Saturday Night Widows (37 page)

He sent her a text:
I can’t do this anymore
. He needed to attend to
his own kids, he said. “So we’re going to try just dating again,” she said miserably.

“This may save the relationship,” said Marcia, but we all knew Lesley wanted more. Family was the center of her life, and she lived to make a home for someone and partake in the ready affection that arose from living together. She continued to weep, while the rest of us traded grim expressions.

“How do you
fix
it?” she asked again.

“Look,” said Dawn, “not to say anything about the relationship with Craig, but this pain has to do with the other loss, too.”

Lesley nodded fervently, swallowing and crying harder.

“It’s another loss,” Dawn said. “Losing
again
is very hard.”

“That’s why it was so brave of you to enter a new relationship,” I said. This was what I had dreaded for myself—losing someone again when I’d already lost more than I thought I could bear.

“You can throw yourself into something to erase the pain,” Dawn continued, “but when it doesn’t work, it’s very hard.”

Lesley apologized for crying. “You are the only ones I can talk to about this,” she said.

“Someone was asking me the other day about what we do,” said Tara, “and I answered, ‘We lift each other up.’ ” Looking at Lesley, I wondered if that was enough.

W
HEN
I
ARRIVED
for breakfast on the sun-washed hotel terrace, Dawn was entertaining the troops, reaching into the past. She pulled out photographs of her children and Andries, who was as handsome as advertised.

“Look at him. So young, so gorgeous. He’ll always be young, the bastard.”

Lesley’s merry laugh returned. Grief, we knew, comes in waves. She was eating fried flatbread studded with olives, figs, and the fleshiest dates I’d ever seen. It was impossible to feel low under the spell of the sapphire blue sky, the cubist canvas of Fès stretched out below, and the clay-colored mountains beyond.

Lesley had been discussing her situation again, this time with the rubbery resilience I had come to know in her. “I realize I underestimated. I had thought if it didn’t work, I could just walk away. But I can’t”—her voice wavered—“because I’m crazy about him.”

“Keep an open mind,” Dawn cautioned. “You may be better apart. But if it doesn’t work, bear in mind that you give much more credence to the first guy you meet—you know,
after
.”

A
MID TOURISTS
in Western dress in the lobby, one woman stood out. An elegant figure in a lime green djellaba, the floor-length hooded robe worn by Moroccan men and women alike, she had almond eyes and long, thick, coffee-colored hair.

“I am your guide, Saida,” she said. She extended her hand.

We repeated slowly: “Sigh-EE-dah.”

“Yes,” she said. “In Arabic, it means
happy
.”

We had managed to engage one of the rare Moroccan women who worked as a guide, and I felt an immediate kinship. Modestly covered, she looked much like other local women I had seen so far, but the color of her robe had more punch, her manner less self-effacement. Her quick eyes darted over us, seemingly as eager
to learn from these strangers as we were from her. Saida appeared amused rather than annoyed that we were running late—the scourge of group travel—after our chatty breakfast. She hustled us onto a van that would take us to the countryside and introduced our driver, Laarbi.

Marcia held up her BlackBerry. “Can I get Wi-Fi on the hike?”

“
No
,” we cried.

Luckily, Marcia became engrossed when we peppered Saida with questions. She held a university degree in English, we learned. Married, a devout Muslim, a resident of Fès, she was the mother of two daughters. Her background was Berber, one of two main ethnic groups in Morocco, along with Arabs. Saida watched the road from the front seat of the van, but she kept an ear cocked when we fell into our usual gossip. “I didn’t know what to think when I heard you are all widows,” she observed at length. “You are a fun group of ladies, I think!”

We were soon bumping along a country road toward some verdant mountains, and we passed a woman carrying hay bales on her head. Eighty percent of the women in rural areas are illiterate, Saida told us with scholarly precision. Some of them marry as young as twelve. Men, she said, are allowed up to four wives.

“How many husbands do women get?” Dawn asked.

Saida laughed. “We are working on that!”

Released from the van into the fresh dry air of the Middle Atlas, we scrambled uphill toward white limestone peaks on a dry riverbed that was carpeted with loose rocks. Saida removed her djellaba, revealing army-green cargo pants, hiking boots, and a slim, athletic figure that could rock the casbah if she let it. A local Berber man who knew the trails joined us for the hike, and Tara, teetering
but uncomplaining in her inadequate shoes, tried to communicate in French and Spanish. He taught her a few words of Berber, and they settled finally on a pastiche with a touch of sign language. He pointed out sage, thyme, quince, and pomegranate that grew under the shade of Aleppo pines and tall, majestic cedars. We sniffed and tasted. Marcia took photos with her fancy camera. We pushed on, upward, and no one talked about home. Saida took our picture from atop a rocky bluff with a valley behind.

“You are all so beautiful,” she said.

“I’m keeping this picture,” Dawn said, “to remind me what I looked like
before
I had four husbands.”

chapter
TWENTY-SEVEN

a
fter the twilight call to prayer, Saida guided us through medieval gates into the heart of Fès, where our footsteps echoed in narrow, deserted stone passages barely illuminated by dusky lamps. We reached a tapered pool of light at the entrance to a
riad
, a traditional Moroccan home. The exterior wall of mud brick gave no hint of the welcome we found on the other side—a courtyard of multicolored tiles with a babbling fountain at the center. The air was tart with the scent of lemons that hung on trees within the walls. Rooms opened off the patio and several balconies above, circulating light and air from within the house rather than through windows opening onto the street. The design deflected heat, Saida explained, and guaranteed privacy, especially for women.

This
riad
housed a restaurant, booked exclusively for us that night. Saida motioned for us to follow her. We passed under an archway into an open-air dining room with ornately carved wood ceilings. Three women in djellabas sat gravely at a long table, on
banquettes buttressed by mirrored pillows. In the impossible dim light, I strained to see their faces, but their heads were wrapped in scarves, their eyes cast downward. Saida had invited them to be our guests for dinner.

“They are like you, widows,” she said, and the word hit me hard.

Widows—months of hijinks with our group had demystified the label by now. We saw ourselves as normal American women, and although we’d taken our lumps, we were moving along—relocating, traveling, dating, remarrying—all of it conveniently possible in our go-go American culture. I couldn’t imagine, wasn’t even sure I
wanted
to imagine, the life of a widow here in Morocco, where women in the best of circumstances were so constrained. They enjoyed a few more freedoms than those in some Middle Eastern countries—free to drive, work, vote, and dress as they chose, within limits approved by their families—but men dominated those families. I knew nothing about how a woman here would cope if suddenly left to fend for herself. I’d become so close to the Blossoms that I saw widowhood through our relatively privileged circumstances.

“How will we communicate?” I asked Saida. My voice sounded sharp and rattled.

“Don’t worry, I will translate. It will be fine.”

I was less concerned with language than the cultural divide. Our guests appeared modest, solemn, their hands folded on laps like novitiates at an abbey, and they sat very still, except for flitting glances at our Western clothes and hair. Tara took a seat next to me and leaned in close. “I hope you don’t think I’m a coward,” she whispered, “but I don’t want to say how my husband died … considering how Muslims disapprove of alcohol.”

For a few minutes I watched with unease, trying to figure how this would play out. The Moroccan women spoke to each other haltingly in Arabic. Apparently, they had never met before, either. Saida’s penetrating eyes followed the conversation, deciding what to translate. How selective was she going to be? “They are saying you all look much younger than your age,” she said. Very selective indeed. “I will ask them to tell about themselves.”

Seated next to Tara, Rashida, a plump woman with a broad flat face, declined to speak at all. She was afraid to tell her story, said Saida, who explained that Rashida was fifty-five, the mother of five children, all of whom lived in one room in the medina. She had cleaned in the courts before the work became too hard and now relied on support from friends. It is one of the pillars of Islam, Saida said, to help the poor, especially widows.

We have so little in common
, I thought, despairing. Wait till they get an earful about Marcia’s suite of corporate offices and Tara’s house with bedrooms for every child. I glanced over at Rashida and saw that she was following Saida impassively, like a stone Buddha in a brown patterned robe and black headscarf.

Waiters distracted us with a clattering of plates. They dropped a bowl of
harira
in front of me, a thick porridge of chickpeas, lentils, and tomatoes with a heady bouquet of Moroccan spices. We passed the customary accompaniment of dates and cookies made with sesame and anise, displayed prettily on an inlaid plate.

“We have a similar cookie that comes from Italy,” Dawn asked Saida to translate, trying hard to connect.

A young woman next to Dawn watched her with a sweet, timid smile. Magda was forty with pale skin and heavy caterpillar brows that gave her an air of dark gravity. Her husband died of cancer
seven years ago, she explained to Saida in a barely audible voice, and she was raising a fifteen-year-old son by working at a clothing store in the new part of town. “She is educated,” Saida said. But she had left it to her son to decide whether she could come tonight, a strange-sounding power balance to our ears. “He decided it was okay, since she will only be with women.”

Were all Moroccan women so subservient? I couldn’t imagine anyone in our group summoning the meekness required to conform to this society. I felt Tara next to me, stirring in frustration. But I was also interested in the woman on the other side of Magda. Outwardly, to my eyes, she didn’t appear as docile as the rest. She was more brightly dressed in a vivid turquoise djellaba and red headscarf, which gave her a modern, almost fashionable look. Her arresting face was considerably darker, her stout body sturdier, and she spoke with the harsh accent of a country woman. Her name was Naima, we learned, and at forty-seven, she had been married three times, twice widowed and once divorced. Naima worked on a farm outside the city to support five daughters and a son. It was rare for widows to remarry, Saida said. “She is lucky woman.”