get to know the next one in line!”

“God forbid! I don’t want anything from this world but Firas. Just Firas and that’s it.”

“You said exactly the same thing about Waleed, and soon a day will come when I have to remind you that you said that about Firas, too!”

“Ya, but just think about it—think about Firas and then picture Waleed, Auntie Um Nuwayyir. They’re so different!”

“Both of them are losers! As the Egyptians say: Why compare flip-flops to wooden clogs!”
*

“I do not get why you don’t like Firas, even though he’s so sweet and lovable. What’s not to like?”

“I don’t like men, period. You’ve totally forgotten the day when I told you I don’t think much of Waleed. You weren’t very happy to hear it then, either, and you have paid no attention to my concerns.”

“I was kind of dumb and naïve. That sick bastard Waleed told me that he had spied on all the telephones in the house—landlines and cell phones both—before our engagement, that he got hold of telephone records and searched through them all, incoming calls and outgoing, for the past six months before his proposal to my father. He gave himself the right to search for anything that might suggest I had a relationship with any guy before him, and I was so brainless that I actually felt proud to know that I had passed
that
exam! What an idiot.”

“Obstinate! That’s what you were. At the time, I said to you this fellow has a real problem with jealousy, he’s pretty sketchy himself. But you didn’t believe me. You were absolutely blinded by love. I said to you: It’s early days still, and look what’s happening already. You’ll never be rid of these tests he puts you through—it’s not high school final exams, it’s
marriage!
Do you know what that means? And what if you fail one of his ‘trust checks’? What will happen to you? He’s gonna leave you for sure! To hell with it. To hell with him!”

“But Firas is different, Auntie. I swear to God he’s never put me through anything that suggests he does not trust me enough, he’s never pestered me with questions like Waleed did. Firas has a good clean mind and he doesn’t see everything through a veil of suspicion the way Waleed always did.”

“But Saddoomah darling, it’s not good to show Firas that he’s everything in your life and that you’ll do anything for his sake!”

“But Auntie, I can’t help it! I’m deeply in love with him. I’m so used to having him around. His is the first voice I hear when I get up in the morning and the last voice I hear before I fall asleep at night. All day long he’s with me wherever I am. He asks me about my exams before my father does, and he lists the things I have to do every day before I even realize them, and if I have a problem, he solves it for me in no time by using his connections. If I need anything, even a can of Coke in the middle of the night, he gets someone to bring it. Can you believe it, one time he went to the pharmacy at four in the morning to bring me a pack of sanitary pads because my driver was fast asleep! He went himself and bought it for me and dropped the plastic bag off at our front door! I mean, is it strange, Auntie, after the way he treats me and pampers me, for me to feel like he is everything in my life? I don’t know, I don’t even remember how I ever lived without him!”

“Oh, for God’s sake! You are making him sound like Hussein Fahmi!
*
I ask God to give you the best out of him and spare you the worst. I’m just not very optimistic.”

“But why? Tell me!”

“Well, if he loves you as you say he does, then why hasn’t he proposed to you yet?”

“This is exactly what I don’t get, either, Auntie.”

“Didn’t you tell me you thought he changed after he found out that you had been previously married to Waleed?”

“He didn’t change, really, but…well, uh, I sensed that he was a little different, maybe. There was the same caring and gentleness and worrying over me, but it’s as if there’s something inside of him that he doesn’t show in front of me any longer. Maybe it’s jealousy? Or anger that he’s not the first person in my life, the way I’m the first girl in his.”

“And who on earth is telling you that you’re the first girl in his life?”

“It’s just a feeling I have! My heart tells me I’m the only love he’s known. Even if he got to know girls before me—and of course he did, given how old he is and all that time he lived abroad—I am sure he didn’t actually really fall in love with anyone and become attached to her and get his life all entangled with hers like he has with me. A guy doesn’t become so fond of someone and go to such trouble and devotion when he’s this age unless he thinks that the one he loves is someone extraordinary! Someone who really suits him. He’s not young anymore, and he doesn’t see things the way a guy still in his twenties sees things. Men of this age, when they fall in love, right away they start thinking about settling down, about getting married. He’s not just fooling around. There’s none of this
C’mon, let’s get to know each other
and
We’ll see how it goes, let’s go with the flow,
and all that little-boy stuff. And what proves it is that to this day he has never asked to see me, since those days in London, except that one time on our drive from Riyadh to Khobar in the eastern region.”

“I don’t understand how you dared let him drive right up to you in the next lane when you were riding with your father. You crazy girl! What if your father got suspicious? What if he saw the way that strange guy in the nearby car was looking at you and got furious? What would you have done then?”

“I wasn’t being daring or anything. The whole thing was a coincidence. I was supposed to travel to the eastern province by car with my father to attend a funeral. Firas was going to spend the weekend with his parents like he always does and missed his plane, so he decided to go by car. My father left work early that day and wanted to set off right away. Firas, who was supposed to have left at noon, delayed until late afternoon because of his work. It happened that we were on the road at the same time! We were texting the whole time, asking each other, How many more kilometers till you get there? I was trying to convince him to stop typing on his cell phone while he was driving! Suddenly I found him saying to me, What does your father drive? I told him, A dark quartz Lexus, why? He said, Just look to the left in five seconds and you’ll see me! Aah, Auntie! I can’t begin to tell you what I felt the moment I saw him! I never imagined I would love someone so much. With that creep Waleed I felt I was ready to surrender, to give up anything, just so he’d be pleased with me. But with Firas I don’t feel the need to make sacrifices. I feel I want to give without any limits. Give and give and give! Can you believe it, Aunt, sometimes I get thoughts I’m ashamed of.”

“Like what?”

“I mean, like I imagine myself welcoming him home in the evening once we’re married. And of course, he always comes home tired. I sit him down on the sofa and I sit on the floor in front of him. I imagine myself rubbing his feet under salted warm water and kissing them! Do you understand what this picture I have in my head does to me, Aunt? It drives me mad! I never imagined I could think things like that about any man, no matter who he was. Even when I loved Waleed, I was too proud to imagine such things! Do you see how this Firas has rocked all my thinking and left me loving him in a totally hopeless way?”

Um Nuwayyir took a long breath and let it out as a deep sigh. “Oh, my dear. I just don’t want to see you get hurt again. That’s all I’m saying. May God give you according to your good intentions, my darling, and keep evil away from you.”

To: [email protected]

From: “seerehwenfadha7et”

Date: September 3, 2004

Subject: Same Old Same Old Gamrah

I’m getting many, many responses rebuking and insulting Um Nuwayyir, and censuring the families of my friends who have allowed their daughters to spend a single evening at the home of a divorced woman who lives alone. Wait a minute. Is divorce a major crime committed by the woman only? Why doesn’t our society harass the divorced man the way it crushes the divorced woman? I know that you readers are always ready to dismiss and make light of these naïve questions of mine, but surely you can see that they are logical questions and they deserve some careful thought. We should defend Um Nuwayyir and Gamrah and other divorcées. Women like them don’t deserve to be looked down on by society, which only condescends from time to time to throw them a few bones and expects them to be happy with that. Meanwhile, divorced men go on to live fulfilling lives without any suffering or blame.

G
amrah’s life didn’t particularly change after the birth of her son, since the real burden of caring for him fell onto the shoulders of the Filipina babysitter whom Gamrah’s mother had hired specifically for the job. The mother knew how lazy her daughter was and how she neglected even herself. How could she possibly look after a newborn? Gamrah remained as she was. In fact, she reverted to what she had been before she was married. She was busy enough tending to the profound melancholy that had enveloped her after she cut herself off from chat. She went on thinking about Sultan for quite a while. She often felt a strong yearning to talk to him, but she always retreated as soon as she recalled his situation and her state of affairs. Both would make it very difficult for them to be together in any real sense of the word.

Every evening, her thoughts took her far away. Envisioning her three friends, she compared her life with the lives they were leading. Here was Sadeem, totally consumed with adoring ( full-time) a successful politician and a man about town, who might at any moment rise up to ask for her hand in marriage. That image was based on what Sadeem was telling her about their splendid love and how they saw absolutely eye to eye on everything.
Oh, how I envy Sadeem,
she thought.
She is lucky to get Firas instead of Waleed! An older guy is a lot better than those amateurs who don’t even know what they want out of the world.

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.