Chapter 3: Eyes on the Prize

I desperately wanted Nick to propose. A New Years' trip to Morocco seemed like the perfect setting. Surely, I wouldn't embarrass myself.

When I was twenty-three, I didn’t think Nick was that close to proposing–until he invited me and my mother on a vacation–over Christmas– with him and his parents to Morocco.

Nick and I had never traveled internationally together before, and although my mother knew his parents and got along with them, a big family trip together seemed like a pretty significant step. Although we were nowhere near “financially stable,” as he was keen to remind me, I was finally moving away from stealing single-ply toilet paper from 24 Hour Fitness, so things were looking up. Nick and I talked about marriage often—he knew I wanted to get married sooner rather than later (yes, we were young, but we had been together for four years already, and had been living together in San Francisco for almost two.) He repeatedly told me marriage was something he always saw himself doing in his late twenties. So for the most part, I had given up on it happening anytime soon. But this trip had me wondering if he had changed his mind.

I knew almost nothing about Morocco although I had heard it was vaguely romantic because of the movie Casablanca (which I also hadn’t seen.) With a strong desire not to be one of those white people who becomes creepily interested in “absorbing the culture”--the adult version of the lobster-skinned blonde girl who returns from her Caribbean vacation with cornrows – I decided to do my part and learn absolutely nothing about the culture other than what I needed to do to be respectful. I would remain wokefully ignorant. I knew Morocco was a Muslim country, but beyond the fact I wouldn’t be able to drink alcohol or wear my beloved Bebe bandage dresses, I didn’t learn much about what that entailed. The last thing I wanted was to accidentally commit some cultural appropriation sin. It was 2013 after all. I would NOT allow a damaging photo of me wearing traditional cultural garb to hit the Internet.

The aforementioned lack of nightclubs, bodycon dresses and champagne meant Morocco wouldn’t be my first choice for a surprise engagement vacation--but who was I to complain? I had wanted Nick to propose for a long time so if he was going to do it in Morocco, I was going to enjoy it. At this point, I would have said yes if he proposed with a live rat behind a dumpster in the Tenderloin.

My lack of research into anything about Morocco meant I thought it would be warm. Morocco was a desert, and if Looney Tunes taught me anything, it was that deserts were always hot (and potentially laced with assorted rope-based booby traps.)  As a result, I was fairly disappointed when I arrived, absolutely freezing. I was wearing my mom’s old velvet button-down from the ‘80s which fit me like a painter’s smock (I had so few clothes that weren’t Kardashian-inspired that my mom had to lend this to me.) Nick immediately told me he didn’t like it, because it “wasn’t tight.” I wasn’t sure how he was going to cope with the rest of my wardrobe, given that none of it originated from Wet Seal or the wholesale dancer websites I sometimes patronized.

This trip to Morocco would span multiple cities, and we would stay at different hotels along the way, traveling in a van. Because we didn’t speak any of the languages spoken in Morocco, we had a tour guide named Ali, a jovial man in his forties who spoke fluent English and wore a pointy-hooded fleece djebella, which I learned was basically a Moroccan coat-slash-robe. The tour group that Ali led consisted of my mother and I, Nick and his parents, and then Nick’s parent’s friends, Bob and Lisa, along with their twenty-six-year-old son Mark. Bob was a wealthy, WASPy doctor with a hawkish slant toward getting ripped off. At our first hotel, he immediately checked out all the rooms to make sure he hadn’t been screwed into a smaller room. His wife Lisa was essentially Exhibit A if you look up “Jewish mother” in the dictionary, constantly asking her adult son if he had eaten, whether he was drinking enough water, and at one point admonishing him for not wearing sunglasses inside the van, chiding “your sister is an ophthalmologist and she would be very disappointed in you right now.” To save money, Bob had insisted all three of them share a room, with Mark sleeping on a portable child’s cot.

I had to remind myself that this was our engagement trip. This was romantic, and nothing was going to get in the way of that. Not even the lack of alcohol, the inability to wear anything Nick or I liked, or the persistent fear that I was being a cringe white tourist. I focused on what was good–being with Nick, the beautiful hotel rooms, the delicious food. I tried not to focus on Bob poking his head into our hotel room right as we were about to have sex, to ask us how big our bath tub was (yes, this happened.) I focused only on what I was positive was coming my way: a ring. It didn’t have to be big, or even real. It would just have to signify that Nick had finally chosen me and only me to be his wife, and I could finally stop worrying about being his starter girlfriend who he would dump at the age of twenty-nine, only to immediately get married to a twenty-one-year-old Slovakian model.

Nick hadn’t given me my Christmas present yet, even though it was past Christmas. When I asked him if he wanted to trade gifts, he said he wanted mine to be a surprise. Who did he think he was fooling? I kept my mouth shut. I figured I’d humor him and act surprised when the ring came out.