Life Without a Recipe

by Diana Abu-Jaber

  I hang up, chastened and frustrated. I resume online hunting: CMML. “This article restricted to subscribers of. . . .”

  One night, I pull out the special name again. I have another idea—a slender message-in-bottle sort of thing. I peck around online and uncover an e-mail address. I write: “Please forgive me for crashing in on you. . . .” Maybe oh maybe the rarity of the disease and the reoccurrence in the family might make Dad’s case more interesting. I describe his symptoms, his cultural background. I keep it short, under a page, sprinkled with apologies. I sigh and send, certain I’ll never hear from this guy.

  Minutes after sending it, an e-mail appears in my mailbox. Almost certainly some sort of automatically generated form—an out-of-office reply or a please-go-through-normal-channels auto-response.

  It says, “Are you the novelist Diana Abu-Jaber?”

  I read through a hazy shock: The doctor knows who I am. He’s a big reader. He’s reading my novel Crescent right now. He’s read The Language of Baklava and he knows who Bud is, too. “How is that crazy, fantastic Bud?” he asks. “I want to know.”

  It feels like angels are laughing just over my head, shaking down stardust, at the good dumb luck of it.

  Dr. K confers with the doctor in St. Augustine, studies Bud’s charts and test results, then makes his recommendations. They have a kind of “targeted” therapy, with fewer pernicious side effects than those of the old-school approaches. The Colonel hands my parents a prescription. Within days, Bud has more vitality. His muttering simmers down and light comes back into his eyes. He splits his palms open, tah-dah, showing off health.

  Dr. K also writes to me about books. He is a voracious, opinionated reader, his brain on hyperdrive. Every email is filled with titles he’s reading in apparently every genre. An inhaler of fiction, he muses over nuances of style, character motivation, pacing. He calls my parents to check in and Bud trumpets into the phone that Dr. K must come to Florida for a social visit: “Come for a month. That’s perfect. I’ll make you grape leaves! I’ll drive you everywhere! We’ll go to the races! Do you like the races? We have a beautiful track, just gorgeous, beautiful. You come. You’re a son to me. You’re part of the family.”

  Bud wears himself out with the invitations. After the phone call, he moves us outdoors for the nightly gaze and talk—a ritual he started when they first moved to a place with warm nights. We’re staying at my parents’ beachside condo, where we can watch the pelicans drift in low formation over the surf. “There you are. Hello, buddies.” He wags a loose hand at them. He points to a white planet over the black water. “See there. Who made that? I wonder. Do you wonder? Who made all these in the sky?” We study the night from our lawn chairs. “I hope I’m going to find out. I think I am.”

  His energy returns—once again he has a million stories, long yarns about sleeping in the fields among the family goats, about the lame midwife “Sitt Urjah,” Limping Lady, who delivered him and his siblings at home in their village, Yahdoudeh, about the elderly man who taught them how to read while they sat in the shade of the lemon grove, the scent of sweet lemon mingled with aleph, baa, taa. Now he talks about the cloth sacks filled with powder they hooked over the children’s shoulders. Powders from America and Great Britain, impressive chemicals. The children walked between the crop rows, scattering handfuls of silty white stuff on the plants.

  “What was it, Dad?” I ask. “The white powder?”

  He smiles and shakes his head. “Who knows? But all the locusts and field mice? They died. The Bedu wouldn’t let their horses near it. Very good powders, very strong.” He sniffs the seams of his palms. “Almost can smell it.”

  In America, CMML is a secondary cancer, a latent consequence of intense deliberate bombardment—chemo or radiation. Dr. K doesn’t think there’s a family predisposition but, more likely, a shared poison. Something the children got into their mouths or lungs. Now we know it came from America, sold to Jordan, along with outmoded antibiotics, canceled TV shows, unpopular processed foods. As Americans started jogging and drinking spring water, Marlboros became a national sport in Jordan. DDT—along with our other outlawed herbicides, pesticides, chemical agents—was a hit in the Middle East.

  Yahdoudeh. So remote it could practically be a fairy tale. The desert, the animals, the fresh air, the stars beyond the stars: A child combs fingers through glittering white powder, pixie dust, and conjures the dream world of America.

  Bud lumbers through the house and Gracie gives chase, screaming with laughter. He can’t bear it if anyone scolds his baby girl or speaks to her sternly. He claps while she wiggles to his recordings of Middle Eastern music. If I tell her no and Scott tells her no, she runs to Jiddo. He sneaks her candy. Anything she wants. He tells us formally, repeatedly, “Her and me, we have a love contract.”

  He has given himself to her. He says, “I’ve lost my brains. The baby took them.” He covers her head with kisses. “My queen, my love, my treasure.”

  Gracie accepts a few token bites from my plate, then inevitably slithers from her chair. She goes to Jiddo. Her favorite food is anything diverted at the last second from her grandfather’s mouth to her own. She sidles next to him, contented, entertained, and eats morsels from his fingers, whatever he offers—tender lamb, stuffed grape leaves, tangy yogurt. If it comes from him, she’ll eat it; we all notice this. Bud informs us that it’s only natural. “She knows! She knows already, come to Jiddo for her food. Look at her. She loves family-style.” There is a gentle permanence in the air; it glistens around them like air above the desert road.

  “We’re in the same wavelength,” he says.

  The three-year-old and the seventy-five-year-old hold hands at the table. Gracie commands, pointing. He gives her bites of lebaneh, falafel, grilled shish kabobs, stuffed grape leaves, hummus, grilled halloumi cheese. “She knows what food is. Just like Grandpa,” he says, rolling the R in “Grandpa.” Then he settles her on his lap, lets her watch all the cartoons she wants, and feeds her cookies. “We’re the same,” he whispers into her hair. If Bud gets up to chop, to cook, to help with dishes, she’ll wait, then patiently take him by the hand and guide him back to the recliner in the living room.

  “You sit der. Jiddo seat.”

  Bud has a good year on his treatment from Dr. K. His energy and blood levels go low, then bob and rise. We indulge in a period of hope: Just look at all the clinical trials, experimental cures, so many stories of breakthrough medical marvels. It’s easy to lose yourself stalking through the Internet. This is how I pretend to be brave, trying to funnel all my thoughts into protection. Bud doesn’t use computers. He reads the Qur’an in his room: You notice he does this more often than he used to. You all watch him now, even when you don’t realize you are, minds split into two pieces, watching and not watching. He murmurs his prayers and watches the nightly stars, as if anticipating a message. Not too much changes. He doesn’t abdicate, there’s no slow retreat to the interior. He protects us by refusing to show fear—in whatever corners it might be crouching. He stays with us, fully himself. After dinner especially, he’s the same Bud as ever, sipping black coffee in the tiny cup, going over all the favorites—politics, Middle Eastern history, family gossip.

  One night, sitting up in the living room, he tells me a story I hadn’t heard before, about a betrayal, saying of a relative, “He could have helped me but he didn’t. There was an opening, for the head of the king’s diwan. He knew I would love this job, but he gives it to some idiot instead. Why does he do this? Because he can. That’s why.” He holds the cup pinched between two fingers. He’s setting the record straight. It occurs to me, a low bell at the back of my mind, these are concluding comments, revelations of hidden old wounds. But then, the next evening, he says, “It’s been a wonderful life. It really has.” Passing my mother in the kitchen, he reaches out and startles her as he takes her hand, kissing it.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Waiting, Transfiguration

  First party: We hover ar
ound the crib, scarcely breathing in the dim light. Six or seven of us: People keep trickling in, holding fingers to their own lips instinctively, bending to peer through the bars. Before us, in the landscape of blankets, Gracie lies scrunched up, arms flung, face near-divine with sleep. Loveliness rises from her like a mist. Watching from the other side of the bars, inside our pooled breath, we could be something she is dreaming. At that instant, she opens her eyes. Her head lifts with a bright, startled look, bursting the dream with her smile.

  Second party: The mixer purrs, whirling around the careful minutes. From her stool, Gracie watches closely. It’s her first birthday and her first taste of chocolate. The room smells like a bloom of sugar and cocoa. Out of the oven, all day, the cake sings to her from its high place where we’ve tried to keep it hidden. She creeps into the kitchen, points at the top cupboard. “Ca,” she informs me. At her party, she is briefly shocked by the singing and candles. High-chair-bound, she receives the first fascinating slice. She considers it for a long moment, then picks up a hunk. “Ca.” She carefully nibbles. She stops suddenly, staring, motionless. Then all at once, all the cake is going into her mouth. Her face is covered in chocolate; she lifts fistfuls of cake; there are chunks in her hair. She grins fiercely, bares her teeth; she looks angrily awake, flabbergasted that this is the first she’s known of such a thing. She is a sugar priestess. Her fist waves in the air, face thrown back, mouth open, as if to say All chocolate is mine.

  Third party: Bring your kids! We were merry and casual about all of it and now there are twelve toddlers zooming around Gracie’s room and swinging from the shutters. Various parents and older children filter in and out, trying to help with riot control, but a continual screeching, giggling, bashing, sobbing din issues from the room. It sounds like the primates house at the zoo. The adults stay in the other rooms with plates of bacon-wrapped dates, sliced torta, mascarpone on melon slices, shouting conversation over the racket. Occasionally, a shriek will puncture the air and one or another adult will put down a plate and run back. A few of the parents give one another pitying looks while the child-free people around them discuss movies.

  As the night’s machinery begins to wind down, the ones without kids yawn and stretch and decide to head home, and the ones with kids stay and stay, helping themselves to long, pleasant slugs of wine. Children begin to trickle out of their play space, small faces considering our adult rooms. They’re wide awake in the amazing, frantic way of overtired kids. They chase each other through the living room, making a circuit, toddlers streaking and rumbling over the wood floors, around the coffee table, storming past the TV, smacking into the rear of the couch. We back out and look on from the dining room, clumped together as though on the banks of a river.

  Somewhere in that gang are Belkys and Greg and Cordaro and Landa and Kai and Sandor and Madison and Tereza. But now it’s just a tumult of kids. Watching them play, I remember a pre-child visit to Jamaica. I was standing on a silent beach looking at night-black water, its silver curl and ruffle in the moonlight. While I stood there, the pieces of moonlight seemed to rise into a cloud of enormous moths. They flickered before my face, bone-white in the dark, moon-flecked. I put out one hand to touch or part them and they drifted out of reach. Off they rose, crinkled gauze, leaving a larger, deeper darkness in their wake. I felt so sad, missing those night moths.

  Soon the parents will put down their empty glasses, claim their children—one or two toddlers will outright refuse to leave; there will be hands pried from furniture, exhausted crying and goodnight kisses and backlit waves from the doorway. For now we watch them with pleasure. They are still running, thunder and shouting and that peculiar, pealing sort of laughter that comes just before tears.

  Now time speeds; it glides through the eaves, I hear it everywhere, going so fast. I get an e-mail from Mom with the heading “Dad’s Blood.” His levels have started to fall again, misshapen white cells breaking apart. Bud’s energy and spirits rise and fall with the number of platelets. I imagine the molecules of bone marrow like tiny cogs and wheels: Somewhere deep inside of him, a wheel has run off its track. Can’t some tiny hammer tap it back into place?

  Now the serious medicines are given through infusions, which sound a little like poisoned teas or flowers. Sulfur blooms spreading just beneath the breastbone. His iron levels are so low that his veins spring leaks. He can’t contain his life force. Transfusions help for increasingly shorter periods; they don’t catch. We rush back to St. Augustine to find Dad in the hospital again, face mottled with bruises, as if he’d been in a fistfight, the whites of his eyes eerily dark, like a horse’s. Semiblinded from bleeds, his irises glow, hazel-brown negatives. Here is my father, umbrella to the rainy universe. My breath is thin; I can’t seem to release it.

  The medical staff has fallen in love with Bud. My parents’ family physician, Dr. F., appears with lasagna heavy as a tray of bricks. “I told you!” he booms in the little room. “I made it! Didn’t I tell you I would?”

  “Mr. Big Talk. I didn’t believe you. Shows to go me,” Bud said—getting it sideways. The way I thought, as a child, everyone said it. “Shows to go me.”

  When it’s time to release him, nurses line up in the hall beside the requisite wheelchair. One kisses his hand, the other the top of his head. “Here they are, my girls. Let me count them. Beautiful flowers. Come here.” He widens his broken eyes. “I can see my flowers.”

  The floor nurse takes my hand. “Your dad. Good lord.”

  Mom and I marvel at it: What does he do in there? He just talks. He calls everyone sweetheart and tells them he loves them and talks and talks and never stops. The usual.

  Gracie drapes herself across his lap and chest, fills his face with her cloud of hair as she watches TV. She expects respectful silence during cartoons and shushes the room, her hand resting on top of Jiddo’s, a diadem.

  Beyond the sliding glass doors, there’s a broad swath of green. My folks live in a new development. Out front, the house shows its clean, spare face to matching neighbors, but the back of their house faces a large round pond bustling with egrets. Bud coaxes them like cats onto the lawn. There’s also an orchard, a rock streaming water, stepping stones, tangerines, olives, kumquats, rosemary bushes, live oaks. Bud shows where he’d put in trellised grapevines. Over time, their backyard has turned into a Mediterranean garden. Rustling with perfume, the yard contains mosaics, tiled tables, umbrellas, terracotta planters, clay figurines, torches, chimes, dark laughter, glass ornaments—caprices—in the high old branches of the pines. The Isle of Capri behind a modular home in St. Augustine. Every year, my parents line the palmettos with so many Christmas lights that we see cars line up to roll past, Bing Crosby melting from their windows.

  Formerly the most-requested Muslim Santa Claus of children’s wards across Syracuse, now in civilian-wear, Bud gazes out at the colored lights. These days, getting up from his chair requires rolling forward, nearly toppling out, hands braced on knees, shaking, groaning, pushing, trembling upright. He still brews, then carries a nightly demitasse of ahweh on a saucer across the living room; we all watch the quaking porcelain. His medications give him tremors, gusts of hot flashes. His people have assembled for the holidays and no matter how we yell at him to relax, Bud has to make us dinner. He sits at the table with his blood-burnt eyes, assembling a pot of stuffed grape leaves, elbows out, fingers curved around the slow, precise rolling. The pinch of filling, just so, at the center of the leaf. Just this much olive oil, that much tomato. “They’re getting cheap, these guys.” He shakes the emptied glass jar. “I counted the leaves. California leaves, they’re the best. Used to be forty-two. Every time. Now it’s thirty-six. They think I don’t notice. These guys. It’s the sons. The father would have a fit.” He can see well enough. The rolled leaves are trim and taut. He puts in the peeled garlic, a whole head. “That’s the good stuff. Right there.”

  A bite of food, a story over the plate, this art is ephemeral. Bud’s brother Hal—who’d grown a
ngry and then angrier still over his illness, had said, “What a shame that I have to die, what a loss, with all that I’ve known and seen and thought!”

  Working at the table, deeply meditative in this fluid, unfixed thing of cooking, making his art, Bud is contented.

  Scott hoists the brimming pot to the stove for my father; down it goes with a clank. Bud says, “I don’t care what anyone else says about Scotty—he’s a good guy.” His go-to joke. He will try it on waiters, flight attendants, bus drivers. Sometimes people get it.

  “Oh, I don’t care what they all say about you—I think you’re a great guy!”

  “I’m not afraid of death,” Bud tells me. “I’m just afraid of doctors.”

  The days orbit appointments: urologist, GP, oncologist, home health nurse. In between, his cronies come to badger him into poker, betting on the ponies, political debate. Occasionally a visitor will want to make everyone bow their heads and pray. “That’s okaaay,” Bud assures me, Mom, anyone in the room. “I don’t mind. Who should I mind? I don’t care. I need extra. Jesus, Muhammad, the Easter Bunny, Buddha. Who prays the loudest, that’s who I’m standing next to.”

  After the holidays, despite all his predictions, Bud is still alive. Most of the visitors have gone, and Scott, Gracie, and I are due to return to Miami tomorrow. Bud proposes dinner out. “Let’s go to somewhere,” he says. “I’m done cooking.” We pull into the busy lot: Not quite 5:00 p.m., and already a line of people winds out the restaurant door. Bud says, “Never mind, never mind—go on in. You’ll see.”