The Garden Party

by Grace Dane Mazur

  After lunch, Pindar would go in to the university and meet with his students. When his colleagues asked him how his book was going, he tried to seem jolly. “Oh, you know. It’s just dreams of eating. Like any other cookbook, only older,” he would laugh. “Dabbling in Babylonian stewpots.” But he loved his old recipes. In fact, he loved all cookbooks, old or new, perhaps because so few other things in life were such unabashed invitations to delight. When, as a young man, he had invented a sandwich made of peanut butter, bacon, and mango chutney, he thought he might die of pleasure.

  * * *

  —

  WHEN PINDAR AND Celia had discussed the menu for tonight’s dinner party he had proposed some of his ancient Babylonian recipes, saying that if one needed something old for a wedding, or for the night before the wedding, he had the oldest recipes in the world. “Spiced pigeon pie,” he suggested. “Bottéro claims it has a crust of raised dough, though I’m not terribly sure he is correct there. Three thousand five hundred years before Christ, but they must have known better than to raise the crust for a savory pie.” He sighed.

  “I was thinking we might want something more normal,” Celia countered. “After all, we don’t know the Barlows very well. We don’t know what they like.”

  “Oh, my family is completely ordinary,” Eliza said. “They eat just about anything. What’s in your pie?”

  “Well, pigeons,” Pindar sighed. “We could use chickens, I suppose, though the Mesopotamians didn’t have them at the time of this recipe. Eliza, how do your people feel about the alliums?”

  Eliza looked at her future father-in-law. “What do you mean?”

  “Sorry. It’s the onion family. All my recipes have garlic, onions, leeks, shallots, and chives—along with the ever-present cumin and coriander.”

  “Oh,” Eliza said tentatively, as though forcing herself to confess. “My mom claims she’s allergic to shallots and onions. But she can eat around them. I don’t know how she is with leeks, but scallions are apparently fine. She uses them all the time.”

  Pindar nodded. Actually he didn’t want to make this dish for the Barlows. He had spent years on his translations of the recipe tablets and he cared too much about them to cook them for people he hardly knew. One should never try out a really old dish on strangers.

  “Oh Christ,” Celia said. “The allergies. I spoke to your mother, Eliza, and she told me everything she could remember on your side of the family.” As she hurried off to get her notes, Celia called back to them, “Of course, Naomi claims that eating meat feels like eating one’s own grandmother.”

  Celia reappeared with her journal. “Nathan Morrill—that’s Eliza’s grandfather, Philippa’s father—can’t eat ice, ice water gives him hives, and there’s something here I can’t decipher, about shock and teeth, I think.” Hives she didn’t want, nor shock, anaphylactic or otherwise. “Yes, and Philippa can’t do onions, leeks, or shallots, just as you said. Now, your brother Barnes, he’s the prosecuting attorney, yes? No peppers, green or red, and his wife, Larissa”—there was some trouble in that marriage, Celia had heard, one of them was leaving the other, but she didn’t know if she was supposed to know, so she wasn’t going to mention it—“Larissa is made ill by cloves. Can it be? I’ve never known cloves to cause anything but numbness. Well, they’re easy enough to avoid. No cloves.” Celia sipped her coffee. “Now, your brother William, he’s the one who lives in Paris? In human rights?”

  “Yes. Well. It’s only part of the year that he’s in Paris, and it’s international war crimes, actually,” said Eliza.

  “I see. Well, I’ve got here that William is allergic to lemons but not limes, while his wife, Olivia, can’t eat wheat, poor creature, no bread, no pasta.” Someone was allergic to nuts, one of the Barlow grandchildren, not the three-year-old boy, Eli, though there was something about him—not tragic, Celia had heard, or not yet tragic, but peculiar. Oh God, at three? How did one know at that age if something was tragic or peculiar? Anyway, it was one of the ten-year-old girls who had the thing with nuts, but there were at least a hundred ten-year-old girls in this family, and she had forgotten to note which one. Or was it peanuts? Were peanuts not a real nut, or not a real pea? “Oh God,” she said. “If we don’t keep track of these things, we could have people seizing up and collapsing all over the place.” She wanted the Barlows to be comfortable, she wanted to please them, even. “Ah,” she went on. “Next page. Stephen, Eliza’s father, doesn’t do spicy. Won’t touch it. Black pepper is okay, Philippa says, but chilis cause distress. But at least nobody’s kosher.”

  “My family?” said Eliza. “They probably don’t know what kosher is.”

  Celia wasn’t sure if Eliza ate mammals; they were, after all, the objects of her vocation. She thought it best not to ask.

  “Mutton fat,” said Pindar suddenly.

  “Dear?”

  “You haven’t said if anyone’s allergic to mutton fat. My recipes are full of the glorious fat from fat-tailed sheep.”

  “You’re not being helpful, my love,” Celia said. Then, looking up from her notes, “Pindar! Oh hell. What about your sisters?” Pindar’s older sisters had been invited from California. It wasn’t clear that they would be able to make it to the rehearsal dinner, but best to be safe. Celia had barely met them. They lived in Orange County and never came east.

  “What is it, sweetheart? Those old birds?”

  “Exactly. Are they allergic to any foods?” They were appalled, Celia knew, by Pindar’s books and his beard and what they thought were unnecessary remnants of Jewishness. They had denied this heritage and sang in the choirs of their adopted Episcopal churches, sent Christmas letters each year tucked inside cards showing snow-filled mangers and turbaned men on camels beneath outlandish stars.

  “Oh Lord,” Pindar said. “Let me think.” He made a muttering n-n-n-n-na sound, as though he was spinning through memories of childhood mealtimes. “Althea is allergic to penicillin, and won’t eat bread that she suspects of moldiness, or blue cheeses. Thalassa, of course, is allergic to yellow foods. Of any origin. This includes things she thinks might be yellow, such as the sulfites in wine. Gin and vodka, though, having no taint of yellow, are just nifty, as she would say. Swell. Better buy a case of each.”

  “Yellow? You can’t be allergic to yellow. Not to a color. That makes no sense. Are you sure?”

  “She doesn’t die. But she vomits. She was projectile as a child. Difficult.”

  “All right. Okay then. I’ll make yellow avoidable.” It seemed so hard to keep people happy by feeding them. If they didn’t perish, or suffocate, or break out in hives, they threw up. Except for Pindar’s mother, Leah, who was so very old. Omnivorous, and stronger than any of them. Leah claimed her heart had turned a bit “quivery,” and that her gait had slowed. Still, she walked two miles a day in those peculiarly comfortable black shoes. “How can we cook for all these people without killing them?”

  “My darling, we’ve never achieved the death of anyone before. Listen, find me a cauldron and I can make a Babylonian stew with onions, garlic, and leeks, lamb and mutton fat, and butter, cumin, coriander seed, and cloves. I’ll add turmeric, saffron, and preserved lemons just to make it yellow. Then we can make paella with hot pork sausage, chili peppers, and mussels. We will watch everybody keel over, whether they eat from one pot or the other. Food poisoning at a feast goes all the way back: Even Enkidu, companion of Gilgamesh’s bosom, died from it.”

  “Stop it,” Celia said, laughing. She hiccuped. “I’ll die.”

  “We could make an enormous cheese soufflé. How is it that none of our friends are allergic to eggs? Surely someone is. Eggs are very propitious for allergies. Leave the cooking to me.”

  Celia hiccuped again. “No one here is allergic to eggs.”

  “This is absurd,” Pindar said. “This introduction. We haven’t met most of your family, Eliza—y
et we know all about their innards, their deranged immunities.”

  Adam and Eliza laughed. Celia wiped her eyes. Pindar shook his head and chewed on his beard; then, self-conscious of appearing to eat himself, he smoothed his beard with his hand.

  In the end, of course, he gave up the idea of making dishes that would offend or poison. Cold poached salmon was decided upon, and asparagus and salads and, along with the breads, several batches of corn zephyrs, in honor of Olivia Barlow, who couldn’t touch wheat.

  * * *

  —

  PINDAR HAD ALWAYS been a worrier. He thought that this was a reasonable response to his mother, Leah, who never seemed to engage in the fretful sport. He had always felt, even as a young child, that it was up to him to worry for both of them, as his father, Gabriel, had disappeared early on and stayed mostly absent, reappearing only briefly and unannounced, an unpredicted comet. As an adult, Pindar worked at being calm and fluid, but most of the time he was pierced. He was flayed. When he taught in the Near Eastern Studies Department or even when he wrote, his veins ran with quicksilver. Being in the kitchen, cooking, quieted him. Celia calmed him—she was his mooring, his pole driven deep into the earth.

  * * *

  —

  THERE WAS WORRY, also obsession and anguish; Pindar saved most of his true anguish for his daughter Naomi. This often sent his heart careening, and his longing for Naomi’s safety infused many of his quiet moments. But that longing, like most others, could not be uttered, for it would be so easy for the gods to misconstrue it. One could achieve safety in more wrong ways than right ones.

  Naomi Cohen had the drive of a visionary without the necessary physical sturdiness. Whenever she returned from one of her missions to try to help others in need, her fair skin would be translucent, her jaw and neck startlingly prominent, her dark eyes too deep-set. Pindar wanted her to be safe and happy but knew that security was not what his daughter was seeking. Over the years he and Celia had rescued her, harbored her, and kept her quiet while she healed. They had plucked her from situations where she was unraveling, always wondering where to place the boundary between altruism and insanity.

  In April, Naomi had returned from working in an orphanage outside of Bucharest, where she had gone a couple of years after finishing college. A whole year in Romania had been too long, even she admitted. Pindar feared it would take her almost as long to recover. She had been back for six weeks now and things were still a bit unstable.

  On her return from Romania, Naomi had called her parents to ask them to pick her up at the airport. They had been giddy with relief at hearing her voice. Pindar had always felt that there was something fleeting about his daughter, even at twenty-four, as though she were a delicate contraption made of feathers and rubber bands and sails. Instead of landing or anchoring, she seemed only to touch down briefly and intermittently to earth. Whenever he hugged her he feared that she was getting so frail that soon he would not be able to feel her arms around him, feel her cheek against his beard. Celia trusted their daughter a bit more, trusted that she would rebound. Whenever they picked her up from a voyage they were joyous, glowing, and also quiet, so as not to frighten her, not to show how worried they had been and remained. Naomi, however, always seemed wildly happy to see them, whooping and almost dancing. Pindar wondered if he deserved such an abundance. That she should love them both so much, he felt, was a shock, like the cleaving of a crystal.

  Logan Airport, the night they went to pick up Naomi, was, as always, full of construction. Pindar disliked construction anywhere, but at airports he felt it was particularly aggressive and wrong. Airports were difficult enough to navigate, and the signage asking the traveler to look for his “terminal letter” always seemed as though he were being asked to reckon the time of his death by figuring out where in the alphabet of existence he would cease. Now Logan had decided to snake all the access roads with curves and buttresses of overpasses that obscured the proper way.

  There were no new buildings—anywhere—Pindar felt, that were better than what they replaced; progress always meant the substitution of some new thing that was tacky, expensive, complicated, and unlovable. That all airports everywhere were always under construction was clearly a bad sign, a sign that humans did not know and could not learn how to do things correctly. As airports got bigger one had to wait longer, and thus all travel slowed. Eventually the whole country would be an airport and no one would be able to move.

  On that April night Pindar still knew how to find his path through the curving labyrinth, but he wondered about next year’s changes, whether loops would arise that would be impossible to exit.

  Naomi wasn’t outside waiting for them at the international terminal. Even though it was close to midnight, they had expected that she would be right there, sitting on her backpack or standing and waving her arms as though to guide them to a space in front of her.

  Inside, the flight monitor did not show any arrivals from Frankfurt. Celia said that Naomi’s flight had probably landed so early that it was no longer showing on the board. Naomi also wasn’t among those waiting for travelers to appear through the customs doors. Celia checked the café. All around her was the crowing delight of families hugging and reuniting. She wandered the length of the terminal, and then back to the customs barrier again.

  Pindar tried to remember if Naomi had mentioned where she would wait for them. He glided up the escalator to the food court, wandered through the domains of oriental-style noodles, tacos, and industrial meat patties, and back again. Finally he noticed someone waving at him and at the same moment he recognized Naomi’s posture, the tilt of her head. But her hair had been cropped or shaved—like a convict or a brain patient—and her head was half-covered with a once-red bandanna. It wasn’t the shaved head that had kept him from recognizing her, but rather her face. Scratches, sudden and horrible, on her cheeks and forehead made it impossible to look at her squarely. All he could do was glance at her out of the corner of his eye. Only by opening his arms to her, turning his face directly toward her, could he get himself to look. This was a physical effort: He told his body what to do, and it obeyed. He could feel the blood rushing away from his head as panic took its place. He wanted to save Celia from the sight of her daughter. Perhaps there was some way to clean or cover Naomi’s face before he escorted her downstairs. Later he would chastise himself that his first feelings had been to protect himself and Celia from having to gaze on her.

  “My Naomi.” He bent down to kiss her. “We couldn’t find you.” She stood up to hug him and he held on to her, rocking her gently but not wanting to take her wind away. She was slighter than ever. It was like hugging a moth.

  The girl gave Pindar such a lopsided smile that he wondered if she had had a stroke or some sort of palsy, something to do with a facial nerve. He would have to look it up.

  “Dad,” Naomi said. “I thought you’d never get here.”

  Pindar looked around for her luggage, but all he could see was a small leather document purse and a bottle of spring water.

  “Oh,” she said. “My stuff. It’s over there behind the chair. I’m afraid it sort of got scattered.” She bent down to stow a toilet kit and a sweater in her knapsack. “I got in a while ago, actually. I wanted to decompress a bit before I called you.”

  “Have you eaten?” He meant Have you eaten since you left home a year ago? She looked inside out, she was so thin. She looked like a compound fracture.

  “Not too much,” she said. “I was waiting till I got home to you and Mom. With all the travel, my stomach’s been a bit off.” She handed Pindar a stack of newspapers, saying sheepishly, “I guess I should get rid of these. Do you want to dump them for me?”

  Pindar saw, as he carried the papers to the trash bin, that they were not foreign, as he had supposed, but were the past three days’ editions of The Boston Globe. Had she found them discarded somewhere? Or was it, and he hated to
think that this was more likely, that she had been living in the airport for days? He gulped back tears. He didn’t dare ask her how long she had been there or where she had slept, or why she had delayed so long to call home.

  Pindar heaved the knapsack onto his back. As they rode the escalator he reached down to touch his daughter’s shoulder, barely feathering it. At street level, she ran to Celia and hugged her, both women caught by the joy and strangeness of reunion. In the car, Naomi climbed into the back and asked if it was okay if she took a bit of a nap. She lay down, and Pindar could see in the rearview mirror that she was soon fast asleep.

  He whispered to Celia, “What on earth do you think—”

  “Shh,” Celia interrupted, putting a finger to her lips. “Later.”

  * * *

  —

  THE NEXT MORNING found Naomi in the local supermarket. It was early still and everyone had been asleep when she left the house. Generally she hated supermarkets, but she thought that today this one could, if not cure her, give her system a much-needed nudge back to normal, simply by her rolling a shopping cart up and down the adamantly bright aisles.

  In the produce section she stopped to inhale the smell of so many oranges—Valencia, blood, juice, navel—net bags of limes, stacks of pineapples. The hygienic overtones of bleach were also in the air and she sniffed at the scent of chlorine as though it were a delicacy. She picked up a watermelon as big as a child, lifting it with difficulty into her cart. A sheaf of plantains. Peaches thick with fuzz.

  She chose bottled waters from Maine and Italy, from Germany and France, then proud-colored squeeze bottles of Joy and Cheer, Dove and Palmolive. She reached for high-protein cereals and protein bars, granola with cranberries, Cap’n Crunch. She explored the store, lapping up the light, listening to the music with its brave half-heard songs of love lost and found.