Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots

by Jessica Soffer

  I blurted, “I’m Lorca.” Blot’s dimples flashed but didn’t make him look young. I had nowhere to look, so I looked at his fingers. Black lines were under his nails as if he’d scraped off all the words of a book, page by page by page. He put his hands into his pockets. I wanted to tell him that I wasn’t grossed out, that he shouldn’t be embarrassed, and that I was always embarrassed too. I wanted to tell him that I would like to see his fingers again. I hadn’t meant to make him uncomfortable.

  “Lorca,” he said softly to his shoes. No one had ever said my name like that. “Wasn’t Lorca the gay one?” he asked, out of nowhere. “Wasn’t he the one they shot?”

  “No,” I snapped, hating myself for a second but also not needing Blot to think that my parents wanted me dead.

  “Yes,” he said. “I know I read that somewhere.”

  “No,” I said again. And then: “Yes.” When the sound repeated in my head, it was impatient and rude.

  “That’s cool, though,” Blot said. “It’s cool to be named after a poet guy.”

  I wanted to tell him, but didn’t, that my father had named me after Federico García Lorca because he wrote about the moon’s white petticoats and the gypsies. (I didn’t speak Spanish, but I memorized the whole poem in its original language when I was seven, and when I recited it to my father, tears came to his eyes and he kissed my face all over, again and again. El niño la mira, mira.) And because my mother had still loved my father then, when I was born, she’d let him choose my name.

  I wanted to ask Blot what he knew about Lorca. Why else a father might have named his daughter after him. Maybe, I thought, I could feel closer to him, knowing those things. Blot got up. I whispered, “Wait,” but reconsidered and did a pretty good cover-up:

  “His first play,” I said, “was actually El maleficio de la mariposa, not Mariana Pineda. It’s about a cockroach and a butterfly who fall in love. It’s a common misconception that it was Mariana Pineda.”

  I was an idiot. Where did I get this stuff? He must know that I loved him. What else?

  “Cool,” Blot said. There went the dimples again. They made me forget to breathe out.

  “Thank you,” I said. Stupid. Moron. Idiot.

  Just as Blot was walking away, it occurred to me that if I really wanted to find the recipe and save myself, I couldn’t waste any time.

  “Hey,” I blurted, a little spit flying. “Do you have any older issues of Zagat?” My face went hot and numb as it occurred to me that this was a bookstore and not a library and why would they?

  “Well, no,” he said. “We replace them every year. We have the newest one downstairs.”

  Obviously. Then I lied. “Oh, the old ones are very valuable,” I said. “The Strand has some in their rare-book collection.”

  “We don’t,” he said. “Are you looking for something specific?”

  Specifically, I wanted to know if he wanted to search for the masgouf with me. If he wanted to traipse around the city and hold my hand and maybe eat a hundred different dishes until we found the one that would make my mother go bananas, in a good way. His presence would change everything. That was the specific question I wanted to ask him. And the specific answer I was looking for was I’d love to. I can’t wait. That’s what I wanted him to say.

  Then, carefully, I explained the situation to him—excluding all the parts about getting in trouble, boarding school, hurting myself, and the romantic bits featuring him. He said, “Is it a special birthday or something? Is that why you want to make your mother the fish?” I hadn’t expected that. I hadn’t expected that it might seem strange that I would go to Mars and back for my mother for no good reason. You’d think I’d have realized how weird this was earlier, years before, but I hadn’t.

  My mother was an enigma, fickle, unknowable, like a giant fish. She loved me in fits and spurts. Lou said that she was how she was because she was adopted. “Someone didn’t love her enough. How about cutting her a little slack?” I told her one thousand times a day how much I loved her, hoping the words would do the trick, but they didn’t. I had to show her love on her own terms, remind her of her kind of happiness. The masgouf was the perfect thing. The only thing.

  “Yeah,” I lied. “It’s a big birthday this year.”

  “Cool,” he said. “Let’s see what we’ve got.”

  I seemed totally normal for a minute, and, I thought, it had taken me only a million lies to get there.

  We spent the next few hours looking through books about New York City restaurants and then books about Middle Eastern cuisine. The most astonishing part of the whole thing was how comfortable I felt. Blot’s co-workers walked by and nodded to him and then to me, as if I were someone they knew. And I said “Hey!” to them, not even caring how high or stupid my voice sounded. We sat on the floor. Every so often, he had to get up and go to his desk, to make sure everything was status quo, and when he came back and sat down, I very discreetly watched the space on the carpet—to gauge whether he’d come closer or moved farther off. Also, I devised a way to hold my sleeves in my hands, over my wrists. My whole wrists. It didn’t look awful. It looked like a thing. I pretended I was him looking at me. I didn’t seem nuts.

  “Are you cold?” he asked at one point.

  “Always,” I said, and felt brilliant. He might want to protect me, I thought. One day, he might offer me his coat.

  “Me too,” he said. “I’m from Baltimore. The ‘South.’” He made quotation marks with his fingers.

  I laughed. And though I couldn’t place Baltimore on a map, I wasn’t an idiot. I knew a thing or two about Maryland crabs and that it had to be a tiny bit warmer there than here.

  In the end, there was nothing in the books about the restaurant. There were, however, a couple of recipes for masgouf. One said that you absolutely must catch the fish in the Tigris or the Euphrates and cook it over an open fire using apricot logs. The history books said that carp was used exclusively, but the modern recipes improvised with red snapper and salmon and, in one case, catfish.

  “How about the lake in Central Park?” Blot asked.

  “I think the Hudson would work,” I joked, and he did a double thumbs-up. We found another book that said fish from the Tigris and Euphrates absolutely should not be consumed because of the many bodies that had been dumped in those rivers. Islamic religious leaders had issued fatwas on the poor creatures. Blot gave me a little elbow jab and said, “Wowie.” The feeling of his touching me echoed on my skin for hours.

  “Your Hudson River idea is sounding better and better,” he said, and even my toes blushed.

  I tried not to examine him even when I didn’t think he was looking. One dimple was bigger than the other. One eye was slightly lazy. There was a tiny divot, like a thumbprint, in the middle of his bottom lip. His eyelashes were not only long but also wet-looking, making his eyes seem brighter, like he’d been swimming for hours in the cleanest, coldest lake.

  We learned that the fish must be cut down its back, not its belly. I didn’t tell Blot that the only time I’d ever butterflied a fish, my mother had stopped me midway through and told me I was taking too many short strokes. What was I trying to do? Make it into chum? Instead, I told him I had no idea how to butterfly a fish, had never even thought about it. He said, “Let’s find out!” And he set off in search of another book that might teach us how. Every time he came back to me, I realized that I’d been holding my breath.

  “The restaurant might have been right around here, near Eighty-Fifth Street,” I said. “That’s where my father used to stay when he came to the city, at this fancy banker’s guest townhouse. He had built all their furniture.”

  It was easy to explain my weird family to him when we were both turning pages, not looking at each other.

  “Well,” Blot said, “how about this? How about we try just walking around? This neighborhood’s full of old folk. Someone must know something.”

  I was silent. He’d said “we.”

  “I just happe
n to be free,” he added. For a second, I wondered if he simply felt sorry for me. If he was trying to be nice and was channeling a very fancy great-aunt who had taught him well. But it didn’t seem that way. From the bottom of my heart, I swear that it didn’t. It felt honest.

  I gave out a too-happy puff of air and then sucked in and kind of snorted.

  “Want to go after work?” he asked. “I get off at seven.”

  A chill shot down my spine. I wanted to be close to him. I wanted to tell him all my secrets and I didn’t want to tell him any. I wanted to show him my foot, my whole arm, to know if he’d find me disgusting, awful. Just to know. I wondered if everyone had that. The one thing a person always wanted to say forever and ever to get herself out of things and into things. The one thing that mattered the most.

  “Okay,” I said instead. “I’ll come back.”

  On the street, out of habit, I thought of ways to hurt myself. It would have been so easy to do it then. It was dark out. Our block was always quiet except in the morning, when people sat in their cars as the street sweeper passed through. But now it would be deserted.

  All sorts of crazy things went through my head—me and Blot tapping on fish tanks at the pet store; me and Blot collecting lost mittens in the snow; me and Blot tangled in a big coffee-shop chair, reading about Ugli fruit and sharing a cranberry-walnut muffin. I spent what seemed like hours wondering what he liked for dinner. I imagined his apartment with a worn wooden table and huge, rickety windows that looked out onto two, maybe three bridges. I bet he cooked for his cool musician friends, mixing spaghetti and sauce and cheese in one giant pot and folding toilet paper into triangles for napkins. I wondered if he would tell them that there was some crazy girl at work who was obsessed with him. But in my true heart, that’s not what I imagined he’d say. I imagined him telling them my name, saying it just like he’d said it to me: Lorca. Like the o was a bubble that he nudged gently off his tongue. L. Ooorc. Ca.

  I kept my mind on him, and my whole body felt lighter, like there was some strong, warm current moving around me. And I did nothing bad. For hours, I kept myself in check.

  My mother had every other Friday off.

  After I got home from the bookstore, I decided to make dinner for her and Aunt Lou. If they were eating or full, it would be easier for me to leave to meet Blot for our not-date. I would bustle around the kitchen and then bustle out the door. Usually, I was on the couch. If I got up for some orange juice, my mother said, “Where are you off to, little girl?” and even if it was nowhere, I’d have to do a whole song and dance.

  Pasta arrabbiata. Lidia Bastianich used pepperoncini and prosciutto ends for hers. Me too. I set the table and lit candles. I was happy. I hadn’t hurt myself. I hadn’t done one thing. I even shaved my legs like a normal person. I’d kept thinking, in the shower, Look at me! Look at me do this! I put on clean jeans and socks that matched and I took more than four seconds to braid my hair. I didn’t put on music but I found myself humming. I kept thinking, He’ll forget. He didn’t mean it. But actually, in my heart of hearts, I believed he did.

  I said, “Dinner’s served!” Aunt Lou told me not to shout.

  Just when we were all ready to start, my mother looked at her plate and said, “You know what arrabbiata means, right?”

  I had a feeling about where this conversation was going.

  “It means ‘angry,’” she said. “Like a red-hot Sicilian woman. Aurelio made it for me the night I left him. He had no idea it was coming. So ironic. So ironic! He took the whole bowl of it and threw it against the wall. That’s how much he cared.”

  Aurelio was a man she’d dated in Italy. That’s all I knew about it.

  I wanted them to eat. I wanted them to hurry so I could pretend to be busy cleaning up. I hadn’t stopped smiling. No one said a thing and I was actually grateful for that. For once, I appreciated it.

  “You never should have left him,” Lou said, all dreamy, picking out all the pepperoncini and making a decorative little clump of them in the middle of the table. I put them in a saucer and she glared at me.

  “I know,” my mother said, and she swirled a piece of basil around her plate until I finished my pasta. “I definitely shouldn’t have left.”

  The phone rang. I jumped up and then felt stupid. Blot didn’t have my phone number.

  “Expecting someone?” Lou said, and I said, “No.” I made buckteeth at her. She made them back and then picked up. It was obvious from her smirk that it was Jorge, the married man Aunt Lou sometimes went away with. Sometimes he didn’t call for three weeks, and Lou went back on her diet for real, got a wax, and bought ninety-seven pairs of shoes.

  She covered the mouthpiece and rolled her eyes. “So needy,” she said, and walked into the other room. Yeah, right.

  It was the perfect time then. I should have gotten my sneakers and left. My mother put up her feet on Lou’s chair. She hadn’t had any pasta, and she was on her fourth glass of wine. It had plumped up her cheeks. Her mascara was in little black pepper flakes around her eyes. She let her head fall onto the back of the chair and she breathed out like she was making imaginary smoke rings.

  Now.

  “Oh,” I said. “Crap. I have to pick up homework from school before the weekend. If I keep up with it, I can still get grades for this semester. Principal Hidalgo said she’d leave it with the guard.”

  Such a lie. Such a big huge lie that no one would notice.

  I put on my sneakers and my coat and I was just about to leave when my mother said, “Come, Lorca. Just come here for a second.”

  Then, very casually, like it wasn’t the point of everything, she said, “Oh, you can go. You don’t have to stay here with me.”

  I went back to the table and sat down. She didn’t budge. My coat was bunched under me. Her head was still back. When her neck was long and stretched like this, I could see the structure of it, the evidence of lack of sun and air, skin like rungs on a ladder, covered in the slightest layer of dust. She was quiet.

  “Let me tell you something,” she said. She hadn’t had a bite of her dinner. I’d even curled the pasta into a little linguine nest in the center of each bowl. My mother’s was still perfect and round and cold. The sauce had darkened.

  “This is delish,” she said. “But it needs red wine. I tell you because I love you and you should know for the future.”

  She went on about deglazing and how it brings out the earthy taste of the onions and never use wine you wouldn’t drink yourself and a young, robust wine is what you use in red sauces, nothing fortified or dry, for example.

  I was sweating in my coat. My stomach was starting to itch. I should have worn an undershirt. I was thirsty. I reminded myself to remind myself to smell my armpits before I went. With her head back like this, every time she took a sip of the wine, her throat looked like a snake that was swallowing a mouse. She wanted to talk about Aurelio some more. She wasn’t looking at me. Whenever she talked about other men, I thought of my father. I didn’t hate him. There was never a second that I hated him. Sometimes the phone rang and I’d pick up and it was quiet on the other end except for what sounded like rustling trees, which I knew was absurd. It was just the way I imagined him. If no one else was home, I’d say, “Dad. Dad?” But no one ever said anything back. When I called *69, it said the number was blocked. There were a billion other people it could have been, though I’d put us on the Do Not Call list, so it probably wasn’t just anyone.

  “Your father was never like that,” she was saying. “Passionate like that. Can you blame me?” She wasn’t talking to me. She was talking to the ceiling.

  “I wanted him to fight for us,” she said, making figure eights in the air with her glass, and then she gave a sudden punch, like she was in some kind of rally. Some of her wine spilled out and went sailing onto the floor.

  “Fight, fight, fight!” she said. “For anything. It didn’t matter what.”

  I said, “I wanted that too,” but she didn’t hear me.
I wanted her to fight for me. I used a paper towel and my foot to clean up the wine puddle.

  “I wanted him to tell us not to go and to really take a stand about it,” she said. “But he wimped out. Like everyone, he got wimpy on me.”

  “Then why did you fall in love with him?” I asked. “If he was such a wimp.”

  She put her glass down, glared at me like I’d misunderstood everything.

  “He changed,” she said. “I thought I knew what he was after. In the beginning, when I worked at La Grenouille, he sent back my sweetbreads. No one had ever done that. He said rosemary was a moth deterrent.”

  She put back her head again.

  “And he was the first man bold enough to order for me at a restaurant. He was his own person then, so into wood. He used to get totally lost looking at a barstool. You wouldn’t believe it. But then, eventually, his interest became me. I was pregnant and he wouldn’t get off my back. If it had stayed like that, I would have left him right then and there. But things ebbed and flowed. I’ll tell you what, though. If he’d liked my sweetbreads, he wouldn’t have had a chance in hell.”

  I refilled her glass. It was 7:05. She wasn’t done. I wanted her to say something about how my needing her was different from my father’s needs. I was her daughter. That kind of need was necessary, biological, heartening. There were a million words I wanted to put in her mouth, but she said none of them. At 7:30, she lifted her head, disconcerted, flushed.

  “Didn’t you say you had to go somewhere?” she said.

  “No,” I said. “It’s okay.”

  By then, I’d taken off my coat. My back was cold with sweat.

  “You go,” she said. “I’ll be fine.”

  “All right,” I said. I put on my coat. I didn’t even want to go anymore. He wouldn’t be there. I’d be ridiculous.