Life in the Desert

She killed my mother. In my opinion, she did it on purpose. And she tried to do the same to me — a little girl at the time, about ten or twelve years old.

ARAMCO wives in Saudi Arabia, where I grew up in an American oil camp, received special training on how to prepare food safely. Trust me: there was no “safe” with the food out there. Everything was likely to be carrying one microbe or another. Some would only give you diarrhea. Others would kill you.

Anyway…we had been there ten years. My father was getting ready to retire from the company — partly because I was sick all the time out there, and partly because, reviled by my nasty little classmates, I dwelt in a continual state of depression. My mother announced that she and I would go back to the states ASAP, after the “Go Home” decision was made. My father would join us at the end of his current contract, a few months later.

So one of his colleagues from down on the docks — they were harbor pilots — invited us over for a good-bye dinner, concocted by his dear wife. My father regarded this guy as a bit of a moron. I was just a kid and so didn’t know from morons. But apparently that’s exactly what he and his wife were.

Actually, I suspect she was significantly worse than that…

They had us over to their house, there in Ras Tanura, for the farewell dinner. Isn’t that kind? Isn’t that gracious?

Uh huh.

So…I was there in the kitchen, playing with their son Bruce and tagging around after the lady of the house, Luella.

I’ve never been able to figure out whether she did this on purpose, or whether she was really so stupid she didn’t know what she was doing. Either way, she poisoned my mother: nearly killed her.

American wives in those days were advised — make that lectured, trained, harried — to sanitize every bite of any food that would be eaten raw. Thus anything that went into, say, a salad had to be soaked in Clorox water first.

For ten brain-banging years, my mother soaked every apple, every orange, every piece of lettuce, every leaf of cabbage, leaving it in a pot of dilute Clorox for upwards of an hour before we could eat it.

Luella…did not.

WTF? Was she really that stupid?

Certainly could have been. If my father was right that the man of the family was a moron, the mom sure might have just fit right in.

At any rate, as I was toddling around her kitchen getting under her feet, she was slipping me pieces of the cabbage she was putting into the salad. The unsanitized cabbage.

Oddly, it had no effect on me. But it did slam into my mother. Basically poisoned her. She came right down with amoebic dysentery. Landed in the hospital just hours before she and I were due to get on a  flight to New York.

She almost died from it. In fact, I believe the doctors thought she was going to die…but of course, no one told the 12-year-old that.

In those days, the treatment for amoebic dysentery was to put you through a half-dozen toxic — even life-threatening — courses of horrible medications. They locked you in the hospital and made you sick. And sicker…and sicker….

Mercifully (I guess…), my  mother survived. After weeks of poisonous drugs, she staggered out of the hospital, gathered up her belongings and her kid, and we flew to New York. From there, we boarded a train to San Francisco, where, in due course, my father joined us.

And so we return to the question: Was Luella really that stupid?

I tend to doubt it. Quite honestly…I think she did it on purpose. She intended to sicken us, and she succeeded, with my mother.

Consider: no way could my father’s opinion about her husband have been a secret. My father blabbed on about what a moron the guy was any time an opportunity arose. She must have known what my father was saying about the man. No way could she “accidentally” have failed to sanitize a head of parasite-hosting lettuce.

Ultimately, my mother died of a gastric cancer.

I can’t prove it…but I strongly suspect the cancer arose from the ferocious, gut-scouring treatment for the amoebic dysentery she picked up in the last week we spent in that horrid place.

Well…the last week we were supposed to spend there. She ended up in the camp hospital for weeks, being subjected to nasty treatments that made her baroquely ill. To this day, I truly do believe that woman deliberately sickened her, by serving up a salad made of untreated greens.

Was her husband in on the gambit? Dunno. Ras Tanura was a tiny, gossipy, horrid little place where everyone knew everyone else’s business. If Luella didn’t keep her own mouth shut, you can be sure her DH knew about it…along with half the other folks in camp. My guess is that she failed to mention that she hadn’t bothered to sanitize the salad greens. But one never knows…