Farah Rocks Florida

by Ruaida Mannaa

  It needs to boil for one hour at least, she says, and so we sit at the counter and eat fresh bread. She puts out two bowls, one with zeit zaytoun and the other with zaatar, to dip our bread in. My friends usually think eating this looks funny, like you are eating dirt. But nothing tastes as good as dipping your bread into the zeit first, then into the zaatar. The spices stick to the oil like a magnet.

  “Do you think Samir will be okay?” I ask Sitti.

  “Yes,” she says.

  “You seem sure.”

  “I am.”

  “But nobody can be one hundred percent sure,” I argue. But I don’t even know why I am arguing.

  “Of course not,” she says. “But let’s study the facts.”

  She closes her hand into a fist, then spreads out each finger one by one as she recites a list of facts.

  One: “He has good doctors.”

  Two: “He has had this problem since birth, and they have been watching him.”

  Three: “This surgery is usually very successful.”

  Four: “He is a healthy boy all around.”

  Five: “If it doesn’t work, there is another surgery that he can still do.”

  By the end, she has all five fingers spread out. “For these reasons, I am at least ninety-nine percent positive.”

  Her very scientific list makes me feel a lot better. I am grateful that she wasn’t just telling me he will be “okay,” without some good evidence.

  Finally, my parents call us back. “Samir came through the surgery just fine!” Mama says, her voice ecstatic and giggly. “I’m sorry you called us so many times, but our phones were off. I hope you haven’t spent all afternoon being worried.”

  I look at Sitti and realize that I wasn’t worried the whole time because Sitti had distracted me with making hummus and baking bread.

  She winks at me.

  And I understand it now.

  She tricked me.

  Holy hummus. Nobody ever tricks me.

  Mama and Baba say that Samir will be recovering in the hospital for a few more days, and then they will take him home, as long as he doesn’t get any infections.

  “Can I come home then?” I ask quickly. Before I realize what I have said, I see Sitti’s face change like a cloud passing over the sun.

  She understood me, even though I spoke in English. And I have hurt her feelings.

  “Not yet,” Mama says, her voice soft like an apology.

  When I hang up, I tell Sitti, “I don’t mean that I want to leave, Sitti.”

  “I know what you meant,” she says. “You must be bored here, with just an old lady for company.” She stands up and tells me to find something to do for a while, until the beans are ready to make the hummus.

  Feeling bad, I take the laptop to the lobby of the main building, where Mr. Delacroix is reading on his break.

  “Bored today?” he asks me.

  “A little bit,” I say, then I tell him that I hurt my grandmother’s feelings.

  “Don’t worry about it,” he says. “You just miss your parents and your brother. Fay knows that.” That makes me feel better.

  “You know, it would be good for her to come out of her condo more,” he adds. “Maybe you can tell her to come with us on the lighthouse trip in a few days.”

  Grand Bums arranges for trips every month for the residents, he tells me. “But Fay always says she’s busy,” Mr. Delacroix says. He raises his eyebrows as if to say, “Doing what?”

  “I’ll tell her.”

  “I hope it works out for you to join us. I think you would really like it,” he says. “The lighthouse is really special.”

  When I go back to her condo, Sitti is sewing quietly on the couch. I think about how much time she spends in silence. Maybe that is why she seemed upset that I wanted to leave, because with me here, there is someone else with her, someone to talk to, someone who ninety-five percent understands her when she speaks in Arabic.

  I sit on the other end of the couch and go online to check that my teachers received my work last week. I check my email and see a picture of the Hope Diamond that Brian Najjarian sent me from his trip. “Farah Rocks, this rock is 45.52 carats! LOL! Hope Florida is fun,” it reads. June Jordan also emailed me, saying that everyone in the writing club misses me.

  It’s weird, but it feels good to know that. My parents are obsessed with Samir’s health right now, but at least my friends haven’t forgotten me.

  I know Mama and Baba love me, but sometimes it’s hard to be the one who doesn’t need any attention or any help.

  Immediately, I feel guilty for this idea. Of course they need to focus on Samir. Because the feeling is icky, I distract myself by opening Google and searching randomly for stuff. VSD, St. Augustine Lighthouse, Haiti. I try again to find my mystery rocks online. I go to my favorite geology website, but I cannot find them there. Then I try to Google bark and rock and Florida, but nothing comes up.

  On a whim, I search beans and find that the opening in each one is called a micropyle. Sitti was right about that. On another website, I also learn that the yeast really is a fungus. The air pockets it makes in the bread are actually carbon dioxide.

  “Making bread is actually a science,” according to the site.

  And Sitti was right, yeast is alive.

  Glancing up at her, I tell her that she was correct about that, and she looks at me like I have eight heads. “Of course,” she says and shrugs, then goes back to her tatreez.

  Later, Sitti tells me to come into the kitchen. She shows me how to dump out the water that the hummus beans were in and rinse them with fresh cold water. We dump them all in her food processor, which is like a big bowl with a small set of blades in the center. She lets me push the button, and I watch as the blades whir and make the beans creamy.

  “Keep going,” she says when I stop. “No lumps allowed in our hummus!”

  Later, when she’s satisfied, we add tahine, then salt, then cumin and lemon. Sitti lays out ten clean spoons, and we use them, one at a time, to taste the hummus. “More lemon,” I suggest. When she pours in another tablespoon and whirs it, I take a clean spoon and try again. “More salt,” I say this time, and she laughs and makes the adjustment.

  “Let it sit for a while,” she says, watching me scoop out the hummus into a clean glass bowl.

  “By the way, what’s wrong with Dr. Fisher?” I ask her as I work.

  She rolls her eyes. “He’s a mean man.”

  “I don’t think he’s so mean,” I say. I tell her about how he offered to look at the mystery rocks I found.

  “He’s crazy,” she says, like it’s an encyclopedia fact.

  “Was he always like that?” I ask.

  She pauses, her hand with the bread poised above the bowl of zeit. “No,” she admits. “He was nice when his wife was alive.”

  Sitti tells me his wife was a school librarian who had red hair and freckles all over her face and neck and arms. A sweet woman, who died five years ago.

  “What about his children?” I ask.

  “He has a son who hasn’t come to see him since Mrs. Fisher died,” Sitti says. “I forgot all about him because I never see him.”

  I feel more and more sad for Dr. Fisher, thinking of his face in the hallway earlier. Grand Bums is filled with people, but it’s still possible for someone to feel lonely.

  We spend the rest of the evening sewing and reading and chatting quietly. And for dinner, we eat the most fabulous, creamy, zero-lumps hummus I’ve ever tasted.

  Chapter 11

  Sitti finds my rocks under the bed one day while she is sweeping the floor. “This towel is dirty now!” she proclaims and throws it in the trash. She won’t let me polish my mystery rocks inside the condo. “Too much dirt!” she exclaims and shoos me outside.

  Even though she is mad,
she is kind of cute at the same time, fluttering around like a bird, flapping her wings at imaginary germs.

  I follow her orders and carry my rocks outside in a plastic bag. As I walk through the main building, Cal hands me a croissant with apples baked inside. “Taste it… I’m experimenting.”

  “Holy hummus,” I say. “It’s scrumptious.”

  He gives me his huge smile and continues to the kitchen. I move on to the lobby, where Mitch sits playing dice with some other people.

  “Here, Farah,” he says and hands me the dice. “Throw them for me. For good luck.”

  I pick up the pearly dice, spotted with black holes, shake them in my palm, and toss them onto the table. They both land on the sixes. Mitch cheers while the others groan. Nearby, Agatha sits watching the game while she knits a long, colorful scarf that looks like pink and green candy ribbons.

  “These are for my grandchildren,” she says. “Too hot here to wear wool scarves!”

  Laughing, I move on, thinking that there are so many nice people here. It’s a shame Sitti doesn’t hang out with them more.

  Outside, I go back to the spot in the forest where I first saw the mystery rocks. And there is Dr. Fisher again, by the big palm tree, digging.

  “Hello,” I say cautiously, because you don’t want to startle a person digging for skulls.

  He looks back at me and nods, then resumes digging.

  “I have those rocks,” I say.

  “Good.” He keeps digging.

  “Did you want to see them?”

  “In a minute.”

  I watch him dig for sixty seconds before I realize he didn’t mean “in an actual minute.” He said it the way adults mean it, which is “whenever I am finished, and I’m not sure when that will be.”

  In other words, forever.

  I move back to the grassy patch and look for more of my mystery rocks. There, by an exposed tree root, is something hard and rough-looking. When I swipe the dirt away with my hands, I realize it is a rock, but it’s buried deep in the ground, so I walk back to Dr. Fisher.

  “What?” he says gruffly.

  “I need something to dig with.”

  He stares at me and then picks up a small shovel with a short handle. “Here.”

  “Thanks.” In minutes, I dig up the rock and pull it out. It is wider than my palm and about as thick as a hamburger. It is rimmed with brown, but it has blue and white crusts on it. It looks like I am holding a rough painting of clouds.

  “Ah, interesting,” I hear Dr. Fisher say. When I look up, he is standing above me, holding a small collection of bones.

  I hand him the tool. “Thanks for the shovel.”

  “It’s a trowel,” he says like he is annoyed with me. “A shovel has a long handle.”

  “Oh, okay! Thanks for telling me that.”

  He looks at me confused-funny, and then he actually grins. “You’re welcome.” He puts out his hand. “Let me see that.”

  I hand him the rock I just found, as well as the smaller ones I found a few days before.

  “This is not a rock,” he says, turning it in his hands. “This is petrified wood.” He looks at me doubtfully. “Do you know what petrified means?”

  “Sure, it’s like when something gets turned to stone.”

  His eyebrows shoot up in surprise. “That’s right.”

  “In Greek mythology, Medusa turned people to stone if they looked at her. They were petrified.”

  “Right. I forgot I was talking to a Minotaur.” He does a weird half-laugh, like he’s starting to laugh but then remembers he is supposed to be moody and stops himself just in time.

  He explains that, a lot of times, wood from old tree bark or branches starts to rot, but then it gets buried in the ground. “And then water rushes in—from the swamp or from the ground—and also floods it. The water has minerals in it, and it fills the wood up,” he says. “When the wood rots away, it gets replaced with the minerals. So, this is actually a fossil,” he says.

  “I thought fossils were just bones,” I say.

  “Oh no, plants can get fossilized too,” he tells me. “That is what you have here.” He sits down on the ground and picks up the trowel. “Let’s keep digging.”

  We find eight more rocks, big hunks of stone that look like chunks of wood, but not really. I’m excited to clean them, but I know Sitti won’t let me do it in the condo.

  “Fay is a clean freak, eh?”

  “She covers the carpet in plastic, and even though we don’t wear shoes in the condo, she even cleans the bottoms of our shoes every night, with Lysol.” I shudder. “My brother gets sick a lot, so my parents disinfect everything, but Sitti Fayrouz takes it up like three hundred percent.”

  He half-laughs again. “My wife used to be like that.” He pauses, then adds, “She would be furious to know I have a condo filled with skulls and bones right now.”

  He starts looking at the chunk of rock very carefully, the way people check fruit at the supermarket to see if it has bruises or spots. I can tell, even though he’s hiding it, that remembering his wife makes him feel sad.

  I don’t know what to say, so I stay quiet. Sometimes people talk too much and it’s better just to say nothing.

  After a minute, he says, “I have a small wood saw in my condo. Let me take this and slice it for you, so you can see the inside. You should be able to see the lines left by the original tree.”

  I hand over my treasures of petrified wood to Dr. Fisher, but before he walks away, he asks, “What’s wrong with your brother, by the way?”

  “He has VSD.”

  “Ah, a hole in his heart. Did they fix it?”

  I nod. “His surgery was yesterday.”

  He nods confidently. “He will be all right. It’s a treatable condition.”

  And I believe him.

  Chapter 12

  Dr. Fisher does exactly what he promised he would do.

  The next day, I convince Sitti to come to breakfast with me, so she can see some of the other residents at Grand Bums. They are all talking about the lighthouse trip. They keep asking her to come, but she keeps saying, “Izz too far for me.”

  Suddenly, Dr. Fisher comes up to me and taps my shoulder. “Come on,” he says, pointing to another table. My grandmother looks at him suspiciously and asks me in Arabic what he wants.

  I explain that he has some rocks to show me. She rolls her eyes and says, “Fine, but I’m watching you.”

  I start to take another sip of my orange juice, which Cal said he squeezed fresh this morning, but Dr. Fisher looks at me impatiently. “Come on,” he says again, so I hurry to his table.

  It looks like he has spread large gems across the tabletop. The petrified wood that he cut has been sawed into slices, like a loaf of bread, and glazed like icing on a cake. I pick one up, and I can see the growth rings in the wood. One piece glitters with blue minerals, while another piece has green and yellow tints.

  “I sawed them with my special saw last night,” he explains.

  I take one piece and start to take it back to show it to my grandmother and Mitch. “Where are you going?” Dr. Fisher asks me.

  “To show my Sitti.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s awesome.” I pause, then ask, “Want to come with me?”

  He looks uncertain, so I say, “Come on,” in that same bossy tone he used with me about one minute ago.

  Mitch exclaims over the wood, and I pass around a few pieces. Sitti picks it up with a paper napkin, turning it over and over. She asks me what it is, and I try to explain, in my not-so-perfect Arabic, that it’s a piece of wood that has become filled with minerals, and now it’s more like a stone.

  “Zay al hajjar?” she asks, wondering if it’s like a rock now, and I nod.

  Mitch starts to ask Dr. Fisher ab
out how he cut it, and Dr. Fisher explains about his saw. “I’d like to take a look at that,” Mitch says, explaining how he used to do carpentry back in Minnesota.

  Dr. Fisher says hesitantly, “You can all come back to my condo, if you like. After you’ve finished eating. To see my workshop.”

  Everyone hurries through breakfast. By the time we are heading down the hallway to the elevator, we have grown to eight people. Mr. Delacroix has joined us, as has the lady who works behind the front desk, and Mrs. Suarez, who runs the office, and Cal, who heard the chatter from the kitchen. Everyone seems excited about seeing Dr. Fisher’s place.

  Dr. Fisher looks nervous. I stand in the elevator next to him and whisper, “You okay?”

  “These people have never been in my condo before,” he mumbles. “It’s weird. I’ve been living here for ten years.”

  “Well, it’s about time, then. Right?” I grin when he looks surprised.

  The elevator dings and we get off, heading down the third-floor hallway in a surge. He unlocks his door with his key and opens it. We enter behind him, then freeze in his foyer.

  Holy hummus.

  Sitti gasps and seizes my hand.

  Mr. Delacroix did not exaggerate one bit.

  There are shelves and shelves everywhere, lined around the living room and dining room, like a library. And on every shelf, there are either books or bones. Small animals, like squirrels and birds. There are bones that are large and unique, like one that might be a part of a rib.

  And then there are skulls, in their own special section.

  I walk up to a shelf, trying not to laugh while Sitti tells me if I touch the skulls, I will not be allowed to touch anything in her condo ever again. There is a small, white card in front of each skeleton or bone, labeling the animal. Phasianidae and Burhunidae, they say.

  Mitch starts to read some of them aloud. Mr. Delacroix says to Dr. Fisher, “This is more than you had the last time I was here.”

  “I keep myself busy,” Dr. Fisher says. He starts to tell everyone about the skeletons, informing them how this bird was only found in central Florida, while this bird was common across North America. Agatha asks if he would like to go bird-watching together one day, and he says, “Well, um… sure.”