Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots (33 page)

“And what did you eat?” I asked.

“TV dinners,” she said. “Gummy, sloppy things. All disgusting.”

“That must have been terrible for you,” I said.

“I guess,” she said. “It was gross. Yes.”

“Okay,” I said. “And what did you talk about?”

“Lou talked,” she said. “Mostly.”

“What did Lou—” I began, but she cut me off. She was done answering questions. I wasn’t done. I felt like I was gaining speed.

“Lorca,” she said. “C’mon, now.”

Suddenly, I was angry at her. Not at anything other than her. It might have been the first time ever. And I forgot where I was going, where my big interrogation was supposed to lead us.

“Why don’t you ever cook for me?” I said. I snapped it. You could tell, my mother wasn’t used to this—me, like this. She sat up as if she’d seen a bug on the ceiling. For a second her face was very hard and I was sure she was going to explode, but then she softened, got too soft.

“Oh, Lorca,” she said. “Is that what you want? Is that all this is about?”

I wasn’t sure what I wanted. I slumped onto the couch, lay down, defeated.

My mother stood, picked up a blanket from a chair, and covered me with it as I stared right at her, not smiling or crying or anything, just trying to figure out if this was real or fake. In real life, I didn’t get angry at her. And I couldn’t make sense of her either, couldn’t tell if she was furious or disappointed. She wouldn’t look me in the eye. She started at my feet, tucking in the blanket beneath them with both hands, gently lifting me and then dropping my weight as she made little shoves with her fingers until I was airtight. She moved all the way around, up one side of me and then the other, and when she came to my shoulders, she looked past me at the pillow as she lifted my head. I let it go heavy in her hands. She tucked the blanket under there too. Everything was pulled taut around me; even my arms were bound to my sides, but I left them. I didn’t squirm. I didn’t fight anything. I let myself be pinned to the couch.

When she was done, she left.

I heard her go into the other room and close the door and that was that. I didn’t hear anything else—not the TV, not her voice on the phone, not nose-blowing. I didn’t even hear what was happening outside. I don’t know what happened next. It might have been the emotion, the fear of being awake and angry at her; or it might have been the way she’d instructed me to relax by tucking me in; or it might have been that she’d just shown me more attention, moving around my feet and legs and sides and shoulders, than she had in years, as long as I could remember, and I could still feel the sensation of her fingers under my head—but it knocked me out. All of it. I fell asleep just like that, just like her.

I woke up to something amazing: the smell of chicken in half-mourning, a favorite of my mother’s, done with black truffles, Madeira, garlic, and loads of butter. She was taking it out of the oven. I raced to stand up and help her. She plopped it onto the counter, took out one knife and one fork. The chicken was steaming, the color of expensive wood.

“There,” she said.
“Bon appétit.”

I wanted to capture this moment just as it was. It was the moment, I thought, just before I told her about Victoria and Joseph. And here we were, like this, like a normal family. A mother cooking for her daughter as she’d napped.

I took out two plates, thinking she’d cut it and we’d eat together. She and I. But instead, she went to the bathroom, came back with the tweezers and a magnifying mirror, and sat herself down on the windowsill, though it was dark out and the window let in an ugly, orange light.

“You’re not hungry?” I said.

“No,” she said. “I’m just not.”

The sensation of collapsing poured through me but I kept standing. I ate as much of the chicken as I possibly could—one thigh, two drumsticks, a very large breast—though I wasn’t hungry either. At first, it felt like I was eating away the space between us, but when I came to my senses, I kept eating, just to have something to do with my hands.

The phone rang. I raced to it, wrapped a paper towel around the receiver so I didn’t cover it with grease, and passed it to my mother. I wanted her to look at me, make sense of what had just happened, but she wouldn’t.

“Hello,” she said, singsongy, like she’d just come in from a swim.

She put the tweezers on the counter, sauntered away from me, and reassembled herself on the couch. She folded her legs beneath her.

“Paul,” she said. Her voice was calm, expectant even. I wondered if he’d ever called her before, begging—though I wasn’t sure for exactly what. And if she’d just sat there, queen of the world, taking it in, like dough rising.

“Paul,” she said with just as much patience. I could make out my father’s voice now on the other end, sounding wild even through the phone. Anxiety gripped my throat. I hadn’t expected him to stand up to my mother about the masgouf, about her eating it with someone that wasn’t him, especially now when he was already so far from her. It had been so very long. I hated myself for having called him, for not thinking of how it would come back to bite me.

“Paul,” she said, and her cheeks went red.

She picked at a burn on her finger only for a second before slamming her feet down on the floor.

“Excuse me?” she said, her voice trampling his.

“No,” she said and kept repeating it over and over, becoming calmer and calmer—her own personal lullaby. “No no no no no no no.”

She let him make a scene. I could hear him. Then, with her eyes closed, she said, “You are right. We were together then. But I didn’t go to the Shohet with someone else. I went by myself.”

She paused, and I heard my father’s voice, but it was softer now, and I wondered if he was apologizing already. For a moment, I could see them as a couple again, after all these years. For some reason, I could still imagine it—not in a certain place or doing particular things, but just the two of them, holding on to each other and floating. He was the only one she allowed to touch her, really touch her.

“I told Lou that I went with you because it’s what Lou needed to hear. If I’d told her I went by myself, she would have asked why, and I didn’t need to tell her. That wasn’t part of our conversation.”

My stomach soared into my throat. I leaned forward. She was about to tell my father about Victoria and Joseph, that they were her biological parents. I had the urge to shout that I knew it. I’d known it first. I’d done so much work, but I could barely open my mouth. My jaw was locked.

“Mom,” I whispered.

“And I have to say, Paul,” she said, “that it’s really amazing that you decide to be jealous now, to give a shit about something now. It’s way too late to get possessive.”

“Mom,” I said again. “Wait.” I started to make my way over to her, but she put up her hand, shut her eyes tight, as if defending herself from a terrible stench. I stopped, sat down, and slumped to the floor. Wait.

My father said something else and she stood up, stepped over and around me. She took a breath. I imitated her. In, out. She rubbed one foot on top of the other and tucked the phone between her shoulder and her ear so she could stretch her arms in twenty different ways.

“I found my parents,” she said. “Just before I went to the Shohet, I’d found them.”

Now I stood up. I covered my mouth. I opened it. “Victoria,” I said. She shot me a mean look, like what was I talking about, and why did I need to say anything right now.

“Victoria and Joseph,” I said. “Mom.” I was loud.

“In the obituaries,” she continued, turning away from me, looking like she had absolutely no sense of what I was trying to do. “I did all this research and ran around for months like a chicken with its head cut off, trying to find where I was from. Finally, I found their names, their address. And just before I was going to go see them, I found them in the obituaries. The man had crashed his jet flying to Nantucket, and he was survived by no one, it said. His ex-wife had died sixteen years before.”

I had to remind myself to shut my mouth, which was still open. Now I picked at a scab on my neck until it bled. She had other parents. The man. The ex-wife. I repeated the whole thing in my head. I turned around once. I turned around again. I wanted to yell. Instead, I shoved my fingernails as deep as I could into my palms.

I sat down on the floor again and replayed what she’d just said in my head, faster and repeatedly. The part that made the most sense was that they’d been wealthy. You could always tell just from looking at my mother that she came from kings and queens. There were constants about her that I imagined had everything to do with fancy blood: perfect skin, white nails, hair that looked blown-dry even when she’d just come from the shower, correctly shaped teeth. Even the way she walked was wealthy. Put her next to Lou and there was no denying it.

“But he was important,” she said. “Always in the papers and with his picture taken at fundraisers. He’d lived in Boston. A patron of the arts.”

My father said something that made my mother smile just briefly. So badly I wanted to know what. For a second, it felt like he’d won.

“Anyway,” she said. “Right after I saw the obituary, I went to that restaurant and had the masgouf. We used to walk past it all the time, remember? It seemed like such a family place. Everyone was so nice. And so not like people from Nantucket. And so not like the people who adopted me. And so not like people from culinary school. And I wanted that. Not forever. But, you know. I kept that obituary in my pocket for weeks.”

She paused for a second and stood up taller, as if pulling taut whatever emotion had become loose and runny inside of her. When her posture returned, so did she. She spoke fast.

“I burned it,” she said to my father.

As my father spoke, softly now, my mother sat down, crossed her feet, pushed the hair from her face.

“I didn’t want to explain all that to Lou,” she said. “Get it now? I didn’t cheat on you.”

He said something else.

“They made good fish,” she said. “What else do you want from me?”

When she got off the phone, she looked at me.

“I’m waiting,” she said.

“It’s not a big deal,” I said. “It’s not like I call him all the time. It’s nothing.”

“And what were you saying while I was trying to explain? Trying to defend myself?” she said.

“Nothing,” I said. “I was just saying nothing.”

She didn’t sit on the floor with me and she didn’t touch my head. Instead, she lay down on the couch, used her foot to knock the blanket over herself, let out a big heavy sigh, and said she was exhausted, would I mind waking her in twenty. She wasn’t looking for an answer.

I felt fogged in, everything too wispy to get a hold of. Even my mother, inches away from me, seemed a little bit like a ghost. My feelings were dull. I had to keep going over the events of the past few hours just to try to comprehend them. Victoria was my grandmother. Victoria wasn’t my grandmother. I wondered if I’d somehow willed her to believe that we were related, if I’d tricked her into it. I felt as though I’d taken advantage of her. I desperately didn’t want to tell her that things weren’t as she believed. I wanted her to think of me as family, regardless. I wanted to be her granddaughter. I wanted her to hold my hands again and to one day sit at my graduation from somewhere, clapping, beaming. Even though I hadn’t had the right reaction before, I would. I could. I was sure of it.

It occurred to me that my actual grandparents were strangers to me. More than ever, and dead. And fancy. And I didn’t care.

It struck me that Victoria was nothing like my mother. And yet, surprisingly, I wasn’t angry at myself, at my hope.
Please, let’s keep pretending,
I thought.
Please.

“Tell me a story,” my mother said after a while. “Something really happy and nice.”

I’d been standing at the counter, cleaning up, holding on. Now I took a deep breath.

“Okay,” I said. I went over to her. I sat on her feet.

I told her one of the few stories that she’d told me of myself as a child. We’d gone to a park by a lake. I was no older than two. Me, my father, and my mother. There was an enormous tree with branches so long and droopy that my father moved the picnic table from underneath it. He was always afraid of me getting crushed. My mother believed that kids had stronger bones than grownups.

“There’s more calcium in her forearm than in an entire dairy farm,” she liked to say.

That day, my mother had made roasted tomato and goat cheese sandwiches with salmon she’d smoked herself, and I ate, she said, double my weight of it. She was complimenting me when she said that. I always wondered if eating so much was my best way of complimenting her.

The story went that all through lunch I kept pointing at a gaping hole in the tree, reaching for it, waving it at. My parents thought it was just that: a hole, one that had been filled with fall leaves, stiff and brown, by some kind of ferrety animal. But I wasn’t satisfied with that explanation. I wouldn’t give up.

“What?” my father kept asking me. “What do you see?”

I ate my sandwiches, drank my sparkling hibiscus drink, and refused to take my eyes off the hole. “It was as if you were flirting with it,” my mother said, “the way you smiled and all.”

Finally, I squealed, “Butter fire!”

Some honey upside-down cake went flying from my mouth.

“Butter fire?” they asked me. “Butter fire?”

“Butter fire!” I yelled, pointing, reaching, waving.

They couldn’t understand. There was nothing interesting about the leaves in the tree. They wondered if I’d seen a squirrel.

“Chipmunk?” they asked. “Owl?”

I shook my head fiercely. No. No. No.

“Butter fire!” I screamed so loudly that I sent hundreds of the tightly packed monarchs that my parents had mistaken for leaves exploding into the air in an eruption of lava-colored flames. They went soaring wildly, first in a vibrating clump and then as tiny careening postage stamps, floating through the sky.

They were proud of me that day, my parents. My father for my recognition of an animal so delicate and precious, and my mother because I’d used a food word, regardless of what I’d actually meant.