Life Without a Recipe

by Diana Abu-Jaber

  Surely she has always been Gram. (And how startling, when I hear her tell someone that she now has to “get used to” saying she’s sixty. Hasn’t she always known she was old?) Every now and then I hear someone call her Grace, and it’s like catching a glimpse of some hidden origin, another long-ago self. She tells and tells me about this other life, a fairy tale that took place in the time of the Garden State—when that moniker wasn’t a punch line. The places my grandmother talks about—Elizabeth, Roselle, Linden—sound pleasing and feminine. There was a porch on the house. Purple blossoms rolled across the painted floor. Maple seeds whirled, horse chestnuts, and fine, full Dutch elms lined the block like hopeful ladies at a dance, and no one could imagine that one day they would gather their limbs and wither away.

  The way she tells it, her life’s one big romance was ruined by deception. But then I think she would see it that way because anger is such a big part of her: I don’t know who my grandmother would be without her anger.

  “He saw me going into the bank building downtown. I always wore a nice dress and a good coat, so he thought I was rich.” Gram sucks at the insides of her cheeks, her face long and droll. We’re working on an angel food, my favorite among favorites for its texture. A wish of a cake, which vanishes on the tongue. Lifting the pan, gently turning it in midair, she shows me how to invert it. I know the pads of her fingers are burning through the useless, hemstitched potholders.

  “He watched me go in and out that building.” She has a private way of telling some stories, as if she’s talking to herself. I stare: It’s hard to fathom a time Gram might’ve wanted much besides cake and ice cream, and, possibly, bowling. “So chaarming. Ach. Those blue eyes. Like the ocean! Like the devil’s, says my sister Alyce. He was the charming, drunken, Irish milkman. Back then I didn’t know—to be careful, I mean. I didn’t know the first thing. Ach, the charming ones.” She shakes her head at me; I feel it, an ache in the chest.

  He thought she was going to the bank, and in all that time she was going to the second floor, the office above the bank, to see her dentist. Getting her teeth drilled and pulled, until the not-too-distant day when she would have to glue dentures to her gums. But back then she still had teeth. “And a lovely shape. Always size six.” In the wedding photograph, the sepia tone makes the serious young people look evanescent, their skin too pale, their eyes transparent. Beside her brothers and sisters in their stylish suits, my grandmother’s expression is transported, unconfined, lifted slightly to the left. Beside her, my grandfather looks directly at the camera. Smirks.

  After just a few years of marriage, my grandmother developed a stitch in her joints, arcs of pain wracked one knee. She couldn’t stand. In the hospital, they discovered she had an “infection.” She brings her face close to mine as we sit at the table, waiting for our cake to cool and firm, trapping air that will keep it aloft after we turn it over. “It was a venereal disease,” she breathes, her gaze scorching. And there’s more. “While I was in the hospital—full of penicillin—he clears out our bank accounts. He goes to the house and snatches my jewelry. Leaves me high and dry. Heads out with Deirdre Miller, who’s the mother of one of my own students. Married woman, no less.” She sniffs. “He’d been sleeping with this one and that. All over town. He gave it to me and then toodleloo.” Left destitute, she and her little girl moved back in with her parents. My mother grew up in that shared bedroom while my grandmother rebuilt herself, enduring lashes of emotion hot as anything the nuns described waiting in hell. The neighbors’ hushed voices; pitying smiles from the other teachers; her father’s stark face, his black German mustache. Penitent, exile, prisoner, she ate and drank the memory of betrayal—the man had poisoned her hopes for love, cast a pall over her younger unmarried sisters, sullied the family name. “I should’ve known. But how could I know?” She echoes the long-ago voices that ringed the old house, their judgment, her feeble self-defense. She says, voice fragile, “Maybe if I was more special? Prettier? Or maybe even smarter. . . .”

  I sense, deep in my ten-year-old self, what she is trying to say, and I fling my arms around her middle, squeeze the air out so her laughter is half-gasp. “Grammy! You’re perfect!”

  So even my grandmother tumbled down into the thorns, the sharp heart of desire, let herself be snagged by hope and mad promises of romance. For all her anger and abiding suspicion, there was a time when even she had gotten caught up. It shouldn’t be a surprise, I suppose, that the angriest people are the ones with the highest, most bitterly dashed hopes—like fairy-tale kings who banish music from kingdoms after the beloved dies. But Grace saved herself and my mother. She did. She held her head up, and she reported to work, and she made sure her girl’s hair was combed and her face washed. And oh, if she twirled sugar, butter, and salt together, just so, therein was found ease and pleasure and another kind of love—the kind that you make for yourself, the kind that delivers on promises and asks almost nothing in return. This was how work saved her—the true work, the kind that takes you so deeply and happily into yourself, away from all the other troubles and unsolvable sorts of hurt, and keeps you sound.

  We loosen the cake from the pan edges, flip it onto a cake plate. Grace wants to drizzle chocolate glaze, the way, she says, Irma Rombauer—author of her exalted Joy of Cooking—would do it. But I want a dusting of confectioners’ sugar. “It looks like a blizzard,” I say, shaking the sifter so sugar goes in a puff everywhere. Her mouth twists but she lets me have my way. She says I’m “creative.” That comes first. We cut the cake with the serrated knife; she takes the piece from the side that isn’t quite as high as the rest—as she will, eating our burnt toast, the stringy or undercooked or unripe bites. Because even though she is angry and full of will and power, we are her prize, the granddaughters.

  “The worst thing you can do to your life. . . .” Gram closes her eyes, inhales cake as you might a bouquet. “The worst thing? Is to get married.”

  I’m ten and this isn’t what I want to hear. “But—what if you’re in love?”

  “Love is different.” Then she scowls. “What? Are you planning to be in love now?”

  “Well, not this second, I mean. But what about babies and stuff?”

  She shrugs before adding chocolate sprinkles to the sugar. “Babies are fine. Babies are for women who can’t do much else.”

  Not far away, there is another kitchen for me, another kind of work to do. The smells of cooking remind me I should be chopping, clearing, setting the table, not hiding in my bedroom, hunched over the bed with a notebook. There are houseguests, my father’s relatives, arguing politics in the living room, a fragrance of rice and zataar, chopped onions, pine nuts fried in butter floating over their heads. So much argument and advice! In this place, children and adults reside on separate planets, only occasionally crossing paths in the kitchen, just close enough for someone to lean down, lifting an instructional finger:

  “Work hard, save your money,” my father says. Though I’ve never known him to follow the second part of that advice.

  “Drink the best wine first,” Uncle Jack offers, “while you still can taste it.”

  “Say yes to the Americans, always oh yes sir. But when they turn around—poof!” Uncle Hal lifts his foot. “Boot ’em in the behind.”

  “Don’t have kids.” That’s my Aunt Rachel, an English professor and much-esteemed mother of favorite cousins Jess and Ed. “They wreck everything.” She says it so matter-of-factly, but there’s a joke inside everything she says. Like the Bugs Bunny cartoons—two jokes, the one on top for children, the hidden one for grownups. “Children are a luxury women can’t afford.” Aunt Rachel read the novel I wrote in fourth grade and says there’s hope for me yet.

  “But men can?”

  She looked at me from the corners of her long, Russian eyes. “That’s why they have wives.”

  In the land of Min Eedi, children are coddled and bullied, doted upon and dominated. Min eedi means “from my hand”: my uncles eat Bedouin-style,
standing around the platter of mensaf. Their wives—some American, like Aunt Rachel, some Jordanian—teach and write and work and work. Uncle Hal scoops a bit of lamb, some rice and onion, and tosses it lightly in the palm of his right hand. He brings the impromptu dumpling to his fingertips, turns to one of the children, and says, “Here. Min eedi.” We open our mouths to be fed these occasional bites, too hot and too much food at once, and you can’t refuse such a special honor, but at the same time you also don’t really want it.

  Soaking in advice, awash in it. I become infected with second-guessing; instinct floats like a thread on the surface of the eye; all decisions are fraught. I’m told to be brave and free, to write fearlessly, live independently. But then again, be careful, careful, careful. Advice is offered like food from the hand—a loving, unwanted gift.

  The more my grandmother warns about men, the more I huff and sigh, mutter man-hater under my breath. The more someone warns you not to do something, the more you want to do it—luscious as a poisoned apple—it wants biting.

  Bud, on the other hand, doesn’t trifle with warnings. He forbids tomfoolery, dalliance, and boys. Any invitation to a party, dance, sleepover is flapped in the air.

  “You don’t know what they’re capable of.” Bud, foreboding.

  “Who?” I can’t help asking, though I know the answer well.

  “Boys!”

  “But you’re a guy, Dad.”

  “That’s how I know!”

  Bud’s bad-craziness is also his good-craziness. He stares at his wife and daughters as if he can’t believe this great fortune. The idea of letting America tamper with us, lure his children away, the idea of us growing up into Americans, is a little unbearable. So he’s vigilant. A guardian and protector, he’s had to learn how to live by his wits and he wants to show us his tricks. Perhaps it’s because he was one of the youngest among a rowdy gang of brothers. He tells me and my sisters, “My mother brought a pot of chicken to the front of the table and those boys went crazy. They used to say, ‘Watch your fingers!’” When it got down to the littlest boys, the pot would be reduced to scraps. They fought over the fatty tail, they cracked open the bones and sucked out the marrow. He shows us these hiding places, the last succulent bites—“oysters” of meat secreted in the chicken back. He gestures for us to lean in over the dinner table and, with a cagey smile, he murmurs, “Nobody knows. Don’t forget—those are the best parts.”

  I lean against the swath of his back as he combs the bulgur wheat. If you try to cook in his kitchen, he stares over your shoulders, but he’ll let you help clean. Maybe chop an onion. “You have to search the bulgur so carefully,” he says, pointing here and there. The tiniest, hardest stones hide inside the grains. Bits of sand that look just like bulgur. “That’s how life is!” he says with a swoop of his hand, mysterious. Usually answering some other thing that no one asked.

  I sit with him, helping him comb. When you cover the grains with water, a kind of starchy mist swirls around your fingers: I see goats with fishtails, all sorts of creatures from my relatives’ stories. Oryx, unicorns, fairies. Which are real and which aren’t? The metamorphosis of cooking mirrors that of story-imagining. I learn to watch carefully for the stones, and sometimes stories come to me, emerging out of the starch, and explain things.

  Instead of going to dances and parties, I stay home and write. By the time I’m in high school, I’ve written pages and pages and pages. Boxloads. In my junior year, I discover that somehow I have enough school credits to escape.

  Sixteen years old, I enroll at the state university up the road. This is where my Jordanian uncles like to send their kids for American-college. Uncle Hal teaches here, so they think it’s safe. I have immigrant cousins everywhere, nearly one in each class: Magnum P.I. mustaches; eyes lively, black, and narrow as whips; everyone restless. Boys tote plastic cups foggy with beer. The lovely smell of old, sour beer is all over the place. I like being in places I’m not supposed to be. The first time a boy tries to kiss me with an open mouth, I jerk back, guffawing like he’d hit me with a joy buzzer. When I see the look on his face, I take a breath and say, “Okay. Do over.”

  In my sophomore year, the writer John Gardner comes to speak at the college. At a reception in a faculty house, I ambush him with a stack of typewritten pages. I ask, voice wobbling, if he’d maybe, someday, glance at my story. To my disbelief, he groans and patiently lowers himself into a chair at the kitchen table. For long minutes he sits there, hunched in a leather jacket, shoulder-length white hair falling forward, his soft, thought-creased face tipped over the pages. He stops me later, story in hand. “I wrote down a few things for you here.” A sheet filled with handwritten notes. Eventually the notes go astray, but his advice remains: Graduate studies. Daily writing. Hone the craft.

  Also, this at the end of the comments, written in soft pencil: You better choose—because you’re a woman—between writing and having a family.

  Gardner’s injunctions play in my head, a spare, repeating melody. I accept his directives without question. I’m not overly concerned; I believe I’ve already made my choice. Writing is essential as a nutrient. And at nineteen, the idea of children is a distant planet.

  Senior year, Jeremy and I share a house because it cuts the rent in half. I have no real romantic interest in him, but no way to grasp or measure this. Our rare couplings are quick and confusing to both of us: I confess to sometimes trying to read through it all, holding a book open over Jeremy’s head. Aside from a few select cousins, I’ve never been allowed to have friends who were boys; at this point, men are a novelty, an offbeat pleasure. Jeremy is sort of a poet. He writes odd, elliptical little paragraphs, which my professor-uncle Hal once observed didn’t “add up to much.” Also, he sometimes sports a turban with a rhinestone in the center. He used to have waist-length, red hair, but at a recent party, Jeremy sat on the lawn with a pair of scissors and chopped off his hair in three swoops, then fed it to the fire like a human sacrifice.

  In our yearlong sorta relationship, Jeremy and I have discussed the whole-wheat-bread recipe in the Moosewood Cookbook, whether to put peas in the carbonara, and the steaming techniques in our latest discovery, a blue tome called The International Cookbook. Our cooking lab is an exploration of the creative process. Gradually, I’m seeing how the process can be nudged into a discipline.

  On an early spring day during senior year, we prepared a watered-down version of Peking duck and steamed pork buns. Even modified, the meal is too expensive and difficult for us, but we’ve been cooking together for nearly a year and have learned a little bit about how to make meals seem greater than the sum of their parts. Jack, Moss, and Isaac have arrived on their Harleys, noise churning the air. Jeremy is twenty-two; his friends are impressively older—from twenty-seven to thirty. Fully grown adults, they showed up in 1980, after the war in Vietnam, each making his way to the university, funded by the GI Bill. We sit on the floor around our table—a steamer trunk—trying to roll up the duck in pancake. Foreignness, we hope, makes things more delicious. Jack hears a sound out front and lifts his hands so all the men look at him and stop talking. The stillness in their eyes is instant and far reaching: It’s something I’ve noticed on previous occasions, as if there’s a sliver in each of them that is terribly old, as if that one piece has absorbed the sadness in their bodies. When it surfaces, I feel within myself a corresponding swirl, a drop of ink in a glass of water.

  We freeze, listening, and the sound comes again: Diana!

  I go to the door: Uncle Hal stands about ten feet back in the middle of the front lawn. A big, healthy man in his early sixties, he straddles a battered Schwinn with a bell and streamers attached to the handlebars. Look closely, you’ll find a homemade price tag stuck to one of the fenders. He pulls a small box out of his pocket. “O niecie, I got you something.”

  He wants to have a conference on the lawn, but the men emerge, shouting, “Professor Abu!” Shaking his hand. There are several reasons why Uncle Hal avoids enterin
g my house. It’s shabby and musty, and seeing the inside will indict my housekeeping, but, more important, it will reveal evidence of a man. When Bud and Hal refer to themselves as Bedouins, it means, among other things, that they adhere to a grizzled old moral code: Their daughters are to remain virginal up to the last breath before they’re married off. Easier to use the Jordanian telegraph system—yelling from the yard—than risk uncovering something you already knew.

  They tow Uncle Hal into the living room. The vets love Uncle, his loud, profane, angry lectures on world politics pinning students to their seats, his roaring indignation at America—its greed, ignorance, corruption—and the suffering of developing countries at the hands of the so-called first world. Hal sits on the futon and looks quietly and unhappily over the proceedings. “What’s all this bamboozling?”

  “Peking duck.” Jeremy offers him a plate, but my uncle merely tsks and huffs and drops his eyebrows: You must be out of your mind.

  “I just came to give you this.” The box in his fingertips. “I found it at a yard sale in Hannibal. It’s real. All kinds of gold. I got the old lady down to $25! So we can . . . fix it—fix up this situation.” His gaze floats to the ceiling. Both Uncle Hal and Bud know and don’t know that I’m sharing a house with a man.

  The box is dark indigo. I watch my hands move as though they belonged to someone else. The lid lifts, revealing a yellow-gold band. The breath rushes out of my chest: I stop moving. My uncle pulls the ring from the cardboard backing. I know he isn’t completely sure which of the guys there is the boyfriend. In this velvet box, from somewhere deep in a widow’s semiattached garage, he’s found a good deal on gold, plus an answer to one of these confounding American problems. He urges me to try on the ring; naturally, it fits. “We can wrap tape around it if it’s too big. Too small is more of a problem,” he says. “This is a gift—from Uncle to you. Now it’s all yours!”