She followed me into the bathroom. It took some time, even for her, to get onto the floor. She winced but made no sound. She examined Lorca, who was in the bathtub and who’d barely opened her eyes since we’d left her apartment.
Now Lorca looked at me, and then at Dottie.
I laughed out loud just once. I put my hand on Dottie’s shoulder. Like I’ve said, I’m a thousand years old. I can barely hold my head up. Do you think I can hold a grudge?
“It’s all right,” I said.
“It will be,” Dottie said. “I’ll need a Waterpik. And a candle, bucket of ice, needle and thread.”
“Joseph used a Waterpik,” I said, walking out of the room.
“He did?” Dottie said.
“Yes,” I said. A wife knows these things, I thought to myself, if not everything.
Lorca
WE DIDN’T HAVE wooden stakes in the ground. We didn’t have burning brushwood either. We didn’t have fish from the Tigris or the Euphrates.
We did have fresh red snapper from Citarella, which I butterflied down the back; tamarind paste from Fairway; hand-skimmed olive oil from Tunisia. We had a small fire when Victoria’s sleeve brushed past the stove. And when I threw a glass of water at her, we had a fit of laughter so overpowering that I had to help her into a chair.
We brought the food outside and sat on the stoop of Victoria’s building and ate with our hands. The fish rested in aluminum-foil boats with grilled lemon rounds that floated like life rafts in the olive oil inside.
It was freezing, but Victoria said she wasn’t cold. And I wasn’t either, though my eyes were watering, the insides of my cheeks were stiff like tin roofs.
Blot showed up just in time. He brought Victoria the old copy of Zagat. He brought me the Dalí book. He put it on my lap. My hand was still wrapped in gauze; it had healed a bit in a week, but not completely. That would take a while. Victoria passed him a foil boat.
“Thank you,” I said.
“Thank you,” she said.
“Thank you,” he said.
The snapper flaked into tender, charred pieces, and the bitter tamarind cut the richness, unperfecting the dish in a way that I wasn’t used to—but in a way that I loved.
“This is even better than the last time,” Victoria said.
“Hear that, Joseph?” I said, and Victoria leaned toward me in thanks.
We ate messily, the food getting stuck beneath our fingernails, the oil plumping our lips. But it didn’t matter. We ate more. And just before we finished most of the fish among the three of us, eating nearly two pounds each, Victoria yelled up to Dottie. She came to the window.
“It’s freezing down there,” she said. “If you were offering hot toddies, I’d whistle a different tune.”
“Absolutely, you make better turshee than Joseph,” Victoria said after a while, leaning back, taking a shallow breath, putting her hand over her stomach. “Bless his heart.”
“That’s the best fish I’ve eaten,” I said. “Ever.”
“I hate fish,” Blot said. “I loved that.”
He said he had to get back to work.
“When do you leave for school?” he asked me.
“In two days,” I said. “It’s just an hour north of the city.”
“And we can come visit on Saturdays?” he asked, gesturing to Victoria.
“Of course,” I said, maybe with a bit too much excitement. “If you want to, come the second weekend. My father’s coming the first.”
When he left, he kissed Victoria on both cheeks and then me. It was a different kind of butterflies I felt now. The only word that came to mind was faith.
Victoria and I sat there for an unreasonably long time, eventually growing so cold we had to move our feet to get the blood flowing. But we were close enough to warm each other. Our shoulders, elbows, knees, and toes were touching. We were blocking the wind.
“Tell me something,” she said out of nowhere. “Why did you do it?”
I’d been waiting for years for someone to ask, and yet I didn’t have an answer, really, not one that I wanted to share.
“Because it felt better,” I said.
“Better than?” she said.
“Better than nothing.”
“Better than this?” she asked. She took another bite of fish, passed some to me.
Like I said, I’m not used to life surprising me. I shook my head no.
“I know,” she said, and though I didn’t, at least not exactly, I put my hand on hers. Her bones awakened to my fingers.
“I would never have thought,” she said, the words less audible than the cracks in her voice.
“I know,” I said.
I leaned into her but it didn’t feel like I was giving in to something stronger or that I was too weak to hold myself up. It simply felt better than not.
I didn’t think this was the beginning of my life or that I’d been given another chance or anything like that. I knew that I was made up of my choices, the things I’d done, and whom I’d loved and how. I thought only that things felt like themselves, but different. This was happiness, I realized, when I was pretty sure that I’d be happy later on, again and not, and then again.
It wasn’t snowing and though it was dusk and slatelike all around us, the sunlessness pouring into the folds between the hungry, reaching branches of the trees, there was lightness in the sky behind the buildings that caught our attention, both at once. There was a bright blue color, like a very heavy, tired eyelid with a sliver of pearl at the bottom—the crest of a wave about to rush through. It seemed impossible that the day was on its way somewhere, or had come from somewhere else, unless its intention had always been to show off the sky just as it was then.
Later, I would go home. Soon after, I would book a ticket and kiss my mother and hail a cab and take a train and carry my own bags and maybe I’d get a job at the kitchen in my new school. Maybe not. I’d have to see.
We sat there and watched people go home and leave home and when I wondered about their dinner tables, I wasn’t jealous. We sat there until well after we’d finished. All that was left were bones.
Masgouf
INGREDIENTS
Whole carp (or other white fish, such as red snapper, sea bass or sole)
Equal parts turmeric, tamarind, black pepper
Olive oil
Lemons
Rock salt
Optional condiments: pickled onions, ambah (mango cured in turmeric, lemon, and salt), or diced tomatoes with garlic
DIRECTIONS
Ask your fishmonger to butterfly fish and leave the skin on. Otherwise, do it yourself: clean and scale fish, and slice all the way down the back so it can lie flat.
Brush both sides of fish with plenty of olive oil.
Cover the flesh with a thin layer of the spice mixture.
Season both sides generously with salt.
Indoors: Place the fish skin side up in a shallow baking dish covered with tin foil. Cook under a preheated broiler for 7–10 minutes, or until the skin is crispy. Flip the fish and cook just until flesh is opaque, about 2 minutes.
Outdoors: Impale fish vertically on wooden stakes and put directly into fire pit or place the opened fish, tail down, head up, in a well-oiled wire grill basket and cook until done, turning now and again for even heat dispersal. Cooking will take anywhere from 45 minutes to a couple of hours, depending on size of fish and intensity of fire.
Serve on a platter with grilled lemon rounds, a sprinkling of parsley and lemon juice, and choice of condiments.
Acknowledgments
So very much gratitude is due.
First, and foremost, thank you to Stella Jane, who is simply the best kind of mother and person and whose love of good writing is contagious, or genetic—and inspirational, for sure.
Then, from the beginning: Blanche Boyd, Julia Fierro, Margery Mandell. Next, Peter Carey, Nathan Englander, John Freeman, Nicole Krauss; Scott Cheshire, Alex Gilvarry, Liz Moore; and, of course, Colum McC
ann, who believed in me first. After that, dearest Claudia Ballard: I didn’t know to hope for such things from an agent. Raffaella De Angelis, Eric Simonoff, Cathryn Summerhayes. Brilliant Jenna Johnson, who made everything, everything, better. Lori Glazer, Tracy Roe, Taryn Roeder.
And finally, my deepest gratitude to Alex for all the tea, green juices, my desk, my pens, heated blanket, faith and encouragement and patience. This is nothing without you.
About the Author
JESSICA SOFFER earned her MFA at Hunter College, where she was a Hertog Fellow. Her work has appeared in Granta and Vogue, among other publications. Her father, a painter and sculptor, emigrated from Iraq to the United States in the late 1940s. She teaches fiction at Connecticut College and lives in New York City.
Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots Page 31