Life Without a Recipe

by Diana Abu-Jaber

  Julie’s Lakeside—of the crooked floors, the fish sandwiches, and the live music—has been one of our Orlando mainstays. Lately, we’ve been going in between hospital and doctor visits, reassured by the little old place, its broke-down familiarity an antidote to bedsheets and sick rooms.

  Today the singer’s electric Hammond wakes Gracie in her carriage. Her eyes fix on him. In a few more years, we’ll find that if there is music, Gracie will insist someone get out there with her and move wildly. I will stomp among cloggers and swing to reggae in clouds of three-year-olds and do freeform movement to cover bands on the beach. She will grow up with her jiddo clapping his hands at her, hooting, “Dance! Dance!” Now she waves her arms at the drum box, so I stand, holding her, and we bob around the patio. The singer half-watches us, mild and distracted. This man has entertained multitudes of children, has sung these songs so many times he no longer hears them—they must loop through his days, natural as exhaling.

  He leans into a microphone, giving us the usual South Florida medley—Jimmy Buffett, Beach Boys, Beatles. Then the atmosphere shifts, some molecule seems to enter the air, and there’s a pause, as if something is being reconsidered. Then he begins singing, “I see trees of green, red roses too. . . .” Less adorned, less adamantly upbeat, his voice is nearly rueful; it’s the sort of singing that makes you stop eating and listen. In the midst of scraping chairs and the clatter of silverware, the performer, who holds a mic in one hand and braces himself with the other, is singing to Gracie. We drift alongside the song. “The bright blessed day . . . the dark sacred night. . . .”

  I lower my head, annoyed by myself, already feeling a catch in my throat. The words, about witnessing the beauty of the world, slide along to a childlike melody, saying, no one notices, no one else sees, and children grow up, flowers close, the beauties slip away while you’re not looking. Bikers, hard-tanned locals, snowbirds from Jersey, Ohio, Quebec chatter around us, waving cigarettes between their nails, the air filled with talk and cologne. “Nobody loves Florida,” Scott said to me. “Nobody stays here long enough to know what it is.” But the song—that almost no one is listening to—seems written for this very place, this bug-bitten, over-hot state, ragged and fringed, lovely as any frontier. My eyes are pinched by stupid tears. I count my daughter among the catalog of beautiful things: the water, the sky, the swish of her arms through the air, even the fact of this moment—that we all happen to be alive at the same time, all sharing this glimpse of daylight. Maybe a few of us also share the same regret—that we can’t seem to remember to keep looking. That we return to our own kinds of blindness each day. We ask few questions, turn away, and forget each other’s names. Not just beauty is lost on us—all of it is. My father-in-law won’t get to see his granddaughter walk or laugh or hear her call his name.

  Now Scott holds Gracie before him and she reaches toward his face, grappling with eyebrows and ears. He laughs, lets her tug fistfuls of hair. When she cries out at night, he races out of his sleep, cradles her, naps on the floor by her crib. I see Dave in my husband’s patience and rare gentleness and unbreakable gaze. It’s startling to me, these other sorts of fathers, calm, easy—so different from my own—yet all of them true, abiding fathers.

  We watch the man sing with such purity, “I see friends shaking hands, saying how do you do? They’re really saying, I love you. . . .” What a singer this man must have been, before the drum box and the tip jar, before his voice had turned so far inward, missing a place or a time that was once splendid but has gone now and will never come again.

  Weeks later, Bud and Mom join Scott, Gracie, and me at Dave’s memorial service. It is dim, cool, and very crowded, voices rising like incense, the scent of shared memory. I hold our baby while we sing “Amazing Grace,” tuck my nose into her hair, and close my eyes.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Legacy

  Daddy knows all kinds of good places to eat: takeout chicken wings in the car—tossing bones back into the box with the uneaten wings, which Mama finds amusing yet mildly repulsive. Grazing at the market—a dusty grape here, a dried mango slice there—as he picks up the last-minute groceries. And there is something Daddy calls “relaxing dinner,” which means plates spread over the coffee table and aimed at the TV.

  Mama likes tables. Gracie helps set the table, plates teetering, one at a time, between her fingers. She folds the paper towels into “napkins,” an assortment of random tiny shapes. She prefers to cut up her own food, but not necessarily to eat it. Then begins the dinner conversation:

  “Mama, tell me bout when you were a bad little girl.”

  I scour my memory for a story I haven’t already told three times. If it’s sweet or nostalgic, she stops me. “Is there a bad? Put in the bad.”

  Daddy and I protest that we can only remember good, happy, obedient-child stories; she becomes impatient. “No. Bad story. When you were bad.”

  These requests remind me of the years I attended Catholic school, first to third grades, the dark minutes spent inside the confessional, the imperative to recall all those bad stories and hand them over, like dues, to the authorities. But I couldn’t remember my sins, not in any satisfying narrative form. Perhaps I just didn’t want anyone to dictate how I told my stories—instead, I offered the priests imaginary, spiced-up transgressions:

  “I’m a secret agent from another planet.”

  “I can fly. I look at people’s heads from up high.”

  “I talk to dogs. They know me.”

  I tell Gracie about making up sins in the confessional, how I first became a fiction writer at Our Lady of Solace. “More!” she hollers, hands in small fists on the table. “More stories about that.”

  Enough with the stories, we say, food’s getting cold. I suggest we hold hands and say grace.

  “Say Gracie?”

  “Grace. It’s like a kind of thank-you. A prayer.”

  “What’s that?” Her round eyes dark as plums.

  “A story,” Scott says. “It’s for when you eat together at a table.”

  “About me?”

  “Yes,” I say, “About you.”

  “Tell me that story. Tell me the Grace.”

  We try to explain about prayer, but we’ve gotten out of practice. “It’s like talking to God, or, I don’t know, heaven, or maybe like the universe, and telling what you’re thinking about, or feeling. Or hoping for,” Scott concludes.

  “Like this?” She spreads her hands on the table and closes her eyes. “Dear Jiddo,” she begins, addressing Bud. “Please I want a really, really big doggie. I love you. Love, Gracie.” She looks at Scott. “Is that a pray?”

  He nods. “Now say ‘Amen.’”

  “Amen.” She thinks about it, then adds, “A-girl.”

  You know she was from Bethlehem; her father was a minister, an Arab Anglican. You know they were refugees, that they found sanctuary with your grandfather’s family in Jordan. You know she was quite young—he was just a bit older; he liked to enjoy himself, to drink and invite and fall in love—and she was cultivated, educated, meant for college and a loftier life. But your grandfather’s family, with their old Bedouin roots, had land and prosperity and a noble, long-lived name. They were a safer harbor. You know that after they married, she collected a library of books, slowly, over the years, a hedge against dispossession and exile. You know she went on to bear at least seven boys and one girl, though you’ve been told there were more, possibly many more. You know that her image seems to stand right up out of every photograph you’ve seen of her; she looks solarized, separated from the others by a thin black line, as if limned by the force of her own will. But with all that, you will never know what her voice sounded like or what the sweep of her hair felt like or what she might have felt about giving her life to all those clamorous children. She died when she was forty-eight—though, in the rare pictures, she looks older. She had gestational diabetes and passed away after your father had emigrated to the States. In your father’s unmedical opinion, sh
e died not in childbirth—not from one—but from childbirth, giving birth and raising children in general—too many children. “They killed her,” he says, as if he weren’t one of them.

  You imagine her when she was still young and lithe, walking into her library, shedding sadness like bits of skin. You imagine the release she felt between her ribs; in such places, you’ve felt it unlock in yourself. A space of rare air, diffuse light, where the voices of children can be heard only distantly, through a wall of books.

  Years ago, outside one of the abandoned Crusader castles in Jordan, in an empty, sand-blown quarter, from out of nowhere, a Bedouin with burnt skin and green eyes approached you, murmuring your grandmother’s name: shaken, seeing her ghost in your face. He’d met her when she was newly arrived in the country; he worked for your grandfather’s family but brought that girl fresh milk from his goats and carried her memory with him like a locket.

  You know that she loved her children because your father had learned to love so well. He is domineering, erratic, and volatile, but also affectionate, doting, outlandishly proud. She must have loved them enormously. But what a struggle for a young woman, a refugee in a strange country, so many children. You wonder as well if there weren’t moments—fleeting, quicker even than thought—when she was leaving the soft, book-lined walls, the crimson Persian rugs, the high, rich light thrown in from the slotted windows, this child and that one crying out her name—that she didn’t also wish them all away.

  Two a.m., sleep and night braid deep-sea strands. Rising slowly toward a beam of sound, I drag the covers back, baby crying in the blue-black darkness. At four or five a.m., I return to bed and lie there, too tired to work, unable to get back to sleep. The big moon eases toward my window and gazes in. This is the hour of visitations: wondering over the grandmother I didn’t know, the missing one. Thoughts of her come in the softest part of the night, when I feel disoriented, cut open. Her silence is its own lesson, warning: Never stop speaking.

  But I haven’t written. Not for two, three, four months: This becomes frightening to me. I’ve lost time at various points in my writing career. There are years between my first and second published books: I spent half a decade—hundreds, thousands, of discarded pages—on a novel that never cohered. Of course, I wasn’t just writing—those years were also taken up with teaching. The classes, the advising, the meetings upon meetings, days when my office call-waiting hopped from one request to the next. The crooked path of a writing life: a series of starts and stops, not enough money, too much teaching or journalism. On top of this was my penchant for writerly experiments—I wove science fiction, mysteries, history into the fiction—piled up as many unpublished manuscripts as published books. Heaps of unread work.

  The most recent experiment happened a few years before Gracie’s birth, when a children’s-books editor sent a note. She’d read my novel Crescent, which contains an ongoing fable, and thought I should try my hand at a narrative for young people. There was a story I liked to tell one of my young nieces, about a mirror world filled with living reflections—something I secretly imagined telling to my own someday-daughter. I tried getting it down—a fantasyland filled with talking objects and flying witches and hidden stairs. But writing it, fastening it in print, changed the story somehow. I kept rewriting and second-guessing, shifting it from fantasy into psychological drama and back again. I asked anyone I could corner if they would read the pages. After three years of rewrites and rounds of kindly critiques, the story felt distorted and unmanageable, and I couldn’t bear to look at it anymore. I shelved it in mourning: I’d published three books but began to feel afraid I’d forgotten how to do it.

  One night, as I’m waiting for Gracie to slip off to sleep against my chest, I begin thinking about a novel that I’d started back in the fall then put down after my daughter’s birth. This story is a bit mysterious, even disturbing to me, about a woman’s near-destruction after her child has run away. As I stroke Gracie’s back, I wonder whether it’s unnatural to have started writing this in the months before my own daughter would be born. There’s always been this perversity in me to write down things that I ought to avoid. Perhaps it’s a way to keep from being too consumed by certain fears—a warding-off. My grandmother Grace had a tremendous knack for saying things out loud that most people only thought, and the absence of my other grandmother’s voice was its own cautionary reminder. Shouldn’t you look at and think about exactly the things that frighten you the most? I’d handwritten a stack of pages by the time Gracie was born. Now the story begins to reinhabit me; the characters stand up, speaking, rearranging furniture.

  Still, my eyes glaze as I sit at my desk, concentration dissolves into drowsiness. You’re told: Sleep when the baby sleeps. But those quiet hours are the only times the mind seems to fit back into its skull. I want to be awake. I should work, I tell myself over and over. Now’s my chance! I recall a writer once saying that becoming a parent was good for her work—the time constraints moved her toward discipline and more orderly habits. “If my son was going to be asleep for three hours each day, I knew I’d darn well better use that time and get serious.”

  Get serious! I scold myself.

  The words slip away from me, threads on the surface of the eye. I’m paralyzed, creaking, sleep-deprived, and on alert, waking every few hours, anticipating Gracie’s first cry from the crib. I miss simple thought, the unoccupied hours in which I could gradually piece together stories. That state of unencumbrance is what I imagine my missing grandmother had wanted—the space, of the mind and house—to lose herself in books. If you have a baby to care for, there are these moments, each time she cries out, in which your mind peels into two pieces, a split twig: You go to her, but you must leave your books, your space, and the sound of your own voice.

  Sometimes the idea of having a baby seems ridiculous and Promethean, like flying too close to the sun—an act of wild hubris. Who dares to think they should be parents?

  Gracie is a few months old when we go out to dinner with friends at a favorite café, located in a bookshop. In the central courtyard, the café is ringed by plants and trees, a small grove. Today, there are also spotlights, cameras, and microphones set up in a circle. It turns out the writer Tom Wolfe is in town being interviewed. Margaria, one of the friends we’re meeting, an editor and critic, offers to introduce us.

  Here’s a vestige of my former life, of days of coffeehouses and readings and conversations. Yes, this will be fine: baby on this side, author over there. Gracie has fallen asleep on me, and the main objective is always to do whatever will keep her sleeping. So there’s a baby nestled in my arm as we wait for a break in the interview. Mr. Wolfe is resplendent in his white suit. He looks so bright and clean, like the song about edelweiss, almost mystical—as though he lived inside a white sheen. Our friend moves forward to greet him and, as she does, my glance happens to fall to my wrist, where I spot a fleck of mustard.

  Huh, I think. That’s weird.

  Because none of us has been eating mustard, there’s no mustard on the table, so why is there mustard on my wrist?

  I move to wipe it, surreptitiously, on my jeans—there’s just a dot, but I must take care not to leave a tiny smear on Tom Wolfe’s sleeve. As I move my left arm, I notice another speck of mustard on my other wrist, just where it curls around Gracie’s bundled form. Tom Wolfe is turning now, our friend’s hand on his forearm, to be introduced, his hand rising toward mine, as it occurs to me—with a slow, stop-motion, dawning horror—that the dot of mustard is actually more like a stripe, a banner of yellow gleaming as I follow it along the length of my forearm. I understand, finally, so slowly as to convey the terrible depth of my inexperience, that it isn’t mustard.

  I burst into a sprint at the moment that our friend is saying, “I’d like to introduce. . . .”

  Gracie lets out a heart-splitting scream as we run across the crowded courtyard, streaming yellow fecal splatter. We crash through the bathroom door. There in the mirror, I see an
outline of Gracie’s body like a crime-scene chalk drawing in diarrhea across my chest, throat, and blouse. There is shit everywhere—coating the insides of my arms, ribboned down the front of my pants. I pull the blanket away from Gracie and it splashes into the sink as she shrieks, distraught.

  Scott rushes into the ladies’ room behind me. “OH MY GOD, WHAT IS THAT?”

  I’ve turned the faucets on and we have to shout to hear ourselves over the screaming and water and the thump of our own panic. “BABY CRAP.”

  “Oh, God. Oh, my God.” Scott tries to hold her as she writhes away from the tepid stream. There are poo splashes and splatters all over us, the counter, and the wailing baby. At this moment, a stately Coral Gables matron enters and takes in this scene, her hand flying to the pearls at the base of her throat. Scott and I freeze like she’s pointed a gun. The woman pulls her chin in, red lips an asterisk, and says at last, backing out of the room, “I’ll wait.”

  When we finally dare return to the courtyard, Tom Wolfe has dematerialized. We are soaked. Gracie’s skin is rosy and clean. We sit and eat dinner quickly, before anything else can happen.

  Three, four, five months pass and I’ve barely written a word. Editors contact me, wanting blurbs for new manuscripts. I write to one, “I’ve lost your galley and I haven’t washed my hair in a week. Don’t wait for me,” as if I’ve crash-landed in the desert. I look with despair upon the heaps of unfinished manuscripts on my desk. I now share an office with my husband. My old office contains a crib, a changing table, and perhaps thirty-three stuffed animals. Everything I write sounds flat, shattered as an old mosaic. Gracie takes two uneven naps from eleven to twelve and three to five. Three free hours a day. Three hours—that should be plenty! What’s wrong with me? I berate myself, thinking of the people with multiple jobs and big families who must do their writing at night or far too early in the morning. I think of my absent grandmother, her house swirling with children—and out in the rocky fields beyond, herds of goat and sheep waiting to be fed and milked. I write a few sentences and fall into a trance at the computer. I wake at Gracie’s call, face pressed against my keyboard.