Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots

by Jessica Soffer

  Joseph wasn’t sure how long they’d have to wait. There was a big clock with black hands above the door. He’d never seen seconds move so slowly. The ceiling, he noticed, had no wallpaper but was painted with very shiny white paint. So shiny he was convinced that he could see his own reflection. He felt as if he were being watched.

  “It’s okay,” Victoria said. He wasn’t sure if she was talking to him or to herself.

  Joseph looked at the cupboards and wondered what was behind the closed doors. Maybe Victoria knew. Maybe she didn’t. That made it worse. That Victoria had been in there alone enraged Joseph.

  He opened a cupboard. Boxes were neatly stacked according to size. He picked up one, changing the entire formation of things. He shook it next to his ear.

  “What are you doing?” Victoria whispered. Her voice was low and tight. “Are you crazy?”

  Joseph put the box back and opened another cupboard. This one was less full. A pile of dressing gowns. Some gauze.

  “It’s not so interesting,” he said to Victoria, as if that would matter.

  Before he opened the final cupboard, he looked around.

  “Don’t,” Victoria said. “Joseph, do not.”

  But he couldn’t help himself. He had come this far. And he felt he had something to prove. We belong here, he wanted to say. I’m not afraid.

  He pulled on the handle but it wouldn’t budge. It was locked. He pulled again, and it moved a little. A light went on inside. He tried pushing it back into the position it had been in. But it was stuck, locked, slightly open and lit.

  “Oh,” he heard Victoria say. Her hands covered her entire face. He scurried back to his seat and sat down very quickly. The doorknob turned, and Joseph trapped gas from his stomach with a giant inhale.

  “Hello, folks,” the doctor said cheerily. A tall, red-haired nurse followed on his heels. She nodded to Victoria, then to Joseph. She looked more like a movie star than a nurse, Joseph thought.

  “How are we doing?” the doctor asked, resting his hand on Victoria’s knee and sticking a silver tool into one of her ears. Joseph moved forward in his chair, wanting to hold her, protect her. A vein flared in her neck. She sensed him. He sat back and crossed his legs.

  “Fine, thank you,” Victoria said. “How are you?”

  “That matters less,” the doctor said, laughing importantly. Victoria blushed. She didn’t seem uncomfortable, Joseph thought. The doctor looked toward the cabinet and then to Victoria. He was concerned.

  “Did you need something?” he asked Victoria. The concern made Joseph angry. She didn’t need anything. She wasn’t the one who’d been snooping around.

  “I did,” Joseph said. Victoria looked right at him. Her eyes didn’t flutter. In crucial moments, Joseph could never have been so calm. He thought for a second that she would make a very excellent assassin. Then he told himself to stop being dramatic.

  “A little towel,” Victoria said. “He wanted to wipe his head.”

  The nurse got right to it. She opened a cupboard below the sink that Joseph hadn’t even noticed and handed him a stack of towels, sturdy and thick.

  “There you go,” she said and smiled to show a set of fancy white teeth.

  The doctor’s hand was still on Victoria’s leg. He put the silver cone into her other ear and looked through it.

  “Great,” the doctor kept saying as he moved her jaw, opened her eyes wide. “Excellent. You’re just perfect.”

  Victoria didn’t move. She let him inspect her like an animal, Joseph thought. Less. In Baghdad, the Hassawi donkeys were like royalty. They carried only watermelon, dates, and honey. They gave birth once in a lifetime.

  “You’re eating properly?” the doctor asked while opening Victoria’s mouth and peering in. “And you’ve been resting?”

  Joseph wanted the doctor to answer Victoria’s question: How was he? Joseph hadn’t forgotten it. Before the towels, before everything, she had asked him that. Joseph thought a doctor should have better manners than this.

  “Yes,” Victoria said. Joseph wanted to tell the doctor otherwise, that she refused to give up her hostessing job—four to midnight three evenings a week.

  “Have you given any thought,” the doctor said, suddenly lowering his voice, “to what we talked about?” Joseph felt like he’d been punched in the stomach. He felt sick. They’d talked about it? She talked to him, Joseph thought, and actually shook his head. The nurse shuffled a bit and cleared her throat. She looked at Joseph. Maybe she wanted him to say something too. This was his chance, Joseph thought. It was now or never.

  “We—” he began, but Victoria shot him a look. He went silent. He picked one towel off the stack and dragged it across the sweat on his forehead.

  “I have,” she said. “I’ve thought about it a lot.”

  Joseph wanted to catch her eye. He wanted to beg her to have the baby. He thought of his life without it, just the two of them, and he couldn’t take it. Her anticipation, her gloom—it was too much for him. He craned his neck toward her.

  “And what does your husband think?” the doctor asked. Now he met Joseph’s eyes. Finally.

  “We’re not married,” Victoria said suddenly. They all looked at her—Joseph included—as if they couldn’t understand, as if she’d offered to deliver the baby herself. They were shocked. Joseph wanted to shout. They hadn’t gotten married because Victoria had wanted to wait until they were citizens, for a nice wedding they could be proud of. It was never an issue. They acted as though they were married because in their minds, or so he thought, they might as well have been. But now, Victoria was using this fact to isolate him. Joseph was determined that it wouldn’t. What was the big deal? he thought. These people were not saints. They were in the business of auctioning off babies. Well, he didn’t know that for sure. But that was how he imagined it happening, at a red stall with a canopy and a yellow flag—like at the state fairs he’d seen in photos.

  Joseph tried to remind himself to be understanding. Her family hadn’t been like his. Her father, to whom Joseph, gratefully, had never been formally introduced, was loveless, cruel. Every evening he spent at the Mee-Dan, and even on family nights there, Victoria had told him, he brought just his sons. Her mother was beautiful but sad, desperate. She used to wander around the market, he remembered, looking defeated, lost, like a flower in terrible need of sun. Joseph’s own family consisted of just his father and himself, which was why when Joseph left for the States, he was banded with hope. He was sure his father would make it to Israel and things would be all right. That was his father’s promise and why Joseph could leave unburdened. If it had been otherwise, he would have stayed. But his father believed that Israel would provide nothing new for his son, so he urged Joseph to flee to the United States. “Go where I could never go,” he’d said. “That is the best thing a father can offer his child.”

  “We are planning for marriage,” Joseph said now. The doctor and the nurse turned their eyes to each other and then to the white floor, waiting. Victoria was staring past the doctor, past all of the shiny silver tools and white towels, toward something that Joseph could not see. Wallpaper? Was something there? Joseph noticed nothing remarkable. Not even a tear.

  “I want to do the adoption,” Victoria said, her voice shaking but determined. “To keep this baby would not be right for me.”

  “You?” Joseph said, feeling like he was yelling through a hurricane, trying desperately to be heard.

  “Doctor,” he finally said, no longer able to hold it in. “I don’t think that’s necessary. I really don’t. Do you?”

  “Well,” the doctor said, putting his hand to his chest as if flattered. “I really don’t feel privileged to say.”

  “But she doesn’t want to discuss it with me,” Joseph said. For the second time, Victoria put her face in her hands. The doctor gently touched one of her wrists.

  “That’s her choice, isn’t it?” the doctor said. “My opinion? You aren’t married. Somewhere, this baby wil
l have a good home.”

  Until then, Joseph hadn’t thought of the baby, exactly. He’d thought of other things. A toddler. A playground. A crib. But a child, a little delicate thing curled into Victoria’s chest—that he had left out of his head. Thankfully. Now he saw Victoria’s arms with nothing in them and a gaping hole through her body where the baby had been. He turned away quickly. He would have gotten up and walked out if he hadn’t feared for Victoria, for what might happen if he left her alone. So he slumped deeper and deeper into the chair. He snuggled his hands into his armpits, away from the itchy armrests. He waited, shutting out all the sound he could, concentrating on the rhythm of his heart. He imagined how fast a baby’s heart must beat, pinging like rain on tin.

  The doctor wrote something on a pad and gave it to Victoria.

  “Your next appointments will be in our uptown office.”

  He shook her hand and passed his folder to the nurse, giving her a wink.

  “You don’t worry about a thing,” he said. “The baby is going to be fine.”

  The doctor walked out, his white coat stiff behind him. Joseph felt hollow and weak. He looked at Victoria. Her eyes were set on the door, which was closed again. Her lips were loose with trust for the doctor. Joseph imagined her asleep, so that he could love her again. It embarrassed him, but that was the only way. All of this frustration would be over soon, he told himself. The next phase would be something different. It couldn’t be worse. That was the first positive thought that had crossed his mind in weeks.

  The nurse underlined various things on a piece of paper. She explained certain points with little movements of her hands and stood very close to Victoria. Every now and then, the two women had a little laugh.

  “Some women forget how big their bellies are,” the nurse was saying. “They get themselves into the oddest places.”

  Joseph could tell that Victoria trusted her too. Joseph motioned that he was going to the bathroom. His stomach. As he walked out, he realized he could barely understand what they were saying, the two of them. They spoke in some language he didn’t know. He thought of birds chirping to one another. His beautiful Victoria chirping, chirping with this leggy, redheaded American who knew everything that seemed to matter.

  Maybe, he thought, maybe she’s my only hope.

  For Joseph, the months after the doctor’s visit were quiet, timid ones. Victoria wanted to exercise and so they walked. Often, they took the subway uptown, made a loop around Central Park, and whenever they passed a vendor with an ice cream cart, they bought one or two, as if to prove again and again to themselves that something like that could exist. In Baghdad, you couldn’t find a cold drink if you tried, let alone something frozen. Joseph thought of all those days in Iraq when he’d trekked so far west across the city for a dish of non-kosher kebabs. Such delicious sacrilege. He ate it in the shadows of old ratty furniture that would never be sold, careful not to be seen. What he would have done for an ice cream then.

  They liked to sit at the fountain. Victoria put her face to the sun, and Joseph could admire her long neck that way. His auntie used to say that a man should marry a woman who had the height of a sail and a neck a yard long. And Victoria did. She had a long, beautiful neck. When she lifted it up and back to look at a fast screen of birds moving across the sky, Joseph felt that he saw a secret in the skin there. That delicate, wonderful skin. And then he’d remember himself. Themselves. They would be one fewer. This buoyancy would not last.

  Joseph went to work every morning. Victoria stayed home. She gave up her job, finally, and she didn’t seem to miss it. Her belly grew and grew. When she stood, she clasped her hands below it as if lugging a sack of grapefruits. At seven months, she seemed on the brink of bursting. She appeared comfortable though, and more beautiful than ever. Her breasts were rounder, somehow closer to her face. Her lips and neck were plumper, and more pink. She had a new kind of confidence, which Joseph saw as an improvement. He wanted to ask her if she felt less lonely. He wanted the answer in his head to be right. He wondered what it would be like to have another person with you constantly, in your belly. Someone who knew all the secret things you did—crying over some classical music and talking while on the toilet, perhaps. He could never share those thoughts with Victoria. She’d call him sentimental.

  She paced the apartment all day, back and forth, tapping gently on her belly to a song she hummed, comforting it. He liked to imagine that she talked to the baby when he wasn’t home. He imagined that she named the child something amusing—Mazel Tov or Aloe Vera. Her belly, it seemed to Joseph, was like a friend she hadn’t seen in many years who had come along and reminded her of a careless youth. She stood for hours at the window, braiding various pieces of her hair. From the side, Joseph thought, her belly emphasized the knobbiness of her knees and bulbousness of her toes and the way her nose was somehow jumpy. The belly made a pattern out of her—toes, knees, belly, nose. It seemed perfectly natural and right.

  One day, Joseph recited the rhyming phrase to himself as he watched her slicing samoon in the afternoon sunlight. Knees, toes, belly, nose. Knees, toes, belly, nose. He had just come home from work, and his shirt and shoes were off. The bakery ovens had left a thin, strong sweat all over his body and it had begun to dry and ice on his skin. Victoria’s yellow nightgown was tight against her stomach. She was wearing Joseph’s boots as she clunked around the kitchen. They slouched around her ankles.

  She hoisted one knee onto the stove in order to reach for a jar. Joseph jumped up, lunged toward her.

  “I’m all right,” she said. “I can do it.”

  Joseph sank back onto the mattress on the floor. Victoria took the date spread from the high shelf. She winced as she turned the lid. Suddenly, she put her hand to her head.

  “Are you all right?” Joseph asked.

  “Just dizzy,” she said. “I’ll be fine.”

  He had asked Isaac’s wife about this. The one who’d had a baby too. She said that everything happened to pregnant ladies. Tiredness, nausea, screaming in their sleep. There was rarely something to worry about. But Joseph couldn’t help it. He felt that maybe it was in his blood to worry.

  Victoria slathered the bread with thick halek. She began to walk over to Joseph with her hand stretched out in front of her, the bread on her palm. Then she stopped. Right there in the middle of the floor. She wavered slightly, then threw her arms out for balance. The bread flipped and fell. The date spread made a quick sucking sound and stuck to the floor. Victoria’s face was surprised, and she cradled her stomach from the bottom. She moaned. Joseph got up but stopped, unsure.

  The baby had kicked. That’s what it was. He wanted to hug her, lift her, laugh out loud. He walked a bit closer to her, wanting to feel it but she put one hand up to block him. His heart sank. She stood still with her eyes shut tight and a strong chin, as if dispelling a terrible fantasy and then waiting for it to rear up again. Joseph rescued the bread from the floor, his hands shaking with denied anticipation. He stuffed it into his mouth whole, dusty, and when the sugar stuck to the sides of his throat he coughed, letting the wet crumbs fly like kamikaze birds.

  The next afternoon, Joseph found himself back on the bus, passing Abingdon Square, crawling along Fourteenth Street. It wasn’t like him to feel this way, furious, irrational, his feet yearning to stamp, shouts bobbing in his chest. He considered himself a patient person—and understanding. But enough was enough. He’d been patient. He’d been understanding. And where, he wondered, had that gotten him? Any food will go bad, he thought to himself, if you leave it out long enough.

  When he arrived at Dr. Espy’s office, a woman was behind the desk, leafing through a catalog, licking her pointer and flipping the pages, all drama. She didn’t bother to look up.

  “Is the other nurse here?” he asked.

  She shook her head.

  “The one with saffron hair and—” he said, and stopped himself before mimicking her very large chest. He didn’t know how else to describe he
r. “She is very nice,” he said.

  “Carmen,” she said. “No. She’s off today.”

  Joseph dropped his hands onto the desk. This seemed like a very bad sign.

  Finally, the woman looked up. That’s when her face changed, like he’d handed her a gift.

  “Is there something I can help you with?” she asked, adjusting her hair, which let out a lovely scent of flowers he’d never smelled. She stood up, so they were eye to eye, and Joseph wondered if she was going to ask him to leave. But she didn’t. Though she’d appeared large before, her waist, wrists, and neck, he noticed, were actually quite slight. Birdlike, even. He wondered if that’s what made movie stars movie stars—that gist of grandness. These American women all seemed like movie stars. And this one looked very clean in her white uniform, he thought.

  “Well—” he began.

  “Tell me,” she said. The office was empty. It was late in the day. The woman reached for her sweater.

  He was surprised at how easily the words came to him, how directly the woman faced him and with such devoted interest. Her eyes were focused and clear. He realized then how much Victoria had kept him out. She avoided him, eluded him. They hardly made eye contact anymore. They never kissed. And he realized how accustomed he’d become, comfortable even, to speaking to Victoria’s back.

  Lorca

  THE NEXT DAY, my mother slept till noon, like she always did on Wednesdays, and I took the opportunity to rip the place apart, looking for hints and clues about why she loved masgouf so much. I hunted down all the dog-eared pages of her cookbooks, went through all the scrawled recipe notes for a particular love of grilled fish that maybe I didn’t know about. I got nowhere. Then I found a website where you put in your favorite ingredients in various combinations and it spit out the “perfect” dish. I listed all the things my mother loved. It came up with nothing even mildly masgouf-y. It came up with pork chop lollipops and rice pudding. My mother would have preferred a sous-vide Christmas tree.