“Shall we put this in the oven?” Lorca said. My heart sank. When she started fiddling with the lemons, I was bolstered. More time. More time. The relief went as quickly as it came.
“I did such a poor job with these,” she said.
“They are perfect,” I said.
“They’re not,” she said.
“No regrets” is what came out of my mouth. It wasn’t what I meant to say—the phrase being nothing I lived by, or even thought very much about.
Lorca glanced at me. You could tell just by looking at her that she knew too much about the world. Something in her eyes—perhaps the depth and sheen of them, how they seemed to summon the world around her and refract it like an artifact window—aged her in a way that had nothing to do with years. She was a gorgeous combination of ancient and brand-new.
“It seems like that for you,” she said. “It seems like you live a life you don’t regret.”
I had to take a moment to swallow back sadness. She wasn’t altogether wrong. Joseph liked to bask in the feeling of how far we’d come. I never made time for that. I never made time for anything, and yet it was the regrets, not the pride, that snuck through regardless.
“Oh, heart,” I said. “There are so many things I’m not proud of: things I did, or didn’t do, and sometimes the person I was. And worst of all, the person I wasn’t and hoped to be. Also, I wish I’d learned to tie-dye and run long distances and play the piano.”
“You could still learn,” she said. “Why not?”
“I’d have no one to play for,” I said. I realized then how very much I’d done for Joseph. How much of what a person becomes is because of the person she loves. If I’d ever taken up piano, which I hadn’t, it would have been to show him. That I didn’t learn, and wanted to, in some way weighed on our relationship too. It kept dawning on me that Joseph’s life would no longer punctuate mine. Or mine his. His life, our life, was a series of notes until his death, which shocked those notes into a song, full of symmetry, full of meaning. Something to behold unto itself. To behold it now was the most I could hope to do. We’d never reach for each other again.
“I gave up a child for adoption,” I said suddenly. “It was the biggest mistake of my life.”
I expected Lorca’s face to fall in some way, for her to be disappointed by this person who’d revealed her deepest secrets to a somewhat stranger, and a child at that. I expected that nothing nice could be said about what I’d done. Instead, she became altogether still.
“My mother is adopted,” Lorca said.
“Your mother?” I said. It felt like I’d just jumped into a frozen lake. My breath was very shallow. Calm down, I told myself. Take it easy. She’s not suggesting anything. I took a glass from the cupboard, filled it with tap water, and chugged it down. All the while, I kept my eyes on Lorca, trying catch a glimmer of something covert.
“But it’s not because she’s adopted that she is who she is,” Lorca said. She was talking casually, drying her hands on a towel. I had the distinct feeling that this was a subject she’d talked through at length, perhaps with someone older, perhaps with a professional. “If her biological mother had kept her, that woman’s life would have been ruined like my grandmother’s, and my aunt’s, and my father’s. My mother does that. She’s kind of like a tornado but people don’t know to run when they see her coming.”
The word biological ran and ran and ran through my head.
“How do you know so many things?” I asked.
“I mean—” she said. The question made her self-conscious, but I wasn’t sure why. She shoved her hands into her pockets. “I guess I’ve thought a lot about it. About my mother.”
“That’s nice,” I said. So stupid. As if it were a good thing.
“Sort of,” she said. “I just mean that you never know. Your child could have an amazing life and so do you and maybe that’s because you’re apart.”
It wasn’t clear if Lorca was getting at something or just stating the facts. The questions I wanted to ask vibrated in my mouth, but I told myself to be patient. Be smart.
“I understand,” I said. “And if her life isn’t amazing—”
“You can’t think that way,” Lorca said, cutting me off.
“Is she ruining your life?” I said.
“Oh,” Lorca said, and she straightened up suddenly, shaking her head as if I’d misunderstood, though I was sure I hadn’t. “It’s not like that,” she said.
I looked out the window and noticed that it had begun to snow a gorgeous, slow-motion snow, like something showing off. Every now and then, a flake would stick to the window and then drip down.
If there was something Lorca wanted to tell me, it wasn’t going to be told now. She had shut down and I couldn’t blame her. My body felt heavy, as though some protective mechanism had cut off my nerves to keep them from overheating, and everything was weighted, stagnant inside.
I put the fish in the oven. “Want to go see it?” I asked Lorca and motioned to the window, surprising even myself. Spontaneity shows its face less and less as the years go by. But for the first time in a very long time, the thought of standing in the snow didn’t seem like a horrific assault on my joints. I needed some fresh air too.
“Come on,” I said. “The fish will be a little while.”
We took the elevator and then the stairs to the roof. When we opened the door, the wind charged at us and I tottered on the top step. But then here was Lorca’s hand on my back, prepared to catch me. I was wearing mittens, a hat, two sweaters, and two scarves and feeling a bit like I’d been stuffed into a sausage casing. Still, I was thankful for every layer. The cold chilled me right to the bone, and fast.
Lorca’s coat looked expensive, all diagonal pockets and reflective patches, something a lot of technology had gone into—but it was too big for her. The flakes snuck into the neck.
“Can I give you a scarf?” I asked and pulled out an extra one—the cleanest and least handmade-looking that I could find—from my pocket, hoping to be a hero.
She laughed. “I’m okay,” she said.
“Oh, right,” I said. “Your circulation still works.”
Our building was higher than most and we could have seen for at least a mile in every direction if it weren’t for the weather. Tonight the city was purplish, washed out, fuzzy but for the flares of streetlights and traffic lights.
“The first time I saw snow,” I said, “I was older than you. I was afraid of it, thinking it might sting, like a spark.”
Lorca was holding her hand out in front of her, her palm open and flat. Her cheeks had taken on a sudden glow not unlike something cooking in an oven.
“It doesn’t,” I said, teasing out a small laugh.
“My mother hates the snow,” she said. The slightest mention of her mother seemed to suck the air out of her. She shrank, tightened in the face and shoulders.
“And you?” I asked, though the answer was obvious.
“Well, I love it,” she said softly.
“That’s very brave,” I said.
Lorca’s face wasn’t giving any clues as to how she was feeling, what all this talk about her mother meant to her. So I looked up at the sky, thinking that perhaps something would come to me—some morsel of wisdom from Joseph, some appropriate words that might make more sense of our conversation than our conversation was making to me. Instead, phlegm dripped down the back of my throat and I had a minor coughing fit.
“I’m fine,” I kept saying as Lorca tapped her hand gently against my back. “Just fine!”
We stood on the roof long enough for Lorca to point to the general vicinity of where she lived, went to school, had taken ballet lessons, shopped for groceries. And then me: where I’d found a hundred-dollar bill, seen the Clintons, witnessed an armed robbery, been hit by a cab. With her foot, Lorca drew the formation of her apartment: living room, kitchen, bedrooms, bathroom. With mine, I drew the house where I’d grown up. Both floors. Lorca drew her childhood home in New Ham
pshire. I drew the countries of the Middle East. Together, they looked like a deformed mushroom. I pointed to Israel.
“Most people went there,” I said. “The great majority of the Iraqi Jews. But not us. Not Joseph. He had his heart set on the United States.”
“I don’t blame him,” Lorca said.
“Thank you,” I said, moving my boot around the snow of Baghdad until I hit on a glimmer of something. A penny. Lorca reached down for it.
“Lucky,” she said, and slipped it into my pocket.
Many minutes must have gone by because by the time we opened the door to go back inside, my hands were stinging, pulsing with cold—and the smell of something burning fumed all the way up the stairs.
“Oy!” I said.
“Oy!” repeated Lorca, more upset than I thought she’d be.
“I can’t believe I did that,” I said. Lorca was passing me, taking the stairs two at a time, the earflaps of her hat flopping against the sides of her head as she made her way down.
“It’s okay,” she yelled back. “Maybe we can salvage some of it.”
It took what felt like a month for me to get down those stairs, though I was moving with all my might. I just couldn’t bring myself to wait for the elevator.
In the end, we couldn’t salvage a thing. I found Lorca flicking off the skin and then the meat in black swaths like small dead bugs.
“This is terrible,” she was saying, still zipped up in her coat. She looked as though she was about to cry.
And me, I was useless, so bundled I could have smacked into a brick wall and been all right. Puddles leaked onto the floor beneath my boots, and for a brief moment, I considered my bladder.
“Hm,” Lorca said. She washed her hands and pursed her lips; she moved them from side to side. She began picking at them fiercely as she stared, just stared, at the fish. I wanted to beg her to stop. I’d messed this up horribly, been a poor teacher and so on. But there’d been a glimmer of hope that it wasn’t just about the masgouf. Now it was obvious that it was.
“I was going to make the masgouf for my mother tomorrow,” she said. “But I don’t know how it’s supposed to come out.”
I had nothing good to say.
“It’s okay,” she said. “It’s fine.”
I didn’t know if she was talking to herself or to me.
“I should probably go,” she said. “I can help you clean up first.”
“No,” I said. “This is nothing. I’m awfully sorry.”
I took off my hat. I needed to think of something or I would lose her.
“We can try again,” I offered. “Or we don’t have to.”
Lorca looked at me.
“You’re not sick of this?” she asked.
I actually laughed.
“Tomorrow?” I said. “I’ll get more fish.”
“Maybe we could butterfly together,” Lorca said. “I’d like to learn that for myself.”
“Of course,” I said. “There’s nothing to it.”
“Your mother’s birthday isn’t tomorrow, is it?” I asked. There was a buzzing in my chest. “Isn’t that why you wanted to make the masgouf?”
“Oh, no,” Lorca said, as if she’d forgotten. “It’s not tomorrow.”
“That’s a relief,” I said, because it was.
Lorca
I SAW HIM BEFORE he saw me. Blot was waiting for me again outside Victoria’s on Thursday, alternating between a jumpy foot shuffle and tapping on the hood of a car, looking away from the building and out toward the street. He was anxious or excited or both. I took a deep breath before finding out.
“Hi,” I said. He swung around, threw his hands up like he’d been standing there forever.
“You!” he said. I held my breath.
“Hi,” I said again.
“I called them,” he said, racing to the steps, sticking out his half-gloved hand to help me down. My fingers went immediately clammy. My first thought was that he’d called my mother and Lou and that I was going to have a lot of explaining to do, although I wasn’t sure about what exactly.
“My parents,” he explained. “I called them after you called your dad yesterday. It got me thinking.”
“Oh,” I said, but it sounded more like phew.
I put on both of my gloves before reaching for him, as if the cold were my concern. There was more snow than not on the street now. Little bits of pavement and metal and trees and car parts peeked out as if they were afraid of getting caught. But otherwise, white. Even Blot’s hat was coated in a thick layer that looked orangey in the streetlight, like a Creamsicle. I didn’t tell him so.
He helped me down the stairs and sort of directed me to face him. His hand was as strong as something marble. Then he let go. We were standing very close to each other, but it didn’t feel particularly intimate. It felt urgent. Necessary, more than romantic. Like things had to be said, and in this manner exactly. Maybe, it occurred to me, that was romance. I tried not to obsess about it and not to breathe too much in his face.
“I stared at the phone for forty-five minutes,” he said, “before I could even pick it up and dial. And then when I did, I was so nervous that I couldn’t speak, and my mom’s saying, ‘Hello, hello, hello.’ And I’m trying to tell her it’s me but I can’t.”
I thought about my father. About those calls we used to get maybe once or twice a week when no one would say anything. All you could hear was trees rustling or maybe just phone fuzz. And I’d whisper, “Dad,” so he’d know that I knew that it was him. Dad. Dad. So he’d feel less lonely. Then he’d hang up.
“And then what?” I said.
“Well, then finally I said something. And my mom wasn’t not nice. She was fine, which isn’t all that surprising. I haven’t been the greatest to them either. I haven’t called in over a year. Which is not a decent thing to do to one’s mother.”
His voice had gotten very stern, grown-up.
“Noted,” I said.
Being this close to him was overwhelming—because of me, because I had no sense of what I looked like, smelled like, but because of him too. He was giddy and I wanted to match his mood, not overdo it and not underdo it either. A smile had replaced his usual expression, and it was as though everything—his mouth, eyebrows, dimples even—was teetering around trying to accommodate it. I wanted to ask him what he’d done, why his parents didn’t want him at home. But I didn’t believe it was his fault, and I didn’t know how to phrase it to get that across so he’d know that I wasn’t blaming him for anything. I wanted him to think I understood it, whatever it was.
“I haven’t told you the best part yet,” he said. “Are you ready?”
“I’m ready,” I said. I shook my shoulders a bit to get them ready too.
“Greta’s here,” he said. His sister.
“Where?” I said.
“In New York,” he said. “Somewhere. Probably midtown. My parents didn’t come this year, but my sister came with my aunt and uncle. They brought all the cousins for a couple of days to see that show and ice-skate and shop and I don’t know what else.”
“That’s amazing,” I said, wishing for something more descriptive. “Brilliant,” I tried. My mother’s word. It sounded dumb, but he wasn’t listening.
“They’re going to Radio City tomorrow afternoon,” he said. “But my mother promised she’d ask my aunt and uncle to drop off Greta with me afterward, so we could have some time. Just us two.”
It didn’t feel strange to me that his parents trusted him with her. And some part of me liked them for that. It seemed like good parenting to know, intuitively, the lines that one’s child would never cross—and that Blot, no matter what, no matter what they were angry with him for, would never do anything to hurt his sister, even if he hadn’t called home in over a year.
“I think my mother was relieved,” he said. “To know that I’m okay. And that I still want to see Greta. Maybe my parents thought I’d forgotten all about her, which I haven’t. Obviously.”
/> For some reason, I felt flattered that he was okay. As if it had anything at all to do with me.
He started walking, first a few steps ahead of me and then backward, looking at me with his hands clasped behind him.
“It’s so good. It’s so so good,” he said.
I remembered what a sour mood I’d been in just a few moments earlier. Victoria and I had ruined the masgouf, which meant that we’d have to try again before I could make it for my mother. The days were getting away from me, and I was afraid that if I didn’t do something soon, I would lose my chance and be sent off to boarding school forever. It occurred to me that I might smell like burned fish skin. I tried to sniff my arm without him noticing.
“Hydrant!” I said and Blot turned around just quick enough to keep himself from tripping over it.
“She could be anywhere in the city,” he said.
I stopped, turned around. Looked up and down. Did a spin.
“She’s not on this street,” I said.
“Good,” he said. “Nine thousand four hundred and eighteen streets left to go.”
I was only the tiniest bit envious. Not enough to ruin anything. Just enough to make me ache a little. His enthusiasm, his love for her, was so huge. So so huge. It endured years and a long distance—all the way to Maryland. I wanted some of that for myself. I imagined it made a person feel toasty to always know that someone was out there, radiating support. My father, warm as he could be, deferred to my mother on everything. Whenever I’d asked him to visit, he’d said, “Oh, honey, did you ask your mother?” As if I should have known better. So it didn’t matter if he was radiating ever because my mother got right in the middle, blocking.
“I had to tell you,” he said. “I figured you’d be here. Sorry to stalk.”
I bit my cheeks so I didn’t smile too hard.
“It’s okay,” I said. “What will you do together?”
Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots Page 21