Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots

by Jessica Soffer

  “You know how they say that life imitates art?” my mother said. “Well, life imitated masgouf. The fish was so good, so tender, and we ate it with our fingers. For a little while, I convinced myself that life could be so simple.”

  Which meant happiness. Masgouf was my mother’s happiness.

  Suddenly, I felt like I’d missed everything. Had I never asked her? Had I never asked her directly the question of questions, about her favorite of favorites? Maybe not. Maybe I’d just assumed. What else had I assumed? Was it just to Lou that she told the absolute truth? Maybe with me, she gave the answer that required the least fussing on her part. When I’d asked her more about L’Ami Louis, she’d said, “Vanity Fair did a brilliant piece on it. Have a look at that.”

  And then it hit me. If I wanted to make my mother happy and remind her why I was essential to her happiness, all I had to do was find the recipe and make the dish. It would make things better. I could be worth keeping around. I could give her the one dish she had loved the most, that had given her the most happiness.

  A couple of years ago, I’d been all bustling like this. We’d had two blizzards and it was only December and my mother said if it snowed one more time she would skewer herself on a butterfly knife. That’s when it occurred to me that we could move to California, and for about ten seconds, I felt like a genius. We could have avocado trees and Honeybell orange juice every morning. We could drive up the coast on weekends and be treated like royalty at the French Laundry. She could open a new kind of bistro that married haute French cuisine with New American. Alice Waters would make us brunch at her place and would be blown away by the dessert that my mother baked with four varieties of heirloom plum. But then, California had been a ridiculous idea. She would never have left Aunt Lou. It would never be the two of us. Another option would have been to move to Florida, which was like California. But the problem with that, of course, was Bubbie. They didn’t get along. My mother always said, “I need her like I need a sharp stick in the eye. Not a creative bone in her body.” And yet, every week, Bubbie called once, twice, three times and left messages on the machine—especially now that Pops was dead. My mother would make a face like someone had just caused her soufflé to drop and she’d say, “She doesn’t understand me. She never could.”

  My mother had not tried to find her biological parents. She hadn’t wanted to, Lou said. Lou had offered to help, said the two of them could run away and find them together. But my mother said no. She must have been so angry at them. People always said, “I would never want to be on your mother’s bad side.” Meat keeps cooking when you take it off the flame; my mother could turn herself off in an instant.

  Lou had admitted to me that she thought it was better this way. “We’d miss her,” she said. “Wouldn’t we? If she found her parents, we wouldn’t be the most important people in her life anymore. They’d be shiny and new and we’d still be us.”

  I’d always had stupid ideas, until now. This was something brilliant. The masgouf was perfect. Simple. It wasn’t ridiculous. It was doable. And it could make her happy. I’d been suspended indefinitely, meaning at least through winter break, which started in two weeks. That gave me plenty of time to get my ducks in a row. Just like she’d said.

  That night I fell asleep scheming—and in my dreams, I wasn’t acting alone. Blot, a boy who worked at the bookstore on Eighty-Fourth, was my sidekick. I’d never said his name out loud but if anyone had bothered to ask me if I was into someone, I would have said easily, “Yes, actually. I’m into Blot.” Just thinking it made me feel like my insides had been replaced with rhubarb freezer jam—sugary and squishy and all pulp—except at my throat, which got tight and dry, like an overdone English muffin.

  In my fantasy, we wear brown leather backpacks and canvas sneakers and race through Central Park and Times Square at night, popping into Middle Eastern restaurants, shoving little bits of this and little bits of that into our mouths and jotting things down on yellow notepads. Our bags bop along like happy toddlers on our backs and when I get home late in the evening, flushed, spent, my mother wants desperately to know what I’ve been up to. I tell her it’s a surprise, and she says, “Really?,” like I’m doing her a favor. She is both patient and proud. She holds my face to get a good look at me and I’m the one who drops her eyes first, blushing. I’ve done good and we both know it.

  Victoria

  I ASKED JOSEPH if he wanted to go for a walk. It was Friday, and he’d been in bed all day, hands folded over his chest as if he were napping beneath some enormous lemon tree. He shook his head, shut his eyes, and cinched his mouth. His skin, which used to look like it was preserved with olive oil, had become matte and flaking. His blue saucer eyes were milky puddles, and his silver beard, once dense as a broom, was a light dusting of powdered sugar.

  “No,” he said. “I’d never find my way back.”

  I’d wanted him to say yes. I’d mouthed yes before he’d said a thing. I wanted to ask him if he planned to stay in that bed forever. I wanted to ask him if I seemed like a spring chicken. I’m fifty million years old. But look at me. I’m up. I’m at ’em.

  I thought, If he loves me enough, he’ll get up on the count of three. If he wants to go on living, he’ll feed himself on Thursday. He’ll get dressed. He’ll rinse a glass. He’ll walk fifteen steps. He’ll ask for the paper. He’ll pee standing up. He’ll turn off the light. He’ll grip my shoulders and say exactly this with an ironic grin: “I love you so much that I cannot live without you. So I won’t die. I’ll live so we can live together.”

  I looked at him now. I loved him so much it made my hands tremble.

  I used all my strength to sit him up and pour water into his mouth. I grunted but hid it with a cough. It would have killed him to see my face wincing as I moved him from the bed to the chair, to know the way it shot hot daggers down my back.

  “Hello there,” I said. He looked around. He was a child, lost in Central Park. I waited, expectantly.

  “If I went out,” he said, “who would let me back in?”

  Suddenly, I had the urge to yell at him. Then I had the urge to weep. The guilt always came later, an aftershock. He was home, I wanted to tell him. He was in his study with two walls of fraying brown cookbooks mixed in with Rumi, Rudaki, Hafez, Bellow, and Roth. But it wouldn’t help to explain it. I wasn’t delusional about that. In my head, I said, Please. Figure it out.

  His eyes darted around, looking for clues. I adjusted the brown blanket I’d knitted myself around his shoulders. “Remember this?” I said, pulling a corner to his face. Nothing.

  I motioned toward the set of framed eighteenth-century spoons. “Remember these?” I asked. Again, nothing. It wasn’t dementia. Nothing as simple as that. It was cancer, pain meds, depression, exhaustion. It was that sometimes he couldn’t bear to be present, to look down at himself and see what he saw. So he checked out. Gone fishing. I’d almost punched a nurse when she said, “Here one minute, gone the next,” but she had a point. He was like a bulb, flickering on and off according to some erratic electrical current inside of him that I was desperate to rewire and fix.

  I brought him the photo of his father’s chicken stall in the Baghdadi market. There were white snowflakes against the lens. “Remember them?” I asked. I looked at Joseph but he wasn’t looking at the picture. He’d begun to stare past things with his dull, weak eyes—a selective blindness.

  On particularly bad days, I’d wonder if my only hope, his only hope, was to bring up our deepest secret, the one thing we never discussed, never mentioned. I didn’t want to, dreaded it. It was desperate, a last resort, but we were at that point. If there was ever a time for candor, it was now. Forgiveness, now. Regrets, confessions, concessions, empathy, desperation, and exaggeration: now.

  I wondered if everyone had a secret like this, something slightly wretched, bent and corroded with time, like a lost key that might not even unlock anything anymore. And if, in the end, it might be the only thing that mattered.
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br />   All those years ago, I gave up our baby. Joseph didn’t want to. Hated it. I said it was to protect us, what we had. But she followed us everywhere, like a chill that we could not shake. I tried never to miss her. Joseph must have done the same. It was what kept us together and broke us apart. How much of what we said was an attempt to not say something else? It was so easy to talk about everything—and so we did. Bad lettuce, broken sidewalks, static on the television, the way our fingers swelled in the summer. We became who we became because of what wasn’t there. What wasn’t there became what was.

  Still, on these new very bad days, I considered bringing her up in order to awaken him. I would ask him if he missed her. If he’d ever looked for her. Most of all, I wanted to know what I’d done, what I’d stolen—to hear it from him. What we were was never enough.

  But I’d never asked him about her. I was too afraid. I imagined saying our daughter, and his eyes lighting up.

  Where is she? he would ask then. I had a recurring dream of him passing away in her arms, his face full of emotion, hers too, together.

  He leaned back and I ran my fingers over his head, waiting for him to fall asleep. I sang a song that he used to sing to me when I was pregnant. It was the only time we used Arabic in America, in song. Even in our home, on quiet evenings alone on our couch, we insisted on being Americans. We made latkes for Hanukkah. We practiced our vowels. We listened to Buddy Holly and Sinatra, and we watched The Honeymooners. Some nights, I’d fall asleep crying for Elizabeth Eckford.

  “Okay,” he said out of nowhere. “Let’s go for a walk.”

  If I were ten years younger, I would have jumped up and clapped my hands. I would have given him a giant kiss on the mouth. But I didn’t. We hadn’t walked together in months.

  I said to him, “Great.” It sounded pathetic, weak. But my age had caught up to me recently. My mother used to say, “Only the wearer knows where the shoe pinches.” It’s true. I never imagined that one day my brain would be racing and my body would be unable to keep up. Like trying to start a car that won’t turn over. I was so used to asking him constantly and hearing no response that the very exercise of asking felt like enough positive effort. Expectations change. And then again.

  “Fantastic!” I said and gave a double thumbs-up, grateful that he wasn’t looking at me but at the carpet, at the long trek to the door.

  I prepared a small bag with water and painkillers and a granola bar. I carried an extra fleece in my arms and cab money in my shoe. I put on a backpack that concealed a collapsible chair.

  Joseph was wearing navy sweatpants, one of my old cashmere sweaters, and a down coat that slumped onto his shoulders. He was a tiny cardboard cutout of himself. His outdoor slippers flapped against his feet. In the elevator, he held the rail so tightly that his knuckles lost their color. It bolstered me. He still had some strength, somewhere. I imagined him hugging me. I imagined that I wouldn’t be able to get out of his embrace if I tried.

  “Isn’t this something?” I said. He blinked.

  We began down Frederick Douglass Boulevard. The air was unseasonably warm for early December. The sun was all through setting. The outdoor restaurant on our corner smelled of garlic. People strolled. Their leather handbags shimmered in the streetlights. They smiled at me. They could see it too, these strangers. How old he’d gotten. How I’d been left. I wanted them not to walk so quickly. I wouldn’t have minded if they’d stopped, said we were a handsome couple. We looked like we belonged together. It had been so long since I’d heard something nice. I found myself craving it, begging silently for it.

  Joseph had had the spirit of a twenty-year-old until around his birthday a few years ago, when the cancer settled into his prostate like a snake curling into his lap. That was the year after we closed our restaurant; the year the winter was so cold we stayed in the house for days ordering in boxes of black tea, paper towels, and Chinese; the year we stopped cooking together.

  His pace was so slow, so achingly slow, and soon my leg cramped because of it.

  “I’m so proud of you,” I said.

  As he pushed forward, Joseph did a kind of back-and-forth maneuvering, an attempt to keep all his parts intact, to keep them from deserting him. After half a block, he stopped.

  “What?” I asked, looking around.

  He looked at me like I was breaking his heart.

  “Shall we turn back?” I asked. In my head, I had the answer all ready. I wanted him to go on. I wanted him to walk steps ahead of me, to turn around and say, C’mon, slowpoke. Hup two.

  “No,” he growled instead. “We’re walking.”

  I tightened my grip. He was giving it all he had. He continued his shuffle. I was rooting for him. We were going to make it.

  “Damn it,” he said.

  “What?”

  I smelled it before I saw it. Urine blooming like an ink stain on his sweatpants. I was suddenly exhausted. I wanted to be home. I hated myself for having been so selfish, for making him walk just for me. The wind had picked up. I hailed a cab. He collapsed into it, mouth gaping, chest heaving. I patted at the wet patch with a tissue.

  “No, Victoria,” he said. “Let it be.”

  We had to loop four blocks to get back. I passed a twenty to the driver as we got out. The meter hadn’t even been started.

  “Keep it,” he said in Arabic. His face was angular and dark, like a strong-jawed animal’s, like Joseph’s when he was young. I had the urge to ask him if he’d ever been to Iraq. He was Egyptian, I could tell, but still. Joseph’s father was alive when I left, and in hiding. For a moment, I imagined that he was living in the beautiful house in Sal-hee-yah where I’d grown up. That when he came downstairs our maid, Daisy, was rolling out shakrlama dough in the kitchen. She’d become his caretaker. I imagined we’d left him in good hands. Joseph never tried to contact him from America. He didn’t have to. He said, “A son just knows.”

  Back on the sidewalk, Joseph put his arm around my shoulders.

  “Sorry,” he said quietly. “I was going to buy you a FrozFruit.”

  He took a five-dollar bill out of his pocket, God knows where it was from, and handed it to me. I wanted to ask him, as if it mattered, what kind he would have bought for me. Lime or cantaloupe. If he still remembered.

  I put my head down, let the tears mass behind my eyes.

  “Come,” he said, nudging me toward our building with his weight.

  We took the elevator up. It clicked along, slower than ever, smelling of steak.

  On our landing stood Dottie, our upstairs neighbor of more than thirty years. She posed, her hands on her hips, and she wore one of her ridiculous robes, a hideous purple thing with giant velvet flowers like tarantulas around her neck. What was left of her orange hair was wrapped around tiny curlers. Seeing Joseph, she covered her head with her hands.

  “Oh!” she said. “I wasn’t expecting you to be up and about. For a handsome young man, I would have dressed.”

  She winked. I rolled my eyes and pretended to gag. It drove me mad, the way she swooped in with her sense of humor, making me look somber, un-fun, a killjoy. And Joseph reacted to it. He straightened up, really smiled. I wanted to tell her that she hadn’t touched his catheter. Do that, I wanted to say, and then let’s see you chipper.

  “You were indisposed,” Dottie said. “I stopped in for your TV Guide.” She shook it in the air. “Thank you.”

  I narrowed my eyes, trying to vanish her. I wanted to be home, just the two of us. Over the years, Joseph had been kind to Dottie, making it impossible for me to shut her out entirely—and I’d grown to tolerate her. And because in her whole life, she’d probably never been more than tolerated, she considered me her all and everything. Still, we couldn’t have been more different. Her cosmetics, her Southern mannerisms, her taste in television. Sometimes I’d tell Joseph to imagine her in Baghdad, imagine her with no microwave or shimmering body lotion. “Don’t be mean,” he’d say, laughing. “She wouldn’t hurt a fly.” But there wa
s something about her—a kind of entitlement to be anywhere, say anything—that I had yet to get over. We’d never felt powerful like her. This country wasn’t set up like that for us. Decades later, and the only reason I continued to mind my manners around her was so Joseph wouldn’t find me cruel. Again.

  His weight was getting heavier and heavier on me. My legs had begun to shake.

  “Onward,” I said. I grabbed around his body to get a better grip and sort of hoisted him, preparing for the final stretch. “Almost there.”

  “So,” Dottie said, stalling us. “If we’re all awake, would you like to invite me in?”

  Then she stopped. Her face, always peppy and alert, fighting against the wrinkles, fell in on itself. She gasped.

  “Oh my gracious,” she said and covered her mouth.

  I looked at her eyes, followed them down. I’d forgotten. How could I? I’d lifted Joseph’s jacket and exposed him. His accident. He was still soaked. He hadn’t even complained. I wondered if he’d caught a chill, if I’d given my husband pneumonia.

  “Dottie!” I said, suddenly enraged at her.

  “Whoopsie-doo,” she said, turning around and scooting up the stairs faster than I’d seen her move in years. “I’ll be seeing y’all,” she called back. “Happy dreams!”

  I watched her, wanting to throw the collapsible chair at her strutting hips. I wanted to wrap Joseph up in my arms and hide him. Did she know what kind of pain he was in? Did she know what he’d been through? And this was how she treated him? Old age scared her, most of all when it crept up on her perception of herself. We’d known her for a million years. She’d aged too.

  “I’m so sorry,” I whispered to him. “She’s a terrible witch.”

  “No,” he said, kindest man in the world. “She is who she is.”

  I was imagining really telling Dottie off, screaming at her with my fist in her face.