Brilliant (17 page)

 

“You're taking me the wrong way, Fiona.” Deborah turned her left signal on and swung into someone's driveway, winter tires shimmying. The snow that looked fairyland pretty the night before, their first snowfall in five years, had turned that morning to slush. Snow, ice, rain, weather. She didn't know how to do any of it anymore.

“Recalculating,” said Fiona.

“Oh, shut up, Fiona.”

It was the first thing she'd said all day, other than a groggy “bye” to Harris as he left for work at seven. She'd planned to get up and make breakfast, had planned to do this every morning that week. But sleep seemed to be holding her down lately, a deep pit of a place neither guilt nor duty could dislodge her from. “I'm sorry,” she'd told Harris the day before when she called him at work. “I just can't seem to get going these mornings.”

“Regime change is never easy, dear.” Harris had sounded work-distracted, but even distracted he could think of something clever to say. The night before they'd howled over a
New Yorker
cartoon: An elderly couple sit primly on adjacent sofas, the woman reading a book, the man looking out the window as helmeted soldiers with tanks and guns swarm the house. Regime change is never easy, dear, the woman says to the man.

“Well, that might be a bit extreme,” Harris had laughed. An office phone was ringing in the background. “More like regimen change, right? Go easy on yourself, Deb. We've only been back in Canada a couple of months. See you at six, traffic depending.”

“Please drive to highlighted route,” said Fiona. Deborah turned the car around and yanked the plug.

 

Having a
GPS
in Abu Dhabi would have been an exercise in insanity, though that didn't stop people from buying them. “How do you program it?” Harris had asked the Indian sales clerk at Carrefour Hypermarket. They were still new to the city then, which meant they were lost every time they got in the car. The clerk had placed the box on the counter as tenderly as if it had contained a Rolex. It had been the usual mad Friday in the store, shopping carts piled with kids and twenty-kilo bags of rice, the electronics counter teeming with testosterone. The store — large as a football field — hummed with consumption. “You plug it in,” said the young man; Safik, his name tag read.

“But there are no street numbers here.” Deborah had had to shout over the din of Arabic and Hindi, English and Urdu.

“Numbers, yes,” said Safik, nodding knowledgeably. “We have numbers.”

“I mean street addresses,” Deborah had tried to explain. “You know, like 96 Elmwood.” Their old address in Ottawa had popped up, unbidden. She could almost smell the lilacs in the backyard. She had almost cried.

The man looked confused. “Wood?” he said.

“Come on, Deb,” Harris had said, taking her arm, and smiling brightly at the clerk. “Thank you so much for your time.”

“You're always so unfailingly polite,” Deborah said when they had escaped the roar of the store. “Don't you ever feel like shaking these guys and saying: ‘Just tell me you really don't know what you're talking about'?”

Harris had put his arm around her, then let it drop quickly. “Nearly forgot where I was. Come on, let's go to Forty Fruity. You need a Honey Bunny.”

 

Driving down route something or other now, the frosty, layered promise of that drink, the cloud of ice cream on top, the pulpy mango, the chunks of pineapple, the honey's drippy sweetness, came back with the force of first desire. She wanted a Honey Bunny and she wanted it now. Instead, there was this: Grey fields disappearing into grey sky; folks saying, “I'll give you a shout”; Home Depots and Tim Horton's and maple everything. A civil society. Yes, indeed.

“Maybe you need a hobby,” Harris said that night as they were washing up after dinner. Now that it was just the two of them again, they rarely used the dishwasher. It sat empty as the extra bedroom upstairs.

“That's rather patronizing, don't you think?” she said. “I'm supposed to take up quilting or something? Hang out at Michael's in the mall with all the other unemployed, crafty empty-nesters?”

“Oh, Deb,” said Harris. Until they'd gone to Abu Dhabi, Deborah had been a lobbyist for the rights of the disabled. She had the three boys, each a project in himself. She'd had her early-music choir, her book club. She had
him
, a full-time job, Harris himself would say. What would she want with a hobby? “I was thinking of something along the lines of, I don't know, scrap-booking? We have all those photos you keep saying you want to organize.”

“Oh, Harris,” she said.

 

She hadn't wanted the expat life. “I like my home! I like my life!” she'd protested when Harris accepted an administrative post at Al Nahyan University after eighteen years of marriage, after a dozen years teaching journalism at Carleton. A much-younger colleague, one of the New Media guys (
his
caps, not Harris's), had just edged Harris out of what would likely be his last shot at tenure. “I mean I like to travel. I
love
to travel. But this is different.”

The heat, the chaos, the sand, the traffic, the malls, the snotty Brits, the impossible distance from home. What had they done? “I'm not sure how long I'm going to last,” she warned after the first month, after the flurry of furnishing their flat in Late Ikea — no point in shipping the contents of their Ottawa home — and after the boys had gotten settled. They were in different schools that first year; the eldest, Thom, in the French high school; the twins, Jon and Terry, at the British school. Teenagers already, they'd been seriously unhappy about leaving Ottawa. But within a month they had chums and rugby practices, trips to the desert and Dubai, beautiful classmates with posh accents and rich fathers. Harris's days at the university were long, with uncertain end times, and packed with meetings, plans and promises. “They want it all — master's programs, accreditation, visiting Nobel scholars. And they think we can give it to them,” he said, shrugging. “Emiratis are so proud of their desert roots, but also kind of ashamed, have you noticed?” She appreciated that Harris seemed to be keeping his weight on both feet, hadn't lost his critical faculties, his old irreverence. Other expats they met had had a conversion experience.

“Been out to Sadiyaat?” A silver-haired man in an expensive dress shirt had cornered her at a hotel
iftar
that first Ramadan. He was balancing two plates, both piled with rice, samosas, pita,
fattoush
. “If you want to understand this place, really get into the Abu Dhabi head space, you owe it to yourself to go out there and see the Sadiyaat Story. These people are so ambitious they're planning to build both a Louvre
and
a Guggenheim. The 2030 plan? Brilliant.” He glanced over at Harris and the boys, slowly making their way down the twenty-foot buffet. Jon, the taller twin, was bouncing on his heels. All that food, even if they hadn't fasted all day. “Great place for kids,” the man said. She was trying to place the accent, a new habit. Not British, maybe South African.

“We've just arrived,” she said.

He gestured to a window — the restaurant was on the twentieth floor with eye-popping views of water, sand and sky. “Can't be immune to that.”

“It's beautiful,” she said.

“Spectacular,” said the man. Deborah strained to see her gang. Perhaps they were sitting down, chowing down, already. “Be sure to attend an
iftar
during Ramadan,” Harris's Egyptian secretary had told her. “Being invited to someone's home is nicest, but some of the hotels do a lovely spread.” This was a spread all right, but the celebrants looked to be expats like herself, strangers far from home, simply having dinner out.

The man seemed to be waiting for something more. He smiled encouragingly.
Heaven on
earth. Go ahead, say it.

“Jury's still out,” she said, knowing she already had an opinion.

“Hey,” he said. “Relax. Have fun. Enjoy yourself.”

“I think I just got advice from a sex therapist,” she said to Harris when she found their table.

“Huh?” The boys had actually looked up from their plates.

 

She was miserable. Not just the first year, but deep into the second. She'd thought the second year would be easier. It wasn't. She'd initially hoped to make at least one Emirati friend, gain one opening into life behind the
shayla
. Who were those women gliding through the malls, the sequined hems of their
abayas
skimming the marble? Were they repressed? Fulfilled? She envied Harris's female colleagues who taught English and computer courses to rooms of Emirati young women. What a window they must have.

But they didn't have locals as neighbours and if Harris's Emirati colleagues extended a social invitation it was just for him, men only. As the months went by, Deborah began to see how naïve it was to have expected anything else. The worlds didn't intersect. There were the landowners and those who worked the land. Meanwhile, the boys continued to be admirably, annoyingly adaptable. Thom began seeing — discreetly — the daughter of the Tunisian vice-consul. Terry and Jon lived the life of British prep boys. Deborah tried to keep their lives normal, i.e., Canadian: no live-in maid, two smallish cars, Friday lunch at home instead of champagne-blurred brunches at the Sheraton or InterContinental. But Saturdays the boys were now mostly off with friends at yacht clubs and private beaches.

Harris was more absent than he'd been the first year, travelling to Morocco and Jordan to recruit students. Emirati enrollment wasn't as high as had been hoped. It will take time, Harris tried to explain to his bosses. “We're building a reputation, growing our profile.” But they didn't like hearing this. And he couldn't say part of the problem was that Emirati families continued to send their brightest sons abroad for university. He'd already seen that anything other than extreme diplomacy could be job-threatening. One of his colleagues had practically been escorted to the airport after (loudly) questioning the university's academic standards. “I'm just not sure they're willing to put forth what's necessary,” Harris told Deborah after another contentious meeting. “Money and pronouncements, sure. Openness and transparency, not likely. Rigour? What's that?”

Saturdays, with the boys out and about, he began taking long naps. At home in Ottawa, she would have welcomed the quiet, the chance to read, email friends, putter. But here she found herself staring into space for unquantifiable amounts of time. “Maybe,” she ventured to Harris during one of those still afternoons, “maybe I go back to Ottawa next year, take the boys, get a job and you stay here and work for another year or two…” But the boys were happy and Harris was more gainfully employed than he'd ever been during a long career in academia. She was the minority vote.

There
were
outlets — the Abu Dhabi Ladies Club, Women in Abu Dhabi and Canadian Women's Connection — that offered organized activities, like shopping hauls to Dubai and bus tours to Yas Island to admire the new Formula One arena, plus endless coffee mornings at various hotels. “One of the great things about being an expat is that you ca
n reinvent yourself each year,” a woman from Edmonton told Deborah at one. The coffee had been lukewarm and she'd had to put twenty dirhams into a silver bowl to pay for it. “Each year you can be and do something different. Who's to know?” the woman chirped. Who are you this year? Deborah wanted to ask. The American wife of one of Harris's colleagues, a mousy little thing, had started a conspicuous affair with their tennis coach. You could call that reinvention.

“Sweetie, why don't you get a job?” Deborah's sister in Vancouver asked more than once. “They must have special education programs or advocacy groups for the disabled. Something, no? You seem so adrift.” How to explain this place to anyone who didn't live here? There was a high-profile fundraising program called Donate a Brick to guilt the city's über-rich into supporting a special-care centre for Emirati children. With the high rate of intermarriage, the local gene pool had shrunk disastrously. Down syndrome, chromosomal disorders, rare birth defects, even rarer cancers.

“Never seen anything like it,” a Canadian pathologist told her at a party. “We've been telling them for the last fifteen years: ‘Don't marry your cousins!' But that wouldn't keep the money in the family, would it? The government turns a blind eye, then sends these poor kids off to a sanitarium in Switzerland.” They'd received a flyer under the doormat seeking donations for the centre: “Planted on Earth…Fruited in Heaven to revive the Endowment Route, help the poor and the needy to elevate life burdens off their shoulders through our endowment expenditures as well as strengthen social & family armpits and parents benevolence through our projects.” They'd laughed themselves silly over the translation. “Oh, yes,” said Harris. “Give me your tired, your poor, your family armpits.”

The only other possibility was the Horizon School for disabled kids. Deborah had visited once and had no plans to return. The staff was well meaning, even compassionate, but severely under-equipped in training and numbers, even philosophy. It was too painful to return to a time best forgotten in her own country when the disabled were pitied more than helped. With so few doors open professionally, she cooked more, parented harder. Under “occupation” on her
UAE
visa it read “housewife.” She'd enjoyed the absurdity of that title at first. Then it rankled. Then it began to feel true.

In the fall of their third year — she'd cried at Pearson on the way out once again — Deborah dragged herself to another coffee morning. There were a few vaguely familiar faces; mostly it was newcomers, smiling hard. It was a relief to not be new anymore, to know the drill, to not expect too much. You did come to know yourself here, she thought as coffee was poured and introductions made, to see who you were and who you weren't, like when the garrulous French woman next to her complained that they were all paying their nannies way, way too much,
mon dieu
.