You may think it odd that I am familiar with Juicy Couture, but I know of the latest fashions as well as the outdated ones. You may think it odd because I am wearing a burqa. So is my sister. So is my mother. But my sister reads all the latest French fashion magazines. We live in Paris. In her dreams she lives in a fantasy world where people stare at her because she is beautifully dressed from head to toe in the latest Chanel or Dolce & Gabbana, not because she is robed from head to toe in her religion. Her eyes often well up in response to the reactions of strangers. I believe those tears are due to her own disappointment that she is not a Westerner or, even more ridiculous, a Western model on the pages of a fashion magazine. I fan through the magazines when she is finished with them, but I do not live in a fantasyland and I’m honored to wear a burqa. I wish she would seek refuge with Allah and give up these thoughts.
Suddenly my sister, Shireen, noticed the Juicy Couture woman as well. I wondered what took her this long. “Look, over there, that woman in the out-of-style tracksuit is staring at us. We should stare at her in that putrid outfit! She can wear anything she wants and that’s what she chooses?” The woman made matters worse by whispering something to the man next to her, doing a sort of half point in our direction. A quick poke for his attention, then a flick of the wrist to direct him to look at the circus act: Muslim women dressed in full burqas in the Western world.
“What do you think she’s saying about us?” Shireen asked me.
I softened it, as I always did. “It’s hot in here. Maybe she’s saying, See those girls with the pretty eyes—they must be hot.”
“I am hot,” Shireen responded, even more annoyed at realizing it. We both looked over at our younger brother in his New York Yankees T-shirt. This infuriated her more—him wearing that T-shirt and us cloaked in our religion. She did not feel the strong bond that I did to our mother and her mother before her in our native Saudi Arabia. My mother knew this, to some extent. Last year she even bought Shireen a special burqa made of crepe, with black velvet trim. Shireen told me the velvet made her cry more. It was like a taste of something that left her wanting.
She interrupted my thoughts. “Dalia was all wrong about New York, all wrong,” she complained. Dalia is our cousin who spent last summer in New York. She went on and on about how Manhattan was different from Paris, how people didn’t stare so much. How in New York you could walk down the street with a camel and no one would stare at you. She was right in that New York is a melting pot. America in general is much more of a melting pot than anywhere in Europe, I think. Europe has a lot of different nationalities in each country, of course, but they never really seem to melt together. You can move to Germany, but you never really become a German. The same is very true of France, and I have been living there since the age of two. In America anyone can become a true American. What Dalia was wrong about was the staring. There are people in New York who seem content to spend their whole day perched on benches staring at other people. It even has a name: people-watching. It’s like bird-watching but without the binoculars. Still, it didn’t bother me.
Shireen decided she was going to take down the Juicy Couture starer with just her eyes. She’d had enough. She stood and walked toward Juicy and the guy she was with and gave them a good, long, obvious stare back. It actually worked. They ran off to a corner and sat with magazines plastered in front of their faces until our flight was called. We laughed so hard that it drew my father’s attention, which was not a good thing. They called for our flight to board at just the right time.
Once on the plane, Shireen looked sad again. I didn’t have to ask her why. She would be married in two weeks’ time, and the trip to New York, which she had thought would satisfy her yearning to explore, had done nothing for her. We had barely been allowed out of our father’s sight; thinking it would be any other way had been just a silly dream of hers. She would be married in two weeks to a man she barely knew and did not love. I know she had dreamed of things that have never even entered my mind. Dreams of dressing in the clothing on the pages of the magazines and attracting a man—even though those dreams defy the exact reason that we wear a burqa: to protect us from the lustful gaze of men. Shireen yearned for the lustful gaze of men. She dreamed of kissing a man. Not her husband, just any man. It is a sin to kiss anything with the intention of lust, anything, even a rock. I didn’t envy her dreams. They brought her only dissatisfaction with life.
CHAPTER 21
Indiscretion at the Ostrich Detective Agency
By Andie Rand, Private Detective