by Becky Aikman
“They should do what we have done,” Lesley said. “It’s good to know other women. It’s good to talk.”
Saida translated, and the others exuded assent. “Yes, we do this, too,” Saida said. “In Morocco we have women who are suffering, who are not happy, but they have fun sometimes together. Women organize parties with their friends. We contribute money for tea and hire musicians, only women. And all the bad things inside come out. Sometimes the women dance and turn until they fall on the ground, and they lose consciousness until we spray orange water on them. Then—how do you say it?—all the genies come out of you. The bad spirits.”
“You find release,” Tara said, nodding with slow comprehension.
“Yes. You are with other women, away from your other life. And the genies are gone.”
I saw relief on the face of the once-silent Rashida, even a hint of triumph. She had survived her brutal marriage, and she had found the strength to tell the tale to strangers from a world away and make them understand.
She asked Saida to translate another thought. “This lady,” said Saida, “she asks me to tell you, it is international. It is good to talk.”
Rashida stood, beaming broadly, and clasped a startled Tara to her sizable frame. “Do they mind if we embrace them, too?” I asked.
“Of course not,” said Saida. We stood and embraced, and walked out into the night together. At last we had hit on common ground, the one remedy we shared—the company of like-minded women as a balm against trouble, a force for good in the battle with genies.
WE MADE OUR WAY through the cat’s cradle of the medina, passing through medieval ramparts to a square where we said good-bye.
“We’ll likely never see them again,” Tara said in her theatrical way. The words hung in the sudden hush when a van pulled away to deliver the widows home. I was aware how much history had transpired on this spot, how little changed was this place, this people. “But we formed a bond in a moment, don’t you think?” Tara turned pensive eyes on our dazed and sobered group. “We all love. We all hurt, no matter where we come from. I felt they were our sisters, our friends in shared tragedy.”
“But they were so different,” Marcia demurred. “For us, it’s a matter of emotions, psychology, doing what we need to do to motivate ourselves. But they have this additional layer of difficulty because of their society. They don’t control their destiny, whereas we do.”
Like a pomegranate, I thought. It is up to fate how lucky you will be.
“Yes,” Tara agreed. “How much lighter we are. How scared they were … lonely … ostracized. We have already decided to lead rich, full lives. It was a stark reminder that we have a choice.”
“It was depressing,” said Dawn, still haunted by the genies we’d unleashed.
Tara shook her head. “No, I feel we lifted their spirits, and they lifted us … to keep going.” She looked at each of us with firm resolve. “Because we can.”
chapter
TWENTY-EIGHT
what is this, rush hour or something?” Marcia flattened herself against the wall of a narrow passage, tucking her camera under her arm like the game ball at the Super Bowl. It was bad enough that so many people were packed into this constricted alley, but then a man shouted, “Balek!”—Look out!—and a mule nudged its way through bearing bolts of shimmering silk on its back. A donkey lugging a crate of Coca-Cola brought up the rear. Marcia twisted to avoid them. “Oh God, will the camels smell like this?”
Saida had led us again into the heart of the medina, this time by daylight, when the eerie emptiness of the night before had given way to this maelstrom. We were swirled through crowds that bore us along like rapids or pooled in eddies. Smells of dung and smoke and bubbling kettles of soup and rotting flesh from leather tanneries wafted in every direction. I sidestepped a donkey that muscled Lesley into a stall selling teapots. “Wouldn’t you know it?” she said. “I’m attractive to jackasses.”
She’d had a rocky night of sleep after our dinner with the Moroccan widows. Too many thoughts closed in around her. “Yesterday was so meaningful, I wanted so much to talk to someone about it. I was so grateful to Craig for not being like those men. I just wanted to talk to him, and I couldn’t reach him. He didn’t answer his phone.” At home, she said, they would lie in bed for hours at night and talk and talk before they went to sleep. “Now I don’t have that, and I’m so insecure.”
“You should take him at his word,” I said. “He says he loves you, and he wants time to sort things out with his kids. You have to assume he means it. You can’t get reassurance now because you’re here.”
“I know,” she said. “But today is the day he’s moving out.”
“Yallah!”—Let’s go!—Saida called.
Lesley collected herself and plunged back into the crush, determined to lose herself in the day.
A crying child toddling by was startled into silence at the sight of Dawn’s platinum hair. His mother turned and mimed a thank-you as she passed. After our evening with the Moroccan widows, I felt kinship with the women surging around us who otherwise would have struck me as picturesque in their exotic coverings, like theme park employees at Colonial Williamsburg. Many stopped to make kiss-kiss greetings with Saida so she could introduce us. There were strong communities within the medina that gave order to the seeming chaos. Each neighborhood, Saida said, was defined by its own mosque, school, fountain, grocer, and fondouk, or way station, for travelers and their beasts of burden. There was also a communal bakery, easily spotted because women bore rounds of dough there each morning and returned later in the day for fully baked loaves of bread. Environmentally, it’s genius—one oven for the whole street! And it does double duty heating water for the hammam, Saida told us.
We’d read before the trip about hammams—the public steam rooms and bathhouses. “Actually, they are much more,” said Saida. “The hammam is the place where the women meet and talk. It is not respectable for women to sit in cafés.” But while a husband might object to a wife going out with friends, no one can stop her from taking a bath, so the hammam is where the real social action is, gossip exchanged, problems worked through, marriages arranged. “A mother looking for a bride for her son can see if a woman has a beautiful body, so she will tell him she has found the most beautiful woman for him.”
“But women dress so modestly in the street,” I said. “They let it all hang out at the hammam?”
“That is where we get to know everything. We will go together. You will see.”
Marcia looked dubious, but the rest of us approved. “I want to try at least one new experience every day while we’re here,” said Lesley.
But there was no time for the hammam that day, thanks to another tantalizing component of the medina, the souks, where artisans make and sell everything under the sun. There was a henna souk and a slipper souk, a fabric souk and a leather souk. Make up the psychedelic shopping list of your dreams, and it’s likely we passed a closet-sized shop that sold something on it: tropical fish, severed goat’s heads, live chickens, fava beans, aphrodisiacs, breast enlargement cream, clay masks for hair, kohl for eyes. We saw baby shoes, tombstones, and filigreed silver belts that brides knot around caftans on their wedding days. The souks had us covered from cradle to grave. There was a guy on the floor of a cubbyhole using a Bunsen burner and a few primitive tools to make combs and bracelets out of sheeps’ horns. We passed men in an alley dunking skeins of silk thread into steaming basins of vegetable dye while kittens darted underfoot.
“I grew up in this souk,” Saida said. “My father was a tailor, and my mother was an embroiderer.”
Normally, I’m cynical about shopping on a trip. Globalization has led to homogenization—you can get the same swag everywhere, I thought. But the decorative arts of Fès put Prada and Gucci to shame, and our varsity shoppers took one look and flashed: the mall! Marcia scored first, snagging a geometric rug hand-knotted by a collective of women weavers, destined for her modern new living room. Lesle
y bought one with a primitive design so she could do over a space that Craig had been using as an office, and then snapped up a djellaba the color of olive leaves to keep her warm at night. Tara found an antique mirror appliquéd with amber and bone for the front hall of her new house. Even I, the shopping curmudgeon, succumbed to spices for Bob and dangling Berber earrings that Tara assured me would appeal to Lily. Each transaction, a protracted game of offers and counteroffers, ended with a benediction when we reached a price: “Bessahah wa toulaamr.” Or roughly, “Long and healthy life.”
We heard music—drums and lutes and tambourines—and Saida urged us to step inside a riad. It was just as we’d been told, a party for women, all in their finest jewels and silks, the colors of indigo and saffron and poppy, dyed right there in the fabric souk, I supposed. They were celebrating the birth of a baby, and as strangers, we were welcome to stay—there would be dancing later. But we would be making an early night. In the morning, the desert called. It was time to push on.
HEADING SOUTHEAST TOWARD the mountains at first light, we began a process of stripping away, beginning with the sensory overload of Fès. A hike in a cedar forest of the Middle Atlas cleared the smoke and fumes from our lungs. Saida taught us how to ululate, making a high-pitched, wavering sound with her throat and tongue that sounded musical coming from her but like a pack of harbor seals from us. We let loose anyway—who was to hear? “Only women ululate, only when they are happy,” she said. “And never by themselves. Only groups of women—it is shared happiness.”
“I have such a girl crush on Saida,” Lesley whispered.
I had been dreading these couple days of the trip, mostly motoring through increasingly barren countryside in the van, breaking for lunches or walks. But as more and more was stripped away, we carried on the most intimate conversations of our acquaintance. Towns yielded to scattered villages, where women washed rugs in streams, preparing their homes for feast days. We passed into the High Atlas Mountains, where even settlements gave way, and green forests faded into scrubby patches of dormant lavender. Marcia took scads of pictures, smiling her crooked half smile.
At first our conversations focused on matters from home. Collins had been sending Dawn enraptured text messages since we’d arrived, inviting her and the kids for Thanksgiving, even making plans to redo a guest room to their taste, all this after a single two-day date. Just when I think this is going too fast, he wrote to Dawn’s delight, then I think it’s not going fast enough. Dawn kept asking me what I thought of love at first sight, wanting details of how I had taken to Bob right away.
“I didn’t love him at first sight,” I said, “but I knew that he was someone I could love and probably would love, if that makes sense.”
But Collins’s messages stopped abruptly, and within a day Dawn plunged into despair. “He’s an attractive single guy. He must have other things going on.”
“Maybe something came up,” I said.
“Oh, something came up all right.”
Marcia turned to Lesley and said, “Thanks to you, even I get that innuendo.”
“Maybe I shouldn’t do Thanksgiving with him.” Dawn turned to address us from a seat near the front. “Because my kids will love him and then …” She moaned. “Oh … before I met Andries, I had the world by the balls. If some guy wanted to date me, he had to work at it.”
“So he’s a jerk,” said Marcia. “That doesn’t mean he doesn’t like you.”
“Give him a break, everybody,” I interjected. “It’s only been twenty-four hours. We were all better off without this technology.”
“I know, I know. It’s just that I want my life to be settled! No more uncertainty! I just want to know that this is it, that I can relax.”
We pondered this for a moment. All of us knew the bitter truth, that nothing—marriage, love, life itself—could be counted on to last, that certainty was a mirage, if an enticing one.
“When I was little, I used to consider being a nun,” Dawn said. That broke the mood with a laugh. “When things went wrong with guys, I used to think I was being punished for not following through. When Andries died, I thought that, too.”
“Dawn, honey, you need to relax,” said Tara. “You need to enjoy this moment, now, and stop worrying about the future. Let things percolate. The percolation is half the fun.”
From the distance afforded by these vast, unfamiliar mountains, Tara considered her own attitude toward uncertainty. “Will is the real deal,” she said, but she resisted thoughts of permanence or marriage. The two of them kept their separate homes, they dated, they saw each other on weekends, they were bound by love. She didn’t want the responsibility of being a stepmother and didn’t see the need for constant companionship. “This is it,” she said. “I’ve raised my family. I’m done. I’m enjoying this for what it is.”
I remembered something she had said at our very first meeting: “I’m trying to come to appreciate the not knowing.”
My instinct was to take Tara’s side. After everything we’d gone through, we knew who we were. We shouldn’t need the sanction of the state or even a shared home to feel complete. I admired Tara’s backbone for resisting the illusory security of marriage. Yet I’d been drawn to marriage myself. Was I weak for trying to wrap myself in certainty, even knowing it to be stitched in gossamer, or was I strong for taking the risk?
I looked out the window, my stomach turning at the sight of precipitous cliffs, and Tara interrupted my thoughts. “When you’ve lost a husband, it forces you to think about how to live … maybe to come up with what is a better way to live. You depend on yourself. And if you happen to be fortunate enough to meet a Bob or a Will or a Craig or somebody else, so much the better.”
“Kevin used to say, ‘I can’t make your happiness for you,’ ” Lesley said. “You have to be happy for yourself.” She sighed. “But I still want marriage. I told Craig before I left, I’m not here only for the good times. I’m here for the bad times, too. I know what that is.”
We waited in attentive silence as she turned away, toward the view, stung by the memory of Kevin. “I deserve a man who will fight for me,” she said at last with a note of finality. “I deserve better.”
OUR VAN SWOOPED and pivoted around hairpin turns as we reached the highest peaks. By now the colors had grown even fainter, dwindling from warm clay to taupe to mocha, just dry earth with a few rocks strewn about. We stopped for lunch on a terrace with a magnificent craggy view. Marcia tortured herself by grilling Saida for details about our desert camp, each new detail eliciting more anticipatory horror. The tents were woven from camel or goat hair, Saida wasn’t sure which. We’d be riding camels in the dark, returning home after sunset. We’d wash from copper jugs, heated over a flame. We wouldn’t be able to carry a change of clothes.
“I can’t wear the same clothes twice!” Marcia said.
“Marcia, haven’t you ever done a walk of shame?” I asked.
“No!”
We had to explain to Saida what that was, the first step in a tutorial on American sexual mores. It seemed that we were scandalizing her with explanations of condoms, oral sex, menopausal sex, you name it, but when Saida had to step away to make a request to the kitchen, she cried out: “Don’t talk more until I get back!”
“Saida, we’ve ruined you,” Tara said.
What did Saida think of us? I asked when she returned.
“I won’t deny that I have learned a lot from you,” she said after a moment’s careful thought, “and I appreciate how you treat me like one of you. You are a brave group of ladies who continue their life in a beautiful way. You are optimists, very chic, having fun, and hoping to meet a nice man in the future.” We basked in her generous description until she continued. “Women in our culture are different. They will say: ‘This is the end of our life.’ They are dead in life.”
Back in the van, we began a slow descent from the mountains. Saida told us that in this remote countryside, there were still a few elderly Berber widows who
had followed a nearly forgotten custom. When their husbands died and others tried to take away their land, these women tattooed blue beards on their faces. “It tells everyone, I am powerful. I do not need a man. I am the man of the house. It works!”
Self-reliance versus attachment. Independence versus love. How best to be powerful. We considered the choices we faced back home. The road ahead flattened out and a landscape the color of gravel blunted the perspective to either side. In the course of this journey, we had stripped away civilization, vegetation, life, color—complications. Now even the mountains were behind us. We were heading to an empty place.
chapter
TWENTY-NINE
yallah,’ Saida said. “Come. Everyone. You must go to the hammam.”
We had stopped at a hotel, a renovated old casbah in a grove of swaying date palms. Creaky and tired after hours in the van, I had zero interest in the hammam. The girly-girls in our group had tried the one in our posh Westernized hotel in Fès. They had warmed up wrapped in towels in a steam bath, and then an attendant escorted them each to a private room, applied some clay to their skin, and rinsed it off, treacly music playing all the while. It sounded like a reprise of our spa visit months ago.
So I was late showing up at this hammam, wrapped in nothing but a terrycloth robe, as instructed by Saida. Marcia hadn’t made it yet, either. We had all seized an opportunity to contact people back home, our last chance for several days, and she had been browbeating someone on her phone when last I saw her, something about business that was cooking in Australia. Did I say browbeating? Browbeating would be gentle for what Marcia was doing. She was giving somebody holy hell. Dawn at least got some relief by making a call. Collins said that he’d been out of touch because he left his phone at the office, a story she didn’t buy entirely but couldn’t dismiss entirely either. I had received a welcome e-mail from Bob: “I love you indecently,” he wrote. That would see me through.
