The Language of Baklava (34 page)

We travel together in a clutch to the cafeteria in the student union building, where Hillel has set up a small assemblage of caterer’s chafing dishes and orange heat lamps against one wall. Besides the falafel, hummus, and baba ghanouj, there’s an okra stew and a plate of sinewy chunks of beef they’re calling
shawerma.
Alongside all of this is a tub full of three-bean salad. We join the sparse crowd, sliding trays through the line. Exuberant student workers with shining dark eyes mill around, greeting everyone individually with a handshake and a bright “Shalom!” But two older men standing glumly behind the tubs and dishing out the food are muttering in Arabic, discussing the three-bean salad:

“I can’t explain it.”

“But what is it? I didn’t bring it.”

“I think that might be the Jewish food.”

“But where did it come from?”

“The Super Duper Market.”

After we settle at our table, Courtney, her eyes continuously damp from her contacts, looks around and whispers, “Is everyone here really Jewish?”

“Courtney, half the kids at this school are Jewish,” Annie says.

“They are?”

“And Diana’s Arabic!”

Courtney stares at me as if I’ve been hiding something.

Elise examines her plate of food, then finally samples some cucumber salad; she praises it lavishly and encourages the rest of us to dive in. Annie, pleased by the break from the dining hall fare, says the hummus reminds her of peanut butter and scoops her pita bread through the dip in wide streaks, then goes back for more. Courtney daintily pokes at the falafel, rolling it around without managing to break the fried crust, and I have to resist the urge to slap her hand. She refuses to touch her food with anything but metal utensils.

The truth is that the food on our trays looks lumpen and uninspiring. It’s been steamed to death under the heat lamps. The hummus is dull as clay, the baba ghanouj thick and bitter. The dried-out falafel crumbles on impact with the bread, and there isn’t any tahini sauce or chopped tabbouleh to spruce things up. Even the three-bean salad releases a viscous, mucilaginous fluid that I scrape to the edge of my plate. I feel too disappointed to eat more than a bite or two.

“Well, really, Diana,” Courtney says, “I don’t know what you expect me to do with this Jewish food. I’m not even Jewish.”

I grind my molars together and stab a cucumber slice. I glance at the two gloomy Arab men behind the chafing dishes and lower my eyes, irrationally worried that they might somehow know me.

Now Courtney looks thoughtful. “They should have an Episcopalian food week, too. I wonder if they ever do that here?”

Elise snorts. “Oh, and what would that be, Courtney? Sugar peeps?” Courtney is renowned in the dorm for subsisting on marshmallow chicks.

“I’m just saying, I don’t see the point of getting all high and mighty about food anyway,” she says, her voice singed with hurt. “I mean, since when is food religious? It’s not like it can make you hear angels or something.”

Elise and I are both looking at her. Elise takes a big bite of falafel and says, “I feel sorry for you.”

Suddenly reinvigorated, I scoop up one of the hard little falafels in a corner of pita and take a bite, expecting it will taste as bad as it looks. And while it’s cold and overcooked, I still taste fried chickpeas, the golden, mellow fundament of falafel, and, embedded deeper within, the sun-soaked air of Jordan. The taste is clear and direct as emotion, glowing inside me, keenly edged with longing—a wallop of a feeling. Reassured, I look up and say, “I’ve heard angels at dinner.”

“Does this taste like angels to you?” Annie asks me, grinning.

“Y’all are like religious fanatics,” Courtney says with a fastidious sniff. She puts down her fork and knife. “And I’m not hungry.”

Before I’d left for college, Bud sat me down at the kitchen table, cleared his throat, and dictated a list of rules that I had to write out on a legal pad. These rules consisted of things I wasn’t allowed to do:

No staying out late.

No parties.

No silliness.

No boys.

“What does that mean, exactly?” I’d asked.

“It means what it means!” he’d thundered. “No boys!”

As it turns out, the list of rules gets “lost,” which happens on a wintry morning, the air as clean and bright as peppermint. I take the elevator to the top of my dorm, exit through the heavy service door, stand on the gravel roof, and slowly, happily, begin shredding the list. I allow these pieces to be blown from my hands and scattered far and wide, past the edge of the building, beyond the curve of the earth.

Days later, I begin dating a boy who calls himself a “punk rocker.” Timmy Fussell wears a necklace of safety pins and pretends to play guitar with a band called the Nervous Robots. He doesn’t actually know how to play guitar—his fingers never touch the strings—but the band keeps him because they think he makes the show “lively.” I’ve seen the Nervous Robots perform twice, both performances ending in drunken, indecipherable arguments between the bassist and the drummer, and there is some doubt about whether the group still exists after that. Timmy is from the same part of Syracuse I am, and in fact, I’d heard of his family before we’d met. His mother, Louise, kept a little meat smoker in her garage that made her famous in town. There is even a local celebration named after her, Louise Fest, complete with T-shirts bearing her name. Once a year, Louise rolls the rattling, shuddering, sawed-off smoker out of her garage and down to the local public green and smokes grease-slathered ribs for everyone. Exactly the sort of food my father would say is
haram
: taboo.

Timmy looks like a banty rooster. He has snappy blue eyes and yellow hair that sticks up from the back of his head in a ruff. He always looks a little sickly, with his shock-white skin, inflamed knuckles, and hairless, glutinous chest. He’s in his second year at college but hasn’t attended any classes I know of. He first picks me out at the large communal dining hall linking the boys’ and girls’ dorms, waving across the room as if we know each other. When, curious, I slide my tray down next to his, he begins narrating a brief history of punk rock and concludes by saying he thinks I’d make a “good punk.” Timmy starts saving seats for me at every meal. Each time he waves as soon as I wander into the chaotic hall. He’s interesting and arresting, and he pursues me with an ardor that I find, at sixteen, irresistible. After a few weeks, we start to meet at the one artsy coffeehouse in Oswego, the Lowlife Café, a decrepit joint with a sour, rotting reek that seems to be sliding by increments into the Oswego River just beneath its windows.

Local musicians spread out their instruments and play guitar rocking back and forth in a chair or standing, bouncing loose-jointed, singing on the squat platform at the front of the café. Sometimes Timmy’s friends let him come up and accompany them on his tambourine. Some of the musicians are off-key, but a few possess clear, sparkling voices or a tender, refined ability to play guitar. Inside, the radiators hiss and the music arcs along the wooden ribs of the old building and down through rickety floorboards. I sit at a table near the stage and pour a misty stream of sugar from the glass canister into my cappuccino, sweetening it into candy. I love the chocolatyroasted coffees rich and airy with steamed milk, the inverse of my father’s blunt, black Arabic coffee.

My days of candy and nights of cappuccino, the music and the boyfriend are all my own. There is nothing here that Bud knows about or would approve of. And there is nothing better than being surrounded by this complicated atmosphere of music, old wooden furniture, high, dark windows, and plumes of steam from the cappuccino machine. The night belongs to me alone. It is a creature of my own invention—a new, seductive country.

My dormitory will be closed for a month during Christmas break. At this point, I’ve made several short visits home and gotten sick. It doesn’t happen on every visit, but it happens enough that I start to anticipate the symptoms almost every evening of every visit: the subcutaneous, creeping sensation of nausea, its rising, unignorable bloom in the gut, the sweating palms and clammy mouth. After weeks of candy, I crave my father’s cooking; I meditate on it during my silent rides back home. But I never know what will happen. I may eat the big welcome-home dinners only to wake in the predawn to throw up again and again. I begin to mourn the food even before I eat it, wondering, Will I keep it down this time?

It’s a frigid night when I return home for Christmas break—too cold to snow, a startling clarity to the air. I drag my bags into my bedroom and look around wistfully. My parents have had it with driving for miles to get groceries. They’re tired of being shocked awake in the early dawn by gunshots from hunters lost in the backyard. They’ve decided to sell the country home and move into a brick house back in the suburbs that we moved away from five years ago. This will be the last Christmas we spend here. For all my moping about the isolation when I lived here, I’ve grown to love the thought of this house. It’s become a romantic Walden fantasy in my imagination.

My bedroom is blue from the early winter moon. Through the frost-stenciled window I can hear rushing fir boughs and the creak of icicles tightening. I gaze into the dim mirror above my dresser: chopped hair, shadowy eyes, hollow cheeks. I feel fragile, almost translucent. Suzy has been occupying my room while I’ve been away. I can see her refined touches—some of my old blacklight posters, strawberry candles, and whirling mobiles have been cleared away in favor of a painted parasol, a straw hat, and a lot more light and air. I feel ghostly, not fully returned.

I sit in the living room before dinner and contemplate the dwarf plastic evergreen blinking on the end table; there’s a lilt of snow sighing past the living room windows. I realize, in this confluence of sweet, brief return and loss, that I think I miss Timmy. I hadn’t expected this. I’d already started cataloging his imperfections before leaving on break. His teeth are small yellow squares, his breath has a fishy cat food edge, and the whole tambourine-playing routine has lost its charm. Over the past several weeks, while he’s stood on-stage, wagging and snapping the tambourine between hand and hip, I’ve fidgeted in the audience, uncertain if my father’s disapproval is enough of a reason to date someone. I’d contemplated breaking up with Timmy before the holidays but had gotten preoccupied with packing. And now, far from the actual Timmy, the idea of Timmy isn’t too bad. It gives me a focal point. Ours has not been a terribly romantic relationship—we’ve barely even kissed—but it is not so much Timmy that I miss as my late nights of music and cappuccino. A month is a long time to be away from my new, barely constructed life. So I give myself to this secret grief. I intend to pine for Timmy, write him agonized letters every night, and regularly sneak him calls, leaning into the rhythm of his breathing.

But tonight I put aside my longing and wash up for dinner. For my first night back, we’re having chicken
fatteh—
a layered dish of toasted bread, chicken, onion, spices, and pine nuts covered with a velvety yogurt sauce. It’s so lush and lovely, I eat recklessly, like an amnesiac, with no awareness of anything but the table, the sweet sadness of return, and the moon hanging like a sigh just beyond the long dark fields.

HOMECOMING FATTEH

Place the yogurt in a double layer of cheesecloth, tie the ends to the kitchen faucet, and let drain into the sink for about 1 hour, until thickened.

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Place the chicken in a bakingdish and drizzle with 3 tablespoons of the olive oil and the lemonjuice. Mix the spices in a small dish and sprinkle over the chicken;surround it with the onion pieces. Cover the chicken with foil andbake for 1 hour. Remove the foil and let the chicken brown in theoven for 5 minutes.

Meanwhile, cook the rice in the chicken broth.

Fry the pieces of pita bread in the remaining oil until crisp and brown.

Stir the crushed garlic into the thickened yogurt. Line a baking dish with the fried bread and place the cooked rice on the bread. Cut the chicken into pieces and lay them on the rice, then cover the chicken, rice, and bread with the garlic yogurt. Sprinkle the parsley and pine nuts over the top and serve.

MAKES 4 SERVINGS.

During the meal, Bud decides it’s time to evaluate what all this American schooling has made of me. He gives me big spoonfuls of
fatteh,
insists that I take more broccoli, and heaps the rice onto my plate. Then he sits in his spot opposite me, frowns, and says, “Ya Ba, now tell me again. Say it slow. What is your major?”