The Language of Baklava (21 page)

On this particular day, as on so many other days I can think of, the women melt back into the kitchen afterward to do the dishes and gossip. Meanwhile, the men—overfull, overtaxed, with their new, oversize American bodies—lumber into the living room and spread out, everywhere but on the furniture, and fall right asleep, taking up every inch of floor space. There is no way to tell their sleeping forms apart. Great bellies rising, they look innocent and slack as sea animals on rocks.

Their breathing-snoring lifts and falls, gentle as a hidden spring, and again the living room is transformed. Monica, Suzy, Jess, Ed, and I wander through a great house of sleep—you can feel it on all sides, buoyant and rippling. Jess is fourteen and actively looking for interesting trouble, and Ed and I, a couple of years younger, are essentially at her command. Seven-year-old Monica is a good sport but fundamentally law-abiding. At eight, Suzy keeps her own counsel, careful and painstaking in all things. We creep through the living room, tiptoeing past the slumbering uncles, peering around as if at a gallery of archaeological artifacts.

We stop at our favorite, Uncle Jack the instigator, flat on his stomach and face on the living room floor. We stare at him, wait for him to awaken and start winking or singing or provoking a fight, anything. After a while, Jess says that we are going to play something called A Journey Through Uncle Jack’s Body. We squat over him with small plastic toy soldiers that we allow to hover just above his inert form. We start at the heels, and at the rise of his calves we spot enemy forces as they charge down the hillside of his posterior. Oh no! We whisper, “Watch out for the damn British!” We beat them back, but it’s all-out war by the time we reach his lower back. The soldiers clash in the air just over his spine. The Zionists appear at the crest of his shoulders, but a spirit of mutual understanding and compromise settles in around his neck, and our armies spread picnic blankets on the back of his head and sit together, eating
magloubeh.

Cousin Jess directs everything, assigning and reassigning roles according to her whims.

“Here, okay, now you be the Israeli, ’kay?” Jess gives her brother the dashing upright plastic soldier who holds a big machine gun. “He stays over here, by this ear. Now, Diana, you be the Palestinian, ’kay?” She gives me the soldier with the face we melted half-off last summer with a magnifying glass. “You stay by this ear on the other side and just look really scared.”

Afterward, my grandmother comes hunting for us and asks what in God’s name we’re up to, playing so quietly by ourselves. I tell her we were playing A Journey Through Uncle Jack’s Body. Her eyes widen and her whole face seems to flatten, then she catches her lower lip in her teeth. “Oh, you were, were you? And did he give you permission? No, I imagine not!” she says in her arch voice. But beneath her stern expression I see what might be suppressed laughter. “Well, then . . .” She turns away and walks to the door. It takes her a moment, then she says, “Well, so much for the great diplomat.”

DIPLOMATIC MAGLOUBEH

If you really want to make the children happy, add pieces
of chicken and substitute sliced carrot for the eggplant.

In a heavy saucepan, heat all but a few teaspoons of the oil. Add the onions and sauté until soft and browned. Add the meat and cook, stirring, until evenly browned. Add the spices and broth and bring to a boil. Reduce the heat to low, cover, and simmer for 1 hour, until the meat is tender.

Prepare the fried eggplant and cauliflower and set aside on paper towels.

Coat the bottom of a large cooking pot with the remaining olive oil. Arrange the meat in an even layer in the pot, cover with the eggplant, spread the rice over the eggplant, and spread the cauliflower over the rice. Pour the broth from the cooked meat over everything. Cover the pot and simmer about 40 minutes, until the rice is tender.

Meanwhile, sauté the pine nuts in the butter until lightly browned.

When the meat and rice are done cooking, invert the pot carefully over a serving platter and pour out the ingredients (this recipe will yield a looser, unstructured version, not a layered timbale). Top the meat with the pine nuts. This dish is very good served with yogurt and a cucumber tahini salad. It makes excellent leftovers, too.

SERVES 6.

EIGHT

Country Life

Bud comes home one day and plonks his keys on the brass table by the door. Then he sits across from us—next to the TV that is filled with our dramatic soap opera—and makes an announcement: We’re moving back to Jordan. He decided on the drive home from work.

Of course, this is an announcement that has been in the air for years. Behind workdays, picnics and outings, and evenings in front of the TV, there is Bud’s feeling that this is all temporary, that we will be leaving America to return to our “true country” any day now. He tells us so whenever we sit down to eat: “In Jordan, we’re going to get a big enough table so the company can sit in the kitchen with us!” Sometimes he’ll turn angry and frustrated if anyone questions his big Jordan plans; it’s easy to bruise his dignity. He can talk himself into a snit just by following one stream in his consciousness to the next, until he remembers something somebody said last week or last month or ten years ago that might possibly have hurt his feelings. He’ll be off, stomping upstairs and threatening to go back
home,
“where they really love me.” And we won’t be sure if he means to take us along at all.

By this point, we have lived in Syracuse for several years, consuming American culture, TV, music, and especially its lavish, oily fast foods—fried fish burgers, fried chicken, and quart-size ice-milk Fribbles from Friendly’s restaurant. Bud is fed up with decadent American culture, tedious, anonymous jobs, and most especially with seeing his children grow into stranger-Americans right before his eyes—dressing like them, talking like them, acting like them!

I don’t react when he makes his announcement. I’ve heard this plan so many times, it doesn’t seem like a real possibility anymore. It’s more like a refrain to a country-western song:
Someday I’ll see my
old home again.

But something is different this time. In the ensuing months, while I try to ignore Bud’s excitement, everything is sold: the furniture, dishes, the house. My friends, led by Sally Holmes, throw me a surprise going-away party just before school lets out for the summer. They present me with a five-pound album swollen with Polaroids and handmade glitter-dusted cards and personally inscribed farewell poetry surrounded by curlicues of glued-on yarn. The one from Jamie Faraday reads, “I had a friend / She went away / And now I am crying / Tears of icicles.” We have moved to Jordan before, but this isn’t the same—this time I’m twelve, I have friends, clothes, opinions. And my opinion is: I don’t want to move to Jordan.

At the party, my friends keep asking, “Where are you going again?” They gaze at me as if I’m shipping out to the western front.

Jamie Faraday puts her hand on my knee; her eyes are big and refracted with tears. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” She swipes at her shining cylinder of bangs, and they break into pieces. The thought comes to me that she must have willed me out of existence many times already.

Sally Holmes’s mother ladles up crystal punch glasses of pink Kool-Aid and pineapple juice for all the girls. Even though this is something I’ve learned to enjoy, today I can’t drink it. It tastes of sugar, stone, and chemicals—the way everything did when I first returned to the States. That fiery reentry comes back to me, the memory of having to re-create myself at seven, at nine, and now again.

It hasn’t been easy for me to construct this American self. I’ve had to observe closely. I have finally acquired hip-hugger jeans and a long shag haircut, in the posthippie fallout look of the seventies. I lie awake at night, trying to imagine Jordan. I retain vivid impressions worked into my body, sharp and inexorable—the whiteness of the streets, the stone houses, the running children. These tokens have always been within me: the scent of mint in my parents’ garden, the intricate birdsong, the seeded crust of the bread, and the taste of dried yogurt steeped in olive oil. All of it returns in my dreams. But when I deliberately try to reimagine it, it turns to dust. Two years older than me, my friend Hisham will be almost fifteen by now, but in my imagination he’s frozen into a bony, wide-smiling, smart-guy ten-year-old. I’ve lost my sense of Jordan. If we move back there, I don’t know what I’ll be any longer.

But nobody asks for the children’s opinion. Bud’s eyes are focused on an invisible, interior point—the repository of his childhood, the place of innocence and wholeness, a brushstroke of cedar and its lingering perfume.

“When we go back to Jordan,” he says, sliding butter-fried eggs onto our plates, “we’re going to see the family again. Won’t that be great?”

My shoulders slump, heavy and sullen with all the things I’m not allowed to say, like
I thought
we
were the family!
Bud is content now, but that mood is volatile and delicate. To question this decision is to risk his quick temper.

“When we go back to Jordan,” Bud continues, stacking piles of toasted pita bread, “we’ll have fresh apricot juice and fresh bread. When I was a boy, we made the dough every day and took it to be baked at the bakery every night. It’s the only way to eat bread. You’ll see your friends Mrs. Haddadin and Hisham, and you’ll speak Arabic again. Won’t that be great?”

I pick up the bread, put it down. I don’t answer.

LOST CHILDHOOD PITA BREAD

In a mixing bowl, sprinkle the yeast into warm water, then stir in the sugar and salt. Let sit for a few minutes, until bubbly.

Place the flour in a large mixing bowl, add the yeast mixture and oil, then combine by hand. Scrape the dough onto a floured surface and knead for about
¹
⁄2 hour, until smooth. Add small amounts of flour if the dough becomes sticky. Form the dough into small, palm-size balls, knead each ball a little, then cover the balls with a towel and let rise until double in size, about 1 hour.

On a floured surface, flatten each ball until about
¹
⁄2 inch thick. Cover and let them rise again, about 1 hour.

Preheat the oven to 450 degrees. Place the flattened balls onto the baking surface (see note).

Bake for 3 to 6 minutes. Watch them very carefully, as they burn quickly.

Let cool on racks. To store, wrap airtight and freeze.

SPECIAL NOTE: The trick to getting the pita bread to puff up and form the hollow pocket inside is to bake them on a heavy preheated surface. Regular baking sheets usually aren’t thick enough. A pizza stone works well if you have one. In a pinch you can even use a heavy, oven-safe sauté pan. Whichever you use, it must be preheated to the oven temperature before you cook the dough.

MAKES ABOUT 10 LOAVES.

We finish the school year and pack our remaining belongings into three big steamer trunks to be shipped overseas. If Mom harbors any secret mutinies in her heart, I don’t know about them. My father’s longing for Jordan is at the center of his identity, which places it at the center of their marriage. Perhaps she believes she must choose between Bud and America. Or perhaps after a few years of suburbia, she really is ready for the adventure. In either case, I have no recollection of my mother resisting the move: She sells the furniture as stoically as she gave away her wedding dress to the nun’s charity the last time we moved to Jordan.