Tender at the Bone

by Ruth Reichl

  “You didn’t say you had an aunt here,” said Serafina.

  “Tunisians have family everywhere,” he replied. “Coming?”

  I would have gone, of course, if Serafina had, but she wouldn’t go. Was this a lover’s dance? I couldn’t tell. She went back to her book and I rolled over, looked lazily at the water, and went to sleep.

  I woke up famished. But as we walked along the sea road to town I grew skittish; we were unaccustomed to being alone in Tunisia. “It seems awfully empty,” I said. “It doesn’t look as if a single tourist has ever been here.”

  “Ooh,” mocked Serafina, “scary.” We reached the edge of the town and peered at the menus posted in the café windows. Not one was translated.

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said, marching toward a little café with strips of red, white, and blue plastic hanging across the door. We sat beneath an awning at an outside table and Serafina ordered an omelet, a salad, and a glass of wine.

  The waiter looked worried. In halting French he said something about flies, insects, the need to move indoors. “It will be stifling in there,” said Serafina, “we’re not moving. We don’t mind a few flies.”

  The man nodded and went away. Ten minutes went by. Twenty. Forty. Nothing arrived. We called the man out and he said yes, yes, the food would arrive any minute. “And the wine,” I said, “don’t forget the wine.”

  He nodded and went back inside. Another half hour passed. Nothing happened. “This is ridiculous!” said Serafina. “I feel like I’m waiting for Godot.”

  She went off to find the waiter and came back with a quizzical expression on her face. “They’ve all gone home,” she said, “and the door’s locked. We’re the only people here. What do you think happened?”

  “It is not a mystery,” said Taeb when we told him later. We were having dinner at the shack on the beach, eating ravenously. He was sipping wine. “This is not Tunis. This is a small town where Arab women do not sit outside by themselves drinking wine!”

  “But we aren’t Arab women,” Serafina said.

  Taeb gave Serafina a sidelong glance. “Really?” he asked politely.

  I looked at Serafina, suddenly realizing what they had been seeing all along: Her shiny dark hair and honey-colored skin.

  “But I’m not!” she said.

  “I know,” said Taeb, in the soothing voice you use to calm a fractious child. “I know.” He started peeling oranges and feeding the sections to Serafina, who took them delicately with her teeth, like a cat. The back of my neck prickled; Taeb’s stillness had disappeared.

  We went back to the bungalow and Serafina spent a long time at the sink, washing her face. “They think you are here to discover your roots,” I said. “They think you don’t know it.” She bent to rinse off the soap. She dried her face, muffling it in the thickness of the towel.

  A few days later Taeb’s sister Fatima was married. The wedding was held in a large, fragrant Tunisian garden so filled with flowers it looked tropical. The men in their western suits were somber spots of darkness, but all the women, even Mina, were arrayed in long silk robes and colorful veils.

  The men left before the bride was carried into the garden on a high palanquin, wrapped in silks and holding her henna-dyed palms before her face. All we could see were her eyes, heavily rimmed in kohl. As she was set on a dais, all the women in the garden began to ululate, the sound bursting from their vibrating throats as if their hearts were speaking. The primal sound, agony and approval, floated up into the air and over the garden wall.

  The music began and the women started to dance with wild, sexy movements, swinging their hips and shaking their breasts with a freedom they never displayed in mixed company. It was lovely. Tiny cakes were served, punctuated by laughter, music, and songs. It went on for hours; toward the end I allowed myself to be pulled into the dance. It was an odd feeling, knowing that no men were watching. I was just relaxing into the rhythm when I noticed that Serafina had disappeared.

  In a panic I went rushing from table to table, searching for her. She was not at any of them. She was not dancing. Finally I saw a knot of women in the farthest corner of the garden. There she was, very still, surrounded by a dozen women talking in high, animated voices. Mina was in the circle too, holding a garment over Serafina’s head as if she were a child about to dress a doll.

  Mina pulled the long silk red robe over Serafina’s short western dress. She covered her hair with a silver-embroidered silk scarf, pulling the ends so that they fell across her shoulders. She looped silver chains around her neck and began to outline her eyes in kohl. I watched as this new, softer woman emerged. Serafina looked as if she belonged in the garden. I was alone.

  A few moments later the groom came to claim his bride, followed by the rest of the men. Taeb was taller than the others so I could see his eyes light up when they landed on Serafina. Serafina saw it too. Her mouth twisted and she began pulling off the costume. By the time Taeb had worked his way to her side she was herself again, but for her kohl-rimmed eyes.

  The party was over. The bride was carried out and everybody made suggestive jokes about the wedding night. The honeymoon would start tomorrow. Serafina and I stood outside the garden with Taeb and Noureddine, wondering what to do with ourselves. It was too early for bed. “Let’s go to the movies,” Noureddine suggested, “there’s a new James Bond.”

  We went down the hill to the huge new cinema on the Avenue Habib Bourguiba. We settled into plush seats in the balcony. The ads were already playing and on the screen some boys skateboarded dangerously along a California sidewalk holding up bottles of Coke. Taeb must have tried to take Serafina’s hand because I felt the jerk of her body as she pulled away. Then the camera tilted up to the San Francisco skyline and I suddenly wished I had a bucket of popcorn in my lap and that I could go outside and find that all the cars were Fords.

  Two days later we took a plane to Algiers. It was clearly time to go. Taeb said nothing, but he was wearing his most intense look, as if he were a hungry man who had been shown a feast. He kissed Serafina gently, one cheek, then the other, then back to the first. Noureddine looked rumpled and miserable. “Why are you leaving?” he cried, as if his generosity had failed and it was somehow his fault.

  I threw my arms around him, grateful and sorry. “You were right,” I whispered in his ear. “Once you get to know Tunis it is impossible to leave.” And then I boarded the plane.

  Serafina immediately ordered a bottle of wine. “I feel as if I am waking up from some very strange dream,” she said. “In Algiers it’s just going to be us, okay? No more men.”

  “Fine with me,” I replied.

  But in less than an hour we got off the plane to find a tall dark Tunisian named Dris waiting on the runway. “I am a friend of Noureddine’s,” he said. “He asked me to take care of you while you are in Algiers. This is a dangerous city.”

  LOVE STORY

  North Africa fixed nothing. I came back as depressed as when I left, and more alone. I didn’t know where to go or what to do with myself.

  “My psychiatrist thinks you should come back to New York,” my mother said. “He thinks it would be good for me.”

  I gritted my teeth. “What about ME?” echoed through my head but all that came out of my mouth was “Sorry. I’m going to graduate school.”

  I hadn’t known, until I said it, that I even had a plan.

  “We won’t pay for it,” my mother threatened.

  “Fine,” I said, “I’ll pay for it myself.”

  I got a job as a lunch waitress at the Sheraton Hotel and a cheap apartment on the wrong side of Ann Arbor. I had a fantasy that living there would be romantic, but the man next door was a monster who spent all night hitting the woman he lived with. I had never seen her, but I had seen him once, walking up the sidewalk, a grizzled old guy with gray hair and skin the color of sheets that have stayed too long on a bed. He didn’t look strong enough to be so mean.

  It always began around seven. A thu
d against the wall and then I’d hear him say, “Get up, I said get up.” Another thud. And on and on and on. She never said a word, or at least not loud enough for me to hear. I’d huddle miserably on my side, cooking as a distraction, berating myself for eating too much. The low point was the night I made a batch of rice pudding for twelve and ate the entire thing right from the pot, standing by the stove.

  I had no dates and I felt as if I would be there forever, living in that awful apartment by myself, listening to the misery next door. I went to bars to escape the sound, drinking too much and developing crushes on men that I met. I’d stay, hopefully, until last call and then come home alone to listen to the sounds next door.

  Serafina had moved to Detroit. She was writing poetry, going to political meetings, and was involved with a radical theater group. She invited me to dinner one night and I thought she might introduce me to her new friends.

  But when I got there it was just the two of us, and we were awkward together. The phone kept ringing and each time she answered it her voice changed, becoming more strident, more assertive. “Ooh, child,” she said once, “you know I do!” I tried to imagine the people on the other end of the phone, but the only thing I knew for sure was their color.

  I had been looking forward to curried chicken and roti and I longed for her mother’s coconut bread. I got barbecued ribs, sweet potatoes, and greens. “I’m surprised you didn’t make chitlins,” I heard myself saying as I left. As I drove back, I thought it would be a long time until I saw her again.

  I got home to the usual thud, followed by the usual command to get up so he could knock her down again. But now he was a broken record, repeating “I said get up!” so many times I thought he might have killed her. I called the police. And ran for my life; I didn’t even wait for them to come.

  “Sure you can stay here,” said Pat when I turned up at the apartment I had shared with her during the summer. “In fact you can have the apartment. I’m moving out in a few days.”

  Anyplace would have done, but 711 Packard was a bargain. The building was so decrepit that the building department did not consider it habitable and the rent was only a hundred dollars. The owner, Mr. Blue, did not even require a deposit.

  But after she had gone Pat’s apartment seemed very big. There was no monster next door, but now I manufactured one, waking up with my heart pounding to imaginary noises. I locked myself in the bedroom at night. It didn’t help much.

  In the daytime it all seemed absurd. But each night I sat alone in the living room of that abandoned building, watching as darkness crept into the apartment and made everything scary and unfamiliar. I was twenty years old and it felt childish to be so afraid. I was ashamed of myself, but that didn’t help.

  One night I was examining the windows, wondering what I could do to make myself feel more secure, wondering if I should see a psychiatrist, when the doorbell rang. I would have been happy to see any friend, even one I didn’t like very much. Unfortunately the tall, lean guy in plaster-spattered jeans was a stranger.

  “Is Pat here?” he stammered, looking flustered. He had fine, straight brown hair, glasses, and smooth rosy cheeks. Despite the paint and plaster on his clothes he looked extremely clean. When I told him Pat had moved he stood there silently, looking like the farmer in American Gothic. I asked if he wanted her address. And then I asked if he wanted dinner.

  I don’t remember what we ate. But the next night, when Doug came back, I made sauerbraten. It was mid-July in the steamy heat of the Midwest, but that did not deter me from serving it with potato pancakes and homemade applesauce. Doug had thirds. Then he stood with me in the small old-fashioned kitchen as I baked brownies in the ancient Magic Chef stove. It took us all night to polish off the pan.

  The next evening I made a batch of Toll House cookies and packed them into a shoe box. I was planning to say my mother had sent them, liking the sheer incongruity of the lie. But when I knocked on his door Doug looked so happy to see me I didn’t say anything at all: I just held out the box.

  “I was hoping you would come,” he said. “I even bought some wine in case I got lucky.” His total lack of guile won my heart. We finished the bottle and then went back to my place for dinner. I made Wiener schnitzel. He never left.

  Doug could fix anything and build anything, but the only books he had ever read were by J.R.R. Tolkien. Most people bored him. At the age of two he had startled his conventional parents by announcing that he planned to be an artist. He had never swerved from this decision; art was all he thought about and for most of his life it was the only companion he really wanted. We had nothing in common, but he felt instantly familiar, as if I had spent my whole life waiting for him to come knocking on my door. From the first we completed each other’s sentences. Pat called us Duth and Rug.

  I assumed that we loved each other because we were so different. I should have known it was not so simple. All I had to do was look at what I was cooking.

  It was Dad-food from the first. Even when it was a humid 100° I was cooking stuffed pork chops and sauerkraut for Doug. I made Aunt Birdie’s potato salad and served it with ham. I baked linzertortes for dessert. I must have known, somewhere inside of me, that I had found Dad’s kindred spirit. And that if I took him home he would finally introduce me to the German gentleman who was my father.

  SAUERBRATEN

  FOR DOUG AND DAD

  4-pound chuck or rump roast

  1½ tablespoons salt

  2 onions, chopped

  10 black peppercorns, crushed

  2 whole allspice

  2 bay leaves

  5 whole cloves

  1½ cups red wine vinegar

  1 cup red wine

  ¼ cup plus 2 tablespoons flour

  ¼ cup oil

  2 tablespoons brown sugar

  ½ cup crushed gingersnaps

  Place meat in glass bowl.

  Mix salt, onions, pepper, allspice, bay leaves, cloves, vinegar, and red wine. Pour over meat. Let stand in refrigerator 3 to 4 days, turning meat twice a day.

  Remove from marinade, reserving liquid. Dry meat and roll in ¼ cup flour. Heat oil in heavy frying pan and brown on all sides. Remove meat, put into heavy casserole, add marinade, bring to a boil, cover, reduce heat, and simmer 2½ hours.

  Remove meat from cooking liquid and set aside. Skim off the fat and strain the drippings. Add water to make 3½ cups.

  Mix brown sugar with 2 tablespoons flour. Whisk in ¼ cup water and blend well. Add little by little to cooking liquid, stirring constantly until smooth. Add gingersnaps, stir again, and put roast into gravy to simmer 15 more minutes.

  Slice meat and serve with sauce.

  Serves 6 to 8.

  “What are we going to talk about?” I asked as we passed the A&W Root Beer stand, where the red-haired carhop wore too much makeup and always remembered that Doug liked onions and mustard on his chilidogs. His mother had invited us for dinner at five.

  “No big deal,” said Doug. “We’ll talk about what we always do. You’ll see.”

  He pulled up in the middle of a street lined up one side and down the other with houses that looked exactly alike. Each had a cement walkway dissecting a minuscule lawn, and each had three steps leading to a tiny white house. What set this house apart from its neighbor was the shiny gray Ford parked in the driveway; the car in the adjoining driveway was maroon.

  Doug’s relationship to his family mystified me. He seemed to like his mother and stepfather well enough, in a distant sort of way, and he thought his brother, Dick, was swell. But they were not really in his life. It was not that he was in rebellion, he just wasn’t there.

  The door of the house opened and Doug’s mother came out. She was plump and comfortable, with neatly set gray hair and sensible glasses. She wore an apron over a light blue print dress and she waved, as if we had traveled a great distance instead of the five miles that separated our apartment from their house.

  We navigated the steps and stood there, awkward
ly. Doug and his mother did not kiss. “This is Ruth, Mom,” said Doug, and she smiled. “Why, hello,” she said, pointing into the house.

  We went into the living room, which was almost filled by a pair of BarcaLoungers, a large television set, and a coffee table. The corner of the coffee table ripped my stocking as I swerved around it; looking down I saw a TV Guide in a needlepoint cover. “My Aunt Winnie is the artist in the family,” Doug whispered.

  The kitchen was spotless and smelled like pine-scented room deodorizer. It was hard to believe that dinner would appear any time soon. But the table in the dinette was set for four and at each place was a cottage cheese-filled canned peach set on a leaf of iceberg lettuce.

  Doug’s stepfather came in, asked, “Dinner ready?” and sat down. He shook my hand, said, “Hello,” and was not heard from during the rest of the meal.

  “Lordy,” said his mother, “I’ve been as a busy as a cat on a hot tin roof today!” She looked at me and confided, “Doug tells me you’re quite the cook. I can’t compete, but I’ve made his favorite dish.”

  That turned out to be her famous chow mein, featuring canned bean sprouts, canned mushrooms, bouillon cubes, and molasses. With dinner we drank hot coffee.

  “I like the way you wear you hair,” said his mother. “It’s so unusual.” She gave Doug’s stepfather a quick glance and added, “Did Doug tell you that we have a cousin who is Jewish?”

  “No,” I replied. “He hasn’t mentioned that.” She looked away and then asked, “Do you understand Doug’s art?” I nodded, trying to picture Big Gray, the flocked form he had just finished, in the living room. It would tower over the TV.

  “I do admire it!” she said, dishing out seconds. “Looks like we’re going to have rain next week.” We managed to discuss the weather until it was time for Doug’s favorite dessert, apricot-upside-down cake. It was very familiar; my kitchen shelves were lined with canned apricots.

  We were out the door by seven. “That went well,” Doug said as we left. “My mother likes you.”