Layla doesn’t respond to my question, and I repeat it, crankier.
“Oh, sorry!” she says, looking over her shoulder skittishly. Apparently, I traumatized the holy babe last night. Something about a Negro Nancy Drew? I’m a hoot when I’m on thirty milligrams of someone else’s prescription! Serves her right for assuming I’d talk to her just because we share the same skin color, which is as presumptious and offensive as assuming all gay men are attracted to one another. “I didn’t know you were talking to me.”
“Did it load?” I ask, impatiently.
Layla looks down at her phone. “Um. It’s loading.”
“Lisa,” I grouse, “what the fuck, man?”
That turns a few more heads in my direction. I don’t normally speak like a twenty-year-old frat boy whose buddy puked on his pillow last night, but here we are.
“Too many of you are trying to get on the connection for it to work,” Lisa says without looking up from her own inbox.
“Can we take turns on airplane mode?” I pose the question to the group, but no one bites. “I’ll go first,” I volunteer, holding up my phone and showing everyone as I drag the button right. “Lauren?” I ask. “Please?”
Lauren groans, but she closes out of Instagram, swipes left, and taps open the Settings icon.
“Done,” Brett adds. The least you could fucking do, I think. Yesterday’s scrumptious memory returns to me: the optimistic panic on Brett’s face when she showed me the message on her phone: Marc told me Lisa thinks we SLEPT TOGETHER! She was so sure I’d flip out too. What did she think—we’d put our heads together and figure our way out of this, Thelma and Louise style? The truth is, I hope Arch hears about it. I hope Arch leaves her fat ass.
I stare at Brett’s Pantene commercial hair that she claims is wash and go. When we lived together, her Conair 2000 wasn’t the only discovery I made about her. With a wolfish smile, I say, “I knew I could count on you, Brett.”
Everyone lapses into silence again, with these phony looks of appreciation for the dusty geological wreckage outside our windows. I make an ooohhhing noise as we pass another patch of burnt-out wasteland. Then I wake my phone and connect to the MiFi when no one is looking.
From far away, the village looks like it was built out of mountain-colored Legos. We pass an ancient man straddling the neck of a white donkey, two rattan bags attached at the flank. Why don’t they just ride the donkey to the well?
“It’s a mule, first of all,” Brett says, and I’m startled to discover I voiced the thought out loud. “Only the wealthy families can afford to own them and it’s tradition that the men use them to transport food and supplies.” Brett turns around in her seat and adds, “?‘Wealthy’ being a relative term.”
A revulsion bucks me, that I am expected to care about these poor village women denied a mule. I am not heartless. My heart is enlarged with caring thanks to the mess my mother made out of raising me. My mother loved me, and she didn’t mean to ruin me, but she did, by teaching me that I am responsible for how other people feel. Between her and Vince and Brett and the twenty-four-year-old blond viewers who don’t want to be made to feel guilty that their ancestors owned slaves because they don’t even, like, see color, I have performed my job so well I deserve a raise and a corner office.
We descend slowly to the lowest tier of the village, where the stone-stacked huts are squat and windowless. Brett explains the gites are grouped politically by association, and asks Layla if she notices anything as we pull into what is going to have to pass for the village center.
“There aren’t any guys,” Layla says, after a minute. Brett reacts to this glaringly obvious observation as though Layla has just defined a parabola.
“That’s exactly right. Most men between the ages of sixteen and forty temporarily emigrate to North African cities to find jobs, and send the money back home to their families.”
Then who is raping them?
We come to a running stop in the hard dirt, attracting a ring of filthy, curious children. A woman approaches the driver’s-side window, wearing a headscarf and sweatshirt, both sound-the-alarm red. The color choice is not a coincidence.
Brett unbuckles her seat belt and squeezes between the driver and front passenger seat. “Salam!” she calls through the open window, and I think about swallowing my fourth Valium in fourteen hours. There is only so much of Brett’s ham-fisted Arabic I can take. “Salam, Tala!”
“As-salam alaykam, Brett!” she returns. She rattles off directions in rapid-fire Arabic to the driver, pointing and waving like a crossing guard with tiny balls and a big blowhorn. I thought women here were oppressed little wallflowers who spoke only when spoken to. I thought these bikes were built to save the hymens of preyed-upon preteens.
We reverse into a narrow sod alleyway, deep enough so that the second van can plug us in. Through the front windshield, I watch Marc push open the back doors and blunder to his feet, rolling his neck and stretching his arms above his head. All warmed up now, he hoists the F55 onto his right shoulder. I take one last sip of tea. Wait for the jump.
Oh, it’s exhausting. Meeting all these grateful women. Watching happy children be happy with so little, the way they pogo in front of Marc, their scalps momentarily clearing the lens. We visit a hut where women weave rag rugs, where Tala explains the spirit of creative reuse, how when a rug is old or torn, the women cut it and sew it into colorful wool and cotton scraps. They never throw anything away, she says, and I glare hotly at Layla. For a time, these rugs were only considered fit for local homes, a practical solution to chilly mud floors in winter. Today they sell for thousands of dollars in a store on La Brea Avenue in Hollywood. Layla takes hundreds of pictures of toothless smiling women holding up their tatty designs, while Brett explains to Tala in pidgin Arabic that Layla is the curator of Qualb, an online boutique that sells home goods made by Berber women.
“The heart?” Tala curves her hand around her breast.
Brett nods. “We have an expression in the States: Home is where the heart is.”
Tala parts her dry lips with an ah of understanding. “That is very clever.”
Layla is on her knees, fingering the fringe end of a rag rug in progress. “Thank you,” she says in a courtly voice that sets my teeth on edge. Who does she think she is, repaying a compliment with a thank-you?
On a sunny stoop we come across an older woman, her face ravaged by the sun, and a young girl with her knees around a pottery wheel. They look like they’ve dunked themselves in a mud bath at an expensive California spa. Layla cries out a name—Kweller?—and the girl glances up, shading her eyes.
“Layla,” she determines. The girl allows the potter’s wheel to come to a stop and stands, clasping her wet hands at her pelvis, unsmiling. She’s tall and angular, like Layla, and what she’s wearing is the closest I’ve seen to an outfit since we’ve arrived: a long-sleeved navy and white top, bulky bright blue jeans, and a burnt orange headscarf, pushed far enough back from her head that I can see she parts her hair deeply to the side. Nautical top, denim, pop of color, hair flip. I had no idea the basic hos of Starbucks had such far-reaching influence.
Layla squeals. “Can you believe I’m here?”
I set my molars to work again. Can you believe I’m here. Starting her young on the make it about me train, which is all reality TV is. Narcissist training.