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.”