Dryland: One Woman's Swim to Sobriety by Nancy Stearns Bercaw

Author:Nancy Stearns Bercaw
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781503942950
Publisher: Grand Harbor Press
Published: 2017-04-17T21:00:00+00:00

THE PERSIAN GULF

March 28, 2015

I sit down in the hospital pharmacy’s waiting area with a copy of the National newspaper someone else has left behind. I want to get my pills and get out of here, but the pharmacist needs time to process my somewhat-contentious prescription. Four pharmacists are behind the counter, but mine is the one who spoke at length with my doctor on the phone. He pauses to confer with them every few minutes.

I’m supposed to be at a meeting with the chair from Chemical Engineering at my university. He wants to improve his department’s web page. He’s a grumpy, red-faced Englishman who’ll bark orders at me. I heard one of my Muslim colleagues refer to him as a “problem drinker.” I wonder if they ever say that about me? I take great pains to hide any sign of my drinking from them. I act chipper when I feel like shit. I smile when I feel like crying.

The Emiratis on campus are vastly more temperate, perhaps a byproduct of being teetotalers, than the Europeans and Americans. We’re a mixed-gender campus, as well as being ethnically diverse. Unlike most other colleges in the region, men and women share the same classrooms too. This university defies every expectation and shatters every stereotype I had of the Middle East. In fact, this campus is almost a world of its own.

The president of the university is an American man who has an American female chief of staff. The vice president is an Emirati man, as is the head of procurement. An Emirati woman runs human relations. A Frenchman is in charge of campus facilities and construction. Our security guards are African men. The food retailers are Filipinas. Rocky, the young man who delivers my coffee to my desk twice a day, is from Sri Lanka.

Rocky is probably worried by my absence at the moment, just as my male supervisor from Palestine may be.

I text my boss, Ali, that I’m running late and should arrive on campus by eleven a.m.

No probs, he texts back. Tks.

I didn’t tell a soul, not even my husband, where I was headed this morning. I hoped to get in, get my meds, and get out before I needed to say anything. But my plans are in danger of being thwarted by a lollygagging pharmacist.

I lift the newspaper up to cover my face, even though only a few other people are in the pharmacy waiting room. The front page features a story about the murder of an American teacher that took place in Abu Dhabi three months ago. I’ve been following the news closely because the crime hit so close to home in so many ways.

The murder happened on the ground floor of Sun and Sky Towers, across the street from our apartment in Mangrove Place. The circumstances were similar to Carolyn’s death twenty-seven years earlier in Seoul—the victim having been stabbed to death by another female.

There was one striking difference, however. The culprit, a veiled and gloved Muslim woman, was in police custody forty-eight hours later.

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