I arrived on January 17 to snowflakes falling. I had never seen real snow, only the man-made frozen water at Ski Dubai. I was met by two Aramco colleagues, a husband and wife, who were already working at EMC2. They helped me with everything, including finding an apartment, buying and assembling furniture, and getting directions for where to go. Apart from missing Aboudi desperately, it was the easiest move I had ever made. I did not need a man to sign my lease agreement. I did not need a man to accompany me to the Social Security office. I could do everything completely on my own. It was so “normal.”
Right away I wanted to get a driver’s license, but my one hour of instruction with my brother was not enough for the state of New Hampshire. The motor vehicle office insisted that I spend two months in a driver’s education program, studying in the classroom and then training on the road. For seven weeks, I left work in the afternoon at 4:00 and went to driving school from five to seven. I studied with a bunch of kids: our teacher was a Muslim, an American who had married a Malaysian woman and had converted. It was funny to think of a Muslim man teaching a Saudi woman to drive in the cold of New Hampshire. I failed the first written test because I didn’t know miles and feet (as in how many miles per hour you could drive or how many feet to park away from the curb or stop from a school bus): I only knew kilometers and meters. But when I retook the same test ten days later, I passed.
I was not scared of the road test when the time came, except for one question: Where are you from? I had been told that if anyone knew I was from Saudi Arabia, I would be given a hard time. Of course, when I got in the car with a large, bald American man, the first question he asked me was, “Where are you from?”
I felt panicked, terrified even. My palms started to sweat and I kept wiping them on my pants. I couldn’t hold the steering wheel.
Finally, the examiner said, “You’ve wiped your hands on your pants five times already. What is going on?”
I glanced over and blurted out, “People told me that if I had to say where I was from, I would have a really hard time. I’m really terrified that I’ll fail.” The examiner made no reply.
I failed the reverse parking section at the end, but he passed me anyway. (I passed what many consider the harder part, parallel parking. My friends often give me the wheel if they need to parallel park their cars.) I waited two weeks and my first driver’s license came in the mail, granted by the state of New Hampshire. It was set to expire on the day my visa ended. I felt like I had been cheated for all my hard work. It was like in the children’s story “Cinderella,” where at midnight the beautiful golden coach turns back into a pumpkin. Later, I learned that I could apply for a driver’s license in Massachusetts and that license would be issued for five years, so before I left the States, I got a Massachusetts license, and that was the license I carried with me back home in Saudi Arabia.
My first few months in the United States were very lonely. I found people in New Hampshire to be careful and conservative, reserved, and not that interested in making new friends. Most of the people I met assumed that with my dark hair, dark eyes, and olive skin, I was Hispanic; a few immediately started speaking to me in Spanish. At first I told people I was from “SA,” but I quickly learned most thought that meant I was South African. Even if I said that I was from Saudi Arabia, I usually received a blank stare. If I explained that it was in the Middle East, people would respond by saying, “Israel?” If I said it was a country in the Arabian Peninsula or said that we have the world’s largest oil reserves or even started talking about camels, they still wouldn’t comprehend. But then if I said one name, Osama bin Laden, I got an “oh” of recognition. Some would add, “That’s a horrible country. You should not go back.”
Slowly I made some friends. Marcus, an American originally from Argentina, taught me about cross-country skiing, gave me a Red Sox sweatshirt, took me to coed soccer games, and showed me Boston; Kenta, whose parents were Japanese, would eat lunch with me at work; and a big guy from Alabama, David, taught me photography and took me for a ride on his Harley. My friend Randy would send me back my emails with all kinds of marks to correct my English, and taught me everything I know about baseball. And I found that once I got to know people, they became real friends, friends you would have for life.
Driving helped. Once I had my license, I could drive to Boston. Aramco paid for my rental car for my entire stay in New Hampshire. It was no small irony to think that Saudi Arabia’s largest company was openly paying for a Saudi woman to drive abroad. I signed up for a couple of social Meetups and there I met an African American Muslim girl, Muslimah, who had moved to Boston from Chicago. She no longer practiced Islam, but she had been raised as a Muslim. She introduced me to theater, musicals, orchestras, jazz performances, swing dance, and stand-up comedy. We saw productions of the musical Cats for $15 a ticket in Manchester, New Hampshire. We went skiing, and when I turned thirty, she and I went skydiving together. I used every long weekend to travel to places like Niagara Falls with my friend from Alabama and my neighbor from Honduras and her two children.
I enjoyed the weather. I had not seen rain for three years before I arrived in New Hampshire, and the first time it rained, I was so excited. When Saudis see rain, our first impulse is to run outside. I jumped up and down in the office, yelling, “It’s raining, let’s go outside.” My coworkers looked at me as if I were crazy. In Saudi Arabia, we pray for God to send us the rain as a great mercy. In New Hampshire, people wished for the rain to go away. I never stopped loving each rainy day.
But I had so many things to learn. One of the first Meetup events I went to was at a restaurant. There were hooks for jackets by the front door and Muslimah left her coat on one. I did the same, but in the pockets I left my phone, my wallet, my money, and my keys. I came back to find my phone and my money gone—thankfully, the thief had left my keys and my driver’s license.
The first play Muslimah and I went to was Spring Awakening, in which two men kiss. I could not believe what I was seeing. I almost fainted watching it onstage in front of me, because in Islam, of course, homosexuality is forbidden, and even punishable by death. Muslimah turned to me, laughing, and said, “I enjoy watching your face more than watching the actors.”