Life Without a Recipe

by Diana Abu-Jaber

  In this time after Gracie’s birth, it feels as if nothing of my former self remains. Several of our child-free acquaintances make themselves scarce—perhaps afraid that I’ll ramble on about diapers and bottles or I’ll make them hold the baby. Another writer friend in Portland, also a mother, reassures me: “It’s going to happen. All kinds of things—it’s just going to shift.”

  “Will they go back again—the things?”

  “Some will and some won’t. But in the long run, it’s going to be fine.”

  Scott, who’s been up and down tending to our daughter half the night, sleeps through the mornings. I get up with Gracie. Often, she will cry and cry, her body screwing into a twist, so loud my eardrums whang back and forth. I miss my slovenly old mornings—lazing in bed, thinking of nearly nothing but the walls, the birdsong, the pool. I wrote before I did anything else, dipping into the residue of last night’s dreams. Oh, what a creampuff life! Gracie lies on her back scowling, limbs floating in midair. I distract her by building things, Lego boxes and block archways that she gleefully attempts to bash. I make sock puppets, talking silverware, dancing shoes. Try not to look at the clock, not to think about time I might spend writing. Do not wonder if I’m truly meant to be a mother. Knock the wooden balls down the fretwork, replace the puzzle cutouts, dress the doll. Did James Joyce spend his days with babies? Did Yeats rush around trying to calm his infant? Or was it always the wives?

  I’m haunted by a shadow-self—the person I was before I became a mother. The old habits come with me—ideas about doing what I want, when I want: How powerfully I craved freedom—a child under a doting, overbearing father; how hard it is to let even a bit of it go. My friend Laura and I walk to the outdoor trattoria nine blocks from the house. I push Gracie’s carriage in the afternoon light, listening to the round, clear syllables that rise from my baby like soap bubbles. I’ve brought plastic keys, bottles of formula, a diaper bag. We sip iced tea under a leaf-dappled table. But as soon as our food arrives, something shifts. Perhaps it’s the ravishing aroma of butter, garlic, and tomato, or the blandness of the bottle. She kicks and lets out a wail. I scoop her up, hum, strumming her back, and for a moment she settles into my arms.

  Then Gracie kicks again, her crying intensifies. I stand with her and sense the other diners lowering their forks, faces turning. I don’t let myself look back, afraid of what I might see. I try to pace and soothe her, but her crying grows steadily louder, verges on screaming. I haven’t had a full night’s sleep in weeks—I can’t remember what it is to sleep. Crazy notions occur to me, thoughts bounce in and out of my rattled brain. As I pat her back, murmur into her ear, stroll between tables, for some reason I flash on the weird echo between ambivalence and bivalve: I think, a clam is the metaphor for indecision, closed into its shell. That’s why they say happy as a clam, isn’t it?—that solitude.

  Laura takes and bounces her, and for a few blessed, distracted moments Gracie seems to quiet, but then no, the loud wail rises again, shattering the peace, unceasing. “Please sit, eat,” I beg Laura. I would beg everyone around us to eat if I could. Please, pretend this isn’t happening. I shoulder the baby, patting, and begin walking again, cut between the tables and go out. She doesn’t start to calm until we’re several blocks away. We walk and walk, her soft breaths against my chest. Gradually she curls into a snooze, cat-tongues of breath under my neck. As soon as I risk returning to our table, she awakens with a start, shrieking, her body twisting. All conversation around us stops as her screams ignite the air. Everyone here is a better, more capable parent—I’d known it all along. I am sweating, face hot, my heart hammers on my ribs; such public exposure, such a primal sense of failure. I should’ve known. I’d had no idea.

  “Please.” I wave a card at the waiter. “Can you box everything?” I gather my baby and we rush together, away from the tables and flowers and chattering people. The air colored a deep particulate blue, full of crying. We move so quickly—fleeing, all thoughts flown out of my head.

  A social worker from the agency checks up on us when our baby is a few months old. It’s one of Gracie’s bad days: Swaddling and upright bottles and bouncing and cooing have little effect. Fabienne tries to soothe our shrieking girl, wandering with her all over the house without luck. After not a lot of time, she hands her back. “I just think that new parents have intense first babies,” she says, eyes down as she writes things on a clipboard. “Might be you’re trying too hard. Maybe you’re making her nervous.”

  I leave a note on a social media site: “Crying after every bottle—what can we do?” Dozens of parents send back consoling thoughts, pointing out that it’s not entirely strange: Babies cry. “It’s one of their few defenses,” a father writes. “It scares tigers away.” I read every comment, wishing someone could just sprinkle some fairy dust over my head; there is none.

  A neighbor’s three-year-old comes over with dolls and a stuffed monkey and dances them around the crib; the baby is quiet but keeps a close, skeptical eye on him. “She like dance monkeys,” he tells me. “But you can’t stop.”

  One morning, I take her out in her carriage. Often she enjoys this, lapsing into a mesmerized contentment, but today, after a few blocks, she starts screaming like she’s trying to turn inside out. We pivot and head right back, but Scott is midmorning napping after a long, broken night. We can’t go into the small house while she’s shrieking and I can’t keep wheeling her around, assaulting the neighbors. My brain feels wooden. I park her in the shade behind the house, go inside, and close the French doors. Staring through the glass at the stroller, I feel my breath whirling. I want to scream just as loud as the baby. Tears squeeze out of the corners of my eyes. Not equipped, I think. Not equipped.

  One of Bud’s favorite stories about my babyhood is about how he liked to threaten to throw me out of the window when I’d scream. As a kid, this cracked me up. “DAD. You didn’t mean it.”

  “I did mean it,” Bud said. “I wanted to. I would have. That window, right there.”

  My grandmother’s solution to all problems of immoderation, from crying children to upset stomachs to bouts of wild giddiness, was a tablespoon of Kümmel—a nightmarish Germanic liquor of caraway and fumes. The taste of it was so shocking it was almost sufficient in itself to make children behave. “Slip it right into the baby bottle,” she advised. “Clears things right up.”

  It seemed the only answer was outright surrender or alcohol. After a few moments with forehead against the window, I go back outside; I pick up my shrieking baby and rock and hum and rock and hum and she howls. None of us knows what to do, I think, and perversely, this gives me heart. None of us is equipped.

  Our pediatrician asks which of us needs the checkup when we arrive for her next appointment, each of us red-eyed, the baby glaring and squirming. Dr. Toledo looks her over, pronounces her otherwise healthy, and jots something on a pad. “There’s this ring of muscle—it holds in stomach contents? Sometimes it’s kind of goofed up when they’re first born. It takes awhile to straighten itself out. They get this acid-reflux thing. So, yeah. You’re going to get a lot of crying.” She smiles as she hands over the prescription. “I guess you already figured that part out.”

  I’m wary of medicine and doctors: My shaman-aunt Aya used to point at lab coats and say, “Like butchers. Only the butchers are cheaper.” But we’re ready to try anything, so I slip Gracie a dropper of the stuff. Something the doctor called an “H2 blocker.” We wait. As the day goes on, we forget to wait. I notice evening sounds that I haven’t heard in months: nightingales, the neighbor whistling for her cats, an ice-cream truck. I notice more of everything. Gracie’s gray-blue eyes have deepened, over the weeks, into a rich brown. Her hair is a silky flutter. That night, I realize something is happening—it’s as if there’s a window, a glisten of contentment, through which we may, at last, reach each other. Her hands swim up toward my eyes, fan through the ends of my hair. Scott hums his cheek over hers—perhaps she feels the haze of stubble—a
misty smile rises to her face. Could it be? Her first true smile—of pleasure or recognition or surprise, the first glint of our deep swimmer rising toward the surface. It spills through me, love like something growing wild, petals ticking open, offering its spiral, twining around our limbs. I remember this feeling—it was there, at the first instant of seeing her, on the first day of her life—and even before then, somehow, months before her birth. Perhaps it has always been in us, a rain forest, deep rooted and whole.

  As soon as we begin dribbling purple drops onto her tongue, the screaming stops. Her crying subsides, she sleeps for longer periods. She laughs. We start in on new kinds of endeavor.

  Dinner is a two-person operation: One of us holds and plays with Gracie while the other cuts our food and offers it up—bite for you, bite for me. We sit across from each other at the V of our couch, wedging Gracie between us. Our daughter tracks the progress of food from plate to mouth, pouting when we bring out her bottle. At six months, we give her a little rice cereal, a thin gruel with milk. Holding my breath, I spoon a dot of the cereal between her lips; she pushes it out with her tongue. I nudge a bit back in and a few particles finally slip down. Her eyes widen, food dribbling from the corners of her mouth. My heart thumps against my rib cage. It’s a kind of enchantment, watching someone’s first bite of food. By the third meal, Gracie opens her mouth when she sees the doll-size spoon, calling out vowel sounds as if describing tastes of things. The rice doesn’t splash and burn her throat the way her milky diet had. Her sleep grows deeper. Soon, we are just about making it from one end of the evening to the other, having luscious, forgotten dreams. Oh, sleep.

  As the pale buds of baby teeth emerge, Gracie’s meals take on flavors, primary colors. We start with the unsurprising pureed things: applesauce, banana, squash, peas. Soon, it’s mashed bits of whatever we’re eating: olives, chili, sausage, lemon, garlic, Camembert. Sometimes I have to remind myself to offer her bites, to not assume she won’t like it. So this is what it means to learn one another, making a first tentative study of taste, rejection, and desire. Easy. She samples with abandon, as if making up for lost time. She gums a sour pickle or grimaces at a creamy sauce with horseradish, then wants more. It’s one of her earliest words: “More. More!” Soon there will be baking, but not yet. I try to set aside the sugar bowl, fearful of its long, bright shadow. After I sprinkle cinnamon on her rice cereal, she waves her arms for it, ecstatic. She opens her mouth as wide as she can, bird-style, giving herself over to new pleasure. Cooking and eating swaying in their balance: Good as it is to offer pleasure, it’s just as important to learn how to accept it.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Asking Questions, Looking Closely

  Dave wants only the truth these days. My father-in-law is the last of the great question-askers. He wants to know, to see what’s there, to peel back the veil. He asks people just about anything that occurs to him. He does so with such guileless curiosity that you could be halfway through your answer before you realize he’s asking for intimate information on relationships, personal grooming, or digestive outcomes. He is just as forthcoming about his own details, casually revealing which of his children he’d let fall from the changing table, his past marital indiscretions, something he’d glimpsed in the toilet bowl—so relaxed, he might be discussing the weather report.

  One night at the dinner table—several months after the grape-feeding incident and several years before our daughter will be born—Bud was watching Dave out of the corner of his eye. He and Mom had arrived in Orlando with us to celebrate Christmas with my new in-laws. We were all spending a few days at their house, getting to know one another. Beginning with salad and progressing through to dishes of ice cream, Dave asked Bud why Iraq had invaded Iran, whether Muslims believed there are two hundred naked virgins waiting in heaven, if he really ate goat eyeballs, the meaning and historical context of his family name, and what the Palestinians were always so hot under the collar about.

  After dinner, Bud pulled me outside the front door as everyone else was moving toward bed. “How well you know this guy, Scotty’s dad?” he hissed. It was a crackling cold December night, the lawns of Orlando frosted with moonlight. “Is he with someone?”

  “What now?”

  “You know.” Bud glanced at the lighted windows. “CIA”

  I couldn’t keep the exasperation out of my voice. “Bud, for real?”

  “He asks so many questions. Americans don’t ask that many,” he said. He’d never met anyone quite so straightforwardly curious before.

  When the doctor tells Dave there’s no cure, he listens, clear-eyed, nodding. Once again, he tries to peel back layers, to look as directly as he can at what is happening. Propped in a clean white hospital bed, he says, “I keep thinking I have to go through all those stages of—what are they? Fear? Anger? Maybe I’m just stuck in denial. How do you know?” Outside, around the parking garage, there is a light perfume from distant orange groves. Whiffs of citrus seem to cross these rooms like reports from another world. He stares out his window past a row of palm trees, his engineer’s mind at work. For years he was an applications engineer for Techtronix; postretirement, he’s maintained a medical robot that simulates patient symptoms for nursing students. “Is it weird to say I just really think this is interesting?”

  Dave’s children lamented his Vulcan approach to life, this lack of fuzzy fatherly emotion. But having grown up with all emotion and little clarity, I find his style brisk and refreshing. The idea that one might say precisely what one is thinking, and welcome, without judgment or criticism, that same precision from others, is a novelty to me—even a joy. Throughout the procedure, he quizzes the doctor performing his thoracentesis—lung draining—and asks to inspect the cannula. Afterward, the specialist rubs his glasses on his lab coat, saying, “Patients generally just close their eyes. Not this one.”

  I would have closed my eyes. It’s hard to look. You get so used to life, so surrounded and protected and shielded by the brightness of the morning, the incandescence of childhood just around the last corner—a state you emerged from just yesterday. How to imagine that such a time comes to a close?

  Ten years earlier, I watched in fragments my grandmother pass away, as if peeping between my fingers—a visit here, a visit there. Even during her last days in the hospital, I was telling myself stories about visiting for the next holiday and also the one after that. But Gram was writing her own story, while she drifted between the wires and tubes, the busy white world clicking off its seconds on the heart monitor. We found it afterward under her bed, scratched on the back of some doctor’s medical notes: “My dear family. Please let me go to live with Jesus Christ.” Steady devotion, foundational as the earth. Love comes with its aggravations, and still it’s not possible to completely let go of it.

  Mom had called to tell us that Gram had gone, but she couldn’t finish any of the sentences. Dad came back on the line to explain things. “She’s okay,” he said. “She misses her mom now.”

  Bud was young when he lost his parents. His father passed on when Bud was a teenager and his mother when he was in his early twenties, living in the States. He grew up in such a crowded family that he never had enough of his parents to begin with. Our grief seemed a little exotic and outsized to him, as if some improbable new beast had entered the room, moved all the furniture. “What? She was old,” he’d said. “Death is good. It’s fine. Better than being crazy and crackled.” I couldn’t accept things as plainly as he did, and I wrestled with a sense of disbelief: Grace couldn’t be gone. She would never do that! It felt more like she was missing than dead. Gone into hiding.

  At her funeral, I had asked at the last moment to be a pallbearer. I almost didn’t—I wondered whether it would seem strange—but Mom had said, “No, go tell them.” I could just see my grandmother pointing to the center of her chest, saying, “You can always know what to do if you feel down here, like a knuckle.” The men looked nonplussed for a moment before one of the funeral home st
aff bowed out. The weight of her coffin was a powerful comfort, hard and solid, something to press against, instead of the lightness of death. It was like a shared secret, the pressure of a hand, an old memory—something only a few of us would know. It helped me begin to feel what had happened, to know this loss—not only in my mind but also in my arms and legs and back. My father knelt by the side of the coffin and opened his hands to the heavens, crying for his old adversary.

  Over the course of a year, there’s been a lot of movement in and out of that white bed, a good deal of testing, dosing, and treatment, to buy us a few scanty months. Eventually, Dave stops going back in. At his seventieth birthday party, he receives visitors at home as he lies propped in bed beside an oxygen tank. The bed has become his house and table. Here he watches TV, socializes, reads the newspaper. Boxes of cookies and bowls with grape stems float across the bedsheets. Our three-month-old daughter snoozes in the guest room, among the coats. Bud and Mom come into my father-in-law’s bedroom. Bud holds both of Dave’s hands and Dave says, “I always think about those red grapes.” Bud cracks his favorite worst joke, “I don’t care what they say about you, Dave. You’re a great guy.” We bring Gracie in to finally meet her other grandfather. We settle her against his side; she burrows between his arm and ribs, companionably, still half-asleep. His eyes tick over her soft form. A hundred questions he wants to ask her, but he doesn’t have the breath. “Hello, Gracie,” he manages. “How do you do?”

  The water is a waxy, crinkling light far down the green slope, dotted with birds and turtles. Scott, Gracie, and I take a table out on the back porch, under an umbrella that sheds blue light. Once on this same marshy slope, my father-in-law gasped and pointed at an alligator just inches from my foot. I choked on my own yelp, jerking backward, before I realized the thing was cement (a harder distinction to make than you might think). Dave cried with laughter; later, I was required to pose for a picture with my foot on its head.