Joseph wound the washcloth around his hand. He stuffed it hard into his pocket and ripped the seams of his pants. He pushed harder and through. He felt his own leg. He pulled a hair. He pulled another and gave himself the chills. He wondered if he was in shock or panicked or numb or what that sensation was, like he was balancing just above the floor. He wished, impossibly, for the feeling to be relief but knew it wasn’t. Relief meant that something was over. He thought of the baby. He would always think of the baby. It would be on the streets, in the sunset, when he looked down at himself in the shower. Here it was in this very back seat, occupying all the spaces in between. And yet, that was the least of it.
For the rest of his life, he realized, he would have a relationship with something that was what it wasn’t. It was what wasn’t sleeping in his arms. It was what wasn’t being breastfed in a rocker in the middle of a night. It was what wasn’t splashing and grinning and splashing and sneezing in the bathtub. It was what wasn’t in framed photographs squished and happy between himself and Victoria. It was what wasn’t reaching for his hand before crossing the street. It was what wasn’t asking if murder was killing a bug. It was what wasn’t going to school from their stoop in the morning, to school with a lunch box, to school in an ironed uniform, to school at a university with giant evergreen hedges and red bricks and books stacked a mile high, making this father so proud, so very proud, the proudest ever. He wondered how he could ever live with what wasn’t, and harder still, how couldn’t he?
He continued to blame himself. If he hadn’t given up, things might have worked out. If he’d taken her to the Statue of Liberty or Macy’s or he’d saved his money for a horse-drawn carriage ride through Central Park or even for a nice shawl, things might have been different. If he’d kissed her harder, rubbed her feet, helped her to wash her hair and braid it, they might not be here. But he hadn’t done any of those things. After a certain point, gestures like those didn’t even occur to him. He covered his mouth and felt himself choke.
The cab stopped quickly and stalled. The driver cursed and started it up again. Joseph pumped his knee, still trying to undream himself. Victoria let out a little sigh. Then he did too.
“Don’t think of it,” she said. “Think of anything else.”
Often, he’d wondered if this was as hard for Victoria as it was for him. He’d wanted to keep the baby, after all. She hadn’t. But her voice now, the way it teetered, nearly broke, left him feeling reprimanded. Of course it had been hard. Of course it had.
He thought about the space below Victoria’s heart, empty now—and how her heartbeat no longer harmonized with another’s. As if hearing his thoughts, she put her hand, warm and swollen, on his. He looked at her but knew she would never indulge him in big, weepy feelings. Instead, she squeezed his fingers. He fought back tears. He hated his emotions. Sometimes he wanted to wrangle them to the ground like a wild animal. Couldn’t he, just for once, have been the steady one, been strong?
She squeezed again, as if telling him she understood.
In the past few months he’d found himself missing her, even when she was an arm’s length away. Now he looked at her. She was touching him. Still, he missed her. She looked at him. He missed her less.
He squeezed back. He squeezed to feel her, to feel himself, to feel her, to feel her, to feel her.
Upstairs, at the apartment, Victoria paused in the doorway as if searching for something she didn’t want to find. Her hands were clasped in front of her. Joseph eased her coat off her shoulders. When he saw a platter of pignoli cookies (Mrs. Messina must have been here) next to the bowl of crushed almonds with honey and sugar that he’d prepared—an homage to his mother, a healer, who fed the almonds to women who had just given birth, to ward off the evil eye and encourage happiness—he used the coat to cover them. It felt inappropriate. No one would have thought that this was how they’d come home. With less than what they’d left with. Fewer knees. Fewer bottom lips.
“Are you all right?” Victoria asked, swinging around.
He coughed to make light of it, swallowed hard. He shook his head that he was fine. He was fine. He wanted a cookie. Hell, he wanted the whole plate.
Victoria walked to the mattress and dragged her feet, not lifting them but shuffling, as if trying to scuff something off her soles. On the bed, she folded herself onto her side, toward the wall and away from everything. She rested her head on her arm. She kicked off one shoe and then the other. They fell next to each other, organized. He imagined her face—twisted like a street pretzel, crying. But as much as wished he could, he couldn’t go to her. Was it written all over his own face, he wondered, what he’d done? It was only then that he remembered how well she could read him, how she could tell from the lines around his eyes if he was unsatisfied or tired or nostalgic. He relaxed his jaw, trying to erase any hints at all about his feelings, keep them from sneaking out. He held his breath.
Joseph thought of all the ways he’d seen her body lying down in the past months. Long, leaflike, silhouetted this way and that—below the windowsill, on the bench, on the floor, on her elbows, on her back with her belly pointing up like a dune. He couldn’t remember her height beside him now, though he tried.
“We’re going to be all right,” Victoria said. He could hear the smile on her face.
“All right,” he said in a voice he hoped would carry her closer to sleep. He was too exhausted to talk. “All right,” he said again and then once more in his head.
Joseph put on the pot for tea and stood with the safety of the counter between them. She would be asleep before the water boiled. The little washcloth was still in his hand. He opened a drawer they hardly used and pushed it to the back. He went to the table and reached for the plate of cookies. He ate every one of them, without a sound, hardly taking a breath. And then spoonful after faithful spoonful, he finished the bowl of almonds too. If he couldn’t breathe, he thought, he couldn’t cry. And if he couldn’t cry, he couldn’t feel sorry for himself. And if he couldn’t feel sorry for himself, he could perhaps convince himself that there was nothing to be sorry about. If he could convince himself of that, he could convince himself of anything.
And yet, the next day, everything changed.
Joseph thought he knew what to expect. After Victoria’s pregnancy, he would need to nurture her, restore her, because some part, he had to think, would undoubtedly have been lost. And he was prepared to take care of her—feed her yellow vegetables, and the ground almonds with honey. He was ready to be flattered by it, by being needed in that way again. It would be a fresh start. It wouldn’t be perfect, but it would be something.
Together they could discover the city in the manner he had originally hoped. She might look at him like she had in Baghdad. The first time he’d ever seen her had been years before they’d officially met. They were at the market. She’d dropped her bag and he’d lifted it for her, held it open while she dusted off a persimmon and put it back in.
Now he watched her. She hadn’t moved all night. She’d kept tight to the wall, her back guarded and hard. There was a darkness about her that he hadn’t known before, as if an angry stranger were standing beside her, refusing to disappear. Then she turned around. He took a step back, but she wasn’t angry. She was smiling. Her face was pink and flooded him with a sudden, alarming warmth.
“Good morning,” she said.
“Good morning,” he answered, breathless.
When Joseph came home that afternoon, the apartment was sparkling. Spotless. The linoleum floor was a lighter shade of gray. The windows were clear, ungreased. Victoria stood in the middle of the room with her sleeves rolled up and her hair rebelling from her face in wild wisps, as though she were a flower in the wind. She had a toothbrush in one fist. She motioned to the countertop. Finally, he thought, finally she was upright, undelicate. It had been so long since he’d seen a flush in her cheeks. He’d forgotten how it made her eyes brighter. Her face was glistening with sweat. But then he remembered, was fill
ed with a sudden rage. Had she forgotten already? What kind of person was she?
“Let us sit,” he said, taking Victoria by the elbows. “You need to rest.”
She resisted him. She snatched her arms away.
“I cannot sit anymore,” she said.
He tried to remember how he’d once felt about her. They were the same people, weren’t they? He believed in chemistry. He believed in love. And he believed that he still loved her; was determined to. More than anything, he wished they could start over. He imagined a crisp white canvas coming down from the sky and rolling out in front of them. He realized that in order to love more, he would have to feel less. This was what it meant to love, he thought. It required a certain degree of forgetting, of loss; it was like rushing into freezing water, jumping with your eyes closed into a dark hole, not making a sound.
Victoria held the toothbrush in the air like a flag. When she smiled, he was surprised to see the beautiful symmetry of her teeth. Her nightgown was long and sorry, and it now appeared incongruous on her, as though the very idea of napping had forced itself on her, against her will, all these months. She scratched one foot with her other foot, not moving her arms. As she stood in the afternoon light, Joseph noticed two silver hairs on the right side of her head. They hadn’t been there before. And yet, he was grateful to them. At least, he thought, he’d not been the only one grieving for months.
He went over to the countertop, put his face to it, and licked. She clapped and raised her hands in the air. She threw her head back with laughter.
“Isn’t it clean!” she said. “It’s clean!”
“So clean,” he said, and he could feel himself begin to laugh too.
As the weeks went by, Victoria continued to do things. She went to the Fulton Market every morning, despite how dangerous she knew it was. She stayed there for hours. When she got home, she cooked. All day, she cooked. She cooked and hummed and kept the windows wide open. She knelt on the floor and peeled cucumbers into a dishtowel. She cracked pomegranates and squeezed out the juice with cheesecloth. She made all the things they ate in Baghdad: kba, tershana, kitchri and ambah, sambusak ab tam’r. She made extra for the neighbors. She used all the money they had on spices and pans, and when Joseph couldn’t pay the rent, he didn’t tell her. He asked their landlady to take pity on them. And because he’d also told the landlady what had happened, she shrugged and said, “You good man. You bring me money when money come.”
Everything was different. Joseph woke to the sounds of the stove clicking on. He was happy. Victoria made him cardamom coffee and he brought it to work. It kept him thinking all day of her bare feet. Flat feet, moving around the apartment with purpose. In the afternoons, he walked all the way home with his body pitched forward. Getting there faster faster faster. Some days, from a block away, he could see a crowd gathering outside his building, looking up at his window toward the dark, orange flavors of Victoria’s cooking. And he felt proud walking through the front door. He felt important.
And just like that, he never went back to the meeting place by Dr. Espy’s office, never leaned on a hydrant, waiting. Never ventured into that dank, sticky bar for midday drinks or shared the weight of his body with someone else. Letting go came naturally, as if the weather had suddenly changed. The day after the baby was born, he’d gone to the pay phone to call. His hand hovered over the dial, but he couldn’t remember the number. For the first time in months, he simply couldn’t recall it. He laughed out loud at himself. He hung up.
As he headed back to their apartment, he imagined himself and Victoria as a small but unshakable unit, walking under an umbrella together as the world tornadoed around them. How could it be any other way? Their accents, their apartment, their memories—it bound them, kept them. They’d met at a market in Baghdad. They fell in love. They would be all right.
Later, he asked her to squeeze his hand. And she did, smiling, only half mocking him. He had to close his eyes to bear it. This, he thought, is the only way forgiveness can be effective—when both people have regrets and hope, both.
The year that followed seemed to Joseph the happiest and saddest of his life. It was the kind of year that had no beginning or end. The seasons made their way open-mouthed from one to the next. Joseph and Victoria anticipated them in a way they never had before. They looked forward to things. They went on walks in the evenings, embracing the weather and changes in the trees. It was during that year that they saw the Statue of Liberty, Macy’s, and Central Park. It was like it had been before. The two of them and the city of New York and everything else mostly behind them, quiet but tender, like delicate scars.
Just as there was incredible happiness, there was fierce disappointment that Joseph couldn’t shake. At night when Victoria lay sleeping, a resentment would stir in the pit of his stomach, all acid and bile. The longer he watched her, the angrier he became. How could she sleep, he wondered, if she knew the pain she’d caused him? And yet, just as his anger reached its pinnacle, her face would quickly clench and release, as if her insides had been seized by some invisible hand. He’d feel sorry then. The resentment would wane, and the anger would realign against himself. He was so much at fault too.
It went like this. Back and forth. On and on.
It was during that year that Joseph suggested Victoria cook for the bakery. They sold her food on Fridays. Her breakfast bread went faster than anything else. Her almond malfuf were gone by noon. They had to make a sign: ONE PER CUSTOMER, PLEASE. They were gone in ten minutes, five minutes; a woman offered triple the price for the whole lot. Soon, Victoria was cooking every day of the week. Some days, she came to the bakery and stood outside just to watch. Her face oohed and aahed as each of her items flew off the shelf. It made Joseph laugh. He’d never seen her so full of herself. It even seemed she’d grown taller, her body less stiff. He bought her a turquoise necklace. She wore it everywhere and moved her chest forward like a peacock.
Still, some nights he woke to her sitting, legs crossed beneath her, dabbing at her breasts as tears spilled down her face. Her nightshirt was stained like drenched soil. Some nights, he sat up too. He consoled her. Other nights, he pretended to be asleep, only half immune to the sadness of the thing.
One day in the late spring, Victoria was frying eggplant. Joseph stood next to her by the stove. He leaned around her, trying to pluck a piece of eggplant from the pan, but the oil kept popping and he drew back his hand. Victoria didn’t help him, didn’t take one out with her fork. Usually, she did. A lump grew in his throat. She was thinking of something. He was afraid of it. Maybe she was going to want to talk about the baby. But finally, things were good. They were happy. Victoria had taken to washing his face in the morning, holding a steaming towel with one hand, the other hand on the back of his head. Or, what if, he wondered, she knew what he’d done? What if she didn’t think their failures canceled out the way he had so doggedly convinced himself that they did?
Now she was looking at him, her eyes set like two rocks in a glass. Joseph’s throat twisted. Please, he thought. Do not ask me. Quickly, he found something to say.
“Are you remembering Baghdad?” he asked.
“No,” she said. “Why?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “You looked like that.”
She smiled. Her eyes became sharper. Whatever she had been about to say, she was now sure of. He had made it worse.
“I’d like to have a restaurant,” she said. Joseph didn’t say anything. He was relieved and he wasn’t. Once again, he felt himself wondering about her—about her capacity for sadness and, if not sadness, empathy, at the very least.
“The people enjoy my cooking, don’t they?” she said. “They ask for more.”
She was swinging the wooden spoon in her hands. Her mouth was wet with excitement.
Joseph knew: he had to move on. He didn’t have the right to hold this over her forever. Not even just in his heart.
He realized only then, as he burned his fingers on a fragrant
piece of eggplant, that forgiveness was born from loss. It required giving up and moving past dark corners where grudges, wrapped in dusty clothes and stacked like corpses, lay idle, unmoving.
“They love your cooking,” he said and took a deep breath. He realized that he missed her already. He felt like she’d just returned to him. But, he thought, he’d done what he needed to do. Now she could do the same. And no one ever died from missing, he told himself. He was quite sure.
“So,” he said. “All right. Let’s.”
Lorca
TWO HOURS AFTER I found out I had a real grandmother, a biological grandmother, my mother announced she was going through menopause.
“Let’s just say,” she said, “it’s the end of being a woman.”
“It is?” I said.
“All the great parts about being female,” she said. “It all ends now.”
She crossed her arms into an X in front of her, and then uncrossed them violently. Done.
“One day you’ll understand,” she said, leaning her head against the back of the couch and tracing her hairline with her fingertips. Her eyes were closed and fluttering. Her chest inflated, deflated.
“You’re far too young to understand. But learning how to be both feminine and powerful is the best thing a woman can do for herself. It’s an art, really. It’s the only reason I survived.”
Usually, I’d be killing myself to get to the heart of what she was trying to say, hoping that something important could be attributed to me. But now I was distracted, away somewhere. It felt like I’d had seventeen café au laits, though I hadn’t had a single one. Part of me was terrified that the secret was written all over my face and my mother would see it, and it wouldn’t go according to plan and all my hard work would be ruined. Off I’d go to boarding school. Another part wanted to tell her sooner rather than later, before she found out some other way, but I dreaded it. I wanted to mull things over, talk to Blot, enjoy Victoria before I had to give her up to my mother. Another part still was disappointed that I hadn’t been able to match Victoria’s emotion the way I had hoped. But when she said she knew who I was and she looked at me like she was going to cry, it felt like a very heavy foot was standing on my chest.
Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots Page 25