Woman Who Fell From the Sky - Jennifer Steil [101]
When you continue to feel nauseated, do not continue to take little green pills without reading the packaging.
When you purchase little green pills, try to make sure the packaging insert is in English.
Remember that lots of different kinds of drugs come in little green pills.
Seeing me weak and helpless has made me less imposing to Noor and Najma. They invite me to their relatives’ weddings and talk to me about things outside of work. My illness has humanized me.
In February, Noor invites me to my first Yemeni wedding. She ducks into my office one day, aflutter with excitement, and shyly presents me with a beribboned card. I’m flattered to be asked and dying of curiosity about the ritual.
I have no idea what to wear. Everyone has told me that Yemeni women wear scandalously little to weddings, where there are no men to ogle them. All weddings are sex segregated. While the bride and groom do meet earlier in the day (or even earlier in the month) to sign the marriage contract, it astonishes me that the celebration of their union does not involve any actual union.
The men have big lunches followed by long qat chews, with music and maybe dancing, whereas women gather in wedding halls to sip tea, dance, and admire each other’s outfits. Some more modern families allow the groom to pick the bride up at the end of the wedding, when almost all of the guests are gone, but this is not common.
While I’ve been told that it doesn’t matter how much flesh I show at a wedding, I cannot bring myself to dress provocatively in this environment. I settle on a knee-length, blue silk dress with a fitted waist and spaghetti straps and wrap myself up in an abaya.
In the corridors of the wedding hall, swarms of women are shedding abayas to reveal spangled, candy-colored dresses and heavily made-up faces. The dresses resemble the most shameless of prom gowns or things a stripper might wear for the first thirty seconds of her act. There are women in see-through lace, women in black rubber miniskirts, women with trains ten feet long. It is impossible to overdress (or underdress) for a Yemeni wedding. Yards and yards of black hair, painstakingly straightened or curled, are sprayed into sticky towers or hang loose down girlish backs, a few strands tucked into a glittering butterfly barrette. In Yemen, my waist-length hair is merely average. The women’s faces are painted with thick black eyeliner and colorful eye shadow, regardless of age. It looks as though they are all wearing masks by the same designer.
The married women wear small, round decorative caps and sit on cushions around the edge of the room, smoking shisha and chewing qat.
Feeling conspicuously modest and plain in my simple dress and bare face (save for lipstick), I wander down an aisle searching for familiar faces. Zuhra finds me first. She is encased in floor-length pink polyester with a sequined camisole top. Her thick black hair hangs in loose curls to her waist, and she wears tiny pink feathers as earrings. She looks gorgeous. She twirls in front of me, smiling, showing off a little. “Come,” she says, taking my arm and leading me to a table near the front.
We sit and talk while Somali women circle the room with trays of milky sweet tea. Clad in a short, spangled dress, Noor hurries to greet me and introduce me to a dozen other cousins. Her mother comes over to introduce herself. “You are all Noor talks about,” she says. “It’s Jennifer tammam, Jennifer tammam!” (“Jennifer good!”) I am enormously grateful. I had never been sure what Noor thinks of me.
Then the dancing begins. The whole outing is totally worth it just to see little Zuhra dance. One of the first to take the stage, she lifts her thin arms, gray from lack of sun, her hair swirling about her waist, lips curved into a sly smile, eyes downcast, hips a-shimmy. No Western woman in a disco could be more sultry a temptress than this candied mermaid, Zuhra, brushing back long strands of hair from her