Life Without a Recipe

by Diana Abu-Jaber

  The universe shrinks to the size of that tiny box, the box into which my life would fit. Uncle Hal is nodding and waving me off as I hold it out. He leans away—it’s radioactive. After a moment of silence, Moss, Jack, and Fred start laughing, slapping each other on the back. Jeremy’s mouth opens and closes fish-style—he looks at me, we’re drowning in air.

  After Uncle Hal’s visit, we will spend a few days laughing about it. Then one afternoon, after we watch a sitcom in which the main characters attend a poodle wedding and end up accidentally and hilariously married to each other, Jeremy will turn to me, a dreamy, floaty half-smile on his face, and say, “But what if we just did it? Got all married?”

  I will say, “Yeah perfect. Prearranged marriage.” But the more we joke, the more Jeremy will seem to talk himself into it. “Really though, maybe we should? Imagine the party!” Bashful and nonchalant, he will say, “And it’s almost the end of classes—are you gonna move back home?”

  I see it before me, fully revealed: the end of college. Looking at the ring box, I experience a sort of vertigo, a sense of toppling into a chasm I’d never noticed opening at my feet. My grandmother had promised that work saves you—that a career lifts you out of circumstances, no matter how bad, that it gives you money, status, direction, community. Where exactly is that career? Now I grasp the folly of majoring in something like English literature. There’s no internship, no entry-level opening under that heading. Throughout my childhood, Bud had insisted that I should go to law school or learn a “trade.” But just a week ago, he’d pointed at a couple of little boys in a diner, faces smeared with ketchup like tribal marks. “Soon, I want you to get me some of those.” It was as if he’d swept away all those other ambitions and revealed his true plan.

  The thought of moving back home stops my breath, an image of black water closing over my head. The ring box is dark as a depthless pool—would this bring more freedom or less? Anything seems possible in these tipping moments. I don’t know how much power I have, because a dutiful child, a girl child, doesn’t have power. Perhaps my uncle was offering a way forward.

  I called her to break the big news. Right away, she said to me, “I know what you’re doing.”

  My chest tightened. “Oh, uh-hunh, it’s so terrible,” I said. “I’m marrying a great guy.”

  “You’re trying to survive your father.” Water was rushing in the background; her least favorite chore. She was washing dishes out of spite.

  “Gram.” I held the phone half an inch from my ear. “Can’t this just be a good thing?”

  Dishes clanked and rattled. “He doesn’t still control you anymore. You don’t have to let him push you around.”

  “I want to do this!” My voice sounded hot and loud in the phone.

  All I could hear was splashing. It felt good to fill up with indignation—it crowded out other more complicated feelings. But then she relented. “It’s fine. You’re right. I just want you to be happy, dahlin.”

  “Thank you. I am happy.”

  “However you have to do it.”

  A dress like a spool of frosting. Two hundred people. The New Jersey relations. At the ceremony, in a church where we’d not once attended services, in a trance-state, Jeremy and I place the gold crowns on each other’s heads, link pinkies, circle the altar, light candles, kiss. I can’t look at him; his crown makes my eyes well with unintentional laughter. For the month of planning leading up to the wedding, this kept happening to me—unexpected, eye-watering hysterics at impossible moments. My mouth hurts from biting my lips. In the reception line, my grandmother crosses her arms and mutters, “This is the last time I will ever again wear a skirt.”

  I suspect Jeremy is in love, though not so much with me as with my distracting, contentious family: with my father’s lamb-stuffed zucchini and my uncles’ backyard philosophizing, and the parties in which pots become musical instruments and the boozy sessions of araq with the cousins, and tracing the stars with a finger, and the dreams of lost countries rising over the clothesline with the moon, which, my Aunt Aya swears, looks different in Jordan, like a golden goblet. Perhaps he thinks that when we marry he too will become a lyrical, disaffected Jordanian. A poet.

  At the reception, the waiters bring out platters of stuffed cabbages studded with pomegranate seeds, grilled pigeon with tarragon, mensaf in yogurt sauce with toasted almonds, lemon-marinated shish kabobs, tiny crisp koftas, minced raw kibbeh, lamb chops redolent of garlic and chili. And chocolate wedding cake. After dinner, to our astonishment, the custodial staff steps forth brandishing long swords and performs a Bedouin dance, swishing and bowing, thrusting and parrying. Two hundred aunties kiss my cheeks, both sides several times, slap them lightly, smooth my hair, lift my eyelids, stare X-rays into my eyes, and tell me the babies will be tremendous. “Gigantic American babies!” Aunt Souhaf observes. The uncles and cousins slap Jeremy on the back, laughing and laughing and saying nothing. My grandmother strolls around the hall in a tasteful brocaded suit, glaring.

  Most dishes aren’t written down: They hover in the memory, a bit of contrail, the ends uncertain. What lingers are the traces, the way the vanilla dallied with the ginger, fading from the tongue like a last thread of salt. The taste, as it’s remembered and passed down, can rarely be duplicated; the steps are mislaid, the ingredients tampered with. The taste is desire itself, the yearning for completion, in love or sugar or blood. Each recipe is someone else’s mistake or discovery. Angry and self-aware, bound to her oven, Grace knew what she needed. She was a journeyman and a proud one. She tried to tell me and I tried to listen. I did. All those hours of talking and scraping down the sides of the bowl were still inside of me. But no one wants to believe they’ll make the same mistakes as others do. I thought I’d chosen the right course—already so certain I understood myself better than anyone ever could.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Desire

  Let nothing but nothing stop you,” my grandmother said. So many precarious elements to her life: an older woman, divorced and living alone, at a time when that wasn’t much in favor. Sometimes she got unnerved—long-distance phone calls made her fretful about the expense, and she gave up completely on driving cars. Still, there was something unstoppable in her: After retirement, she trekked around the world on her own, took a prop plane to the high end of Alaska; crisscrossed Eastern Europe; sailed the Panama Canal. There was a “dalliance” with a performer on a cruise ship—to her grandchildren’s amazement. They wrote to each other for years afterward, their letters purple with euphemism. In crucial ways, she seemed fearless.

  One summer, Gram took me along to Paris, so I could “get culture.” She’d never visited and had decided my indifferent language studies would suffice. Once we arrived, though, the trip turned into an investigation of boulangeries and patisseries. We glanced at the Louvre and the Eiffel Tower on our way to bake shops—tiny places with polished stone floors, wooden counters, and indelibly delicious cakes. There were fruit aspics and meringue twirled like whipped hairdos and mousses shaped like birds and starfish and Impressionist paintings in marzipan.

  We went to the shops as early as she could roust me out of bed—usually by orange sunrise—and visited two, three, four bakeries in a day. We poked around corners, down alleyways, tottered over cobblestones, up the broad sidewalk of the Champs-Élysées, a guidebook and torn map fluttering in the breeze. Even through the oily city rain, we could smell the shops on approach, each with its particular scent of rising dough, baked fruit, roasting sugars. Gram leaned on the glass cases, looked toward the swinging doors to

  the oven, calling for the baker. If one emerged—blinking, uncertain, antisocial—she introduced herself. These men, glowering as if awakened from hibernation, claimed not to speak English. This didn’t deter Grace from talking and talking to them.

  Perhaps there was something compelling about my grandmother’s refusal to believe in language barriers, or possibly some charm in her puffed blond hair, purple lipstick, cornflower-blu
e eyes, her jaunty lavender outfits, her kimono-style pajama suits. Maybe it was the novelty of being invited out front. In any case, eventually the bakers drifted nearer the counter, arms folded over barrel chests, chins tucked, and began to demand particulars.

  “You are from where?” One man barked at us over a counter in the Latin Quarter. “Why are you here?”

  I struggled to translate. I’d taken French for years but quickly learned I didn’t know anything—the language, as spoken by actual native speakers, dissolved into a murk of vowels and gestures.

  “Why are you dressed like that?” he asked my grandmother, gesturing at her head. “If you go uncovered, you’ll get too much of the sun—it’s unhealthy.”

  “Tell him,” Gram dictated carefully, “we don’t wear babushkas in America!”

  The baker was dressed in an immaculate apron, his white jacket straining at the buttons. A flat-topped toque flopped forward on his brow. He bore a slight resemblance to Bud—many of the French did—round faces, olive skin, sleepy hooded eyes. When I mentioned this to Gram in the Latin Quarter shop, she said, “Please, don’t ruin it.”

  “How old are you?” the baker asked Gram. “Where is your husband? How many children do you have?” He had such a frank, evaluative manner it seemed natural that he’d want to know these things—as if he were sizing up Gram like a basket of berries. Gram squinted at rows of apricot tarts nested in doilies as she offered her vital statistics. She used to tell me that priests were the best sorts of men, because they had “no appetites.” Yet in our tour of bakeries, it seemed she was drawn to men who were nothing but appetite. When Parisians bowed before the oven, I felt they were doing something more than merely baking, something important and secret.

  The baker went in back and returned with two slim loaves, which he buttered then spread with a jam black with fruit and sugar. On this, he layered a soft cheese and some sort of meat shaved to translucence, then squashed and cut the sandwich on the bias into spearlike slices that he arranged on three plates. He gave us cups of black coffee and, as a child of perhaps nine had materialized to run the store, the three of us moved to a table on the sidewalk.

  Our baker was named Marcel and he came from a line of bakers, he said, dating back to Charlemagne. I translated with effort and clumsiness; Grace’s shoulders rose. “Well, my granddaughter here is in high school. She is in honors English,” she shouted, trying to burst through the language barrier.

  He stared at me. “English classes? Why? You already speak English.”

  My mortification made translating more difficult. I tried to explain that I was studying literature.

  “The books of the English?” He looked cut into. For a long moment, he stared off, scratching the underside of his chin. “Quel dommage! The English, they have no feeling for anything. What do you propose to do with yourself? How will you acquit yourself?” I had reached the outer limits of my language abilities as he raised increasingly metaphysical issues. His face darkened; he said things that I grasped at in a literal way. “Do you think life is for the clouds and the air? Life is for the blood! If you want the feeling for life, for the blood of the mind, you should be studying Hugo, Proust, Stendhal, Voltaire, Flaubert!” He turned his lecture from me to Grace. She smiled and lifted an eyebrow at me as if she understood everything and it was all satisfying. Her thoughts were written across her face: You see what can happen when you take a chance? This is what happens!

  Eventually, Gram folded her napkin, telling the baker that his sandwich was “interesting”: I translated this as “superbe.” She went back inside and pointed at the glass case: This one with the chocolate shell, that one with the ganache, the baba au rhum, the one over there like a pyramid. Marcel rushed back and forth with a pair of silver tongs. “Oui, Madame; oui, Madame!” He had a wheezy, cigarette-broken laugh. Together they filled two large boxes. Then Gram simply did what she did at every shop: opened her purse full of francs and said, “Honor system.” He removed one shiny, stray dime among the francs and said in English, “A memento, Madame.”

  We took our boxes, sagging with chocolate and cream, to a riverbank, spread our new silk scarves on the bright grass, and sat, just the two of us. The moment intertwined with the bolt of French blue sky, the warm summer air, the smell of the Seine. When we bit into them, the pastries were crisp, then bright puffs; they were clouds and bridges and fine art in gold frames and old books in leather bindings and weightless days to come.

  Oh yes, I knew—I knew, I knew!— it was foolish to be married that first time round, for ten silly months, to Jeremy—who had lain on the couch in a haze of pot smoke and TV-lit depression and such lethargy that I found it unendurable—ending in hasty divorce, and I was so relieved to be out of it. Still, the idea of marriage—the comfort, the notion of certainty—had returned to enchant me once I started graduate school and took up with someone new, D. There was love, it must have been love—mustn’t it?

  Or maybe it was foolish to try to insist on one narrative, one easy way of interpreting such desires. D. stands for Deconstruction—his course of study in graduate school. A field filled with thickets of language. D.’s favorite theorist, Michel Foucault, said, “Maybe the target nowadays is not to discover what we are but to refuse what we are.” I turned the thought over and over: If you haven’t discovered who you are, can you still refuse it?

  I’d walked into the seminar room and D. was long arms and legs, stretched out on a couch in the back. Hair blue-black as crows’ feathers, a marvelous laugh that could get the whole room stirred up—one of the best laughers I’d ever met. D. was slumming it in a writing workshop, hiding out from the courses on postmodernism. He wrote stories about young men tormented by existential problems and by touchy young women. The class—six men, plus me—hailed his work.

  One of the students said my writing, on the other hand, was “like an opera singer having a seizure.” The Deconstructionist defended me vigorously, gallantly. He used the word wonderful. A week later, he gave me a lift home. I leaned across the front seat and experimentally nosed his ear. He was safe, both hands glued to the wheel, eyes on the highway.

  “I love a man driving,” I’d said.

  His profile smiled. “Do that again. With your nose.”

  D. came to my parents’ house for dinner. He brought a bottle of araq for my father. Bud served him stuffed squash and cabbage leaves. That was the first visit. After a few more such meals, Bud began his program of systematic, low-grade harassment. As Mom picked up the platters from dinner, my father rolled forward on his elbows and asked him, “So, you have intentions?”

  “I’ve got all kinds of intentions,” D. laughed.

  “The kind of getting married.”

  “Ohhhh . . . that kind.” He sat back, offering a Mona Lisa smile.

  Bud’s chin was pulled in, his brows heavy: Dad with his propriety, his air of bruised dignity, indignant at Americans and their jokey ways. An Arab man with three smiling American daughters. D. was nothing if not a charming troublemaker. Bud turned his head to one side and aimed his eyes at me. “What is this? What is going on here?”

  My palms felt damp. “What is what?”

  “He comes to dinner fifty million times and you’re not getting married?”

  “Oh, no, no—I never said that,” D. said smoothly. “Maybe we will get married.”

  “When?”

  “Well . . .,” D.’s eyes traveled to mine. “Eventually. Someday. Maybe.”

  “Someday? Maybe? What does that mean?”

  “Dad, we haven’t even discussed it ourselves,” I broke in, enervated by a sense of déjà vu, annoyed with myself for not seeing this coming. I’d invited D. to dinner so casually, trying to prove something to myself—about my family’s new openness and Americanness. I was an idiot. “We don’t know what we want to do yet. If we want to do anything.”

  Bud swiveled toward me. “If you don’t know, then maybe this isn’t the right one for you! Maybe not! Did you think of that
ever?”

  After each dinner, D. and I had our post-Bud fight. We barely pulled out of the driveway and the question would burst from me, “Well, why don’t you want to get married?” On the outside, I looked just as American as anyone, but the Jordanian daughter emerged from within, addled by a thousand years of Bedouin etiquette and advice.

  Foucault said, “Where there is power, there is resistance.” D. was not thrilled about the whole marriage proposition. His father had lived in the basement of their house for years, leaving an arctic region between himself and D.’s mother. I could understand his anxiety, completely empathize with it, and his reluctance made it irresistible to me.

  “This is what happens when you wish,” she says, pointing to the girl at her feet. “God plays a joke.” Sitt Abdo is my grandmother’s cousin. She has withered cheeks and three furrows like arrows pointing to the center of her chest. The front of her shift slips enough so I can see them, creases deep enough for a baby’s finger. “All my life I wish for a child, I wish for a child. No baby, no baby. Then he plays his joke.” She looks impossibly old to me when I am seven—the same age as her daughter Joumana. It is possible that she is one hundred, though I hear my aunties, later, telling each other that she is sixty-two.

  Sitt Abdo, her husband Sayed Abdo, and Joumana live in the most beautiful house with whitewashed walls and rooms rippling with light, just as if someone tossed buckets of water through the air every morning and left behind sheets of brightness. As her mother carries on, Joumana looks at me with round eyes and a droll smile, so I could almost believe she is in on the joke. Her mother sighs and groans and wanders around the house in bare, lovely feet, carrying a bowl of Seville oranges. “He waits!” Sitt Abdo turns to me suddenly, as if I too played some part in the joke. “He waits until it’s too late. When I’m so old I can barely see and my neck looks like a camel’s back,” she says, pointing to her straight spine. “And my husband is himself a three-year-old child,” she throws in irritably. “When I’ve given up and I don’t want it any longer, that’s when God grants the wish.”