Life Without a Recipe

by Diana Abu-Jaber

  We stand still, surrounded by this galaxy of dreaming babies. I breathe, “Which one?”

  She lifts her chin.

  My arm is touching the bassinet. She’s wearing one of their little knit caps, jaunty as an elf, her slate-gray eyes partially open, glimmering in a half-state, watching, just as though she’s been expecting us.

  They wheel the bassinet into a private room. When the nurse lifts the drowsy, soft bundle into my arms, a sob breaks from my throat, my eyes flood with tears. The nurse turns away as she leaves the room. Scott’s eyes are dark and wet as he touches her head. I don’t know how to hold a baby. My hands feel big and clumsy; we’re so new to each other. Her diaphanous fingers open and close carefully about my thumb. We feed her a minute bottle, then later, at the nurse’s coaxing, dare to change her diaper, her limbs rubbery, bent into froggy folds. Her paper ears lie flat against her head, intricate as origami. She is the color of my palm, soft as a blush, a song.

  After a couple more hours of paperwork, notaries, interviews, and observation, the door to the nursery opens. I am, as first mothers go, unsteady. Wiping off her tiny body in the nursery sink, we’re terrified of spilling water over her head, anxious to get the swaddling right. I need to stop in the ladies’ room before we leave, but I hesitate: Can I just “dash” into the bathroom? Do I take the baby? Do I hold her? Where do I put her? Thankfully, the nursery attendant kindly offers to watch our child. I stare at the inside of the restroom stall door, staggered by how little I know.

  It’s a frosty day for Florida, a thin January wind curls through the air. I cover the bassinet with blankets, curve my body around the sleeping inhabitant as I carry her, dismayed to have to take this small being out into the cold. We move quickly, clipping her into the car seat. The nursery attendant and the social worker stand shoulder to shoulder in the hospital entrance like Bogart and Rains. “Congratulations!” They wave at us. “You’ll be great! Don’t be scared—it’s only a baby!”

  As promised by friends with kids, she sleeps through the four-hour ride. Scott drives, I sit in the backseat holding her silky hand, marveling. I say at least once, in complete astonishment, “There’s a baby in our car.”

  When we get home, we walk in and set her, still dozing in her bassinet, right on top of the dining-room table. We sit at the table beside her, holding hands, breathing lightly, watching her sleep. The air feels curved and sparkly, as though we were seated inside a soap bubble. We hold each other’s gaze a moment. This is our first prayer, this wordless pause. A plea for blessings, addressed to all the unknown places, the darkness between the stars, the machinery of dreams. My synapses feel electrified, racing up and down my spine with raw fear and elation. Our child. Our Gracie.

  PART III

  Good Eater

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Easy

  When a child is born into a family, someone new enters the room. Who, pray tell, is this? one asks. And deeper, beneath that question lies another: Now who am I? Am I still the same?

  When Bud wasn’t searching for houses, he frequently looked for a son. Not having that little boy seemed to make him feel less than himself. As if our family wasn’t quite yet our family. When I was twelve, Suzy eight, Monica seven, our father solemnly sat us at the bargaining table. He and Mom had talked things over, he said—our eyes skated to our mother—and they wanted to know how we’d feel about adopting a baby. In theory. There wasn’t an actual baby, of course, just the idea of one. But a boy, to be specific. He wanted to adopt a son.

  Shock percolated among us, the air bubbled. There were too many questions: Really? How soon? Where would he come from? How would we get him? There were also all sorts of questions that we kept to ourselves, such as: Do you want a child or a boy? And, if your first child had been a boy, does that mean there would have been fewer daughters? None of us?

  We’d grown up hearing Dad’s relatives call him “Abu Jaffer.” Arabs are referenced by their children. “Abu” means father of, and this title is commonly followed by the name of the firstborn son. Long ago, in a reckless moment, Dad apparently had bragged that he would produce a handsome, hearty son and this boy would be named Jaffer. Why Jaffer? “It means ‘lovely stream,’” Bud explained with his usual opacity. Ever after, he was tormented by this nickname, Abu Jaffer, mocking his absent heir, his track record of only daughters. “He’s ABU DIANA,” I used to roar at these uncles and cousins in their slacks and sideburns, cracking them up. Bud never backed me up, though, instead busying himself with turning the kabobs on the grill, burning his fingers, never a pot holder. “Abu Jaffer!” they yelled at him. “When’s dinner ready?”

  Around the curved sectional couch my sisters, parents, and I sat, the circular glass coffee table before us, the steel arc of the floor lamp above, waiting for someone to stand too quickly and smack their head. Bud hunched forward, elbows on his knees, his eyes so soft and ardent they looked candlelit: He explained how this was his heart’s desire, the missing piece—if only we could all help fill it in.

  “Or?” he added. “We could get a swimming pool.”

  All eyes skidded back to Mom. She lifted her eyebrows at us.

  Bud sighed. “That’s our other idea here. We saved just enough so we could get a baby—or, right, we could get a pool. You know—put it over in the side yard? We can’t afford both—but one maybe we could.” He sat straighter, looking each of us in the eye, his tunneling gaze. “So we talked it over, you know, and we think—your Mom and me—you girls should decide.”

  Who knows why? They’d never asked for our input before—not on any of our house moves or how to spend our summers or even what we’d have for dinner. Maybe it was some sort of test of strength or character. Maybe he really thought we’d have a different answer. Maybe he knew somehow, grasped some wisp of self-awareness, of his own powerful ambivalence. It was possible Bud was already figuring out that he didn’t know what he wanted or needed to be happy. He only knew that he wanted, not what it was.

  My sisters and I repaired to the kitchen for a private session. At the Formica table with the sparkling chips, we gaped at each other and said things like, “Now what?” This was the first any of us had heard of a baby boy. We’d been in this house for a year and I was already holding my breath, dreading the reappearance of the For Sale sign on the front lawn, the inevitable next move to parts unknown. Filled with gravitas, I settled my fingers along the table’s edge, inhaled, then looked at my sisters. “Here’s what I think. No regular human can figure out this kind of question. So! I think: If the phone rings in the next sixty seconds, then it’s a sign to us. From, like, heaven.”

  “Like a stop sign?” Monica asked.

  “Right. It’s a sign of something.” I put my fingers to my temples and closed my eyes. In addition to discovering black-light posters, I’d recently started reading about ESP and the occult. “If the phone rings, then we should get the baby. Definitely. That means we have to do it.”

  Suzy asked, “Well, what if the phone doesn’t ring?”

  I opened my eyes and smiled. We stared at the second hand on the wall clock. After sixty quiet seconds, we ran out to give them the good news.

  Bud never adopted his baby, but he went through life gathering others to him, attracting this one and that, cottoning to strangers for no good reason. He invited people over because he liked the rake of a grin or the flower in a buttonhole. Because someone stood beside him at a street corner, waiting for the same light to change. So many invitations to dinner. He left family back in another country and began finding more people nearly everywhere.

  I learned from him: No telling where family comes from. It’s something richer than blood. It can be made and unmade and made again. It waits patiently to be claimed, taken indoors, for another place to be set at the table. The Qur’an says, We are one human family, make peace with your brothers and sisters. Another way of saying, I think, put out more plates. I’ve felt the sense of kinship inside dinner clubs and writing groups and classe
s—sometimes strong and whole, other times just hints, tendrils twining around your legs, the way grass seems to grow up around your fingers and toes if you sit in a spot long enough, the earth table. Family is all around, calling your name in the mornings, asking you to listen. Here we are, and you, you’re already home.

  Her head is like a grapefruit my father cups in the palm of his hand, her swaddled form draped in his lap. They gaze at each other. Bud makes an O with his lips; we watch Gracie’s mouth go round, a pop of surprise: There you are! “I knew it was you,” he crows softly. “How did I know it was you?” He insists they’ve known each other “from way back,” though she is eight days old. “Her and me,” he croons. He chants an annoying old rhyme:

  Sabahlkhair, ya ghazal ibbrair!

  kul ahlick shin’n, inti helwa mnain?

  inti jeeti zeyyithum!

  Roughly and unrhymingly translated:

  Good morning, oh gazelle of the desert

  Your whole family is ugly, so where are you from?

  You came to them to make them beautiful!

  He carries her through the neighborhood, through shopping malls, through car dealerships, with his inexplicable brag, “I knew it was her!” He kisses her head and ears and tells us she has his nose, and she looks up at us with her wise eyes. “This is my baby.”

  She studies him so sternly when he gives her a bottle that he laughs with nerves. She softens in his arms, a bleb of ice cream in a blanket. He urges us to go out, enjoy ourselves, makes a shooing motion with his free hand. Mom decides to run a few errands. My husband and I stroll through St. Augustine, where my parents recently moved. We hold hands, notice each other’s faces, recall each other’s arms. But the call comes in half an hour: She is crying so loudly the tears take on a sheen through the cell phone, a metallic whang. At first it’s all I can hear, then somewhere in the background, John the Baptist in a wilderness of crying, there is Bud calling, panic-stricken, “She is awake! I don’t know why! What’s wrong! Come back. Hurry, hurry.”

  We fly, driving too quickly, jumping out of the car in the driveway like actors in a cop show, both of us a blur of fear and self-reproach. My seventy-two-year-old father is out of practice with babies—what were we thinking? The door swings open; it’s so still inside that a shudder runs through me, a golden sliver through the heart. In the living room we find Gracie pillowed on her grandfather’s stomach, the two of them placidly watching Al Jazeera while Bud eats sliced cucumbers. “What? Look. All settled. We’re fine. We understand each other.” He makes a calm-down-already flap with his hand. “Why you came rushing? It was nothing. Everything is easy.”

  An easy baby. The creature parents fantasize and whisper about. We take her on jaunts: for her checkup, a stroll through the park. She dozes in her carriage. Passing strangers and older children peep in at her, delighted. She stirs for short visits, barely waking, her mild features agog at the world. Her eyes don’t quite obey each other yet, slipping lazily out of alignment from time to time; she frowns, her swimmer’s hands reaching out at this hazy world. Mornings, we lay her in a patch of sunlight like a houseplant, to warm away jaundice; she drowses and stretches.

  She is our beautiful mystery, a storybook placed on our laps. Open it to the first page and it’s written backward and forward, dream-language. Each day we expect a repeat of yesterday, but every day is different. We have a dawning awareness of a parent’s new self that had, prior to children, lain dormant within, beside all the other selves—daughter, say, or wife, or baker. This is a germination, this seed splitting itself open, revealing a fresh, fiercer love and possessiveness. Who are you? I ask the reflections I catch in car windows and storefronts. My child stretches across my chest, clinging; if someone takes her, she cries out, her face caves: I don’t relax until I have her back.

  Then, life accelerates. At all hours there’s the sound of a roiling boil in the kitchen. Scott stands over a cauldron, sterilizing glass bottles. Every minute of every day, we seem to be moving between boiling pieces, assembling bottles, warming formula, feeding baby, sterilizing the bottles. Barely time to eat or sleep. Scott comes back from the store with bags heaped with Pop-Tarts and beer. Fine, I think. I shrug off notions of nutrition. Mom comes on the fifth day. She scoops Gracie up, whispering to her, murmuring, bouncing, walking, and our baby nestles into her. At night, the three adults rotate among the couch, an air mattress on the nursery floor, and our bedroom—the only real bed in the house. Repeatedly, it’s 3:00 a.m., one person is up cradling Gracie, feeding her as she fusses, and the other two are also up, staring like statues, addled by sleeplessness.

  On the eighth day, Mom calls Bud. She tells him to come and to “bring food.” She says, “Hurry.”

  Bud arrives from St. Augustine with loaves of pita, chopped salad, and a kettle of stacked, stuffed grape leaves. I take the pots and put Gracie into his arms. At first he’s wordless, fish-mouthed. Then he peers at her, holding her close to his face. “Gracie,” he whispers. “I’m Jiddo.” Grandpa. She waves a pink hand, twists his cheek, and he chortles with delight. “She will tear off my face!” The house goes humid with the scent of garlic and tomato, outside is a wintry gray vapor. It’s the first time in a week I’ve been able to look at my writing, shuffle notes. I feel like myself for a few minutes, settling back in. It’s not writing, but the paper feels good in my hands, familiar as the shape of my face or the sound of my voice.

  Dad, Mom, and Scott are on the couch, sacked out in front of the TV while Gracie snoozes in her basket. The grape leaves simmer, gently reheating; outside, a drizzle brushes dust off the palm leaves. It’s the sort of moment that I’d package if I could: a gumdrop, postage stamp. The kind of day that makes optimists say, Hey, now This is okay. I got this.

  “Grow,” Scott commands three-week-old Gracie. “Grow!” He pushes back his unwashed hair so it sticks up like feathers. “I don’t know what to do with this. When can I take her kayaking?” Once again, she’s dozing in a patch of sunlight on the carpet. “What do people do with babies?” he mutters. “What’s their deal? They’re like pet rocks.”

  “Houseplants.”

  When she sleeps, I backslide, puttering at my desk, consciousness veering off toward the novel I’ve been working on. Every now and then, I creep to the door to spy on her sleep, curious and impatient, like a kid peering through the oven door. I go into our bathroom, stare at my sleep-drained reflection; dream-shocks shake my bones. “I have a daughter,” I inform the mirror. Day and night drift past our window, unconnected to our lives—we are awake or sleeping at all kinds of hours. We hustle between bottles and reading, bottles and writing, bottles and Internet—pushing back our own naps—pure madness! I’m so tired my mind feels foamy, my eyeballs burnt crispy, consciousness drifts away on the breeze. The ache behind my eyes sinks into my head, everything sagging. This was the easy time.

  After a few weeks of coasting, she really wakes up.

  Now the baby is implacable, demanding with new, wild screams that something must be done. She glares, hands slashing the air. We take turns walking around, bouncing, carrying her pressed to our chests and she shrieks over our shoulders. A few hours later, she’s fast asleep. We anxiety-laugh and compare her to a coma victim crossed with a car alarm. She sleeps stonily, sinking below the surface, then bursts awake crying, screaming with remarkable volume. She blasts thoughts right out of my head, so I feel physically sped up, in a brainless state of emergency.

  Is this completely normal? It’s been more than forty years since I last lived with a baby, but I don’t think so. Her bottle comes under scrutiny. After each feeding, she tucks in her chin, stiffens, wails. We try making some elaborate home-brewed stuff. We try anti-gas, gluten-free, hypoallergenic formulas. One of the pediatrician’s nurses, a young woman from Barbados, slips something into my hand—a jar with a smeared label: Gripe Water. “This will do the trick,” she murmurs. I sniff it and sample a bit: sweet, with an herbal scent like lemongrass and rosemary. Tilting the eyedropper
, we dribble some into Gracie’s mouth. No change. I research infant ailments online. We prop her on pillows, slant her crib, lift her head. We hold her upright, at an angle, tipped up against a shoulder, put her crib on the running washing machine, turn on a hair dryer; we drive her through the streets of Coral Gables. She cries and cries. I read books about colic, try every pointer about using rockers, breathing shshshsh in her ears, lowering the lights. From time to time we’ll hit on a small hope: Sometimes she’ll settle when I carry her snug in a sling. Scott finds that if we swaddle her just right, from head to toe, tight as a cigar in one of her blankets, her crying tapers off. I learn to hold her wrapped, head propped on my shoulder, to feed her strictly upright, across my chest. But still, after most feedings, a storm of wailing shivers through the walls of our house, turns the air blue; we stash earplugs in our pockets for the worst of it.

  When Gracie is seven weeks old, my friend Damaris calls to check up on us. “Is it wonderful? Are you over the moon?” she asks.

  In the backseat of the car, Gracie is howling. I mash my palm against my non-phone ear. A sheaf of typed pages sits on my lap, a partial manuscript—I carry it around like a good-luck charm. “Maybe ask me that again in another month,” I say with a weak laugh.

  “What?” Damaris is horrified. She doesn’t have children herself, but she’d watched me go step by step, working through the whole adoption process. “What do you mean?”

  “No, no, we’re fine. We will be fine.” It would be truer to say that we’re still finding out about each other, still learning who each of us is. But at two months, it seems we ought to know more than we do.