The Language of Baklava

by Diana Abu-Jaber

  Finally Mrs. Holmes stands in their back door. The light glows through her apron ruffle and makes a halo of her shellacked hair. It’s time for Sally to go in for dinner. “Diana, honey,” Mrs. Holmes says, “your mom just called, she’s looking for you.”

  I wave to Sally, who clomps up the back steps in her skates. I’m about to leave as well, but I stay for just one more turn around the rink. Then I think I will take one more. And then one more and one more. Now that I remember skating, I can’t quite bring myself to stop. I keep gliding through the expanding dark. After a while, I notice to my surprise that my toes have stopped hurting. How can I stop now? A heavy snow starts to fall, and I hear the warm family murmur and the clink of dinner through the wall of Sally’s house, and this gives me a delicious sense of sadness that I press into. I imagine that I am a poor, familyless orphan condemned to skate forever while the rest of the world eats its cozy dinner. For some reason, this makes me think about Jordan, my friends there and the balmy air of the courtyard. I haven’t thought of them in months, and the unexpected memory makes my throat tighten, and then my lashes freeze together and my scarf freezes to the breath on my lips.

  Eventually, I hear footsteps crunching along the side of the house through the glazed snow and my mother’s navy blue sigh through the frozen air. She allows me to walk home in Sally’s ice skates. The streets and houses sparkle with cold, and the night looks mauve in the wells and footprints of earlier pedestrians. We pass two cars freshly stranded in snowdrifts and another spinning its wheels on the ice.

  “People should just skate everywhere,” I remark as I teeter along. “That would solve all kinds of things.” I laugh when Mom inquires about my extremities. My toes feel dumb and blocky as chunks of wood. “But they don’t even hurt, Mom! Not even a little!” I boast.

  “Well, that’s nice, dear,” Mom says, squinting toward our house.

  At home, I sit on the foyer bench, tug off the borrowed skates, and release my toes, which still feel lifeless and blunt. For a moment I flash on Hamouda’s wooden leg and wonder if something about this isn’t quite normal. Mom peels off my socks, and my feet are an astonishing beet red except for my toes, which are grayish green. “Ooh,” says my sister Suzy, touching them. “Lookit.”

  “Wow,” I say, bent over them. “Whooie. They don’t even hurt.”

  Suzy taps one. “It feels like Super Balls.”

  “Hey . . .” I laugh. “I don’t even feel that! Try this one.” We work our way down my toes, plonking each one in turn like plates on a xylophone: nothing, nothing, nothing!

  Eventually I look up and notice that Mom’s eyes are burning. She is staring at my feet and clutching her mouth with her hand. I gulp air as adrenaline charges through me. “Mom, Mom, Mom!” I bleat. Am I dying?

  Bud appears, eyes wide. “What did you do with your feet?” he bellows, as if I’d given them away.

  Mom says, “Should we call a doctor?”

  Then something weirder happens: My mouth falls open and I’m shrieking, “No, no, no, nooooo! I don’t wanna gooooo!” Tears burst from my eyes. My panic shocks even me—I’m vividly reliving my last doctor’s visit, when we were given six inoculations at once for our trip to Jordan and my arm swelled up as if it’d been pounded with a crowbar. I cling to Mom’s leg, fall over my useless feet to my knees. “Please don’t make me, please, I’ll be gooooood!” I howl, my voice husky with terror. Monica starts crying upstairs in her crib. Suzy starts crying, too; she clings to my arm.

  “Okay, okay, okay!” Mom shouts, covering her ears with the flat of her hands.

  Besides, there’s no easy way to take me anywhere. The snow has started up again, shaking and fierce in the windows, and cars are winding sideways through the unplowed neighborhood streets. While Mom rubs my feet, Bud calls his sister in Jordan, the famous Auntie Aya, who can cure anything.

  The sounds of Arabic wash through the room. There is a flash, a soothing memory of my aunt’s stone house. I breathe; I begin to edge back down to earth. After he tells her the problem, the first few minutes of their conversation are about Bud apologizing for being such a fancy idiot and moving us all to this dangerous land. This never would have happened in Jordan: “Yes, yes, of course you’re right, I know, I know. . . .” Then he is getting instructions. He thanks her, hangs up. There is the sound of water bursting into a pot, then the pot banging onto the stove. A scrambling of cabinets opening, jars clinking.

  “Hon?” Mom calls out, her voice taut. “What are you doing in there? What did Aya say?”

  “She said make soup!” he cries.

  I stare at Mom’s face, afraid to look away. “What’s going to happen, Mom?” I ask. “What’s going to happen?” I can’t look at my toes anymore. Now the dead color frightens me. I’m no longer sure they’re attached to me or that the ghoulish whiteness won’t begin to creep up my ankles. I can’t remember exactly how many times I ask what’s going to happen, I only know that she doesn’t answer.

  Finally, Bud brings out his soup, steaming and fragrant in the pot. It smells less like soup than perfume, like oranges and flowers. He gives me a mug of it, and the mist in my face makes me tranquil and drowsy. He’s poured the rest into a big pan, added some tapwater to cool it to a middling warmth, put it on the floor, and told me to place my feet in it. “In the soup?” I look at Mom and she looks at Bud, who doesn’t look entirely certain. But five-year-old Suzy claps and says, “Feet in the soup!” So I plunk them in.

  For a while not much happens. We all stare at the mysterious soup. Now my feet seem even more alien, like some kind of pink fish asleep in a puddle. I sip at my mug of soup, the bits of herbs bright and appealing, mingled with chewy morsels of orange peel. It is too dark and earthy, to my child’s palate, to taste delicious, but something inside of me is called away by it. I start to forget about my sleeping fish feet. Suzy gets bored and goes to bed. Then, as I am starting to nod off, something does happen. I feel it starting like a sliver, deep inside the bones of my toes. A warmth and then a heat that grows and grows and then flashes like a struck match. I shriek and yank my feet out, crying, “The soup is burning me!” And Mom and Bud both grab me as if I might fly away. Mom holds me tightly, and Bud says, “Don’t be afraid.” And Mom says, “It’s not the soup burning, honey, it’s your toes.”

  They hold my feet down in the soup while I shake and my skin turns to silver and my toes bloom red as roses in snow.

  Our sprawling neighborhood is filled, in its family rooms and rec rooms and extra bedrooms, with a nation of children. There’s Karen, Carl, Lilah, Raymond, Lisa, Donna, Sally, Jamie, the Malcolm twins, and many more all within the first three blocks of the school bus route. Jamie Faraday used to be best friends with Sally Holmes until I appeared in the lunchroom with my bags full of cold roasted chicken kabobs slathered in hummus and wrapped in pita bread. Sally dragged back the seat beside me, plumped her chin onto the heel of her palm, and said, “What you eating?” Down the length of the long linoleum table, I see Jamie abandoned. She lifts her head and I see myself come into focus; her forehead rises with a look almost like recognition. Now Jamie eyes me warily every time she gets on the bus, takes note of Sally seated beside me, and waves with an enraged little flip of the hand. Then she clatters down the aisle far from our seat into exile.

  I notice all this but don’t completely take it in: I’m trying to get my bearings. Throughout our first year back in the States, I seem to see everything through a glittering mist. I hear the expression American dream and I think that, somehow, this quality of mistiness must be what it refers to. The children in the neighborhood are so soft and babyish that they barely seem to have outlines. In other ways they are deliberate, remorseless, and exacting. The politics of the school bus and the rumor mill of the classroom are fierce, filled with intrigue and menace. It all feels so different from the good-times kids I knew in Jordan, with their shared gum, their sharp, brown shins and broken-toothed grins. In America, I learn there is a certain way to dress
(hip-huggers, flared jeans), a certain way to wear your hair (gleaming, Prince Valiant bobs), a certain lunchbox to carry (Barbie for girls, G.I. Joe for boys—I am nearly cast out of fourth grade when I show up with a Flintstones box). And there are, it turns out, many things that—under any circumstances—you do not do.

  For example, the neighbors don’t barbecue in their front yards. That is apparently what the backyard is for. The backyards here are fenced off and guarded—spaces as private as other people’s dreams. But our front yard has the better view and has easier access to the front door, which is closer to the kitchen and hence a very practical place for grilling. Also, the front yard will allow us to share food, cross our legs on the plastic lawn chairs, and gossip with the neighbors, as we did in Jordan. We have survived a long, howling, isolated Syracuse winter that hardened into filthy icebergs of decaying snow. By April, Bud is ready to pronounce it spring and set up his hibachi. On the first warmish sunny day, we drag out the picnic table, digging mud furrows through the half-frozen yard. Bud has chicken marinated in olive oil, vinegar, rosemary, and a whole head of garlic. Its butter yellow skin hisses and crackles over the coals, and the aroma fills my head. The beautiful charred smell of the grill circulates through the spring air and bare tree branches, still shocked with cold.

  “DISTRACT THE NEIGHBORS” GRILLED CHICKEN

  This is a delightful, simple dish that will

  fill the neighborhood with a gorgeous scent.

  In a large bowl, mix the oil, garlic, lemon juice, brown sugar and spices. Add the chicken pieces (you may cut the chicken into cubes, if you prefer), stirring to coat the chicken with the marinade. Cover and refrigerate for 3 hours or longer, turning occasionally.

  Place the chicken parts on the grill (if cut in cubes, the chicken can be threaded onto skewers). Grill over hot charcoal for 10 to 15 minutes, turning frequently and basting with the marinade. This is very nice with bread and salad.

  SERVES 4.

  We set the table, bring out bowls of elegant baba ghanouj and sprightly tabbouleh salad full of bulgur and fresh parsley, a basket of hot bread, and skewers heavy with onion and tomato wedges to be roasted. We sit, marveling over our good fortune—to live in these rolling green lawns, these creamy houses, and the bold vaulted sky of our new neighborhood. The chicken is crusty and redolent with garlic and rosemary. We eat well, shivering just a bit in our jackets. I have a sense—as I often do when I contemplate this blue moon-stone sky—of the future. It is a broad, euphoric feeling. Does the rest of the family feel this way? I don’t know for sure, though I imagine they do. Whenever we all drive home together, Mom asks as we pull in the driveway, “Who do you suppose lives in this little house?”

  We are lost in the food, in the smell of grilling, and in the spring when there is a powdery sort of sensation sprinkling down the back of my neck and suddenly I realize a man and a woman are standing at the edge of the street, just a few feet away, staring at us.

  I put down my chicken leg, which has rolled juices and smoke between my fingers. “Hi!” I call brightly. New neighbors! They look hungry. The woman starts and blushes, as if she didn’t imagine that we could see them. Her eyes are a pale linen blue, of such crisp clarity that she looks as if she could X-ray with them.

  Bud stands, maître d’ of the front lawn. “Welcome. I’m Gus, this is my wife, Pat—”

  The two strangers pull back and lightly bump into each other. I dimly register the sense that they didn’t think Bud could talk.

  “We just moved here in November.” Bud gestures at the house as if they might assume we were picnicking on someone else’s lawn. “I hope you’re hungry! We’ve got all this crazy food—shish kabob, baba gha—”

  The woman’s kerchief white hand flutters up to her throat. There’s a pause, and Bud bends back a little and asks me quietly, “Haddol nawal?” (“Are they Gypsies?”) They look marooned and stateless, standing there mute in the street. But I remember seeing a family of Gypsies once in the old market in Jordan, with their fringed scarves and spangled earrings and high-voltage expressions. These mild, normal people don’t look anything like that—the man in belted beige slacks and tasseled loafers and the woman in a milky, synthetic blouse and culottes. Finally the man clears his throat and says, “Oh no, no, thank you—we . . . we just, um, ate. Um.” He blinks. “We, uh . . . we uh . . . we live over there, on Cumberland Drive? We uh . . . well, our neighbors—you know the Tinerkes on Roanoke Circle?”

  Bud frowns, trying to process the name. I picture rabbity little Timmy and chinless Bitsy Tinerke sitting in the third seat from the front of the school bus.

  “Anyway. Well, see, they live really close by here, too.” The man and the woman glance at each other. He puts his hands on his slender snaky hips. “Well, they saw you-all out here eating or burning things or something and then called us to say there might be some kind of— I don’t know, exactly—maybe some kind of trouble going on out here? And so we just came on over to check into it—you know, we all like to keep an eye on things—this is a nice neighborhood— and so . . .” His voice trails off; his face is slowly turning an alarming, bruised color.

  Bud is still standing there, still frowning, as if this man is speaking in tongues. Then my mother stands and the couple look startled once again. She is nearly six feet tall, with good level shoulders and a long neck and unwavering Cassandra eyes. She also puts her hands on her hips, almost casual. “There’s no trouble here,” she says in her smooth, leaf-blown voice.

  They put up their hands and back away as if she is waving a pistol at them. “No, no, no trouble at all—sorry for the—the—misunderstanding. . . . Welcome to the neighborhood!” Then they are gone.

  And that’s about when I get the feeling that starts somewhere at the center of my chest, as heavy as an iron ingot, a bit like fear or sadness or anger, but none of these exactly; it is simply there, suspended between my ribs. I look up at the neighborhood and the mist has cleared. All the mean, cheaply framed windows are gaping at us, the sky empty as a gasp.

  The next day on the school bus, Jamie climbs on, gives me her hard smile, hesitates, then flounces down on the seat next to me. She tilts her head and parts her lips. I look up in alarm. “Just to let you know,” she says in a sweet, burning way.

  “Let me know what?”

  She crosses one bare leg over the other, and her brilliant white socks bounce with the rocking of the bus. “Well, you know, of course. My parents saw you out there the other night. I heard them talking with the neighbors. They said it was an ‘unholy disgrace.’ See, okay, the thing is, you better know that in this country nobody eats in the front yard. Really. Nobody.” She looks at me solemnly and sadly, her bangs a perfect cylinder above her brows. “If your family doesn’t know how to behave, my parents will have to find out about getting you out of this neighborhood.”

  She squints, pinches her lips together in a narrow, bitten-down way. I can see every pointed pale lash, the pink ridges above her lower lids.

  I feel the iron inside of me. It drives through every bit of my body. It vibrates like a bell clapper. I turn away from her and tip my forehead against the frigid pane of glass. There’s an echo in my head saying: She’s right. Shame fills me: I see it in the rain stroking the windows, so bright that it burns holes in the backs of my eyes. When Jamie finally slides out of the seat, I don’t even hear her go.

  I mope, barely speaking, for a solid week, appetiteless, rejecting Bud’s lunches of stuffed squash, shawerma, kibbeh. Even Mom’s peanut butter and Fluff on white bread brings tears to my eyes, and I stuff it in the garbage barrel at the cafeteria.

  Mrs. Manarelli asks me what’s wrong.

  But I have no way of explaining to her that I have awakened from the mist and now our neighborhood looks hard and squat and drudgy. I have no way to explain Jamie Faraday’s pink-rimmed eyes and long bulb of a nose. Instead I just mope and shrug and sigh wordless blue shadows. So she slants her head to one side, then swats at my behind and tells
me I don’t have no sign of a butt at all. And I get indignant and say I do so have signs of a butt. And she says fine, well, okay then, come on inside, I need your help in the kitchen.

  The entrance to Mrs. Manarelli’s house smells like roasting tomatoes and garlic. She doesn’t go in much for opening the window curtains, which she says fades everything, so the whole downstairs is doused in shadow and all the furniture crackles under clear plastic covers. Directly over the couch in the living room is a spotlit, gilt-framed painting of the Last Supper, and here the notes of tomato sauce are so pronounced that you could imagine this is what the apostles are eating. Her husband, Johnny, sits on the couch, ankles crossed on the coffee table, always glaring at what seems to be the same word in the newspaper. The family room smells of red wine, fruit, and chocolate, and I know the bedrooms upstairs smell either of bread when she’s baking or of the fresh cedar, lavender, and pine hillsides of another country. Once, in the upstairs bathroom, I was so transported by the scent of rosewater that Mrs. Manarelli found me there a half hour later sitting on the edge of the tub, combing my hair and singing.

  We go into the kitchen and there is something shimmering in a gelatin mold on the counter. She instructs me to soak a kitchen towel under the warm-water tap and wipe this along the mold. Then she turns it out onto a pastry board dusted with confectioner’s sugar; a puff of sugar blooms in the air. It is so brilliantly white that it reminds me of the nuns speaking of food that removes all sin. Mrs. Manarelli wipes a knife with the hot towel, cuts into the whiteness, and brings me a slice of panna cotta gleaming and dewy on a Melmac plate.