The Language of Baklava

by Diana Abu-Jaber

  I am home for good.

  POETIC BAKLAVA

  For when you need to serenade someone.

  In a saucepan, boil all the syrup ingredients until the mixture turns clear. Cover the syrup and set aside in the refrigerator to cool.

  In a food processor, grind together the walnuts, sugar, and cinnamon to a fine, sandy consistency. Set aside.

  Preheat the oven to 300 degrees.

  Carefully unfold the phyllo dough, making sure not to crack or tear it. Keep it covered with a piece of waxed paper to help prevent it from drying out.

  Butter the bottom of a shallow baking pan. You can also use a cookie sheet that has at least an inch-high lip. Carefully unpeel the first sheet of phyllo and lay it flat and smooth in the bottom of the pan. Brush with the clarified butter. Continue layering sheets of phyllo dough and brushing each sheet with butter until you’ve used half the dough.

  Spread the nuts-and-sugar mixture over the dough.

  Place another sheet of dough on the mixture and butter it. Continue layering and buttering dough until you’ve used up the rest.

  Using a sharp knife, carefully cut through the baklava in long, straight lines to form diamonds or squares (about 2 inches long).

  Bake for about 50 minutes or until golden brown. Pour the cooled syrup over the hot baklava. Eat when ready!

  FOURTEEN

  Bad American Girl

  It’s after dinner when the doorbell rings. As usual, I’m in my lair of a bedroom with a screen of rose beads hiding the entrance. Around me are my purple floor-length curtains, half a dozen mobiles, several blacklight posters, and my pink shag-rug bedspread. Every surface is covered with strawberry-scented votive candles. I’m sprawled across my bed with pad and pen, loose-leaf papers fanned over the covers, writing an inspirational piece about a man who makes a pair of wings out of beer pull tabs and flies away from his oppressive parents. I sigh and write and stare furiously at the wall and sigh and write a little more. I ignore the chiming doorbell. It will just be another non-English-speaking cousin who’s newly arrived unannounced from overseas.

  I can hear my sisters go out to the front entranceway. I know they’re peeping through the little spyglass window in the top of the front door, but they don’t open it. Their voices clang together as they nervously debate whether to open the door or go get Dad. Finally, the door opens and there are more voices, speaking English. I look up and frown. Suzy runs to my room. Her shoulders and arms are taut with panic. She pushes back her curly dark hair. “A boy,” she says. “Here. For you. ” She runs back to the hallway.

  I peer around the corner. There, larger than life, is Ray Jansen from Advanced Placement English class. He is fingering the hinge on the doorjamb as if he’s admiring the fine workmanship. My breath roars as though I’ve dropped from a high place into a lake. The ironclad rule in our house is: No boys. Bud has drilled these rules into my sisters and me: Who are you? Good-Arab-girls. Who aren’t you? Bad-boy-crazy-American-girls. Doesn’t Ray Jansen know this?

  I walk to the front door on watery, bouncy knees. I’m vaguely hoping he’s here to raise money for the Euclid volunteer firemen. He’s a sweet-natured boy with a loose, daring smile, a foreshadowing of a mustache on his upper lip, and easy black eyes. He lives down the road in one of the crooked tar-papered houses, where there’s always a passel of unwatched little kids. Ray works on cars and keeps a wrench and a red bandanna in his back pocket. He’s probably the closest I’ve ever come to a cowboy.

  He is bold and a little dashing. His picture was in the Liverpool-Salina Review for helping put out the fire at a local pool hall and dragging out a man who was too drunk to walk. Ray would make a perfect object of infatuation if such a thing could occur to me. Instead, I’m grimly adding up the way he flirts with me in English, how just the other day in class, he stood arched over me as I sat at my desk, his arm barely brushing mine, his breath grazing my hair, as he helped me write a book report. Now the lights in our hallway seem to flare as I get it. That wasn’t just to get a closer look at my paper.

  He thinks I’m an American girl.

  His grin is a little lopsided. “Hey, Di, I just happened to be in the neighborhood—”

  “Hi, Ray.” I’m trying to keep my voice natural and neutral—oh sure, cowboys turn up at our front door all the time!—but my jaw feels tight. Ray’s smile dims. I can feel Bud sailing up behind me.

  “Yes, sir,” Bud is saying, drawn up and straight backed, voice an octave lower, as if Ray is a salesman whom Bud is about to dismiss. “What can I do for you?”

  Ray’s expression broadens and flattens. He stammers something about going over our English homework.

  “English homework?” Bud says in a strained voice. He looks at me. “Do you know this man?”

  The air is thin and unbreathable, like something from the far side of Mars. “Well, yeah,” I say. I can barely hear my own voice. “He’s in my English class. And . . . he wants to go to law school.” Pathetic. I can’t meet Ray’s eye, but he doesn’t correct me.

  “Law school?” Bud mumbles. The information about English and law school makes him edgy—I can tell he’s trying to work out if this is educational and respectable or not.

  Next thing I know, we’ve all somehow made it upstairs and into the living room. I have no idea how this comes to pass. Events seem to ooze together. The whole family is up there with us. Our living room is a long, window-banked rectangle divided into two seating areas. Bud instructs my sisters to watch something on TV. Monica, after a long, incredulous gawk at Ray, flips on Truth or Consequences and Bob Barker’s wry, avuncular voice ripples through the room beneath waves of canned laughter. The blue vapor light washes over the back wall. Bud seats us in the opposite end of the room. Mom hovers near the hallway, looking as though she’d love to catch a bus out of town. She gently asks if Ray would like something to drink. He searches her face for a moment, then says anything is fine.

  A dreamy moist heat rises from my skin. A boy in the house! It’s like fumbling into a Dalí painting—all the clocks slither off the wall, and Bud’s smile looks as if it’s cut out of a magazine. We’re all well mannered, but the living room floor is spongy. Bud sits forward in his recliner, elbows propped attentively on his knees. He sighs, nods, shakes his lowered head, as if someone has just told him a really good one. He looks up in a patient, aw-shucks way and says that he better explain some things to Ray. Then he flaps his hands on his knees, pushes up, and goes into the kitchen.

  I follow him, feeling doomed yet curious. I’m not sure if I’ve ever been in this much trouble before. I keep forgetting that none of it was my idea in the first place. Interspersed with a sense of doom is the feeling that I’ve just won a raffle: A boy, here, for me! In the kitchen, Mom busies herself with pouring soda. Bud starts rooting through the refrigerator, mumbling something that sounds like ancient incantations under his breath, sliding out one Tupperware bowl after another. He begins spooning leftovers onto a plate: some rice, salad, a big slice of stuffed kibbeh, the crisp wheaty bulgur layers fragrant with ground lamb and spices, all of it still fresh from dinner. I stand by uselessly, arms dangling, then trail after him as he brings it back out into the living room and sets it on the carved brass table between him and Ray, a challenge.

  Bud doesn’t have any intention of actually letting Ray eat. After placing the platter full of food before Ray, Bud leans back in his armchair and tips his head at an insouciant angle. “So, sir, who are your people?”

  Ray looks up from the plate. “My people?” He squints, picks up a fork, turns his head slightly to one side.

  Bud pushes on. “What is your trade?”

  “Well, I . . . I volunteer for the fire department, and I fix some cars for people. I’m mostly still in high school.”

  Bud nods gravely, considering this information. “Where are your people from?”

  “Well . . . I—” Ray gestures vaguely toward the windows. “I guess Granny and Grandpa are living right up the r
oad there, outside of Baldwinsville.”

  Where the houses are broken down and heaped with junk, where people live in abandoned buses, where the roads dissolve into gravel. I gaze at him: my tragic hero.

  As the food rests and Ray sips his sweating glass of 7-Up, Bud leans forward and sighs. “All right. You see, sir, I have to explain something to you,” he says evenly. “This is something very easy for you to understand. My daughters are good Arab girls.”

  I feel a paroxysm of lethal embarrassment. My sisters sit up on the couch. Suzy telegraphs sympathetic looks to my side of the living room; Monica hides her face in her hands, then looks out between her fingers. Ray’s glance slips toward me, checking to see if Bud is kidding or not. Bud is just getting warmed up. “My girls are not like these American girls.” His face tightens. “Not like these girls that you’re used to.” With this accusation, he rolls even farther forward, his voice ascending. “My daughters stay home like good girls, and do their homework and help their mother. They’re going to marry the men that I tell them to marry—good Arab men. Doctors and lawyers. Maybe an engineer, maybe. My daughters don’t ‘go out.’ They don’t go to ‘parties’ or ‘do drugs’ or ‘run around.’ ” He’s getting louder, as mad as if Ray had in fact proclaimed that we go right out and do those dreadful things regularly. “So I don’t know why you come here, walking into my house and looking at my daughters, but I can tell you right now, sir, you have the wrong idea.”

  “Yes, sir,” Ray whispers.

  I feel an old fury rising in me. I’ve heard Bud’s speech many times before, but listening to it in the clear, public presence of a stranger makes it excruciating. Bud has been shaping and containing the direction of my life as long as I can remember, but never before has it seemed to matter so much. I don’t know a thing about Ray Jansen, I only half recognized him at the door, but suddenly he seems like the only thing in my life that has ever really mattered at all.

  Bud grows impassioned—combating legions of invisible American boys—cowboys!—attempting to steal his daughters. “I don’t know where you got this great big idea,” he continues, gesturing over our heads, “that you can just come into my house—the home of Ghassan Abu-Jaber—come to my home uninvited, talk to my daughters, and—and—and—” Whatever it is that Bud thinks Ray was intending to do is too horrible to put into actual words. Ray shrinks from it, creeping back into the seams of his chair.

  There is a crackling pause like the second before the execution. Suddenly, Bud stands and Ray seizes the moment. “Well, thanks for everything, sir, s’long!” He’s on his feet and moving fast down the stairs toward the front door.

  “That’s right,” Bud growls. “That’s right. Time to go home now, you. Go back to your people and your girls and your—your —cars!” He follows Ray all the way down the stairs, shouting, “Go on now, time to go home!” The sounds of Truth or Consequences follow them to the door.

  I don’t let myself look out the front window. I know I will only see Bud banishing from our property the sole man in the world who will ever be interested in me. I can’t believe any of this has happened. I am not prepared to accept that life can be so unfair. I tremble with indignation and furious excitement: A boy liked me! My father chased him away!

  When Bud comes back in he looks invigorated, as if he’s just gone for a jog. There’s an expansive mellowness settling over him, as if he’s preparing to be tolerant about the whole sordid affair. I can barely contain myself. I glare at him while he settles into his armchair, puts up his feet, nods to himself, and plucks up the paper. I finally burst out, “How could you, how could you?” my voice a pure, scorching wave. “Don’t you care about me at all? Don’t you care about my feelings?”

  Bud looks at Mom in astonishment. “What? What feelings?” he says.

  “It’s not fair!”

  He looks utterly blank. He looks at Mom.

  I appeal to my mother, who, I know, was raised by a reliably American mother. “What about you, Mom?” I say. “Didn’t you go out on dates? Didn’t you go to malt shops with boys and wear poodle skirts and go to your prom and everything? What about that?”

  She allows this, nodding. “It’s true, but if your father feels so strongly about this matter, I think we should respect that.”

  I am abandoned. My mouth is open, my indignation shimmers. I swing my focus between the two of them. “Why didn’t you just lock me into some prison in Jordan when you had the chance?”

  Bud thumps the arm of the upholstered chair, infuriated all over again. “I wanted to!”

  “I wish you had. It’d be better than here.”

  Bud is incredulous. It’s as if he can’t even see me. He widens his eyes, but he can’t make my features out. “Did you hear that?” he asks Mom. “Look at her—look at that belligerence. In Jordan, daughters never look at their fathers like that. If I looked at my father like that— my father would beat us every day! You don’t know what a family is!” He’s shaking his finger at me, his voice a rampaging force. He’ll go all night long and I’ll stay up, too, and we’ll burn down everything in our path.

  We fight to the brink of exhaustion. Bud’s logic is free-form, leaping from half memories to accusations to wild conclusions. There are few connections between any of it, so it’s almost impossible to fight back. He makes speeches about what a bad daughter I am, we all are, all daughters in the world are. He recalls moments of grief and suffering at my hands, offenses that I’ve utterly forgotten or didn’t know about in the first place. “Do you think I’ve forgotten about the day you told me to ‘never mind’?” he demands. “Do you think I forgot about that?” He’s relentless.

  But I can’t hold on to my anger as I tire. It seeps out of me in wisps, leaving me in a sort of trance. I slump in my chair as all of it falls away from me—Ray, freedom, the future. Eventually I’m so tired that I’d give it all away in exchange for a chance to go to bed. I end the fight in the most expedient way I know how: I let my face crumple, my chin caves in, and the warm, ignominious tears come. Bud, from his family of tough boys, is stupefied by the sight of female tears. He waves his hands in the air, a little frightened, and the spell is broken. “There, there,” he says. “We’ll forget the whole thing.”

  I rub my eyes and stand to go. My throat aches from anger and from crying. Then I notice something on the table. The plate. It’s there like a message in a bottle. Apparently, at some point during my father’s earlier speeches, Ray managed to eat the food that Bud had set out. The rice and okra have been scooped up, the crisp lamb kibbeh is gone. He did it somehow, without anyone noticing. The sight of Ray’s empty plate is so potent that I hold still inside myself and don’t even let myself smile. And I know then that there are all sorts of things that can be done that don’t require anyone’s permission.

  COWBOY KIBBEH

  TOPPING

  2 medium tomatoes, sliced

  thin (optional)

  Soak the bulgur in water to cover for 2 hours. Drain well and set aside.

  Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

  Prepare the stuffing: In a small saucepan, sauté the onion in olive oil until lightly browned; transfer to a bowl and set aside. Sauté the pine nuts in the same oil; transfer to the bowl. Sauté the lamb in the remaining oil with salt and pepper. Drain off the fat and then combine in the bowl with the onions and pine nuts; set aside.

  In a large bowl, mix together the bulgur, lamb, water, and onion, seasoning with salt and pepper. Press half of the mixture in the bottom of a baking dish. Sprinkle the stuffing over this. Spread the second half of the bulgur mixture over the stuffing and press down lightly. Top with tomato slices if desired. Bake for 45 minutes at 350 degrees, then remove and cut into squares.

  MAKES 4 TO 6 SERVINGS.

  The next day, Ray passes me a note in English and I meet him after class in the library. We pick a large, polished wooden table near the card catalog and sit at a right angle from each other, our joined hands resting on the amber-colored tab
le beside a stack of books. At first I feel frightened and excited, my breath rippling through me like electric sparks. But then I realize I don’t feel guilty at all, not one bit, and no one in the library cares that we are holding hands anyway.

  The whispering, watery sounds of the room are soothing to me. We don’t talk very much, so I’m able to study the way our fingers knit together. I look at the black tufts of hair above Ray’s knuckles and the neat, smooth trim of his nails and a few dark lines of grease near his palms—the kind that remain even after you’ve scrubbed and scrubbed. I marvel at how natural it feels to link hands with this boy, a stranger.

  We avoid talking about the previous night, instead discussing our homework, our eccentric substitute English teacher, the trouble Ray is having with his Thunderbird. Finally he looks at me through a fine spray of hair over his forehead and says, “But you know what? I really liked that food your dad gave me to eat last night. Especially that sort of crunchy one? With the tomatoes?”

  I have to suppress a nervous burst of laughter. “The lamb kibbeh?”

  “Yeah,” he says, his eyes a little far away. “That was the best thing.”

  Ray and I never progress beyond holding hands, and I don’t really see much of him after that day. Once I’ve established that I’m brave enough for secret meetings and hand holding, I don’t feel especially interested in Ray anymore. But oddly enough, he seems to feel that he and Bud have struck up a friendship. If Ray is driving by while Bud is out on his riding mower, he’ll honk and wave and Bud will wave back. Sometimes he’ll pull over, and he and Bud will chat like old pals.

  Bud will come into the house looking for cucumbers and cheese, salted nuts and tomatoes. “Nice boy, that Raymond,” he’ll say. “A real good kid.”

  FIFTEEN

  Food and Art