The Language of Baklava (31 page)

“That’s right,” Bud growls. “That’s right. Time to go home now, you. Go back to your people and your girls and your—your
—cars
!” He follows Ray all the way down the stairs, shouting, “Go on now, time to go home!” The sounds of
Truth or Consequences
follow them to the door.

I don’t let myself look out the front window. I know I will only see Bud banishing from our property the sole man in the world who will ever be interested in me. I can’t believe any of this has happened. I am not prepared to accept that life can be so unfair. I tremble with indignation and furious excitement: A boy liked me! My father chased him away!

When Bud comes back in he looks invigorated, as if he’s just gone for a jog. There’s an expansive mellowness settling over him, as if he’s preparing to be tolerant about the whole sordid affair. I can barely contain myself. I glare at him while he settles into his armchair, puts up his feet, nods to himself, and plucks up the paper. I finally burst out, “How could you, how could you?” my voice a pure, scorching wave. “Don’t you care about me at all? Don’t you care about my feelings?”

Bud looks at Mom in astonishment. “What? What feelings?” he says.

“It’s not fair!”

He looks utterly blank. He looks at Mom.

I appeal to my mother, who, I know, was raised by a reliably American mother. “What about you, Mom?” I say. “Didn’t you go out on dates? Didn’t you go to malt shops with boys and wear poodle skirts and go to your prom and everything? What about that?”

She allows this, nodding. “It’s true, but if your father feels so strongly about this matter, I think we should respect that.”

I am abandoned. My mouth is open, my indignation shimmers. I swing my focus between the two of them. “Why didn’t you just lock me into some prison in Jordan when you had the chance?”

Bud thumps the arm of the upholstered chair, infuriated all over again. “I wanted to!”

“I wish you had. It’d be better than here.”

Bud is incredulous. It’s as if he can’t even see me. He widens his eyes, but he can’t make my features out. “Did you hear that?” he asks Mom. “Look at her—look at that belligerence. In Jordan, daughters never look at their fathers like that. If I looked at my father like that— my father would beat us every day! You don’t know what a family is!” He’s shaking his finger at me, his voice a rampaging force. He’ll go all night long and I’ll stay up, too, and we’ll burn down everything in our path.

We fight to the brink of exhaustion. Bud’s logic is free-form, leaping from half memories to accusations to wild conclusions. There are few connections between any of it, so it’s almost impossible to fight back. He makes speeches about what a bad daughter I am, we all are, all daughters in the world are. He recalls moments of grief and suffering at my hands, offenses that I’ve utterly forgotten or didn’t know about in the first place. “Do you think I’ve forgotten about the day you told me to ‘never mind’?” he demands. “Do you think I forgot about that?” He’s relentless.

But I can’t hold on to my anger as I tire. It seeps out of me in wisps, leaving me in a sort of trance. I slump in my chair as all of it falls away from me—Ray, freedom, the future. Eventually I’m so tired that I’d give it all away in exchange for a chance to go to bed. I end the fight in the most expedient way I know how: I let my face crumple, my chin caves in, and the warm, ignominious tears come. Bud, from his family of tough boys, is stupefied by the sight of female tears. He waves his hands in the air, a little frightened, and the spell is broken. “There, there,” he says. “We’ll forget the whole thing.”

I rub my eyes and stand to go. My throat aches from anger and from crying. Then I notice something on the table. The plate. It’s there like a message in a bottle. Apparently, at some point during my father’s earlier speeches, Ray managed to eat the food that Bud had set out. The rice and okra have been scooped up, the crisp lamb kibbeh is gone. He did it somehow, without anyone noticing. The sight of Ray’s empty plate is so potent that I hold still inside myself and don’t even let myself smile. And I know then that there are all sorts of things that can be done that don’t require anyone’s permission.

COWBOY KIBBEH

TOPPING

2 medium tomatoes, sliced
thin (optional)

Soak the bulgur in water to cover for 2 hours. Drain well and set aside.

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

Prepare the stuffing: In a small saucepan, sauté the onion in olive oil until lightly browned; transfer to a bowl and set aside. Sauté the pine nuts in the same oil; transfer to the bowl. Sauté the lamb in the remaining oil with salt and pepper. Drain off the fat and then combine in the bowl with the onions and pine nuts; set aside.

In a large bowl, mix together the bulgur, lamb, water, and onion, seasoning with salt and pepper. Press half of the mixture in the bottom of a baking dish. Sprinkle the stuffing over this. Spread the second half of the bulgur mixture over the stuffing and press down lightly. Top with tomato slices if desired. Bake for 45 minutes at 350 degrees, then remove and cut into squares.

MAKES 4 TO 6 SERVINGS.

The next day, Ray passes me a note in English and I meet him after class in the library. We pick a large, polished wooden table near the card catalog and sit at a right angle from each other, our joined hands resting on the amber-colored table beside a stack of books. At first I feel frightened and excited, my breath rippling through me like electric sparks. But then I realize I don’t feel guilty at all, not one bit, and no one in the library cares that we are holding hands anyway.

The whispering, watery sounds of the room are soothing to me. We don’t talk very much, so I’m able to study the way our fingers knit together. I look at the black tufts of hair above Ray’s knuckles and the neat, smooth trim of his nails and a few dark lines of grease near his palms—the kind that remain even after you’ve scrubbed and scrubbed. I marvel at how natural it feels to link hands with this boy, a stranger.

We avoid talking about the previous night, instead discussing our homework, our eccentric substitute English teacher, the trouble Ray is having with his Thunderbird. Finally he looks at me through a fine spray of hair over his forehead and says, “But you know what? I really liked that food your dad gave me to eat last night. Especially that sort of crunchy one? With the tomatoes?”

I have to suppress a nervous burst of laughter. “The lamb kibbeh?”

“Yeah,” he says, his eyes a little far away. “That was the
best thing.
”

Ray and I never progress beyond holding hands, and I don’t really see much of him after that day. Once I’ve established that I’m brave enough for secret meetings and hand holding, I don’t feel especially interested in Ray anymore. But oddly enough, he seems to feel that he and Bud have struck up a friendship. If Ray is driving by while Bud is out on his riding mower, he’ll honk and wave and Bud will wave back. Sometimes he’ll pull over, and he and Bud will chat like old pals.

Bud will come into the house looking for cucumbers and cheese, salted nuts and tomatoes. “Nice boy, that Raymond,” he’ll say. “A real good kid.”

FIFTEEN

Food and Art

Our regular English teacher, Mrs. Loprienzo, goes on maternity leave, and when the substitute takes over, everything changes. It turns out that Mr. Sims, a man with an innocent, simple-minded expression, has a fondness for modern classics. My English class veers away from studying the ruthlessly dull Leatherstocking tales and begins reading works that were written in the same century in which we were born. Mr. Sims brings in cases of new books, one of which is an anthology with the words
Here and Now
on the cover. These are full-bodied, difficult, modern works. I want to crawl into these books and live there.

One afternoon, Mr. Sims brings in an oversize book and reads twenty pages of
The Waste Land
to us in a theatrical, puffed-up voice, gesturing with one open hand as if to tap the ideas floating around his head. I don’t understand most of what I’m hearing, but I feel it. I’m entranced and distracted by the writings of Sylvia Plath, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, F. Scott Fitzgerald, thrilled by Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, and Edna St. Vincent Millay, startled by John Dos Passos, Flannery O’Connor, and William Carlos Williams. One of the books that most intrigues me is
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas,
replete with Stein’s descriptions of salons and dinners full of painters and writers. I’ve grown up within the curve of dinner parties; the years of inviting and cooking vibrate behind the pages as I read Stein’s descriptions of a witty, artistic community. What seemed parental and dully natural to me now becomes charged with possibility. I glimpse the electricity of the dinner party, the way that one might join the perfect yet incongruous worlds of eating and thinking, food and art.

Inspired, I ditto off fragrant blue hand-printed invitations to come to my house and read literary works, to perform and “converse.” Across the bottom I’ve written, “A light French Picnic will be served.” I bestow these invitations upon a selection of friends whom I have deemed sophisticated and urbane enough to invite. This group consists of my three closest girlfriends, Olga, Sonja, and Mahaleani, and the three American boys with long hair in my English class.

We get to the house before my parents get home from work, so I can sidle my friends in the front door, through the house, and out the back door. We sprawl in the long, blowsy backyard grass, and my sisters watch us from the kitchen window. Suzy opens the back door. “You know that Dad’s going to be home soon,” she says. They don’t know what to make of this. I haven’t told anyone I was planning to do this, so no one has had a chance to tell me not to. Boys have always been forbidden in the house, but nonetheless there we are, sitting together in a circle, reading aloud. I’m hoping that Bud will back down from making a scene in front of a group.

We sit cross-legged while Jay Franklin strums his yellow guitar. Jay wears his hair in an unbroken oily sheath, propped to one side of the rim of his glasses. He closes his eyes and leans into his song: a quavering plea. The spring sun heats the grass, releasing its sweet, starchy scent. I close my eyes halfway and the light reddens my lashes. It wouldn’t be so hard to imagine myself falling for Jay Franklin. Why not? He isn’t obviously good-looking, but he has wonderful, watery blue eyes and Coke-bottle glasses, and he’s brave enough to sing this awful stuff to us in his feeble, half-shattered voice. I think he must be sensitive and, therefore, completely different from Bud.

I’m almost sixteen now, and circuits of feeling run through me. What I think I want is love. I want to be in love, to be set loose in a mystery. I lean back into the scent of dandelion dust, the sun-cooked dirt and grass, and Jay’s fragile singing sounds lush and promising. Something in that sound and that sweep and that light is just what I want, and exactly the thing I’m not to have. Boys. Their hands and voices and minds, hidden and uncharted.

Next comes Jerry Depiza’s reading of a short story that renders in minute, Escher-like detail a scene in which a man bullies his young son into shooting a deer. It’s a drippy yarn, meant to be read through tears, but I’m enchanted. It may be the first story I’ve actually known to exist outside of a classroom. Finally, Martin Chapelle gives an impassioned reading from
The Communist Manifesto
that I ignore. Olga opts out of the performance; she has already decided that she’s a conceptual artist who will make assemblages out of things like kitchen appliances. And my other two girlfriends shake their heads when I ask them to read. “We’re the audience,” Sonja says. “Somebody has to listen.”

They look at me expectantly, and I feel the gravity of my hostess-performer role. First I try to bribe the audience by bringing forth the French picnic from a Styrofoam cooler. The menu is inspired by M. F. K. Fisher’s descriptions of meals in the Alps and on the French Riviera, but it is influenced more specifically by the availability of ingredients in upstate New York. The sandwiches are meant to be composed of a little Brie and prosciutto tucked inside buttered baguettes. But the closest I could come to baguettes at a moment’s notice are the spongy loaves in paper bags that the Super Duper Supermarket calls “Italian bread,” the only unsliced bread in the store. The kindly grocer with the bristling eyebrows at the Greek import market downtown unearthed some prosciutto—at stunning expense—but no Brie. He did, however, have fresh wet balls of a white cheese that he advised me to place sliced on the bread with fresh tomato and basil leaves and dark green olive oil, so this is what we do. There is also supposed to be a foie gras pâté and cornichons and whole-grain mustard, but, finding none of these items at the Super Duper, I guiltily substitute chips and French onion dip. Dessert is based on our French teacher’s junior year abroad in Aixen-Provence, when he learned to eat slim black bars of good chocolate upon a baguette. Our version: Hershey’s and more Italian bread.