Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots (32 page)

“Let us sit,” he said, taking Victoria by the elbows. “You need to rest.”

She resisted him. She snatched her arms away.

“I cannot sit anymore,” she said.

He tried to remember how he’d once felt about her. They were the same people, weren’t they? He believed in chemistry. He believed in love. And he believed that he still loved her; was determined to. More than anything, he wished they could start over. He imagined a crisp white canvas coming down from the sky and rolling out in front of them. He realized that in order to love more, he would have to feel less. This was what it meant to love, he thought. It required a certain degree of forgetting, of loss; it was like rushing into freezing water, jumping with your eyes closed into a dark hole, not making a sound.

Victoria held the toothbrush in the air like a flag. When she smiled, he was surprised to see the beautiful symmetry of her teeth. Her nightgown was long and sorry, and it now appeared incongruous on her, as though the very idea of napping had forced itself on her, against her will, all these months. She scratched one foot with her other foot, not moving her arms. As she stood in the afternoon light, Joseph noticed two silver hairs on the right side of her head. They hadn’t been there before. And yet, he was grateful to them. At least, he thought, he’d not been the only one grieving for months.

He went over to the countertop, put his face to it, and licked. She clapped and raised her hands in the air. She threw her head back with laughter.

“Isn’t it clean!” she said. “It’s clean!”

“So clean,” he said, and he could feel himself begin to laugh too.

As the weeks went by, Victoria continued to do things. She went to the Fulton Market every morning, despite how dangerous she knew it was. She stayed there for hours. When she got home, she cooked. All day, she cooked. She cooked and hummed and kept the windows wide open. She knelt on the floor and peeled cucumbers into a dishtowel. She cracked pomegranates and squeezed out the juice with cheesecloth. She made all the things they ate in Baghdad:
kba, tershana, kitchri
and
ambah, sambusak ab tam’r
. She made extra for the neighbors. She used all the money they had on spices and pans, and when Joseph couldn’t pay the rent, he didn’t tell her. He asked their landlady to take pity on them. And because he’d also told the landlady what had happened, she shrugged and said, “You good man. You bring me money when money come.”

Everything was different. Joseph woke to the sounds of the stove clicking on. He was happy. Victoria made him cardamom coffee and he brought it to work. It kept him thinking all day of her bare feet. Flat feet, moving around the apartment with purpose. In the afternoons, he walked all the way home with his body pitched forward. Getting there faster faster faster. Some days, from a block away, he could see a crowd gathering outside his building, looking up at his window toward the dark, orange flavors of Victoria’s cooking. And he felt proud walking through the front door. He felt important.

And just like that, he never went back to the meeting place by Dr. Espy’s office, never leaned on a hydrant, waiting. Never ventured into that dank, sticky bar for midday drinks or shared the weight of his body with someone else. Letting go came naturally, as if the weather had suddenly changed. The day after the baby was born, he’d gone to the pay phone to call. His hand hovered over the dial, but he couldn’t remember the number. For the first time in months, he simply couldn’t recall it. He laughed out loud at himself. He hung up.

As he headed back to their apartment, he imagined himself and Victoria as a small but unshakable unit, walking under an umbrella together as the world tornadoed around them. How could it be any other way? Their accents, their apartment, their memories—it bound them, kept them. They’d met at a market in Baghdad. They fell in love. They would be all right.

Later, he asked her to squeeze his hand. And she did, smiling, only half mocking him. He had to close his eyes to bear it.
This,
he thought,
is the only way forgiveness can be effective—when both people have regrets and hope, both.

The year that followed seemed to Joseph the happiest and saddest of his life. It was the kind of year that had no beginning or end. The seasons made their way open-mouthed from one to the next. Joseph and Victoria anticipated them in a way they never had before. They looked forward to things. They went on walks in the evenings, embracing the weather and changes in the trees. It was during that year that they saw the Statue of Liberty, Macy’s, and Central Park. It was like it had been before. The two of them and the city of New York and everything else mostly behind them, quiet but tender, like delicate scars.

Just as there was incredible happiness, there was fierce disappointment that Joseph couldn’t shake. At night when Victoria lay sleeping, a resentment would stir in the pit of his stomach, all acid and bile. The longer he watched her, the angrier he became. How could she sleep, he wondered, if she knew the pain she’d caused him? And yet, just as his anger reached its pinnacle, her face would quickly clench and release, as if her insides had been seized by some invisible hand. He’d feel sorry then. The resentment would wane, and the anger would realign against himself. He was so much at fault too.

It went like this. Back and forth. On and on.

It was during that year that Joseph suggested Victoria cook for the bakery. They sold her food on Fridays. Her breakfast bread went faster than anything else. Her almond
malfuf
were gone by noon. They had to make a sign:
ONE PER CUSTOMER, PLEASE.
They were gone in ten minutes, five minutes; a woman offered triple the price for the whole lot. Soon, Victoria was cooking every day of the week. Some days, she came to the bakery and stood outside just to watch. Her face oohed and aahed as each of her items flew off the shelf. It made Joseph laugh. He’d never seen her so full of herself. It even seemed she’d grown taller, her body less stiff. He bought her a turquoise necklace. She wore it everywhere and moved her chest forward like a peacock.

Still, some nights he woke to her sitting, legs crossed beneath her, dabbing at her breasts as tears spilled down her face. Her nightshirt was stained like drenched soil. Some nights, he sat up too. He consoled her. Other nights, he pretended to be asleep, only half immune to the sadness of the thing.

One day in the late spring, Victoria was frying eggplant. Joseph stood next to her by the stove. He leaned around her, trying to pluck a piece of eggplant from the pan, but the oil kept popping and he drew back his hand. Victoria didn’t help him, didn’t take one out with her fork. Usually, she did. A lump grew in his throat. She was thinking of something. He was afraid of it. Maybe she was going to want to talk about the baby. But finally, things were good. They were happy. Victoria had taken to washing his face in the morning, holding a steaming towel with one hand, the other hand on the back of his head. Or, what if, he wondered, she knew what he’d done? What if she didn’t think their failures canceled out the way he had so doggedly convinced himself that they did?

Now she was looking at him, her eyes set like two rocks in a glass. Joseph’s throat twisted.
Please,
he thought.
Do not ask me.
Quickly, he found something to say.

“Are you remembering Baghdad?” he asked.

“No,” she said. “Why?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “You looked like that.”

She smiled. Her eyes became sharper. Whatever she had been about to say, she was now sure of. He had made it worse.

“I’d like to have a restaurant,” she said. Joseph didn’t say anything. He was relieved and he wasn’t. Once again, he felt himself wondering about her—about her capacity for sadness and, if not sadness, empathy, at the very least.

“The people enjoy my cooking, don’t they?” she said. “They ask for more.”

She was swinging the wooden spoon in her hands. Her mouth was wet with excitement.

Joseph knew: he had to move on. He didn’t have the right to hold this over her forever. Not even just in his heart.

He realized only then, as he burned his fingers on a fragrant piece of eggplant, that forgiveness was born from loss. It required giving up and moving past dark corners where grudges, wrapped in dusty clothes and stacked like corpses, lay idle, unmoving.

“They love your cooking,” he said and took a deep breath. He realized that he missed her already. He felt like she’d just returned to him. But, he thought, he’d done what he needed to do. Now she could do the same. And no one ever died from missing, he told himself. He was quite sure.

“So,” he said. “All right. Let’s.”

T
WO HOURS AFTER
I found out I had a real grandmother, a biological grandmother, my mother announced she was going through menopause.

“Let’s just say,” she said, “it’s the end of being a woman.”

“It is?” I said.

“All the great parts about being female,” she said. “It all ends now.”

She crossed her arms into an X in front of her, and then uncrossed them violently. Done.

“One day you’ll understand,” she said, leaning her head against the back of the couch and tracing her hairline with her fingertips. Her eyes were closed and fluttering. Her chest inflated, deflated.

“You’re far too young to understand. But learning how to be both feminine and powerful is the best thing a woman can do for herself. It’s an art, really. It’s the only reason I survived.”

Usually, I’d be killing myself to get to the heart of what she was trying to say, hoping that something important could be attributed to me. But now I was distracted, away somewhere. It felt like I’d had seventeen café au laits, though I hadn’t had a single one. Part of me was terrified that the secret was written all over my face and my mother would see it, and it wouldn’t go according to plan and all my hard work would be ruined. Off I’d go to boarding school. Another part wanted to tell her sooner rather than later, before she found out some other way, but I dreaded it. I wanted to mull things over, talk to Blot, enjoy Victoria before I had to give her up to my mother. Another part still was disappointed that I hadn’t been able to match Victoria’s emotion the way I had hoped. But when she said she knew who I was and she looked at me like she was going to cry, it felt like a very heavy foot was standing on my chest.

Formations of words collected in my head and then slipped away like spaghetti on a spoon. There were some food magazines on the table and I paged through them slowly, just to keep from being idle. I stopped at an article on celeriac, left it open, pretended to be very interested. All the while I stayed quite still, as if my mouth were packed with soda bubbles and too much sudden movement would result in a giant, delirious explosion of words, all of them wrong, all of them ruining what I’d been trying so hard to perfect.

“When I was your age,” she said, now smiling, “I had so many boyfriends. A lot of them were older, much older.”

I was about to say something about Blot.

“Which is not right for you, cookie,” she said. “You’re not ready for any of that just yet. You’re very, very young for your age. You’d be taken advantage of. It’s okay to take your time.”

She looked at me, her eyes not interacting with mine but like confident periods at the ends of her sentences.

“Look,” she said. “What I’m trying to tell you is that I’m thrilled. I gave you a life that no one gave me. I gave you time to grow up and to grow into yourself. And just look at you!”

I looked at her. She looked genuinely proud for exactly one second.

“A life of leisure,” she said, as if the term had just dawned on her. “I’m not saying that you’ve taken full advantage of it. You haven’t. And actually, I’m quite angry about that, but that’s not the point right now. The point I’m making is that I’ve done well by you. As a mother.”

I was starting to get itchy in my chest. I flicked a table lamp on and off four times and pinched the backs of my knees.

“So,” she said. “Maybe my job as a woman is done.”

Her eyes were on me, her face too bright.

“Right,” I said. “Yes. It’s been great. Everything!”

She was waiting for me now, waiting for more. Her silence was an uncovered manhole that I fell into every time. She knew something was up.

“What if,” I said, straightening my posture, flattening the wrinkles on my sweater, “I knew a really big secret?”

She cocked her head but didn’t seem intrigued. She breathed in and out and blinked slowly, like I was five and had woken her from a nap.

“A secret,” she said. And then: “Okay.”

“Well,” I said. I crossed my hands in my lap as if holding something inside: a magic bunny or a special key. “What if I knew
two
really big secrets?”

“One isn’t enough?” she said.

I refused to let the disappointment stick.

“One secret has a lot to do with the other,” I said. “They’re not entirely separate but they’re both brilliant.” Her word.

“You’re pregnant!” she shouted and erupted into laughter.

“No,” I said patiently, trying to bring her back.

“Okay, okay,” she said. “I’ll be serious.”

I was waiting for her to ask me about the secrets, paw for them.

“I’m confused,” she said. “Am I supposed to be guessing?”

I realized that I wasn’t sure. It hadn’t been my plan to tell her like this. But that’s how these things always played out with her.

I wanted there to be a big reveal, something dramatic, lots of buildup so that my mother could gasp when I finally said,
I found the recipe. And not just that; I found them. For you. For you, Mommy.
In real life, I never called her that.

“I don’t know, Lorca,” she said. “You got a tattoo that says you love me?”

“No,” I said. I tried to compose my thoughts. “Did you have family dinners as a kid?” I asked. She looked intrigued.

“Does it count,” she asked, “if we didn’t like each other?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Okay,” she said, a little disappointed in me. “Then, yes.”