Wanderlust (12 page)

We picked up the tie-dyed rectangles. Positioning one end in a horizontal line just under my eyes, I tied the two top corners behind my head. Now I was painting my canvas with the local colors. In the West we talk critically about conformity, about the pressure to look a certain way, but it never goes as far as this. Extreme veiling, the kind practiced here on the Arabian peninsula, wasn't just for hiding features. It turned individuals into an undifferentiated mass.

The final addition was the bedspread expanse of cotton. I gathered mine up and draped it over my head, looking in the mirror to
try to imitate local women. They held extra fabric over their arms, and clutched the whole thing together in the front. “My ankles are too dressy,” I said. I wished I could wear my hiking boots, which made me feel tough and protected, but I slipped on the leather flip-flops instead. Our creations were complete.

“How do we get out of here?” I asked.

“Quickly,” she said. I still didn't believe we were going to do this. I felt like a child playing dress-up. Did we have to take our game outside? But it was too late; we'd issued the mutual challenge.

We flew down the stairs, stifling a laugh as we passed the front desk. The hell with them, I thought, we weren't breaking any laws. As far as I knew.

We turned right out of our hotel door, along a busy shopping street in the new part of the city. I stopped laughing, but my heart beat faster.

“Just walk, just walk,” Mona said, sounding alarmed, and breaching her own commandment that we should speak no English.

My breathing slowed, but I still felt befuddled—there seemed to be a din in my brain blocking out the street sounds. Then I remembered why I couldn't hear: There were three layers of fabric over my ears. I couldn't see very well, either, with my peripheral vision blocked by the bedspread. I concentrated on walking at a normal pace, and we settled in beside each other. I tried not to adjust, shift, fidget, itch. Everything seemed wrong. My fabric was dragging on the ground, I was too tall, my feet were too pale, my ankles too sparkly.

The sidewalk was thronged at the end of a business day, with men and women poring over watch displays, electronics, and bins of shoes. Most of the women were dressed exactly like us, the same garish patterns covering the same bits. I tried to ascertain funny looks, sideways glances.

I turned to Mona and shrugged.
“Mish mushkeela,”
I said. No problem. She didn't answer, but then she probably couldn't hear me. I thought maybe she looked worried, but then I couldn't see her face.

We turned right onto the dirt road that led into the old city, a mini-
souk
lined with vegetable stalls. This was interesting, I thought, although not as much fun as I had hoped. I couldn't shake my simmering anxiety. The problem, I realized, was that while I knew what local women looked like, I still had no real idea how they behaved. I didn't know their signals and postures, or what they did when. As an obvious foreigner, I knew who I was in the street and how I reacted to things. I knew that if my conduct was eccentric by local standards, it was the accepted eccentricity of a foreigner.

Mona started showing far too much interest in a display of tomatoes, and then, to my horror, asked how much they were. The vendor either couldn't hear or couldn't understand her. She reached up under her tie-dyed veil and pulled down the hatch of her underscarf, and tried again, to no avail. Hubris had taken over a realistic assessment of her ability to communicate. I admired her nerve even as it dismayed me. She kept trying to talk to the tomato man until finally I tugged her on toward the old city.

A few minutes later I was pretty sure we were being followed. And, either because we were nearing the old city or because the shopping day was coming to a close, there were suddenly many fewer people around. In fact, there were no women, none except for us. And it was dusk. Since our first night in Yemen, which now seemed like a distant, innocent time, we had hardly ever gone out at dusk. The two young men were definitely following us. I bowed my head to Mona's and told her. We sped up. They sped up. We turned a corner, they followed. My skin bristled with fear.

The confounding thing was that we had no idea why we'd been
singled out. Being harassed for being Western was at least reassuringly predictable. Maybe these two had seen through our disguise, but maybe not—it was hard to say which would be worse. Maybe local women who stayed out after dusk got followed all the time. Maybe only hookers stayed out after dusk. Maybe they thought we were some girls they planned to meet. I was ignorant, and this was a stupid idea. As myself I knew what I did: I told them to scram, yelled shaming words, or raised my fist in their face. But I had no idea what a Sanaa woman did.

“Left,” Mona commanded, and I followed; we were trying to lose them now, handicapped by the looming darkness and our muffled ears. We'd entered the old city, and were on a street lined with sandstone four-story homes. And suddenly, we realized, we were at a dead end. I hoped for a moment that they hadn't followed us into the alley. But then we heard them coming up behind us, one of them saying something I couldn't understand.

“Don't turn around yet, don't turn around yet,” Mona whispered loudly, just as I was about to. I saw what she meant; the logic of instinct kicked in. I didn't turn around but instead made a fist with my right hand. I remembered something Graham had taught me years before—why had he taught me? I couldn't remember. It was so much more useful than telling me that dangers lurked. When you make a fist, he had said, don't hold your thumb under your fingers, or you'll hurt it when your knuckles connect with a jaw.

We let them come close.

“Now,” Mona hollered, and we both turned around. I swung and hit a shoulder, and the impact ran up my arm. He exclaimed and fell back, undoubtedly more surprised than hurt. We ran between them. One of them shouted something after us. We ran back to the end of the alley, hearts pounding, then right, and right again. My
thighs burned and I thought I'd never run so fast, though really I'd just never run like it mattered so much. I held my fabric up in my arms so that it didn't trip me up.

When we had made a third turn, we slowed down and looked over our shoulders. There was no one there, and no sound in the street except for the smack of our flip-flops on stone. As mysteriously as they'd begun to follow us, they'd disappeared. We didn't know why they'd started or stopped. We didn't know who they were—they could have been cops, rapists, bored teens. Conceivably all three.

Now night had fallen, the streets were deserted, and the moon lit up the paving stones. Our panicked turns had gotten us completely lost. I pulled out the hand-drawn map one of the Peace Corps volunteers had made. The compound was near a well-known mosque, but the map was drawn from the point at which we were supposed to have entered the old city. The streets didn't have names, nor the houses numbers. We wandered in silence, down alleys too narrow for moonlight, between walls punctuated with stained-glass squares lit up from within. My heart stopped racing, and I saw that the windows were beautiful. When we turned onto a broader street, we saw a white-trimmed minaret and two domes catching the moonbeams. I lifted our map again.

We ran down the street and reached the tall metal gate to the Peace Corps compound. Our host, Aaron, came down to the guardhouse, a forbidden beer in his hand; he was wearing a Grateful Dead T-shirt. “There you are,” he said cheerfully, a walking piece of America, and instantly we'd crossed worlds.

We stepped into the courtyard, and before the door had clanged shut Mona and I were clawing at our clothing as though the fabric were burning skin. I pulled my black scarf violently back, almost choked myself, stopped to untie the knots, and threw it away from
me. Mona dashed her bedsheet to the ground like she thought she could break it; I wrestled mine into a ball and stepped on it, and finally yanked my tie-dyed face cloth, which had fallen around my neck, off over my head. Aaron backed away and watched our frenzy from a distance until we settled down. He had female Peace Corps colleagues in Yemen; he'd seen them go quietly nuts. Then he led us to a room where we flopped into plastic chairs, and silently, solemnly, handed us cold beers.

We landed in Cairo in the middle of a weekday with the feeling of returning to civilization. I felt welcomed into the dry, sunny heat, the honking and dust. In the taxi from the airport we decided we had to eat before parting ways. It took only a moment to decide: We asked the driver to take us to Pizza Hut.

chapter ten

W
hen I returned in midsummer
from Egypt to Vancouver, I took a job as a hostess in a downtown restaurant called Penny Lane. It was never quite busy enough. I stood for long hours at the podium by the entrance, and when that grew too dull I sat down and rolled silverware into napkins, which at least resulted in the satisfying accumulation of piles of bundled cutlery. The manager was not at all impressed that I'd spent the past year in Egypt, a fact that drew only a blank stare in the interview, after which I moved on to emphasize the one time I'd worked briefly—and unsuccessfully, moving slowly and forgetting orders—as a waitress. You could explore all kinds of different worlds, I now saw, but couldn't necessarily reconcile them to one another. This didn't bother me at the time. I could infiltrate the worlds of rich Egyptian kids, or strict Muslims, or Spanish nightclubs, or the young and aimless wait staff of my own hometown, who were themselves ramblers from elsewhere, Quebec and Ontario and Australia and Britain. I took pride in being a chameleon. Still, it felt strange to let Egypt slip so quickly behind me, as though I'd lost a limb and continued merrily on my way. There had been no debriefing. One day I was in Cairo, school having ended, most of my American friends already gone. The next I was in Alexandria, Virginia, where I was stopping to visit my half sister on my way home.

Just one instance of reverse culture shock lingered in my mind. Within hours of my arrival, my sister and I went out walking among a milling summer crowd on a boardwalk on the Potomac River. The weather was hot and humid. I bought an ice cream for four dollars, stunned at the price. And then I noticed the girls in sports bras, which stunned me even more. They were wearing their underwear in public; they were nearly naked. Disbelief passed over me, then disdain at their immodesty. Egypt had beaten a new sensibility into me. I'd been one of those girls a year earlier. I remembered cleaning my new Cairo apartment in a sports bra when two friends had come over, and how I hadn't even put on a T-shirt. Our modesty or immodesty was all arbitrary, I thought. Capable of growing in whatever direction was dictated by our surroundings. But once we were trained, once our culture was all in place, it was hard to dislodge.

Graham was living in his father's trailer home and working as a park ranger, and many nights I drove out to White Pine Lake to pick him up. He closed up the park and finished work at eleven. He had to meet me at the gate to the park to let me drive in. One night I pulled up to the gate, which was at the side of a winding wooded road, to find him standing next to his truck, buck naked except for his work boots. I burst into laughter and drove through. It took him a minute to close and lock the gate, and the whole time I watched him, wondering if a car was going to come cruising along the public road at any minute. I was enchanted by Graham's abandon. I thought maybe it was an impossible thing for a girl to feel, but I wanted it for myself anyway.

I went back to Seattle to begin my senior year, and Graham moved back to Whistler, the mountain town where he'd spent the previous winter. He'd saved up for a season lift pass and planned to spend as much time as possible on a snowboard. When he was in
Egypt he'd sometimes talked about going to college, but now he only mentioned the possibility occasionally and without much conviction. His enthusiasms were strong—powdery snow, photography, teaching himself the guitar. It was hard for me to see where these would go. I didn't judge him, because I hadn't solved the riddle of where I was going, either. I began to see that the future self he was creating might be radically different from my own.

Still, we were dutiful to our love. It was like a religion with two members, and whatever doubt we felt, we paid it our devotions. He took the Greyhound bus down to Seattle, or I drove my Ford Escort to Whistler, which I could do in about four hours with no stops. I was an alien in his home, a four-bedroom condo with eight housemates. He had his own room, the smallest one, with a single bed that we shared. I had a clunky laptop computer and piles of folders. While he was at work I set up shop at his kitchen table and pounded out my senior thesis, to be titled “Saudi Arabia and the Reunification of Yemen.” His roommates passed in and out and talked to me about the snow conditions; I made a point of being
au courant,
my small way of fitting in.