Woman Who Fell From the Sky - Jennifer Steil [102]
Soon a flock of women converge upon the dance floor, a field of undulating butterflies. No two are wearing the same color. One fat woman has even squeezed herself into something that looks like a Hefty bag or an S and M outfit. Women form a circle on the stage, taking turns dancing in the middle to whoops of appreciation.
The dance is mostly in the hips. The upper body is still, arms carving slow arcs through the air. But what surprises me more than anything is the slackness and abundance of flesh. I had thought Yemeni women were all tiny, thin little things, but the fifteen hundred women on display are anything but. Their flesh is loose from lack of exercise, their backs utterly without tone, their arms jiggling when they wave. The physical consequences of their confinement. Their skin is mottled and pale, the result of being denied even a glimpse of sunlight through their abayas. When Zuhra returns, I look at my arm next to hers on the table and notice mine is browner.
When the bride finally arrives, she proceeds slowly down the raised stage running through the center of the room. Cameras flash and a black rayon wave ripples across the room as the women cover themselves with scarves to keep from getting caught on film. Only professionals take photographs; the rest of us had to leave our cameras at the door.
The bride is petite and dressed in a mass of Princess Diana—style white satin. I suspect her face is pretty, but it is obscured by thick layers of foundation, blush, eyeliner, and lipstick. I try to guess how she feels about her impending wedding night from her smile. It looks forced; she is posing for the cameras. But she doesn’t look unhappy. She gazes down at the crowd with a sort of haughty triumph, as if lording her union over the poor, unfortunate spinsters around her.
“Tell me she is marrying someone nice,” I whisper to Noor.
She nods. “She is,” she assures me.
While I am pleased finally to experience a Yemeni wedding, the festivities ultimately make me restless. The music is so loud that we cannot talk, we can only dance or watch. After a while, women perch on the edge of the stage, dangling their feet and looking suffused with ennui.
So as soon as the bride is safely down the aisle and surrounded by women ululating and cheering her, I slip out with Zuhra. There is not much left of the ceremony, Zuhra tells me. The bride will hold court for a while and dance with the women. Eventually, she will either meet her groom at their new home later that night or return to her home and wait to meet him the next morning, when they are both fresh.
In the hallway, we pull on our long robes before heading out into the night. The streets are full of loitering men waiting for their painted women to emerge, once more swathed in anonymous black.
FOURTEEN
tropical depression
One day, the usually gentlemanly al-Matari marches into my office midmorning and announces, without preamble, “Then I will quit!”
“What?” I say, looking up from my computer.
“They have not given me my whole pay, so I will quit.”
“Why didn’t they give you your whole pay?”
“I don’t know.”
I march upstairs to the accountant’s office with him. It turns out that al-Matari has forgotten that he recently borrowed money from work to buy a blender. Once he realizes where the money has gone, al-Matari tells me everything is okay and goes back to work. I hope it’s a good blender.
Then when the accountants dole out my own February salary, they give me only $50. “That’s all we have now,” they say. Right. Still, this is plenty for the moment, and it is more important that the rest of my staff gets paid, which they haven’t been this month. It’s several days after payday, and they lack the various safety nets I have in times of crisis, like credit cards (which exist in Yemen but are not widely used).
My reporters don’t just live month-to-month, they live in the future. They spend every paycheck before it arrives, so delays are always harrowing. A week before the end of the month, everyone starts coming to me to borrow money