Simple Recipes

by Madeleine Thien

  “It’s ready then,” my father said, setting lunch down on the table. There was only one chair so my father sat on his mattress, plate balanced on his lap. He looked me up and down. “Eat,” he said, smiling happily.

  Through the walls, I could hear the shadow of a conversation, interrupted by the play-by-play of a ball game. At one point, my father asked me, “How is your mother?”

  “She’s fine. She’s been working hard, as usual.”

  He nodded, face lifting up. “Does she want to see me at all?”

  I shook my head. My mother had prepared me for this question before I came. “I don’t think so,” I told him, as gently as I could. “Not right away.”

  My father looked at me, his expression bewildered.

  We ate in silence for a few moments. Then I asked him, “Will you be going back to real estate?”

  He glanced at me searchingly, then dropped his gaze. “I don’t know.”

  “But what will you do for money?”

  My father didn’t answer. He moved on to a different topic, the cold weather, the early winter. I noticed how the cuffs of his sweater were frayed and his hands were those of an old man, wiry and marked by liver spots. After we had finished lunch and he was clearing the dishes, he said, “I managed to borrow money while I was away. But it ran out while I was in Indonesia.” He turned the tap on, moving the dishes underneath. “I’m on welfare, but don’t worry about me. It’s only for the time being.”

  We went outside and stood together on the balcony, and I told my father that I was planning to marry. He looked out at the grid of streets running down to the docks and said, “So soon?”

  It made me smile, because I knew he still thought of me as a young girl. I laughed. “Don’t worry. I’m sure you’ll like him.”

  My father seemed to consider this. Then he smiled at me. “It’s good that you found someone. It isn’t necessary to be alone.”

  Afterwards, when I stood up to leave, he walked me to the door. He waited there, as if he could not step over the line that would separate him from where he now lived. One hand gripped the door frame, the knuckles white.

  I leaned towards him and kissed his cheek. “I’ll call.” Then I ducked out into the hallway, down the elevator to the ground floor. Outside, I couldn’t see straight, the rain was coming down so hard. On Commercial Drive, a man and his two Labradors sat on the sidewalk. He held his hands out to me, asking for spare change, but I hurried by, anxious to be gone. So this was the result, I thought, of being brave. Of dismantling your life. I walked away from my father’s apartment, under the rain cascading off the awnings, past the barred-up storefronts. No emotion came to me, though I walked across the city that afternoon, kept walking until my body could go no more.

  Will used to say that happiness is something you just take. It’s sitting there like a package in a store and you either pick it up or walk by. I told him nothing was that simple. Sometimes circumstances colluded against a person. It’s a nose-dive, I told him, and you can’t pull out of it.

  “Some people choose unhappiness,” Will said.

  “Sometimes unhappiness chooses them.”

  “Like your father.”

  “Will, we’ve been through this before.”

  “At some point, you’re going to have to deal with this. You can’t pretend he doesn’t exist.”

  “This is not something I want to talk about with you.”

  “Then what is? What do you think we should be talking about?” He put both hands to his temples and shook his head.

  By that time, I had not been to see my father in almost a year. But this failing of mine was private. The grief I felt was not open to discussion. When Will tried to talk about it, I shut down, turned and left.

  Now and then, it disappeared. All that tension evaporated and we could approach each other again, though tentatively. I lay in bed, Will’s entire body flat on top of mine like a wrestling move to pin me down. Will looked at me with an expression I thought was long gone. Amazement, wonder. But underneath his expression there was sadness. “Don’t worry so much,” he said. “We’ll get through this.”

  He put his hand to my stomach, traced a line from left to right as if he could see that tension and he could track it down.

  The night that we learned that the pregnancy was over, I finally felt released. Removed, suddenly, from the course I had set out on. I leaned back on the motorcycle then, arms dropping, and Will put one hand to my thigh, as if that could hold me there. He kept going, along a curved road overlooking the cliffs. He was the kind of person who would love me despite all my failings. But I could not continue. That image of my father remained with me, his one suitcase, his solitary self crossing the ocean in search of things remembered. A backwards journey to remake the future.

  Living alone and on social assistance, my father’s condition did not improve. During my infrequent visits, on my way to somewhere else, I noticed that the walls were slowly emptying. The Christmas cards came down first. Then the plaques. There were pills lined up on the kitchen counter, an arsenal against depression and loneliness. My father put on weight and lost it, put on weight and lost it. Once or twice, late at night, he had called my mother, hoping to go back. She had let him down gently. When he confided this to me, I could only nod, unsure what response I could give.

  How could I change his circumstances? I didn’t know and so I chose to withdraw. There were emotions that he carried — disappointment, regret — that I wanted gone from my present life, as if they had everything to do with him and they had no root in me. My father saw my reluctance and accepted it, as if it was all he could rightly ask for. He did not demand more.

  During our visits, he always reached for his photo album. When he bowed his head, I could see how thin his neck looked, how precarious. That air ofresignation that he carried was still palpable, it filled the room.

  We would start at the beginning. My father as a boy, standing in short pants at someone’s wedding. Then at twenty-five, my age now, leaning against a tree, his face full of pride. He had a picture of us from years ago, blue mountains in the backdrop, but only my father is staring straight ahead, into the camera. My mother and I are distracted, drawn to invisible points to the left or right. When we came to a picture of my mother, alone, my father always paused to examine her. He half-covered the photo with one hand, as if he could only manage a piece of her at a time, now her dress, now her arms, now her face.

  One night in September, Will and I fell into our old habit. He brought out both the helmets and we climbed onto the motorcycle.

  He took us out to West Vancouver, where the highway is cut into the cliffs, precarious above the ocean. The road curved dramatically and Will leaned far to the side, wind rushing on the downhill slope. Over the city skyline, the sun was lowering and the moon was full; neither day nor night. Those thin skyscrapers seemed to float on the water. In all the newspaper boxes along the way, there were pictures of Indonesia, flags flying in Timor, a referendum, finally, to decide the future.

  At a lookout, Will leaned the bike onto a shoulder. We got down, pulling our helmets off. There were islands in the water, bare trees sharp on the surface. Will pointed out the nearest one. “That’s Bowen, isn’t it? Didn’t we camp there years ago?”

  “I think so. I can hardly remember now.”

  Will looked out, nodding. “It rained,” he said, his breath clouding the air. “I remember that it rained the whole time.”

  He stood up and walked to the edge of the lookout, pointed out the other islands, their strange, heavy shapes. I watched his glance moving over the ocean. “You’re barely here,” he said, turning.

  I reached my hand out to touch his face. But his expression was so open and so trusting, it made me hesitate. “I didn’t expect this.”

  He looked at me questioningly.

  “Perhaps I never knew what I wanted.” Will’s whole body seemed to sag but I continued on. “I mistakenly thought I wanted this. And I don’t. I
know that now.”

  “Miriam,” Will said.

  “This isn’t what I want,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  “Explain it.”

  I shook my head. I didn’t know any more if I even loved him, or what I had once believed. Will’s expression was beseeching. He deserved an explanation from me, but I could feel my emotions shutting off, clean and hard. “I’m sorry.” I said. “I can’t.”

  Will looked at me for a long moment. “Forgive me,” he said, when he finally spoke. “But it’s cowardly. This is a cowardly act.”

  “Don’t tell me that.”

  “You’re walking away with as little resistance as possible. You think this will save you somehow. From what, I don’t know.”

  “I’m just trying to do what’s best.”

  “What’s best? You don’t even know that. You can’t even be bothered to figure out what that would be.” He shook his head, impatient. “It angers me, how little you’re willing to risk for me and for yourself.”

  It had started to rain and Will pulled his hood up. The water fell forward in front of his eyes in a thin waterfall. All I had to do was lift my hands and grab hold, but I refused. How could I tell him that I did not understand it myself? Whatever feeling was necessary, whatever energy I needed, seemed gone. He was right, I wanted it all to disappear.

  Later, when we climbed back onto the bike, I put my arms around his chest, hands flat. The bike took off and I watched the highway. The line of a mountain range ran alongside us, an unbroken, hazy shadow, a separate history, a different life.

  Will booked a ticket home to Ontario to give us some time apart. After he had left, I tried to picture him there — exhaling drifts of air, man in the snow. Walking, he sinks a few inches down. He s very cold and the expression on his face is stoic. At home, I lost myself in wild thoughts. Catching my face in the mirror, I was surprised by my expression — stunned. Uncertain. Cut loose from what I knew.

  Once, Will and I stood in my father’s apartment and tried to find all the ways that the map of the world had changed. The Soviet Union was the most dramatic. The country crumbling at the edges — Estonia, Latvia, then falling away like a landslide. We stared at the map in wonder. My father knew Southeast Asia. Will knew the ancient cultures of art, the old foundations — Mesopotamia, Byzantine — that once existed. I loved Vancouver, the city wading out into the ocean, the border of mountains. There we are in my memory, each of us drawn to a different region, each of us straying our hands across a different country.

  In the days after Will left, I turned that picture of us over again and again in my mind. At that time, the news was filled with Indonesia. In East Timor, the region had exploded in violence. There were photographs of refugees, the widespread displacement. I stood at my kitchen table, turning the pages of the newspaper, unsure then whom I was, in fact, grieving for. I recognized my own selfishness. When I saw those pictures, I ached for the country I had never seen, the parts ofWill and my family I had never recognized, the loss that seemed so unresolvable.

  When I was younger, I used to study all the details of Indonesia, its wealth and beauty, its lost ages. As if I could understand my father and myself by knowing this, as if what I needed could be compiled, written down, and it would shore me up against the present day.

  Two weeks after Will went back to Ontario, the first snowfall of the year took the city by surprise. I lay in bed listening to the phone ringing. It must be Will, I thought, but I did not know what to say to him. Lying in bed, I could see rooftops. The snowfall had cloaked the landscape, so that now it seemed a place where you could walk for days with no sense of moving forward.

  I remembered the time I was a child, when I came down with pneumonia. My father blamed the snow. We had tobogganed on Mount Seymour, sliding on Glad bags down the hill. Late at night, my father bundled me up and we drove home, down the dark mountainside, the quiet roads where only a handful ofcars slipped and skidded on the ice. The radio warned us to “Stay in if you can. If you can’t drive in the snow, don’t.” My father drove with both hands gripping the wheel, squeezed the brake worriedly. The sky was luminescent with stars.

  By morning, I was feverish and hallucinating. My father was already at work, turning the Closed sign over, polishing the glass, dusting the gleaming wood of the French Provincial sofas. My mother and I caught a bus to the hospital. In the late afternoon, my father came and drove us home. I was bundled into the back seat. Through the windows I could watch the city blur by — tops of trees, neon signs. The car was warm and self-contained, a moving house.

  In the front seat, my parents spoke in whispered voices. “Noo-moan-ya,” my father said, testing the word out.

  At home, my father fed me rice porridge from a plastic spoon. In the hollow of the spoon was a picture of two boys playing soccer. They became part of my dream state. I thought I was speaking to my father. I was telling him how the boys were running ahead and I was so far behind them, but my father was holding out a blue bicycle. He was running beside me, pushing me off on my blue bike. Out I went, twirling like an acrobat, into the wide world. My father nodded and smiled, his hand cooling my forehead.

  On a cold, windy day when I felt stronger, we took a walk through the tree-lined streets, beside the drifts of snowbanks. My father cut an icicle down and presented it to me and I held it gingerly in my mittened hands. “You have to take care of yourself,” he said sternly. He was always concerned about my well-being.

  I nodded, comforted by his attentions.

  “Don’t strain yourself or get upset.”

  “I won’t.”

  “Good girl.” He patted my hair. “One day you will buy me a very large house.”

  After the sun went down that afternoon, I sat at my bedroom window. In the backyard, my father was building a snowman. My mother took a photograph, white flash in the dark, of my father standing beside his creation, one arm wrapped around its snowy body. Inside, the image, ghostly, stayed with me. My father in the snow, smiling for all the world to see.

  The phone rang all morning but no one left a message. I wandered from room to room in the apartment, picking things up at random, then putting them down. Will’s books were still stacked in pyramids on the floor. Art in the Byzantine Era, Rubens to Picasso, and, at the very bottom, What to Expect: The Toddler Years. I flipped through, laughing at Will’s notes in the margins. He must have gone through and underlined the art references: “Food blowing. Certain foods lend themselves better to dramatic expulsion.” And: “To some toddlers, a bowel movement is a remarkable personal statement, a crowning achievement, something to celebrate, revel in, and if the spirit so moves them, decorate with.” In the margin, Will had sketched a big-headed baby, with a list of names underneath: Dumbo. Tin Tin. Babe. Hey Yu.

  I turned the radio on but all they could talk about was the weather. This city, with its temperate climate, was always struck dumb by snow. Buses were grounded, the roads undriveable. I rummaged through the fridge, found an old frozen pizza, and set it in the oven. Then, pulling a jacket on, I walked outside. The kids next door stumbled through the white, diving head first into snowbanks. They pelted each other with snowballs. Beside them, an elderly man shoveled his driveway. He tipped his fragile body forward, his breath unfurling into the thin, blue air.

  What would Will say if he were here? He’d say, “This is packing snow, all right,” both arms stretched out, a wide smile. “Ontario packing snow.” When I lifted my face to the sky, the snow headed straight for me, converging between my eyes.

  Inside, while I shook the powder from my shoes, the phone started up again.

  “Thank God,” my mother said, before I’d even said hello. “Thank God you’re home.”

  A car outside the window stole my attention. It fishtailed left, slow motion, then burrowed into a snowbank.

  “Miriam, I’m so sorry. Something’s happened.”

  The passenger door of the stalled car popped open. The driver climbed out and stood still, wa
tching the snow come down.

  “Miriam? Are you there?”

  “I’m here.”

  “Your father,” she said. “Someone found him.”

  The room was moving. I couldn’t concentrate. Outside, the driver of the car was walking away. “What happened?”

  “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” Her voice broke. Then, “Miriam, you need to get here now. We’re at Vancouver General. Your father attempted suicide.”

  I looked around the room. “I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “There’s something in the oven,” I said, my voice rising higher. “I can’t come right now.”

  “Miriam, listen. The buses are stopped. There are no cars on the road. I couldn’t get hold of you. You need to come right now, okay? Do you understand?”

  She hung up first. I stared out the window, at the car abandoned in the road. An inch of snow coating the roof.

  I was still wearing my coat. When I opened the oven door, the pizza was still there, wrapped in plastic, frozen solid- The oven was cold. This made me laugh, an unsettling sound that filled the room then stopped, broken off. Somehow, I knelt down on the floor and put my shoes back on. I turned all the lights off, then let myself out the front door. The walk to the hospital wasn’t long, perhaps fifteen minutes, but I wondered if it was possible that I was too late. Not only in body, but in desire, in thought. And if not too late, then something else. Too blind.

  Through the snowfall, I could see the red Emergency lights. I walked through the automatic doors to the reception desk and gave my father’s name. A nurse pointed me upstairs. Somebody took my hand, another nurse, and we turned off the main hallway, pushed our way through a set of double doors, into a very silent corridor. She opened a door to the waiting room, off to the side, and led me through.

  “You’re here,” my mother said, looking up. She came and embraced me, her warm hands against my face. “You’re freezing.”