Girls of Riyadh

Gamrah accustomed herself to her new life. It had become clear to her that Rashid’s behavior toward her was not just a matter of feeling shy or embarrassed with the wife who had suddenly assailed his life. It was something more. Gamrah did not have it in her to actually give a name to his doings—not, anyway, the name that echoed in her head, even if a certain string of words kept on seeping out from her mind in spite of herself, and then creeping into her troubled heart: My husband, whom I love, hates me. He wants to throw me out.

Just a few weeks after their arrival in Chicago—and after Rashid’s grumbling about her laziness and how she never left the apartment had grown louder—Gamrah got used to going out by herself to shop for household goods at the end of every week. Rashid himself was not prepared to teach her to drive, but he had no confidence that she could understand and be understood by a foreign teacher with her poor, broken English. So he turned for help to the wife of one of his Arab friends who had offered to teach Gamrah how to drive, for a fee. After Gamrah failed the driving test three times in a row, however, Rashid put a stop to the driving lessons and ordered her to learn how to use public transportation to do what she had to do.

Whenever she went out, Gamrah wore a long overcoat with a hijab.* Even her clothes became a source of irritation to her husband after a while: “Why don’t you wear ordinary clothes like the other women here? It’s as if you are trying to embarrass me in front of my friends with the things you wear! And then you wonder why I don’t take you out with me!”

Neither Gamrah nor her mother could really understand why he was so annoyed. What was the source of the constant irritation and tension that seemed to have overcome Rashid? Yet, in spite of her distress and misery, Gamrah was prepared to do anything to make the marriage work. Or at least to keep it going.

On one of the rare days when they were both at home, Gamrah kept after her husband to take her to a movie, and he finally relented. After they arrived at the theater and he found two seats for them, she surprised him by taking off her coat and hijab before sitting down. She gave him a shy smile, trying to read his thoughts at that crucial moment. He studied her with a sidelong stare, and after just a few seconds, he said, “Taking them off isn’t making you look any better. So just put them on again.”

Before the wedding, her delight about the engagement, and about the groom, who was such a good catch—so totally elegant—and all of the bridal finery from Lebanon with a dowry that no girl in the family had been able to top—all of this was too much to allow any doubts to creep up on Gamrah. But now there were plenty of doubts and even more questions.

So why would he marry me if he didn’t want me? Gamrah asked herself time and time again. She asked her mother whether she had heard anything from Rashid’s family to suggest that he had been forced to marry her. But did it make sense that a man—and he was every inch a man, whatever else he turned out to be—would be forced to marry a woman he didn’t want, no matter how compelling the reasons?

Before the wedding, Gamrah had seen Rashid only once, and that was on the day of the shoufa, the day set for the bridegroom’s lawful viewing of the bride-to-be. The traditions of her family did not permit the man seeking the engagement to see the bride again before the contract signing. Moreover, in this case there was no more than a two-week gap between the signing and the marriage celebration itself, and Gamrah’s and Rashid’s mothers agreed between themselves that Rashid would not see his bride during that time, so that she would have no interruptions as she prepared for her wedding. It was all completely logical in Gamrah’s eyes, except she did find it a little odd that Rashid had not asked her father’s permission to talk to her on the phone so that he could get to know her better like all men do these days.

Gamrah had heard that most young men these days insisted on getting acquainted with their fiancées by telephone before the contract-signing, but her family’s particularly conservative practices didn’t allow for that. As far as they were concerned, marriage was—as they always said—like the watermelon on the knife, you never knew what you were going to get. Her older sister Naflah’s watermelon had turned out to be one of those extra-sweet ones, while her own watermelon and her sister Hessah’s were more like dried-out, empty gourds.