Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots

by Jessica Soffer

  “Are you okay?” she said.

  I looked up. For some reason, it felt like she’d punched me in the chest. Not because it was so typically Dottie or because I probably wasn’t okay and wouldn’t even have to admit that since it was apparent all over my face, but because it occurred to me that I hadn’t really thought about it, and that felt suddenly like a big, fat betrayal of Joseph. I was going through the motions—but more than that. Lorca had been here, giving me a kind of happiness I hadn’t experienced in years. Despite Joseph dying. Perhaps even because of it, though that thought was too much to bear.

  “What’s okay?” I said.

  “It’s—” Dottie began, and stopped. She looked out the window. “I don’t know,” she said and sort of snorted a laugh.

  It was a sincere question she’d asked. I could tell. She was worried about me. She was good at worry and had ample reason for it. Look at the facts: I’d just lost my husband of a hundred years. I hadn’t been outside in the five days since he’d died. And yet the really worrisome part was that there was nothing tangible for me to worry over. No cancer. No heart disease. No husband on the cusp. In the end, that’s the price you pay for taking such good care of yourself—for eating well, shunning artificial sweeteners and antibiotics, taking echinacea and vitamin D and evening primrose, and keeping your head warm in winter. I ended up, for all intents and purposes, all right. And alone. Any real damage, any signs of distress were holed up and shifty on the inside, and unless I was willing to deal with them directly, to press and press on them like an old bruise, I was okay.

  “I’m not as good as I’ve ever been,” I said. It was all I could think of.

  “As bad?” she asked.

  Now I looked out the window.

  It occurred to me that in my happiest times—falling in love with Joseph, for example, and bustling around on Saturday nights at the restaurant—I couldn’t imagine being any happier. But in my saddest, I’d always imagined it could get worse. I wondered if perhaps not everyone was like that. Stop waiting for the sky to fall, I told myself. The voice in my head was Joseph’s.

  “It’s hard to know,” I said.

  “Of course it is,” Dottie said. “That’s probably as right an answer as there is.”

  Getting dressed for the cold is always a task. At my age, it’s an undertaking. It requires not only layers, protection from wind and wet, and comfort, but also planning in regard to the more subtle issues of balance and bladder control. Getting dressed after Dottie left took me a full forty-five minutes.

  As I buttoned up a wool sweater, I thought about how odd it was that Dottie had become the closest thing I had to a friend. There was no one else here, was there? I’d grown apart from all the other women I knew: the Iraqi Jews in Great Neck, the wives of Joseph’s backgammon partners. It took effort to maintain those relationships, and effort I wasn’t willing to give. Effort went to the restaurant. Effort went to Joseph. It’s possible, I thought, that other people simply had more effort to begin with, that it was genetic. Or maybe you could store it up, increase it with good karma. But that wasn’t me. After a time, I stopped craving travel and culture, new experiences and chitchat. My life was a potted plant.

  Dottie and I were friends out of convenience. Friends only to a point. Over the years, we didn’t exactly listen to each other. One of us spoke, and the other responded with a physical reaction rather than an emotional one. She told me to get dressed, and I did. I told her to go away, and, for the most part, she did. Rarely did either of us answer a question with a question. I’d never needed it. She mustn’t have either.

  I finally dragged myself outside and down the stone steps. I stopped, took a deep breath, prepared myself.

  “It’s cold,” I said to no one in particular.

  “You ain’t kidding,” said a man walking by. “It was in the sixties last week.”

  “Right!” I said.

  Not wanting to overdo it, I walked only one block before hailing a cab. “I know, I know,” I whispered to Joseph. He believed in the subway like one believes in flossing. You do it because it’s good for you.

  “On the way back,” I said, lying to him and pretending that he knew that too. Somehow. “I’ll take it on the way back.”

  Sometimes, it feels like New York City is doing you a favor. Perhaps it’s a matter of expectation. But on this day, when I walked so carefully, afraid of slipping, of missing Joseph, of the enormous and bleak possibility of going anywhere, anywhere in the entire world, of falling into some crack in the earth and having that go totally unnoticed, everything seemed to snap to. A taxi stopped for me immediately. The driver didn’t drive like someone was holding a gun to his head. The traffic lights were on our side. Fairway was not horribly crowded, and the persimmons were perfectly ripe. Though there was only one other woman on line at the fish counter, she suggested I go ahead of her.

  “Really?” I said.

  “Yes,” she said. “I’m feeling indecisive.” She moved aside and consulted her shopping list.

  I kept thinking, The world goes on. I kept thinking, Does it look like I’ve just lost him? I kept thinking, Is anyone else as sad as me? Of course, I told myself. Of course. But the thought didn’t make me feel any better.

  As I passed the dried-fruits section, I ran my fingers over the bulk apricots. Joseph’s favorites. How many bags, I thought, had I filled for him over the years? So many times I had watched him place three or four of the apricots on his tongue, letting them rehydrate into a sticky glob and then chewing them endlessly before swallowing. “The sweetest thing you ever had,” he’d say, mouth full.

  I plucked three apricots from the bins without using the tongs. I placed them on my tongue. I closed my eyes, leaned on my shopping cart, and waited for that surge of sweet.

  The next day, I spent hours preparing for Lorca. I tidied the house. I threw out every condolence gift basket that had been gathering dust on the dining-room table. I kept only the dark chocolate and herbal tea selections, and I schlepped everything else to the curb. I bathed. I used hair remover on my upper lip, moisturized my elbows, overdid it with the rose water. I made myself a shot-glass-size screwdriver with some ancient vodka, just to loosen up the joints. By the time Lorca buzzed, I was so exhausted that I was nodding off on the couch.

  “Coming!” I shouted, but my knees had a different plan. They’d stiffened up as I’d slept and I just about went face-first into the desk.

  “Coming!” I said again.

  As I buzzed, I checked in the mirror. A trail of drool on my chin shone in the evening light. “That’s fantastic,” I said out loud, and used the sleeve of my blouse to wipe it off.

  I opened the door. I waited. I waited. Lorca never took this long. She was a gazelle up those stairs, an Olympian.

  “Hello?” I said into the hallway. I didn’t hear anyone. I cursed the buzzer and poked at it again and again, thinking maybe the dumb thing had finally met its Maker.

  Seconds later, the elevator doors opened.

  “Nice to meet you too,” Lorca said to someone before stepping onto the landing. Her face was vibrant with cold.

  Dottie leaned out of the elevator. She wiggled her fingers at me.

  “Good evening, madam,” she said. She was all made up and her hair had been done. The word that came to mind was buoyant. She had a mink coat dramatically wrapped up to her chin.

  Lorca turned around to wave at her.

  “Bye, Dottie!” she called.

  Reluctantly, I waved too. Bye, Dottie.

  I felt violated. I shouldn’t have. I should have known that Dottie would find a way to insert herself into my relationship with Lorca. She couldn’t help it. She had to be a part of everything. I wondered how long she’d waited in the lobby for Lorca to show up.

  “She’s so nice,” Lorca said, closing the door behind her and taking off her hat.

  I made some singsongy noise with my mouth shut and held out my hands for her coat.

  “She let me in do
wnstairs,” Lorca said.

  “She did, did she,” I said.

  “She says you and she are the best of friends,” she continued. I knew those weren’t Lorca’s words. Best of friends. As if we had other friends from which to select the best.

  “We are, are we,” I said.

  Lorca shrugged.

  “That’s just what she told me,” she said in a way that meant that she didn’t believe everything she heard.

  “Right,” I said. She followed me as I hung up her coat in the hall closet. I heard Dottie turn on the television upstairs. Go pick on someone your own age, I thought. Your hair looks stupid.

  As far as I knew, Dottie hadn’t done any damage. Yet. The issue was that she couldn’t simply let me have my happiness. My happiness. She couldn’t go find her own. For as long as I’d known her, she’d relied on us in a way that could only be considered inappropriate. And it wasn’t just for happiness. When we went to the post office, she’d throw in money for stamps. If we had our floors refinished, she’d do the same. On holidays, she’d show up at the restaurant and sit for hours. Joseph and I would take turns keeping her company. She insinuated herself into every nook of our lives and, in doing so, diminished whatever preciousness, whatever joy, whatever sadness, even, was finely balanced between Joseph and me. In cooking, one poaches in order to keep something delicate from coming apart. In life, it means stealing the delicate thing away. And Dottie was a poacher of the highest order. The only secret we’d ever kept from her was the story of our daughter, and somehow, I realized, the fact that Dottie didn’t know about her made it seem like she’d never existed.

  You’d think such feelings would grow irrelevant in time: the jealousy, vanity, hate even. They don’t. They simply find fewer occasions on which to present themselves and when they do, it’s as if they’ve multiplied in the dank, unlit place where they’ve been dormant. In my case, the occasions almost always included Dottie. Again and again and again.

  “I’m so excited for our lesson!” Lorca said. It was then that I realized I was still wearing my slippers. Dottie hadn’t been here to dress me. I hated her. I loved her.

  I kicked them off and allowed the cold to quickly infiltrate my feet.

  “Me too,” I said.

  Lorca waited for me before making her way into the kitchen, as if afraid I might not follow. But of course, I did. To be with her. As we walked, I found myself wanting to hold her hand, but I couldn’t. Instead, I awkwardly touched the middle of her back. And like this, I forgot about my anger. Like this we went.

  “Masgouf is a simple dish to make,” I explained as I moved a glass out of the sink. “It’s a humble dish, but it has a lot of history.”

  “I read that,” Lorca said. She wore layers today, maybe even more than I could count. A hooded sweatshirt on top of a thermal, with some black ribbed thing popping out from underneath, along with a half-dress/half-shirt, gray and stretchy, pulled down below her waist. She had on blue socks and jeans stitched with yellow thread.

  “The rivers in Baghdad were a place of life, of happiness,” I said. “Am I boring you?”

  “You just started,” she said, so earnestly that I laughed.

  “So I did,” I said.

  I went on about the Tigris and the Euphrates, the fishermen on the banks and how they hauled out the carp, made a fire, split the fish from head to tail, seasoned it with salt and oil, and speared it so it cooked, open and on its side, over a smoky fire.

  “It took a couple of hours,” I said. “We didn’t have these fancy grill pans.”

  As I began to lift ours out of a bottom drawer, Lorca came to my rescue. And thank goodness. What strength in such a tiny thing, I thought.

  “What is amazing,” I said, “is that no one will ever eat this meal that same way again. As we did, growing up. With all the dead bodies in the rivers, they’ve declared a fatwa on the fish.”

  Masgouf merely scratched the surface of all that never would be again. Life: never again.

  “Everything is changed,” I said, staving off sappiness. “Not just the food. We use red snapper here.”

  “Have you been back to Baghdad?” she asked. She was sitting at her place at the bar now, her head propped up on her hands.

  “No,” I said. “We never went back. We never could, legally or safely. We had to give up everything to come to the United States. And the Jews have no place there now. We were once the majority, the intellectuals, the sophisticates. But that changed quickly because of the Nazis. And when Joseph and I came to America, we promised to make this our home.”

  I realized how strange it must sound to anyone, much less a young girl, to abandon a life, to move forward with such determination. Leaving is the easy part, I wanted to tell her. It’s moving on that one gets mired in. It takes years. Decades, actually. It takes tragedy and drama and the most painful part: the haunting feeling of what’s lost when it finally starts hurting less. And yet to this day, if I close my eyes I can smell where I grew up. Burning vegetable skin and floral tea. It pulls the tears out of me, as if it’s the scent itself coming through my nose and rushing down my face.

  “We had to love America more than we yearned for Baghdad,” I said, wanting to defend myself, “or we couldn’t have loved America at all. I don’t know if that makes much sense.”

  “It makes sense to me,” Lorca said. It was obvious: she too knew what it felt like not to be understood.

  I unwrapped the fish, which was still in its brown paper. I did it slowly and noticed that Lorca had lifted herself just slightly off her seat to watch. This seemed like a good thing.

  “The monger has butterflied the snapper for me, you see,” I said. “But it is not so complicated to do it yourself. My hands shake,” I offered as an explanation, and then wished I hadn’t. “I bet you have a very steady hand.”

  Lorca blushed and shrugged. She pulled her sleeves all the way over her fingers and sat on them.

  “No, no, no,” I said. “Your turn. Come.”

  Lorca came around to where I was, delicately revealed her hands, and began washing them in the sink.

  “We oil the fish first, and then season it,” I said. “So the spices will stick.”

  I took out some new salt I’d bought, fancy flakes that seemed impressive at the time but now appeared overwhelming and rough. As subtly as I could, I shoved it to the back of the cabinet, taking out my trusty sea salt instead.

  “Olive oil?” Lorca asked.

  I feigned shock.

  “Of course olive oil,” she said. “Stupid me.”

  “No.” I laughed. “Not stupid.”

  I would have to be better with my behavior, I told myself. I would have to be so careful with this little girl. She’s as sensitive as I am. Instinctively, I looked toward the study, as if Joseph would be standing in the doorway in a thick cardigan, cordu- roys, and slippers, on the same page as me, nodding. But of course, he wasn’t. Not standing there. Not on the couch. Not anywhere yet. His remains had been ready since yesterday. They’d taken only five days to “process” is what they told me over the phone, and I could come by to get them. But I couldn’t bring myself to go out the door and do it. What would I carry him home in? I wondered. A shopping bag? A cashmere shawl? What could bear the weight of him, of everything he ever did? Nothing felt right. For the first time, elaborate funeral processions made perfect sense to me. Without one, without the fanfare, there was life and then dust. And I couldn’t bear the thought of him like that—like almond meal, cake flour, or sand. He was the love of my life. The world to me. But until I went to the funeral home, I had no idea where he was, really. I had no idea where he went. I’d come home from my walk that night and all that was left was the shell of him. The rest had slipped away somewhere. Would you believe I checked under the bed? I considered lifting his head, the pillow, as if it might have been trapped beneath there. Until then, even when he was sleeping, despondent, nearly catatonic from a morphine drip, there had been something between us, sust
aining us. What is inside a person is unknowable as anything. That’s not life. Life is the dynamic, silent buzz humming around us, like static. And when it’s over, there’s none of that. All I could feel, as I stayed with him before Dottie helped me away, was the lonely echo of my own life, myself. A vacant, one-pitch hum. It was worse than feeling alone. It was being alone.

  Lorca salted the fish. The word remains played over and over in my head and took shape as something else: a glass container of leftovers in the fridge. I shuddered and kept my eyes on the study again, as if willing him there. Did you see that? I wished to say. This child was as sensitive as me.

  “And now?” Lorca said. She was talking about the fish but it felt like she was ushering me along.

  For her, and for me, I kept on.

  As it turned out, the assembling of the masgouf took much less time than I’d imagined, and hoped. So before putting it in the oven, we pickled some onions, made mango chutney with a rock-hard mango, and I let her in on the secrets of making Iraqi flatbread. Perhaps it was Lorca’s nimble fingers, or maybe her excitement, which seemed to fuel her motions, but she was brisk and confident today. Purposeful. That, ever so slightly, broke my heart. I thought, We might make the masgouf and then I’ll be obsolete. I was giving her the secret to living without me. And yet, how could I not?

  For some reason, it occurred to me that that might be the key to parenting: rendering oneself obsolete. It was something I rarely thought of, parenting. It was something I had no business considering. But here I was. I hardly knew her. I had to remind myself that I hardly knew her at all.

  I wasted time doing some dishes. I was distracted, thinking of Joseph, of Lorca never coming back. As I wiped down the countertop, circle after circle after circle, it was as though I was trying to wipe my mind clean of worrying. It didn’t work.