“So,” Mom says, breaking into Sister John’s reverie, “Diana tells us you’re interested in Jordan.”
Sister John’s face pinches into a smile as she chews. She bats her eyes and cranes her pleated neck at my father. “Well, my goodness, who wouldn’t be?” she asks in a new voice, as if this were a private joke between her and Bud.
“Oh ho ho,” Bud says, scooping up more rice for Sister John. “That’s a good point!”
Sister John ducks her head and titters. Mom gazes off in the distance, her face drawn up as if she were pleading with invisible entities.
“It’s where anyone who’s holy goes,” Bud expounds. “It’s true— Jesus, Moses, Muhammad. All of them guys, they’re somewhere around. They’re hanging all over the place.”
“Oh, you,” Sister John says, as if they’ve been best friends for just ages. She spoons up great mounds of Bud’s special rice for company—steamed, then drizzled with cinnamon and pepper and pine nuts toasted in butter.
Bud and Sister John linger at the table forever, Sister John eating and asking my father question after question about the Holy Land, my father in turn making up answers, waving his spoon, and weaving his theories-in-progress about “the beginning of the world” and “what it all means” and “the difference between men and women” and so forth.
Eventually my mother gets up, clears the table, and does the dishes—muttering darkly under her breath the whole time. She puts a half-thawed pound cake and some forks on the table and goes upstairs to bed. Suzy and I hang over the back of the couch, watching everything we can on TV while Monica chugs and fusses in her crib in the nursery. When Sister John finally stands, after what seems like the end of time, her whiskery, paper-bag face is lit up. She totes a sack full of leftovers. She wrings Bud’s hand and says, “Oh, how can I thank you? Tonight has meant everything—everything—to me!”
Bud laughs and shakes his head and says, “Well then come back here for dinner again tomorrow!”
And her face flashes as if this is the most brilliant idea. “Oh, Gus,” she croons, curling one veiny hand against her chest. “I’d be honored!”
The next day, Mom stands at the kitchen counter and writes a long note for me to give to the Mother Superior. She comments—not exactly to me—as she seals the note, “Once again, someone will have to draw the line somewhere.”
Later at school, I stand fidgeting before her desk while the elderly, lipless woman reads it, whispering faintly, then turns it over and back, then reads it again. She closes her eyes. She says something to her secretary, then asks me to go to the outer office. I sit there, swinging my legs and sucking on a lock of hair. After a few silent, solitary minutes, I hear the too-quick footsteps in the hall. Sister John enters. She walks past me with her hot eyes burning through the floor, and I know not to say anything. Mother Superior closes the door to her office, and for a while all I hear are the dreamy, pillowy sounds of voices through the glass. Then Sister John comes out, her eyes burning another trail up the floor as she goes. Mother Superior comes out and looks at me. “Miss Abu-Jaber,” she says, “why are you crying?”
I snuffle, I rub the back of my hand against my nose. Tears! My head is an absolute blank. “I don’t know,” I say.
That morning, I am back at my old scarred wooden desk, back in Sister Paul’s room. Someone named Dolly carved her name into this desk with a black ballpoint pen. There are no more three-legged races at recess for me and no more lunchtime rendezvous. I realize that I am relieved. I start avoiding the rooms that I think Sister John may be in: I imagine her hiding, waiting for me behind doorways like a ghost. Whenever I play Mom’s Home! with Francis, I imagine her watching me, observing the way I pretend to be Mom.
Only on rare occasions do I glance up and catch her looking at me from across the cafeteria, silent among the group of other nuns, her tray of food untouched, her eyes burning as if with some sweet but dimly recalled memory.
BUD’S SPECIAL RICE FOR SPECIAL COMPANY
In a medium saucepan, bring the water and salt to a boil, add the rice, and boil for 2 minutes. Turn down the flame, cover the saucepan, and simmer for 20 minutes; the water will be absorbed. Turn off the heat and let stand for 10 minutes.
Melt the butter in a frying pan. Sauté the pine nuts until they are golden.
Place the rice in a serving dish, sprinkle with the toasted pine nuts and butter, and dust with the cinnamon and pepper to taste.
SERVES 4 TO 6.
THREE
Native Foods
Mom and I float alone in the darkened living room, watching TV. The dangerous jagged music of the nightly news with Huntley and Brinkley and the mournful, escalating music of Perry Mason both fill me with anxiety and a lonely ache. There are serious things on TV, reporters running through jungles and children starving and American Indians weeping. Mom leans forward, brushes aside the hair that is always in my eyes, and tells me that Bud has gone to Jordan looking for a job and a place for us to live. “Don’t we live in America?” I ask. I try to read her expression, but Mom’s soft, pretty face is calm as pond water. Her eyes are tinged with the faintest anxiety—possibly caused by her marriage to Bud—an eternal sort of anticipation that gives her an air of tragic beauty. In photographs, Bud makes monkey faces, flexes his biceps, makes horns with his fingers behind someone’s head. Mom holds one of his arms and looks at the camera as if to say I’m sorry.
My mother’s quiet presence is subtle yet familiar to me as a texture of air, like the fullness that lifts a room when the windows open after a long winter. Her eyes are like mine in the way we both have the dark rings around the irises and the lighter insides, and it is hard to truly see what color our eyes are because they are so flecked with other colors and odd bits of dimensions. But her eyes are blue, and mine are a murkier green: A person would either have to be very rude or somewhat in love in order to study them long and closely enough.
Where Bud is hot and worked up, she is clear and cool and waiting. Where Bud is talking all the time, she listens. Where Bud knows exactly where he is from, starting a thousand thousand years ago in the same place, Mom shrugs and says, Irish, German, maybe Swiss? Or Dutch? And she is taller than everyone in the room, with high, level shoulders. Her hair is short and quick and sleek as a bird’s wing. She grew up in a shared bedroom with her own mother in an old New Jersey house full of extended Irish-German-Catholic family, so there is a deep, private center to her. She didn’t expect to marry this antic, atomic character, and I think she has vowed never to let anything else surprise her again—only she is married to Bud, once and for all, so it’s difficult.
But she is not serious or gloomy or hard—her voice is young, her face will remain smooth and unlined. She can enter a room without anyone seeing, entering consciousness pale and quiet as sea foam, the lacy edge of a dream. She does not struggle and grapple with the world; unlike Bud, she is at ease.
She brings me books from her school all the time, and I will proudly tell anyone, whether they ask me or not, “My mother is a reading teacher!”
During the time that Bud is away, Mom cooks: grilled Velveeta sandwiches on Wonder bread; triangles of date-nut bread and cream cheese; meatball sandwiches. Gram, Mom’s mother, considered cooking a form of specialized imprisonment—like ironing—and encouraged Mom to rely on instant, just-add-water ingredients. Without Bud, we are living according to Mom’s rules. In the evenings, I get to stay up late, and we watch more somber, sepia-toned television shows together on my parents’ big bed. Monica and Suzy are unusually cooperative and go to bed peaceably. Bud is somewhere, I don’t know where. Everything is suffused with an air of uncertainty.
COMFORTING GRILLED VELVEETA SANDWICHES
Melt the butter in frying pan. Place the cheese sandwiches in the hot butter. Cover and fry until golden on one side, then turn and fry on the other side. The cheese should be oozing and hot. Cut the sandwiches on the diagonal.
SERVES 2.
After several weeks or mor
e of this suspended animation, Mom says it’s time. Then there are huge smelly suitcases, and hold-your-sisters’hands, and some important and constantly missing items called pats-sports. There’s an airplane ride full of milky, walkable, stirrable clouds, a ride that takes all day and all night. I am incapable of sitting still for much longer than five minutes. I stand in the aisle and push up from the backs of the airplane seats and swing my legs until everyone in a four-aisle radius is openly glaring and clenching their jaws.
We emerge from the plane onto a steaming hot tarmac, wave at all kinds of soldiers holding big guns, pass through long, echoing glassy corridors, and there is Bud—who’s grown a mustache! Then we climb into a funny, old-fashioned car shaped like a cracker box and discover that the streets and buildings here have all turned to white stone and dust. The sidewalks are not like the orderly, straight-line sidewalks of our old neighborhood. Here, they wind around and roam this way and that, as if they’ve decided to go where they pleased.
Our new house is actually a ground-floor flat inside a larger building. There are veined marble floors, cool underfoot in the summer heat, and a deep, moody living room crisscrossed with shadows and draped with silk curtains as long as bridal trains. All the rooms are low ceilinged and rectangular, and it seems to take a long time to get from one end of the room to the other. My sisters and I share one big, echoey room across the hallway from my parents. Directly above us are four more identical flats, stacked up like layers on a cake. Across a little walkway is a matching building; the twin buildings are encircled by a courtyard, and running along the inner courtyard is a garden thick with big, nodding sunflowers, and marigolds, and mint plants, and now it’s my duty to go pick the leaves to steep in the teapot. I’m practically eight, and I know how to do this; my sisters, on the other hand, are two and four and utterly hopeless. There are also furious-looking cats that moan and skulk all over the garden. The night comes at a new time, and the moon looks sideways like a silver cup. There’s so much to look at that for a while I feel that all I can do is stand in one place and stare. One morning, after we’ve been there a few days or weeks, a gang of grinning, dirty-kneed kids pounds on our front door. They cheer when they see me, as if they’ve been searching for me for a long time, and they pull me outside. The gang expands and diminishes like a flock of starlings. We run everywhere and into everything, up stairs and down alleys. I don’t understand anything that they’re saying, but this doesn’t matter because I know how to run.
In a matter of days, I am familiar with the labyrinthine windings of our ancient neighborhood. There are buildings so rickety and narrow that they look as if they’re built on stilts; there are staircases leading into murky darkness that I gape at but refuse to ascend; there are apartments—many apartments—that smell powerfully of babies and dinner all the time. One day my gang of friends takes me to the roof of our building and I discover yet another world of children running around, women gossiping, clotheslines brightly draped and flapping gaily as sails. I lean over the precariously low railing, five stories from the ground, and someone gives me a play shove from behind that swipes the breath from my lungs and makes stars pop in my head. I swing around and lay eyes on Hisham for the very first time. I can tell right away that he is the one I like best of all: He is about my age, small and thin and dark with close-cropped hair, soft, myopic eyes, and full, round, almost feminine lips. Of all the children, his sweet, soft face is the most appealing to me.
My new best friend, Hisham, Hisham’s seven or so younger brothers and sisters, and a varying number of neighborhood children play in the courtyard of my building. No matter what time of day or night I step into the street, one or, more likely, all of them will be out there singing, skipping, throwing things, running. Hisham and I hang on the balustrades of the swinging iron gate of the courtyard railing and ride it shut, the rusted hinges shrieking as it goes. Then we get off, open it, and ride it shut again. Then we play our talking game. Sometimes I go first, sometimes he does, but frequently we go at the same time.
I say, “Idon’tknowwhatyou’resayingbutIwishIknewwhatyouwere sayingIwishsomuchthatyouknewwhatIwassayingreallytrulyIreallydo becauseit’ssoweirdit’sreallycrazybutyoudon’t . . .”
And he is saying, “Yabaainteesadeekatibessintimajnoonashway moomkinbazunbessanamishakeedleeanoabensamabafimtwaintee matfimtkamaamoolaishhathamabafimtculshi . . .”
It seems we spend whole afternoons in this way, talking and swimming through our private thoughts. In the distance, the calls to prayers from the eight neighboring mosques rise and overlap, quavering through the streets and alleyways. We silently spy on Hamouda the gardener as he washes his hands, face, feet, and neck with the garden hose behind the house. He lays out a few sheets of newspaper and uses that as his rug to pray upon, bowing solemnly in the direction of holy Mecca.
Eventually our talking game starts to change, slowly at first, with meaning creeping in around the edges of what Hisham is saying to me, like a slow burn eating at the edges of a page. And one day, after weeks of running around in the streets, I am speaking Bud’s language. It’s the language we spoke in tiny specks and pieces back home, a confetti language that Bud saved for his brothers or for getting angry or for driving in traffic. Suddenly, all of it is there in my head. (The first complete sentence I learn in Arabic is Atini nosher beyda, “Gimme a dozen eggs,” which the shopkeeper puts loose into a brown paper bag. Then I dutifully run home and deliver up a bag of squashed egg mess.) My mother is the first to notice—she interrupts as I’m chattering with the Bedouin woman who works for us. “Since when do you speak Arabic?” she says to me.
I look at her and I see there is something in her eyes when she says this that I feel in the center of my chest, just under the bone. Instantly, I don’t want those words in my mouth anymore.
The neighbors are more than neighbors. Their apartments spill onto the same central courtyard, and their meals spill into ours. They sit together on low cushions in the courtyard and tease me about my pale skin, kiss my head and cheeks, and read my coffee grounds. They give me bread and baba ghanouj and jameed, balls of yogurt that have been cooked, dried, and hardened in the desert sun. Usually, people eat jameed only after it has been softened by weeks or months of marinating in olive oil and then smeared on bread. But I discover that it’s challenging and absorbing to gnaw on the hard little unmarinated yogurt rocks. It will keep forever in this form, which is lucky because no one on our street, or anywhere in the neighborhood, seems to have a refrigerator.
But two weeks after we arrive, my mother acquires a refrigerator. It’s a wonder. This was apparently one of her conditions for moving the family from New York. I don’t know where they found it. It takes ten men to drag it from the truck into the kitchen. It is a refrigerator unlike any I’ve ever seen before—big, enameled, sometimes roaring like a jet engine, sometimes moaning like an elderly man. I have to hook both hands around its chrome handle and lean back with my full body weight to get it to open. In Jordan, even I start to marvel at the fact of a refrigerator—I, who used to hang on the fridge door back in New York, just browsing. Now I see it in all its glory.
The refrigerator is roaring. Munira the Bedouin stands beside it at the ironing board, moving her black anvil of an iron over the clean shirts. Every pass takes her whole back. I can see the muscles in her shoulders flexing through her thin white blouse as if she is swimming. Mom sits at the kitchen table, frowning at her needlepoint. I stand at the end of the ironing board, staring at Munira’s intriguing face, bisected by more wrinkles than I could imagine in one place; her too-black eyes glisten as if she is permanently weeping. She talks and talks and talks. I lounge at the ironing board, my arm slung over an unused end, translating whatever she is saying: “Munira says that the food in Jordan is much, much better for us because it’s real food. It sticks with you and doesn’t just evaporate. She says eating American food is like eating dust! She says it’s full of jinns and bad omens—she can tell just by looking at us. She says w
e’ve been eating nothing but air and bones and flying insects. She says we got here just in time! She says it’s going to take a little while longer for us to recover from being Americans. . . .”
Abruptly Mom puts down her needlepoint, stretches her long arms and legs, and says, “I think I feel like pancakes today.”
My mouth falls open; I’d forgotten about pancakes. In that instant I miss them unbearably and completely. It washes over me, all the foods I forgot I loved: pancakes, ice cream, hamburgers. (Bud takes us out for falafel and says these are Jordanian hamburgers. And even though I’ve eaten falafels back in the States and I know their smoky taste of cumin and sesame, I’m so hungry for the tastes of home that I’m willing to imagine that in Jordan they are transformed. But what a disappointment—they don’t taste like hamburgers at all.) Our breakfasts here are much the same as our breakfasts in America— cheese, bread, hard-boiled eggs, olives, tea. But at the moment there is nothing better than pancakes.
Mom, my sisters, and I all go to the Big Market by ourselves. When we first arrived, Bud always went to the market with us. But lately he is busy, he says, with not finding work in this ridiculous excuse of a country. He drives off in the morning in a suit and tie, to see about another job that he predicts will be an “impossible aggravation.” So it’s just us today, which makes it more exciting than usual. And it is always exciting at the Big Market, much more invigorating than at the P&C back in Syracuse. Here, people are shouting and walking around and gossiping and haggling fiercely. Food and things are stacked in great towers; there is straw and dust all over the floor, canvas walls, empty boxes, burlap sacks, chicks scratching at the floor. You might find anything in the world here—big, swampy barrels of olives, roasted chickpeas that taste dark and musty in your mouth, bread so fresh that it has wilted its paper wrapper, crates full of candied almonds and midnight-rich foil-wrapped chocolates from Syria, hand-cut blocks of olive oil soap, big square sheets of pressed apricot leather wrapped in orange cellophane. The original scent of Jordan is here: sesame, olive, incense, rosewater, orange blossom water, dust, jasmine, thyme.
The Language of Baklava Page 4