Life Without a Recipe

by Diana Abu-Jaber

  Bud looks at her. “I am?” A veil lifts from his features. He turns to me. “But—how—where will you get the baby?”

  “Well, Dad, so—”

  New ideas glisten in his eyes. “You know what—you can get him from Jordan! Maybe even, can we get a boy baby? I would like that, a boy baby. What will you name him? Maybe you’d like to name him after my father, Saleh. We can all go to Jordan to get him—he might even look like me. I have a cousin who runs an orphanage—she has babies. She can give us a baby.”

  Mom watches him during this outpouring with a familiar sort of patience. It reminds me of the times when my sisters and I were young girls and Bud would lament, “If we lived in Jordan, you girls would marry royalty. Actual princes.” Mom’s face would light up and she’d say, “Hey, great, where are the actual princes? Are they coming for dinner?”

  Now she says to Bud, “Gus—you aren’t the one adopting this baby. Diana and Scott are.”

  Scott leans forward. “We’re going to sign up with an agency in town. It’ll be a domestic adoption—I mean, assuming someone picks us.”

  “Who wouldn’t pick you?” Bud’s chin is tucked. “I would pick you first.”

  We’ve just spent weeks constructing a profile, a kind of life-infomercial, including snapshots of house, car, friends, and family, which the agency gives to birth parents, along with information about your careers, religion, and ethnicity. Scott explains this to my parents, and Bud nods and puts his forearm on the table, taps it. “In Jordan, we don’t say we’re white or black. We’re qameh. Which really is the best-looking—you get a little of taste everything. See?” He shows off his tan skin as the waitstaff attempts to exchange one set of bowls with another. Qameh means “wheat.” “I think the baby should be qameh, too. He will be beautiful.”

  “It doesn’t really work so much that way, Dad. They pick us.”

  “The baby is going to be beautiful,” Mom tells Bud—now fully embracing the facts. “Whoever this baby is. Whatever she looks like.”

  The waiters are before us, ladling bowlfuls of steaming brown broth. Plumes of meaty aroma dampen our faces, mesmerizing as incense. Bud leans over his bowl, gazing at a reflection. “Look, there’s an us’meh,” he breathes. A sign. “The baby will look like me!”

  Over the summer, we filled out psychological profiles, got fingerprinted, underwent background checks, submitted a handful of personal recommendations, attended adoption classes, group sessions, parenting workshops. We are settled in for what, by all accounts, will be a good long wait, for a young pregnant woman to point to our pictures and say: Them. It’s well into the fall, but the Floridian heat has hung on, a deep, scorching presence with slashes of summer in it. I’m half-writing, my mind in that funny, multilevel pentimento in which thoughts drift over unformed but persistent underthoughts, transparencies of preoccupations, layers superimposed on top of one another. Sometimes I think it would almost be a relief to be pregnant, to let the body take over what’s needed and free the mind for a little while longer. But just as with any pregnancy, I’m learning there’s a vigilance about adoption—nothing’s taken for granted. Every now and then, Scott will stroke my hair, put his lips on top of my head, and say, “How’s it going in there?” I’m at my desk, my husband and dog out in the front yard, playing catch. Here is our dailyness, the regular rhythms that bind our days and help keep us as calm as can be managed. Without listening, I hear the sounds of their play, Yogi’s regular woof at each toss of the ball, Scott’s Go get it! Behind all this, the oceanic currents of traffic whirl down the street, just a few doors beyond our house.

  There is just a slight pause, a moment that seems tender, like a sag in time. That’s what I first notice: not the woof, but its absence.

  Then a mechanical screech, brakes. Her scream breaking open the wall of my office, a crescendo, higher and louder than any sound she’s ever made. Shock enters my body like icy fog. I stand. I can’t seem to remember how to walk normally. I tell myself, okay.

  Scott rushes in the front door as I reach the living room. He says, “She’s hit.” He says, “Don’t go outside.”

  “Call 911,” I gasp, forgetting that Yogi isn’t a person.

  He wraps his arms around me.

  I see, through the open door, our dog’s body, a dark pool, a young man in a suit squatting beside her, hands out as if in supplication. The car askew at the side of the road. I stand in the doorway, trying to take it in, but I can’t because the world is wavy. There are men working on the roof across the street, yet far away, the neighborhood is silent, the air has turned thin and silvery and hot. My knees and throat feel molten. I cling to the door frame and someone screams at the young man, “YOU KILLED MY DOG.” Maybe I didn’t scream it. He doesn’t seem to hear.

  Scott says it happened in a weird, logy, impossible moment—something from the back of a dream. He watched as she turned and casually strolled past our front lawn, right into the street. No reason. The car, he says, materialized.

  Scott heads back out, tells the driver, “Go. Get out.” The man scuttles to his car, shoulders hunched, and vanishes. We move quickly, before any more cars whirl around the corner. Scott slides her body onto a bit of cardboard and we carry her into the backyard. I place my palm on her side, the silk of her, the ribs as delicate as fish bones; I try to detect the old hum of energy, a steady drum, but she feels flat. Through my shock, I focus on an emerging thought: to bury her myself, to do it with my own hands, in our backyard. We start digging a hole. Then another, and another. Scraping and hacking, here and there and here and there, we discover that our entire yard, and possibly the whole of South Florida, is built on a substratum of coral covered by a few inches of topsoil. We can’t carve a hole any deeper than five or six inches. There’s a high, white, whining sound in my ears. I tear up our yard while our dog’s body grows cold, loosely wrapped in a towel. Finally, Scott brings out bigger tools, chisel, crowbar, and hammer. We don’t stop: The harder it is, the harder we push, as though performing some kind of death-duty or penance. We smash away layers of stone, trading the chisel back and forth. Scott can break away twice as much as I can, but I keep swinging and bashing, which is better somehow than crying or praying, sweat streaming down my back, laboring at this small, hard act.

  I spend six days outside visiting with our dog in her shallow grave. Each morning, I talk to her and tell her about the day—trying in some way to keep her beside me. I’m squatting by her grave again, knees aching, when I hear the phone ring inside. It’s our adoption agency. Our social worker’s voice sounds different—shimmering, somehow, almost iridescent. I’ve never heard her like this. I lower myself slowly into my chair as I hear her saying that there’s a pregnant girl—not far away. “Guys—she chose you.”

  Am I underwater? The air won’t come into my lungs. Everything is shiny, ungraspable.

  “Are you there? Did you hear me?”

  “I can—I am. . . .” I look at Scott, who is staring at me, just inches away, but it’s hard to see him clearly, the way tears make everything smeared and waxy.

  The social worker faxes the information on record for this woman—her family and medical history: She’s single, without work, and six and a half months healthily pregnant. Beyond these bare details, all is mystery.

  I put down the pages of medical tests, go outside, and look at the arc of yellow flowers behind our house, blossoms curling into tiny bubbles. For the past week, I’ve been subsisting on sips of broth, tea, crackers, not a trace of sugar: a grief diet. I climbed out of bed and the clang of sadness sent me straight back. “Someone is coming,” I murmur to the ground. “You knew.” This might be the closest I’ve come to prayer in years. As I rise from my crouch beside her grave, the palm trees lift their fronds, sailing on the midwinter air.

  A few weeks after we learn we’ve been “matched,” a social worker calls to ask if we’d like to meet the woman who will give birth to our daughter. Our birth mother, she’s called, as if she will be de
livering all of us.

  I spend days thinking about gifts. Nothing is right. In despair, I settle on a basket to fill with fruit, cheeses, nuts, and chocolates. We pile up the big woven basket. It occurs to me this will also be a gift to our child. I try to find the sweetest Satsuma oranges, the rosiest pomegranate. I imagine whispering to the baby: Have a taste of this and this—cashews and macadamias and strawberries dipped in chocolate, buttery shortbreads scented with vanilla, triangles of Camembert and winey grapes. On the day of our meeting, I change clothes until my hair’s crackling with static, everything in a floor heap. My nerves are hectic, sprung, my breath feels raw. I glare at my reflection: Does this make me look like a mother? Does this?

  The drive isn’t long, but it feels Odyssean. The sky stretches into elastic blueness and white, architectural clouds. The birth mother’s social worker decided we’d meet at an Olive Garden. Bud hooted, “In an olive garden! Jordan is all olive gardens! And lemon trees. It’s an us’meh.” That’s how the us’meh is: dreadful or funny or miraculous, and always unquestionable. We pull into a vast parking lot, a shopping-mall sea. I picture decades of jangled adoptive families gathering here to wonder, meet, pace, and fret. Scott and I have arrived too early and wait in the front window-lined lobby, holding hands tightly. I gaze with beagle eyes at everyone who pushes through the doors. At two o’clock on a Sunday afternoon, every woman walking into the Olive Garden is seven months pregnant. The room seems slightly tilted, noises zoom around us, in and out of focus. I pat the hair out of my eyes over and over, my hands damp.

  Scott’s eyes lift over my head, to the parking lot beyond, and stay there. Then I turn too.

  That’s her. We just know. She has brave, erect shoulders and her eyes are lowered. I feel abashed, suddenly uncertain; twelve years old in the middle-school gym, eyeing my square-dance partner. I watch through the glass as she approaches, an echo bounces between us like déjà vu. We are versions of each other—tall and angular, our faces have the same flat planes. Crazy hair. The glass door flashes, she walks in, bringing a bolt of humid air from outside. Somewhere in the distance, a lawn mower growls awake. Connie, the social worker, introduces us to Lilah and her boyfriend. She signals us from behind Lilah, shakes her head, rolls her eyes, mouths: NOT THE DAD.

  I take Lilah’s hand; soft as a wish. This is all so almost-normal. We’re seated in a quiet, open area to the right, at a big round table. The social worker places herself like a plump hen between me and the young woman. “Can you believe the traffic? It’s crazy—they’re like crazy people!” Connie swabs her forehead with a folded napkin. “Every time I come out to this mall I think, that’s it—I’m giving up on shopping. It’s not for me. Sometimes I wonder if I’m cut out to be an American—you know? Like maybe I should go try Portugal or Sweden or someplace. Because really, what’s the point anyway? All of this rush, rush, rush. Where they all rushing to?” She rattles on, her small head turning from me to Lilah to me to Lilah.

  Scott tries to lean around her and address Lilah. “We were so glad you wanted to meet. It’s not every day that—”

  “Oh, no, it isn’t, is it?” Connie intercepts him. “None of us hardly go to this side of town. And now it’s getting toward the holidays—well, forget it. It’s not going to get better.” She scolds as if he’d asked her to direct traffic.

  Lilah holds her menu up like a mantilla, shyly covering her face. When the waiter comes, she and Miguel stare at him, blinking and speechless. Connie orders antipasto for the table. “Please—whatever you like,” Scott urges them. “Take it home if you don’t finish.”

  Lilah orders in a nearly transparent voice. Twice, the waiter asks her to repeat herself. Once he leaves, Connie resettles herself, smooths out her skirt, and begins quizzing Lilah: Where did she grow up? What did her parents do? How did she get her hair like that? She fingers a lock of Lilah’s hair as if this were a perfectly normal thing to do. “So you use a curling iron or is it like that naturally?”

  “I straight-iron then curl it.” Lilah looks bemused. “Why you asking so much about my hair?”

  Connie sniffs, rests her chin on the back of her curled fingers, and turns toward the window. I hold a section of my own hair. “This drove my parents crazy. Dad was always saying . . .”—I switch to a Jordanian accent—“‘Make there less of it!’”

  Lilah lets go of a wisp of laughter, then glances at Miguel. “My mother don’t like my nails,” she allows, flaring out her fingers. A tattoo of musical notation spirals up her arm. Connie leans between us. “Diana is a college professor,” she murmurs in a low voice, as if to say professors don’t approve of nail polish.

  Lilah sinks into her seat, edging toward Miguel, who hasn’t stopped smirking. Scott nudges my foot under the table. He asks Lilah, “Did you like being in school?”

  A look at Miguel. “Sure.”

  I try, “Did you have any favorite classes?”

  A shrug, her lids like hoods, hiding places; her face is crossed with shadows. “I don’t know. . . .”

  “Oh, now I loved social studies.” Connie begins tearing a slice of bread into pieces. “I thought I’d become a teacher. Maybe I missed my calling? Who honestly knows? Okay, but now my fifth-grade homeroom teacher. . . .” She prattles on, buttering each of the little bits. I imagine pushing her under the table.

  Lilah’s gaze flits to mine. Her eyes tip and her lips wrinkle slightly, as if she’s thinking about laughing.

  So, dessert. Connie picks something for the table that turns out to be a big block of chocolate covered in whipped cream, scrolled with chocolate sauce and tiled with chocolate curls like wood shavings. Lilah and Miguel lean forward, hands on their laps. Connie wedges a fork in one corner and gets stuck. Lilah and Miguel wait for her to work out the one bite, then they go at it, cutting in, closing their eyes as they eat. Scott speaks to a waiter, and when the man returns with our check, he hands Lilah a takeout box containing another brick of chocolate.

  I hang back to walk out with her. She lowers her head, slides hands in her pockets. I ask if she’s tired. She says, “Oh, yes, I am. Can’t wait to get my jeans back on.” Her sugar-drunk smile lingers. “The normal ones.”

  Connie says, “How about a picture?” We stand in the lot beside the dusty backs of cars. Between Scott and Lilah, I put an arm around each of them. In the shot, I’m grinning, chin tucked, goofy, unbalanced; Scott is more reserved with the weight of the moment, and Lilah gazes into another direction, her smile quiet and private, her eyes sleepy, as if, with a little more sun and a spot of grass, she could curl up for a nap. The hidden one is also there, of course, asleep beneath our arms, full of pasta, cream sauce, and chocolate.

  Strange, to know one is predestined, appointed, to fall in love before meeting the beloved; like the presage of bouquet before the wine. It seems that pregnancy isn’t limited to the physical but fills the mind, colors the soul. She is coming, the air whispers; she is somewhere.

  Seven weeks later, the highway swims before our eyes, its path blurring and shifting in the predawn. I keep seeing imps in the roadside shrubbery. Scott didn’t get any more sleep than I did, but he drives easily, eyes soft, resembling someone who feels calm and clear-headed. Lilah has scheduled a birth induction today. At 4:00 a.m., Scott and I sat up in bed, looked at each other, the suitcases waiting like ghosts in the gloom, and he said, “Okay?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Let’s go.”

  Halfway into the three-hour drive, my cell phone rings; it’s the birth mother’s social worker, Connie. “Um, don’t leave quite yet.”

  I’m holding the phone tightly; calls from Connie have this effect on me. “What do you mean? We left! We left hours ago. We want to be there for the birth.”

  There’s a reshuffling sort of pause. Finally, she says, “Well, the thing is, they’re trying to talk her out of it.”

  Scott is trying to drive and watch me at the same time. I turn toward my side window. “Who is trying to talk who—”

&n
bsp; “It’s a thing these days. . . .” She releases an aggravated breath. “These religious types get a hold of the nurses and start trying to tell them religious things. Evangelicals or something. Are they all over the place down there? They think that kids should only be raised by their birth mothers. No other choices. Nobody else ever.”

  The agency brochures didn’t mention this. I hunch into the phone, tucking my elbows on my knees. “Aren’t fundamentalists, like, antiabortion?”

  “Who knows? They just want to dictate the whole deal—no abortions and no adoptions, no nothing. They think it’s all just gonna be handy-dandy. Birth mothers don’t have any say in any of it, as far as they’re concerned. It’s the people on the bottom that always get sat on.”

  “But Connie?” I hunch closer to the phone. “Do we stop? What are we doing now?”

  “No, no, no. You’re already this far. Come on.”

  Connie assures me, before hanging up, “Lilah’s been clear from the get-go, this is what she wants. There’s just—you know—some idiots and maniacs trying to freak her out.”

  I don’t remember saying goodbye. I sit holding the cell, gazing ahead, sleepiness a dull weight at the back of my head.

  We pull into the familiar circular driveway: My in-laws’ house is just half an hour from our birth mother’s hospital. We’ll stay with them as we wait for the baby. Geraniums and loquats and oranges are blooming in their yard. When I first met my father-in-law, Dave walked around the front yard with me, plucking ripe fruit; we inhaled its incense. He and I filled a paper bag with loquats from the tree in the front yard. Six feet six, he was able to reach the fruit on the highest branches. He kept asking questions; it was our first meeting, and Dave was incorrigibly curious: “When do you write?” “What does your last name mean?” “What do you think of Yasir Arafat?” “Did you grow up with pets?” “How do you say ‘loquat’ in Arabic?”