Life Without a Recipe

by Diana Abu-Jaber

  After the trolley are more blocks, also a raised embankment of jagged stones that Daddy calls “hot lava,” where Mama says, “I don’t care if you’re sort of holding her hand, it’s still not safe.” And you have to run across screaming so the boiling lava doesn’t burn through your rain boots.

  Half the time or more, it’s raining. When you get to the school, it’s old and pretty and covered in ivy and it smells, Mama says, like a real schoolhouse. There are stairs and construction paper and cubbies. The world shrunk down to its best size: The big place out there is too big and this is the size things are meant to be.

  It’s almost the bad part. Not quite yet. First there’s a little story in the reading nook with Mama. Then hang coat on low hook. Then say hi to everyone standing around. Then three hugs and four kisses or thereabouts. Five kisses, twenty-three hugs. This is the plan, which got invented when you woke up on the second day and stretched out in bed and picked up Big Dog and said, I’m not going to school today. Maybe next week. And then at school when Mama said goodbye and gave kisses and went out so quickly, you were laughing because you could run down the stairs and get to the front door even before she could. You could do it three times in a row! And then Bella the teacher asked Mama, What do you want to do? And Mama said. . . . And Bella said, I can hold her. Say goodbye and I’ll hold her—this happens a lot in the beginning. And Mama’s eyes looked big and sad shadows were there, and you wanted her to say, no, maybe next week. But instead Mama said, Well, she’s really strong.

  And Bella said, I’m strong too.

  Three kisses and four hugs because there is love here and work over there and we stand between the two places, love and work. If we do this just exactly right and do it the same every time, maybe it will soften the scorch just a bit, the coming-apart to discover our new worlds.

  So I let go and see you smile and start to launch yourself, to race down the stairs to the front door, but Bella grabs you with both arms and lifts you off your feet. I see her face register the shock wave of your body, your remarkable strength: Is it physical or is it your will, root-deep, like your scream, a curtain of shattering glass beads, the wild-horse eyes you train on me as you thrash and shriek: “MAMA, DON’T LEAVE ME.”

  You don’t stop. Your voice rampages behind me: I flee like a coward, though someone else (another parent?) is also in the hallway shouting (humorously?), “Courage!” Your voice is there on the staircase, in the hallway, at the front door. “MAMA, COME BACK. MAMA, MAMA.” It doesn’t stop until I’m outside the building, on the street, the sounds of traffic swarming over my head, my heart trying to fly out of my throat. It’s all I can do not to turn and run back up those stairs.

  But I don’t because the teachers said this was the best thing to do, the only thing to do, that if I give in to your demands, it will never get easier. Because I have to teach my own classes and go to meetings, and there is no other option. Because friends have told us there is nothing better for children than a school and this is such a good school, so progressive and sweet. Because we’re trying to learn each other’s lessons: to demand and to release. And two minutes after I’ve started walking, legs shaking, toward our home, Bella will text a photo of you laughing, building an enormous buttressed complex of Legos with some other children. “She’s fine. She calmed right down after you left.”

  And it does get easier after that: You almost start to enjoy school. We settle into routines. Yet I still regret that day, all these years later. I don’t know if I will ever stop regretting it.

  A magnificent day of sunshine, a friend’s house vibrating with feet and voices. The party is too crowded and too loud and threaded with hyper kids. Regrets and shadows and backward glances are dashed out the windows with a sorcerer’s broom. How do you put a life into perspective? Maybe you have to invite everyone over and ask them to tell it, ask them to hold up memories like tiles in a mosaic—step back and see what pictures emerge.

  People have flown here from everywhere. Bud moved so much that someone observes, “The mountains have come to Muhammad.” People holding highball glasses lean against the front wall to tell weepy anecdotes about Bud’s tenderness and his short fuse, his cheerful madman hospitality and his lousy tips. His willingness to stop everything and talk to anybody at any time. His pleasure in a good, top-volume fight. His unbelievably bad financial advice. The time he invited an airplane full of passengers over to his house for dinner. His stuffed grape leaves. His shish kabobs. His jokes. His indecipherable political views. His breakfasts. The time he sat at dinner with a group of lefties deploring the war in the Persian Gulf and announced his hopes that America would “blast Saddam Hussein off the planet.” The time he wandered away from a tour group in Hawaii for half a day to follow “the voice of the earth.” The time after the hurricane, when he and Mom set up a food line outside their condo and cooked breakfast for thirty-seven neighbors. Finally, Connell Duffy makes his way to the front of the room. He’s slow and deliberate, and when he gets there, he props himself straight-armed on a sturdy chair back. “Gus used to tell me, ‘You know, you and me—we’re different from these others.’” He nods, his handsome Irish face startled by grief, tousled white hair falling forward. Bud understood him, their homesickness one of their great, shared experiences. “He was right, you know. That Gus. Gus knew. . . .” His voice wobbles. He has to sit down before he can tell us. What did Gus know?

  After the tributes are over, my husband calls for a toast.

  We had to comb St. Augustine to find the araq. The licorice booze, so sharp and hot, Bud’s ritual celebration drink, crucial as his nightly shot of coffee. Derived from aniseed, araq has medicinal uses—for stomachaches, to lighten the heart, and to improve storytelling. One can marinate chicken in it or make a lovely geranium liqueur or an incendiary sangria. My father liked to sip it before dinner, an aperitif with some mezza—a few nuts and chopped vegetables. I grew up with the understanding that a few bites and a few sips, either in conversation or in quiet meditation, were a marker of a civilized life.

  Here’s a story that I don’t tell at the memorial. Years before I was born, when my father was just a teenager, my grandfather Saleh lay dying of stomach cancer. Bud cooked his meals and then quietly soaked them with araq to help dull the pain. My grandfather (according to Bud) had always preferred Bud’s cooking; eventually Saleh sent away everyone else. “I was the only one who could stand his screaming,” Dad would say, rubbing his temples to soften the memory. Sighing at his cutting board, as if regret and uncertainty could be pressed with the tines of a fork, ingredients soft and cool as butter. “There was so much pain. Day and night, screaming and screaming.” When Bud was a child, his father’s drinking was such that Bud used to help his mother hide the araq; years later, when his father was dying, Bud returned to all the hiding places and unearthed the bottles. My father had cooked and soaked and served, and withstood the screaming. What I learned from that story was that sometimes, even when something is very hard, there still isn’t a better way to do it. You might mourn something and still do it that way all over again.

  My brother-in-law, Don, assembles the drink in the traditional order: pour into a short cocktail glass one part araq, then two parts water, then some ice. Make sure you always assemble it in this order or the oils from the araq will separate into a film and condense inside the glass. Araq means “sweat” in Arabic. Some say this condensation is where the name came from, but possibly it’s a nod to the drink’s sly potency: Once you add water, it’s milky white but strong as sin, unlocking desire, the scent of black licorice on parted lips.

  My other brother-in-law, Lance, carries a tray around the room, handing out diminutive cups. The room buzzes with interest, inhaling the vapors from the milky drink. There’s a pause in the conversation as we touch our dainty glasses then knock back the shot. It pools, a pearly liquid silence.

  It occurs to me, maybe we should’ve warned everyone about araq.

  The gasp is like a jet door thrown open
. One hundred proof—some brands even stronger—the drink has a demure anise scent and a donkey kick. People grab the arms of their chairs, one of Dad’s cronies pops up and then falls back in his seat, a woman claps both hands on top of her head. Someone says, “HO MAMA.”

  Huffing, wheezing sounds roll through our memorial service. A gray-haired woman in the back of the room is already rolling forward on the couch for another. Araq is its own lesson: It hurts you and makes you want more, like so many things, like falling in love, like loving anyone so much that you can never imagine that you won’t have them forever and ever. And the life continued on the other side of that person is like nothing so much as a dim, gray mist. And this is what Bud knew, even if Connell didn’t say it out loud: You regret not a bit, not any of it.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Work and Recovery

  At my desk, a glaze of computer light in the late afternoon, I can hear dinner sounds, soft tick of pots and spoons and husband’s and daughter’s voices. I feel ghostly, eavesdropping on daily life from this point of remove, as if I waited on just the other side of a membrane.

  Here is the writing life, pure observation, yet I chafe against it as I listen to them laughing. Here is work; I must work. Still, their voices pull at long strands and tendons. I want to get up and go out to them. I need to work a while longer. Work is what saves you. For a few minutes, my concentration returns to the page, then they break back through. I take in the scent of frying onion and garlic, my daughter demanding crayons, ice, wrestling. There is her voice asking, Where’s Mama? Though she knows. My fingers hover, held midair above the keyboard. I lower them. She keeps closer tabs now, having recently learned that someone can leave the house in the morning and not return in the evening.

  I thumb through a few yellowed pages of Dubliners, searching. The voices recede as printed words sift through me. I’m on an Irish city street in a snowfall, the flakes brushing my face, my body feeling buoyant and distant. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. There is a rustling sound and Gracie stands between my knees. “Mommy,” she whispers near my ear, “can I tell you something?” She steps on my feet, climbs onto my lap. “I want to write words. On the work.” She points at the computer.

  “You do, do you?” I hold her so close I can’t see the screen.

  “Write ‘Gracie’ there.”

  “Here, let’s write it on this paper.”

  “No, there. There. On the work.” She knows that’s the thing.

  “How about over here . . . ?”

  “No! Computer.”

  We write GRACIE in capital letters in the middle of the sentence in the middle of the page. She checks each letter, studies the total effect. She says, “That’s better,” before running out.

  “Mama.” Gracie is clutching my arm, her voice compressed and urgent. She’s just dashed back from inside the house. “You come with me right now. There’s something. In there!”

  We’re still in the driveway, unloading suitcases after the six-hour drive to St. Augustine. But my daughter is a passionate, frequently undeterrable person. The week before, she’d awakened us before dawn in a storm of tears, wailing, “Where is my tiara?”

  I stop everything to follow my three-year-old. She runs into the guest room and gives a full-armed flourish like a hostess on a game show. There’s a new painting on the wall over the bed, its colors bending and swerving, a pointillist cascade. Mom follows us in to see our reaction.

  “When did you buy this?” I ask.

  “Well.” She laughs softly, glances at the carpet. “It’s really weird. I just sat down the other morning and this painting just sort of came. . . .” She twirls a hand in the air. “Spilling out.”

  About twelve years ago, my mother took an acrylics painting class. She produced a series of vivid beachscapes and portraits. Bud gazed upon these wordlessly at first, filled with a kind of fretful pride. He said things like “Look what Mom made!” She painted for an hour or two each afternoon at the dining-room table, then removed her work each night in time for dinner. We bought her supplies and canvases, but eventually Mom stowed it all away. “Your father doesn’t like messes. And painting is pretty much mostly messes. It just takes up so much room.” She shrugged.

  Now Gracie stands on the bed, sweeping her fingers near the canvas in a swoon. She returns to this post several times over the next few days and I have to offer her distractions—cartoons, vanilla pudding, an extra bedtime story—to get her to leave the painting alone.

  That new painting is just the beginning. Gradually, my mother’s house fills with images of water and movement; her brushes litter the dining-room table. The place where Dad used to sit rolling grape leaves is where Mom now leans over an easel, the tablecloth stiff with smears of burnt sienna, royal blue, cadmium, and titanium white. Her new work is electric, bolder than the pieces she’d done years earlier. The walls are covered with canvases, windows filled with half-faces, figures swimming through clouds and air and flowers and words. At seventy-three, after a half-century of Bud’s stories and opinions, my mother steps into the new stillness and starts to work. I wonder whether my grandmother Grace—herself filled with barely suppressed energy—had sensed this desire inside her daughter, lying in wait. “Women will pour everything they have into a man,” she’d lamented. Mom had quieted her artistic self, Bud had acceded to living in the States: Was this what each of them had given up for the other?

  Even though Bud was big-mouthed and overbearing and generally seemed twice as large as he really was, my sisters and I lived in the space that he and Mom made between them. Without Dad, we shifted, looking to see what would fill the empty place. Who was our family now?

  “It’s the most beautiful,” Gracie says, sprawled backward on the bed, gazing up at Mom’s painting.

  “What do you think it is?”

  “A sea witch?” she asks hopefully, though there’s no discernible human shape on the canvas.

  I contemplate the work, its expansive, dotted, brilliant motion. At first I’d thought the painting depicted my mother’s freedom—released from caretaking and my father’s ailments, released from fifty-plus years of marriage to Mr. Personality. But later, when I remembered how she’d bent over his bed after he’d passed away, kissed him, and said, I’m so happy for you—you’re free, I think it’s the shape of my father’s light as well.

  Drive straight north, out of Florida, and just keep going. Our rented cabin is perched on the lip of a small Adirondack cove overlooking a cobalt lake. We sleep well in this place: It might be because of the air—thin, pure, clear, and cold. Dusted with pine needles, traces of old smoke. The fresh, feathery air echoes that of my childhood—not far from here. I keep listening for Bud’s voice, certain he’s just around the corner. This could be the summer when I was seven years old, in bed before the sun went down, drowsing to the sound of my parents’ voices. Though I’ve never been to this little community before, there is the delicious sense of return. Already we have small familiarities and routines. Early to sleep, windows open, then, seconds later it seems, a voice crosses my dreams: Hello? Hello?

  This is a fluid time, just after Bud’s death, a boundary-waters place. I want to carry on as usual, do my work, talk to people, but it’s like combing fingers through fog. Work goes, conversation, concentration. Some of our friends already seem to know about the gray time—they call us with invitations, lures out of the normal world to possible retreats and sanctuaries. One day I say, Sure, let’s go.

  Here is a terrace and railing from which you can view the blue distance. My three-and-a-half-year-old daughter has discovered she can climb out of bed at first light, cling to the railing, and yell greetings into the valley. Then, wondrously, one or another of the vacationers in the cabins inside this grassy bowl will look up from their coffee (or their beds) and call back.

  “Good mornin
g, Gracie.”

  “Hi!” cries the child. “Hello, hello!”

  “Yes, hello.”

  “GRACIE.” Scott is sitting up in bed. “Get back in here.”

  There’s no way to stop her or close her in; nothing locks. The door to our bedroom is a sort of glorified shower curtain; there’s no door at all on her room. Early riser, she evades us each morning, waking me with the same dream, a tiny voice floating out of the clouds.

  Our meals in this easy place are delicious. Hamburgers on the grill, macaroni and cheese, cold fried chicken and salad. All day, kids play on the swings and slide or swim in the cold lake, the air hot and dry. By evening, everyone is ravenous. One morning, we drive into Vermont to pick blueberries. Gracie devours half the berries before there’s time to stir them into muffins, her lips and palms stained blue for the rest of the day.

  We stroll back and forth to our friends’ cabins and present ourselves by peering through the windows, then wandering in. Privacy is pretty much nonexistent, but no one seems to miss it. The adults agree: This is the way we should live! No television or computers or gadgets! Good food, clean air, exercise: reading on the terrace until last light. The children bask in this sudden swath of freedom. No adults saying, “Oh, no no. Don’t go out there. Hold my hand.” It reminds me of the early days, when you were able to roam all day on bicycle, riding through new worlds filled with other children.