Just after the first Gulf War, I moved to Jeddah with my husband. I didn’t realize at the time that I hadn’t married Essam, I had married his mother and the women of his family. The minute I arrived, they became my world.

During the day, there were six of us: my mother-in-law, Um-Essam; her two youngest daughters, Arij and Johara; a daughter-in-law, Hasanat; and me with my infant daughter, Yasmina. They had never lived with an American before, and they regarded me like an ugly old armchair that was too big to stuff out the window. (For the virtuous, home-bound woman, the window was the only way to dump trash.)

We lived in Kilo Seven—a district measuring seven kilometers from a rotary at the downtown Meridien Hotel. We had more religious police than most neighborhoods, and we didn’t dare leave the house without our husbands. The apartment was our world.

While the men went to work or spent their time with friends, the women were free to do what they liked: walk around scantily clad, comb their hair, walk around scantily clad. It was a peaceful liberation, this freedom from men, but when we stripped off our robes to mop the sweat from our necks, it was clear that the heat was our warden.

Five times a day we’d hear the mullah’s call to prayer, his microphone so loud we could hear him scratch his beard. We always paused to listen, but no one prayed. Beyond our walls, we heard the neighbors: screams of untended babies, angry second wives hurling insults at first wives, young girls squealing over the world’s only blonde-haired, blue-eyed doll.

We had no tables and chairs. The men’s sitting room—a detached parlor at the front of the house—had floor pillows stitched in cobalt and gold, but we never went in there for fear of strange men. Male friends dropped by even when our husbands weren’t home. They used the sitting room like a tree in the desert, a journey’s respite. The women’s sitting room had a ring of sofas built into the wall, but the upholstery was so expensive that we weren’t allowed to sit there.

We lived on the floor. We worked there, ate there, slept on wicker mats lined like cots in an orphanage. We kept our clothes in piles. We shared robes, bras, underwear, we used them as pillows and cleaning rags.

Lounging in a wall niche by the kitchen door, the telephone was the geographical and spiritual center of the house. At-talifoon. It rang every day, and Um- Essam had to answer it. She would snatch the receiver from anyone who reached it before her, amidst howls of protest and May a thousand fleas infest your armpits.

We could always tell when a man was calling. Instead of twitters of oh, how are you and ah, rheumatism’s acting up again, Um-Essam would stand frozen in the dining room, phone at her ear, and shout Hello? Hello? A theatrical pause. Hello? Aywa? she would say, yes? Allo? And sometimes, for fun, an English Hay-lo? The proper etiquette, of course, was to acknowledge that the silent caller was a pious man who didn’t dare speak to a woman outside his family. Had Um-Essam been so pious she would have placed her palm on the receiver to garble the beauty of her feminine voice. Occasionally, she would give the caller a piece of her mind: All right, you pervert, I’m going to report you to the Committee for the Protection of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice!

But sometimes the caller was a woman. Women dialed numbers at random and waited for a sympathetic female voice. You don’t know me, but my name is Khadija. I’m bored. I’m sick of the view from my back door. Um-Essam scoffed at these callers. They would have to be frantic to get her attention. My name is Aisha. I’m going to kill myself. Or once, Please, can you tell me the least painful way for a baby to die? In these cases, Um-Essam would gather up the telephone cord, go into the kitchen and shut the door. When she came back out, she would give us details in a whisper so that Johara wouldn’t hear: That girl was going to jump from the roof. She was seventeen—just like you Hasanat—and her husband brought home a second wife.

Um-Essam had acquired a small collection of these women. Zara called every morning after her husband went to work. I spoke with her once. Because it was cool, everyone had gone to visit the downstairs neighbors, but I hadn’t felt up to the strain of formalities. When the phone rang, I answered but didn’t say hello. Zara’s meek voice broke the silence.

“Hello, please, is Um-Essam there?”

“She’s out. Who’s this?”

“Zara. I call all the time. My husband’s at work, so I have nothing to do.” There was an awkward silence. “You have an accent. Where are you from?”

I felt, somehow, that it would be wrong to answer. “I can’t stay on,” I said.

“Oh, I understand!” a hurried whisper, the voice of conspiracy. “I’ll call back later. Bye!”

I stared at the phone: no, she did not understand.

Zara continued to call in the mornings. Lamees called on Sundays. And an Egyptian girl whose name we never could pronounce called about twice a week. They were young, late teens, just married to men they hadn’t met until their weddings. Lamees had just had a baby. She’d been married at fifteen; the mother of three at twenty. Hasanat and I were convinced she was suffering from post-partum depression, but Um-Essam told us not to be stupid. “What does science understand about marriage!” She guided these women through the domestic void: You listen to me, your job is to take care of yourself. No one’s going to do it for you. You have to give everything you have to your husband. You have to raise his children. Now how can you do that when you’re falling apart? Shame on you! You’ve got to treat yourself right. Do you like chocolate cake, American style? Let me give you a recipe. You need special ingredients to make it, and I bet you don’t have them in your kitchen. So here’s what you do, start making the cake while your husband is home, promise him it’ll be the best thing he’s ever eaten, then halfway through, you have to shout: Oh no, I don’t have any baking soda! He’ll say: What’s that? You tell him the cake won’t rise without it and he has to take you to store right away, preferably a small, specialty dry goods store. The reason you want to go there is that once you’re inside, you can go off on your own, not like those big supermarkets. While your husband talks to the cashier, you grab a basket and go down the aisle and take whatever you want. You dump it all in the basket and bring it to the cashier, never mind the cost. There’s nothing your husband can do about it without looking stingy.

When she felt that the women were stable enough, she would hand them off to each other, linking them with fiber-optic threads. “Zara, I want you to call Lemees. She’s another friend of mine. This is her number.” Eventually they’d stop calling and Um-Essam would relax, swearing she’d done enough good for one lifetime. But still the phone rang every day, and each time she leapt for it. Hello? Hello? Her face a weird mask of anger and foolish expectation.

And we always waited, wondering if it was a woman. We could tell because their pitiful tenors broke the sequence of hellos. Or sometimes they said nothing. I think it was a woman that time, Um-Essam would say. I could tell by the breathing. Or maybe a baby was crying in the background. (No man would sit with a crying child.) In any case, when she thought it was a woman, and not a truly desperate woman, she would draw herself up and say: I’m sorry, there’s nobody home. Then she would ceremoniously hang up the phone.

Sorry, she would mutter. Nobody’s home.