I printed it out, folded it, and put it into my wallet. The truth was, I’d done things like this before: cut out the saddest article I’d ever read about children getting raped or about animals being skinned just for money. I could use that as an excuse when I didn’t have one. I told myself I was hurting so they could hurt less.
Victoria
FIVE YEARS BEFORE, I would have bet my life that I would never work again. We’d closed the restaurant. My feet hurt. I had no more small talk in me. That’s what being a hostess is. It’s walking and talking. I would have said, had anyone asked, that I wanted to do nothing but catch up. Gather my rosebuds. That I’d like to never ask another person how he was doing, if he needed anything. An extra napkin, perhaps? The check? All the little things I needed to take care of, I’d finally have the time to do: clean out the junk drawer, glue a broken turtle sculpture, throw out ripped stockings, edit our cabinet of spices. The coriander had no flavor. It had been there for years. Chipped dishes needed weeding out.
But Joseph got sick. I told myself that the catching up would have to be put on hold. There wasn’t time for it. No room for it. All I wanted to do was wait for him to get better. I hate to be superstitious, because what’s the point? You know what they say about a watched pot. I watched him. In Baghdad, they’d say, “A fog cannot be dispelled with a fan.” Still, I waited. I would sit for so long my knees went numb. I began delaying my coffee until ten. I found that it was best not to start reading until noon. That way, there was all afternoon to do it. The nurses began to make me lunch. I would sometimes notice that I hadn’t changed clothes in a week. I had been waiting. I waited. I thought I’d never have the energy to work again. And yet, when Dottie left with the photo of me, threatening to see the graphics whiz kid upstairs, I didn’t run after her. I didn’t wrestle her to the floor and yank the picture from her hands. But now, the class held so much weight. Our daughter might come through the door. I wanted to capture the image. I wanted to hold it down in my head and examine it. I wanted to see her face. Of course she wouldn’t come. I knew she wouldn’t. It was self-indulgent for me to think this way. Foolish too.
But what would she think? I wondered. If she did come. I knew what: Remind me to kill myself before I end up like her is what. Look at her clothes. The moth holes. Everything needs airing out. She must sit in here with the windows shut so tight that she inhales in the evening what she exhaled that morning. That’s what she’d think—and that it smelled old in here. Like someone had been napping with an open mouth. She’d feel trapped. I couldn’t blame her.
I opened the windows. I lit a candle. I ran a dishtowel over the hanging pots so they didn’t look so dull. I tinkered around with the silverware so that there was sound in the kitchen again. I poured soap all over the sink. There.
Monday morning, less than twenty-four hours before the first class, I woke up at two, anxious to check on Joseph. I turned on the lamp, put on my robe, and got to the doorway before I remembered. It took that long.
It had been just three nights since Joseph died, and there had been much of the same: the same concern shaking me in my sleep, hurling me into a state of groggy paranoia. And then—disappointment. I stood at the doorway, aware of a certain quality about the air. It felt fluid—more than before—and unpunctuated, as if everything swished around between the walls, unchecked. I was alone. I was the only breathing thing. I thought of our daughter. Imagined her somehow here too. She was everywhere now, a fast-moving shadow attached to every one of our things. I thought about Joseph’s body, not alive but— No, I wouldn’t say it. Not alive. The remains would come soon and then I’d put him in his study, in his urn, next to a photograph of his mother. She was wide-shouldered and stern, almost manly. Her smile was a short, straight line. He would be ashes beside her. Lighter than feathers. She could strew him all over with a snort, a too-brusque turn on her square heel to grab a fleeing chicken.
I wished I could have kept his body, his actual body, for a little while longer. It’s morbid but I read about a lady who kept her husband in her garage. She liked to pay the bills with him present. It was something they used to do together. And so, once he was dead, she brought her manila envelopes, her pens, stamps, and calculator to the garage. She sat on a chair and reminded him that the late fee for the electric bill was exorbitant, that they really should switch cable companies. I thought of her when I decided to put the urn on the shelf, where I knew it would get the morning sun. Joseph believed there were two kinds of people: morning-sun people, and the others.
I went into the kitchen and turned on the light. It made the hallway look darker, denser. All of the ingredients were here. I’d ordered them over the phone yesterday and had them delivered to our door. Even flowers. Now I rearranged the flowers in their vase. I cut up some lemons and put them in a Mason jar with olive oil, sugar, and salt. It felt good to be doing this. The lemons were now the brightest part of this house. It was already tomorrow. Seventeen hours until class. The thought made me want to lock the door. If someone rang, I’d just not answer.
And yet, for a moment, I was proud. The citrus slices were floating in their jar in perfect, consistent rounds. Later, I’d tell the students to do this very thing. They’re great to have on hand, I’d say. Simply throw one in the pan with your chicken or fish.
Our child might think of me as the kind of woman who prepared, who kept heaps of little meat pies, sfiha, wrapped in tin foil in the freezer, who was ready at a moment’s notice to whip up a feast. I should have made some turshee, or some other pickled goodie that would last. I used to do that all the time. I used to be that kind of woman. Maybe our daughter would feel less sad knowing that I hadn’t given her up because I was incapable, a drug addict, a loser. It was because I was smart and deliberate, a planner, a woman who stuck to her guns. Right? Wouldn’t it seem like that? I knew what was best for her. The truth was, I hid Pop-Tarts behind the vinegar. Broken bits of wheat crackers lined the couch like a random sprouting of tiny mushrooms.
A wave of tiredness came over me and I started back to the bedroom. I wasn’t afraid of being alone until I thought about it. I tiptoed. I checked that the door was locked. I jumped when I noticed the Chinese takeout menu on the floor, forcibly stuffed halfway under the door. I wasn’t sure if I was afraid of an intruder or if I felt like one myself. Joseph’s father, a great believer in proverbs, used to say something like “At the end of the night, all ghostly cries can be heard.” Haunted.
I crawled back into bed. It occurred to me that I might not have enough almonds, that the chickpeas wouldn’t have sufficient time to soak, that everyone would be bored, that I wouldn’t remember how to remove the lamb from the bone and I’d mangle the thing. I’d had it delivered from the best butcher in town. The extra eighty cents per pound to have it filleted wouldn’t have killed me. I should have splurged. And what if someone asks about chicken liver foam? I wondered. I was behind the times. I didn’t make foam. I didn’t want them to whisper. That, I couldn’t take.
And yet, I was hopeful.
Four people had called to confirm yesterday. Four people with four different voices, using four different phones, four different pairs of socks on their feet. Actual people, I thought, including Robert. No relation to Dottie. One of them was a woman, the right age. When she said “Hello,” my hands began to quiver. Her voice was tugged just slightly by French and I wondered, Had our daughter gone to boarding school in the Alps? Did she ski? I couldn’t. I’d never learned.
I didn’t dream every night. But that night I did, and I remembered it. There were rows of chickens lined up along our counter. And there was a knife. I sharpened it. I got that far. I lifted up a chicken and turned it over like I was just about to fillet it. I pulled its legs apart. I was in a red apron. But then. Nothing. I couldn’t for the life of me recall what to do then.
I started getting dressed four hours before class. And a good thing too. It didn’t go well. I was an old lady. A deflation. My knees sagged into rotten
peaches. Even my ankles were orbits of skin above my feet. Let us not discuss my neck or chest. God forbid. The clothes looked horrid.
I tried on every hostess outfit I had. They were all too big. Worse, they were highly inappropriate. Worse. In the calculated light of our restaurant, with Arabic music and high heels and stockings, they’d worked because they were ethnic and part of the whole thing. But now they were absurd: shimmery and sounding like crunching lettuce when I walked. I tried on a black dress. Too fancy. A pair of purple slacks and white blouse. I put on my orange corduroys. Old Faithfuls. I’d worn them on the Friday that John F. Kennedy was shot. I was shining Joseph’s shoes in front of the television and he was rubbing my shoulders. I dropped the shoe right onto my finger when we heard it. I pinched it so badly that a blood blister formed.
Now I called Dottie.
“Dottie,” I said, “I have nothing to wear. I can’t even find an apron.”
I knew this would thrill her. She’d be flattered to the point of tears.
Sure enough, she waltzed through the door seconds later in a red chenille robe. I made a face and then began to laugh. Her smile disappeared. She looked away.
“If you feel I have so little fashion sense,” she said, nose up, turning around, “you shouldn’t have phoned.”
“I have no choice,” I said. “Who else can I call?”
I used to be easy to talk to. I used to say the right things. I was a hostess, for crying out loud. Now I was hateful. And to Dottie? She didn’t deserve this. She was all I really had—actually had. Again, it occurred to me to tell her about the note, about our daughter, but I couldn’t. All these years, Dottie had wanted to be part of our relationship—Joseph and mine. We were so solid. And it was only because of that that we could tolerate her. My admitting to Joseph’s secret, our secret, would unravel too much.
I looked down. I was in a towel. There were two hours until the class.
“Dottie, please,” I said. “Look at me. I need you.”
She smelled like a cosmetics shop. It made my nose itch.
“You do,” she said. “Of course you do. What’s happened to you?”
What had happened to me? I looked terrible. I was an utter disappointment.
Dottie realized what she’d done, how she’d affected me. Her face got smaller with embarrassment.
“I’m okay,” I said.
“I know,” she said.
She took a deep breath and waited for me to follow suit. Inhale. Exhale.
“Go wash your face,” she said, quieter, gentler now. “I’ll be back.”
As she walked out, I noticed toilet paper stuck to the heel of her shoe. I began to say something but stopped myself. Sometimes, enough is enough.
I threw cold water on my face and believed that I smelled, in the threads that dripped off my nose, notes of cinnamon and leather. Joseph’s after-shave. I held my breath, willing the smell back. I’d forgotten he was gone. How long did that last? When would it sink in, I wondered, and stop surprising me? When would it be everywhere all the time, like a season in full? I walked out of the bathroom, sat down on the bed, steeling my body against lying down.
I looked again at the only traces I had of my daughter. Here were papers from the adoption agency in New Jersey, unfolded now but with deep, determined lines all through. The phone number of the doctor I’d seen. Here was a little cloth, yellowed and flimsy now. I’d tried to leave it at the hospital. I left my clothes. I left my comb. I left the book I’d been reading with the bookmark inside. I didn’t care. I left the cloth I used to wipe my face—or so I thought. Earlier, I’d been looking for my pearl bracelet and found the cloth shoved to the back of a drawer in our guest bathroom. It was among junk—hair clips, broken blow dryers, unused hostess gifts; everything that had no place. Joseph must have retrieved it. I’d gasped. What had I done to him? He’d tried so hard to hold on. Had I ever said I was sorry? That I couldn’t remember made me hate him less for his secret.
The papers and cloth were all I had of her. Everything and nothing. Everything important ends up in a tiny space. A drawer, a safe, an envelope, a small jar with a lid.
It was pathetic, I realized, for me to go looking for her now, after all these years. After she’d known Joseph and she’d never wanted to know me. But without me, she’d never know that he’d passed. Or would she? Had he had a plan for this: that the nurse would call her, or our lawyer? Was everyone in on the secret but me?
I went into the living room and waited for Dottie. She came back, her arms weighed down with outfits that I’d never even seen. She put one thing against me and held the hanger above my head, accidentally whacking me with it. Then another. Another. “Yuck,” she said, and I was embarrassed. I was awful. That was the truth of it. There was a lump in my throat, like all my organs had been gathered and knotted there. I was weak. This was too much.
But then she found it. Her head bobbed like mad when she put a blue wrap dress against me.
“That’s the one,” she said. “It’s the perfect thing.”
“It is?” I said, but she wasn’t paying attention. I looked at her, wanted her to know that I had something to say—I wanted to tell her how important this day was, what it meant—but she was fumbling with a pile of tangled jewelry, shaking it, cursing. “Lord Jesus!” she shouted.
As quickly as it came, the urge to speak vanished. You say it and it’s no longer yours.
Dottie helped me into the dress. I held on to her. She held on to the dresser. And still, we were shaking.
“Aren’t we agile,” I said.
“Don’t I know it,” she said.
She tied a bow at my hip. She came close. I wanted to rest on her.
I sat down to stuff my feet into some slippers. She wasn’t going to make me wear heels. I stood up. She bent her knees to get a good look at me. She pulled a chunky silver bracelet from her pocket and shoved it onto my wrist.
“There,” she said. “Ta-da.”
I was pinching at the fabric, squirming in it.
“Too tight,” I said.
“Shush you,” she said.
I tried to untie the dress but she smacked me on the hand.
“Don’t,” she said. “You’re perfect.”
I acted like I wasn’t happy about it because for the moment, I was.
I let her do her thing. Fuss over my hair and apply three different lip-glosses to my mouth. I kept waiting for her to mention the slippers but she didn’t. That was the thing about Dottie. Sometimes, she was exactly right.
“Don’t come down here during class,” I said.
“Oh, please,” she said. “I’d double your attendance.” She swung her hips, winked with one eye and then the other. I liked Dottie like this. When she was jokey, not taking things personally. She had some stake in this class too, I knew. We were both less futile, less old, for it.
It was seven o’clock and no one had shown up.
It was seven fifteen and no one had shown up.
It was seven thirty and no one had shown up.
Dottie had come down twice already. She knocked on the door. Banged, really. She started yelling, “Victoria! Open the door! It’s Dottie!” She singsonged it so the neighbors wouldn’t think less of her, or that she was unloved. I didn’t open it. I heard her shoes click-clack right back to where they’d come from. Let her pout herself sick, I thought.
The phone had rung once, at about ten after seven, and I’d thought it might be one of them saying the subways were flooded or, better yet, he or she was downstairs but the dumb buzzer didn’t seem to be working. But it was no one. I raced to the phone but there was no one on the other end. I kept saying, “Hello, hello, hello.” Nothing. “¿Hola? Soy Victoria,” I tried.
I’d spent too much time hoping. In the beginning, I’d been skeptical. It’s better that way, always safer. It was Dottie’s fault for getting me into this in the first place. She hadn’t gotten my hopes up though. That was my own doing. I got a little dreamy. It felt nice
. I let go. That’s the compromise. I forgot that. Happiness is an act of faith. But you can’t let it in and be done with it. Emotions come at you from all directions. I forgot to cover my head. It had been a while.
Now, you’d think the sadness would come from something else. From loneliness, rejection, something fundamental. But it didn’t. It was from the silly fact that I was all dressed. It took so much effort. I’d clipped on earrings. They pulled. They made my ears hot. Now my earlobes were raw and stiff. In the end, I’d taken off my slippers and put on shoes. Not only that, but I’d put powder in too. I used mouthwash. I cut my hangnails. So much for nothing.
I went back to the kitchen and looked at the stations I’d set up. I’d set up stations! One for peeling and chopping. Another for butchering the meat. Another with the food processor and a spatula. The salt was in the water. The water was in the pot. The pot was on the stove. It would have boiled. There would have been so many bubbles and that smell of starch. I loved that, cooking in the evenings. Basmati rice was my favorite smell in the restaurant. Nothing like it.
Each person was going to have a station. I would have pointed them out, like exits on an airplane. I had baked date-nut bread. The smell still floated in the kitchen. It’s the oldest trick in the book.
It didn’t surprise me. Or it did, but it shouldn’t have. I’d had this feeling it wasn’t going to work out. I imagined our daughter getting to her building’s elevator and turning around, going back inside her apartment. I imagined her taking off her coat, stuffing it into the closet. I imagined her telling her husband to sit down because she was going to prepare dinner after all; I imagined her kids cheering. She took homemade pizza dough out of the freezer. Together, they all cut the smoked mozzarella, the mini yellow tomatoes. The kids assembled them as they crouched on stools. All the while, their mother hated me. That kind of thinking was a leap of faith too. I was a pessimist. Joseph always said, “Stop hoping the sky’s going to fall.” It didn’t help when he said that, though he had a point.
Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots Page 12