Simple Recipes (17 page)

By the time I was seven, the furniture store had fallen on hard times. I still accompanied my father after school or on weekends.
More and more, I caught him resting. He would be sitting on a couch, looking out the window, just waiting. He had always been
a restrained man, and whatever emotions he carried, he kept well hidden. Looking around at the couches and the chairs, my
father simply waited in silence, turning his head at the sound of the door opening.

One
night at dinner, my mother bowed her head. “We better sell now,” she said, her voice low.

Beside me, my father ate quietly, bowl held in one hand, his chopsticks lifting slowly.

“There is nothing else we can do. We can’t afford it any more.”

I pretended I wasn’t listening, the polite thing to do. I kept eating, with my legs swinging quietly under the table.

“What about the mortgage?” she asked, shaking her head. “We can’t pay the mortgage or the car payments. At this rate we will
lose the house, not just the store. Please, don’t be so stubborn.”

My father pushed his plate away, then stood up and left the table. Beside me, my mother sighed and continued eating. When
she was done, she pushed her chair back and went upstairs. I was always the last one. Sitting on my own, I’d forget all about
dinner and let my mind wander. Sometimes I was still there at nine or ten at night, lost in thought, my bowl still half full.
All the light in the kitchen gone so I would curl my legs up on the chair and rest my face on the table. Small bits of rice
stuck to my cheek. Eventually my mother would come and take the bowl away.

That night, my parents went into the bedroom to argue. Their voices were faint through the house like a distant television.
Someone slammed a door hard. Eventually I got up and tipped my own bowl of food over the garbage. When I went upstairs to
bed, all the doors were closed and the house was quiet.

The next morning, my parents started up again. I was already sitting at the table, eating breakfast.

My father came out of the bedroom and circled the kitchen table. “What do you want me to do? What do I do when the store is
sold?”

“Go back to school. Do something for yourself, make yourself employable.”

“I am employed, I’m working as hard as I can. Is it so disappointing to you, everything that I have done?”

She shook her head impatiently. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

I stared from
one
to the other. My father laughed suddenly. It was a harsh sound, sad and bitter. He smiled, one hand waving up into the air
then falling slowly. “Who is it?” he asked.

“What do you mean?”

“The one at work, the one who promoted you.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“What did he do that for, promote you? In Indonesia you couldn’t hold down a job. Here, a promotion. I can’t understand it.”

My mother looked at him in disbelief. “I was miserable there. You know that.”

“You tell me,” he said, his voice even. “How is this possible? Remember, you are the one who wanted to leave Irian Jaya. It
is because of you that we are in this situation.”

My mother burst into tears. “This has nothing to do with who you are and who I am. I am only trying to do what is best for
us.”

I stood then, picking up my plate. My hands were shaking and the dish tipped, spilling milk and cereal. My father looked at
me, then turned towards the sink. He picked up a cloth and ran it, end to end, across the table. Then he turned back to my
mother. “I do
not think so,” he said, “And it is not your decision.”

My mother picked up her purse and walked out the back door, the screen swinging behind her.

“I’m doing the best I can,” my father said. “Your mother, she wants everything. Do you see that? She wants everything.”

I tried hard to behave as I’d been brought up, to ignore what I was not involved in and to hold my tongue and pretend I was
deaf and blind. Eyes lowered, I stared at the table.

Afterwards, when he bundled me up and walked me to school, he said nothing. He let go of me and I ran into the schoolyard,
immersed myself in hopscotch and California kickball. I would adapt. He knew I would grow up and do well here. My father turned
around, he started walking home again.

For six more months, the store pushed on. Whenever my father thought he might have to give in, somebody came along and bought
a couch. A sofa here, a loveseat there — this somehow kept us going from week to week.

Now, looking back, I see that the store had an impoverished look to it, that the couches were old and worn, and that my father,
once so patient a salesman, had begun to speak to his customers with an air of quiet desperation. At home, my parents had
fallen
into a deep silence, speaking to each other only when necessary. “Tell your mother that…,” my father said, and I was thrown
out like a line between them.

On the weekends, I kept my father company in the store. Sometimes, during the afternoon lulls, I fell asleep on the lawn chair.
Once, just waking, I sat up and listened for my father’s movements, the creak of his chair, his shoes on the polished floor.
There were no sounds at all. Thinking he had disappeared, I pulled the curtain open and ran out. I can see myself, a small
girl in blue sweatpants and a faded T-shirt, my John Denver ears, all keyed up. He was sitting at his desk. I looked at his
face, his furrowed brow, and asked, “Is there something wrong?”

He looked at me for a long time, his expression melancholy. Then he said, “No. There is nothing to worry about.”

Not long after, the bank sent my father a letter saying they were foreclosing on our mortgage. When we moved out of our house
on Curtis Street, my father would be the one who packed. While my mother kept me occupied on the back lawn, he would go from
room to room, throwing everything into bags, my mother’s good dresses and shoes, my toys and socks. Driving away to our new
apartment, we would turn back to the house, catch a glimpse of our excess furniture lined up on the sidewalk, the line of
boxes and Glad bags stretching down the block.

But that day in the furniture store, my father was calm. He stood up from his desk and walked to the door. He turned the sign
over and said to me, “I don’t think anyone else is coming today.” My father gathered my crayons and drawings and I started
telling him about the book I was reading, Dumbo and the crows and how at the end he flies and his mother who cradles him in
her trunk. My father just looked at me. This was the last business he would ever own.

That was the end of it. I don’t recall stepping inside the store again. When I saw it next, the windows were papered over
so that I could no longer see the interior from the road.

The other day, my father telephoned to give me the news. “Fighting in Aceh,” he says. “And another ferry has gone down.”

I tell him about Will’s new teaching position.

He says, “That’s very good news.”

This new relationship we have is tentative, like moving in the dark. A step forward, then back, feeling for the perimeter
of the room.

“Are you free?” I ask. “We can have coffee.”

“I can’t drink coffee,” he says. “It gives me heartburn.”

I file this information away, then I suggest tea.

Silence, as he considers this. “Will you come in the car? I’m having some problems with my knees.”

“Of course.”

When I hang up the phone, I feel a surge of hope, of fierce protectiveness over him. Perhaps, knowing everything that has
brought us here, I would redraw this map, make the distance from A to B a straight line. I would bypass those difficult years
and bring my father up to this moment, healthy, unharmed.

But to do so would remove all we glimpsed in passing, heights and depths I never guessed at. That straight line would erase
our efforts, the necessary ones as well as the misguided ones, that finally allowed us to arrive here.

In the summers, Will and I left Vancouver at every opportunity. When the college shut down after spring semester, we headed
out along the west coast. I was doing secretarial jobs then, temp work in law firms or ad agencies. I loved the transience
of it, learning a routine then forgetting it in place of another.

Once, we spent the week in Neah Bay. I had set my finger down on the map, touched the westernmost reach of the Olympic Peninsula.
“Here,” I said, turning to Will. “I’d like to go here.” We raced the
motorcycle south, then west. The town sat high on a cliff of rocks overlooking the Pacific Ocean. That first night, in our
tiny motel room, Will told me that piercing a lime with pins is said to cause pain for the person you love. “That’s it,” I
said. “Were throwing all the limes out.”

He smiled. “Who needs limes?”

Not us.

“But children, on the other hand.”

“To cause us pain?” I said, laughing.

When he didn’t respond, I looked over at him. Will’s face was serious. He pushed himself up on one arm. “It scares me too.
But let’s think about it. It won’t be so terrible. We can get a car seat for the motorcycle. We can get a baby helmet. Our
lives won’t change so much.”

“Okay, I’ll think about it.”

He rolled over on top of me. Some emotion, fleeting and sad, hit me then. “What’s wrong?” he asked, moving his fingers against
my face. “I haven’t been near any limes.”

I smiled, circling my arms around his neck. We could do this, I thought, if I didn’t stop to think. We could have the kind
of future Will imagined and that I, in moments of abandon, admitted that I wanted too. Outside I could hear cars on the gravel
road, here and gone, the shifting pebbles. Will picked my hand up and I should have said then what I
feared. Instead, I allowed the moment to pass. I let it drop there like glass in the sand.

After the furniture store closed so many years before, my parents declared bankruptcy. In the years that followed, they lived
from hand to mouth. My mother took on a second job in order to support us. My father tried his hand at different careers.
For a time, he cooked in an Indonesian restaurant. Afterwards, he sold encyclopedias, door to door; then cars at the Ford
dealership. Finally, my father went into real estate. I was fourteen years old and I would follow him to Open Houses. Sunday
mornings, the city half asleep, we loaded my father’s signs into the trunk of his car:
Open House Today,
they said,
Come on in!
He planted them in the soft ground, into the dewy grass.