Every Man in This Village Is a Liar_ An Education in War - Megan K. Stack [65]
“Security here is so bad,” Tracy griped. “Wednesday and Thursday nights we have all these youths here, and they don’t belong here.”
“Why not?” demanded Cora. “They’re friends of the kids here.”
Pamela caught my eye across the table. “Life here is so great for those of us who are here,” she said breathily, with a faint smile that cracked and immediately slipped.
There is oil under our feet, and these are prairie women. When the topic of the kingdom outside the gates comes up, they turn questioning faces in my direction. They had carted themselves along, Americans swaddled in Americana. Maybe this is the essence of the Saudi–American relationship, I thought. We need one another, and we are braided together. But we don’t try to become one another, and maybe we don’t even try to understand one another, because what each sees in the other provokes visceral disgust. In Saudi eyes we are a nation of whores, drugs, broken families, and guns; we swing our power like a club and the world bides its time until our ignorance strips us of our glory. To Americans, Saudis are fanatic, brutal, sexist, materialistic, modern-day slave owners. But we have been wrapped up in the Saudi oil industry since Americans struck black gold in 1936 and on down through the twentieth century, as riches welled up and transformed an illiterate, impoverished backwater into an opulent kingdom. Americans needed Saudi oil, and Saudis needed American expertise and political cover. All of that weird codependence revolved around Aramco. America is here, absolutely, but hidden so as not to anger the locals, walled off because otherwise who can stomach Saudi Arabia? We will coexist but neither side will sacrifice its character. We will not show our faces and we will not look one another in the eye. These women do not know what I know, because they have not lived outside the gate.
One afternoon I had found a Starbucks in a fancy shopping mall in Riyadh. I filled my lungs with the rich perfume of coffee, and it smelled like home—caffeinated, comforting, American. I asked for a latte and the barista gave me a bemused look; his eyes flickered and he shrugged. The milk steamer whined, he handed over the coffee, and I turned my back on his uneasy face. The Saudi men stopped talking and watched me pass with hard stares. I ignored them and sank into an overstuffed armchair.
“Excuse me,” hissed the voice in my ear. “You can’t sit here.” The man from the counter hung at my elbow, glowering.
“Excuse me?”
“Emmm …” He drew his discomfort into a long syllable. “You cannot stay here.”
“What? Why?”
Then he said it: “Men only.”
He doesn’t tell me what I will learn later: Starbucks has another, unmarked door around back that leads to a smaller espresso bar, and a handful of tables smothered by curtains. That is the “family” section. As a woman, that’s where I belong. I have no right to mix with male customers or sit in view of passing shoppers. I must confine myself to the separate, inferior, and usually invisible spaces where Saudi Arabia shunts half the population.
I stand up. It’s the only thing I can do. Men in their white robes and red-checked kaffiyehs stare impassively over their mugs. I drop my eyes, and immediately wish I hadn’t. Snatching up my skirts to keep from stumbling, I walk out of the store and into the clatter of the shopping mall.
Futilely I would count down the days until I could flee westward on sterilized jets, only to remember, over and over again, that there was no escape. Saudi Arabia stuck to me, followed me home and shadowed me through my days, tainting the way I perceived men and women everywhere. Back home in Cairo, the cacophony of whistles and lewd coos on the streets sent me into blind rage. I slammed doors in the faces of delivery men; cursed at Egyptian soldiers in a language they didn’t speak; kept a resentful mental tally of the Western men, especially reporters, who seemed to condone, even relish, the marginalization of women in the Arab world. If a man suggested