The Language of Baklava

by Diana Abu-Jaber

  She sits beside me at the speckled linoleum table just like our own and says speculatively, “Only men in my life—husband, son . . . why do you suppose that is?”

  I blink. I want to dwell on my own problems, but this is a novel idea to me, in our house of mostly girls. I reach for my grandmother’s favorite explanation: “Maybe it’s because Jesus says so.”

  “Jesus!” she snorts. Then she sighs and fans herself and looks off at the place where the ceiling meets the wall. “Eat your dessert,” she says. “Jesus.”

  The first spoonful of panna cotta is so startling, I want to laugh or sing or confess my sins. It tastes of sweetness and cream and even of the tiny early flowers the cows have eaten to make the cream.

  I take another bite of panna cotta and another. Before long, without even realizing it, I’m talking, telling all, secrets dissolving like panna cotta in the mouth. Mrs. Manarelli scrapes her chair in closer, puts her chin on her hand, and watches me talk about grilled chicken and the Gypsy people in loafers and the school bus and how Sally now likes me better than Jamie and how that is my fault and Jamie’s cinched smile and how I don’t have the right lunchbox or the right pants or shoes or socks and how things are different from Jordan and how I can never remember my sins in confession so I make up new ones and isn’t that a sin of a sin and does that mean I am going right to hell, are they going to kick us out of the neighborhood, and can we move back to our apartment in the courtyard with my boyfriend Hisham?

  When I have exhausted myself and have scraped up every bit of panna cotta on my plate, Mrs. Manarelli goes and stands at the stove as if she is cooking something, but the little red light on her stove isn’t on. She is muttering things in different languages, and her voice sounds serrated: I hear angry odds and ends of words. Finally she turns around and says, “There’s nobody going to hell around here except for the ones think they aren’t gonna go. That’s if you ask me. And they damn better not ask or they’ll find out a thing or five they don’t want to know!”

  This comment raises more questions for me than it answers. While I’m mulling this over, she grabs the phone receiver and shakes it like a mace. “What’re their names?” she demands. “I got a few choice words for them.”

  “Who?”

  “The Gypsies! The Gypsies and their loafers!”

  “Maria Elena Theresa, do not call the neighbors.” Her grouchy husband’s voice erupts from the living room where he is rattling the newspaper. “We are no longer in Brooklyn, we are in civilization up here now. People don’t do that kind of stuff up here.”

  “Don’t tell me what people do!” she shouts back. “The Italians invented civilization!”

  “I was Italian five years before you was born,” he retorts. “I got a PhD in civilization.”

  She shakes the receiver a few more times at the wall behind Johnny’s head, jaw set at an indignant angle, as if she is still arguing with him. But she seems to concede the argument because she slams the phone back down and turns to the counter. Now Mrs. Manarelli is busying herself with a new plan of attack. She wraps up the panna cotta in waxed paper, then cloth napkins, like swaddling a big baby. She puts it in a basket with some cold sliced roast beef, some soft white cheese in a jar, some tender roasted red peppers in oil, tiny black olives, and a crusty round loaf of bread. “We’re going out!” she shouts at her husband. Then she says to me, “C’mon, kid.”

  We walk next door to my house and Mrs. Manarelli knocks loudly, then comes halfway in, yelling up the stairs to my mother. Mom comes down the stairs, patting at her new bouffant hairdo, tall and firm and shiny. Mrs. Manarelli holds up her basket, tells her that she’s brought a picnic and doesn’t want to eat it at the round, speckled table in the kitchen, she wants to eat it outside. Mom starts laughing. “But it’s fifty degrees out—and I just got my hair done!” I admire her long neck and towering hair, all of her descending the foyer stairs like a goddess on a trophy.

  “Hoity-toity, Pat,” Mrs. Manarelli says, and nudges me. “Now, there’s a woman.”

  Mom stares at us a moment as we stand grinning and wind whipped in the doorway, gives a last, regretful pat to her hairdo, and goes in to put on her parka and collect my sisters. Mrs. Manarelli also looks magnificent. Usually she’s plump and hunched up, her hair trapped in a net like a dark fish. But once we go back outdoors, she comes unfurled: Her short brown hair bobs in the wind, her lips are round and scarlet against the whiteness of her skin. She stands straighter, and under her wool church coat the hem of her cotton print dress flails around her knees. It’s the end of April and we had the last snowfall four weeks ago, our ill-fated barbecue three weeks ago. The neighborhood windows and doorknobs still stay rimmed with frost an hour after the sun comes out.

  The hibachi is stowed away in the garage, but the picnic table floats abandoned on the thawing grass out front, and this, of course, is where Mrs. Manarelli wants to eat. She spreads out a checkered tablecloth, and when we can’t get the cloth to stop blowing off the table, we sit on top of it. Mom brings out plates and wineglasses and Kool-Aid for me and my sisters, and there is a look on her face as though we’ve just told one another a good joke. Her cheeks gleam with the cold, and her high hair unravels in the wind like a ball of yarn. It’s so cold that I’m having trouble tasting anything, and Monica says she wants to go back inside and see the rest of her soap opera. (She’s only four, but she’s already addicted to the high drama of General Hospital.) But then Mrs. Manarelli unveils the baby panna cotta: It shivers and gleams white as a star. We eat it directly from the waxed paper with plastic spoons.

  The neighborhood cars pass, some quickly, some slowly, and we wave at them all with the wave we’ve seen at Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade, a feathery tilt at the wrist, forearm upright. No one can tell us anything. We are five queens drifting over the suburbs on our own private float.

  MRS. MANARELLI’S CIVILIZED PANNA COTTA

  Heat 2 cups of the cream with the sugar in a heavy saucepan and simmer for 15 minutes. In a small bowl, sprinkle the gelatin over the remaining 2 tablespoons of cream. Remove the simmered cream from heat and add the gelatin mixture, stirring to dissolve. Pour 1⁄2 cup of this new mixture into 4 lightly oiled metal molds and refrigerate for 4 to 6 hours. Dip the mold in hot water and run a knife around the edge; unmold the panna cotta onto individual serving dishes. Serve each with 1 to 2 tablespoons sauce, either fruit purée, sweetened fruit, or chocolate sauce.

  SERVES 4.

  FIVE

  Madama Butterfly

  For as long as I’ve known her, Gram has wanted revenge. There are many things she wants it for:

  A bossy, domineering German father.

  A wavy-haired husband who emptied their bank account, ran off with one of her students’ mothers, and abandoned her with a young child.

  The Great Depression (brought about by men).

  A soft-eyed, wavy-haired foreigner who married, and thus stole, her only child.

  So, in other words: Men.

  Gram has had it with men; she’s had it up to here with them. The topic makes her eyes steely and her lips tighten. “Don’t get me started,” she says.

  Luckily, she has some granddaughters to work with.

  Gram and I open her big, flour-breathing Betty Crocker cookbook, and Gram leans forward on the counter. I’m staying with her for the weekend, on a vacation from my family. Gram lives in New Jersey, and sometimes, when I feel inspired, I take a five-hour bus ride down, present myself at her door, and say, “Here I am!” We’re pals. When I was a baby, I’m told, I loved to hold her tissue-soft face between my palms and meditate on her bluebonnet eyes. It looks as if everything about her is soft, from her permed blond hair to the cute short pants she calls pedal pushers, but her white forearms on the counter are like crossed swords. “Men are trouble,” she says intensely. “Listen to me—I know.”

  I roll my eyes: I’m ten, and believe me, I’ve heard it all before. She tells me every chance she gets: shopping for shoes—
men have nasty feet; watering a garden—men trample everything; watching a game show—men are all cheaters.

  Gram likes life to be orderly and refined, clear and comprehensible. Each and every Sunday, Gram and her old-lady friends in their woolen coats and stiff, tail-biting mink stoles all ride to church together in Mrs. Harvey’s son’s big, big car. Mrs. Harvey lives one floor below Gram—she is the reason my sisters and I are not to run like “a herd of wild buffalo” through Gram’s apartment.

  But Gram also has a powerful, undeniable inner nature. Storms of emotion roll through her, spreading a deep red geranium bloom from her chest up. She indulges her grandchildren like a maniac, takes us to the supermarket and allows us to fill the shopping cart with every candy that catches our eye, from the classics to the esoteric—malted milk balls, Good & Plenty, red licorice whips, saltwater taffy, Red Hot Dollars, jawbreakers, chocolate papooses. Two years earlier, I slept over at her apartment on the night before our first trip to Jordan. She shared the bed with me, smearing away tears and holding me tightly, making me swear not to tell my parents about her crying. And on the day we returned to America, she squeezed the air out of my lungs and whispered into my hair that she’d never let us move away again, never.

  Now we pore over Betty Crocker, the reasonable, neutral recipes for pot roast and macaroni and cheese. Gram prefers the ordered cosmos of the cookbook world; she loves the optimism, clarity, and direction of recipes. But she frowns as she reads, chews plum lipstick off her lower lip: The recipes never turn out the way she wants them to. Or perhaps they turn out as she expects them to—the pork chops curling, the Swedish meatballs crumbling, the baked chicken limp and bland. She cooks like someone who never wanted to spend time over an iron or a broom or an oven, like someone who never wanted to clean up after anyone else again.

  Naturally, Gram and Bud are always at odds, like mythical adversaries. Their competition—over race, culture, values—is primordial and monumental. Gram was appalled when my young, long-legged, coltish mom, before she was Mom, told her mother that she was going to marry this—this—foreigner with the black eyes and the black mustache and the black hair all curly and glistening with Brylcreem and powerful doses of Old Spice and lemon perfume. Gram asked Mom for a photo of Bud to display to the parish priest, to prove, Gram said, that he wasn’t black. (I never got around to asking what happened if he was black.) So Mom sent the photo and Gram proved it. But somehow, in the long run, since he wasn’t precisely white, either, it didn’t solve anything. The two of them struggle endlessly. Sometimes the fight is still and quiet and sometimes loud and operatic, but it’s always there.

  According to family lore, when Mom first brought Bud home to meet her mother, Gram covered the table with dishes, the biggest one containing a glistening, clove-studded ham—not realizing that Muslims don’t eat pork, or perhaps realizing it very well. Bud shows us the expression that was on his face when the pink pig appeared on the table: eyeballs bugging out, mouth agape. On the second meeting, she served shrimp, not realizing that Bud—who had never seen such things before—would think they were giant insects. Bud’s expression this time: eyes slits, mouth yanked back at the corners. “I think for sure she is trying to kill me,” he confides to us years later. Both times he left the table hungry and slipped out for White Castle burgers. But he still married my mother.

  The problem seems obvious to me: Gram is a baker, Bud’s a cook. Cooks are dashing, improvisational, wayward, intuitive; bakers are measured, careful, rational, precise. Gram can follow a recipe, but the drama for spice isn’t in her bones. “Oh, rosemary,” she says to me dismissively as we discuss a chicken recipe. “Rosemary is for show-offs.” On our Easter visits she makes an honest roast beef that browns and caramelizes for hours in her oven, accompanied by a velvety mushroom gravy. But if there’s more to her repertoire, I don’t know about it.

  Mostly it seems that Gram contrives not to cook at all—dinners are BLTs, noodles and butter, or tuna salad sandwiches. Even as a child, I am obsessed with cookbooks, and I lose myself for hours wandering through the food section at bookstores; but Gram more or less restricts herself to Betty Crocker and her much-treasured I Hate to Cook Book by Peg Bracken. All her dealings with the male animal, she says, have given her more than enough surprises for one lifetime. She likes to know exactly what her food is going to do. Beside the books in the kitchen are her two life guides: a stack of Good Housekeeping magazines bookmarked at “Hints from Heloise” and—the bane of my existence—a little pink book of etiquette that has rules on what color purse may be carried after Labor Day and the correct folding of hankies. Today, after she’s spent a few minutes poring desolately over the same five grease-dotted recipes for tomorrow’s dinner, her fingertips drift off the page and she taps the table absently. “Maybe ... ,”she says, then stops and looks in my direction, but her gaze trickles out a foot before it reaches me.

  “Maybe what?” I ask. She watches me tear another strip of gamardine from its cellophane wrapping and stuff the shred in my mouth. Gamardine is a Middle Eastern precursor of fruit leather. The pressed apricot comes wrapped in big golden rectangles, slick on one side, corrugated on the other, a lush, yellowy-sweet melting flavor. Since I’ve returned from Jordan, it’s displaced malted milk balls as my favorite food. Gram scowls at the gamardine, her features pulled together like a purse drawstring. She sniffs and turns away when I offer her some and says that it’s full of insect wings. Then she turns back and smiles in the way that tells me I don’t yet know all there is to know about my grandmother and says, “Have you ever eaten Oriental food?”

  I jerk my head up from a recipe for “Easy Cheezy Macaroni” and study her face. Tiny sparks run over my skin, raising every hair. “No, never,” I say, a low thrill blooming in my voice.

  “Neither have I,” she says. She opens her eyes wide; they are cornflower blue, magnified behind cat’s-eye glasses. She closes the recipe book slowly on one hand, as if keeping her place, then slides out the hand. “But I think it’s high time.”

  I can’t sleep that night, thinking about the Oriental food. What might it be? The next day, just around the crack of dawn, I slide out of bed and call Bud, waking him. I tell him about the Oriental food plan. “This is a kind of food? From where?” he asks, yawning.

  I ponder. “Well. Yeah. I don’t know.”

  “Is there a sauce?” (Yawn.) “Is there bread or rice?”

  I twine the phone cord around my finger. “It’s Oriental, Dad, there must be a sauce.”

  “When I first come to this country, I met a man on the boat from As-seeni. When we get to New York, he made a soup with seaweed and jellyfish. It was excellent.”

  I frown and curl up my tongue. I have a special aversion to jellyfish, which sometimes speckle the Jersey shore. I ponder this and come up with a satisfactory resolution. “Well, that was different. That was As-seeni. This is from . . . Orientals.” Because, of course, As-seeni is Arabic for Chinese.

  He whistles, marveling, laughing. “Well, Ibn Battuta,” he says, referring to his favorite ancient Islamic explorer, “you’ll have to tell me what Orientals eat for dinner. I’m going back to bed.”

  Gram decides we will make what she calls an “Oriental event” out of the day. She opens the special hall closet where everything is covered in the smell of mothballs and the crackle of dry-cleaning paper. She pulls out two fur coats—the first is an ankle-length, fluffy imitation raccoon duffel. I gasp and immediately want to wear that one, but Gram says, “Let’s just try this first,” and slides my stick arms into the satin lining of a sheared seal imitation with a trapeze shape. The three-quarter sleeves come to my wrists and the body of the coat bells out below my knees, but the fur collar nuzzles my jaw and magically draws out planes I’d never noticed in my face before. I look in the full-length wall mirror and see something shift in my features, suggesting the face that I will grow into.

  “I wore that to my high school grand pavilion dance,” she says, stroking the sleev
e fondly.

  “Who did you go with?” I ask, very curious.

  “Oh, I don’t remember,” she says, carefully adjusting the collar. “Some nincompoop.”

  I turn this way and that in the mirror, stunned with admiration for myself. From over my shoulder, Gram nods at my reflection. “It might be faux, but it’s still very, very classy.”

  Gram wears the big raccoon coat, and we two very classy ladies wait on the curb in front of her building for the bus. Since she doesn’t drive, this is our usual transportation to Manhattan, and these excursions are always marked by the smell of diesel smoke. Later, after I’m grown, the smell of buses will always make me feel keen and expectant. There’s a wet snow tumbling from the sky, so Gram gives me one of her immense supply of plastic rain hats—tiny squares that unfold into a sort of Saran Wrap babushka with ties that knot under your chin. I find these just as intriguing and marvelous as the fur coats, and I wear my hat until we’ve boarded and Gram suggests that it’s safe to remove it.

  We sit in my favorite seats—the ones positioned at a right angle to the rest of the seats, directly behind the driver—and I swing my legs, eyeballing the passengers behind us. Two stops later, a distinguished older gentleman with swirling white hair, a powder blue suit, and a maroon ascot climbs on and sits next to me.

  I sense Gram straightening her back, a telegraphed message to behave. I try, with limited success, to stop swinging my legs—number seven on a list of “Ten Unladylike Behaviors” enumerated in the little pink book.