Every Man in This Village Is a Liar_ An Education in War - Megan K. Stack [71]
“Oh, don’t say that!” Valerie interrupted. “Now it will be in the paper, the Stepford Wives of Aramco.”
“It’s true,” Tracy cried. “My mother came here and she was like, ‘This is kinda weird. It’s too perfect. It’s like the Stepford Wives.’”
But now the American embassy had issued a blunt warning to leave the country, and the women believed the bloodshed they’d already seen was just “the tip of the iceberg,” Valerie said.
“My husband isn’t ready to go yet, and I’m like, ‘When can we go?’” Tracy said. Her husband was urging her to take the kids out, she said, “but I didn’t sign up for this single mom thing.”
“I told him, ‘We can go back and you can flip burgers if that’s what you need to do, but we need to stay together.’ And then my daughter said, ‘If he’s here alone, maybe he’ll get a girlfriend like Mr. So-and-so.’”
“She did not!” the other women cried with one voice.
“She did!” Tracy said.
“She did,” another woman confirmed.
“There’s this tribal mind-set that more information is dangerous,” Pamela said. “They don’t know how to give information out. It’s not in their nature.”
“You’ve got people who say we need the expats gone, but then the whole country will really go down,” Cora said. “All of us have known for years there was a lot of civil unrest. If we all leave we just hurt ourselves.”
“Are people resigning?” I asked.
“They may not be resigning, but they’re job hunting,” said Amy.
“Everybody says, ‘I’m not leaving, but I’m looking,’” said Valerie.
Cora sighed again. “Every night, every mom, we say, ‘What’d your friends say at school? What’d they say on the bus?’ I was on the phone all day with people at the Oasis.”
Sitting there with these women, I could feel their reluctance. None of them would ever manage to duplicate their sumptuous lifestyles back in America, and they all knew it. In a sense, they were living out their own childhood dreams—they talked about the things they’d pined after as little girls, and finally found here. Valerie, who once dreamed of ponies, shared a horse with her daughter at nearby stables. Their children trooped off on field trips to Nepal and South Africa. They are so sophisticated and worldly, the women said of their broods, smiling immodestly.
“What do your kids think about leaving?” I asked.
“My son’s twelve and he’s not at all pleased about it,” Tracy said. “It’s a way of life for my kids and they feel safe here. We went to Switzerland on spring break. How many middle-class kids go to Switzerland? My kids have studied the Nile and been down the Nile.”
Tracy was bragging now, bare feet bouncing on the floor like a child gloating over a stash of sweets.
“They know how to sign their room numbers for drinks at the hotel bar,” Valerie said. “It’s unbelievable. They’re not going to Pinewood Whatever, Wherever.”
“Camping on vacation!” scoffed Cora.
“Commuting,” Tracy said. “Going to Grandma’s. I mean, we like Grandma’s, but we want to see New Zealand!”
Tracy had hoped to treat her nieces and nephews to overseas adventures, inviting them one by one to join the family on vacations. “I’m trying to hang on for that,” she said, as if she had not, five minutes earlier, said she was yearning to leave.
In Amy’s childhood, the greatest excitement of summer vacation was putting coins into vibrating beds in roadside motels. The room erupted in laughter.
“My son is like, ‘Oh, Mom, do we have to go to Europe again?’” Tracy said. “And I’m like, ‘You little … ’” she flapped her hand in the air as if she were slapping her son.
The afternoon wore on. The women kept forgetting about the terrorism. Then they would remember again, and the room would grow quiet and they’d fidget uncomfortably.
But only for a minute.
ELEVEN
LODDI DODDI, WE LIKES TO PARTY
There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we now know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know. So when we do the best we can and pull all this information together,