Life Without a Recipe

by Diana Abu-Jaber

  Because I can’t think what else to do to help, I begin making big pots of food in the afternoon and sending Janet home with bowls of pasta carbonara, meatballs, spicy chili, lentil soup. Her mother has allowed her ex-husband and Mami to move back in, and now he works with the boyfriend in his landscaping business. According to Janet, somehow they’re all getting along “very lovely.” But not even Mami wants to do the cooking. Through the kitchen wall, I hear the sounds of Janet singing, reading, chanting rhymes to Gracie. The minute actions of slipping skin from the garlic, washing lettuce, and stirring a roux or risotto steady the mind, release imagination. I jot book notes on the backs of recipe cards—details, plot points, fragments of metaphors, images.

  Gradually, a writing life reassembles itself within the form of this new life. When Janet arrives, I turn on the slow cooker, gather up a book bag, and walk to a café. There are new hours to spend, let loose in the imagination, hunched above a coffee mug, walking home in the late afternoon with new pages. The Miami sun is brassy, a razor burn on the back of the neck. A hundred familiar scents float in the shade, and I’m transported right back: childhood, little hamlet outside of Syracuse, climbing off the school bus into the smell of baking milkweed, pussy willow, Queen Anne’s lace, the house filled with younger sisters and cousins waiting to be entertained.

  Even when I was nine, conjuring up and describing to Aunt Aya my single life in airplanes above the cities and houses and sidewalks, I never pictured doing it alone: Someone in this dream-life always flew with me—a partner or friends. There would be an imaginary backdrop of parties, crowds next door. I wanted children—just beyond arm’s reach—a sociable introvert’s dilemma. Laziest of servants, I had only one entertainment to offer when I was a babysitter. After school and on the weekends, my younger sisters, cousins, and I were regulars at Flamingo Bowl. We wore the rented bowling shoes, creased by generations of children. Sprawled at our lane while Suzy kept score, Monica, Ibtissam, Dalia, and Farhad all rolled two-handed, slow-rolling strikes and spares. I brought composition notebooks along, slouched in the molded seats, drank root beer, dragged fries through lakes of ketchup, and wrote stories about escaping. The crashing waves of balls and pins and spilled sodas and pretzels all hovered at the edges, just beyond thought. I felt them around me, the small faces, the dark slices of their eyes, a nearby humming energy.

  Who is the served and who is the servant? What I learn and relearn is they’re inseparable, and frequently, quietly, they change places. The roles are unfixed, despite class, education, gender, despite anything. The one requires the other.

  Janet takes home plastic containers almost every night, returns them empty. She requests dishes that I don’t know how to make: ropa vieja, empanadas, and roasted pork chunks. I work on vanilla-scented flan, guava pastellitos, tres leches. One night, I hand her a cooling loaf of sweet Cuban bread. The next day, she tells me that they’d eaten it but I hadn’t used the right flour. She gives me a cookbook, Eat Caribbean, saying, “I thought, since you like cooking, you might like to learn more.” The book’s edges are ruffled with Post-it notes: “These here are our favorites.”

  I spend the weekend cooking and paging through the book, trying to figure out the proportions for twelve servings. “Maybe I should just triple everything?”

  “When did we open a restaurant?” Scott responds, peering into a bubbling pot.

  One Monday, an hour after Janet’s usual starting time, she sends a text: “Found new house. Moving to Pensacola. Sorry.” Her cookbook lies on the kitchen counter.

  That cobbled-together work life goes up in a whoosh. Scott is amazed. “How could she leave us? We paid her to nap on the couch and shop.” I compose many different letters to her in my head in varying shades of pleading. Upset as I am about losing writing time, I’m more shaken by the sense of abandonment—it’d felt like Janet had grown into the shape of our lives. I find I miss waiting on her, miss picking up her plates and worrying about her family. We barely knew each other, yet we leaned on each other—weren’t a lot of families like that? After Janet’s departure, I begin to appreciate her labor a little more. Toys and picture books drift unmoored around the house. Scott and I start leaving crumb-filled plates in every room, creating our own fairy-tale path. Eventually, a couple of our worried neighbors send their daughter over, a teenager with a clear, intelligent gaze, a kind voice; she wears T-shirts and running shoes. She brings her own meals and rinses off her plates.

  Writing comes back in the smallest dribs and drabs—sentence, paragraph. I’m careful, afraid these restored working hours will be yanked away like a magician’s tablecloth. One word at a time, I reenter the manuscript. My process is attenuated but still in motion—increasing as Grace begins to sleep better. Scott takes over nights entirely and the work picks up.

  One day, a new novel arrives at the house in big cartons, the cover a woman’s face consumed by shadow. I take one off the top and stare at it, surprised it exists, this confirmation that it’s possible to do more than one thing at a time. I open it and sign one for Janet, Thank you for this.

  Janet got me started. That extra nudge that rolls the wheel.

  Now, I sit outside at the café table with my notebook. I’ll stay here and work until I can’t see the ink. In the distance, bundled dark clouds move continents across the sky; far-off thunder murmurs in the ground, but up close a moth opens black wings, tumbling through the wind, playing, it seems, around the edges of the storm.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Protection

  The look is a flick of light, fingertips of brightness on a crowded street, subtle yet a thing you can feel, the merest feather on the skin, as I walk with Scott and Gracie—a look absorbing the contrast of tan fingers interlaced with pale ones.

  It’s a familiar old sensation. I grew up with the look: It was there whenever I was out with Bud and his brothers, a bony thing carried along in a crowd of Arabic. Outside King David Restaurant, a man with a glittering afro and embroidered dashiki stood on the street with copies of the Nation of Islam newspaper, Muhammad Speaks. I ran to him. “My dad’s Muslim!” I pealed. “Can I get one for him?”

  The young man took me in: plaid sundress, peaked shoulder blades, swamp-green eyes, tumbleweed hair. He looked at the gang of skinny foreigners, arms covered in whorls of black hair, blocking the door of the restaurant, blasting their conversation. Back and forth he looked, then gave me a magnificent scowl. “No, little girl, I don’t know nothing about that,” he said, and huffed off to find a better corner.

  The look is with me again today as we walk through the farmers’ market. Here there are painters and poets, surfers and counterinsurgents, also men in hunting caps and boots, Union Jacks bolted to the backs of their pickups. There is the woman in the next booth at the St. Augustine Diner, complaining about the carved mahogany statue, because, she fretted, “St. Augustine wasn’t brown.”

  If everything must have a color, then I call it lemon yellow. I feel the sour glance here and there, here and there, a tap, touch, game of hopscotch: I’m looking, no I’m not. I’d forgotten the stroller, so my baby is in my arms and I know it is generally a fine thing for people to look at babies. There are murmurs and doting smiles, admiring or sympathizing, from the people who remember what a ten-month-old weighs. We stroll past onions and berries and flowers and hula-hoops and kazoos. At a table covered with seashell night-lights, a woman folds arms across her plump bosom, resting them as if upon a tabletop. Her cheeks are pink and damp. She is watching us in that nakedly hopeful way some vendors have, as though each browser represents the last possibility of survival. Her wares are pretty if a little useless—how many scallop-shell night-lights could one person need? Still, I think Gracie may like to see this whelk lighting up the hallway. Just after the moment of transaction, the woman places our seashell in a bag, bustles over change, and says to me, her voice full of Spanish moss and sweet tea on the porch, “Your baby is so pretty, and such an interesting color—was her daddy very dark
?”

  My own father has been idling at the other end of the table, touching and turning over every single item, bags of cucumbers and radish and pita loaves at his feet. He comes to lift Gracie out of my arms. Bud never said a thing about what any of his children looked like—nothing but beautiful, beautiful, night and day, beautiful. If you hear it enough, eventually it doesn’t matter one damn bit what anyone else wants to say. I feel something inside me rearing on its hind legs and lifting claws—a raw, sudden rush of protection. I’m not usually this way. When curious, well-intentioned people ask, “Oh, where did she come from?” I don’t always want to answer, “From the nation of none-of-your-business.” Often, I will dutifully reply, “A little Puerto-Rican-African-Irish-Native-American-Arab. But basically Floridian.” Just as, when people ask me, “‘Abu-Jaber’? Where’d you get that?” I don’t always say, “Oh, I made it up.” But today I don’t like the way this one asked nor the set of her stubborn trout mouth. The woman watches me, Bud, Gracie, her face sharpened, trying to add up our colors. Perhaps it’s not kind, but I say brightly, “Actually, I’m not sure who the daddy is.”

  On our way out, I hear Bud stop and say to the woman, his voice happy, very light, “You know what, the lemons are on a big sale, two tables down.”

  Once Gracie is walking, she wants to do it outside. Our house has no backyard, just a brick patio and a small pool. Out front there’s a busy street with cars whizzing past. I’m continually aware of the effluvium of cars, their smell, their wretched, useless speed. Safety-hunting has become my hobby. Like a madwoman, I research communes and remote islands, places where cars aren’t allowed. I try to hunt it down—that safe place. Where are the environmental laws stricter, the doctors better, the cars fewer, the stress levels lower? “There’s this little community off the coast of Maine. You have to take a ferry. . . .” I read articles to Scott in the shared porch–office.

  He nods slowly, rubs my shoulders. “Another idea—we could encase our child in a large Plexiglas egg.”

  I carry Gracie into the pool for the first time, an inner voice nagging me about chlorine and amoebas and when to start infant swim class. The water is warm as breath; she’s laughing and agitated. Inside the house, the phone rings. Scott takes Gracie and I run, tracking wet footprints across the wooden floors.

  “Ya Bah, it’s your dad,” he yells, his phone voice. “Well, I have not-bad news. Not so good, but not really bad.”

  My breath gathers in my throat. I’d half-forgotten, maybe on purpose, that we were waiting for the results of a bone-marrow biopsy. He’s always been a champion napper, but lately he collapses into sleep. Black wings enfold and down he slides. I’d been dismissive, certain he was just worn out from moving to a new house—even if that was over a year ago now. Bud is seventy-four and full of heartiness. He has a tall, bullish build, good shoulders, a big round middle, strong bandy legs. Not quite seven months ago, we’d attended my father-in-law’s memorial service.

  “Well, okay, just so you know—I have it.”

  My uncle—Dad’s beloved older brother, Hal—had recently passed away from a rare form of leukemia. When Hal was diagnosed two years earlier, he’d broken the news to us, boasting, “It’s the best cancer to have.” Supposedly slow-moving and treatable. Dad’s oldest surviving brother, my Uncle Fred, was diagnosed with the same kind of leukemia nearly twenty years earlier and was still going strong. He took a marvelous pill that kept his disease in remission. But the great pill didn’t work for Hal. After more tests, it turned out they had closely related, very slightly different forms of leukemia. Hal’s was even rarer, harder to treat. And a third uncle, Jack, had died just a year before Hal, in the same ineluctable way—after an evening of parties and socializing: a hemorrhagic stroke, knocked down as if by a bolt of lightning. I try to take a real breath, but it’s balled up in the center of my chest. I’m listening, but something pulses in my head. The day is spangled with pool water, the baby’s chortling, the talcum-powdery-blue light over Miami.

  “We weren’t going to tell you.” Bud keeps apologizing. He is lousy at keeping secrets—the absolute worst. “I guess I thought you should know. Now forget about it. I’ll be fine. I feel fine—tell your sisters, okay? Or, I’ll tell them.”

  “Dad—what kind is it? What kind of leukemia?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Something-something. Nobody gets this kind. That’s all I know.”

  “Put Mom on, please?”

  “Hon?” Mom says. “It’s called chronic-something-something-leukemia.”

  “Chronic-something-something leukemia?” I try not to sound aggravated or terrified. If I’m not one way, I tip automatically into the other. I rub my eyes and they make dry little squeaks. There are sequins of pool water all over the place. My eyes ache with the brightness. Not now, I think. Not now. Not now.

  “I’ll find out,” Mom is promising me. “I’ll get back to you. It’s long—the name of it. I’ll find out.”

  A long terrible name. “Is it treatable? Is it the kind Hal had or the kind Fred has?”

  “Maybe it is? I guess we don’t know. It was a lot to try to take in—what the doctor was saying. We weren’t really expecting to hear that. I don’t know why.” She pauses. “He hasn’t been himself these days.”

  When I finally walk back outside, the pool has changed. The water and sky seem to have shifted toward a fuller blue. Everything is somehow cooler and more beautiful, a taste on the tongue. Soft as cream and very, very far away. Light stars bounce on the water, bright as pennies, flung from their ridiculous distances. Into the air rises that sound of delighted, musical laughter.

  Aggravation gives way to terror again. I’m no good at handling this level of anxiety. Dreams, clenched jaws in sleep, heart bounding, captured thing. The system floods with the need to run. Sleepless, I think of a morning years ago in Lincoln, Nebraska, when I was awakened by a blaze of noise. I’d stumbled out of bed to the blinds, dragging them open, and realized the bell-shaped objects mounted on the building across the street were some sort of siren. The sky seemed to invert itself, recalling the moment in sci-fi thrillers when the immense mother ship emerges from behind a cloud. The clouds themselves converged and there was a thunderous sound of wind. The top of the sky turned too white, then the white materialized into a loose column, a skyscraper. I watched the whiteness lean this way, then topple the other way, its narrow bottom telescoping toward earth, then, zip! The ground rose into a black veil, as though something had pinched up the earth. It lifted a black V and the whiteness turned black, and only then did I understand what I was looking at—the lazy conical tilt that terrified me as a child, every time I watched the The Wizard of Oz. An honest-to-god tornado.

  My father rolls the fulcrum from terror to aggravation and back. None of us is brave. Unlike Dave, Bud finds nothing fascinating about his illness. His emotions roil the way they did when he was younger. He moons around their house, breathing complaint. Every time he stands, it’s a theatrical event, an unearthly ohhhh from deep in his throat. Leukemia saps his strength, licks the marrow from his bones; his naps increase and intensify. Stirring coffee at the stove, he mutters under his breath. He grouses, unexcited by whatever diminished time is left to him. He and Mom have seen their friends obliterated by medical treatment. At dinner, he announces he wants to go now, go quickly. Done! Finish!

  “I can’t tell what’s real and what’s your father,” Mom confides.

  “End it now!” Bud shouts from the other room.

  I want him to see a specialist, but Dad sticks with their local guy, “The Colonel,” as we call him, a dour oncologist who seems to run the only clinic in town. His office happens to be close to a bakery, so appointments are bookended by cake and almond croissants.

  Is this how it all ends, at a cut-rate body shop next to a Panera? At night I don’t sleep so much as drift a few inches above the bed, caught in nets of fear and grief. In the morning, Gracie is there, sleeping sweat-suctioned to my arm. She’d climbed out
of her crib and tottered to our bed. I try not to move. My breath rides on hers, a new form of calm. The raw early hour gives me a glimpse into normally guarded corners of thought. I risk stirring a few hairs off her forehead and consider how lucky it is that sometimes what you want is bigger than what scares you. Maybe desire is just its own kind of bravery. And you don’t even have to feel brave if you can figure out how to just act like you are.

  Other times, I’m at the computer into the deeps of the night. I hunt around medical websites for articles on Chronic Myelomonocytic Leukemia—it has a name at last. Also known around the house as The Kind That Hal Had. But the resources available to the general public are slim: The only articles with any detailed information are limited to medical staff and other subscribers of stunningly expensive professional journals. Perhaps the AMA fears I might begin brewing home remedies in my kitchen alembic.

  Reading and reading, I see names begin to reappear; over time, they become familiar as celebrities. Authors. Specialists. One name begins to glow—Dr. K, a department head at an august hospital, covered in honors. Just as important, his name is filled with Old Country vowels and syllables, a poem of a Middle Eastern name that Bud will love. I call Dr. K’s office and am routed to some central clearinghouse where a clerk lies in wait, implacable as the Sphinx. There are forms and medical-history questions, a fortress of paperwork. The clerk says that in order to consult with Dr. K, you have to move to Texas, undergo a new battery of tests (including another of the dread marrow biopsies), and become a regular patient.