The Bolter

"And then it happens all at once and unexpectedly. That is how things happen, I suppose. You pack your bags and find yourself walking yourself home.” –Shannon L. Alder

I was that kid whose name was often broadcast over public loudspeakers, the zoo, the supermarket, the department store, once on an ocean liner, and another time from a police car when I disappeared on a trip to Fire Island. That day was going really well after I joined a family having a vast beach picnic and was fed lobster until the families left with their own children. When I was a teenager, I saved my babysitting money until I had enough to go to Europe on my own. My sister made the mistake of revealing her earnings, so my parents suggested she pay for stuff. I remained mute until one day I announced I was spending the summer in England and Ireland. One year my mother gave us money after she finished a design job. My sister got her roof fixed; I flew away. My father’s nickname for me was “The Bolter” after an English woman with five husbands who was always running off. I only had three husbands.

Looking at my passport one afternoon I saw a dearth of stamps, little proof I was still capable of, like Snagglepuss, exiting stage left. Husband number three had just returned from Saskatchewan, Canada where he had been working in a camp moving potash. The economy was in a construction dip, and he had left Chicago to spend the winter in the coldest place on earth. Nevertheless, I was jealous. I wanted to go somewhere so I went to Abu Dhabi. A job teaching English in an Emirate girl’s school had materialized. My mother offered me a year’s salary not to go. I vaguely promised and then picked out my outfit for the interview. I am really good at getting jobs. Occasionally they are great jobs but even if a job sucks, I want it. This is probably not the best plan for life however it was my bone deep need to escape that made me say “yes” when they asked me to become an English teacher in the United Arab Emirates..

My son had joined an outlawed fraternity at the University of Illinois and was close to behaving as badly as I once did at his age. But that was the 70s and if you wanted to hitchhike on the New Jersey Turnpike and party like a rock star it seemed like a fine idea. When the phone rang and he told me he had nearly killed himself driving my car, now totaled, I decided it was time for me to bolt, leaving his father to move him out of the fraternity house into an apartment and deal with the legal trouble he was in. It was impossible for me to find a way to act like a responsible grown up. I was his mother who could only yell and cry, threaten and beg. Clearly, I could be temporarily spared from the mother/wife/daughter situation to move to the Middle East.

Fourteen hours into the flight, land was visible, a vast desert with what appeared to be tinker toys arranged in a square in the corner. This was Abu Dhabi. I saw a sign that said “Mary Moynahan.” This is not my name. My christened/legal name is Mary Ellen, but I have never been called anything but “Molly.” After I confronted my mother as to why two lapsed Catholic nonbelievers would name all three of their daughters after saints, she murmured something about corridor babies left in limbo if not properly christened. I had written Buddhist on my job application; it was mandatory to choose a religion. The sign was held by a man who, when I tried to shake his hand, shook his head and said , “Mafrac?” This was where my hotel was. He offered me a water bottle which I declined but when the door opened and the one-hundred-and-ten degree heat washed over me, I held out my hand. It was three o’clock in the morning.

photo by Junhan Foong

I have a terrible sense of direction. Somehow navigation was lumped in with math and my ability to judge direction was, like my ability to understand Algebra, poor. Interestingly, Abu Dhabi has no street addresses despite the various businesses pretending this isn’t true. My favorite coffee shop had an impressive address that turned out to be wholly invented. There was no mail and if you wanted to communicate with the outside world it had to be done by international shipping.

On our way to Mafrac I noticed people leading camels, people riding camels and a camel that seemed to be taking a nap on a collapsed tent. I saw several children both with grown-ups and alone and other things you might not expect at three o’clock in the morning like an open fun fair and people selling fruits from an open truck.

I tried to draw the driver into conversation but then remembered the warnings about single women and men. In the UAE it was important to not speak to workers or taxi drivers aside from giving them directions which in the case of the cab drivers didn’t work since there were no street addresses. Much of this was solved by knowing the name of the major shopping malls where many of us expat teachers seemed to converge. 

After a few days in the hotel, I was picked up and driven to the school where I would teach, The Advanced Technology High School. Advanced technology since all the books, papers, and writing implements had been banned. The entire school ran on sketchy internet with projectors bursting into flames and my students, all girls, all Emirati, spent much of their time taking inappropriate pictures of themselves on their iPads.

Besides the bolting, I was someone who couldn’t bear to give up. Yes, the school was a disaster, yes, the administration spent all their time threatening us with dismissal when they weren’t forcing us to sit through endless meetings featuring PowerPoints containing so many errors in spelling and grammar it was hard to decipher the actual point. Still, I was going to inspire these young women who told me their dream was to become Etihad flight attendants, that the Holocaust never happened, and no one ever walked on the surface of the moon. We were called into meetings daily and told that all communication must be through email but since the wireless was constantly failing, many of these announcements never materialized. 

Then my boss, a bully from Jordan, backed me into a wall and demanded to know when my husband was arriving and when I would sign a yearlong lease on an apartment. I had read the horror stories about contracts, expats with contracts being put in jail for failure to pay. The airport parking lot was full of dusty, abandoned cars from these same expats fleeing the country. It was time to leave. But I had signed an employment contract, and it seemed possible I too would end up in jail if I broke it. Still, I called my husband in Chicago and told him I was leaving, made a reservation and then managed to transfer most of my earnings to my American bank. 

I told my friend I planned to go home and she offered up her driver, who was really a lover, as someone with an exit strategy if I was caught. He was ex-secret police and had all sorts of ideas about disappearing. Arriving at the Abu Dhabi Airport for my midnight flight, I was informed I had missed the plane. When I burst into tears, the person at the desk suggested I go have some coffee and calm down. Instead, I managed to book myself onto the next flight to Chicago knowing this information might go straight back to my employers who had the option of having me arrested.

I sat up all night with some very sketchy people but as dawn arrived, my flight was announced and after passing through passport control without being stopped, I felt somewhat safer. But the plane was delayed, there were men on the tarmac that might have been searching for a fleeing teacher of English. I felt like I was in the movie Argo about the Iranian hostages, waiting to leave, sure they would be stopped. But we took off. I sat straight upright in my non-reclining seat, happy to leave the Middle East despite my return to the Midwestern Polar Vortex.

– Molly Moynahan