Saturday Night Widows (40 page)

“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

y
allah
,’ 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.

Steam blinded me when I stepped inside the
hammam
door. I began to make out a kaleidoscope of green and blue tiles on the floor and walls, and a large basin of running water, like a public well, when an indistinct shape appeared in the mist, gradually coming into focus as a Moroccan woman, her black hair tied in a loose topknot.

“Off!” she ordered, rapping the sleeve of my robe like the head nun at a Catholic school, only she was disconcertingly naked except for a pair of red cotton bikini underpants. Hysterical laughter broke out all around me, and through the fog I made out human forms, some of them sprawled on stone slabs, some on the floor, each one naked as the day she was born.

“Nobody here but us rotisserie chickens,” said Dawn.

“When in Rome …” I whipped off my robe and tossed it outside the door. I know women are supposed to aspire to utmost thinness, but I was relieved that Bob’s cooking had put a little flesh on me by now. I hoped I looked less pinched, more like one of Matisse’s Moroccan odalisques.

“Down!” the headmistress commanded.

I dropped to my knees, arms in the air, in the international posture of “Don’t shoot!” but she wasn’t satisfied. “Down,” she repeated, her breasts dangling in front of my face, so I stretched out on the floor.

Next thing I knew, her hands were all over me, and I mean
all
over me, under my arms, behind my ears and—“Open!”—between my legs, rubbing in some kind of black soap that smelled of eucalyptus and olives. She let me sit up and marinate while she rushed from one to another of the Blossoms, scrubbing and polishing like the employee of the month at a car wash, while we got more and more raucous in turn. This was nothing like the sissy spa experience my girly-girls were used to. It was a bachelorette party without the booze, not an event for anyone who took herself, or her friends, too seriously.

“What is going on here?” I asked. But before anyone could answer, the headmistress advanced on me with a bucket of water and dumped it right over my head. I was still sputtering when she refilled it and smacked me with gallons of water in the face, from the side, the back, while the Blossoms howled. “Down,” she ordered again, and this time she spread a scratchy paste all over me, leaving it to form a crust.

Saida had headed off alone to some kind of whirlpool bath in another room, but before she left she had told the others fond memories of the
hammam
from her childhood, when friends would spend the day ululating and turning buckets upside down to beat them like drums, a ritual of pleasure and escape. The mud I was steeping in right now, made of clay and roses and chamomile and lavender, was the same brew she remembered from those halcyon days.

The others left to take a breather from the steam, and the attendant zeroed in on me again, scrubbing the mud with a glove that felt like a Brillo pad, as sheets of outer skin peeled off me. Unable to communicate in Arabic, I begged for mercy in rudimentary French.
“Pas trop fort?”

It was then, through the fog, that I saw a stunning sight. It was
Marcia, pale and shiny, squinting through the steam as she crept into the
hammam
like a bond trader balancing on a ledge on Black Friday, her face still glowering from the fight on the phone. The headmistress, arms akimbo, wasted no time. “Down!” she barked. I waited for Marcia to explode, to pull alpha-female rank on this martinet and say, “No,
you
get down!”

“Down!” the mistress ordered again. To my shock, and no doubt hers, Marcia hit the floor and submitted to the black soap treatment. I was sucking in my breath at the thought of the outraged objections this indignity would set off, when Marcia opened her mouth wide and emitted the most surprised and hysterical laughter I have heard in my life. I knew what was coming when I saw buckets being filled, but Marcia didn’t until she took a shot full in the face. More water rained down on her head until the laughing stopped, and I grew concerned. Had a line finally been crossed? Would an enraged Marcia touch off a cross-cultural dispute with only me, clad in a layer of mud, to mediate? I heard nothing but the hissing of steam and the trickling of spigots.

Finally, I got up my nerve and asked: “Are you okay over there?”

Marcia spat out, “Of course I’m okay. I was laughing so hard I swallowed clay!”

It was my turn for another splashdown, and the two of us soared into new flights of laughter.

We met the others in their robes under the palms. After much recounting of our latest adventure and much comparison of our rosy, gleaming flesh, Lesley got serious. “How safe we feel with each other,” she said. “It’s sacred.”

And how far we had come. Eleven months into our year together, all the masks were finally off. Venturing deeper and deeper into
Morocco, we had removed ourselves from familiarity of place. Now we’d stripped away something of our everyday selves, as well—modesty, privacy, a couple layers of skin. We would approach the end of our journey stripped and cleansed, with skin like newborn babies, everything washed away but each other.

“Do you ever feel when we’re all together,” Dawn posed, “that none of the bad stuff happened to us? Even though we gathered for that purpose, I forget it sometimes. It’s not such a part of us as it was a year ago.”

“We’ve seen it lift,” I said.

“There are times when it feels like we’re together,” Dawn said, “just because we’re together.”

“W
ELL
, B
ECKY
, you finally got what you wanted,” Marcia said, not pleased, not pleased at all. “We’re in the middle of
nowhere
.”

And it wasn’t promising. The van had dropped us off at the very edge of the Sahara, in the far east of Morocco near the Algerian border, where we waited for Range Rovers to pick us up and continue. The earth was flatter, the color paler, even more neutral than we’d seen before, the ground nothing but cracked, hard-packed clay, too dry even for dust. A lone man buzzed by on a motor scooter, balancing a goat on his lap. We’d left behind us the last oasis, Rissani, a stop on caravan routes since the seventh century, populated by women covered completely but for their eyes and tall men in turbans and robes the color of the sky.

“I was seeing an acupuncturist before we left,” Denise said. He’d been helping to relieve some stress-related pains she’d been having.
“He told me that the most distinctive thing about the desert is that there is no smell.”

“What about the camels?” said Marcia.

“Marcia, I’m trying to say something serious here. I was telling him about how I needed to get out of the past and get on with the rest of my life, how hard that is to do. He said the desert is the perfect place for me to be, because one of the main reasons people stay connected to the past is that they associate smells with people or places or events.” We nodded, remembering how we had saved our husbands’ worn T-shirts, how the scent of leaves burning in the fall or flowers budding in the spring reminded us of unwelcome anniversaries. “The desert is the perfect place to disconnect from the past and be in the present.”

“I’d like to leave behind the feelings I don’t want to have anymore,” said Dawn. The rest of us agreed.

“We should have a ceremony when we get there,” said Tara. We decided on a ritual we’d seen at the camp for grieving children where we’d volunteered. Each of us would write down what we’d like to say to our departed husbands, and we’d place our notes in the fire at the desert camp. “I’d better start now,” Tara said. “I’ll need five pages.”

But two Range Rovers arrived, piloted by Blue Men, members of a nomadic tribe of Berbers who had traversed the Sahara in peacock-blue robes since the third century BC. They seemed unapproachable, nodding a quick greeting, their faces half obscured by scarves and mirrored sunglasses. We bumped farther east across the stony desert floor, lulled by monotony in the still heat. A shimmer to the north turned out to be a mirage. In the distance before us, mountains gradually appeared, but they were mountains unlike
any I had ever seen, mountains the color of gold. “What are those?” I called to Saida in the backseat.

“Those are no mountains,” she replied. “They are the famous dunes, the Erg Chebbi.”

I’d seen sand dunes at the beach before, but nothing like these, majestic tidal waves sweeping toward us, dunes that rose eight or nine hundred feet in height. We gasped with astonishment as we drew closer, finally skidding to a stop at the base. This was the place we’d been searching for: a place unlike any other.

Saida showed us how to wrap scarves around our heads and faces to protect us from the sun, and it was time to go. After all the anxious buildup about camels, we took to them right away. There was a fair amount of squealing on our part when Ali, our Berber guide, helped us in turn with the awkward mounting, the camels whipping us forward, then back as they stood first on their back legs, then their front, but the camels themselves took our silliness in stride. Marcia squeezed her legs into the saddle to the point of bruising, but she stayed on board with teeth-gritting determination interspersed with laughter of the sort she’d unleashed in the
hammam
. Everyone felt the vertiginous rush of adventure.