Dorsai - Taxi

I'd managed to draw a small laugh from her – a delightful sound – before she decided that it was time to call her parents. After she left to use the pay phone I could see from our booth, I got the attention of our server and ordered supper for both of us. She didn't spend too much time on the phone, and had just sat down again when the spaghetti I'd ordered arrived. She started to object, and I simply told her "I would usually be having supper about this time; it has been a long day for me, and I'm hungry. I wouldn't be comfortable eating while you just had coffee, so I ordered something for both of us."

By taking the responsibility onto myself and presenting her with a fait accompli, I hoped that she'd be willing to accept it – after what she'd said about not having any money or credit cards, I had the suspicion that her pride was getting in the way of being sensible. I watched her face as she debated it with herself before she told me "This is the first time I've gotten to have pasta in a long time. Thank you", and picking up a fork.

As we ate, she told me that she'd been able to reach her parents, and that they would be wiring her enough money for a hotel room and a train ticket home. It would take a couple of hours for it to get to her, and she asked if I would be willing to keep her company until she could pick it up. I assured her that I would be delighted to spend the time in the company of a pretty girl such as herself, and she graced me with a lovely smile.

When our dishes had been cleared away, the two of us sat there and I listened as she told me what her life had been like after she'd married. Despite all the assurances she'd received beforehand, and how lovely and elaborate the marriage itself had been, it hadn't taken her long to realize that life in her husbands country and her 'parent' culture weren't going to be all that she'd thought. Her wedding night had been both painful and embarrassing – her husband hadn't been patient or gentle in the slightest, and she hadn't even fully recovered from the experience when his family was being shown the bloodied sheet of her wedding bed as proof of her "virtue and honor". Then, in the weeks and months that followed, she came to realize just how constrained her life was to become: growing up in America, she found, her parents had let her pass on so many of the restrictions and limitations women lived under in their native land. While she could have theoretically gone to the U.S. Embassy as an American citizen and tried to make arrangements to return, as a practical matter, she couldn't get anywhere near the place without the help/approval of a male member of her husbands family. The only people she could have unsupervised contact with were other females – and those were either of her husbands family, or so imbued with the culture and customs as to be useless. On top of that, her husbands own habits and personality further limited her options: he allowed her only extremely limited amounts of cash, and her infrequent shopping trips with other women were accomplished with his credit cards which he monitored very closely. For all intents and purposes, she was a prisoner in her husbands home and granted only extremely limited privileges.

And as if that wasn't enough, she was also subject to whatever physical abuse her husband wanted to heap on her. If she did anything to upset him, the best she could hope for was simply to be slapped; there had been a few times, however, where he'd actually beaten her – though not to the point of needing medical attention (which, she explained, would have actually diminished his status: beating a wife was okay; beating her until she needed a doctor wasn't). Their "married life" (it took me a bit to understand she was referring to the physical part of the marriage) consisted of his efforts to cause her to produce a son, without concern about her. Those efforts had been frequent and vigorous at first, but as time passed without the desired results, he became less and less interested in her (much to her relief). What she confided in me (with admonitions that it should never get back to her parents) was that the few reservations she'd had about the entire situation had been enough that she'd had her doctor fit her with an IUD for birth control before the marriage; she'd wanted to hold off on children until the marriage was 'stable', and the absence of children was one of a very few consolations she had about the entire experience. One of the other things that I learned was that she'd spent the entire time since the marriage in her husbands country; this had been her first trip back to the U.S. in several years.

The entire time she was telling me all this, I expressed my sympathy and understanding and appreciation of it all to give her as much support and encouragement that she'd done the right things as I could. Inside, however, I cycled between disgust, anger, and horror. Hearing about all she'd been through only made me that much more relieved and happy that I'd done what I had.

By the time she was ready to see if the money from her parents was available, I could see that she'd managed to purge herself of at least some of all the assorted crap that had been weighing her down: she was visibly more relaxed and calm than she'd been when I first saw her in my cab. A quick check of a phone book told me where I could find the wire transfer service her parents had told her, and it was less than half an hour later that she had cash in her hand. From there, it was a fairly quick trip to the hotel that she'd opted for – a decent middle-class kind of place. The only ID she had was her passport, and the hotel was initially reluctant to give her a room without some means of guaranteeing any additional charges, like phone calls and the like. When I gave the desk clerk my ID and a credit card, though, that was enough.

I'd set her bags down on the floor of her room, and was about to leave when she turned toward me and said "Thank you, Jim, for everything."

"I'm happy I was able to help, Saleh. Nobody should have to put up with that kind of nonsense, and I'm glad that you have a chance to be happy now."

She moved to stand in front of me, and I wasn't particularly surprised when she hesitantly put her arms around me and gave me a hug which I softly returned. What practically floored me was when it went from being a soft, chaste hug to having her holding me tightly enough to damn near cut off my breathing, and crying into my chest in great wracking sobs. All I could do was put my arms around her and gently hold her while I offered words of comfort and reassurance. What really threw me, though, was the feel of her body against mine: underneath the shapeless sack she was wearing, I could detect a medium-sized frame with all the usual parts in the usual proportions – all in all, she made for a nice little bundle in my arms, and I couldn't help but start to react to the feel of her body against mine. Still, I knew she was at a delicate point in all kinds of ways, and simply turned my body a little so that she wasn't pressing (as much, at least) against my semi-erect penis while I continued to try and get her settled down.

We must have stayed there like that for a good fifteen minutes: she'd settle down a bit, and then the whole thing would start up all over again. Her crying was frequent and hard enough that the entire chest of my shirt was wet before she'd calmed down enough to relax her hold on me. Even then, it was still a while longer before I heard her tell me "I… I'm sorry to cry on you like this, but when I started to hug you, I was just trying to let you know I appreciate everything you've done to help me. But when I looked around this room, I suddenly realized that I was finally back in my own country, and that I was truly free again – that I didn't have to worry that people were spying on me, or that I was going to be hurt because of some bullshit honor thing, or any of the other crap I've had to live with for so long. Then everything that's happened just hit me, and I lost it."