Girls of Riyadh (7 page)

She got up to turn on the cassette player. She picked up a tape from among the many that were scattered across the floor. She pushed it into the machine, crept back to her bed and rolled into a ball like a fetus in its mother’s womb. She listened woefully to Abdul Haleem’s
*
mournful voice:

Sadeem cried and cried, and cried, alone in her London flat, wishing and hoping to rid herself of woes and tears, instead of crying years and years. Instead of crying spring and fall, bringing joy to traitors all.

To: [email protected]

From: “seerehwenfadha7et”

Date: April 30, 2004

Subject: A Life That…“Could Be Worse”

Frankly, I did not anticipate all of this flurry, all of this back-and-forth, around my modest little e-mails!

A number of you ask how I conceived of this project.

It all started in my mind about five years ago in 1999, that is, around the time when the story of my friends, as I am writing it to you and for you now, started. I didn’t do anything to turn this idea into a reality until very recently, however. What got me going was that I saw my brain’s capacity to hold anything reaching
DISK FULL
. The time had come to squeeze out the sponge of my mind and my heart, to really wring out that sponge so that I could absorb something new.

T
he marital relationship between Rashid and Gamrah was not exactly the cinematic ideal. However, it wasn’t so utterly miserable, either. Preoccupied with his studies, Rashid left the responsibility for taking care of things at home to Gamrah after he realized how completely unenthusiastic she was about enrolling at the university. Even though it was difficult in the beginning to shoulder all of the household-related tasks, gradually Gamrah learned how to depend on herself. She began to find the courage to ask people on the street where an address was, or to ask salespeople in shops how much this or that cost.

She didn’t actually see Rashid very much, but she got the money she needed whenever she asked for it, and most of the time without even asking. Even her own private needs—those “miscellaneous” needs—he gave her enough cash to meet, from time to time, anyway.

Gamrah wasn’t able to compare what Rashid was giving her with what other men would offer their wives. What she did obtain, though, seemed satisfactory enough. The only needs she wasn’t attending to were her emotional ones, and if that was all that was left out, she figured that she ought to consider herself a lot luckier than many women of her age and circumstances.

Once she had lived with Rashid for a while, Gamrah began to see his good side revealed, even though this goodness never emerged openly in his dealings with her. She could glimpse it in his treatment of others: his mother, his sisters, people out there in the street, and children. Rashid would become a happy little child himself in the presence of children. He would play with them fondly and very gently.

She became convinced that with time, Rashid would come to love her. After all, at the very start of their married life, he had always been remote and even a little rough with her, but as time passed he seemed more accepting of her and less severe, although he still sometimes blew up at her for reasons that seemed to Gamrah trivial. But aren’t all men from Najd like that? If she thought about her father or brothers or uncles and their sons, she did not think that her husband was any different. This was his nature—and that was what gave her patience with him.

What bothered her most in Rashid was that he never sought her advice or consulted with her about anything having to do with their home. When he decided to put in a receiver for cable TV channels, he chose the bundle that included his favorites, without considering the fact that HBO, which ran her very favorite show,
Sex and the City,
wasn’t among them. Gamrah followed that show avidly, even though she could only understand a little of what the characters were saying to each other. So what Rashid did, not taking her into account, as if she didn’t even exist, really angered her, especially when he made it clear that her irritation didn’t give him a moment’s pause. He might as well have said that she had nothing to do with any of the important and basic household decisions, as though this were his apartment alone!

It went on like that. Every day, he would get her worked up about things of this sort. And yet she would be in for a terrible time if she were to forget in the evening to prepare his clothes or to iron them first thing in the morning before he was even awake. Furthermore, she had no right to ask him for help in tidying up or preparing meals or washing dishes, even though he had been accustomed to living the bachelor life all those years of studying in America. As for her, in her family’s home in Riyadh there had always been servants around to do her bidding, furnishing whatever she and her siblings might request from moment to moment.

Rashid spent long hours at the university. When Gamrah would ask him why he was always so late getting home, he would simply inform her that he was carrying out research on the Internet using the easy-access computers in the university library.

In their early months in Chicago, Gamrah spent her time in front of the television or reading the romance novels she had brought with her from Riyadh, which Sadeem had introduced her to when they were in middle school.

Rashid had a computer in the apartment which he did not use. He allowed her to use it if she wanted to, but it was not connected to the Internet. Gamrah spent months learning how to use it. Rashid would help her sometimes, but she tried to rely on herself as much as possible. She noticed how quickly Rashid would insist on helping her as soon as he realized her determination to teach herself. The fact that she didn’t come to him for every single little thing—or every single big thing, either—as she had done at the beginning of their marriage seemed to make him more receptive. Do men sense a threat to their authority when they begin to catch on that a woman is developing some real skills in some area? she wondered. Are men afraid of any moves toward independent action on the part of their wives? And do they consider a woman reaching independence and working toward her own goals an illegal offense against the religious rights of leadership God bestowed upon men? And so Gamrah discovered a crucial principle in dealing with men. A man must sense the strength of a woman and her independence and a woman must realize that her relationship with a man shouldn’t just be built on needs: her need for his money, his share of domestic responsibilities, his support of her and her kids, and her need to feel her own significance in the universe. It is very unfortunate, isn’t it, that a woman has to have a man to make her feel this sense of importance? Sitting at the computer, Gamrah was going through some files containing screensavers when her eyes fell on a file that appeared to hold a great many photos of an Asian woman. She was Japanese, Gamrah learned later. Her name was Kari.

Kari was petite and slim and appeared to be about Rashid’s age or perhaps a little older. In some photos they were side by side. In fact, in one photo they were draped across the sofa in this very apartment in which Gamrah was living.

Here was something that didn’t require any deep analysis! These photos were the missing link in Rashid’s inexplicable behavior toward her. Rashid had had an affair with this girl before marrying her, Gamrah saw, and it wasn’t a stretch to think that he was still having a relationship with her.

After that, the evidence mounted. In addition to the time he spent with Kari every day on the Internet or the phone when he was at school, Rashid was in the habit of spending two days every month away from the apartment with his “friends” on some excursion. She had welcomed those trips because they seemed to have had a magic effect on Rashid; he always returned to her in a state of delirious rapture, in a good mood and outdoing himself to show his affection, to the point where she had felt real gratitude toward those friends and would await the next month’s trip impatiently!

How had he managed to hide his relationship with this woman for all these months? And how could Gamrah have been oblivious to her husband’s affair with another woman? The first month after their wedding had been really difficult, for sure; but then he had changed gradually, turning into a traditional Najd husband very much like her sister Hessah’s husband. How had he been able to keep up this acting in front of her for all this time? Did he meet that woman regularly? Did she live in the same state or did he travel somewhere every month to see her? Did he love her? Did he sleep with her and make her take birth-control pills like he made his wife do?

If anyone had told me that this resigned and unassertive woman Gamrah would do what she did, I would not have believed it. Not before I saw it with my own eyes, anyway. This young wife took up arms, intent on fighting to defend her marriage and struggle for the sake of its survival. She told no one of her painful discovery except her friend Sadeem, who had let her know about her abandonment by Waleed. This friend of hers who had fled into a London exile, Gamrah felt, was the person most capable of really understanding her feelings at such a time, even though she didn’t know why Waleed and Sadeem had split up until a year later.

In their daily phone conversations, Sadeem cautioned her not to say anything to Rashid about her discovery. Follow a defense strategy, Sadeem advised, rather than an attack plan for which she had not amassed a large enough stock of weapons.

“You don’t have any choice. You’ll have to meet her and come to terms with her.”

“What would I say to her? ‘Stay away from my husband, you husband thief’?”

“Of course not! Sit down with her and try to find out what sort of relationship she has with your husband and how long it’s been going on. You don’t know! It may be that he’s even hiding from her the fact that he’s married.”

“I’d die to know what he saw in her, this hussy with slitty eyes!”

“More important than finding out what he saw in her looks is finding out what he saw in her personality. Don’t they say, Know your enemy?”

Was Gamrah right when she decided to fight for her marriage? Or is a successful marriage fundamentally a relationship that doesn’t need war to guarantee its preservation? Is a marriage that demands warfare one that is preordained to fail?

Gamrah came upon Kari’s telephone number and address in Rashid’s pocket diary. She had a number in Japan. She also had a number in the next state over, Indiana, where Rashid had studied for his MA. Gamrah called Kari at the second number and asked to meet her. She introduced herself first. Kari answered calmly, saying she was willing and ready to come to Chicago to see her at the next available opportunity.

That was about two months after Gamrah had discovered this illicit relationship between her husband and that woman. In the interval, Gamrah had worked very hard to control her clashing emotions. She did not want Rashid to sense any change in her before she had her appointment with his lover.

During those two months, Gamrah stopped taking pills without consulting her mother, whose opinion she knew anyway: “All you’ve got is your children, my dear. Children are the only way to tie a man.” Gamrah did not want children to be the one tie between them—or, to put it plainly, the one thing that forced Rashid to stay with her. But he was forcing her into this—let him bear the consequences of his own deeds! And let their children bear the consequences of the deeds of them both.

Dizziness, queasiness in the morning and even vomiting, which was really annoying: here were the well-known signs of pregnancy for which Gamrah had been waiting impatiently. She wanted these symptoms to appear before she called Kari. She went to the supermarket on the ground floor of their building to get something that would confirm her suspicions. She did not know exactly what she was looking for, so she turned to one of the girls who worked there, pointing at her belly with both hands and sketching a round tummy in the air.

“
I…I…I bregnent!”

“Oh! Congratulations, ma’am.”

Gamrah had never liked the English language and she had never gotten as good at it as her friends. Every year she had passed English class with difficulty, and one year she had to retake her final exam and then only passed because the teacher felt sorry for her and gave her marks higher than she deserved.

“
Noo! Noo! I…bregnent…haaw?”
She flattened both of her palms in a gesture as if to ask,
how?

The shop attendant’s brown face showed bewilderment. “Sorry, my dear, but I don’t get what you mean!”

Gamrah kept pointing at herself with her index finger.
“Mee…mee…haaw bregnent? Haaw baby? Haaw?”

The shopgirl called over two of her colleagues, and they, together with a shopper who had overheard the exchange, labored to solve the riddle of what Gamrah was trying to say. After ten more minutes of effort, Gamrah finally obtained what she was looking for: a home pregnancy test!