The Language of Baklava (22 page)

At the end of May, Bud flies to Jordan ahead of us to figure out, once again, who we are, where we will live, and what our lives will look like. As our departure date gets closer, I start to lose the feeling in my hands and feet. Life is a sluggish dream as I fold clothes and empty the drawers. I can’t stand the taste of food, everything catches in my throat, my skin is too sensitive, and my clothes scratch. I stop eating, sleeping, speaking.

Mrs. Manarelli comes over one day, and she and my mother have a whisper-conversation at the kitchen table about leaving me in the States to live with the Manarellis. I eavesdrop with dreadful hope, biting my nails down to the quick. I imagine sleeping in the lavender-scented guest bedroom, listening to Marco’s Monkees 45s through the wall, learning how to knead airy sweet loaves of bread dusted with rosemary. But I know it’s impossible. My sisters and I are chief among Bud’s reasons for moving back to Jordan. And I feel guilty for this, as if becoming American is a weak-minded decision I’ve made. A better girl would have embraced the Saturday morning Arabic lessons in the old church basement downtown, would have cheerfully made all the Arabic foods and Arabic coffees her father wanted. I believe that if only I had willed myself more fully Arab in America, all this dislocation might have been averted.

Bud has been away for over a month, and I enter a dull state of lethargy. The panic has subsided into a sort of mute day-drifting through the house. I float, haunting my own life.

Mom resigns her teaching position. Some people come and take our curtains away. We have our tickets, and we leave the day after tomorrow. And just when the house is completely empty, the new buyers plotting out where to put their tomato garden, we receive a surprise cablegram from Jordan: SENDING BACK TRUNKS COMING HOME.

I stand beside my mother, heart stuttering. We reread the scrap of paper about twenty times, both of us holding a corner. “What does it mean?” I ask.

She stares at it. “I do not know.”

It means we’re not moving to Jordan. Bud comes back. He doesn’t want to discuss it. His jaw is set and his eyes have a fierce new light in them, the look of someone who’s been shaken awake.

I am swept by relief so powerful that I stand in my empty bedroom doorway gripping the door frame as I feel my knees tremble.

But, oh. This is awkward. We’ve said good-bye to everyone, sold the house and everything we own. Now what?

We learn that by some crazy, lucky, last minute chance, the art teacher at Mom’s former school happens to be spending her summer break and the following school year on leave in London, and we can stay in her place. The five of us pack into her tiny one-bedroom apartment across from the Lakeshore Drive-In, behind O’Connell’s Grill. It turns out this is my dream home—everywhere are screens of beads instead of doors, purple-tasseled pillows, pink velour drapes, hot pink shag carpeting, brass elephant incense burners, Buddha statues, and blacklight posters; I am particularly obsessed with the ultrasaturated Maxfield Parrish and audacious Aubrey Beardsley drawings. I sigh and swan-neck around in front of the posters, entranced by the sizzling colors and intimate lines. What’s more, the apartment complex has a grand blue slab of pool that we spend the pallid upstate summer in. At night, my sisters and I make our beds on the furry couches in the living room and I doze off while staring at the artwork, the pulsing forms emerging in my sleep.

Bud can’t cook in the funny little galley kitchen with the feathered dream-catchers dangling over the stove and the naked Gaia incense burners in the window. He says being in this apartment is like having a fit. So we live on cold tabbouleh salad that Bud keeps stocked in the fridge and fine, greasy onion burgers and curly fries at O’Connell’s Grill. Monica, Suzy, and I spin on the stools up front and chat with the gravel-voiced drinkers who slouch over the bar all afternoon. Mom and Bud have murmuring conferences in one of the vinyl booths in back.

Bud has looked vaguely different ever since he returned from Jordan. He lost some weight while he was overseas, and the long, serious slant of his jaw has surfaced. The first flecks of gray dash his sideburns, and he has a new way of gazing into people’s eyes. Sometimes it’s a little scary to look at him now: He looks back too long, as if he will devour you. I start to flinch at his touch. Mom whispers that he was “very disappointed” in Jordan.

We also have a new family ritual that Bud calls “going for a drive.” This entails hours of circling neighborhoods in our Rambler, peering at endless neighborhoods. Families wandering over their fleecy lawns, kids working Big Wheels, men in Bermuda shorts spraying rainbows from the garden hose, all of them stare back at our car. They exude a bland, impassive silence. I believe that if we ever actually rolled to a stop, someone would call the police.

Bud says, “How about this one . . . Evergreen Terrace, how does that sound?” as we turn the corner into another nearly identical cul-de-sac.

“Dad, what are we even doing?” I ask, grouchy about being dragged away from the pool. “Are we really looking for a place to live or are we just fooling around or what?”

“Ooh, just looking, looking all around,” he says in his airy way. “Don’t you like to see what’s out there?”

“Yeah, whatever.” I tilt my forehead against the window. One neighborhood pours into the next, seemingly without end or reason. Where does it all lead? Where is the center of all these courts and terraces and cul-de-sacs? My parents no longer have jobs, a house, neighbors. My sisters and I no longer have a school district. We came uprooted that easily. Our Rambler is our home. My throat and eyes burn; something is ignited inside me. I look around the car and survey the backs of their heads: How will I ever take care of all these people?

Late in July, after weeks and weeks of looking around, we set out on what I assume will be another aimless drive. We leave the suburban neighborhoods and drive until the tree-lined lots taper away and we pass acres of yellow-parched weeds. There is nothing but telephone poles, empty roads, and the rolling hills of New York State. Finally we turn off the road and rumble up a long, gravel-popping country driveway. The house is set back among acres of chiming crickets, its long windows sparkling in a plush velvet night, the moon burning over its right shoulder. “Do you like it?” Bud asks us, grinning crazily. He nods as if agreeing with something somebody had said and announces, “That’s good, ’cause I already bought it!”

The house is a chunky, modern redwood with traces of Frank Lloyd Wright in the wood-framed rows of windows. The bedrooms are all downstairs, which we are told is a “Californian design.” A deck lines the upper half of the house and gives us a view of trees and the long, single road that stretches from us to everyplace else. This house is only twenty miles away from our previous house, but we may as well have moved to Jordan. I can no longer bike to see my friends. I can no longer walk anywhere except down a scalded, shoulderless strip of country road. I wander around the house half-dazed. The countryside feels vast and fabulous, depressing, inspiring, and inescapable: utterly isolated. All around us are waving, pollen-cloudy acres of fields, crickets, streams, maples, lilacs, blue spruces, and cicadas. There’s a scary little convenience store way down the long country road at the intersection with the county highway, and a gas station across the street from that. Up the hill there’s a public water-works building, and that’s it.

Euclid is silence and sun spots fried into the carpet and watching the country road for the kids who burn down the gravel on their banana-seat bikes, grime thick as war paint on their faces, their hair slack and unwashed. The boys skid vulture circles and pop wheelies in front of our house of girls. Bud forbids us to go outside and look at them— which my baby sister, Monica, frequently does anyway; she has trouble keeping track of what’s forbidden. So I just watch them from my bedroom window.

One day, just a week after we move in, I hear voices outside. I run to the window to see Monica standing in the front yard, chatting with a gang of four boys circling on bikes in the big empty road. They never actually stop, just tilt into their lazy orbit, a vapor of dust hanging over them. Their faces are raw with dirt, and their bikes make screeching noises with every pedal push. Seven-year-old Monica is standing with her hands on her hips, busy telling them everything in the world. I slide open the stiff, wood-framed window and listen to her explaining that the word Bud has pasted in huge red letters on the mailbox is our last name. She tells them the ages of herself and her sisters, the national origins of our parents, their occupations, and a long story about how we’d just sold everything we owned and almost moved to Jordan but then our father changed his mind and moved us here instead.

The boys listen with a grim, determined silence, sawing away on their bikes and apparently communicating telepathically. Occasionally one will throw out a question like “What you call yourselves?” or “You got any candy or cigarettes?” and Monica will go into another extensive answer. They sound, I note with some anxiety, almost as if they’re from the South, their vowels flattened, syllables stretched and approximate: “What’s at thin’ yerr wearin’?”

Eventually, their telepathy clicks again; the meeting is over. With a flick, they turn like a flock of sparrows, pumping down past the four corners and disappearing over a hill.

Monica watches them go as if they are her last friends on earth. I watch, too.

SUBSISTENCE TABBOULEH

For when everything is falling apart
and there’s no time to cook.

Wash the bulgur and let it soak in water to cover for
¹
⁄2 hour. Drain thoroughly and add the vegetables. Add the oil, lemon, and salt and pepper to taste. Mix well. Cover, and let the tabbouleh marinate in the refrigerator for a couple of hours.

MAKES 6 TO 8 SERVINGS.

NINE

Runaway

I am twelve, and I can’t take it anymore. I can’t stand the stillness of this place, the ruthless acres of blowing, dried weeds. It is a hot, still September, the road full of dust and pollen. To soothe myself, I start writing stories in spiral pads while slouching at the dining room table. The stories are all about a girl who is bored and lost and abandoned by her friends and stewing in the middle of nowhere, who spends her time imagining ways to get back at her father for moving her there. One day, I write a story about a girl who gets so frustrated by her life of captivity in the countryside and her cruel, slave-driver father that she runs away to Jordan. Upon rereading the piece, I suddenly realize that this story seems remarkably like my own: I become indignant about what I’ve written and rear up from the dining room table.

“That’s it,” I announce. “I’ve had it with this place, I’m done—I quit!”

My sisters look up hopefully from their Barbie Dream House— both of them half-stunned by the same boredom. “Where you going?” Suzy asks. She generally dislikes snap decisions and impulsive behaviors, but since we’ve moved to the country things are just a little too slow.

“I can’t take it,” I quaver. “I’m leaving town.”

Monica throws down her stiff-legged doll. “Can we come, too?” She is easily rankled and generally ready for action. Her new motto since moving to this rural boredom is, You’re not the boss of me.

In a spontaneous show of solidarity, my sisters walk out with me. Mom and Bud watch from the couch. Bud says, “Hey, where you going? It’s almost dinner!”

I roar at them as we thunder down the stairs, “
You
don’t understand anything!
”

This is all improvisational—I don’t know where we are going or how long it’ll take us to get there. It’s just the three of us walking fast and gloriously righteous along the bare shoulder of Morgan Road. The sunlight glistens on the road and floats a watery mirage before our eyes. An opaque bead of sweat streaks my forearm. After a while, all we can hear is the sound of our feet and our breathing; the sun seems to crackle overhead, and insects sing in the parched weeds.

Throughout my childhood, Bud has informed me that I am “in charge” of my younger sisters, speaking as if they were my employees or personal possessions. He says that if we lived in Jordan, I would be responsible for guiding the shape of their lives, approving of their choices for husbands and other assorted life decisions. I am meant to be their watcher, their mentor, and their activities director. Sometimes I feel I can’t bear the weight of this responsibility. (When I am seven, my three-year-old sister, Suzy, vanishes from the front yard and is missing for two frightening hours. Frantic and dazed, Bud scolds that I’m to blame for failing to watch my charge. I fall into a devastated stupor, staring out the car window as my mother drives, until Suzy is found wandering around the next neighborhood.) My sisters become another element in Bud’s array of obligations, duties, and family protocols, which makes it so hard for us, as children, to simply be friends. It is almost never possible for us to be together like this away from Bud’s scrutiny and expectations. Even though it’s strange to be walking along the side of this big empty road like this, on our way to nowhere, it feels a bit like a holiday as well.