Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots (3 page)

But not with me. With me, she was different, softer, looser, which was only one of the many reasons I could never leave her. I needed to protect her secret side. If I couldn’t, it might disappear, and then what? I wouldn’t let that happen. That was my job as her daughter. That is what I told myself.

Now she smiled around the liquid in her mouth and I felt lifted. She could do that: make me feel like I’d lit up a room, if only for a second. Already I’d forgotten about boarding school. Now, remembering, I got a little frantic. I sat on the bed and put my bare feet next to hers so they were touching. I was casual about it, imagining that this was something we did often.

She moved away.

“Don’t make me go,” I said, only realizing once I’d said it that there was no way not to sound desperate.

“You’re a danger to yourself and to others,” she said, waving off an imaginary fly.

“I’m not—” I began, but stopped. I was better off quiet. If I’d learned anything in my entire life, it was that.

“You should see how they look at me,” she said. “All those administrators with their ironed pants.” She brought the mug to her face and inhaled. I waited for her to say something about the tea so I could run with it. I knew a lot about Earl Grey—she just needed to get me started.

“I had to give them comps to the restaurant,” she said.

She shook her head. I dropped mine. I gathered my feet beneath me and made myself into the tiniest ball I could, wanting to intrude less on her space but not desert her. She didn’t like to be alone. Sometimes, even when I’d made her mad, she’d ask me to sit by her—and then she’d pretend I wasn’t there. A half punishment, really.

“Can’t I just see the school psychologist again?” I asked. I’d done it before, but it turned my mother into a nervous wreck. She kept wanting to know what the lady asked me, what I told her, what she said in response. I knew there was a secret I’d better be keeping; I just wasn’t sure what it was. So I told the lady next to nothing. “It was just a phase,” she’d said in the end, signing a paper for me to give to my teacher. “And I do think you’re so much better.”

“Just a phase!” I’d exclaimed in agreement.

“Lorca, Lorca, Lorca,” my mother said now. “If that worked, would we really be here again? You’re in eighth grade. This is not a joke.”

I had been so careful. I’d gotten away with it so many other times. Hundreds of times. Gajillions, it felt like.

“Yes,” I said, pretending it was nothing at all. “Sure.”

My mother ignored me as she looked for the remote. She turned up the volume on the TV until she wouldn’t have been able to hear me even if I’d shouted. She watched intently with her back curled, the tea hovering at her mouth. Aunt Lou’s room reeked of artificial vanilla.

“I’m sorry,” I said into the enormous TV noise.

“I’m sorry,” I said louder.

“Mom!” I said, but still nothing.

“I’m so sorry!” I yelled. “Don’t make me go.”

She must have heard me then, but she did nothing about it. And I didn’t dare touch her, not wanting to scare her. Then she lowered the sound.

She lay down. I did too, but her face didn’t get weird and melted like mine. Her internal structure was made of something stronger, something that made her beautiful even in the mornings, in unbearable heat and cold, when she was upside down.

“I could live with Dad,” I said.

She made a noise like she’d been punched in the chest.

“Right,” she said. “Because he’s so effective. He’d let you kill yourself, for chrissakes, while he was outside whittling a goddamn tree into a stupid giraffe.”

It was just a suggestion. I knew she was going to say no.

“Why is everything so hard for me?” she said and turned her head away.

The truth was, my mother was a magician. She could make herself disappear. If I had any hope of staying with her, I had to find a reason for her to come back.

There was one thing that made my mother truly happy: food. In New Hampshire, to save money, she turned off the heat and kept on the oven while she made four varieties of roasted beet soup. She wore pomegranate perfume. At the supermarket, she was like an ant building a hill. At night, she slept with yogurt and honey smeared on her face.

Food was my mother’s life. Sometimes, I wondered if she’d married my father because of his last name: Seltzer. Her maiden name wasn’t really her own. She was adopted. So she took a last name that represented the only part of herself that felt true: food. And seltzer was her secret to delicate crepes, the perfect French onion tart, and fried chicken that actually glittered.

If I were normal I would have:

1. called Principal Hidalgo;
   
2. begged to be forgiven;
   
3. promised to see the school psychologist twice a week (and promised my mother I would not say anything incriminating about my home life);
   
4. written a note to Kanetha Jackson that looked identical to a sincere apology for having scared her;
   
5. composed a speech explaining that kids went through phases, tried things, stupid things, and after screwing up and learning valuable lessons, they returned to normal—like I would—and then recited that speech to my mother and Aunt Lou.
   

Instead, I went to bed early. I was hopeless. Earlier that evening, I’d made a wild mushroom quiche, just to see if it could prove to my mother that I was worth keeping around. I made the crust from scratch. When she removed a woody thyme stem from her teeth, she didn’t even say anything. She didn’t have to.

Because of a gnarly herb, I was still going to boarding school.

I tossed and turned. My mother and Lou were watching television in the living room, but not really watching, and they didn’t turn it down.

Aunt Lou said, “Nance, these things happen for a reason.”

And I heard my mother say, “What reason?”

Aunt Lou liked that phrase. She said it a lot. When she was angry—like if she lost her MetroCard or dyed her hair and it didn’t come out right—she closed her eyes and took a deep yoga breath. She called it that. She’d taken one class twenty years ago, but she acted like it had changed her life.

“Everything happens for a reason,” she always said with her back very straight, her thumbs and forefingers curled into Os. “Everything happens for a reason.”

And then, because I’d been practicing listening for years and years and years, I could hear Aunt Lou whisper, “Shhh.” I could hear the sweep of her hand running up and down my mother’s back. My own back began to itch. I tried to do the same sweep for myself but it was physically impossible.

I looked at the cut on my thigh, and the guilt made me sick. I flipped onto my stomach and shoved my face into the pillow.

When Aunt Lou had nothing to say to my mother, she played a game that she’d learned from me.

“If you could eat only one thing for the rest of your life, what would it be?” she asked now.

“Country bread, buttered, with heaps of black truffles.”

“If you were on a deserted island, what item could you not live without?”

“A paring knife.”

“If you could have lunch with anyone, who would it be?”

“Julia Child’s husband, because she obviously didn’t drive him nuts,” my mother said.

“What is the best thing you’ve ever eaten?”

Poulet rôti. I was sure that my mother was going to say the poulet rôti from L’Ami Louis in Paris because she’d sat next to Jacques Chirac there and he’d said that since she was a chef, perhaps she would cook something for him. And so she did. She went right back into the kitchen and whipped up something fabulous. After that, they used goose as well as duck fat when frying their potatoes, because it had been her way.

I mouthed
Poulet rôti
into the pillow. But my mother was quiet. She could have made conversation, little noises while she was thinking. But she didn’t. Lou didn’t care.

“
Masgouf,” she said. “From an Iraqi restaurant that’s closed now.”

I sat up. I opened my mouth. I almost yelled,
What?
But she was still talking.

“I went there with her dad years and years ago.” I imagined her jerking her thumb in the direction of my room. “The company was like watching paint dry, but the food was fantastic. Out of this world.”

“And?” Lou said.

“And,” my mother said, “I went back a couple of years ago, just to see, and it was closed up. Totally empty and sad. One silver tray sat in the middle of the place, I remember. Broke my heart to pieces.”

“Masgouf?” Lou said.

I was already out of bed, sockless and by the bookshelf, zipping through the index of
The Joy of Cooking,
then
Cook Everything,
then, finally,
Recipes from All Over.
I found it. “‘Traditional Iraqi fish dish, grilled with tamarind and/or lemon, salt, and pepper,’” I whispered, shocked.

“It was heaven,” my mother said. “Literally heaven. I’ve tried to replicate it, I can’t tell you how many times.”

For a second, I saw spots. I would have bet my life on it—on the poulet rôti.

“You know how they say that life imitates art?” my mother said. “Well, life imitated masgouf. The fish was so good, so tender, and we ate it with our fingers. For a little while, I convinced myself that life could be so simple.”

Which meant happiness. Masgouf was my mother’s happiness.

Suddenly, I felt like I’d missed everything. Had I never asked her? Had I never asked her directly the question of questions, about her favorite of favorites? Maybe not. Maybe I’d just assumed. What else had I assumed? Was it just to Lou that she told the absolute truth? Maybe with me, she gave the answer that required the least fussing on her part. When I’d asked her more about L’Ami Louis, she’d said, “
Vanity Fair
did a brilliant piece on it. Have a look at that.”

And then it hit me. If I wanted to make my mother happy and remind her why I was essential to her happiness, all I had to do was find the recipe and make the dish. It would make things better. I could be worth keeping around. I could give her the one dish she had loved the most, that had given her the most happiness.

A couple of years ago, I’d been all bustling like this. We’d had two blizzards and it was only December and my mother said if it snowed one more time she would skewer herself on a butterfly knife. That’s when it occurred to me that we could move to California, and for about ten seconds, I felt like a genius. We could have avocado trees and Honeybell orange juice every morning. We could drive up the coast on weekends and be treated like royalty at the French Laundry. She could open a new kind of bistro that married haute French cuisine with New American. Alice Waters would make us brunch at her place and would be blown away by the dessert that my mother baked with four varieties of heirloom plum. But then, California had been a ridiculous idea. She would never have left Aunt Lou. It would never be the two of us. Another option would have been to move to Florida, which was like California. But the problem with that, of course, was Bubbie. They didn’t get along. My mother always said, “I need her like I need a sharp stick in the eye. Not a creative bone in her body.” And yet, every week, Bubbie called once, twice, three times and left messages on the machine—especially now that Pops was dead. My mother would make a face like someone had just caused her soufflé to drop and she’d say, “She doesn’t understand me. She never could.”

My mother had not tried to find her biological parents. She hadn’t wanted to, Lou said. Lou had offered to help, said the two of them could run away and find them together. But my mother said no. She must have been so angry at them. People always said, “I would never want to be on your mother’s bad side.” Meat keeps cooking when you take it off the flame; my mother could turn herself off in an instant.

Lou had admitted to me that she thought it was better this way. “We’d miss her,” she said. “Wouldn’t we? If she found her parents, we wouldn’t be the most important people in her life anymore. They’d be shiny and new and we’d still be us.”

I’d always had stupid ideas, until now. This was something brilliant. The masgouf was perfect. Simple. It wasn’t ridiculous. It was doable. And it could make her happy. I’d been suspended indefinitely, meaning at least through winter break, which started in two weeks. That gave me plenty of time to get my ducks in a row. Just like she’d said.

That night I fell asleep scheming—and in my dreams, I wasn’t acting alone. Blot, a boy who worked at the bookstore on Eighty-Fourth, was my sidekick. I’d never said his name out loud but if anyone had bothered to ask me if I was into someone, I would have said easily, “Yes, actually. I’m into Blot.” Just thinking it made me feel like my insides had been replaced with rhubarb freezer jam—sugary and squishy and all pulp—except at my throat, which got tight and dry, like an overdone English muffin.

In my fantasy, we wear brown leather backpacks and canvas sneakers and race through Central Park and Times Square at night, popping into Middle Eastern restaurants, shoving little bits of this and little bits of that into our mouths and jotting things down on yellow notepads. Our bags bop along like happy toddlers on our backs and when I get home late in the evening, flushed, spent, my mother wants desperately to know what I’ve been up to. I tell her it’s a surprise, and she says, “Really?,” like I’m doing her a favor. She is both patient and proud. She holds my face to get a good look at me and I’m the one who drops her eyes first, blushing. I’ve done good and we both know it.

I
ASKED JOSEPH
if he wanted to go for a walk. It was Friday, and he’d been in bed all day, hands folded over his chest as if he were napping beneath some enormous lemon tree. He shook his head, shut his eyes, and cinched his mouth. His skin, which used to look like it was preserved with olive oil, had become matte and flaking. His blue saucer eyes were milky puddles, and his silver beard, once dense as a broom, was a light dusting of powdered sugar.

“No,” he said. “I’d never find my way back.”

I’d wanted him to say yes. I’d mouthed
yes
before he’d said a thing. I wanted to ask him if he planned to stay in that bed forever. I wanted to ask him if I seemed like a spring chicken. I’m fifty million years old. But look at me. I’m up. I’m at ’em.