The Language of Baklava
Page 23
Perhaps it’s due to my mournful slouch through the halls, but one day my guidance counselor casually mentions that with enough credits, it is sometimes possible to skip one’s senior year of high school and go directly to college. I’ve become convinced that college is where my life will begin. I start collecting stacks of university brochures and spreading the glossy images of red-brick, ivy-sided campuses across the table at breakfast. Bud touches the gleaming pamphlets, leaving fingerprints. “So—this is a college?” he says in a dazed church voice. Bud barely wants to let me out of the house at all. But the very notion of college leaves him a little breathless. After intense negotiation, he agrees to let me skip my senior year of high school, but only on condition that I attend the State University of New York in Oswego, thirty miles up the road from us, where Uncle Hal and Aunt Rachel teach. Where I will stay at the all-girls dorm. Where the family will keep an eye on me. Isn’t that wonderful?
When we get to campus, Bud looks across the crowded school bookstore and intuits that the manager is a Palestinian immigrant. He grins, introduces himself, and flings one arm across the man’s shoulders. Then they walk off toward the man’s office. When they come back, I learn that I have a job, starting now. I’m going to work for minimum wage at the campus Sweet Shoppe, a big open counter that turns out to be at the hub of the university’s social life in the heart of the student union building.
At the Sweet Shoppe we sell newspapers, cigarettes, girlie magazines, and candy. The floor-to-ceiling shelves are crowded with old-fashioned glass jars with shiny metal lids that need constant polishing. There are two antiquated weighted scales that we measure the candy into, piece by piece, using sugar-dusted metal scoops; then we slide the pieces into white paper bags. We sell quarter, half, and whole pounds of candy, and I get so used to the incremental measurements that I can tell by feel what small things weigh. If we like someone, we dribble in extra.
The dull prefab candy arrives directly from the factory in cartons that smell of old chocolate, waxed paper, cardboard, and dust. But there’s a great variety—malt balls, chocolate turtles, nonpareils, fireballs, double-dipped peanuts, orange jellies, sugar-coated fruit slices, English toffee, gumdrops, peanut clusters, jawbreakers, and so on. We sell the candies my grandmother grew up with, Mary Janes, butterscotches, and Bit-O-Honeys. Even the cash register is old-fashioned—the manual keys thwack like a typewriter’s, and I have to think about how to make change.
Most of my work hours are scheduled before afternoon classes. Early in the morning, I cut across the cool compound of the student union, past sleepy commuter students sunk into chairs, nodding over coffees, staring at notes. The metal grating rumbles up with a crash, and the first wave of Sweet Shoppe aroma makes my stomach trip. I settle into one of the tall chairs on rolling casters behind the counter. We are instructed to leap to attention whenever a customer appears, but some of my co-workers manage to work entire shifts while rolling themselves around.
We have our regulars—sugar junkies who arrive at eight a.m., angling toward the counter as soon as they push through the big glass doors at the front of the union, a draft of cold wind, lakefront rain, or early snow washing in behind them. The junkies are usually bored or lonely, homesick and stressed out, looking for easy comfort, their eyes a smidgen off kilter. They come by to mope around our counter. I sell them expensive whole cartons of Winstons, Salems, and Marlboros, newspapers, and Playboys. They confide how excited they are about candy fruit slices. They buy bags of rubbery Swedish fish and pay for them with crisp twenties. All I ever seem to have in my pocket are crumpled singles and silver.
The school is unequally divided between the generally less moneyed, less sophisticated upstaters like myself, and the downstaters who come from New York City and Long Island. We all have the same conversations over and over. A student leans over the counter, peering into the dim candy cave, then looks at me mournfully and asks, “Where you from?”
“Upstate.”
“Upstate! You’re from here!”
“Yeah. Where’re you from?”
“The Island.”
“You like it here?”
“Yeah, it’s not my parents’ house. You?”
“Same.”
My parents, thank heavens, are paying my tuition and board, but I never have any cash. I discover that my co-workers consider nibbling from the jars a way to supplement their food budget. Dorrie, the Sweet Shoppe manager, is an unhappy, overweight single mother who wears the same baggy sweatpants and shirt to work every day— a “townie.” She says we’re supposed to eat only the broken candies and stale remnants, but Dorrie stays locked up in her closetlike office in back, reading dog-eared romance novels, one hand fishing around in a bag of peanut clusters while on the other side of the door her staff has contests to see who can catch the most M&M’s in their mouths.
My parents have bought me a year’s worth of breakfast, lunch, and dinner at the loathsome dormitory dining hall. My floormates and I go en masse to cafeteria-style meals where we are served trays of glutinous soups, curling gray steaks, and tissuey salads. One day I am so appalled by the state of the bacon and eggs at breakfast that I write my first ever food review on a paper napkin, then sit down with the dining hall manager and read my tirade aloud. He listens, his head nodding with laughter, his school ring clacking against the linoleum table as he slaps it in amusement. He mumbles over it, rereading: “Hey—trichinosis—big word!” Then he asks if he can keep the napkin as a souvenir and walks away, stuffing it in his back pocket.
After a few weeks of food misery, I start skipping dining hall meals and snacking liberally at the Sweet Shoppe. It’s not enough food, but it’s not the regime of enforced starvation that some of my dormmates are on. Within my first months at college, on two different occasions I see girls—stick creatures—pass out from hunger. I adore eating well and will eat less than well if necessary, but the dining hall with its lifeless taupe sauces and tepid ingredients leaves me appetiteless. Bud calls every day and asks, “What are they feeding you there?”
“Flank steak, mac ’n’ cheese, chicken à la king,” I say glumly, twining the phone cord around my wrist.
“Sounds good!” he says too enthusiastically. “Is that all one thing?”
By midterm exams, I’m living on candy. Occasionally my dormmates order a pizza and I consume a little protein, but aside from that it’s chocolate almonds, jelly beans, and nonpareils. I start to lose weight. My tongue feels stripped and scalded from eating so much sugar, my teeth ache, my skin looks ghoulish, and there are hollow blue crescents under my eyes. I complete this look by wearing black sleeveless T-shirts featuring punk bands—the Sex Pistols, the Ramones, the Clash—and black stovepipe jeans. I sit in my poetry class, my blood fizzy and acidic. I bounce in my chair, a rushing sugar jig, foot wagging, teeth clicking, until people get annoyed and grab me, trying to press me down into my seat. Three minutes later, I start bouncing again.
Two or three times a month, I unfasten my safety-pin necklace, put on a cotton blouse and corduroys, and take the hour-long bus ride back to my parents’ house. But something inexplicable begins to happen on these visits. Bud prepares big special meals, all my favorites— roasted chicken, shish kabobs, grape leaves. I eat and talk with abandon, inflated with college ideas and new classes, helping myself to seconds and thirds. But hours later, after dinner and dessert and dishes and more dessert, at some point late at night, deep asleep in my bed, I’m awakened by molten nausea. It comes with a dreadful disorientation—the sense that something is deeply wrong yet completely unidentifiable. It is such a primordial sensation that it seems in those waking moments that I’ve never lived without it.
I spend the wee hours of the night staggering between my bedroom and the bathroom, vomiting, then retching. My body is racked, helpless, reduced to rubble. Usually it’s just as the dawn is beginning to turn watery and pale that I’m able to collapse back into sleep. I awaken late in the morning, shaky but stabilized.
“It couldn’t be—nobody else got sick,” I groan.
She places a cool washcloth on my forehead. “Or it’s just some weird bug. Probably you’re a little run-down from all your studying.”
The nausea begins to occur with such regularity on my visits home that I wonder if this mysterious virus is somehow embedded in the walls of my old room. I consider that it might be psychosomatic, since it happens only when I return home. But the sickness is so immense, crashing over and swamping my whole body, that I can’t imagine it’s something that comes simply from my mind. That seems much too clean and abstract for this pitching agony.
Aside from the nausea, my visits home are unremarkable. Rather, what is remarkable about them is that I no longer feel edgy and impatient with everyone. I’m no longer driven to hide behind the double set of beaded curtains in my bedroom doorway. I feel this relief especially with Bud. The sizzling stress between the two of us has dissipated. We’re calmer and more genial around each other. All the usual old flash points of debate topics like dating and boys, women’s rights, and Middle Eastern politics seem beside the point. Instead, I sit sideways in the kitchen chair and, newly curious, ask Bud about his life.
“Tell me again—how did your youngest brother die?”
“Oh.” Bud shakes his head with the memory. “They put leeches on him—but his appendix still burst open. Terrible thing. I couldn’t watch.”
“How did they take out Uncle Hal’s tonsils?”
“Oh.” He rolls his eyes. “No nice drugs forty years ago. The barber was also the dentist. He came at Hal”—Bud lifts his hands into claws—“with a great big pair of scissors!”
If I’m steering the conversation to safety, neither of us notices. Bud is glad to visit the past with me, and sometimes it feels as if we are both in there in the old place. Our conversations are journeys. We lose ourselves in former lives. I half wonder if Jordan would exist if Bud weren’t here.
Barely a month into the semester, the mornings are charged with sharp, clean filaments of winter air. By October, I can look out of my eighth-floor window and view the campus grounds all the way to the start of Lake Ontario glowing in a crystal ice sheet. Light snow glitters in the air. For some reason, I miss my childhood. It’s a subtler, more ancient form of homesickness that I find absorbing, a delicious sadness.
In late October, Hillel, the Jewish student organization, papers the hallways with posters for a Jewish Foods Day as well as a menu that includes a number of the foods I grew up with. The poster features the Middle Eastern dishes that I think of as the Trinity: falafel, hummus, and baba ghanouj. I study the sign and recall Aunt Aya’s teachings on the origins of dishes. Does falafel belong to a nation? A culture? I stand in the corridor, hands on my hips, mulling over the poster.
Whatever the nationality or religion, I’m excited about this event. I’ve never heard of anyone outside of our family serving such dishes— especially falafel, which is a messy, deep-fried affair. Better to leave falafel sandwiches to the guys with the full-body aprons selling it from carts.
I try to convince a number of my dormmates to attend Jewish Foods Week with me. But the girls in my all-girls dorm are turning out to be finicky, hothouse flowers. They spend hours lined up in the mirror-lined bathrooms, blow-drying their hair to glassy straightness, painting their toenails, or lolling in bed eating ice cream and pizza. In the end, I manage to entice only Elise, who happens to be Jewish, and to harangue my two roommates into submission. Annie is a stolid, good-natured Irish-Catholic girl from working-class Long Island. She owns two pairs of jeans and six T-shirts and wears her long brown hair parted cleanly down the middle so that it hangs in two shanks on her shoulders. Courtney is a strawberry-blond southern debutante with sticky mascaraed lashes. She is engaged to the former captain of her high school football team. “I don’t like anything new, pretty much ever,” she says in her buttery accent. But, grudgingly, they agree to go.
We travel together in a clutch to the cafeteria in the student union building, where Hillel has set up a small assemblage of caterer’s chafing dishes and orange heat lamps against one wall. Besides the falafel, hummus, and baba ghanouj, there’s an okra stew and a plate of sinewy chunks of beef they’re calling shawerma. Alongside all of this is a tub full of three-bean salad. We join the sparse crowd, sliding trays through the line. Exuberant student workers with shining dark eyes mill around, greeting everyone individually with a handshake and a bright “Shalom!” But two older men standing glumly behind the tubs and dishing out the food are muttering in Arabic, discussing the three-bean salad:
“I can’t explain it.”
“But what is it? I didn’t bring it.”
“I think that might be the Jewish food.”
“But where did it come from?”
“The Super Duper Market.”
After we settle at our table, Courtney, her eyes continuously damp from her contacts, looks around and whispers, “Is everyone here really Jewish?”
“Courtney, half the kids at this school are Jewish,” Annie says.
“They are?”
“And Diana’s Arabic!”
Courtney stares at me as if I’ve been hiding something.
Elise examines her plate of food, then finally samples some cucumber salad; she praises it lavishly and encourages the rest of us to dive in. Annie, pleased by the break from the dining hall fare, says the hummus reminds her of peanut butter and scoops her pita bread through the dip in wide streaks, then goes back for more. Courtney daintily pokes at the falafel, rolling it around without managing to break the fried crust, and I have to resist the urge to slap her hand. She refuses to touch her food with anything but metal utensils.
The truth is that the food on our trays looks lumpen and uninspiring. It’s been steamed to death under the heat lamps. The hummus is dull as clay, the baba ghanouj thick and bitter. The dried-out falafel crumbles on impact with the bread, and there isn’t any tahini sauce or chopped tabbouleh to spruce things up. Even the three-bean salad releases a viscous, mucilaginous fluid that I scrape to the edge of my plate. I feel too disappointed to eat more than a bite or two.
“Well, really, Diana,” Courtney says, “I don’t know what you expect me to do with this Jewish food. I’m not even Jewish.”
I grind my molars together and stab a cucumber slice. I glance at the two gloomy Arab men behind the chafing dishes and lower my eyes, irrationally worried that they might somehow know me.
Now Courtney looks thoughtful. “They should have an Episcopalian food week, too. I wonder if they ever do that here?”
Elise snorts. “Oh, and what would that be, Courtney? Sugar peeps?” Courtney is renowned in the dorm for subsisting on marshmallow chicks.
“I’m just saying, I don’t see the point of getting all high and mighty about food anyway,” she says, her voice singed with hurt. “I mean, since when is food religious? It’s not like it can make you hear angels or something.”
Elise and I are both looking at her. Elise takes a big bite of falafel and says, “I feel sorry for you.”
Suddenly reinvigorated, I scoop up one of the hard little falafels in a corner of pita and take a bite, expecting it will taste as bad as it looks. And while it’s cold and overcooked, I still taste fried chickpeas, the golden, mellow fundament of falafel, and, embedded deeper within, the sun-soaked air of Jordan. The taste is clear and direct as emotion, glowing inside me, keenly edged with longing—a wallop of a feeling. Reassured, I look up and say, “I’ve heard angels at dinner.”
“Does this taste like angels to you?” Annie asks me, grinning.
“Y’all are like religious fanatics,” Courtney says with a fastidious sniff. She puts down her fork and knife. “And I’m not hungry.”
&n
bsp; Before I’d left for college, Bud sat me down at the kitchen table, cleared his throat, and dictated a list of rules that I had to write out on a legal pad. These rules consisted of things I wasn’t allowed to do:
No staying out late.
No parties.
No silliness.
No boys.
“What does that mean, exactly?” I’d asked.
“It means what it means!” he’d thundered. “No boys!”
As it turns out, the list of rules gets “lost,” which happens on a wintry morning, the air as clean and bright as peppermint. I take the elevator to the top of my dorm, exit through the heavy service door, stand on the gravel roof, and slowly, happily, begin shredding the list. I allow these pieces to be blown from my hands and scattered far and wide, past the edge of the building, beyond the curve of the earth.
Days later, I begin dating a boy who calls himself a “punk rocker.” Timmy Fussell wears a necklace of safety pins and pretends to play guitar with a band called the Nervous Robots. He doesn’t actually know how to play guitar—his fingers never touch the strings—but the band keeps him because they think he makes the show “lively.” I’ve seen the Nervous Robots perform twice, both performances ending in drunken, indecipherable arguments between the bassist and the drummer, and there is some doubt about whether the group still exists after that. Timmy is from the same part of Syracuse I am, and in fact, I’d heard of his family before we’d met. His mother, Louise, kept a little meat smoker in her garage that made her famous in town. There is even a local celebration named after her, Louise Fest, complete with T-shirts bearing her name. Once a year, Louise rolls the rattling, shuddering, sawed-off smoker out of her garage and down to the local public green and smokes grease-slathered ribs for everyone. Exactly the sort of food my father would say is haram: taboo.
Timmy looks like a banty rooster. He has snappy blue eyes and yellow hair that sticks up from the back of his head in a ruff. He always looks a little sickly, with his shock-white skin, inflamed knuckles, and hairless, glutinous chest. He’s in his second year at college but hasn’t attended any classes I know of. He first picks me out at the large communal dining hall linking the boys’ and girls’ dorms, waving across the room as if we know each other. When, curious, I slide my tray down next to his, he begins narrating a brief history of punk rock and concludes by saying he thinks I’d make a “good punk.” Timmy starts saving seats for me at every meal. Each time he waves as soon as I wander into the chaotic hall. He’s interesting and arresting, and he pursues me with an ardor that I find, at sixteen, irresistible. After a few weeks, we start to meet at the one artsy coffeehouse in Oswego, the Lowlife Café, a decrepit joint with a sour, rotting reek that seems to be sliding by increments into the Oswego River just beneath its windows.