Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots

by Jessica Soffer

  “I will take care of everything,” I whispered, as if words might be enough to lure him back. I promised him that I’d open an Iraqi pastry shop. I lied.

  “We will sell the vanilla cake with pomegranate sauce, the date truffles, the cardamom cookies, the shakrlama.” All the things he loved. Things we had served night after night at the restaurant. Things that might have, if anything could have, perked him up, brought him back. I said this as if all of a sudden he might open his eyes and say he’d love a cookie, thank you very much. And I would have raced to the kitchen and there would have been a platter of them, piled high and hot.

  “Everything will be all right,” I said. I was aware of the weight of the sky, the blood careering through my veins, the cold slippery feeling of my feet, a bus somewhere down the street, its long, labored exhale. Lucky breath.

  And then I was saying, “I will find our daughter.” I didn’t care if Ada could hear. She’d known nothing. Now she knew everything. I wasn’t thinking of myself. “I promise,” I said.

  This was where it happened—on a pull-out couch after sunset on a Friday, with the smell of latex gloves in the room, of browning garlic outside, dirty white socks on the floor stiff as old bones, our old old building clanking like a madman was inside the pipes, two books on the shelf tipped toward each other and making room for a vase of dead purple flowers, me on my knees with my face on an unbeating heart while everything else around us continued to move, in its way, or be moved, for something hopeful in the future.

  “I will find her,” I said, meaning it. “It wasn’t your fault. It was mine. She will love you still.”

  Lorca

  I DIDN’T SLEEP a wink. The morning after overhearing my mother reveal her favorite meal of life, I lay in bed, awake before everybody, hoping desperately that a brilliant idea about how to track down the masgouf recipe would dawn on me. My hope was that my mother had written various versions somewhere as she tried to perfect it and stashed away the best one on a tiny piece of paper so all I had to do was find it, master it, and fini! that would be that. But there were three problems with this. First, my mother kept very few things. You couldn’t find a single one of my kid drawings or report cards if you tried. I doubt she even had her own Social Security card. Second, what she did keep, she kept in a box below the couch where she slept. Where she was sleeping now. Third, my mother had said that even she couldn’t replicate the dish, so if she’d written it down, and if by some miracle I was able to find it, the odds of my making something halfway decent from that recipe were slim to none. Closer to none.

  Still, hopelessness is about as useful as rotten eggs. I hadn’t had a good idea since the maple bacon and caramelized banana ice cream sandwiches that were now included on the brunch menu at Le Canard Capricieux, and my mother would be home all day, so I told myself that if I was going to do something, I’d better do it now. If I waited till she woke up, I’d wait for hours. When I couldn’t stay in bed any longer, I went into the living room, got down on my hands and knees, and crawled across the floor. If she woke up from my movement, I’d just say I was defuzzing the carpet. Staying flat was harder than I’d expected; my arms quivered. But at this time of day, my mother was very sensitive to light. I couldn’t move too quickly and I couldn’t stand up. If even a piece of a shadow crossed her face, I’d be toast. I put one elbow in front of the other. She hiccupped. I went flat. I waited a minute. I kept going. When I was two feet from the couch, out of nowhere, very loudly and very clearly, my mother said, “Christ.” I was sure she was awake and about to ask me what I thought I was doing, but she just flipped onto her left side, away from the room and me.

  I looked at my elbows. They were covered in rug fuzz. I reached my arm under the couch. Just then, Lou’s alarm went off in her bedroom. My heart stopped. I knocked my chin on the floor and bit my tongue. Only when I heard the shower turn on and Lou get in did I resume my quest. I had to stick half my body beneath the couch to reach the little shoebox. I grabbed it and raced to my bedroom, jumping when the door slammed behind me.

  I poured everything onto the bed. There were dozens of napkins stamped with the names of my mother’s favorite restaurants—most of which I recognized, none of which sounded Middle Eastern. I went through every single one. There was a replica of one of Julia Child’s mixing spoons, a tiny burned thing, that my father bought from the Smithsonian gift shop. There was a small bouquet of dried lavender whose flowers were now spewed all over my bed like fleas. The only good news was that there was a photo of my mother as a child, which I stuffed into the flap of my father’s old lumberjack hat to examine later. She hated photos of herself, and the only picture I could remember seeing was one my father had taken when they’d gone to the Berkshires. Her face was like something from an old movie. I’d found a treasure, and yet, no recipe. No restaurant. No nothing.

  I shook everything out again before I put it all back, just to be sure I wasn’t missing something. I gently nudged the box back under the couch just as Lou turned off the shower and turned on her electric toothbrush.

  Next, I scoured the Internet, searching for the restaurant, for any Iraqi restaurant in New York—for anything about it, reviews or photos or menus. Then for any Middle Eastern restaurant that had closed years ago. Nothing. Then for any Middle Eastern restaurant that hadn’t closed. Nothing helpful. I found lots of street carts and distribution corporations in Brooklyn. New York magazine mentioned a Syrian place in the theater district. So I took the portable phone and, balancing the laptop in one arm and opening the door silently with the other, went out of the apartment and into the hallway. Then I called, even though it was six thirty in the morning.

  I plopped down next to the elevator.

  When someone picked up and said hello, I was deep in the archives of Chowhound and almost forgot to respond.

  “Hello,” he said again in a very nonprofessional, non-restaurant-host voice. He had thick throat congestion and a heavy accent. I wanted to say A-hem before we continued. I imagined my mother. Lorca! Manners! But at Le Canard Capricieux, the GM hired the hostess based on her phone voice: GoodeveninglecanardcapricieuxhowmayIassistyou?

  “Sorry,” I said. “Maybe I have the wrong number? I’m looking for a restaurant.”

  “This is a restaurant,” he said. “We’re not open for breakfast. We’re not open for lunch either. And soon, we’re not open for dinner.”

  “Are you closing?” I said and because I didn’t think it through, I got hopeful.

  “Department of Health says we’ve got rats. I don’t think that’s the end of the world but they do and so does my wife.”

  “Oh,” I said. “I’m sorry. Do you make masgouf?” I whispered the word, not wanting my mother to hear.

  “Masgouf!” he yelled back. “Syria has only forty-four kilometers of the Tigris. Iraq has the whole thing. Masgouf is from the Tigris. Fish from freshwater Tigris water. We don’t have any masgouf here.”

  “Okay, and—” I started but he interrupted me.

  “Are you a critic? I can make you masgouf. You want masgouf? Do you have funding?”

  “No,” I said. “Sorry.”

  He said, “I’m sorry too. Have a happy holiday.”

  It wasn’t a holiday as far as I knew but he hung up before I could ask him about it.

  Chowhound turned up nothing on masgouf. Neither did MenuPages. I searched through Indian and Turkish restaurants. I called the Syrian guy back and asked him if he knew of any Iraqi restaurants in Manhattan and he said, “First, you want Iraqi dish. Now you want Iraqi restaurant. We’re Syrian! What can we do about it?”

  I said sorry and hung up for the second time.

  I went back into the apartment.

  Lou walked into the living room with her blouse on inside out. I was about to tell her when she put a finger over her lips, telling me to shush. She pointed to my sleeping mother. She put on her coat and rustled her keys. On her way out, she let the door slam. She opened it again.

  “So
rry, Nance,” she half whispered and blew my mother a kiss.

  Oh, and T.G.I.F., she mouthed to me before it occurred to her that I hadn’t left for school, and then she remembered what had happened yesterday. When she did, she threw her hands up as if to say that we’d once been on the same team and I’d deserted her. But we hadn’t been. Ever.

  I learned online that the previous month, the restaurant in Baghdad with the best masgouf had been blown up by a car bomb. It killed thirty-five people. There was a photo of a little boy crouching next to a corpse. His knees were wide, like he was about to jump up for leapfrog. His hair was still parted perfectly like little boys’ hair can be only when their mothers spend extra time. His hands were wrapped around the dead man’s feet, covered in blood like water-soaked oven mitts.

  I closed the screen.

  I couldn’t look at other people’s blood. Only mine.

  It was nearly noon when I decided I’d done all the research that I could possibly do at home—and I was no closer to finding the masgouf. For a moment, I wondered if somehow my mother was tricking me, trying to distract me. There might be no restaurant at all, no sacred recipe. This was all just to keep me busy and out of her way until I was sent to boarding school. You could never be sure with my mother. I wouldn’t give up so easily.

  I put my hair up and down and up and down four times before I managed to get out the door and to the bookstore. I wasn’t usually so fussy, but I was thinking of Blot. Finally, I braided it tight the way that my dad used to like and then took it out a short while later so it was crimpy. I brushed my teeth and flossed and used the tongue scraper even though it wasn’t like I was planning on kissing him. Not even a little.

  Before I left, I told my mother I was going out. She was lying on her back on the couch and she flipped her head toward me. It was like an oven opening, the sudden gush of flushed light. Ever since I was a child, I’d wanted to savor that exact moment when I was leaving, the brief second in which she looked at me, acknowledging that tiny bit of mystery in my departure, my leaving her, for a change, the possibility that I might not come back. It had always seemed to me that I might never see her again—even when I was with her, it felt constantly like she was just coming or going.

  Of course, I’d probably do better at the library, find out more, but Blot didn’t work at a library.

  At the bookstore, I collected three books: one on Middle Eastern cuisine, one on favorite fish dishes of Manhattan, and one with two hundred applications for watercress. My mother loved watercress.

  It was quieter than usual even for a Friday. There was a reading going on in the children’s section. The mothers were bouncing their legs. Strollers were positioned in a line. I slunk around the store as if I might get in trouble for being school age and not in school.

  I went to the third floor’s standardized-test section because it was deserted. Also because the books were big enough to reach the fronts of the shelves, so when I sat and leaned back against them, it wasn’t like leaning back against the top of a picket fence. Sometimes I wanted to say to someone—and the someone was always my mother—Look. See? It isn’t all the time. I can help myself. I’m not a danger to myself or to others. There’s no reason to send me away. Look at me just sitting here. Look at me trying to be comfortable.

  The week before, I’d read a whole book on mushrooms, and later I’d said something to my mother about morels and she’d said, “Hey now! Look at you, daughter of my heart.” My chest tingled with bubbles until she went ballistic on the phone to one of her sous-chefs, who’d quit. And on a Saturday. If I’d picked up first I would have told him that it was not a good idea and that he should trust me because if I knew anything, I knew my mother. After that, she said she couldn’t even speak. She turned on the TV so loud that I had to move some of the pieces in Aunt Lou’s porcelain poodle collection so they wouldn’t shimmy off the dresser and shatter. The sous-chef debacle cut off my morel story before it had even begun.

  I also sat here because Blot’s desk was no more than ten steps away.

  I had plopped down in a nice little spot where I could see him. My pulse did jumping jacks. He was in charge of this section—self-help, test-taking, libros en español. He had blond hair, flushed cheeks, and roughed-up leather boots that looked like they belonged to a different century. The bottoms of his pants were stained with black but he rolled them up so that it looked like dark cuffs. It occurred to me that maybe this was intentional, like he was too busy reading to take the stuff to the laundry. He wasn’t dirty. A number of times, I had imagined myself smelling his chest, but I tried to stop thinking that way, realizing how insane it was. He kept a book in his back pocket and a pencil behind his ear. His hair was long enough that he was always touching it, swatting it away from his face like some kind of stubborn bug. I wondered what it looked like wet, if it stuck to his head like a little kid’s, like mine. Now I imagined him leading me to a very secret place in Central Park with the biggest trees you’ve ever seen and a twig canopy. He’d read from a book and for some reason it was in Portuguese, which for some reason I understood. I told myself to get a grip, which is like trying to sear scallops in liquid.

  He wore his nametag on his collar, and I loved how his name was stranger than mine. I liked to think it was a loving nickname, maybe from his baby sister who couldn’t pronounce Blake or Blaise, though he didn’t look like either of those. He used to have a skateboard that he tooled around on until his manager said, “Hey.” I could tell, though, adults couldn’t stay mad at him. In that way, he was the opposite of me.

  He carried a huge stack of shiny books wrapped in plastic, and when he walked by he gave me a little wave, keeping his elbow tight to his side. I looked around. There was no one but me. Me? I looked at my lap. I looked up. He was waiting. It was the first time he’d waved. Usually, he’d tighten his lower lip, a kind of acknowledgment, as I’d been here a thousand times. I’d tighten mine back. I practiced it in the mirror to be sure I didn’t look like a duck. Now what, I thought. I had already done my lip thing. Or had I? I couldn’t remember now. So I did it again but my mouth was stiff like I’d been sucking on frozen peach slices. I was relieved when he started walking again. At least I hadn’t done something hugely ridiculous like yelling a Hey, Blot! and waving with octopus arms. It occurred to me that I’d been staring at him for far too long. Probably he had to wave. Probably he was just being polite.

  I needed to start looking for the recipe, but I was distracted.

  I was sweating. I shouldn’t have walked so quickly. My mother liked to say that I scurried like a pigeon. I took off my backpack and sweater. The bandage on my leg was thin, and, I noticed, the blood had leaked through. A dot of purple stained the pants on my thigh. Stupid Kanetha Jackson. She’d startled me. Made the knife go straight in. I went to the nurse. They made me. I was fine. The nurse was mousy. She never looked me in the eye and must have thought that I was some kind of vamp nut. But when the goose bumps came, she put her hand flat out on my thigh and kept it there, as if blessing me. I wanted to put my fingers between her clean, unfancy mother hands. I wondered about her own children, about whether she sat with them in the mornings and watched them eat breakfast. I bet she did. I bet she made them eat oatmeal—or pancakes, if they must, but blueberry buckwheat. Something with a little heft, she’d say, opening the fridge and reaching for the milk.

  My mother was always sleeping in the mornings; I’d become a professional tiptoe. A professional silent French-toast maker too. You couldn’t blame her for being tired. She had a staff of thirty-five but some of them were so unprofessional. Sometimes a prep chef would just not show up. I wanted to tell them what they did to her. How they wore on her nerves.

  I put my jacket over my legs, put on my sweater, and made sure Blot hadn’t seen the blood, which he hadn’t. I didn’t even know where he’d gone.

  I took out my notebook and opened the book about Middle Eastern cuisine. It was divided up by region. Iraq took up only six pages,
and three of them were recipes for desserts. I was about to get up when Blot’s shoe appeared on the gray carpet beside my leg. My heart did that sighing thing again, and out of nowhere I felt like I had to pee. I glanced up and held my jaw tight so I didn’t look like a smiling dimwit. I narrowed my eyes, pretending something was bright. It kept the grinning at bay.

  “What are you doing?” he asked. “You always look so busy.”

  “What am I doing?” I repeated, no better than an intelligent parrot. “I’m researching,” I said. I gestured to my notebook and hoped that he couldn’t see my notes. I’d drawn his shoe one day, next to a recipe for Ina Garten’s savory coeur à la crème. I thought, It wouldn’t take much to recognize your own shoe. I got lightheaded. I covered the pages with my hands.

  “Researching what?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. Stuff,” I said too harshly. I hoped he wouldn’t go away.

  He sat down next to me and rested his arms on his knees. His legs were so long and thin that he could have tied them into knots. He moved his hair out of his face. He smelled of detergent and deli, which meant bacon. I took this as a very good sign. I was into bacon. My mother had said, one day when she loved me, “I want to wrap you up in bacon and put you on a silver tray.”

  “Stuff,” he repeated. He rubbed his chin, pretending to be old, though he was probably only nineteen, five long years older than me.

  “You know,” I said. “Like, stuff.” It felt like there was cheesecloth between my brain and me.

  “I’m a stuff specialist,” he said. “So if you need any help, I’m Blot.”

  “I know,” I said, and in a moment of rare clarity, I pointed to his nametag so I didn’t seem like a stalker who might also know his birthday, address, and mother’s maiden name. He smiled. He didn’t ask me my name. He just sat there, not really waiting for anything, just sort of being there, with or without me. Quiet. I’d never been good at that. Aunt Lou said that a lady should refrain from blurting but I couldn’t help it: I’d become someone who snuffed out silence.