Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots (7 page)

The week before, I’d read a whole book on mushrooms, and later I’d said something to my mother about morels and she’d said, “Hey now! Look at you, daughter of my heart.” My chest tingled with bubbles until she went ballistic on the phone to one of her sous-chefs, who’d quit. And on a Saturday. If I’d picked up first I would have told him that it was not a good idea and that he should trust me because if I knew anything, I knew my mother. After that, she said she couldn’t even speak. She turned on the TV so loud that I had to move some of the pieces in Aunt Lou’s porcelain poodle collection so they wouldn’t shimmy off the dresser and shatter. The sous-chef debacle cut off my morel story before it had even begun.

I also sat here because Blot’s desk was no more than ten steps away.

I had plopped down in a nice little spot where I could see him. My pulse did jumping jacks. He was in charge of this section—self-help, test-taking,
libros en
español.
He had blond hair, flushed cheeks, and roughed-up leather boots that looked like they belonged to a different century. The bottoms of his pants were stained with black but he rolled them up so that it looked like dark cuffs. It occurred to me that maybe this was intentional, like he was too busy reading to take the stuff to the laundry. He wasn’t dirty. A number of times, I had imagined myself smelling his chest, but I tried to stop thinking that way, realizing how insane it was. He kept a book in his back pocket and a pencil behind his ear. His hair was long enough that he was always touching it, swatting it away from his face like some kind of stubborn bug. I wondered what it looked like wet, if it stuck to his head like a little kid’s, like mine. Now I imagined him leading me to a very secret place in Central Park with the biggest trees you’ve ever seen and a twig canopy. He’d read from a book and for some reason it was in Portuguese, which for some reason I understood. I told myself to get a grip, which is like trying to sear scallops in liquid.

He wore his nametag on his collar, and I loved how his name was stranger than mine. I liked to think it was a loving nickname, maybe from his baby sister who couldn’t pronounce Blake or Blaise, though he didn’t look like either of those. He used to have a skateboard that he tooled around on until his manager said, “Hey.” I could tell, though, adults couldn’t stay mad at him. In that way, he was the opposite of me.

He carried a huge stack of shiny books wrapped in plastic, and when he walked by he gave me a little wave, keeping his elbow tight to his side. I looked around. There was no one but me. Me? I looked at my lap. I looked up. He was waiting. It was the first time he’d waved. Usually, he’d tighten his lower lip, a kind of acknowledgment, as I’d been here a thousand times. I’d tighten mine back. I practiced it in the mirror to be sure I didn’t look like a duck.
Now what,
I thought. I had already done my lip thing. Or had I? I couldn’t remember now. So I did it again but my mouth was stiff like I’d been sucking on frozen peach slices. I was relieved when he started walking again. At least I hadn’t done something hugely ridiculous like yelling a
Hey, Blot!
and waving with octopus arms. It occurred to me that I’d been staring at him for far too long. Probably he had to wave. Probably he was just being polite.

I needed to start looking for the recipe, but I was distracted.

I was sweating. I shouldn’t have walked so quickly. My mother liked to say that I scurried like a pigeon. I took off my backpack and sweater. The bandage on my leg was thin, and, I noticed, the blood had leaked through. A dot of purple stained the pants on my thigh. Stupid Kanetha Jackson. She’d startled me. Made the knife go straight in. I went to the nurse. They made me. I was fine. The nurse was mousy. She never looked me in the eye and must have thought that I was some kind of vamp nut. But when the goose bumps came, she put her hand flat out on my thigh and kept it there, as if blessing me. I wanted to put my fingers between her clean, unfancy mother hands. I wondered about her own children, about whether she sat with them in the mornings and watched them eat breakfast. I bet she did. I bet she made them eat oatmeal—or pancakes, if they must, but blueberry buckwheat.
Something with a little heft,
she’d say, opening the fridge and reaching for the milk.

My mother was always sleeping in the mornings; I’d become a professional tiptoe. A professional silent French-toast maker too. You couldn’t blame her for being tired. She had a staff of thirty-five but some of them were so unprofessional. Sometimes a prep chef would just not show up. I wanted to tell them what they did to her. How they wore on her nerves.

I put my jacket over my legs, put on my sweater, and made sure Blot hadn’t seen the blood, which he hadn’t. I didn’t even know where he’d gone.

I took out my notebook and opened the book about Middle Eastern cuisine. It was divided up by region. Iraq took up only six pages, and three of them were recipes for desserts. I was about to get up when Blot’s shoe appeared on the gray carpet beside my leg. My heart did that sighing thing again, and out of nowhere I felt like I had to pee. I glanced up and held my jaw tight so I didn’t look like a smiling dimwit. I narrowed my eyes, pretending something was bright. It kept the grinning at bay.

“What are you doing?” he asked. “You always look so busy.”

“What am I doing?” I repeated, no better than an intelligent parrot. “I’m researching,” I said. I gestured to my notebook and hoped that he couldn’t see my notes. I’d drawn his shoe one day, next to a recipe for Ina Garten’s savory coeur à la crème. I thought,
It wouldn’t take much to recognize your own shoe.
I got lightheaded. I covered the pages with my hands.

“Researching what?” he asked.

“I don’t know. Stuff,” I said too harshly. I hoped he wouldn’t go away.

He sat down next to me and rested his arms on his knees. His legs were so long and thin that he could have tied them into knots. He moved his hair out of his face. He smelled of detergent and deli, which meant bacon. I took this as a very good sign. I was into bacon. My mother had said, one day when she loved me, “I want to wrap you up in bacon and put you on a silver tray.”

“Stuff,” he repeated. He rubbed his chin, pretending to be old, though he was probably only nineteen, five long years older than me.

“You know,” I said. “Like, stuff.” It felt like there was cheesecloth between my brain and me.

“I’m a stuff specialist,” he said. “So if you need any help, I’m Blot.”

“I know,” I said, and in a moment of rare clarity, I pointed to his nametag so I didn’t seem like a stalker who might also know his birthday, address, and mother’s maiden name. He smiled. He didn’t ask me my name. He just sat there, not really waiting for anything, just sort of being there, with or without me. Quiet. I’d never been good at that. Aunt Lou said that a lady should refrain from blurting but I couldn’t help it: I’d become someone who snuffed out silence.

I blurted, “I’m Lorca.” Blot’s dimples flashed but didn’t make him look young. I had nowhere to look, so I looked at his fingers. Black lines were under his nails as if he’d scraped off all the words of a book, page by page by page. He put his hands into his pockets. I wanted to tell him that I wasn’t grossed out, that he shouldn’t be embarrassed, and that I was always embarrassed too. I wanted to tell him that I would like to see his fingers again. I hadn’t meant to make him uncomfortable.

“Lorca,” he said softly to his shoes. No one had ever said my name like that. “Wasn’t Lorca the gay one?” he asked, out of nowhere. “Wasn’t he the one they shot?”

“No,” I snapped, hating myself for a second but also not needing Blot to think that my parents wanted me dead.

“Yes,” he said. “I know I read that somewhere.”

“No,” I said again. And then: “Yes.” When the sound repeated in my head, it was impatient and rude.

“That’s cool, though,” Blot said. “It’s cool to be named after a poet guy.”

I wanted to tell him, but didn’t, that my father had named me after Federico García Lorca because he wrote about the moon’s white petticoats and the gypsies. (I didn’t speak Spanish, but I memorized the whole poem in its original language when I was seven, and when I recited it to my father, tears came to his eyes and he kissed my face all over, again and again.
El niño la mira, mira.
) And because my mother had still loved my father then, when I was born, she’d let him choose my name.

I wanted to ask Blot what he knew about Lorca. Why else a father might have named his daughter after him. Maybe, I thought, I could feel closer to him, knowing those things. Blot got up. I whispered, “Wait,” but reconsidered and did a pretty good cover-up:

“His first play,” I said, “was actually
El maleficio de la mariposa,
not
Mariana Pineda.
It’s about a cockroach and a butterfly who fall in love. It’s a common misconception that it was
Mariana Pineda.
”

I was an idiot. Where did I get this stuff? He must know that I loved him. What else?

“Cool,” Blot said. There went the dimples again. They made me forget to breathe out.

“Thank you,” I said. Stupid. Moron. Idiot.

Just as Blot was walking away, it occurred to me that if I really wanted to find the recipe and save myself, I couldn’t waste any time.

“Hey,” I blurted, a little spit flying. “Do you have any older issues of
Zagat
?” My face went hot and numb as it occurred to me that this was a bookstore and not a library and why would they?

“Well, no,” he said. “We replace them every year. We have the newest one downstairs.”

Obviously. Then I lied. “Oh, the old ones are very valuable,” I said. “The Strand has some in their rare-book collection.”

“We don’t,” he said. “Are you looking for something specific?”

Specifically, I wanted to know if he wanted to search for the masgouf with me. If he wanted to traipse around the city and hold my hand and maybe eat a hundred different dishes until we found the one that would make my mother go bananas, in a good way. His presence would change everything. That was the specific question I wanted to ask him. And the specific answer I was looking for was
I’d love to. I can’t wait.
That’s what I wanted him to say.

Then, carefully, I explained the situation to him—excluding all the parts about getting in trouble, boarding school, hurting myself, and the romantic bits featuring him. He said, “Is it a special birthday or something? Is that why you want to make your mother the fish?” I hadn’t expected that. I hadn’t expected that it might seem strange that I would go to Mars and back for my mother for no good reason. You’d think I’d have realized how weird this was earlier, years before, but I hadn’t.

My mother was an enigma, fickle, unknowable, like a giant fish. She loved me in fits and spurts. Lou said that she was how she was because she was adopted. “Someone didn’t love her enough. How about cutting her a little slack?” I told her one thousand times a day how much I loved her, hoping the words would do the trick, but they didn’t. I had to show her love on her own terms, remind her of her kind of happiness. The masgouf was the perfect thing. The only thing.

“Yeah,” I lied. “It’s a big birthday this year.”

“Cool,” he said. “Let’s see what we’ve got.”

I seemed totally normal for a minute, and, I thought, it had taken me only a million lies to get there.

We spent the next few hours looking through books about New York City restaurants and then books about Middle Eastern cuisine. The most astonishing part of the whole thing was how comfortable I felt. Blot’s co-workers walked by and nodded to him and then to me, as if I were someone they knew. And I said “Hey!” to them, not even caring how high or stupid my voice sounded. We sat on the floor. Every so often, he had to get up and go to his desk, to make sure everything was status quo, and when he came back and sat down, I very discreetly watched the space on the carpet—to gauge whether he’d come closer or moved farther off. Also, I devised a way to hold my sleeves in my hands, over my wrists. My whole wrists. It didn’t look awful. It looked like a thing. I pretended I was him looking at me. I didn’t seem nuts.

“Are you cold?” he asked at one point.

“Always,” I said, and felt brilliant. He might want to protect me, I thought. One day, he might offer me his coat.

“Me too,” he said. “I’m from Baltimore. The ‘South.’” He made quotation marks with his fingers.

I laughed. And though I couldn’t place Baltimore on a map, I wasn’t an idiot. I knew a thing or two about Maryland crabs and that it had to be a tiny bit warmer there than here.

In the end, there was nothing in the books about the restaurant. There were, however, a couple of recipes for masgouf. One said that you absolutely must catch the fish in the Tigris or the Euphrates and cook it over an open fire using apricot logs. The history books said that carp was used exclusively, but the modern recipes improvised with red snapper and salmon and, in one case, catfish.

“How about the lake in Central Park?” Blot asked.

“I think the Hudson would work,” I joked, and he did a double thumbs-up. We found another book that said fish from the Tigris and Euphrates absolutely should not be consumed because of the many bodies that had been dumped in those rivers. Islamic religious leaders had issued fatwas on the poor creatures. Blot gave me a little elbow jab and said, “Wowie.” The feeling of his touching me echoed on my skin for hours.

“Your Hudson River idea is sounding better and better,” he said, and even my toes blushed.

I tried not to examine him even when I didn’t think he was looking. One dimple was bigger than the other. One eye was slightly lazy. There was a tiny divot, like a thumbprint, in the middle of his bottom lip. His eyelashes were not only long but also wet-looking, making his eyes seem brighter, like he’d been swimming for hours in the cleanest, coldest lake.

We learned that the fish must be cut down its back, not its belly. I didn’t tell Blot that the only time I’d ever butterflied a fish, my mother had stopped me midway through and told me I was taking too many short strokes. What was I trying to do? Make it into chum? Instead, I told him I had no idea how to butterfly a fish, had never even thought about it. He said, “Let’s find out!” And he set off in search of another book that might teach us how. Every time he came back to me, I realized that I’d been holding my breath.