The Language of Baklava (12 page)

Place the lamb in a large pot, cover with water, and bring to a boil. Turn down the heat and simmer for 20 minutes. Skim off any fat that drifts to the surface, leaving behind a lamb broth.

In another large pot, stir the egg into the buttermilk and bring to a boil over medium heat,
stirring constantly;
otherwise the buttermilk will curdle. Reduce the heat to a simmer and continue stirring, for about 20 minutes.

Transfer the lamb to the buttermilk mixture and reserve the broth. Add 1 cup of the lamb broth to the buttermilk mixture and stir thoroughly. Simmer for about 1 hour, stirring occasionally. Add salt and pepper to taste.

In the meantime, cook the rice in 2 cups of the lamb broth. Add salt to taste.

Sauté the onions in 1 tablespoon of the butter until lightly browned. Add the onions to the buttermilk mixture toward the end of the cooking.

Layer the bread on the bottom of a large serving platter or wide, shallow cooking tray. Pour enough of the buttermilk mixture to soak the bread. Spread the rice over the bread in a low dome. Place the lamb over the rice. Pour the buttermilk over the meat (but not so much that it becomes soupy. Reserve any extra buttermilk sauce and serve it on the side for those who’d like more).

In a small pan, sauté the pine nuts or almonds in 2 tablespoons of the butter until the nuts are lightly browned. Sprinkle over the meat.

Dot the whole dish with slices of the remaining butter before serving.

SERVES 6.

FOUR

A House and a Yard

America is a cold breeze that snaps us awake. We’ve been gone for a year, but once we’re back, I keep recognizing types of trees, stores, buildings, and blurting out, “Oh yeah!” We’ve left Jordan, with its lush winds, dust, and sun-stained air. When I wake in a hotel bed on the first morning back in America, I’m dazed by a blankness around me: the sleekly painted walls, the air slack without the scents of mint, olive, and jasmine, and an immobilizing silence. I close my eyes and conjure the songbirds Mrs. Haddadin kept in a gold cage hanging from a tree branch; the wobble of Munira’s singing as she dashed a broom through the courtyard. It is almost too much to imagine I will never hear them again, so I lie in bed for as long as Mom will let me, listening.

We’ve returned to Syracuse, to a split-level house that does not have another family living in the upstairs apartment or a communal courtyard or thick hedges of mint. But this house does have a generous backyard for tearing around in. All around us are trees and confined, suburban fields.

There is something mothlike about the houses in this new neighborhood—in the morning they look half-dissolved. They are sided in tentative shades of beige, dove gray, avocado, cream, and colonial ivory that shimmer in the cold New York morning fog. There are picture windows, two-car garages, foyers, family rooms, and big basements. The neighbors seem hesitant to emerge from their glimmering homes, and we almost never see anyone outside. But we quickly find out about Mrs. Manarelli next door. She lives in a house nearly identical to ours, with her grumpy husband, Johnny, and her son, Marco, who’s my age and notable for having what could be the world’s largest collection of Monkees 45s. Mrs. Manarelli has powdered white down all over her face, two rouged spots high on her cheeks, and a low, peaked hairline. But she also has a gaze that feels soft as kisses on both your cheeks and a way of looking at you that makes you want to lean into her. Her parents were both from Italy, and since she was born in Brooklyn she says that makes her an immigrant, too.

Mrs. Manarelli travels around the neighborhood with covered bundles that at first I think are babies. Then she comes to our house and I find out that it’s food: pasta slippery with fresh pesto, or a plate of grilled sausages, or a whole roasted chicken. She cooks and then she looks for people to feed, because Johnny is always on a diet and Marco is delicate and sensitive and allergic to everything. When she and Bud meet, it’s as if they’ve found each other at last. She raps on the glass of the kitchen door as Bud fries some lentils and tomatoes and onions. “Hey, you!” she calls. “Whatcha doing in there? What is that in the pan?”

Bud lets her in and she waves at us on her way to the stove. “You put butter or what in there?”

And so their conversation begins.

She hovers around my father while he cooks, asking accusatory questions about his technique and attempting to doctor the spices. He laughs and tries to hold her back with one arm.

“What you doing it like that for?” she demands, her newly set hair in a stiff wave around her head. Then she bawls through the kitchen door at my mother (who’s reading, stretched out easy, long legged, on the couch in the next room), “Pat! He’s about to put
something yellow
in this beautiful rice!”

“Sumac wakes it up,” says Bud the poet. “You don’t know yet. Just wait.”

“I don’t want my rice awake or sleeping,” says Mrs. Manarelli. “Can’t I just have it in a bowl?”

But once she tries it, spooning it right out of the pan, she nods with her spoon in the air and says, “Okay, yeah, I see your point.”

My favorite neighbors are my new best friend, Sally Holmes, and her parents. Bud says that they are “real Americans.” Sally has a pert turned-up nose and pink freckles and ringlets of ribbon red hair. Her mother wears her hair in a glorious upright pillar called a bouffant. Every year, Sally’s parents put up a ceiling-high, rotating, carol-piping, aluminum-silver Christmas tree in their family room. When I first behold this tree, my heart speeds up and little jittery bursts pulse under my skin: I feel shame over our own three-foot, stationary, non-snow-sprayed tabletop version. Sally and I sprawl stomach down on the floor of her darkened living room and play Ouija board by the red, green, and white strobe lights of her tree. We ask, “Who does Harry Meyer like?” and, “Will I ever in my life have a boyfriend?” The planchette flies over the board, spelling out hostile maniac answers like “You wish you, HA HA HA” and “Never you you never now.”

Mrs. Holmes comes out of the kitchen with a silver tray of instant chocolate pudding in single-serving aluminum tubs and says, “Cocktail hour, ladies!” It tastes like burnt plastic, but I study the way Sally and Mrs. Holmes scrape their tubs and lick the spoons. Later she pours us crystal cups of gummy eggnog from a carton. I jiggle my glass, fascinated with the way its surface quivers in place.

This is American food, I tell myself. I don’t like it, I think, because I’ve somehow forgotten it. I must remember.

The days grow crisp and sharp. People raise their eyebrows, look at the clouds, and say things like “Yup, it’s coming all right.”

On the news, the reporters recount stories about how many people were buried alive in cars under snowdrifts in previous years and how many more they anticipate going under this year. Then I look up one day from a book I’m reading in English class to see that the windows of the classroom are filled with whirling, white chaos. There is no day, no night, just snow and our huddled weak light inside.

Three days after Christmas, Sally’s father, Max, unravels the garden hose and floods their backyard; by the next morning the yard has frozen into a skin-smooth skating rink. Sally loans me her old skates and she wears her new Christmas pair, the leather a gleaming bone color. At first my ankles feel loose and untrustworthy and I sway from side to side, but the feeling gradually starts to come back to me, from years of skating at the public rink with my grandmother. As I remember, I begin to relax, to lower my wobbling, windmill hands. Sally and I spend hours that day skating in circles. Mrs. Holmes brings us hot chocolate with tiny crunchy marshmallows floating in it. We sip and warm our fingers, but we stay out on the ice. The sun goes down early and my toes start to tingle and then hurt, but I can’t stop.

Finally Mrs. Holmes stands in their back door. The light glows through her apron ruffle and makes a halo of her shellacked hair. It’s time for Sally to go in for dinner. “Diana, honey,” Mrs. Holmes says, “your mom just called, she’s looking for you.”

I wave to Sally, who clomps up the back steps in her skates. I’m about to leave as well, but I stay for just one more turn around the rink. Then I think I will take one more. And then one more and one more. Now that I remember skating, I can’t quite bring myself to stop. I keep gliding through the expanding dark. After a while, I notice to my surprise that my toes have stopped hurting. How can I stop now? A heavy snow starts to fall, and I hear the warm family murmur and the clink of dinner through the wall of Sally’s house, and this gives me a delicious sense of sadness that I press into. I imagine that I am a poor, familyless orphan condemned to skate forever while the rest of the world eats its cozy dinner. For some reason, this makes me think about Jordan, my friends there and the balmy air of the courtyard. I haven’t thought of them in months, and the unexpected memory makes my throat tighten, and then my lashes freeze together and my scarf freezes to the breath on my lips.

Eventually, I hear footsteps crunching along the side of the house through the glazed snow and my mother’s navy blue sigh through the frozen air. She allows me to walk home in Sally’s ice skates. The streets and houses sparkle with cold, and the night looks mauve in the wells and footprints of earlier pedestrians. We pass two cars freshly stranded in snowdrifts and another spinning its wheels on the ice.

“People should just skate everywhere,” I remark as I teeter along. “That would solve all kinds of things.” I laugh when Mom inquires about my extremities. My toes feel dumb and blocky as chunks of wood. “But they don’t even hurt, Mom! Not even a little!” I boast.

“Well, that’s nice, dear,” Mom says, squinting toward our house.

At home, I sit on the foyer bench, tug off the borrowed skates, and release my toes, which still feel lifeless and blunt. For a moment I flash on Hamouda’s wooden leg and wonder if something about this isn’t quite normal. Mom peels off my socks, and my feet are an astonishing beet red except for my toes, which are grayish green. “Ooh,” says my sister Suzy, touching them. “Lookit.”

“Wow,” I say, bent over them. “Whooie. They don’t even hurt.”

Suzy taps one. “It feels like Super Balls.”

“Hey . . .” I laugh. “I don’t even feel that! Try this one.” We work our way down my toes, plonking each one in turn like plates on a xylophone: nothing, nothing, nothing!

Eventually I look up and notice that Mom’s eyes are burning. She is staring at my feet and clutching her mouth with her hand. I gulp air as adrenaline charges through me. “Mom, Mom, Mom!” I bleat.
Am I
dying?

Bud appears, eyes wide. “What did you do with your feet?” he bellows, as if I’d given them away.

Mom says, “Should we call a doctor?”

Then something weirder happens: My mouth falls open and I’m shrieking, “No, no, no, nooooo! I don’t wanna gooooo!” Tears burst from my eyes. My panic shocks even me—I’m vividly reliving my last doctor’s visit, when we were given six inoculations at once for our trip to Jordan and my arm swelled up as if it’d been pounded with a crowbar. I cling to Mom’s leg, fall over my useless feet to my knees. “Please don’t make me, please, I’ll be gooooood!” I howl, my voice husky with terror. Monica starts crying upstairs in her crib. Suzy starts crying, too; she clings to my arm.

“Okay, okay, okay!” Mom shouts, covering her ears with the flat of her hands.

Besides, there’s no easy way to take me anywhere. The snow has started up again, shaking and fierce in the windows, and cars are winding sideways through the unplowed neighborhood streets. While Mom rubs my feet, Bud calls his sister in Jordan, the famous Auntie Aya, who can cure anything.

The sounds of Arabic wash through the room. There is a flash, a soothing memory of my aunt’s stone house. I breathe; I begin to edge back down to earth. After he tells her the problem, the first few minutes of their conversation are about Bud apologizing for being such a fancy idiot and moving us all to this dangerous land. This never would have happened in Jordan: “Yes, yes, of course you’re right, I know, I know. . . .” Then he is getting instructions. He thanks her, hangs up. There is the sound of water bursting into a pot, then the pot banging onto the stove. A scrambling of cabinets opening, jars clinking.

“Hon?” Mom calls out, her voice taut. “What are you doing in there? What did Aya say?”

“She said make soup!” he cries.

I stare at Mom’s face, afraid to look away. “What’s going to happen, Mom?” I ask. “What’s going to happen?” I can’t look at my toes anymore. Now the dead color frightens me. I’m no longer sure they’re attached to me or that the ghoulish whiteness won’t begin to creep up my ankles. I can’t remember exactly how many times I ask what’s going to happen, I only know that she doesn’t answer.

Finally, Bud brings out his soup, steaming and fragrant in the pot. It smells less like soup than perfume, like oranges and flowers. He gives me a mug of it, and the mist in my face makes me tranquil and drowsy. He’s poured the rest into a big pan, added some tapwater to cool it to a middling warmth, put it on the floor, and told me to place my feet in it. “In the soup?” I look at Mom and she looks at Bud, who doesn’t look entirely certain. But five-year-old Suzy claps and says, “Feet in the soup!” So I plunk them in.

For a while not much happens. We all stare at the mysterious soup. Now my feet seem even more alien, like some kind of pink fish asleep in a puddle. I sip at my mug of soup, the bits of herbs bright and appealing, mingled with chewy morsels of orange peel. It is too dark and earthy, to my child’s palate, to taste delicious, but something inside of me is called away by it. I start to forget about my sleeping fish feet. Suzy gets bored and goes to bed. Then, as I am starting to nod off, something does happen. I feel it starting like a sliver, deep inside the bones of my toes. A warmth and then a heat that grows and grows and then flashes like a struck match. I shriek and yank my feet out, crying, “The soup is burning me!” And Mom and Bud both grab me as if I might fly away. Mom holds me tightly, and Bud says, “Don’t be afraid.” And Mom says, “It’s not the soup burning, honey, it’s your toes.”