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Ladies and gentlemen, we will be entering the airspace of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in thirty minutes.” The pilot’s announcement, repeated at twenty minutes and again at ten, was evidently a countdown for last call with the drink carts, and also a cue for the Muslim women aboard to disappear into the airplane bathrooms and reemerge covered from head to toe in black veils, head scarves, abayas, and in some cases gloves. As the seats filled up with black and the plane began its descent, what had been a fairly chatty flight grew quiet. I remember a balding British man who got so drunk on the flight that as soon as we walked down the rolling staircase to the tarmac, oven hot even at night, he had to sit on his luggage and scoot forward while we waited in a long line to enter the airport building. What is the matter with him? I wondered. This was before we walked through a blast of cold, cigarette-smelling air into Dhahran Airport, and into a sea of men, all pressed together for the hours-long wait at customs. They were laborers fresh off jumbo jets from India, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka, and what I noticed, apart from how skinny they all were, was how much everyone stared at the small group of exposed Western women coming off our flight.
It had been mentioned in our cultural orientation in Houston, a week before we flew out, that men in the Middle East had a different way of interacting with women. This was said in the kind of offhand, casual way that one would note that the desert is hot. It was not considered rude to stare, said the smiling, pantsuited woman in charge of the seminar for children, in which my brother and I were the only teenagers. Certain places, stores, or restaurants did not allow women, but sometimes there would be a sign on the door pointing to an alternate entrance and a smaller, screened-off “family” section. Then she singled out me and my pasty Irish complexion and said, “And what a lovely tan you’ll get!” So I was unprepared, to say the least, for how unnerving the stares felt coming from every corner, how threatening and all encompassing. When we finally got through customs to my dad, now darkly tanned, twenty pounds lighter, and grinning like a maniac, I ran up and hugged him with a magnetic appeal for the shadow of his protection, something I hadn’t felt I needed, or that he could provide, since I was a little kid. Hide me.
The Aramco compound, at first glance, seemed to me much like a middle-class American suburb except that the signs were in English and Arabic. Our house, number 150 on the corner of First and Gazelle, was on a part of the compound called Main Camp. The houses, identical and arranged close together with circuit board regularity, were called modulars. Different jobs within the company carried different “grade codes,” a sort of ranking system that determined not only salary but also where you were allowed to live. Families with higher grade codes, or those with accrued seniority, could live in “the Hills,” where the houses were larger and varied and the yards had trees.