by Sasha Martin
“You can keep that one,” Phoenix said from behind the flowers.
“T–thank you.” I pressed the photo to my heart. In this moment, I wanted nothing more than for my father to walk out of the photo and say hello—just once.
“What happened?” I asked Lotty. “My mom never told me why—”
“That’s your mom’s story to tell, and what’s more, I don’t know it,” she responded. “But I can tell you, your father was a complicated man. I met him out at Lake Tahoe when I was 20. I was at a resort with my parents, and he was the cook. He always smelled delicious and, oh, God, he was a looker. He proposed to me two weeks after we met on a bench at the end of a dock.” She laughed. “When you have eyes like that staring into your soul, there’s nothing to say but yes.”
Lotty pulled out a photo of my father holding baby Phoenix. He was beardless, clean-cut, and at 22, looked even more like Michael.
“He wasn’t just a cook. He was an artist. A poet. A brilliant inventor.
“But there was darkness, too. His mom was only 14 when he was born. He started off in a boys’ home. He spent Sundays on the front steps, waiting for her to visit. She never came.
“We did alright for a while. The darkness, his fits of anger, happened after Phoenix was born. We divorced, but saw each other every week for her sake.”
Phoenix was looking over at her mom for the first time since we’d arrived.
Lotty sighed. “I showed up one day with her when she was maybe a year old. He was painting furiously in his studio. He was convinced that he was the Count of Monte Cristo. I couldn’t talk him out of it. He spent a year of his life in an asylum. I checked him in myself.”
She leaned forward.
“He climbed over the fence and escaped to New England. He still deserved to see his daughter, so I sent her out there every summer until she was out of the house and old enough to make her own arrangements.”
Lotty pulled out a stack of letters from the manila envelope. “He wrote her about boys, about love, about everything a father should. But his return address always changed. And sometimes there was no way to reach him.”
She dropped the letters on the table, and I picked one up, addressed to Phoenix. I soaked in his words, pretending they were for me: “If this guy you say you like doesn’t treat you with respect and give you the attention he should, then he’s not worth your time. You deserve better, honey.”
Lotty continued. “He became a mountain man—that’s what Phoenix called him. He lived out his life deep in the woods of New England, camping, wandering. He was his happiest far away from it all. Being in society was like a cage to him. But when he died, I do think he’d managed to find some kind of peace.”
I looked up at Phoenix. “What was his funeral like?”
She shook her head.
“She didn’t go,” Lotty said.
“You didn’t go?” I spat back, incredulous. Phoenix looked away. I immediately regretted my tone. “I’m sorry.” I turned to Lotty. “Did you?”
She hesitated, and then shook her head: “Phoenix hasn’t seen him since that photo.” She paused. “He put her through … a lot. We spoke on the phone every few years, when we could find him. He got lung cancer, his smoking caught up with him. The state called to let us know he passed; there was no money for a funeral, and she was his oldest kin.”
Phoenix cleared her throat and spoke for the second time since we’d entered her mother’s apartment. Her voice trembled. “When I was looking for you, I found a picture of you and Michael with your firefighter cousin. Antonio—was that his name? I got the idea to call the firehouse where he worked. When I called, I guess you were already overseas. He had no idea where you were. He said Michael had …”
She sighed. “When I called Dad to tell him about Michael, we cried together over the phone.”
“It’s hard to believe that was 16 years ago.” Lotty added.
Mom had been right on every count. My father had been a man without roots, without stability. But what Mom hadn’t said was that he cared. The photos and the stories painted a man conflicted, a man who battled to love his world and be loved, sometimes with less success than others. I left California with one shadowy photo and more questions than when I’d arrived—questions that could only be answered by a man six feet under.
CHAPTER 21
A Baby and a Blog
ICONSIDERED SEEKING OUT my father’s grave, but decided against it. It was time to focus on our baby—transitioning from my job at the Girl Scouts to raising our child full time. I moved my old white teddy bear into the waiting crib.
Mom came to visit in late June, about a week before the baby was due. She brought along a few balls of tan-and-white cotton-cashmere yarn and taught me to knit while we waited for my body to kick into gear. Day after interminable day, we sat side by side, our needles clicking out two pairs of booties and two tiny caps.
We cooked together, too: three of Mom’s zucchini pies, made with a couple of white-flecked zucchini, three eggs whipped until frothy, and—as always—more Parmesan than seemed proper. For a finishing touch, Mom chopped a handful of parsley from my flower bed and stirred it into the egg.
I relaxed into her company, content not to talk about my father, not to fight about the past. I was simply grateful she could be beside me in this time of endless expectation. Finally, when it seemed every ounce of water I’d drunk over the last ten months had pooled under my skin, I went into labor.
It was 2 a.m. on the Fourth of July. According to the doctors, the baby was ten days late. Of course, Mom had told me that was hogwash. “Babies know when they want to be born,” she said, “They’re stronger if you listen to your body, not some chart.”
Now Mom’s door was open. I could see her small, sleeping form in the moonlight. It surprised me how a twin bed swallowed her up. When I knocked lightly, she sat up like a rocket, her frizzy curls bouncing forward.
I nodded through the darkness: It was time. She grabbed a skinny, green mug off the desk, handed it to me, and told me to drink the contents. Then she turned to shut the door.
“Aren’t you coming with me?”
She looked me up and down.
“It’s going to be a while. You’re just getting started.” She pointed to the mug: “Drink that. I’ll come by in the morning.”
On the way to the hospital, I sipped Mom’s lurid brew, a bitter and potent blend of chamomile tea, turmeric, and honey. The combination made my stomach churn. Almost immediately, my contractions quickened and I abandoned the mug in the cup holder of the truck.
At the hospital, when the nurses checked me, I was a half-centimeter dilated. Under normal conditions, they’d send me home, but since the baby’s sluggish heartbeat indicated it wasn’t responding well to stress, they wanted to monitor us. More to the point, I was getting sick with every contraction. Once they added antinausea medication to my drip, there was no sending me home.
Finally, after four hours in triage, a penguin-shaped nurse wheeled me over to labor and delivery. “You’re going to have a baby today,” she twittered as we rolled down the long, shiny hallway. I looked up at Keith and smiled.
Around 8 a.m., Mom breezed into the hospital room. I was between contractions. She inspected all the beeping, blinking computers, and groaned. “This is exactly why I had you at home. It’s a baby, not a disease.”
The nurse stared at Mom with pinched face and large, unblinking eyes. Mom screwed up her brow, primed for a debate.
“Hey, Mom …” I called, loud enough to distract her, “you made it!”
Mom softened her expression and pulled a chair up to the side of the bed. “We can’t have a birth day without a few gifts,” she said, smiling. She dug three wrapped packages out of her leather tote: a sketchbook made with recycled paper (to draw the baby), a jade necklace (for me), and an old three-dimensional valentine from 1914. Mom got the card from her father, who happened upon the unused card in his piles of paperwork.
The brittle card was a goo
d ten inches tall, scalloped along the edges. On it, a Victorian mother held her child to the sky, smiling up at the baby’s face. I was moved that Mom had saved it all this time.
Mom pulled a small bottle of champagne from her purse. She’d sneaked it past the colony of nurses who bumped and jostled in and out of my room. Mom said the bubbles would help me relax. Hastily, I pushed the bottle back into her purse, worried that we’d get kicked out if we were caught.
Our eyes were still locked while I wheezed through the searing pain of another contraction, my hand gripping the pillow. The nurses glanced at me, and then frowned at the monitors. Quickly, one strapped an oxygen mask to my face. Mom stood by, helpless, while Keith grabbed my hand.
Mom’s eyes brimmed over. She busied herself smoothing the sheets at the foot of the bed. A few stray tears rolled down her cheeks, which she quickly wiped away. As the contraction passed and my breathing slowed, she mumbled something about getting some cups for the champagne and rushed off to the cafeteria.
I don’t ever remember seeing my mother cry. Not when she thrust us into the arms of the Dumonts, not when Michael was in the hospital—never. She’d always been able to keep it together in front of me. Even in the courts, she’d worked to exude the sort of strength one would expect of a mother. But in the process, I realized, she’d made herself appear cold and uncaring.
Her tears now revealed the truth I needed to see: My pain was her pain. Everything that hurt me, hurt her.
It really was that simple.
While Mom was gone, the doctor administered my epidural. I insisted on not being completely numb for the birth, so they gave me a walking dose. The relief was instant and complete. Keith and I were playing Boggle when Mom returned with two Styrofoam cups.
“How are you holding up?” she asked, sizing up my relaxed countenance with surprise.
“I got an epidural. I’m going through a huge contraction now,” I said, “Do you see it?”
She pointed to the top of the digital mountain on the screen, “This? I suppose these gadgets are kind of neat after all, aren’t they?”
We clunked our foam champagne glasses with a dull thud.
By midday, real labor began. Keith was at my side, Mom a few feet away by the window. I hadn’t planned to invite her to stay, but after I saw her struggle through my contraction, I knew she belonged at my side.
I was ten days overdue, but the labor went quickly. Four strong pushes later, my child greeted the world with a mighty wail.
“It’s a girl,” Keith grinned.
We named her Ava Marie. She floated in my arms, her soft skin warm and redolent. In the first instant I held her, my heart cracked open. I would do whatever I could for my child, this soft, sweet stranger of my heart’s creation. I knew I would never abandon her; like Mom, I’d give her the life I knew she deserved. I would protect her with my everything.
Mom stayed another week to help me and fawn over Ava, but then had to get back to work. She’d recently taken a job as the business manager at a local seminary in Boston. After I dropped her off at the airport, I found a chubby-cheeked baby doll in the crib next to my old teddy bear. I recognized the blue eyes and yellow knit cap instantly: It had been Michael’s. Unbeknownst to me, Mom had kept it all these years, and now she’d left it for Ava.
For the next several months I cradled, nursed, rocked, and read to my daughter. She learned to hold her head up, roll over, sit up, cuddle Michael’s baby doll. I cheered her on like a crazed soccer mom. For the first time since I’d become an adult, I saw the world through a child’s eyes: I understood that it was an incredible place, but also a place of surrender. She could do nothing but trust me and her surroundings.
Nursing her was the ultimate reminder of this: I was literally Ava’s food. The responsibility was humbling. I called Mom eight times a day with questions. When the all-night sessions wore me down, Grace, who’d successfully nursed two babies, talked me off the ledge, reminding me to drink plenty of water and to eat right. Our calls always ended with, “I wish you weren’t half a country away.”
While Keith was at work, Ava and I were left to figure each other out as best we could.
There is terror in every happy ending: terror that it’s not real, terror that it cannot be sustained. Though I’d settled into mine when I was pregnant, it was a naive sort of complacency. Phoenix’s sudden email had dredged up the tough reality that no joy is impervious to misfortune. This was on my mind as I floundered through my first months as a mother.
Sure, I now had the American dream: a husband, a baby, a house, two cats, two cars. Friends and family regularly affirmed I was doing everything right. “Motherhood suits you,” Keith whispered one night, while I cradled her. “It’s like—you’re all lit up.”
And yet the intensity of my love for this child overwhelmed me. When I considered the future, I saw a deeply rooted probability that I would somehow fail as a mother and wife.
By Thanksgiving, I was crumbling at the corners. Now that I had forged a family of my own, the cracked foundation of my own childhood had finally caught up with me, incapable of withstanding the pressure I put on it: my fantasy of what a home should be. I found myself waiting for the other shoe to drop.
I put my nervous energy into watching reruns on the Food Network, scanning through cookbooks, and surfing the Internet for kitchenware. I fixated on a set of “French square” spice jars listed on a wholesale website; I must have looked at them 50 times. I imagined that my dusty spices would glow anew within the glass, their rightful color restored: the warm goldenrod of turmeric, the deep plum of sumac, the royal green of dill, the moss of oregano.
I shouldn’t have been surprised when Keith got me the jars for Christmas. He said he couldn’t watch me ogle them one more time. He could tell I was at loose ends and gently suggested that some old-fashioned “home cookin’ ” might be a good distraction from my anxiety as a new mother.
The box of spice jars sat on the Formica counter for a month before I got a chance to move them into the drawers beside the stove. There they stayed until one sleepless, snowy night in February.
It must have been midnight when I padded from my warm bedroom to that dark kitchen. I could almost hear the walls around me creak, brittle against the press of cold air. By now the snow was done falling. I couldn’t see five feet into the yard, and yet a universe away the stars shone clearly. The shrouded planet felt at once enormous and much, much too small.
I stood barefoot on the kitchen tiles, thinking about why my kitchen had fallen into disuse. Sure, Keith was picky, and at seven months old, Ava was barely eating solid food. But there was something more. I pulled open the spice drawer and held one of the empty jars to the dim light. In it, I saw my childhood—Mom’s improvisation, Patricia’s determination, and the 12 countries that fed me: France, world famous for pastries, tarragon sauce, and lacy lavender; Greece, known for thick yogurt topped with golden pools of honey; Tunisia, where the markets burst with baskets of spices so heady the scent lingered on my clothes for days.
Marcel Proust, the 20th-century novelist, knew how easy it is to bring the past to life: When he bit into a tea-soaked madeleine, the shadows of his childhood took on color, snapping into full dimension. If I put the right ingredients in my spice jars, I realized, they’d be portals to that bygone era.
My thoughts turned to all the countries I hadn’t been to yet, to all the exotic foods I had yet to experience. What would it be like if I could fit this uncharted world in those jars, if I could use them to season my future? Perhaps I could bypass Proust and enjoy a madeleine of my own making.
Suddenly, I knew what I had to do. I ran to the bedroom and shook Keith’s shoulder.
“I’m going to cook the world!” I exclaimed.
“What time is it?” he said, lifting his head from the pillow and squinting.
“Recipes from every single country!” I gushed, “One per week—I’ll start a blog!”
While he rubbed the sleep from
his eyes, I explained that I wanted to help him learn to love new foods, become less picky—that, together, we could raise our daughter with an appreciation of other cultures. I could wake this kitchen up and hopefully quell some of my wanderlust. And then there was the reason I could not yet give voice to: I could begin the next chapter of my life afresh.
Little did I know that it would be nearly impossible to separate my history from the future I wanted to create.
PART FIVE
True Spice
“Follow your bliss and don’t be afraid. Doors will open where you didn’t know they were going to be.”
—Joseph Campbell
CHAPTER 22
Afghanistan or Bust
ICAN COUNT ON ONE HAND the number of times I’ve used a shopping list since Keith and I got married. I always get the same things: frozen fish, macaroni and cheese, canned beans, Pink Lady apples, and if I’m feeling particularly naughty, a half-gallon of mint chocolate chip ice cream. But not today: Today I am on an entirely different mission.
Today, I will cook Afghanistan. Thanks to the alphabet, this mountainous country in south-central Asia is the first of the 195 countries awaiting me on our family’s journey to eat our way around the world. When I’m done, I’ll share my recipe adaptations on my new blog, Global Table Adventure. There’s something comforting about knowing that for the next four years, this will be my quest: one meal per country, one country per week. Straightforward. Structured. A check-it-off-the-list-for-immediate-satisfaction kind of adventure: the yin to the yang that is motherhood.
But none of my cookbooks have Afghan recipes. I expand my search and find a blog by an Afghan man living stateside, who says that community is the heart of Afghanistan’s nomadic culture. Nowhere is this more apparent than at mealtime. Families gather together on dusty floors and eat with their hands out of communal platters, and anyone who comes into the home is treated with the respect afforded a close relative.