The Language of Baklava (28 page)

Bud has many unique treatments that he’s unaware aren’t standard medical procedure all over the States. He removes dust from our eyes by licking them clean, and he rubs a cut clove of garlic over a bee sting, a piece of onion over a mosquito bite.

Besides my aunt’s exploits with herbs and cosmetics, she is also, like most Bedu, a bit of a bonesetter, an exorcist, and a general practitioner. She works extensively with leeches, specialized teas, and earthy spices that she has ground in her own mortar. She apprenticed under Sitt Arjah, or the Limping Lady, the gifted midwife of Yehdoudeh who delivered Aya and the many little brothers who followed her. My aunt also loves the fall fashions at J. C. Penney and feels strongly that the nails should match the lips and the shoes must, if at all possible, match the purse.

The first time I ever met Aunt Aya was in Amman when I was eight years old. After a boring lunch with some relatives in a dull, grand house devoid of children, I’d escaped into the kitchen to get some water, expecting to see a maid, and run into Aya instead. She was sitting like an empress at the kitchen table, a burning Pall Mall between her index and middle fingers, the beetle-shelled scarlet nails glimmering. She hadn’t sat with us at lunch, even though this was apparently her house. I realized with a burst of understanding that she was escaping from the relatives as well. She looked me over, her eyes fierce inside thick wings of black eyeliner, lips pointed and lacquered an uncompromising red, hair a shimmering, coal black tower, and skin powdered white.

I think we stared at each other a full minute before either of us spoke. Auntie Aya finally gestured a little with the cigarette and said, “Go ahead, then, let me see you walk across the room.”

I had the sense that I was auditioning for the role of a lifetime, and I put everything I had into it. I settled on something between a swoon and a glide, attempting to use every muscle in my body while pretending for some reason to be waving my own smoldering cigarette. When I finally made it across the room this way, I touched the wall like a swimmer and shimmied back to the other side again.

“Mm-hm, mm-hm,” she said. She took a deep drag on the Pall Mall, her eyes slivering narrow and wet, the cigarette ember glowing. Then came a long, steamy exhale, after which she said, “I see you haven’t a bone in your body.”

Bud laughs anxiously and averts his eyes when one of his brothers returns from Auntie Aya, but I know that Bud has also consulted her on treatments. One night, I overhear him murmur to his sister over the phone, asking if she ever sees the spirit of their father. Because, he says, he has. He has spotted him wandering through the kitchen at night. He describes the ghost looming over the refrigerator door, as if he would like to peek inside—but how can a ghost open a refrigerator? A fiery thrill runs from my nape through my wrists. He’s afraid that his father is hungry, the same father he fed spoon by spoon during his last days on the earth. Bud asks, Is this possible? If so, what should I feed him? How? I strain to listen, desperate to know the answer, but it’s hard to make out his whispered Arabic. A few days later, I find a small glass full of watery
araq
beside a small loaf of bread on the window ledge in the dining room.

This is Auntie’s first visit to this country in years, and she is not used to things. She, my mother, Monica, Suzy, and I patrol the shopping malls, where Aya is upset by fashion offenders—particularly the ones in stretch pants or matching pastel sweat suits. “Now, will you look at that?” she flares up, startling a woman in a tight green sweat suit. “Isn’t that just a shame? Why does she want to squeeze herself into something like a little pork sausage? Why must she do it in that color? Will nothing else satisfy her?”

Mom steers us quickly into the food court. There, Aya samples my Orange Julius with a parfait spoon, looks astounded, and pronounces it inedible. She rests her chin on her fist and sighs. “In Jordan,” she comments, “not many can afford fashion, so it isn’t such an issue. But in America, where anyone can afford anything,
why this
?” she laments, gazing at the sea of jeans and sweat suits. “Why?”

Aunt Aya happens to have arrived at the time of the Long War between me and Bud. This war started sometime after I turned thirteen, around the day that Bud came home early from work, got the mail first, and found a tattletale midterm report enumerating my many crimes in Algebra 1, including talking in class, passing notes, cutting up, failing the first quiz, and general lazy, goon-headed good-for-nothingness. When the school bus pulled up in front of our house that afternoon, I spotted Bud from the bus window. He was standing at the bottom of the driveway, waiting.

He flapped the white letter in the air as I walked up, ranting that this time I’d done it—I’d really, really done it. He called the parents of one of the girls I’d giggled with throughout algebra and told them that their daughter, Molly, was a “criminal” and a “bad influence” and to keep her away from his daughter. He tore the school letter into confetti, threw the pieces into the air, grabbed his hair, and shouted, “That’s it! Finish! No more! I can’t take it!” He was sending me back to Jordan, he couldn’t take one more second of any of it.

For as long as I’d known him, there were times when my father’s emotions roared and threatened to incinerate him and everyone else in the room. Bud would come home in a bad mood from his latest stressful, impossible job—as a court bailiff, carpet salesman, hospital custodian, department store security guard—go to the upstairs bedroom, and storm around over our heads, cursing and stomping and yelling to himself until he’d yelled it all out. He was trapped, destitute in the American dream. Then he’d come back down to take us out for ice cream. These episodes were like electrical storms, breaking with ferocity and passing swiftly. This wasn’t a problem for me until I hit thirteen. Then it was as if the chemical composition of the air in our house had changed. Something made Bud edgy and frantic and paranoid, and something made me skulk in my room for hours on end.

Our fights roll like thunder through the house. It’s the way I’m dressed, the late hour I returned home, a bad mark in school. Frequently it will be about something as subtle as a mere glance or my “attitude.”

“Look at the expression on her!” Bud cries out midfight if I pout or roll my eyes. “
Look
at the belligerence—it’s written all over her!”

In the end, the cause of the fight is always the same: the astonishing fact that I’m growing up. Worse, this happens to be going on in America, where to Bud’s mind girls are famous for such stunts. He blames my whole adolescence on the United States and believes that in Jordan the problem would be solved.

“You say one more word like that,” he threatens, pointing—I may have said a sulky “Fine” in response to his “How was school?”—“and I’m sending you back home to Jordan! You’ll go live with Auntie Aya. She’ll straighten you out a hundred percent.”

“I’ll never go back there. You can’t make me,” I retort like a movie tough guy, driven by the same surge of rage as Bud’s. “That isn’t my home. I don’t care what you say. My home is
here.
”

“You say this to your father.” Bud’s face glows, his hands rise in the air. “You deny your ancestors and culture and your whole family!”

“
My
family isn’t Jordanian,” I throw back at him, the refrain of my adolescence. “My family is American!”

He opens his mouth, pulls at his hair, squeezes shut his eyes. He runs into the next room, as if trying to escape from me, then suddenly bends, seizes one of the fluted dining room chairs, and flings it across the room so hard that it shatters against the wall.

I remember the home of certain well-to-do cousins in Amman where the girls were indeed polite, docile, and obedient to their father, treating him more like an official in the house than a family member. These daughters attended the private girls’ school with its coal gray uniforms and regimented, straight-backed rows of chairs. They kept their voices low and discreet, bowed their heads, brought their father slippers, cookies, and books, then scurried away, relieved of duty. There was no joshing, no in-depth reading in the bathroom, no flying off the top stairs, and no father in the kitchen. They weren’t friends, they were employees. But my father sees only the polished, lowered tops of the girls’ heads and the tranquil, limpid air in their house. He doesn’t notice the expression on their faces.

So every week and then every day, my father and I cross words and burnt colors fly over our faces. The tension between us lowers the ceiling, draws in the walls, makes the floor glow—too hot to walk on. When I come home one day and my auntie is waiting in the kitchen, the blood seems to fall from my head in a sheet. My first thought is that she’s come to take me away. Aunt Aya looks me up and down and up again and says, “
Habeebti,
you look like the terrible ghost of the Black Valley.”

She gestures for me to sit, as if it is I who has once again burst into her kitchen, then she sits across from me at the kitchen table, studying my face closely. She turns my hands over, looks at a lock of my hair, frowns, and asks why I’m so thin and white anyway.

I chew at the edge of a nail for a second, studying the mica speckles in the linoleum floor. Suddenly I am telling her what, at the time, I think the problem is: that Bud wants to ship me back to Jordan. Because somehow, somewhere along the line, I’ve gone bad. Just because I argue with him relentlessly, it doesn’t mean that some very big part of me isn’t convinced that he must be right. He is, after all, the father.

Her kohl-lined eyes widen and her scarlet mouth falls open. She is sixty, yet her hair is like polished onyx and her eyes are wine black. Her clothes are bright and tropical, given to drifting on the breeze, and she bedecks herself with armfuls of ringing golden bangles.

“Oh, that is all dog-headed nonsense,” she says. “Look at you—” She seizes my hand and flaps it in the air. “You’re soft as a fish. What are you going to do in Jordan? What would they do with you?”

She instructs me to stay right where I am, and then she bustles to the front entryway, comes back with a suitcase, and lays it flat on the kitchen table. She unzips the long, whining zipper and the top flaps back, releasing a pungent puff of dust. Inside the suitcase are dozens of small plastic and paper bags filled with all sorts of dried herbs, shrunken buds, and dark spices. “Lucky that Mr. Customs Man didn’t look in this bag!” she says, chuckling. She sprinkles a few pinches from certain containers into a pan of water and makes me a cup of what she calls “shaking tea.” “For when you need to calm down and figure things out,” she says.

It’s a tawny brown liquid. I inhale, and a mist fills my sinuses and chest. It mingles with the brown melancholy inside of me. It tastes a bit like bark and earth and tears, yet somehow it’s delicious. It releases particles of sleeplessness and sadness embedded within me. I sigh, my eyes well, my nose runs, my mouth waters. I want more. But Aunt Aya says, “That’s enough,” and puts her hand over mine. She examines the empty cup for some sort of sign, then sighs, clicks her tongue, and puts the cup in the sink.

SHAKING TEA INFUSION (MODERN VERSION)

In a saucepan, cover and gently simmer all the ingredients except the nuts for 10 minutes. Strain into a nice mug and garnish with the nuts. Serve with sugar or honey.

MAKES 1 SERVING.

“Okay,” she says. “I recommend that we bake.”

“Fine,” I say, then shock myself by saying, “As long as it isn’t Arabic.”

She lifts a taut brow.

I lean forward, perverse and obstinate. There is a fine, nictitating tremor in my right hand. I narrow my eyes and say, “I hate Arabic food!” Then I look away quickly, afraid to see her reaction and frightened of my terrible words. Worse even, it seems at that moment, than saying, “I’m not an Arab.” It is like a rush of cold air after holding in my breath for too long. I am dizzy.

Auntie Aya sits back down across from me, slaps her hand flat on the linoleum, and says, “Fine, I’m not so impressed. I hate it, too!”

I stare at her. My breath chugs in my chest. I’d expected—I realize now—to be punished for saying such a thing. But that’s not what is happening. Aya’s face is direct and bold. She tosses back a few strands of hair, then looks at me. “But how do you feel about baklava?”

Something large and heavy opens its wings and begins to lift from my rib cage. Baklava?

“The Arabs say
baklawa,
of course, but the Greeks call it ‘baklava.’ I can’t imagine what the Turks call it. And I don’t know who made it first, but we can call it baklava since we both hate Arabic food.”