In the Land of Invisible Women (33 page)

“OK, let me teach you.” She flashed me a dazzling smile. I was always struck at how eager the Muslims in the Kingdom were to educate me on matters of religious scholarship. It was a reflection of their passionate belief.

Over the next several hours Fatima explained to me how families resolved divorce, always with the interests of the children as the foremost consideration. Islamic teachings demarcate three stages in childhood: the age of weaning, the age of discretion, and the age of sexual maturity. Weaning usually means until about the age of two, and discretion until about the age of seven or nine (when a child can express his or her free will and understand the choices). In between, the child matures until he or she reaches the age of sexual maturity and is an adult. These stages determine custody of children in the event of a divorce. Fatima explained the custody of her children in these terms:

“My eldest son is fourteen and my daughter is twelve. The littlest has just turned five years old. Faris and I decided that the eldest boy would be better served in the company of his father now that he is becoming a man, and in fact at his age the custody usually goes to the father anyway. My daughter expressed a desire to live with Faris, so she is with him. She has reached the age of discretion so she is allowed to choose where she will live.” Fatima looked wistful and after a short pause, explained further.

“She is a very caring soul and I think was very worried about how her father would cope without me. I of course supported her choice to live with him and I see her all the time. She is not far from me. You know, Faris's house is that one over there.” She drew back the curtain pointing to a house across the cul-de-sac. “So of course they play together all day, the kids. The little one is still not at the age of discretion and Islam favors his custody to me, the mother. He will stay with me until, like his sister and brother, he is old enough to make his own choices.”

I already knew Riyadh was ruled according to Sharia law determined by the Riyadh clergy. In the Kingdom, a Saudi mother is allowed to maintain custody of sons until the age of nine, and female children until age seven after which the father's custodial rights take precedence. Most importantly, Sharia courts always dictate that the child go to the home most likely to foster the purest Islamic environment. In Fatima's case, both the father and mother could provide this, so in the court's eyes this wasn't a dilemma.

Saudi fathers always maintain legal custody even when the mother is Saudi herself. By law he retains all rights over where his children live and travel. My eyes widened as Fatima reassured me.

“Thank God Faris and I have a good relationship that we can still communicate respectfully. He would never take the children away from me, and he knows I provide them stability and support, which is hard for him to do. You know about his nighttime duties at the King's Majlis, I assume?” I nodded, remembering his sleep-deprived weariness, which greeted us so often in morning report in the ICU. She wanted to explain more. I asked her what would prevail if she married outside her religion.

“The custody is also affected if I decide to marry a non-Muslim after divorce, which of course I will never do.” Fatima giggled at such a preposterous possibility. “If I did, I would lose custody by remarrying a non-Muslim, or if I decided to live in a home of nonrelatives. Do you see, Qanta, our customs seek to preserve families even when the marriage is broken? Our laws guarantee that the child's religious upbringing is not compromised. God forbid if something happens to Faris, even if he knows my wishes to keep the children together, Sharia law allows custody of children to be awarded to the closest male relative of a Saudi father. That might be a difficult one to fight. I don't know. Inshallah, I hope it never comes to that.”

I was stunned. A divorce here truly meant the destruction of a family. Not only parents separating but brothers and sisters too. And where was the emphasis on motherhood which I had learned from the tiniest age, from my father: “first comes your mother, your mother, your mother, then your father,” in a paraphrase of The Prophet's words
¹²
when asked to determine which parent is most revered in Islam. In a society where family was the base-unit kernel to every community, divorce was atomizing societies into particles that could never consolidate together in the same way. What had been once an indisputable sense of unity in community—the basic nuclear family—was just as fractured and damaged as in suburban America. The Saudis were struggling with the same issues we did in the States. I had more questions.

“But Fatima, tell me more about divorce. How do you know it is time to end a marriage? What is this mediation process, designed to put the brakes on an angry couple? What were the negotiations that you refused really to consider?”

Fatima locked her clear gaze onto me, pausing to consider her response. “You are right. There are several stages that have to pass when either the husband or the wife has decided to seek divorce.” Her face had become grave. The smiling bow was transiently unfolded into a firmed jaw. I concentrated to follow her detailed explanations.

Fatima explained that if a man did inform his wife of the desire to divorce, using the word “Talaq,” and he uttered it serially, three times, after that the marriage can only be dissolved after three months and not in that instant, a commonly held misperception. Muslims must continue to live in their married home under the same roof but retreat from sexual relations during that time. In fact the wait is determined by three cycles of the woman's period. In this way the wife will discover if she may be unknowingly pregnant and if so, the divorcing husband will be required to meet his responsibilities for the new baby. But equally important, however, is that these three months can be a useful cooling-off period in which they hopefully seek a reconciliation, which is also permitted in Islam. If the husband and wife do reconcile, at anytime during this period they are permitted to re-enter the marriage without a need for a new contract or a new ceremony or even a new mahr. I glanced at the ticking clock. It was growing late.

“In fact,” Fatima continued, “this three-cycle waiting period can be repeated, but if there is mention or demand of divorce a third time, then it cannot be avoided. It becomes permanent, irrevocable. For me it became very clear Faris and I could not agree on this central issue. There was no other solution but to dissolve our fifteen-year marriage.”

I wanted to know more. “In the States some couples do re-marry even after divorce. Is this allowed according to Islam?”

“Yes, Qanta, a man is allowed to re-marry the same woman twice. After the third divorce she becomes haram for him to marry. Forbidden.”

“So perhaps you and Faris will reconcile one day?” I asked hopefully.

She threw her head back in disbelief. “No chance, Qanta. This is for good.” She offered me more coffee, which I accepted. I watched her pour the thin, golden liquid into the small cup. She poured herself some more too and curled her legs up onto the sofa, kicking off her sandals.

“So Fatima, what about you? If not Faris, will you think of marrying again? Or are you done?”

She smiled indulgently to herself and finally in a peal of giggles, looked up at me, quite girlish for a woman of forty-seven.

“Oh yes, Qanta. This time I will marry for romance, for love, for passion! I don't want any more children. Alhumdullilah I have three, Mashallah, long may they live. No, this time I will be completely selfish. I want to be with a man who will take me to Paris and Geneva. I want to have flowers and chocolates and see movies. I want to be courted and cherished!” She hugged her knees tight like a teenager dreaming about her high school crush.

“Wow, that sounds great, Fatima. Where will you find that? What kind of man will he be? Will he be a Saudi?”

“Of course he will, Qanta. I am going to marry a man who is already married. I don't want to marry a naïve bachelor. I want to marry a man whose primary needs are already met.” I was nonplussed. She had just denied her husband the opportunity of a second wife, but she was willing to adopt that very role herself?

“I couldn't imagine anything more undesirable, Fatima, than to be with an unavailable man. Where is the fun in that? You would always be second best. Please, I don't understand, can you explain this more clearly? I have never met a woman who wanted to marry a married man. I mean, that's the worst nightmare of every single woman in America.”

“Well, Qanta, I have my busy career, my professional conferences, my meetings. My career demands a lot of time. And then I also raise my children. I don't have energy to do this again for another man. I don't want to, in fact. I am not a young girl anymore. I am a forty-seven-year-old woman of the world.” I severely doubted her “of the world” statement, but I couldn't deny that she had already raised a family. She was bubbling on in excitement, oblivious to my reaction.

“And most Saudi men would not accept a Saudi wife dedicating so much time to her work. Sometimes I must come in and read emergency biopsies at inconvenient or very late times. You know that.” I nodded in confirmation. “But if I married a man who already had one wife, perhaps even two, then there would obviously be evenings when he didn't require me, nights that would be my own, when I can do whatever I chose, whether work at the hospital or take a bubble bath at home. I would have freedom!”

“Marrying a man who is married means freedom to you?”

“Yes, Qanta, of course.” And again she giggled.

I was dumbfounded. This was actually something she wanted. “But why didn't you want Faris to have the same freedom?”

“That is completely different! It was not my wish. He was doing that for his own comfort, not for mine.”

She sounded bitter. I wondered if she had been uncherished in her marriage to a limited, possibly depressed man. Although Faris was universally accepted to be extremely kind, perhaps meaningful intimacy truly eluded him.

“No, now it is time for me to think of myself. After fifteen years of marriage I want to be selfish. I want something for me, a man who comes to me because he desires me, wants me, wants to spoil me and make me laugh. He is under no obligations to be with me for children. He just wants me for myself. I tell you, that is what I want, and what I will seek! Khalaas!” With the familiar Saudi vernacular for “that's it” or “that's the end of it” she bustled up to the kitchen to make more coffee. She had said the final word on the matter.

I sipped my coffee in puzzled silence. There was something sad and incredibly deprived about Fatima's juvenile aspirations, as though she was planning to finally live her teenage dreams in her later years. Where would her children fit into this scenario with a polygamous man? Did she really believe she would have the carefree, globetrotting trysts of a girlish imagination in a marriage to a married Saudi man? Perhaps I was mistaken. Perhaps that could be possible. But as I watched her slipping her hands into the Rubbermaid gloves to clean out the dregs from the coffee thermos, I severely doubted it. Her life was already half-gone in a marriage cemented around children, not passion. A brilliantly intelligent woman, these years had muted, eroded her blossoming passion, and now I doubted she would ever find sincere partnership in a man in her society. From what I had seen it was highly unlikely. Fatima was a Saudi divorcée and likely to always remain so.

Today she remains without a partner. She never remarried, though Faris eventually did. Her whirlwind romance with a Saudi polygamist never did arrive. But Fatima remains hopeful. Despite her weakening sight, she can still see her dreams clearly.

DESPERATE HOUSEWIVES

I
HAD ARRIVED ALONE AT the hotel. Hurrying through the lobby in my abbayah, fearful of the omnipresent Muttawa who could appear without warning, I scurried toward the ladies' hall. Finding it at last by following my nose (there was a cloying smell of heavy scent), I stepped into a ballroom, joining the other ladies. I allowed myself out of my abbayah, comfortable in a room full of women. We were in segregated company. Filipina waitresses circulated with Arabic coffee and sweets. Following the others' lead, I allowed my abbayah to hang from my chair. I chose a spot toward the back of the room.

It was a wintry evening. In anticipation for the cold return journey later that evening, I had come warmly dressed. I quickly discovered I was the most covered woman in the wedding hall, but my itching turtleneck and hot feet were quickly forgotten as I watched the spectacle unfold.

Nadija adjusted her veil in the final moments before she stepped into the blazing spotlights. She stood just a couple of yards from where I sat. I studied the young Saudi bride.

She stood alone. Behind her, two female relatives, bustling in jewel-colored evening gowns, coaxed her toward the staged platform where she would be on display. Nadija was a member of the lower middle class. Unlike her colleague, Zubaidah, she really needed her small salary. Nevertheless, her family had pulled out all the stops at her wedding.

She was dressed exactly like an American bride. She wore a huge, white bridal gown complete with a lace veil that draped over her face, reaching almost to her knees. The dress was pure 1950s Hollywood; all hoop and lace. I was reminded of a young Grace Kelly without the restraining elegance. Everything about the gown and the bride was overdone. The sweetheart neckline was cut low, exposing a young and unblemished cleavage. Her décol-letage shuddered under the glacial air conditioning showering from high ceilings. She shivered. Goose-bumped arms were smoothly outlined in shimmering sleeves of jeweled lace, the wrists reaching to the middle of her hand and looping over the middle finger to secure them in place. She rustled as she moved nervously to her destiny.

I looked at her heavily made-up face, studying her profile. Her eyes were deeply lined, her complexion rouged into a vibrant plum, and around her eyes, layers of glitter shone above arched, long brow bones. Unfortunately the makeup conferred a preternaturally startled look on her pretty face. Liquid brown eyes shot brief glances around the room, fearful and nervous as a puppy. Even so, I could still detect ephemeral flutters of excitement behind the carefully painted mask of makeup. Periodically, she broke into a nervous, deeply dimpled smile, exposing a single chip in an upper incisor. This slight, charming imperfection of her toothy grin was the only genuine beauty resilient under the thick dunes of an airbrushed foundation. I watched as she fluttered in her steps, tremulous with circulating adrenaline. I wondered if she thought of her groom.

She clutched a bouquet of creamy white Columbian roses handed to her. Frigid petals trembled with her mounting bridal anxiety. The lovely flowers lacked fragrance, obliterated by hours in the icy hold of cargo planes that had left South America days earlier. Like the beauty surrounding me, the flowers were sterile and lifeless. At last, following final moments of encouragement from women around her, she took a single step forward, revealing a strappy, spiraling, silver stiletto: very Vegas. Her women friends retreated, releasing an audible sigh of relief, easing the pressure of boned bodices barely containing their rippling, already-married bosoms.

She stepped out toward the stage, where a pair of wedding thrones awaited the crowning moment of marriage that was to be recorded in a family album for ever. A ginger first step revealed toenails manicured a deep burgundy, matching her hands. She must be menstruating, I decided, by now knowing the Kingdom women's practice of painting nails only during their periods. The orthodox Saudi women believed that proper cleansing before prayers could not be accomplished with nail polish and so they avoided manicures and pedicures during the month when they were not bleeding, when prayer is allowed. When menstruating, Muslim women are not permitted to pray, so at that time, most orthodox and even less-orthodox Saudi women would splurge on their nails. Even Zubaidah followed this practice. Her friend Nadija was probably no different.

Inadvertently I had selected a seat close to the sentinel subwoofer fueling the roar which passed as music. Hungry, because I hadn't eaten since lunch, my head was already beginning to throb and food was hours away. I hadn't been aware; weddings in Riyadh were distinctly late-night affairs. Still, from here, I had a terrific view.

I watched as the bride began to walk. Like so many Saudi women desperate to become wives, this was the moment she had been waiting for since childhood. She was steps away from life as a wife.

The rows were packed; there were at least six hundred women present, the largest gathering I had yet attended in Riyadh, and easily the most dazzling. It was at least forty minutes before I noticed Zubaidah entering the room. She had spotted me, waving at once, but there were other people she had to greet first. I followed her with my gaze, agog.

Zubaidah had exchanged her demure baby-blue daytime shades of chiffon and linen for the svelte lines of a Saudi siren. Regal in a maroon, charmeuse silk gown with oversized diamante buttons, she was utterly dazzling in her womanhood. Her flaxen hair was exquisitely coiffed into glossy, voluminous flounces. Her makeup, though heavy and dated, eyes almost obliterated by dark eye shadow, added to her a new mystique. She looked like a Beiruti chanteuse from the 1950s. Impossibly black eyeliner was seeping into her already red, stinging eyes, as she gazed at onlooking guests with molten allure. Heavy lashes, obviously prosthetic, dragged her hooded lids downward, conferring an even more doe-eyed look than usual. Her ample bust was beautifully captured in a tasteful, ruched neckline. As she extended a long-sleeved, elegant, but definitely plump arm to elderly dowagers who ringed the stage in circles of crooked sentries, she cut a dashing but still conservative figure. Zubaidah was the model prospective bride-to-be.

In comparison, other women had clearly lost the plot entirely. Their fleshy desperation was on full display, either to forget the misery of their marriages for a few hours or to somehow scrabble into the mystery of marriages they were desperate to enter. The amount of exposed flesh was unbelievable. I had never seen this much leg, breast, and thigh in New York City. I couldn't believe this was Riyadh. I couldn't believe these women were Muslim.

In my dumpy outfit, I had already attracted disapproving looks. I was inappropriately dressed for such an important occasion. I wore no jewels. My clothes had no shine, glitter, or polish. The other women had evidently spent hours, some even days, in preparation. Around me almost all women were in sleeveless dresses; in this instance Zubaidah was an exception. I spied colossal jewels: Cellini, Di Grisogono, Kwiat, and Damiani, to name a few. These were jewels one only ever saw in magazines, but at a dietician's wedding, they were common currency.

The jewels lay on bared expanses of creamy skin, though one or two women may have been as dark complexioned as I was. Most wore dresses a couple of sizes too small, accentuating fulsome breasts, some still lactating, others clearly lifted and augmented. The plump circular outlines of hardened silicon implants were dead giveaways of a visit to the plastic surgeon, likely in Jordan or Beirut. Perhaps some of them had even been revised by Mu'ayyad, my plastic surgery colleague who often salvaged the worst breast jobs from around the Persian Gulf.

Coolly he once mentioned the commonest indication for breast implants in the Kingdom was a bored husband pondering the assumption of a second wife. Desperate to avoid this, women rushed to him in droves for plastic surgery, pleading with him for revisions or further augmentations. Mu'ayyad calmly explained that breast implants would never be a salve to a wounded relationship, sending them away without the silicone breastplates they craved to protect failing loves. He turned many of these desperate housewives away, leaving them to find a less-scrupulous surgeon who would agree to carve away their mounting fears of wife number two.

But tonight, whether silicon or adipose, the high domes of breasts were scaffolding to gravity-defying gowns. Too-narrow dresses cut viciously into the once-small waists of several-babies-ago. Merciless satin spilled ugly panniculi of lumpy fat unhinged by the cruel seams. The scene was an anarchic Oscar night without stylists to hold back the poor-tasted, petulant appetites of the diva army.

Many women wore backless dresses, some forgoing efforts to hide cumbersome brassieres in the process. I studied the layers of flab cascading down the back of a woman who was already dancing to the unbearably loud music. Her black bra strap crushed her back into a bizarre reverse cleavage—fascinatingly ugly.

The bride wasn't the only one exposing fledgling cleavage. Far more brazen, her guests were competing with one another in plunging necklines and dresses slit to reveal plump and newly waxed legs that had never seen a StairMaster. The draconian makeup was reminiscent of an Egyptian soap opera. Nothing was left to the imagination. Every feature was intensified; lips, eyes, and cheeks all were emphasized until the women resembled Pharonic masks. Rather like Carnivale, I was attending a masked ball in Riyadh. The garish makeup ensured I couldn't distinguish anyone's expression. Somehow the women were still veiled, even when so exposed. And funnier still, they all seemed to have been to the same makeup artist.

Like actresses in a Saudi Mikado, high and hard eye shadow was heavy, dragged upward into a near-Japanese altitude at the edges of the eyes to make the eyes appear even wider apart. They looked like transsexual Geishas. Faces were whitened with dense foundations, enhancing even naturally light-colored skin to a further extreme. In the middle of the smoothed, unlined canvas, collagen-injected mouths were rubied into hard, garish gashes that moved relentlessly over yellowed, lipstick-flecked teeth as they mouthed mummified pleasantries, repeated on endless loops.

The only women unaffected by the desire to compete in this display of bosoms and behinds and Botox were an inner circle of older matrons. They dressed conservatively, many of them remaining in their abbayahs, or else revealing their dour, glum, tent-like dresses that swept loosely over robust, often obese figures. Invariably they wore clothes patterned in burnt-orange-and-brown paisleys, tiny patterns magnifying their heaviness. A sickly sweet scent of attar floated from the grand dame army, hovering just above in thick clouds of rose vapor. The matrons didn't depend on jewels or satin or expensive updos for their status. Their breasts were unaugmented expanses of flattened flesh long abandoned by overstretched brassieres. Instead their bosoms sagged on ligaments stretched loose by endless pregnancies and relentless decades of breast-feeding. These women were exalted. Their status was codified in the generations of sons and daughters they had birthed and the grandsons which had followed.

Like a ring of Mafia mothers, they held court, slowly lifting their thick, turkey-necked, weighty heads in appraisal of prospective brides like Zubaidah. They peered at the younger women with reptilian eyes surmounted by balding eyebrows, giving away the prevalent underlying hypothyroidism. They scratched their thinning scalps with unjewelled fingers, tipped in fresh orange henna. Now and again a solitary gold bangle caught the light, but otherwise they remained unadorned.

Matchmaking, however, was feverishly unfolding as I watched, and ever-hopeful, over-bearing mothers clucked their daughters forward to the paisley-clad, stumpy matrons, hoping perhaps to ensnare a potential son-in-law by the end of the evening. A beady-eyed once-over had the potential to make the eager single woman into the much-sought-after housewife that so many women in this city desperately dreamed of becoming.