The Language of Baklava (13 page)

They hold my feet down in the soup while I shake and my skin turns to silver and my toes bloom red as roses in snow.

Our sprawling neighborhood is filled, in its family rooms and rec rooms and extra bedrooms, with a nation of children. There’s Karen, Carl, Lilah, Raymond, Lisa, Donna, Sally, Jamie, the Malcolm twins, and many more all within the first three blocks of the school bus route. Jamie Faraday used to be best friends with Sally Holmes until I appeared in the lunchroom with my bags full of cold roasted chicken kabobs slathered in hummus and wrapped in pita bread. Sally dragged back the seat beside me, plumped her chin onto the heel of her palm, and said, “What you eating?” Down the length of the long linoleum table, I see Jamie abandoned. She lifts her head and I see myself come into focus; her forehead rises with a look almost like recognition. Now Jamie eyes me warily every time she gets on the bus, takes note of Sally seated beside me, and waves with an enraged little flip of the hand. Then she clatters down the aisle far from our seat into exile.

I notice all this but don’t completely take it in: I’m trying to get my bearings. Throughout our first year back in the States, I seem to see everything through a glittering mist. I hear the expression
American dream
and I think that, somehow, this quality of mistiness must be what it refers to. The children in the neighborhood are so soft and babyish that they barely seem to have outlines. In other ways they are deliberate, remorseless, and exacting. The politics of the school bus and the rumor mill of the classroom are fierce, filled with intrigue and menace. It all feels so different from the good-times kids I knew in Jordan, with their shared gum, their sharp, brown shins and broken-toothed grins. In America, I learn there is a certain way to dress (hip-huggers, flared jeans), a certain way to wear your hair (gleaming, Prince Valiant bobs), a certain lunchbox to carry (Barbie for girls, G.I. Joe for boys—I am nearly cast out of fourth grade when I show up with a Flintstones box). And there are, it turns out, many things that—under any circumstances—you do not do.

For example, the neighbors don’t barbecue in their front yards. That is apparently what the backyard is for. The backyards here are fenced off and guarded—spaces as private as other people’s dreams. But our front yard has the better view and has easier access to the front door, which is closer to the kitchen and hence a very practical place for grilling. Also, the front yard will allow us to share food, cross our legs on the plastic lawn chairs, and gossip with the neighbors, as we did in Jordan. We have survived a long, howling, isolated Syracuse winter that hardened into filthy icebergs of decaying snow. By April, Bud is ready to pronounce it spring and set up his hibachi. On the first warmish sunny day, we drag out the picnic table, digging mud furrows through the half-frozen yard. Bud has chicken marinated in olive oil, vinegar, rosemary, and a whole head of garlic. Its butter yellow skin hisses and crackles over the coals, and the aroma fills my head. The beautiful charred smell of the grill circulates through the spring air and bare tree branches, still shocked with cold.

“DISTRACT THE NEIGHBORS” GRILLED CHICKEN

This is a delightful, simple dish that will
fill the neighborhood with a gorgeous scent.

In a large bowl, mix the oil, garlic, lemon juice, brown sugar and spices. Add the chicken pieces (you may cut the chicken into cubes, if you prefer), stirring to coat the chicken with the marinade. Cover and refrigerate for 3 hours or longer, turning occasionally.

Place the chicken parts on the grill (if cut in cubes, the chicken can be threaded onto skewers). Grill over hot charcoal for 10 to 15 minutes, turning frequently and basting with the marinade. This is very nice with bread and salad.

SERVES 4.

We set the table, bring out bowls of elegant baba ghanouj and sprightly tabbouleh salad full of bulgur and fresh parsley, a basket of hot bread, and skewers heavy with onion and tomato wedges to be roasted. We sit, marveling over our good fortune—to live in these rolling green lawns, these creamy houses, and the bold vaulted sky of our new neighborhood. The chicken is crusty and redolent with garlic and rosemary. We eat well, shivering just a bit in our jackets. I have a sense—as I often do when I contemplate this blue moon-stone sky—of the future. It is a broad, euphoric feeling. Does the rest of the family feel this way? I don’t know for sure, though I imagine they do. Whenever we all drive home together, Mom asks as we pull in the driveway, “Who do you suppose lives in this little house?”

We are lost in the food, in the smell of grilling, and in the spring when there is a powdery sort of sensation sprinkling down the back of my neck and suddenly I realize a man and a woman are standing at the edge of the street, just a few feet away, staring at us.

I put down my chicken leg, which has rolled juices and smoke between my fingers. “Hi!” I call brightly. New neighbors! They look hungry. The woman starts and blushes, as if she didn’t imagine that we could see them. Her eyes are a pale linen blue, of such crisp clarity that she looks as if she could X-ray with them.

Bud stands, maître d’ of the front lawn. “Welcome. I’m Gus, this is my wife, Pat—”

The two strangers pull back and lightly bump into each other. I dimly register the sense that they didn’t think Bud could talk.

“We just moved here in November.” Bud gestures at the house as if they might assume we were picnicking on someone else’s lawn. “I hope you’re hungry! We’ve got all this crazy food—shish kabob, baba gha—”

The woman’s kerchief white hand flutters up to her throat. There’s a pause, and Bud bends back a little and asks me quietly, “
Haddol
nawal?
” (“Are they Gypsies?”) They look marooned and stateless, standing there mute in the street. But I remember seeing a family of Gypsies once in the old market in Jordan, with their fringed scarves and spangled earrings and high-voltage expressions. These mild, normal people don’t look anything like that—the man in belted beige slacks and tasseled loafers and the woman in a milky, synthetic blouse and culottes. Finally the man clears his throat and says, “Oh no, no, thank you—we . . . we just, um, ate. Um.” He blinks. “We, uh . . . we uh . . . we live over there, on Cumberland Drive? We uh . . . well, our neighbors—you know the Tinerkes on Roanoke Circle?”

Bud frowns, trying to process the name. I picture rabbity little Timmy and chinless Bitsy Tinerke sitting in the third seat from the front of the school bus.

“Anyway. Well, see, they live really close by here, too.” The man and the woman glance at each other. He puts his hands on his slender snaky hips. “Well, they saw you-all out here eating or burning things or something and then called us to say there might be some kind of— I don’t know, exactly—maybe some kind of trouble going on out here? And so we just came on over to check into it—you know, we all like to keep an eye on things—this is a nice neighborhood— and so . . .” His voice trails off; his face is slowly turning an alarming, bruised color.

Bud is still standing there, still frowning, as if this man is speaking in tongues. Then my mother stands and the couple look startled once again. She is nearly six feet tall, with good level shoulders and a long neck and unwavering Cassandra eyes. She also puts her hands on her hips, almost casual. “There’s no trouble here,” she says in her smooth, leaf-blown voice.

They put up their hands and back away as if she is waving a pistol at them. “No, no, no trouble at all—sorry for the—the—misunderstanding. . . . Welcome to the neighborhood!” Then they are gone.

And that’s about when I get the feeling that starts somewhere at the center of my chest, as heavy as an iron ingot, a bit like fear or sadness or anger, but none of these exactly; it is simply there, suspended between my ribs. I look up at the neighborhood and the mist has cleared. All the mean, cheaply framed windows are gaping at us, the sky empty as a gasp.

The next day on the school bus, Jamie climbs on, gives me her hard smile, hesitates, then flounces down on the seat next to me. She tilts her head and parts her lips. I look up in alarm. “Just to let you know,” she says in a sweet, burning way.

“Let me know what?”

She crosses one bare leg over the other, and her brilliant white socks bounce with the rocking of the bus. “Well, you know, of course. My parents saw you out there the other night. I heard them talking with the neighbors. They said it was an ‘unholy disgrace.’ See, okay, the thing is, you better know that in this country nobody eats in the front yard. Really. Nobody.” She looks at me solemnly and sadly, her bangs a perfect cylinder above her brows. “If your family doesn’t know how to behave, my parents will have to find out about getting you out of this neighborhood.”

She squints, pinches her lips together in a narrow, bitten-down way. I can see every pointed pale lash, the pink ridges above her lower lids.

I feel the iron inside of me. It drives through every bit of my body. It vibrates like a bell clapper. I turn away from her and tip my forehead against the frigid pane of glass. There’s an echo in my head saying:
She’s right.
Shame fills me: I see it in the rain stroking the windows, so bright that it burns holes in the backs of my eyes. When Jamie finally slides out of the seat, I don’t even hear her go.

I mope, barely speaking, for a solid week, appetiteless, rejecting Bud’s lunches of stuffed squash,
shawerma,
kibbeh. Even Mom’s peanut butter and Fluff on white bread brings tears to my eyes, and I stuff it in the garbage barrel at the cafeteria.

Mrs. Manarelli asks me what’s wrong.

But I have no way of explaining to her that I have awakened from the mist and now our neighborhood looks hard and squat and drudgy. I have no way to explain Jamie Faraday’s pink-rimmed eyes and long bulb of a nose. Instead I just mope and shrug and sigh wordless blue shadows. So she slants her head to one side, then swats at my behind and tells me I don’t have no sign of a butt at all. And I get indignant and say I do so have signs of a butt. And she says fine, well, okay then, come on inside, I need your help in the kitchen.

The entrance to Mrs. Manarelli’s house smells like roasting tomatoes and garlic. She doesn’t go in much for opening the window curtains, which she says fades everything, so the whole downstairs is doused in shadow and all the furniture crackles under clear plastic covers. Directly over the couch in the living room is a spotlit, gilt-framed painting of the Last Supper, and here the notes of tomato sauce are so pronounced that you could imagine this is what the apostles are eating. Her husband, Johnny, sits on the couch, ankles crossed on the coffee table, always glaring at what seems to be the same word in the newspaper. The family room smells of red wine, fruit, and chocolate, and I know the bedrooms upstairs smell either of bread when she’s baking or of the fresh cedar, lavender, and pine hillsides of another country. Once, in the upstairs bathroom, I was so transported by the scent of rosewater that Mrs. Manarelli found me there a half hour later sitting on the edge of the tub, combing my hair and singing.

We go into the kitchen and there is something shimmering in a gelatin mold on the counter. She instructs me to soak a kitchen towel under the warm-water tap and wipe this along the mold. Then she turns it out onto a pastry board dusted with confectioner’s sugar; a puff of sugar blooms in the air. It is so brilliantly white that it reminds me of the nuns speaking of food that removes all sin. Mrs. Manarelli wipes a knife with the hot towel, cuts into the whiteness, and brings me a slice of
panna cotta
gleaming and dewy on a Melmac plate.

She sits beside me at the speckled linoleum table just like our own and says speculatively, “Only men in my life—husband, son . . . why do you suppose that is?”

I blink. I want to dwell on my own problems, but this is a novel idea to me, in our house of mostly girls. I reach for my grandmother’s favorite explanation: “Maybe it’s because Jesus says so.”

“Jesus!” she snorts. Then she sighs and fans herself and looks off at the place where the ceiling meets the wall. “Eat your dessert,” she says.
“Jesus.”

The first spoonful of
panna cotta
is so startling, I want to laugh or sing or confess my sins. It tastes of sweetness and cream and even of the tiny early flowers the cows have eaten to make the cream.

I take another bite of
panna cotta
and another. Before long, without even realizing it, I’m talking, telling all, secrets dissolving like
panna cotta
in the mouth. Mrs. Manarelli scrapes her chair in closer, puts her chin on her hand, and watches me talk about grilled chicken and the Gypsy people in loafers and the school bus and how Sally now likes me better than Jamie and how that is my fault and Jamie’s cinched smile and how I don’t have the right lunchbox or the right pants or shoes or socks and how things are different from Jordan and how I can never remember my sins in confession so I make up new ones and isn’t that a sin of a sin and does that mean I am going right to hell, are they going to kick us out of the neighborhood, and can we move back to our apartment in the courtyard with my boyfriend Hisham?