Ninth grade was the last year of schooling available for the children of foreign workers in Saudi Arabia. After that, companies paid to ship the kids off to boarding schools of the families’ choosing, anywhere in the world. I was still trying to come to terms with the fact that I would be leaving home (such as it was) at fifteen, and I had no idea where I wanted to go. My classmates, who were militantly competitive about who had gotten the latest Primus T-shirt airmailed from a friend back in “the States,” and who got to vacation in Kenya or Switzerland over their families’ “repat” travel breaks, already knew where they wanted to go, and the fact that I had no clue what each school name meant in terms of its placement along the scale of academic elitism or hard partying was only further evidence that even though I was the freshest import, I was so behind the times. A friend had to pull me aside after I’d been “going with” a boy named Jad for two weeks to ask pointedly if I knew what “frigid” meant, and how the word was being applied to me. I had to answer that no, in fact, I didn’t know what it meant, that in this country that topped out daily at 120 degrees, I’d been singled out as frigid.
I was one of three new kids in my ninth grade class of seventy-five, and pretty much every day felt like being a turtle getting pried out of its shell. There seemed to be only two currents to follow socially. You could be a good kid and attend the weekly church groups, renamed “morale meetings,” and find favor among the few well-connected families who had memberships to the Mission Inn, a former military mess hall where you could get root beer and sometimes even bacon; or you could be a bad kid and hang out with the older “returning students” back from boarding school for holiday visits, drinking the home-brewed alcohol everyone called sidiki (Arabic for “friend”), smoking Afghani hash, and getting it on. Like in any small town, rumor was a powerful force, and it hardly mattered whether you actually did any, or all, or some combination of these things; it just mattered what you were perceived and reported to be doing.
I had a fuzzy perception of my reputation among my peers, enough to understand that I was a disappointment as a girlfriend and a source of perplexed annoyance among the pack of girls that eventually claimed me. The only relationship I had that hung on past the tumult of high school, and within which I felt something closest to my true self, was with my friend Larry, another relatively recent import. We both lived on Main Camp and walked together to and from school and passed notes in English class, and with his strict Chinese mom and white, ex-military dad, Larry alone seemed subject to the same frequent groundings as me, the same stern lectures, and the same as-yet-unfounded parental suspicions. In other words, his family seemed about as uncomfortable in Saudi Arabia, for whatever reason, as mine.
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There was a prom and a graduation ceremony and then some kind of big, beach-based good-bye party, but I attended none of these. As soon as our required residency year in-kingdom was up, my mom had the whole family on a flight to Scotland to make the most of our remaining time together before I got jettisoned to boarding school back in the United States. I was already out of the country before I understood I could never really go back to Saudi Arabia again for anything other than a short visit. Even if my parents had stayed longer and sent both Doug and me through boarding school and on to college, once we reached twenty-five, we would be among all the other children of foreign workers who had aged out of their access to the kingdom. Even if that was your childhood home—and for many of my classmates, it was—its doors closed to you forever. Unless you repeated the whole cycle by going to work for Aramco, a pattern that was not uncommon. Remembering the various versions of expat life in Saudi Arabia, a practice to which whole Web-based forums and Facebook pages are devoted, takes on the peculiar quality of hypernostalgia. There is a premium placed on how thoroughly you can remember, how long you spent there, how much you belonged to that life. (Doug, incidentally, adjusted much better to life in the desert, enough to remember it fondly. Whether this is because of the few additional freedoms allowed to boys or because he’s just fundamentally more adaptable than me, I don’t know.)
But we didn’t stay. We didn’t belong. I can’t claim to be a “Saudi kid” or an “Aramco brat” because I’m not one. I don’t qualify—not then, and not now, when there are extended videos on YouTube from the point of view of a handheld camera in the front seat of a car as it drives slowly around the compound in Dhahran as sad piano music plays in the background. I understand the feeling of homesickness, of feeling unmoored in the world with little or no remaining connection to your own history. That feeling for me has only amplified over the years with each successive move, but Saudi Arabia is not a place with any claim on me, or me on it. I consider my time there something close to trespassing—in someone else’s country and in someone else’s memories of home.
The feeling of not belonging makes me hesitant to claim the Navy as my community now, though every day it becomes clearer to me that the military is a tribe with its own language, its own traditions of including and initiating, separating and grieving, celebrating and always moving on.
CHAPTER 12