“I’m doing none of your business. What do you think? I’m making sandwiches for your stupid trip.”
“For real?” Felice leans in for a better view. Particles of light are just beginning to drift through the windows. She feels better. Last night Emerson held her closely against his ribs and told her to breathe with him, to be calm, calm, calm. Breathe in, wait, breathe out slowly. He told her: This might take a while. In that dark spell she felt as if she’d forgotten her own name or who she ever was. Now the light in the kitchen is clean and vital and the terror has lifted like lace from her body.
Felice has watched Nieves for two weeks and knows she can be sharp and moody, but other times so quiet she barely seems to be present, an entrancing remoteness. On the cutting board there are two peanut butter and red currant jam sandwiches for Emerson and two Serrano ham, shaved cheddar, and apricot chutney sandwiches for Felice. Nieves wraps them smartly in waxed paper, tapes them, and puts them back in the fridge. There’s also a cooler Nieves opens: packed with trail mix, sliced pears and apples, and the lemon bars. Jarvis Firmin, another volunteer, is going to drive Felice and Emerson in his nursery truck as far as Pensacola. From there, a series of Stanley’s friends and former employees will drive them across country. Felice squints at the kitchen window, trying to imagine the network that will carry them. Nieves sighs as she fits the lid back on the cooler. “At least you won’t starve before Iowa City.”
“Really, thank you,” Felice says. For a second she feels a bitter little bead like fear or anger, like a remnant of a nightmare, surfacing at the center of her chest. She studies the floor with its cheap mustard-brown linoleum, so ugly. After a moment, the feeling softens again.
“If I thought it would do any good, I would tell you not to go.” Nieves stares at her. “Don’t go. Okay? Don’t do it.”
Felice gives the floor an aimless smile, wraps her arms across her chest. Nieves pinches the fabric of Felice’s shirt—which had until recently been Nieves’s shirt—between her fingers. “You’re not going right this second—come on outside with me.”
THE EASTERN SKY is beginning to take on depth as they push out of the apartment. A block away, there’s a murmur of light traffic on Krome Avenue. Nieves and Felice walk down the main street, the stores quiet, several still covered with plywood and storm shutters. The light is so gray and glassy it feels as if the two of them might be ghosts, as if they’d wandered out of someone’s dream. There’s a small square with benches where Felice has noticed a few homeless people, drifters, sleeping in the grass; but it’s empty now. They settle on one of the benches and watch coral streaks brighten and expand in the distance, pink wisps of clouds over purple wells of darkness. A whorled landscape of clouds piled on the tabletop of green fields.
The two girls sit close, their forearms bands of color in Felice’s peripheral vision—reddish brown and pale olive. Nieves slumps back against the bench. “You know, I used to be so pissed at my mother.”
“Oh yeah?” Felice stares shyly at her knees. “How come?”
“Mmm. I still am, a little bit,” she continues. “Though I guess these days I almost think, like, a good mother will let her kids be pissed at her, if they need to, you know?”
Felice smiles. “Ha. You think?”
Nieves slides one hand over the small globe of her belly. “It use to be like I practically hated her for drinking so much and feeling sorry for herself all the time. And going off on how horrible men were and then following home any giant loser who showed up. Like my stepdad.” Her fingers stop their slow circles and pat gently in place. “And then—just recently this was—I was at the market unloading artichokes? And I suddenly kind of knew that I only hated her because she had five kids and I was second to last and I just wanted her to myself. I was jealous.” She smiles lazily at Felice. “Isn’t that funny? How you can just know something all along but not, sort of, tell yourself?”
“I guess.” Felice glances at Nieves’s stomach. “Do you think you know something like that right now?”
“That’s the trouble. You can’t know until you let yourself know.” Her head falls back to rest on the back of the bench. “It’s like my mother had this story—I mean she had like a thousand stories. But there was this one I really loved. I used to think it was true. About a girl—she was really pretty and nice and smart and she lived with her mother in Florida. Just the two of them. But there was this guy? He was like, he did construction work, I think. Welding. He was totally into this girl, but she wouldn’t even, you know, even look at him. He was rough and tough, like this bearded mountain-man type? So one day she was walking by the construction site and he couldn’t stop looking at her and suddenly he just went crazy and like stole her. He grabs her and takes her like to the coldest place he can find, this freezing tiny island way, way north. I mean it’s so cold and so far away, there’s no other people and nothing grows there but little gnarly trees and little seabirds, but way off in the distance, so you can’t even hear them. And he keeps her there with him in this little cabin and makes her probably like his love slave.”
“Right, right,” Felice says, listening, her eyes closed.
“So of course her mother goes berserk. Just insane. She starts looking for her daughter everywhere. She goes all over the world, asking everyone she sees. And one day she spots one of those little seabirds and she gets a hunch and follows it back to the freezing island and she finds her daughter.”
“This is supposed to be true?”
“Don’t worry about it. This is the short version, I’m leaving tons of stuff out. Anyway, the mountain man says he won’t give her up and the mother begs and pleads with him. So finally they work out a deal—the girl can go back and be with her mother for part of the year, and the rest of the time she has to go live on the freezing island with the guy.” Nieves sighs and smiles and adjusts her weight on the bench. “That’s pretty much it. That’s the story. I guess I just loved thinking about the mother going and finding her daughter and getting her back like that. But the part that I never got? Was why did the girl keep going back to the freezing island? You know, like why didn’t she just stay and hide with her mom somewhere?”
“Maybe she really fell in love with the welder guy.”
“Yeah. I thought of that. But I also thought, you know, I bet she liked going away to the little cold island. She liked being far away and hidden from everything. Getting a break from her mom. She loved her but she always thought her mom was going to eat her alive.”
Felice doesn’t say anything. It seems like a sad story to her—like the girl never gets to have anything of her own—trapped on either side of things, between the cold and hot places. Felice can remember feeling when she was little that she might get burned up in her mother’s gaze. She’d thought that’s what love was—like a furnace. But yesterday in Stanley’s office, her mother had stared at her. Then, just like that, she stopped, her gaze fell, and something tipped inside of Felice. She feels it there now, subtle as a gesture: it is still falling, looping through the air. Another memory comes to her—something that’s been happening since she’s returned, as if a chest filled with fragments of her childhood has swung open. She thinks about a handmade ceramic bowl—a wedding present to her parents from her mother’s mother—enormous yet almost paper-fine, light as silk. It was painted lavender and sea blue and a ring of silver fish swam between its bands of color. One day, when Felice was six or seven, she was alone with the bowl, tall enough to reach its protected shelf: she picked it up, turning it, admiring its colors. But somehow she lost her balance and the thing dropped out of her fingers, shattering on the floor.
Felice gasped, then burst into tears, inconsolable. Her mother rushed into the room. Instead of scolding her, Avis knelt beside her, lifted the biggest shard, and smashed it on the floor. “See?” she said. “We broke it together.”
That was what Felice had kept trying to say to her mother yesterday. Seeing her again in Stanley’s office, the old memory of the bowl had returned
to Felice: that moment of closeness. “We broke it together,” she said, caught in some crosscurrent—angry and hurt and full of wondering, helpless love, afraid to let go of her mother for even an instant.
Felice sits quietly, feeling the looping circle, the remnants of long-suppressed grief. Now she misses her parents with a vividness she hadn’t felt over their five years apart—as if she hadn’t had to feel the loss as long as she’d kept them at a distance. She almost can’t bear to go to Portland, but as much as she wants to stay she wants to see if these new feelings will remain with her, to test the edges and see if she’ll still want to come back after she’s been away. And she’s gotten used to the rigors and energy of movement: she isn’t ready yet to ease back into the comforts of a family. She’ll return soon, she thinks, but not yet. There’s a long, faint call of gulls, soft as if the cries were a gradient of the air, its streaks of dampness and old rain. She listens to the birds, an arm draped along the bench, and her eyes slip back to Nieves’s stomach.
“You can touch her,” Nieves says, and smooths her shirt down. “Lately everyone does. I think she’s still sleeping right now, though. Or he.”
Felice moves her palm shyly over the rising curve, brings her face close and says, “Hello in there, baby.” There’s a flutter under her hand and she sits up and looks at Nieves, who is laughing. “She heard you,” Nieves says.
“For real? Did she?”
She shrugs. “Sure, I guess. Why not? They’ve got ears and stuff.”
Felice gazes solemnly at her stomach. “Can I hear her?”
“That I don’t know.” She pats her belly again. “Try if you want.”
Felice considers for a moment, then she turns on the bench and lies back, lowering her head to Nieves’s lap. Her ear presses against her stomach, and as she watches the dwindling streaks of clouds she waits. Gradually she makes out small sounds, a distant riverine gurgle. “Oh. Oh my God. Is that her?”
“It’s probably just that I haven’t had breakfast.”
Felice puts her hand on the top arc of belly and presses her ear in close and she’s almost certain now she hears a low, steady murmur. “Hi baby,” she says. “Here I am. It’s Felice.” She seems to hear tiny motes, a far-off pulse like the movements of fish. The clouds unravel over their heads and Felice shades her eyes with one hand. Beyond the sound of the traffic there’s a noise, a rip in the air. Unidentifiable and syncopated, it lifts, voices torn from the high branches. Felice watches as a flock of birds rises over their heads and curls into the white sky. She watches its progress and she holds herself silent and very still, waiting for what will come.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
For invaluable advice, assistance, and guidance, my deep gratitude to Nanci Lanza, Stephanie Pacheco, Jose Pacheco Silva, Yesenia Balseiro, Bertha Vazquez, Cristina Nosti, Adrienne and Frank Curson, Sara Fain, Ellen Kanner, Mitchell Kaplan, Daniel Kaplan, Barbara Goldman, and Sally Richardson. Special thanks to Alane Salierno Mason, Joy Harris, Sarah Twombly, Denise Scarfi, and Andrea Gollin, who were heroic and steadfast and made this book possible. And thanks most of all to Scott Eason, who read every draft, and thought about, talked about, and paced through this book right beside me.
BIRDS OF PARADISE
Diana Abu-Jaber
HOW TO WRITE ABOUT A BAKER
By Diana Abu-Jaber
First published in Gilt Taste. Reprinted with permission.
In our family of mostly-women, baking was the feminine form. There was usually something magnificent under the heavy glass cover on the porcelain stand, some pastry displayed like a Tiffany’s necklace. We baked for the sugar, but for more than that: for the communal pleasure of working together, for baking’s equal parts chemistry and alchemy, for the physical beauty of the baked thing.
And yet, even after years of food writing, I’d not once addressed the private, ecstatic rites of baking. I’m not sure why that was, but I suspect I might have dismissed it—as if I’d decided baking wasn’t quite special enough. It had always seemed so familiar and intimate, even in some sense, private—which perhaps made it seem dull.
My grandmother, an early, furious, proto-feminist, held that “women’s work” was lesser stuff, far beneath her daughter and certainly not for her granddaughters. It was important to her, in fact, that we never learn the tasks that she was raised to do, like ironing, sweeping, or typing, that we never be, in any way, associated with such menial labor. Baking, with its quaint sentimental quality, had a special category, however: it was a form of guilty pleasure.
Not despised, but not to be taken seriously. Further, she had given me to understand that even in the professional world, men were cooks, like my father, and women were relegated to the pastry work—a backseat occupation with lower wages and less fanfare—in second place, always trailing the main course.
One day I began writing a novel set in Miami. The main character was a woman named Avis and the crux of this story, as I imagined it, was that her daughter had run away and that it had driven her slightly insane. I felt I understood Avis’s solitude and angst, her struggle to feel like a part of an unwelcoming community. But on reading the early draft, I could see that Avis lacked a sort of direction, intention. This listless character needed some vital spark—the sharp hook on which to hang a novel. I could make her a pastry chef, it occurred to me, but I recoiled from the idea almost immediately.
I was writing about the restaurant world for the Portland Oregonian in the late 90s and early 00s. Every week, restaurants
shimmered in and out of existence like fireflies. During this time, there was an intriguing bit of gossip involving a pastry chef.
Formerly head pastry chef at Alain Ducasse in New York, he’d been lured to Portland to elevate the desserts at one of the city’s best restaurants. His work was reputedly stunning, Babylonian: ziggurats of sugar and cream, temples, pyramids, erupting volcanoes and cooling streams. The paper had asked me to write a profile on him and his work, but when I went to the restaurant, he was already gone. Apparently, this mercurial genius, this Daedelus, had lasted all of six weeks before the head chef had shown him the door.
“It was merely time for a parting of the ways. An artistic difference,” Chef purred in his French accent. “He’s extremely talented and he’d learned all we could teach him.” But when I put down my notebook, Chef slapped the top of his head. “He’s like all pastry-chefs, totally fucking insane! He wants to take over the whole kitchen! He screams at all my line chefs and throws pans at the waiters! He will use only hand-churned butter! He buys maroon saffron threads from Kashmir—for one mousse! And he was ordering gold leaf from Austria to sprinkle over his puddings. Actual gold leaf. Do you know what that costs?”
Ah, but I loved the idea of such egregious behavior in the name of dessert. It seemed wonderful to me that someone would damn practicality, to demand baking be given its due, to assert the sweet could be just as vital as the savory.
The following day, I sought out this gold leaf baker. He’d already taken a job at an expensive “atmospheric” high rise restaurant where the kitchen staff seemed to scuttle around and stare at him from behind corners. All suave, feline charm, he came to my table dressed in his white jacket and baggy pants and tilted his head as if we were on a date. His pastries,
which a series of cowed wait staff ferried out, were architectural
marvels—paved slabs of chocolate and shards of nuts, cakes with doors and hinges: they were indeed glorious.
But was it all a little much? It struck me in the moment as almost egotistical, to spend this much time and effort on dessert, making something too beautiful to eat. I noticed tucked among the gorgeous pastries, a single ripe pomegranate: it was nestled in a bed of green grass made of spun sugar. I was struck by the ingenuity of setting off the pastries with a bit of fruit—a nod to the un-improvable beauty of nature. A spark of modesty that redeemed the chef in my mind. He plucked up the fruit; using a sharp little knife, he cut into it, revealing rows of glisten
ing ruby seeds. I realized it hadn’t torn apart like a pomegranate would but broke into shards: its red sheath was actually a berry-tinted chocolate. While the interior seeds were actual pomegranate seeds, they’d been painstakingly embedded by hand into an inner membrane of white chocolate. I looked into the chef’s hooded black eyes and thought: Hello, Colonel Kurtz.
He leaned across the table. “That French idiot—he is totally insane.” His eyes were over-bright, his hands flat on the table. “He thinks that his cooking—his meat—is what’s important? I feel sorry for him. I feel pity. He doesn’t know that everyone is waiting for dessert?”
I thought about this sharp, hot energy years later when I began to rethink my character. I wanted her to have the same sort of nature, with that blend of male and female, ambition and comfort. Still, I tried to imagine all sorts of other pursuits for her: teacher, nurse, illustrator, tour guide: nothing fit. . . . There seemed to be an obvious solution and yet I avoided it.
Perhaps the problem wasn’t simply about gender bias or status symbols but my own familiarity with the subject. I became a writer out of a state of crisis: as a child, I was drowned out by my loud relatives. My family was too insistent, too restrictive, too traditional: the spoken truth was dangerous. But if I wrote things down, I could take risks, just about get to the truth of things, my own truth. Writing gave me a sense of creativity, openness, and audacity—which meant everything to me. I had a dread of telling the same stories over and over—worse, of being expected to tell the same sort of story. I’d already written a novel about a chef in a Lebanese restaurant and a memoir filled with family recipes. How could I write about a baker and not repeat myself? I feared the story couldn’t possibly stay rough and strange and new enough. It seemed inevitable that those deep planes of discovery and emotional risk would be smoothed away, polished by repetition into familiar old ideas. And so few American novelists seem to lavish much attention on eating and cooking in their stories—perhaps there was something inherently limited about such a basic human function. Just how far could I get with a baker?
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