The Ruins of Us (3 page)

“Pig!” she shouted. Then, more quietly, “You’ve ruined us.”

UPSTAIRS IN HER
bathroom, she locked the door and then lay down on the thick, cream-colored rug that covered the tile. It smelled of the rose-scented detergent that Abdullah insisted they use because it reminded him of his mother. Rosalie turned her cheek to one side and waited until she no longer felt like vomiting. This took two days.

HER NAME WAS
Isra: nocturnal journey, after Muhammad’s midnight journey to Temple Mount before his ascent into heaven. She should be named for shadowy things, Rosalie thought. After all, Isra agreed to live in secrecy for years.

After two days on the bathroom floor, Rosalie moved to her room and called for Mariam. Rosalie started to explain about Isra.

“Baba told me,” Mariam interrupted. She shifted her eyes to the floor and folded the hem of her sleeve into a point.

“Tell me you didn’t know about this before, Mariam,” Rosalie said.

“La, Umma. But I know who she is, I think. Isra is not a common name.”

Rosalie was impatient. “What do you mean, you think? Either you knew of her or you didn’t.”

“I didn’t, I swear. But last summer . . . I thought she was Baba’s business partner.”

“Where?”

“Doha. When Faisal and I went with Baba. You were sick. Remember? You didn’t come.”

“My God, he has no shame.”

“She gave me European soaps.”

“From hotels?”

“Yes. I still have them under my sink.”

No doubt from the fine hotels that Abdullah and Isra had stayed in all over Europe. The Grand
-
Hôtel du Cap
-
Ferrat; Claridge’s; The Empire Palace. Rosalie could practically feel the crisp linens; hear the clink of Limoges china in the vaulted dining rooms. She could see them lying together on seaside recliners, clutching sparkling water and wearing broad, comical sunhats, as she and Abdullah had done for countless summers. There would be Champagne and late dinners served on tables docked in the sand. There would be lamp-lit streets haunted by the faint music of buskers. There would be lovemaking, and small, expensive soaps in the shape of shells or stamped out in perfect squares, bearing the imprint of the hotel name and smelling of an herb garden in late summer. She would make Mariam show the soaps to her so she could map out Abdullah’s travels, marking each city in which he had betrayed her.

“I canceled my birthday party,” Mariam said.

In her misery, Rosalie had completely forgotten. What kind of mother forgot her daughter’s birthday party?

“Oh my sweet girl. I’m so sorry . . .”

“I was glad to do it. I can only dance when I’m happy, anyway.”

“Your sixteenth will be amazing, I promise. We’ll do something really special.”

“Can we go to the States so I can get my driver’s license?”

“Uncle Randy still has the old Mustang that I learned on. You’ll take driver’s ed and then we’ll do a road trip across Texas.” Rosalie reached out and put a hand on her daughter’s cheek. She paused. She knew better than to ask, but she couldn’t help it. “Habibti,” she said. “Tell me. Tell me about her face.”

FROM INSIDE THE
darkened car, through the window that she had asked Raja to roll down to get fresh air, Rosalie stared at the Star of Arabia Mall looming at the center of the parking lot. It was evening, and the mall was lit up like a casino. Raja had killed the motor and was flipping through a magazine. Rosalie’s friend Lamees was always late, and Rosalie often contemplated building an extra fifteen minutes into her own schedule. Inevitably, though, she could not overcome her near-fascist insistence on punctuality. She believed once you had lost your respect for time, you might as well rocket straight up into the sky, into your daydreams.

Besides, Rosalie appreciated these idle moments in the car. She could sit unseen and watch the women gliding by with their daughters, the older men with their portly wives, and the bands of teenaged boys in Western clothing who gathered together in the parking lot before dispersing to any of the mall’s five entrances. There, the teenagers would try to circumvent the mall rules against unaccompanied single men by coaxing an auntie into posing as their mother. Inside, the mall promised shining marble floors, cascading fountains, and also an abundance of soft-smelling girls wandering unescorted from shop to shop. In a way, she wished her son, Faisal, would join in their loitering. Instead, he seemed content to spend all his time driving around with his friend Majid, or listening to tapes of the Koran’s suras being sung in clear, mournful tones. As a lapsed Baptist and, more recently, a nonpracticing Muslim, she didn’t feel equipped to handle the complications of adolescent piety—hormones, yes, but religious fervor, not as much.

Here, out in the parking lot, sheltered by the silver and black bodies of the cars, the boys’ faces were etched with a distinguishing anticipation. Rosalie wondered about her husband’s boyhood and how he had satisfied his young desire in Saudi Arabia’s climate of oppression. Al Dawoun had been a fishing village then, a half-civilized outpost with many places to hide and many daughters to watch secretly, from the accounting room of his father’s first store, along the shallow canals that watered his cousin’s date palms in the Hasa oasis. Yes, there, Abdullah had honed his appetites.

Leaning back in her seat, Rosalie pressed her cheek against the cool leather, watching other people come and go, amazed at how effortlessly they catapulted themselves forward to their destinations. It had taken a cajoling call from Lamees to get Rosalie to slide into her sneakers and get into the car. Now at the mall parking lot, she observed the passing people, searching for signs of grief and loss but seeing nothing. We hide our feelings so artfully, she thought. Out of politeness or pride, we do not talk of the things that matter most. She wished she could dig into the beating hearts that passed her and unearth the sorrows that lurked there beneath the disguising flow of blood.

After finding out about Isra, she’d spoken to her brother Randy for the first time since their mother had passed away. Randy had refused to come to Rosalie’s wedding, and she knew he still judged her decision as a foolish one. But she called him nonetheless, needing all the help she could get. When she told him the news, she had expected a lecture, but instead he’d just said, “I’m sorry, little sister. I’m so sorry. Come home.”

Home, she’d echoed. But I am home. I’ve been in this place for more than twenty-five years. My children, my friends are here. Despite her parents’ efforts to keep her fully expatriated during her childhood on the State Oil compound—just a traveler in their immediate dusty world for as long as it took her father to make enough on the Tapline to retire back to Sugar Land—Arabia insinuated itself in Rosalie. For years after her family left for good, when they were living in a thin-walled development house in East Texas, she could not hear a PA system crackle on without hoping the call to prayer would follow. She had returned to reclaim the place that had been taken from her with the swift motion of the consular officer’s letter opener, which he used to remove each family member’s visa when they left. Of course, there was also the matter of her love for Abdullah. Both reasons for returning seemed insubstantial now.

Divorce was out of the question. Her parents had passed away, she couldn’t even remember how to drive a car, and who would hire a middle-aged college dropout? Furthermore, she loved so much about the harsh, relentless place where she’d spent most of her life. There was beauty in the people’s insistence on survival. She dreamed in Arabic. And tucked within the sprawling Baylani family, with their rituals and gatherings and new babies and noise, she had felt more connected to their family than she ever had in the States with her parents. She loved the long Thursday afternoons spent in her sisters-in-law’s sitting rooms, where they drank sweet coffee and tea, shared gossip, and marveled at all the beautiful children. When Faisal and Mariam were born, the family was genuinely delighted, and although they remained somewhat formal with Rosalie, at least they were with her, which was more than could be said of her parents, who were so intent on making their point that they’d died while still proving it.

And while her college friends were getting divorced and remarried, she believed she was genuinely happy with her husband and with her life in Saudi Arabia. He was the man she’d thought he was when they got married—charming, a little possessive, smart, ambitious, and confident. She’d surprised herself by how well she fit into his life in the Kingdom. So well that it became
their
life.

There was a rap at the window, and Rosalie glanced over. It was one of the parking-lot boys. He had probably noticed her red hair through the open window and assumed she was an American from the State Oil compound. Those women, housewives from Texas and Louisiana, were known to be more sympathetic to the boys, who were barred from entering the mall without family to reduce the threat that packs of boys would roam and flirt and disturb the order of things. The State Oil women often returned to the parking lot several times to help them get inside. Lamees, who lived on the compound with her husband, said she overheard them talking at the women’s group meetings and in the commissary, saying, “Boys will be boys. I don’t see what the heck the problem is.” I’ll tell you what the problem is, Rosalie wanted to reply. This country so deprives its men of women that, by the time they are old enough to marry, one wife is not enough.

Rosalie cracked her door slightly so she could better hear him.

“Aiwa?” she said. She enjoyed the surprise on his face when he heard her Arabic, which was nearly flawless after years shaping her tongue around the heavy Gulf syllables.

“Madam, are you going inside? Please help me to get inside. I just want to buy a pair of sneakers.”

She stared at his face. He would not be handsome, his nose a bit too narrow, but there was a pleasing mischief in his eyes.

“Later, perhaps. I’m waiting for a friend.”

“Yes, of course. I’ll be right over there, if you change your mind.” He pointed toward a cluster of young men in the next row. “Shukran,” he thanked her.

“Afwan.”

Would any of the mall boys marry their mall girls? Rosalie was curious. Was saying you met in a mall the Saudi equivalent of Americans meeting in a bar? She and Abdullah had met in a bar. He was a regular and she was a bartender. Though perhaps he’d become a regular because she was a bartender. These memories of what had come before Isra were painful now.

Lamees’s driver honked at them as he pulled alongside their car. Rosalie removed her headscarf from her shoulders and wrapped it carefully around her hair. She was wearing her abaya with the silver embroidery because Lamees said it made her look regal, and she was in desperate need of queenliness tonight. Already, she felt her body become soggy, at risk of settling into her shoes like mud. As she stepped from the car, she turned back and gave a little wave to Raja. He knew the routine. She and Lamees were not there to shop. They were there in white tennis shoes and sweatpants hidden under their abayas. They would walk the perimeter of the mall four times, or
3
.
2
miles. It took about an hour.

“Oh, honey,” Lamees said, leaning in to give Rosalie a hug.

Rosalie let her body be held, though she didn’t have the energy to squeeze back. It used to be that her husband was the one to hug her like this when something terrible had happened. She tried to remember if anything truly awful had happened in the last two years, awful enough for her to crumple into his arms. Thankfully, no. No deaths, no betrayals, not even any illnesses. Her father had died of cirrhosis four years ago. That was her last great tragedy and even that was not enough to make her flop like a fish into Abdullah’s arms. Over the previous three decades of his life, Wayne March had gone through a bottle of Jack a day, paid for with his State Oil pension, so the death—a slow pickling—was not a surprise.

“Come on, now,” Lamees said. She pushed Rosalie back and held her at arm’s length, surveying her face. “Let’s fight with a mutawa and flirt with the teenagers. We’ll swing from those awful fake vines they’ve got hanging over the fountain.”

“All right,” Rosalie said.

Lamees took her hand and led her down the row of cars. The feeling of Lamees’s hand brought a sudden clutch of tears just behind Rosalie’s eyes, so that she had to widen them in the darkness to keep from crying. They had been friends for ten years. Rosalie had seen Lamees smoking a cigarette in the shadows outside of Safeway, cursing in English into her cell phone. Rosalie had waited until the call was over and then bummed a cigarette. It was not often you saw a woman smoke in public in Saudi, and Rosalie desperately needed someone to talk to. Rosalie had just found out her mother had died, her gangrenous, diabetic body finally rotted to the core.

Inside the mall, the light was golden, expensive, originating from spotlights and melting over the moving people. Behind shop windows, outsized bottles of perfume were elevated on pink boxes, and heavy sequined dresses shaped themselves to faceless mannequins. Even though it was winter, the air-conditioning whooshed through the long corridors, the cold air catching in Rosalie’s abaya to reveal her sweatpants beneath. Usually, for modesty’s sake, she would tug at the runaway folds of the robe, but tonight, she didn’t mind the eyes of the men watching her from the coffee stands. Rosalie and Lamees walked briskly, sidestepping the window shoppers and pumping their arms. Under her layers of clothing, she felt her heart rate rise, the slow spread of heat moving outward from her core. She breathed loudly, in and out, so that people turned to look as she passed.

“Khaled can’t believe it,” Lamees said after they’d settled into a rhythm. “He just keeps saying ‘Abdullah al-
Baylani
?’ as if there’s been some misunderstanding. He’s always seen Abdi as a mentor. A model businessman.”

“Oh, he’s still a model businessman. No question.”

“You know what I mean. A great man, period. Progressive, educated, ahead of his time. Not to mention funny. Khaled loved him. But then, this. It’s so messy. Very unlike him.”