Life Without a Recipe

by Diana Abu-Jaber

  Divisions and boundaries begin to ease—not only the walls but also the lines between the home and outdoors, between the family and the gang. Our families flow into each other. Gracie runs around the valley with the older kids while we look on from grown-up distance, our lawn chairs and grill. When Gracie shouts in the morning, it must feel to her like she’s gained a magical power—the ability to summon greetings and voices from unexpected places. A sense that the world might be closer and sweeter than she’d ever realized. It’s a fuller life, a village life, not so different from that of my father’s Bedouin clans, for whom parenting was general and shared. This, it seems, is the tribal existence that Bud was always trying to return to. I feel guilt-pricked, thinking how I never understood what he wanted, how impatient I was with his dreams.

  Eventually, though, it rains and the children are cooped up and cranky. At bedtime, Gracie vows she’s wide awake, she’ll never be sleepy again. The air turns biting in the morning; we recall our old lives and start to miss them. Soon we’ll be returning to houses. Soon, I suspect, I’ll start to feel grief.

  On our last morning, I stumble out of bed, trying once more to intercept her, but there it is, with the first streaks of pink, the voice shouting, “Hello? Hello?” Five or six people call back. Most of our valley is awake. One of the two sisters who own this property confided the other day that they’d nicknamed Gracie “the alarm clock.” Resigned, I join her on the terrace. She leans on the railing as we watch the morning embankment of fog sparkling over the water. Erased by mist, the loon lifts its voice, so mournful I feel a shiver between my shoulder blades. “Good morning!” Gracie hollers.

  “Honey, too loud.”

  The bird calls again—long, unearthly notes—as if it were summoning souls back to the earth. An improbable new member of the family. Gracie says, “Mama, I have to tell him. He’s waiting.”

  How lucky it is, once in a while, to be able to hold still. The fog shimmers in place, a tiny pocket, a gap in time’s fabric. Later, it will burn away over our car, our dazed thoughts trained on the highway, a hot little cinder starting in my center. Now it’s only us and our faraway bird—these greetings called, tossed out, our voices connecting in these invisible places.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Want

  She’s lying sideways on the chair, head and feet hanging. She wants us to feed her this way. We tell her to sit up; she does briefly, then slithers, knees first, to the floor. “I wan eat down here. This my underhouse,” she says from beneath our legs. “I’m a puppysnake. I ate your feet.” Now she wants us to throw “scraps” to her the way she saw a woman on a farm tossing orange peels to a rescued pig. She licks our ankles, then bites them. I yell, “GRACIE.” Scott gives me a long, she’s-your-daughter stare across the table. Really, it’s just another version of the new-parent conversation we have these days: Are all kids supposed to be this hard?

  People say to us: It’s girls. Boys are so easy—they’re puppies. Girls are difficult. They always want something.

  Girls need things to be happy, my grandmother told me crisply. Dolls, dresses, all sorts of stuff. She puffed her cheeks, overwhelmed by the futility of it all. She couldn’t afford it, but she couldn’t help herself. She bought us things (though we learned to be careful and not make requests), then said, “If you leave your new clothes on the floor I’ll haunt you after I’m dead.”

  Now my daughter lies flat on her back on the floor, breathing heavily through her nose for some reason. “Pretend I’m canni-ball”— a word gleaned from some wildly inappropriate cartoon. “You gonna eat my pieces.”

  “Baby. Up.” I feel around for her unsuccessfully, unwilling to get on my knees.

  From somewhere under the table: “In two minutes.”

  “Baby.” I’m talking to under-the-table, but I look at Scott, sag, imagine my grandmother laughing. See how it is? Didn’t I tell you? “Come up. Don’t you want some dinner?”

  Why won’t she eat? We ask each other. What does she want? The question taunts us. She won’t stay at her plate: maybe three bites, no more. What is the secret food or flavor, the token, the word, the gift that will hold her, lure her out of the underhouse? I lower the fork under the table and she nibbles at it. I feed her nearly a whole plate of food this way. The more they don’t want to eat, the more you want to feed them. The more difficult they are, the more you love them.

  No, I’m fine, I tell people. Oh, I feel a little kicked in, burnt around the edges. Singed. But otherwise fine.

  The stream of Bud’s voice really has stopped: a stream that had run so continuously, I don’t notice it until it’s gone. I sing lullabies to Gracie before bed, drawn toward the sad-sweet songs. There are so many pointed edges now, snags, unexpected grief-traps hidden here and there. I see a fat gourd of a vegetable at the market, unidentifiable, and suddenly feel tears, realizing Bud would know how to cook that. I gravitate to certain friends—cooks and immigrants. When a favorite chef moves back to France, I call him to say goodbye; afterward, I sit down, feeling something like the heel of a palm press against my chest, thinking of his round Mediterranean eyes.

  But really, I’m all right. I’m looking for a house.

  I wake up one morning seized by the idea. So that is what I want. A talon closes around me and it becomes all I can think about: We must move. Solid and new, the idea of a house—of looking for one—clears me out, smooths away edges. I will think about nothing but this.

  Scott and I had talked about getting a bigger place for years, but only recreationally. There were just the two of us when we bought our Miami house—a glorified studio. Good old floors and sly whimsies—a paw print in the floor of the enclosed porch, inside shutters, carved archways—but minuscule. We have to open the shower door to sit on the privy, the floorboards shriek and crackle, fumes from the garage wisp directly into our shared office-porch. One lively morning, the knob comes loose from Gracie’s door, shutting her inside with me until Scott unlocks it with a butter knife. When we get out, I say, That’s it. Buying a better house strikes me as the embodiment of growing up, making space for a family.

  I spent half my childhood in the backseat, Bud driving in tireless circles, Bedouins wandering the deserts of suburbia. Hunters. For years it was the thing we talked about: where to live, where? Bud in the car, arm out the window, fingers drumming against the metal, worry beads swinging side to side from the mirror. Houses lined up like soldiers or reclining like odalisques, gazing back at us through the windows, taunting: Maybe your true life is here. No, wait, maybe here. We moved so many times between my first grade and the start of high school that teachers asked if my father was in the military. I couldn’t explain. “What about that house? Look at that place.” Whenever we pulled back into our driveway, Mom—trying to tether us to something—said, “Oh, look. Who lives in this sweet house?” The children cried, “We do, we do!” Bud remained silent at the wheel. The problem wasn’t the neighborhood, it was the whole country. He couldn’t fix that part, couldn’t settle in. After she finally left her parents’ home, Grace moved just a few blocks away, to live in the same small apartment for more than thirty years. She said, “You get one house and one church, one country, and you stick. None of this dancing around all the time.”

  He tried to move us back to Jordan, but whenever we got there, it seemed to hurt him just as much as America did—not being the place he remembered and longed for. Oh, it was lovely, but the night no longer shone with lilac streaks, the air was no longer spangled with stars of bitter almond. No more beautiful parents or family cosmos. Some of those things were there, just not the way he remembered them—which was even worse.

  Bud taught us: any house might hold a magic portal. All you do is find the right one. Stare hard at those front doors and windows until some inkling comes to you, a sense that here, this is home. Each house has its own language. A micronation. You’re choosing not just a home and a neighborhood but an identity. Find the structure, settle in, as naturally as a sou
l dwells in its body. What was the grail after all, but a tiny home for blood and spirit. And who doesn’t want to find that?

  “Look at him go, go, go,” Gram commented, watching Bud pull out of the driveway to “go looking.” “Lord only knows where he thinks he’s headed.”

  Scott and I can’t afford a bigger mortgage, so we tell Travis, our new realtor, that he must perform a magic trick and find us a bigger place for the same amount of money. We start searching within a mile radius of our house, but each neighborhood lazes into a new one, with so many enticements—nice lawn, second story, bricked driveway, wide sidewalks. We drive into corners of our town we never knew existed. Travis’s car is soft as amnesia, a small continent of air-conditioning and black upholstery. In here, it doesn’t matter that something terrible has recently happened. Grief has a backward gaze. No wonder Bud adored house-hunting—it was a kind of antithesis to sadness, all forward momentum.

  Each weekend, back into the car I go, sinking into the shadowy interior, drifting farther and farther afield. Travis hands us color printouts—prices and school districts. We travel farther north, squinting as the square footage increases and prices inch up. It is fine, all-consuming, Sisyphean work.

  Each time the door clips shut, I settle into the seat, something murmuring forget, forget, behind my ear.

  On a day of sterling sunlight, we pull into a driveway. It’s forty-five minutes to the north, just a few minutes from the condo where my parents used to live. I look out, palm on the car door handle, and hesitate. The place looks small, slightly scrunched, hobbity. Still, when the car opens, I smell salt water in the air. The beach is a few blocks away; it ignites the sky, the windows in the house flare. “You can walk to water from here.” Travis lifts a hand, his eyes broadsided by light. The palms that circle the house wave and undulate, and sunlight seems to wag through the air like brilliance thrown off ocean waves. We enter through an aquamarine front door, and the rooms flow from one to the next, filled with this particular sunshine, everything ocean-colored—the walls, the paintings. A sea house.

  The owner hurries before us, throwing doors open, going room to room, pointing out tiles behind the kitchen sink, a lamp of colored-glass fruits twinkling over the dining-room table. She studies me with stark eyes, talks through every detail, complains about other prospective buyers. “People are crazy! They’re all, ‘Oh, the ceiling is low,’ ‘Oh, the rooms are so small,’ ‘Oh, why is the clothes dryer in the kitchen?’ Can’t they see?” She fans out her arms like Maria in The Sound of Music, marveling at her house, at the insanity of the world, before the listing agent comes in and steers her away.

  Behind the house, in the center of the little backyard, my sister and I drop into the grass under a tree’s dense canopy. It’s like something grown out of a fairy tale: fat, emerald leaves, half-wild, the crooked trunk all burls and knobby roots. “I better get up now,” Monica says, staring at the clear blue sky, “or I’ll never leave.”

  I glance back at the house and notice the owner watching from the door.

  Travis is in the kitchen going over numbers on a clipboard. He reveals, with a lowered glance, that this sea house is priced far above our already-unrealistic top price. I laugh and say, Forget it, though my breath constricts with disappointment. But he’s shaking his head. He grew up on a working ranch before becoming a real estate agent, and when we met I recognized my father’s wily old horse-trader gene in him. “This house is way overpriced,” he murmurs, an eye on the door behind me. “It’s undersized and pretty oddball—the layout is kind of kooky. And that weird blue front door?” He gives me a look like a poke in the ribs. “I can run comps for the area. She could drop it a fair bit before things start to line up.”

  I think about her hot eyes, the swoop of her arms. “I don’t know, Trav.”

  He reclines against the countertops. “Y’ask me, it’s been listed for four months. It’s getting tired. And the way things are going—in this market?” He lifts an eyebrow. For the first time in years, housing prices have dropped. Travis regularly hands us stacks of printouts of newly sold houses in the areas we like: Nearly every sale has shown a plummet in asking price. Like Bud, our realtor likes the edge of a counteroffer, playing with that fine line between insult and possibility.

  In the second bedroom, the owner swirls up behind me again, talking as though we were in midconversation, delivering stream-of-consciousness family history. Her father built the place seventy years ago. She and her husband remodeled it themselves, top to bottom—see that sea-glass backsplash? See the porthole in the bathroom? Eight years of remodeling. They were finally done; they were going to travel. But her husband dropped dead four months ago. Bad ticker. She was all set to retire this fall, but now she isn’t sure what to do. Maybe cruise around the world? Maybe live in a van by the river with her dog? Like a hobo! Ha! Ha! Ha!

  “Okay there,” the listing agent enters, stealthy as a nurse. She puts a hand on the owner’s elbow. “I was just wondering where you’d gotten off to.”

  Thoughts of the house circle me during the ride home—the glass tiles on the bathroom floor, the color of the ceiling. I can’t shake it—the doorbell, the name of the street, the way two yellow Adirondack chairs face the front lawn. A more sober piece of me can see, yes, it’s patched up and only half-repaired in places, the roof appears to be crumbling off the walls, and we plain can’t afford it. But the house inhabits me. It’s as if, with the story of her husband’s death, the owner draped a gauze over the building, its details watercolored by loss: I see their hands on each cornice and railing, imagine the way she and her husband moved through their home together. The place is burnished, polished by grief. Enchantment falls over me. Some piece of my hidden sadness has come forward to join hers, key in a lock. It turns and opens a door in me.

  The price unnerves him, but Scott admits he likes the rambly yard and clean garage. After months of looking, it’s a place we finally agree on. We make an offer—tens of thousands of dollars under the asking price. It’s still more than we can realistically manage, yet it feels like dropping a penny into a wishing well. I tell myself I’m ready to be disappointed, but I’ve learned from watching my father that bargaining is as much about having faith as anything else.

  We wait to hear back. I stare at the phone; I live with it in my hand. Occasionally I turn it off and on. There are five endless days of silence before the listing agent returns with a counteroffer that is almost the original asking price. Beside the barely adjusted amount, in capital letters are the words FINAL OFFER.

  “So that’s that.” Scott rubs the back of his neck. “It was worth a shot.”

  A knot of disappointment forms in my throat. I chew on my lips, thinking hard. “But still, she came down,” I say. “Not enough, but still—maybe that’s a sign.”

  “What? Like a secret message? She’s making her counteroffer in code?”

  I jam my hands in my pockets, scowl out the windows. I’d seen Bud wrest unbelievable deals from people—merely by smiling and refusing to let up. He called it us’meh, but he willed it into being. He haggled in supermarkets, movie theatres, and shopping malls. He haggled with car mechanics, telemarketers, and Girl Scouts (then he tipped them). He haggled with the turnpike toll collectors. He got his price.

  Travis agrees with Scott but he also talks strategy. “Let’s just let it cool off for now. Give her a little time to stew in her juices. And it can’t hurt to keep looking, right?”

  But I see us in that house: Gracie a schoolgirl, fishing from the backyard dock, a preteen getting burgers at the corner store, in high school, walking a dog down the sandy blocks, working out algebra equations under a rainbow-striped umbrella. Such a house, some tiny, crazy part of me thinks, dispels sadness. I try to give us’meh a nudge and write a note to the owner that I hope sounds less desperate than I feel: “I wanted to let you know how much we love your place. I understand what a special place it is to you and how much history you have invested in it. We would be hono
red to be able to add to that history.”

  Only later do I realize how little that letter is about the house.

  The new pages look pale, almost watery in the dark morning. Four a.m. I am writing instead of sleeping, a penlight hazing over the notebook.

  This book is ineffable and elusive. At first, I thought it was going to be the follow-up to my memoir, another book of family stories and dishes. But for some reason I keep describing it in different ways: I tell a few friends it will be called “A Food of One’s Own.” I tell a bookstore audience that it’s going to be a feminist manifesto—with recipes! Other days, I think it will be about how to raise a good eater. If only I knew how to do that.

  Though I’m staring at pages, at the back of my head, I’m listening. There is a chamber in me that is absolutely quiet, still waiting for my father’s voice. After my grandmother’s death, I continued to have frank conversations with her—generally while in the kitchen, standing by the mixer or the oven. A whiff of nutmeg, rum, and chocolate from an open cookie tin and she appeared, leaning against the refrigerator, scolding me for not setting the timer, or airing her philosophies of love and relationships, or filling me in on the necessary components of a young woman’s education.

  Where is my father’s ghost? While he was alive, there was nothing more maddening, endless, and impractical than Bud’s advice. Now, of course, I miss it—oh, I miss it.

  Concentration whisks away, words dissolving, sugar in tea. I get up and drift through the house to my anchorage. We keep the night-light in the kitchen. I take out my soldiers—flour, brown sugar, vanilla, salt—wisps of powder like magical capes. I don’t know what I’m making until I’m into it, sighing and stirring. Tonight an apple crisp; tomorrow, caramel bars; the next day, angel food. Here is the last sanctuary: The cool, methodical steps will clear the air, the recipes soothe me with their calm voices, and the sugar brushes away sorrow.