Girls of Riyadh

by Rajaa Alsanea

  “Hey! Check her out. The pharaohs are back!” The influence of Lamees’s Egyptian grandmother was always readily apparent in Lamees’s sharp tongue and manner.

  She and Michelle studied the heavy makeup that coated the face of their friend Gamrah, especially her eyes, which had turned the color of blood from all the kohl seeping into them.

  Michelle’s real name is Mashael, but everyone, including her family, calls her Michelle. She answered Lamees in English.

  “Where the hell did she get that dress?”

  “Poor Gammoorah,* I wish she had gone to the dressmaker who made Sadeem’s dress instead of this mess she came up with herself! Just look at Sadeem’s gorgeous dress, though—anyone would think it’s by Elie Saab.”

  “Oh, whatever. Like there’s even one lady in this provincial crowd who would know the difference! Do you think anyone has any clue my dress is by Badgley Mishka? By God, her makeup is painful! Her skin is too dark for such a chalky foundation. They’ve made her practically blue—and look at the contrast between her face and her neck. Ewww…so vulgar!”

  “Eleven o’clock! Eleven o’clock!”

  “It’s one-thirty.”

  “No, you idiot, I mean, turn to your left like the hands of a clock when it’s eleven—you will never get it, will you—you’ll never pass Gossip 101! Anyway, check out that girl—she’s got ‘talent,’ all right!”

  “Which ‘talent’—front bumper or back?”

  “Are you cross-eyed? Back, of course.”

  “Too much. They ought to take a chunk off her and give Gamrah a dose on the front, like that collagen stuff everyone is using.”

  “The most ‘talented’ of all of us is Sadeem—look at how feminine she looks with those curves. I wish I had a back bumper like hers.”

  “I think she really needs to ditch a few pounds and work out like you do. Alhamdu lillah, thank God, I never gain weight no matter how much I eat, so I’m not worried.”

  “What luck for you, I swear. I live in a state of permanent starvation to keep my body looking like this.”

  The bride noticed her friends sitting at the table nearby, smiling and waving their arms at her while they tried to cover up the question that lurked in their eyes: Why isn’t it me up there? Gamrah was ecstatic, almost intoxicated with this precious moment. She had always seen herself as the least favored of any of them, but now here she was, the first of all to get married.

  Waves of guests started coming up to the dais to congratulate the bride, now that the photography session was over. Sadeem, Michelle and Lamees all stepped up and hugged Gamrah while whispering something into her ear: “Gamrah, wow! Mashaa Allah, God’s will be done! So-o-o gorgeous! The whole evening I’ve been praying to God to take good care of you.” “Congratulations, sweetie! You look great—that gown is stunning on you!” “My God, girl, you’re spectacular. A vision! Best-looking bride I’ve ever seen.”

  Gamrah’s smile grew broader as she listened to her friends’ praise and noted the envy half hidden in their eyes. The three of them posed for photographs with the happy bride. Sadeem and Lamees started dancing around her while the eyes of all those older women who devote themselves to arranging marriages were glued to all of their bodies. Lamees was proud to show off her distinctive height and her gym-toned body, and she made sure to dance slightly apart from Sadeem, who had expressly warned her beforehand against dancing next to her so that people wouldn’t compare their bodies. Sadeem was always longing to have her curves liposuctioned so that she could be as slim as Lamees and Michelle.

  Suddenly the men came shooting through the doors like arrows, the fastest arrow of all being the groom, Rashid Al-Tanbal, who headed straight for his bride on the dais. The women retreated en masse, desperately searching for whatever they or their friends had that would conceal their hair and faces—not to mention any other revealing body parts—from the eyes of those men on the march.

  When the groom and his companions were just steps away, Lamees yanked up the corner of the tablecloth to cover her cleavage. Her twin sister Tamadur used a shawl that matched her dress to cover her hair and open back, while Sadeem whipped on her black embroidered abaya* and silk veil, enveloping her body and the lower half of her face. Michelle, though, remained Michelle: she stayed exactly as she was and eyed the men one by one, paying no attention to the mutterings and truly sharp stares that she drew from some of the women.

  Rashid plowed toward the stage along with Gamrah’s father, her uncle and her four brothers. Each man tried to download as many female faces as he could onto his mental hard drive, while the ladies, for their part, were staring at Gamrah’s uncle, in his forties, who bore an unmistakable resemblance to the handsome poet Prince Khalid Al-Faisal.

  When Rashid reached his bride Gamrah, he flipped the veil back from her face as his mother had rehearsed with him, then took his place by her side, giving way for the rest of her male relatives to pass on their good wishes to her. He settled himself next to her and then the other men crowded around them to congratulate the couple on their blessed, auspicious and fortunate marriage.

  The voices of the bride’s friends floated upward in the ballroom’s hot air. “A thousand blessings and peace be upon you, beloved of Allaaaaah, Mohammed!” the bride’s friends chanted, and the piercing sound of women’s trills filled the room. The men, except for the groom, soon left the place heading home as their part in the females’ celebration was over and their own celebration—which was only a big dinner—had finished before the females’ party even started. The couple, followed closely by every female relative, headed toward the food tables to cut the cake.

  It was then that Gamrah’s friends started chanting at the top of their voices. “We want a kiss! We want a kiss!” Rashid’s mother smiled and Gamrah’s mother blushed red. As for Rashid, he sent the girls a scathing stare that sliced them into silence. Gamrah cursed her friends under her breath for embarrassing her in front of him, and cursed him even more for embarrassing her in front of her friends by refusing to kiss her!

  Sadeem’s eyes welled with tears as she watched her childhood friend, her Gamrah, leave the ballroom with her new husband to go to the hotel where they would spend the night before heading off for a honeymoon in Italy. Immediately after the honeymoon they would leave Riyadh for the United States, where Rashid was to begin studying for a PhD.

  Among the group of four girls, Gamrah Al-Qusmanji was closest to Sadeem, as they had been classmates since second grade. Mashael Al-Abdulrahman—or Michelle, as we knew her—didn’t join them until the second year at middle school, after she returned with her parents and little Meshaal—or Misho, as everyone called her younger brother—from America. Her father had gone to college there, at Stanford University, where he met their mother. After college he stayed in America for a few years to work and start his family. Only a year after Michelle came back to her home country to live, she transferred to a school where all the classes were taught in English. She simply didn’t have the command of Arabic that she needed in order to attend Sadeem and Gamrah’s school. At her new school, she got to know Lamees Jeddawi, who became her closest friend. Lamees had grown up in the capital city of Riyadh, but, as her last name implied, her family was originally from Jeddah—a port city with a long tradition of bringing together people from many places and therefore the most liberal city in the kingdom. Gamrah’s family was originally from, Qasim, a city known for its ultraconservative and strict character. Only Michelle was not from a well-known family tribe linked to a certain region.

  In college, Sadeem studied business management, while Lamees went to medical school.* Michelle decided on computer science. Gamrah, the only one among them who wasn’t so keen on her studies in high school, needed to use pull from several family friends to get accepted to college as a history major, one of the easy fields to get into in college. But she got engaged a few weeks after the semester started, and she decided to withdraw in order to devote herself full-time to planning the wedding. Sin
ce she would be moving to America right after the wedding anyway so that her husband could finish graduate school there, it seemed like an especially good decision.

  IN HER ROOM at the Hotel Giorgione in Venice, Gamrah sat on the edge of the bed. She rubbed her thighs, legs and feet with a whitening lotion of glycerine and lemon that her mother made for her. Her mother’s Golden Rule was spinning in her mind. Don’t be easy. Refusal—it’s the secret to activating a man’s passion. After all, her older sister Naflah didn’t give herself to her husband until the fourth night, and her sister Hessah was more or less the same. But she was setting a new record: it had been seven nights and her husband hadn’t touched her. Rashid hadn’t touched her even though she had been quite ready to ditch her mother’s theories after the first night, when she took off her wedding dress and put on her ivory-colored nightgown (which she’d put on quite a few times before the wedding, in front of the mirror in her room, provoking the admiration of her mother, who had murmured God’s name over and over to ward off envy as she gave her daughter a few suggestive winks). Her mother’s delighted approval had filled Gamrah with confidence and pride, even though she knew that the expression on her mama’s face was a bit overdone.

  But on her wedding night she came out of the bathroom to find him…asleep. And although she almost could have sworn that he was faking it, a theory her mother dismissed in their last telephone conversation as “Satan’s evil whisperings,” she agreed to devote all of her energy to “leading him on,” especially since her mother had recently announced to her on the phone that the policy of withholding had decidedly backfired in this case.

  Since Gamrah’s marriage to Rashid, her mother had gotten bolder about discussing “the business of men and women.” In fact, before her marriage contract was signed, her mother hadn’t talked about such matters at all. Afterward, though, Gamrah got immersion training in the art of seduction from the same woman who had ripped pages out of the romance novels Gamrah used to borrow from her friends at school, and who wouldn’t even let Gamrah go over to her friends’ houses, with the exception of Sadeem’s, after Gamrah’s mother had gotten to know Sadeem’s aunt Badriyyah quite well through several social circles among other ladies of the neighborhood.

  Gamrah’s mother was a firm believer in the theory that “woman is to man as butter is to sun.” But her strong convictions that girls should be utterly naïve and guys should be experienced melted away in an instant the moment the girl had that marriage contract. As for Gamrah, she started listening to her mother’s anecdotes and treatises on “the enterprise of marriage” with the heightened enjoyment and sense of pride of a young man whose father offers him a cigarette to smoke in front of him for the first time.

  2.

  To: seerehwenfadha7et@yahoogroups.com

  From: “seerehwenfadha7et”

  Date: February 20, 2004

  Subject: The Girls Rally Round Gamrah’s Big Day, in Their Own Way

  First, I have a little message for the following gentlemen: Hassan, Ahmad, Fahad and Mohammed, who made my day with their earnest e-mail inquiries.

  The answer is: Uh-uh! Forget it, guys…no, we cannot “get to know each other.”

  Now that I have applied my signature bright red lipstick, I will pick up the story where I left off last week.

  After Gamrah’s wedding her friends lined up the petite keepsake clay jars engraved with the names of the bridal couple alongside the other souvenirs they had collected from other friends’ weddings. Every last one of Gamrah’s girlfriends was secretly hoping that the keepsake from her own wedding would be the next one to be added.

  Well before the wedding, their little clique—the shillah—had made special preparations for its own intimate precelebration celebration. The idea was to put on something like the bachelorette party that, in the West, friends of the bride throw for her before the nuptials. The girls weren’t interested in doing a DJ party, because these days, that was becoming as common as sand. Besides, a DJ party meant that it would have to be a positively massive dance party that might even have involved hiring a professional local taggaga, a female singer, the kind that once upon a time just had a drum backup but now might have a whole band. They would need to send out invitations to every one of their girlfriends and female relatives and everyone that anyone knew, while pretending to keep the bride in the dark the whole time. And, of course, the little shillah of friends hosting the party would be burdened with all of the expenses, which would mount up to nothing less than several thousand riyals.

  But Gamrah’s friends wanted to do something new. They wanted to come up with something so bold and so much fun that others after them would imitate it, and then it would become a trend, and everyone would know who had invented it.

  Gamrah arrived bright red in the face—and scarlet all over her body—because she had just come from a scrubbing at the Moroccan hammam as well as having the hair plucked from all over her face with a thread and from her body with sticky sugar-paste halawa. They were all to meet at Michelle’s house. The hostess greeted them wearing baggy trousers with lots of pockets and an oversized jacket—gear that artfully concealed any sign of femininity—plus a bandanna that hid her hair. To top it all off, she had on a pair of colored sunglasses that gave her the appearance of an adolescent boy who has escaped parental surveillance. Lamees wore a masculine-style flowing white thobe with a shimagh draped over her head and kept in place with a snugly fitting black eqal.* With her height and athletic body she really did look like a guy, and a handsome one, too. The rest of them were wearing embroidered abayas. But these abayas weren’t the loose teepees that you see women wearing on the street. These were fitted at the waist and hips and they were very attractive! With the abayas, the girls wore black silk lithaams that covered everything from the bridge of their noses to the bottom of their throats, which of course only emphasized the beauty of their kohl-lined eyes, their tinted contact lenses and their outlandish eyeglasses all the more.

  Michelle had an international driver’s license. She took charge: she drove the BMW X5 SUV with its dark-tinted windows. She had managed to rent it through one of the car showrooms by putting the rental in the name of her family’s male Ethiopian driver. Lamees took her place next to Michelle while Sadeem and Gamrah climbed into the backseats. The CD player was on full blast. The girls sang along and swayed their abaya-clad shoulders as if they were dancing on the seats.

  Their first stop was the famous café in Tahliya Street. But when Michelle parked the vehicle, the SUV’s darkened windows gave them away in an instant: since tinted car windows are only used when women who need to be concealed are inside, all the guys in the vicinity, with their keen hunter eyes and their ready instincts, knew right off that the X5 had to be a priceless catch* They jumped in their cars and surrounded the SUV on both sides. After the girls got the drinks they wanted from the drive-through, the entire parade started to move toward the big shopping mall in Al-Olayya Street, which was the girls’ second stop. Meanwhile, the girls were taking down as many phone numbers as they could. They did not have to work very hard, because these numbers were generously showered upon them by the guys. The girls could memorize those with catchy sequences and repeated digits as the guys stuck out their heads through their cars’ windows while driving and kept repeating them for the girls to write down. The girls also copied from placards the guys had hung on the windows of their cars so that girls in neighboring cars could see the numbers clearly. The truly bold knights among them held out personal business cards, passing them through the windows to be snatched up by the girls, who were every bit as brave as the aspiring Romeos.

  At the mall entrance the girls got out. Behind them appeared a rush of young men, but they all came to a stop uncertainly in front of the security guard. It was his job to keep all unmarried men from entering the mall after the call to the Isha prayer that ushered in nightfall. The weaklings fell back, but one lone fellow summoned his courage and approached Michelle. With her lovely face
and delicate features, which she was quite simply incapable of concealing in her eccentric attire, Michelle had stood out from the start as a girl who was possibly bold enough to be looking for adventure. The guy asked Michelle if she would allow him to go in with them as a member of the family, and he offered her a thousand riyals for the privilege. Michelle was astonished at his nerve. But she accepted the deal without much delay, and she and her friends surged forward beside him as if he were one of their group.

  Once inside the mall the young women split up into two groups, one made up of Sadeem and Gamrah, the other of Lamees, Michelle and the handsome young man.

  His name was Faisal. Laughing, Lamees remarked that no guys these days had the old Najdi Bedouin names, like Obaid or Duyahhim. They all pretended they had one of those cool names like Faisal or Saud or Salman just to impress girls. He laughed along with them, swearing that it was his real name, and invited the two girls to dinner at an elegant restaurant outside the mall. Michelle turned down the invitation. Before leaving them, in fulfillment of the agreement, he gave her two five-hundred-riyal notes after writing his cell phone number on one of them and his full name on the other: Faisal Al-Batran.

  Women in the mall had an annoying way of following Gamrah, Sadeem and the rest of the girls with their eyes. It didn’t matter that their face veils were in place: the girls could feel the sharp and threatening challenge of the women’s inspections. They felt uncomfortably that any one of those women might as well be saying to them, I’ve figured out who you are, but you don’t know who I am.

  That’s the way things are here in the shops and the malls: guys stare at women for their own reasons, while women stare at each other just because they are nosy! And they have no excuse for it. A girl can’t stroll about in the malls under the protection of God without being checked out thoroughly by everyone, especially her own kind, from her abaya to the covering over her hair to the way she walks and the bags she carries and in which direction she looks and in front of what merchandise she stops. Is it envy? The French playwright Sacha Guitry was so on the mark when he said, “Women don’t pretty themselves up for men: they do it to get back at other women.”