Life Without a Recipe

by Diana Abu-Jaber

  “Bud. It’s fine. Things just—they weren’t right. For a really long time. We just didn’t. . . .”

  “What? What didn’t you?”

  I fish for the words, searching the air. “It’s hard to really—”

  “Did he beat you?” Bud still suspects (incorrectly) that the first kelb beat me.

  “Dad,” I sigh. I can’t think of any way to explain this that he could really get his head around. I hardly understand it myself. “No, Dad.”

  “Not a little?”

  “No.”

  “I never trusted him,” he says (a lie). “He didn’t like to sit and talk to me. Not for more than an hour or two.” Here is my father’s best, truest test of character: who is willing to spend days at a time, without cease, talking to him? That is the person who can be trusted.

  “No, Bud, you were right.”

  “If only you will listen.” Now he sighs.

  “If only.”

  Three years earlier, my grandmother had spent her final days in a hospital bed. We’d returned to written messages, our old form of communication, since she’d had thyroid surgery, her neck too swollen for speech. These notes between us seemed like quiet last words, though none of us acknowledged this. She bent over a notepad, then showed us her lovely penmanship saying how happy she was that my sisters and I were “settled” and “squared away.” I’m not sure she imagined that any of us difficult, untamable girls actually wanted to be married, but she would have felt sorry about losing D. Over the years, she’d knitted him several immense pullovers that he dutifully sweated into each time we visited her. A few months before anyone knew she was sick, we’d gone to a family dinner. D. sat on her left and treated her to his rolling laugh as she told him scandalous family stories about Aunt Myrtle, Father Liam, and the mystery baby—my cousin Padraic—or the three bachelor uncles who shared a bed but weren’t actually brothers. Listening well was another of his virtues. Afterward, he could recount hair-raising things about my extended family—including the backstory of the cousin who’d claimed to be a prophet and kick-started his own cult—that I’d never heard before.

  But I’d imagine Grace would’ve been as philosophical about my second split as she was about the first. Among her many brothers and sisters, she was the only one to spend most of her life single; this, she swore, was the key to happiness. After my first divorce, she’d said, merely, “Well, I’m just glad you got that out of your system.”

  Two years after I left Jordan, Mai was diagnosed with a monstrous, nearly unknown form of cancer: It sprang, seemingly, from nowhere, leeching the life force from her blood. She came to the States seeking medical attention. Still exquisite, aloof, and tanned, she looked not at all sick.

  I have started seeing someone new: Mai likes him. He slips an arm around my waist and I think I see the wistfulness on her face that I’d felt in Cairo. When it’s time for her to return to Jordan, she clings to my shoulders and whispers in my ear, “I’m so scared.”

  That would be the last time I saw Mai. I learned of her death through friends of friends, weeks after the funeral near her parents’ home in Al-Salt.

  There is something I think I couldn’t quite get until I was a bit older, which is that there are unique configurations of time and people. They belong to each other for a while, months or years, atoms in a crystal, until eventually, bit by bit, they fall away. That’s the part a younger person doesn’t believe—that it won’t last forever, that this assortment will never come together again.

  I see my grandmother in one of her flowing “pajama suits,” seated at the restaurant table, this one oversize and rectangular, leaning into D., squeezing his elbow, the two of them laughing, coconspirators. I see Mai seated at the breakfast table beside me in Cairo, turning on her finger a gold ring, stamped with large Roman numerals, a ring I’d never seen her wear before, one that slipped, just a bit loose, the last time we saw each other.

  All things in due time, my grandmother liked to say, as if eventually desires become clear, the dearest wishes rise to the surface, and all best possibilities pass through your net if you just hold it out long enough. But I began to feel that wasn’t quite true, that one must swing, and swing the net high and wide. There is never enough time and the net is too small. After almost thirty-five years of family, roommates, and husbands, the move into the tiny apartment marked the first time in my life I would truly live in my own space. I’d touched the sliding glass door, the pane so thin I could feel the traffic thrum of a distant bridge along the bones in my forearm. The sense of this opening out, threaded with fear, was also sharp and sure, a diamond-hard bolt: the first moment of hearing your own voice. It takes such a long time, I thought, to get to the starting place.

  PART II

  A Food

  of One’s Own

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Unknown

  I’d blurted to Scott, a few months after we’d become a couple, “I really think I want to have a kid!”

  He’d said, “It’s nice to meet you, too.”

  I was testing the idea, daring myself at the same time I was daring him. Sick of ambivalence, that draining sensation, I’d waited instead for baby-fever, pictured a mistral sweeping away clouds, rotating over the desert floor, a force of intention and desire. If you wanted so badly to be a mother, perhaps that meant there was something inside, some muscle, some hidden talent, that would ensure you would make a good mother. I was thirty-six when Scott and I started dating. I knew only that I wanted to want. At last, here was someone I could imagine wanting with.

  Over the course of four years, we moved in together, joined our bank accounts, bought a house. Each step made me panicky with anxiety. Especially the house. For months after we moved in, I walked around as if there were unexploded mines in the floor. I was afraid of old traps, of waking up and discovering that I’d fallen into the wrong relationship. Or gotten married. Or forgotten how to write. Over the years, several of my teachers had suggested that a writing life was a vocation, that one was called to it, that any woman who wanted to be a serious writer should consider avoiding marriage and children, become a high priestess. But when I lived alone, I mostly wanted to give dinner parties. I started writing a column for The Oregonian about restaurant life that required eating out and gossiping with chefs all over town. My half-finished novel waited in the corner like a troll; I made wide circles, avoiding it.

  At the time I met Scott, he was working in a fly-fishing shop, tying flies, selling gear, and taking customers out to water’s edge, showing them how to use the expensive stuff he’d sold them. “Fly-fishing,” he’d explained to me, “is for people who are privileged enough to needlessly complicate their lives.” From outdoor equipment, he went on to selling boats—then even bigger boats. A born salesman with a sharpshooter’s eye, he could look into people and see what they truly wanted—or what he could convince them they wanted. By our third or fourth date, he’d said, “We have to arrange things to make it easier for you to write.”

  After years of stealing time, ducking out of dates with friends, putting off paper-grading or eating a proper dinner—always at war with the world and the self, forever stealing away to write—this was the relief of recognition, a kind of leavening. In an antiques/junk shop, Scott found a hulking dining-room table with fluted edges and mosaic inlay; he situated it under the window with a view of the coastal range where I could work and watch storm clouds roll in.

  I went to my table early in the morning, warming my hands on a coffee mug, staring through reflections in the dark window. So good to feel in possession of yourself, thoughts moving through in glassy waves. Seven years had passed since the publication of my first novel. At my dining-room table, sheets of rain blurring the sky over Portland, I began writing a new novel. It was about an Iraqi restaurant in a mythically sunny Los Angeles. It’s a fine, expectant thing to write at one’s table, even if, of course, you write without hope—almost every writer I know loses faith, utterly, precipitously, in any gi
ven project, at some point or other. Sometimes you get it back, but in any case, you learn how to ignore yourself and keep going. About twenty minutes after sitting down, there would be the phone ringing, then my father’s voice shouting from the other room, “Hello? Ya Bah?” Little Daddy. Nickname for a bossy girl. “It’s just me. Your dad! You are there? Get over to the telephona, I got things to ask you.”

  Even after my two marital implosions, my father still just wanted, as he said, to make sure his girls were “situated,” meaning married. I’d finally started doing things like writing books, and gradually he began to see that I might be leading a different sort of life than the one he’d envisioned. Still, as soon as Scott and I bought the house together, Bud started to go a tiny bit crazy: First, because we still weren’t married, and second, because we’d bought a house without consulting him.

  “Your grammy might think that’s cute, but not me,” Bud shouted. Grace had been dead for seven years, but they were still fighting. I got up from my table, as I did each morning, and turned down the volume on the machine to a sub-audible stream of advice. Then, a hunt through the freezer for breakfast ice cream: bowls of rocky road or chocolate with peanut butter cups, preferably capped with dollops of whipped cream. This was the subversive breakfast I’d picked up from Gram, who’d fixed us eggs, bacon, and sliced cantaloupe—but only when our parents were around. On our own, meals were kids’ paradise—rivers of chocolate and cream. “My dominion, my apartment, my rules,” Grace declared. “I says so.”

  Cool, sweet spoonfuls sliding down my throat, I wrote and rewrote. When the ice cream was gone, I went after our dog, scooping her around her skinny Italian greyhound middle and flipping her onto her back. “Be the baby,” I commanded. She pulled in her bony feet and gazed at me with wet eyes. A Roman bump on her nose, lips dark as if she’d applied lipstick. When I kissed her head, she tucked the length of her muzzle under my chin, tapping cold wet under my earlobe. We walked around the kitchen like that for a while until Scott said, “Aren’t you supposed to be writing?”

  I let the dog escape and captured the dark-eyed man in my arms. Oh, it wasn’t just that he led me back to my work—that was so much, yet possibly the least of it. There were enlaced fingers and kisses like falling from great distances and an unbroken gaze like a rope between us. Desire like this was more than discovering another body, it was discovering your own—the depth and dimensions of it. Like the dream in which you walk to the back of your house and find a hidden door that opens to a floating city of onion domes, turrets, and waterfalls. This sort of desire could almost make you sad or angry, for all that you might have gone through your life without knowing. But then you just had to feel grateful again: You didn’t in any way qualify for this love, you lucked into it.

  “I’m ready to read your new pages,” he says into my neck, about the sexiest thing he could ever say. He’s never been married and yet seems to have a shocking nonchalance about trying it out. “Soon as you’re ready to show them.”

  “Fine,” I say. “Let’s do it. Marriage. Whatever. Why not.”

  The gazebo at the end of the pier costs a grand to reserve, or . . . the concierge cocks one eyebrow, gives a shrug of a smile.

  Or?

  Take a chance. No one else reserves it on whatever day you pick? You can do what you want, throw a wedding—no charge.

  In September, Key West is a hot mouth. Its clouds are fat-bellied, trundling just above the earth. This is our mythical place, sly and entrancing with cat shadows, blue-banded water, and nights that slide over our shoulders. After a vacation there, startling and too brief, we both thought of it for our wedding. Now there are twenty wedding guests assembled. Everyone watches the sky. “It’s gonna come down.” Dave, my father-in-law-to-be, shades his eyes.

  Bud stands with him, filled with joy and complaint. The dads. “I dun care what it does, just as long as I dun have to get back into that machina that brung us here. You see that thing? I feel like I’m back in the king’s air force, when I flew the airmail plane. Did I tell you about how I was flying that? I was sixteen. People kept falling out.”

  We’d opened wedding gifts that morning, before the ceremony, pushed by a sense of expediency—several of our older guests were already making comments about the heat, using words like “ungodly.” Invisible hurricanes dot outlines on the sky, churning just beyond the horizon. No one seemed to know what to give us: We’d bought our house together three years earlier, we’re too old for toasters. This gathering is more like an excuse for a vacation with nuptials thrown in. One beautifully wrapped present turned out to be a weather barometer embedded in a coffee mug. My parents gave up and wrote a check. Scott’s grandmother Jean gave us a battered Betty Crocker cookbook from 1967. “Was this one of your favorites?” I ask her. A few food-stained pages fall out.

  “Oh, gracious no.” She waves a hand at me.

  “Well.” I hug the book to my chest. “Thank you.”

  “What does this mean about babies?” Suddenly her tone is bracing, a let’s-get-down-to-business whip-snap.

  I sit at attention. “About . . . ?”

  She lifts her gaze, regal and impatient. I catch flashes of my own grandmother in her purple lipstick, the steel in her posture. “If you’re ever going to have them.”

  Jean stops just short of saying tick tock. I do a kind of mental reshuffle. The rest of our party have gone in to sweat on their beds and take third showers. The wedding is in a few hours. My future grandmother-in-law and I are lingering at one of the plastic beachside tables at the hotel, surrounded by crumpled wrapping paper and drained margarita glasses the size of fish bowls. The urge for asking advice has resurfaced in me lately. Such an ingrained impulse it’s made seeing therapists almost impossible—I end up begging, “Please just tell me what to do.” I know there’s some kind of protocol: grow up, fall in love, get married, have babies. Roughly in that order. But I’ve fallen out of step. I want a village elder, a bent crone to herd me back into line. I touch her hand which is cool and puffy, her manicure fire-engine red. “It’s so hard to figure out!” I cry. I have these impulses of self-revelation; they come in gusts, often with the most unsympathetic confessor. “I mean, here we are. I’m forty! I’m trying to—I don’t know what I’m trying to—I’m just so unsure. I mean I think I do—want them. The babies. Then I have a heart attack about it. Wow. Then I think—you had four of them. And Dave—what a sweetheart he must’ve been. All of them. I’ll bet you never regretted any of it, did you?”

  Her smile is a stroke that curls up at the ends. “It’s all heartache, my dear,” she says. “Heartache and regret, every bit of it.”

  Luckily, the pier is not otherwise in use and we gather there in our wrinkled nice clothes. But it turns out that MTV is filming something called Summer Beach House on the sand directly behind the pier. Later, watching the wedding video, we can see our lips forming the words to our vows, but all we can hear is Bananarama singing, “It’s a cruel, cruel summer.” In the background, girls and boys in postage stamp–size swimwear bound past as if slowed down, gold and amber-colored flesh soaring against blue. There are no clouds over the gazebo, such bright pale sky you can see almost to Mars. The twenty-two members of our wedding party put their arms around each other and smile bravely, even defiantly, right into the light.

  We fly back to our lives in the mist; after Key West, our house looks tired as a sigh, the backyard a living mass of blackberry thorns and canes. That spring, I have a job offer in Miami and we decide after a few moments of agony to leave Oregon. Craving that blue, brilliant light, we sell or give away almost everything in a blaze of energy and drive across oceans of Nebraska and Iowa to South Florida. Our new little Question, bedeviling, unanswerable, finds me again. It’s as if all the old patterns had been torn away in our lives—why not try some new craziness? The wisps of feelings intensify, that quality of missing someone begins drifting over me more frequently. I debate The Question privately, brooding over it . . . just one
child. . . .

  I push it away. It comes back. I raise it at dinner; Scott shakes his head. I let it go; accept it; tell myself: not for you. Once we married, even Bud turned expansive and lazy, saying things like, “Your sisters took care of having the babies for you. It’s lucky!” Still, I talk it over with friends. I announce contentment: I love having my freedom! Often, though, I slip into a reverie, murmuring, just one. . . . An acquaintance unhappy with a lack of progress in her own writing career—her hands full with an unruly daughter—scowls when I ask how one manages both writing and kids. She scolds, “You can’t have everything, you know.” People question me at readings and talks: Do you have any kids? I think I detect a streak of sympathy in their eyes. One day, after giving a reading, after I’m asked yet again about kids, another woman in the audience cries out, “Her books are her children!” She’s indignant, head lifted: I toss up my hands, laughing, but I don’t mean it. It feels like a bit of flayed skin from my throat, the back of my laughter. I don’t want books to be my children.

  Whitewashed buildings stream by as we ride through the streets of Amman. I’m in Jordan with Scott to visit universities, read from the new memoir, and talk about writing. But every taxi driver squints in the rearview mirror and asks where our children are, their faces expectant and wry. After a few wrong answers, I start to say, Inshallah—God willing—so they nod, instead of doing what the first drivers did—stare with horror and pity. Then another driver asks, and I forget my response of convenience and answer him honestly: we don’t have any.

  “Why not?” The young man nearly rises out of his seat as we swerve around a traffic circle. All I can see in the mirror is a thatch of hair and smudged black eyes. The mirror keeps slipping to point at the floor; he adjusts it, aiming it at me. He speaks English but doesn’t address Scott, as though he knows this situation must be my doing. “You have to. They’re essential. Children are God’s blessing. I myself have five. Each one is a diamond.”