The Language of Baklava (44 page)

“Look at her play with her little mousy.” Dobby nudges me, slitting his eyes and making his smile very sly. “She’s toying with him.”

At that moment, Aunt Sandra emerges from the kitchen carrying a small tray of glistening stuffed grape leaves that she says are the “vegetarian special.” She takes the plate right up to Fattoush on the dance floor and waves it under his nose so that the rich aroma softens him and his dancing falters. He sneaks a delicate glance at Mai, who shrugs, and he follows Aunt Sandra back to the table like a man in a waking dream.

The atmosphere is feverish, the air humid with conversation and drinking. Sandra has proclaimed that this meal would be an American-style buffet. She has hired a man who claimed to be a professional bartender—a dusky-eyed young Bedouin who takes all sorts of orders for mixed drinks, beer, and wine but serves everyone tall glasses of
araq
instead. Fattoush, Mai, all the wives, and I are seated at one table. Most of the uncles prowl the buffet table, eating directly from the serving platters with their hands.

“They’re standing up like wild Bedouins in a tent!” Sandra complains, glaring at the bartender as if he is responsible. But her husband, Haroun, is the leading culprit, calling his brothers over to this or that plate, brandishing chicken legs, and encouraging them to tear the lamb pieces directly from the skewers with their teeth.

Haroun materializes at Fattoush’s left shoulder and gestures at his plate. “Come on, boy, let me give you some real food. Enough with the leaves and twigs.”

Fattoush pays no attention. He is glazed from his joyful exertion and sheerly buoyant beside Mai. He hunches over his plate of vegetarian grape leaves and guards it with both arms, as he’s learned to do so the uncles won’t try to pile on more food, and he eats with evident appetite. He’s lost about ten pounds during his weeks in Jordan, with all the meat dodging he’s had to do. This is the most I’ve seen him eat in one sitting.

Haroun brings up the recurrent concern about Fattoush’s child-bearing abilities. “You know, you can’t have a baby from just dancing around and eating leaves like a monkey,” he observes.

Sandra waves her husband away with her long, imperious fingers and seats herself to my left. She complains, “These Jordanian men can’t fathom anyone deliberately turning down meat.”

Fattoush grins as he eats, nodding at Mai, Aunt Sandra, me, back to Mai, and so on. Sandra, who never eats when she is feeding others, pulls her elbows into her lap and asks, “How long have you been a vegetarian?”

Fattoush chews and bobs and scoops more grape leaves onto his plate. “Ever since I was eleven years old. I’ve been a vegetarian for more than half my life now. I saw a TV show on the way they slaughter cows and that did it for me,” he confides to Mai in a tender way.

Sandra contemplates him with a fond, abstracted smile, clearly enjoying his pleasure in the meal. Like Bud, she doesn’t have a son, and she looks as though she’d like to try rubbing her hand along the shorn, downy nape of his thin neck. “Do you like the grape leaves?” she coaxes. “I made them special.”

He nods with his whole upper body. “I’ve never had anything like these. I’d eat them every day if I could—I don’t think I’d ever get tired of them. They taste incredible.”

“Oh, well . . .” Sandra brushes modestly at her sleeves. “After all, we want you to grow big and strong.”

It is not so much what she says as the way she says it—sharply, disjointedly. I slowly turn toward her and think I see in her eyes the coppery glint of a secret arsonist or poisoner. There’s an odd set to her lips, and the angles of her jaw don’t quite match up. I glance back at Fattoush, and then I slowly return my gaze to Sandra. She’s holding so still, she doesn’t seem to be blinking. All at once, a great fizzing rush comes over me. My spine unbends. My fingers close around the silvery handle of my fork. I reach toward Fattoush’s plate—is that Sandra’s chilly white hand rising to stop me? No, she lowers it. Without asking permission, I spear a stuffed grape leaf from his plate. “I just have to try one of these special ones,” I say, and then bite in. It is delicious, of course—there was no question of that. I taste the moist sweetness of rice and fresh oil, the faint brine of the leaf, a luscious node of onion, garlic, currant . . . and there, quite subtle, nearly transparent yet unmistakable, is the flavor of lamb.

My eyes fly up to Fattoush, who is devouring the tightly wrapped packets in single bites as he fans one hand through the air, describing his skateboarding exploits to Mai. Do I tell him what he’s eating? I look back to Sandra, who is watching me, her eyes amused. She puts her hand on mine—it’s surprisingly warm. “There’s just a little in there,” she says. “For flavor.”

Fattoush smiles at us as he forks up another helping, chewing and rocking.

My lips part. I hesitate. Fattoush notices my expression and lifts his eyebrows.

“And quite honestly,” Sandra says in her drowsy, flat American voice, “I’m not that sure that what they’re saying isn’t true—” She tilts her head at Fattoush. “You know, he really
might
have trouble having babies otherwise. For heaven’s sake, you can’t literally cut out all the meat. Look at Haroun—he always ate so much milk and ice cream, and you see? All we had were daughters!”

Fattoush stops mid-chew, his mouth a tiny circle, eyes filmed with the intimation of panic. He covers his mouth with his hand. He swallows.

His skin takes on a pewtered sheen, slick with sweat. He stands, slightly lopsided, and says, “Oh. Oh.”

Mai eyes Fattoush’s plate, then indignantly snaps in Arabic at Aunt Sandra. Sandra regards us placidly in turn and says, “Oh now, what’s all this fuss about a little taste of lamb?”

I find Bud standing over a platter of sumac-roasted chicken with Uncle Frankie. They appear to be having some sort of business meeting. I interrupt to point out Fattoush, who is still standing but is now starting to crumple, clutching his stomach. Mai crouches beside him, trying to fan him with a napkin.

Dobby and Bud half carry, half drag Fattoush outside, where he totters and sways and then vomits weakly down the center of the driveway. Mai watches from a window. Uncle Haroun comes out with a garden hose while Aunt Sandra stands in the doorway. Her neck and shoulders are erect as an empress’s, and her hands are squared on her hips. She is supremely annoyed. “Now what on earth?”

“I can’t digest meat,” Fattoush says meekly. He is mortified and apologetic and wrings his hands as if begging for mercy. “I haven’t eaten it in fifteen years—I don’t have the enzymes for it.”

“Oh, God in heaven,” Sandra says, flinging her hands in the air before going back inside.

Fattoush vomits out the window on the ride home, speckling himself. At one point, he whimpers about disgracing himself in front of Mai, but I say that she likes him far too much to mind a little vomit. I tell him to think of it as a bonding experience. He then spends most of the night moaning on the floor of his room, occasionally crab-walking to the bathroom for more retching. Bud hovers at the bathroom door with mugs of soup, tea, and ginger ale, all of which are waved away by Fattoush’s limp hand.

I keep vigil with Bud, both of us upright and unblinking at late-night TV, an eye-scalding buzz of ancient westerns that I’ve never heard of.

“This reminds me of when you and your sisters were the littlest girls,” Bud says as we nibble Fattoush’s broth and crackers. The toilet roars and shudders one wall away.

“Whenever somebody was sick, your mother and I would sit up just like this, worrying about you.” He gestures toward Fattoush shuffling miserably back to his room. “Do you remember those times?”

It’s true—there is something about this cave of light in the dark, the glass of ginger ale, the scent of soup, the waiting to get well, that reminds me of childhood and a time when my parents were practically still children themselves. Our lives were something we went into together, in quiet living rooms, waiting up past bedtime.

“I think Fattoush could use someone to take care of him,” Bud says, his voice low.

“Do you think this is all in his head?” I ask Bud.

He shrugs. “Maybe yes, maybe no.”

“Maybe he could take better care of himself.”

Bud pooches out his lips. “That sounds like something an American would say.”

As dawn is turning to a bronze glow in the windows, Bud has fallen asleep in a chair and I’m uncomfortably kinked on the couch. Fattoush appears in the living room entryway. “I think I’m better now.”

I wake up a little and squint at him in the dimness. He looks as hollowed out as a parenthesis, and his eyes are wells. My voice doesn’t work yet, so I wave at him. He smiles wanly and waves back. He starts to head off to bed, then stops and returns. He sways once, lightly.

“Phinny?” I boost myself onto my elbows. “Do you need something? Some aspirin? Another blanket?”

“Well, it’s just . . .” He props himself against the wall and lowers his head as if ducking a ray of light. His forehead wrinkles as he lifts his eyes to mine. “I was just wondering—do you really think Mai likes me?”

One week later, I come home after a day of errands and find my father and Fattoush sitting around in the living room, the air turgid with the feel of a broken-off conversation. Their faces, as they turn to me, are colored with guilt. Fattoush stands, putting out both hands as if to hold me in place. “Now—okay, don’t get all upset,” he says, measuring his words.

“What?” I stand still. The breath pools in the bottoms of my lungs, and the TV image freezes. Outside, the birds hold their last notes.

Bud smiles a wide, unnatural smile. “Hello, Ya Ba,” he says.

I study his smile. “What happened?”

“This wasn’t a plan or anything.”

“Please—just tell me.”

Bud grins and shakes his head the way he does when it’s someone on the phone he doesn’t want to speak with.

“What.”
My voice goes an octave higher.

They both look alert now. Fattoush nods and swallows and finally says to me, “Your father—okay . . . he . . . he bought a building today.”

“He—”

“See, what did I tell you?” Bud says to Fattoush. Bud bats at an invisible crumb on his sleeve, then looks up with a flash of inspiration. “I bought it for you, honey!”

I carefully set my bags of groceries on the coffee table, then I drop onto my hard couch. A flume of dust goes up.

“It’s for the whole family.” Bud sits forward into his excitement, warming up now. “We can all live on the first floor, the restaurant will go on the second floor—”

“The place was a steal,” Fattoush enthuses. “Two hundred K!”

“Two hundred thousand dollars!” I white-knuckle the arm of the couch. “Where are you going to get that kind of money?”

Bud bunches up his lips as if concocting an answer. Finally he says, “I have some retirement money saved, for your information. And who likes to retire, anyway? No one! You know what happens when you retire? You go crazy! For your information, I have a
plan.
I will make a restaurant that my family can all come and work at! Besides, your mother always has some money hidden somewhere, in the cupboards, under the rug. She loves doing that.”

“So you told Mom about this?”

More batting at invisible crumbs. “Not a hundred percent exactly yet.”

“Diana, listen, listen, this is a totally amazing, awesome, incredible deal,” Fattoush persists. “Frankie’s house is huge. There’s more than enough room for everyone on just the first floor alone—”

“Or maybe we should put the family on the second floor and the restaurant on—”

“Okay, wait a minute—” I put out my hand. The sun in the windows, usually so clear and light, seems to thicken and liquefy. “You mean you bought
Uncle Frankie’s
house?”

Both of them look at me. Bud rubs his eye with the flat of his palm.

Among my rascally, troublesome, sly uncles and cousins, Frankie is the most rascally, troublesome, and sly of all. Aside from occasional, half-joking stabs at employment, he has lived most of his life like one of the lilies of the valley, neither toiling nor reaping. He survives by shaving off pieces of the land he inherited and selling them at exorbitant prices. He has also recently invested in a small franchise that embeds holographic images on pendants for necklaces. This business, he tells any potential investor, is a “gold mine.” But for the past decade, he has largely augmented his lifestyle by renting out the floors of his five-story, squared-off house while he and his wife retreat to an ever shrinking space at the center. The house no longer has a kitchen because Frankie tore out the stove and refrigerator to sell to some Bedouins who didn’t have access to electrical outlets. He rented the flat roof of their house to a family that wore bright scarves and gold earrings and cooked over a rooftop campfire. Most recently, he rented his first floor and his fourth floor to two opposing political parties to house their campaign headquarters. The front of the house is draped with two thirty-foot banners proclaiming the names of the two warring factions, and there are constant skirmishes over which banner is to be draped higher than the other. Sometimes both banners hang straight down in parallel tatters. All day long, middle-aged men run out of one or the other campaign headquarters, up and down the steps of the house with bags of takeout food, throwing their garbage wrappings and melon rinds at each other’s doors. The entryway reeks like the dumpster behind a bowling alley, and refuse clutters the staircase.