“That’s not exactly comforting when I’m this far away.”
“It’s just—I don’t want to give up our privacy. I don’t want to live behind a guarded fence again.” What I couldn’t bring myself to say was that the last time I had lived on a compound was the year I spent with my family in Saudi Arabia, a year that led to my unraveling. I missed the sound of his voice. The few times my dad had called home from work he’d at least had the grace to sound as far away as he was. It felt cruel, having such a clear phone connection, and wasting precious conversation time on the question of Hip-Hop and whether or not I would agree to move. I visualized a meter like the ones at gas stations, the slower side ticking off the seconds and the faster one calculating how much money it was costing the U.S. government to connect us for this brief moment.
“This is not going to be like Saudi Arabia was for you.” Ross was able to hear my unspoken fears. “Please, I need you to do this.”
It was a long pause before I said, “Okay.”
CHAPTER 11
The Aramco compound in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, was surrounded by a razor wire fence, and its two gates were manned by Arab guards carrying machine guns and checking IDs. They ran a stick with a mirror on the end along the undersides of vehicles, and when the weather dropped below sixty degrees in the winter, they wore heavy jackets, hats, and gloves. They never looked happy to see us.
“Where iss your EYE-dee? Bedge number!” As a teenager, I was often barked at by compound security guards for looking like I was up to no good, which usually meant being outside my house, and sometimes even being outside my house with a group that included boys. All of us would have to produce our company dependent IDs and recite our fathers’ badge numbers, after which it was expected that we move on to sit around somewhere else.
My ID showed a girl with long dark hair, staring wide-eyed and stiff-shouldered into the camera and refusing to smile. The men taking the picture had just finished fingerprinting me, one of them cradling my forearm and stroking its inside as my mother and brother were herded out of the room to wash the ink off their hands. The men had smiled and laughed, told jokes in Arabic while they fluffed my hair in front of my shoulders and steered me into place in front of the camera. Right before the flash, the photographer pursed his lips and made a loud, sucking kiss noise at me. The shock captured in that picture never really wore off for the year I lived there. The whole thing, how I was suddenly turning from a child to a teenager and how we simultaneously ended up in the Middle East, just never stopped being a surprise.
My dad got laid off from his job when I was entering the seventh grade, right after we’d finished building a house in Georgetown, a small town thirty miles north of Austin. The plan had been to move to a place where we could afford a better quality of life. Instead our family spent the next year and a half eating through savings and cashing in my parents’ retirement accounts as my dad sent out dozens of resumes a week and my mom just barely floated us on a high school math teacher’s salary. They fought and worried and fought some more, and my dad’s depression went from chronic and long-simmering into something darker, something that spurred my mom to hide his shotguns in the back of the attic. I grew from an awkward kid into an awkward teenager, channeling all the angst I felt over my disintegrating home life into playing the clarinet in the junior high honor band. Then my dad took us all out for dinner one night and dropped a bomb. We were moving to Saudi Arabia.
Dad fiddled with the salt and pepper shakers and spoke gravely and at length about the sacrifices he would need from us to assure our family’s future. It was the tail end of my eighth grade year and my brother’s seventh grade one. Dad would leave almost immediately. Mom would stay behind with me and Doug until we finished the school year, at which point we would pack up most of our furniture into long-term storage and rent out the home we’d just built to strangers. I had no way of knowing it at the time, but starting with the move to Georgetown, and for the rest of my life up to now, I would never again live in one place for more than three years at a stretch.