Woman Who Fell From the Sky - Jennifer Steil [35]
Women continued to stream into the room, each one circling to kiss the others several times on the cheek. Some of them had a rhythm: two quick kisses, a beat, then three quick kisses. Each seemed to have a signature way of kissing hello.
The women spoke to each other and over each other in rapid-fire Arabic. Without Dr. al-Haj, I had no one to translate for me; no one else in the group spoke English. Communication was accomplished with my few Arabic words and scores of hand gestures. If I were to stay, I thought, I’d learn Arabic quickly, out of sheer necessity. Leila told me they were discussing democracy. I should have liked to hear that, particularly because I’d been told that Yemeni women rarely talked about anything other than babies and other domestic matters. This did not seem to be true in our group.
When everyone had arrived, the group consisted of about twelve or thirteen women in various states of abaya. All had their veils pulled back from their faces, and many had taken them off entirely. I sat with Leila on my left and a faux-blond woman on my right. The blonde did most of the talking. She asked me if I were married, pointing to my ring and to hers. I told her (and all the other women, who stared at me the entire time I was there, as if I’d just landed from Pluto) that I was indeed.
“Babies?”
I shook my head. “Not yet.” Then, as an afterthought, I added, “Insha’allah” (“if God is willing). At that, everyone smiled and nodded, and seemed to relax a bit. I wasn’t so different then after all. Despite my uncertainty about children, it did occur to me that if I accepted Faris’s offer, I would be spending one of my last fertile years in a country where there was little chance I would find romance, let alone a partner with whom to raise a child. Should I decide I wanted one.
A large elderly woman, who I believe was our hostess, passed around a tray of cups of sweet tea before preparing the enormous water pipe standing in the corner by placing glowing-hot lumps of tobacco atop it. A three-inch-thick hose snaked from it across the floor, so that the mouthpiece would reach even the woman sitting farthest away. The mouthpiece was passed from woman to woman, each keeping it for the space of approximately ten inhalations. “Khamsa wa khamsa,” Leila said to me. “Five and five.” I was grateful that I had learned all of my numbers before I left New York.
When the water pipe came my way, Leila showed me how to smoke it—you don’t inhale all of the way, just slightly. I accidentally took in too much and began to cough. My eyes widened and I touched my hand to my heart, which was enough to make the women take it away from me. When I couldn’t stop coughing, the blonde whipped out a little vial of oil and rubbed some on the back of my hands. She and Leila both gestured that I should sniff it.
“Oxygen,” said Leila in English. I wasn’t sure why sniffing rose oil on my hands would increase my oxygen levels, but I wasn’t about to debate the issue.
An African-looking woman pulled tinfoil-wrapped pie shapes from her bag and began passing them around. I thought perhaps they were