As it turned out, he was outside. I should have known. He had his hands stuffed into his pockets, his face to the sky. His eyes always watered in the spring, and a single tear was slinking down his cheek. He never cleaned them up but let them fall, stain his collars, the pockets of his shirts. Perhaps he was reabsorbing his emotion, doubling it, as if for the both of us.
“Remember the sky in Baghdad?” he’d asked me, right in the middle of everything. I told him not to get schmaltzy. I told him to come inside. I was so excited. This was a big night for us. A very big night. They wanted to take our picture.
“Come on,” I must have said. And he did. He tipped his head down, put one foot in front of the other. He followed me because he knew it mattered to me. What mattered to him we left outside—the charcoaled, blotchy sky, which looked as though the moon had bounced around, restless, before finally settling in. In Baghdad, the stars burned so bright they were like deep holes, not at all transparent. When Joseph came inside, everyone wanted to be around him. Wanted to know where he’d been. People loved him, wanted just to touch his arm, his shoulders, be close to that big, warm head. But I was angry, refolding napkins like my life depended on it. I remember that I was suddenly, stupidly fed up with him for always thinking so much, feeling so much.
I’d worried about the flowers—that the petals might stain someone’s dress shirt or jacket, that the stains might get yellower and deeper as the night went on, as clothes came off, slumped discarded on chairs. Joseph’s feelings made me embarrassed about my own brain, which was no bigger than a bird’s. His feelings were glass between us. Decades later, I hadn’t gotten over our differences. Still, I wondered why Sunday mornings had never made me giddy; why musicals couldn’t bring me to tears. I believed in karma because I’d been selfish. Joseph didn’t waste his life not living it.
I tried to remember the rest of the evening but couldn’t. A couple sleeps together so many nights. It occurred to me that I could remember very few. It’s like driving by cornfields. I wondered if Joseph had been different from me in that way too, or if his memories were a tightly packed box. Perhaps he’d known where our child was even then. Maybe our restaurant had been across the street from her apartment and he’d stood outside just waiting for a glimpse of her.
My quiet lasted a very long time because I snapped out of it only when I heard Dottie making unsubtle tapping noises upstairs with her shoe. I knew what she was doing. She was trying to get my attention. She wanted me to invite her down.
Lorca didn’t seem to notice.
“I would miss him too,” Lorca said. What a wonderful, feeling child she was. I so wanted to know where her sadness came from—if it was specific or innate. I felt responsible, somehow, though I shouldn’t have. I was entitled to nothing. And yet, she was so much like Joseph. She didn’t wear her sadness like a hat. It was buried deep within her, hungry worms below the dirt.
I studied Lorca, trying to gauge what this meant to her, seeing her grandfather perhaps for the first time.
“Okay,” she said. “And now?”
“Well,” I said, trying for levity. “Now, now, now.”
I turned around. I started fiddling with the stove. I made a little drama with my hands. I was terrible at making light of things. I couldn’t laugh at myself. Lorca put the photo back and closed the drawer with a civilized click.
“Found it,” she said and held up a vanilla pod, shriveled and dark. “What else do you need?”
I heard her like I was underwater. It took time to process. I put my hands to my face to remember me. I wanted to say the right thing to her—and to thank her. I wanted to tell her our stories, to know hers. But how she was reacting made me unsure. Maybe I’d misunderstood everything. Though I hadn’t. I thought of the photo; of the freckle on Lorca’s face; of her mother, the chef. I couldn’t have been so wrong.
As Lorca skimmed the vanilla from its pod with a knife, I put everything into a small pot and began stirring over low heat.
“Like this,” I said, but it wasn’t right. The mixture gobbed like dry concrete. I needed a backhoe to get through it.
“Strange. It must be the weather,” I lied.
She nodded, as if I might have a point, then picked violently at the sides of her nails. Soon she shuddered and stuffed her thumb into her mouth. I was making her anxious.
“Sorry,” I said.
“Sorry,” she said.
I wished Joseph had been there. He would have known what to do. He wouldn’t have been awkward or embarrassed. He made the most of things.
I turned off the burner. I needed to think.
“I have to ask you something,” Lorca said quietly.
I walked toward her, holding on to the counter for strength. I had been waiting for this moment, hoping for it. Lorca was lifting the bowl of dough, turning it slightly, and putting it down. Around and around. Again and again. I put my hands over hers, stopping her. She wouldn’t look at me directly, but I couldn’t take my eyes off her. I didn’t know a lot of young girls, but I was sure that this one was perfect.
“I know,” I said. “It’s all right.”
“Well, the thing is,” she began. She shuffled her feet on the floor and bit on the side of her lip. I wanted to tell her to stop. She didn’t need to worry. She didn’t even need to speak. “When I first came here, I came for the recipe. Because of my mother. It’s complicated. But then you said some things that got me wondering about why my mother mentioned masgouf in the first place. I’d never heard of it before. And then Blot, the friend . . .” She paused. I nodded.
“The one I’m friends with,” she said. “He really put things together for me. Said something that made me think that there was a very significant reason for my mother to mention the masgouf. And then I asked my mother about it—”
I cut her off.
“I know,” I said. I closed my eyes. “I know who you are.”
I was holding her hands and I wasn’t sure if they were shaking or if it was just her pulse consuming her, fluttering like a million butterflies from the inside out.
“You do,” she said, half asking, half telling.
“I do,” I said. I opened my eyes.
There were tears the size of grapefruit pits rolling down her face and when she finally looked up at me I noticed that her irises turned a pale gray when she cried. Like a peaceful bird. Like mine.
In that moment, touching her warm little fingers, I didn’t ask myself why or how I loved her, I just knew that I did. It had nothing to do with need or comfort, which is more about the feeling than about the object itself. That was my terrible truth about love: I loved my mother because it comforted me to need her, and I loved Joseph because I needed love. Eventually, I loved who Joseph was, but that was always secondary to the act of loving him.
But this was different. I hadn’t looked for Lorca. I hadn’t even known to wish for her. Her turning up was a heartening confirmation that not every good thing had been sucked into that jagged hole between Joseph and me, me and all else. She was here, feet on the ground.
It occurred to me that everything, every single moment up until this one, I could have imagined. Brushing teeth, paying bus fares, hearing “Happy Birthday” sung to other people at restaurants, never returning to Baghdad, falling asleep at the movies, sickness, health, and sickness again, even Joseph’s death, even my own—all of that, I could have foreseen. Some things a person fears; other things, one wishes for.
But this, this moment with Lorca: I never.
And that’s what love is, I suppose. The one thing that is most worth hoping for, and the one thing that’s most surprising when it lands. Because it’s better. It exceeds hope, makes hoping nearsighted. For me, and forever, Lorca was the world’s evidence of love.
“I think I have to go to the bathroom,” she said suddenly, breaking the shell of my trance.
“Are you all right?” I asked, afraid that she might throw up, that all this was, in fact, too much for her.
“Sorry,” she
said, shuffling down the hall.
“What for?” I asked, but she was moving away and didn’t turn back.
I felt foolish standing in the kitchen alone, like it had rained but only on me. I wasn’t prepared for Lorca to walk out so abruptly. I told myself that I shouldn’t have expected anything. It would have been overwhelming for anyone—all this emotion—and even more so for a young girl. If there’s one bit of good news about getting old, it’s that the surges of feeling stop taking you by surprise. And physical pain, even the terrible kind, never feels catastrophic. It’s bound to happen. Everything tastes the same if you cook it long enough. This moment with Lorca, of course, was different.
There were questions I wanted to ask her—so many questions. I wanted to know about her mother. But now didn’t seem like the perfect time. I reminded myself of Joseph, of not waiting for the sky to fall. This should be enough, I told myself. Enough.
Just then I caught a glimpse of my reflection in the window. I was haggard, like someone no one could stand being related to. I searched around for a tube of lipstick and found one of Dottie’s. I covered my teeth with my finger in an attempt at a decent application. I reorganized my hair. I smacked at my cheeks to subdue the emotion.
Lorca was still in the bathroom. There was nothing but silence between here and there. Like an idiot, I glued my eyes to the door, waiting for her to reemerge. Snap out of it, Victoria. I pumped my hands at my sides.
To keep myself busy, I cleaned off the countertop. I wondered what Joseph would have done if he’d been here. He wouldn’t have applied lipstick, I thought, and he would have laughed at me for doing so. I tried to laugh at me.
Well, Joseph, I said without speaking, what shall we do now? I took out the newspaper clipping again and looked at him.
Hm? I said, again in my head. Any thoughts?
Silence.
“Me too,” I said out loud.
Lorca was back. I put the clipping away.
“Can we still make baklava?” she asked.
“Of course,” I told her. Of course.
I tried to contain myself when at the very same instant we began to roll up our sleeves.
That night, I was too excited to sleep. I was imagining the rest of my life with Lorca and my daughter in it, and trying desperately not to imagine the rest of my life with Lorca and my daughter in it. Just in case.
So, I watched some TV. I listened to three shows on the radio. I made myself a cup of lavender tea. I watched some more TV. I stood by the window and counted cars. I listened to a couple have it out across the street. They were speaking Russian. Eventually, I tried warm milk with honey. I turned on the white-noise machine. Then, probably around two o’clock, I shut it off. That my bladder wasn’t used to so much liquid wasn’t helping anything either.
Eventually, bored and feeling productive, I flossed between every tooth and then between every tooth again. I gargled with salt water until my gums burned. As I brushed my teeth, I fake smiled at myself in the mirror, trying to get a sense of how I looked to someone else. It was something I hadn’t wondered about in years. I paused. I really looked. As it turned out, I looked very different than I’d imagined. Older, of course. Everything had slumped into the wattle of my neck. But changed too. For most of my life, my reflection had come as a shock to me. My nose was always smaller than I thought, and my eyes larger, farther away—even now—from my brows. But those were little things. What struck me now was something more significant and subtle. I leaned my head to one side. Then the other. I inspected my profile as best I could.
Then it hit me. I was American-looking. Not like a cowgirl or a WASP, but like a New Yorker. Like someone second-generation, with parents from Italy, Greece, or Spain. Maybe born in Brooklyn. Maybe Queens. But certainly, I thought, I didn’t look like a Baghdadi. My skin didn’t have a uniquely olive cast. My eyes were no more almond-shaped than anyone else’s. It couldn’t even be said that I looked Jewish. I wondered when these changes had happened. Whether it was a particular haircut that had redefined me permanently. Or the diamond studs from Joseph that I rarely took out. Or whether the linguistic shift from Arabic to English had altered the curve of my mouth, so that when the lines and wrinkles grew around it, they grew around my American voice. Or whether I really never had a sense of myself to begin with.
When, exactly when, I wondered, had this taken place? Had Joseph seen it too? How could I not know myself yet? Was it my appearance that had changed? I wondered. Or me, considering my appearance? There was no way to know, and yet neither possibility should have come as much of a surprise. The truth was, I hardly stopped to consider myself, the state of my physical affairs. For years, I’d stayed busy. Kept going. Kept on. So much fancy footwork involved to keep myself afloat and from thinking too deeply about the marriage I’d damaged, about Baghdad, about loss and change despite loss. And then Joseph, so sick. I couldn’t think about that either. Not for a moment had I allowed myself to wither into sadness. Wouldn’t. It’s impossible to know when sadness ends. It’s a string I feared I’d keep on pulling until I unraveled the carpeting of a million rooms. So I’d told myself—all along I’d told myself—that every negative thought I indulged in nudged me one step closer to a very dangerous ledge from which I would one day slip and fall. Holding things together is what I thought I was doing. Keeping the sadness out. Not falling. And this was done by never analyzing change. Never even considering it. Never looking too hard at my reflection and wondering. But of course, fighting against sadness never kept me from feeling sad. It just moved things around. The ledge, the endless hole below it, bore itself inside of me. The only thing I avoided was the sensation of falling. I couldn’t avoid the gorge. And I was nothing more than the delicate rocks on either side.
I suddenly became conscious that Joseph might be aware of these thoughts, so I said out loud to unworry him, “Not anymore, Joseph. It’s all all right now. We have Lorca. We have her to love.”
Joseph
NEW YORK, 1953–1954
On a particularly warm day in March, Joseph considered rolling down the window in the taxi but then thought better of it, not wanting to upset Victoria. It was just the two of them. Joseph and Victoria, Victoria and Joseph, as it hadn’t been in nine long months. It was the two of them and no baby, just the heavy, leaded absence of it. Of her, Joseph thought. His baby was a she, they’d told him.
They weren’t speaking, the two of them, but Joseph felt they were communicating. He hoped that. He needed it. Victoria sniffled. He coughed back. Victoria scratched her forearm. Joseph crinkled his nose. He kept his right hand beneath his leg, hiding. It was beginning to go numb. He was holding a small washcloth. A nurse had given it to him, thinking Victoria might want it. It was hers. But of course, she wouldn’t. She wanted no part of any of it. She’d even bought new clothes for the occasion and had thrown the old ones in the trash—she went that far. But this washcloth was something. Joseph kept thinking: It had been in the room. It had been there. It had touched his baby. Joseph kept it wound very tightly in his fist as if it were cutting off a valve that might make his eyes burst. He felt like a wall of glass, just smashed though still suspended.
He watched as Victoria put her hands on her knees and tucked her chin to her chest. She was wearing a new dress, baggy and shapeless, beneath a large brown overcoat. Her legs were bare and pale. A pair of men’s socks pooled around her ankles like spilled milk. She pulled them up and then let them slink down again. Then she looked at her belly. Her face loosened. She reminded Joseph of a child who had made a mess. To see her that way made Joseph ache. He wanted to hold her. He missed her. But he knew—he’d gotten used to it—that if he tried, she would retreat from him. So he didn’t try. He tightened his grip on the washcloth. He coughed, ridding himself of the impulse as if it were an irritating fleck of dust.
As they sat there, the two of them in the back seat, Joseph couldn’t help but think that he’d given up long before—and it made him feel awful. Months ago, wh
en he’d convinced himself that enough was enough, and there was nothing else he could do for Victoria, he’d given up. And then, each time Victoria didn’t reach for him in his sleep, when she was furious with him for not abandoning the idea of keeping the baby, he gave up a little more. When she didn’t hold his hand on the street, didn’t smile when she looked at him, didn’t put honey into his tea, so compulsively ignored every aspect of her pregnancy and rejected his having any part in it at all, he kept giving up. He gave up until his sympathy was entirely given away, and he felt he had nothing else to give. That’s when he’d found himself at Dr. Espy’s office, ready to be given to. Ready to take. Now he’d been taking for months, on most weekdays after work. He told Victoria that he’d been given additional duties at the bakery. How strange, he thought to himself, to call it a “duty.”
And now, he felt horrible. He felt sick. He was sorry but couldn’t say so. He wanted to be sure that the affair hadn’t been the final blow to ensure this—this lack of baby. This everything. Maybe if he’d been more loving, if he hadn’t lost hope so quickly, so easily, things wouldn’t have turned out this way. Victoria could have changed her mind. But he couldn’t be sure of anything now. He’d done what he’d done. Everything, he thought to himself, every feeling about the baby from now on would be wrapped up in the fact that he’d found someone else for a while—because of that, and despite it too.
He opened the window, stuck his head all the way out, and gasped for air. The driver honked, and Joseph jumped, nearly broke his neck. Victoria crossed her arms over her chest and shuddered. Joseph almost asked her if she was cold—the words were on the tip of his tongue—but he decided he’d better not do that either. He decided that he wouldn’t tell her. Couldn’t. And if he didn’t tell her about the affair, he had to do something kind, something selfless to make it right. He was afraid of what his voice might convey. He kept his eyes set forward on the traffic, the splashes of red light. It was rush hour. This was going to be an expensive ride. Joseph was making calculations in his mind until he caught a whiff of baby powder, and he was back in the hospital again, where, for just a few moments, he’d been a father.
Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots Page 24