The Language of Baklava (23 page)

“I’m so fed up,” I mutter. I pick a stalk of a dried-looking purple weed by the side of the road, smell it, and then throw it down when I remember that I’m angry.

“Yeah, me too,” Monica says. She also picks a purple weed, throws it down.

There is the low rumble of a car behind us, gravel popping. We step to one side as we walk, but the rumble lingers. “That’s Dad,” Suzy says without turning around.

Bud doesn’t stop, he just rolls down his window and calls out from behind his steering wheel. “Monica, Monica!” he calls to my youngest sister. “Dinner’s almost ready . . . aren’t you hungry?”

Monica looks at me—a neat furrow above her clear eyes. I can read her expression, which asks very clearly:
Now, what are we doing
out here again?
Her shiny hair falls in spikes across her forehead.

“I’m making grape leaves,” Bud croons. “It’s your favorite!”

Monica glances back at the car, then looks at me again—mute and helpless. I realize I’ve already lost. She’s a feisty, skeptical seven-year-old, impressive for her headlong fearlessness, but grape leaves truly are her favorite. “Monica,” he sings, “there’s already butter on the rice!” Monica has been known to eat butter straight from the stick. She sighs and flaps her arms as if it’s all too hopeless and inevitable, then veers off and joins Bud in the car. They turn and drive back to the house.

Suzy and I keep walking, but now our walkout feels compromised. And the day is too cheery—it interferes with indignation. Our marching speed slows significantly. Little black crickets chirr and hang in the long grass like musical notation.

“How far do you think we’ve walked?” Suzy asks. At eight, she is a wise, meditative child, capable of giving herself for hours to intricate school projects—science reports, watercolors, flute practice—much more focused and disciplined than I could ever hope to be.

“Oh, at least a quarter mile,” I speculate, silently factoring whether or not dinner is already on the table.

Neither of us stops or looks around, but we can hear the car creep up and then follow us at parade speed for several minutes. Finally, there’s a squeak as Bud cranks down his window. “Suzy! Suzy!”

Suzy looks at me. The late afternoon blows her hair into ringlets, covers her eyes with long violet shadows.

“There’s also stuffed squash with ground lamb—it’s just the way you like it!”

Suzy’s face moves into deep deliberation; then her eyes roll up at me. We both know there’s no point resisting. “I better go back,” she says grimly.

“You better.”

“Maybe you should come, too.”

I squint toward the sun, try to look rugged and independent. “I know,” I say. “But I just can’t help it.”

“I know,” she says.

After the two of them drive away, I walk just a few paces more, then stop on a slight rise and watch the car curl back into our driveway. I grit my teeth. It’s just me and my clenched fists and the breathy afternoon light and dreaming clouds. I can’t keep going, but I won’t give in, either. Grievances roll through my mind: I never wanted to move to Jordan; I never wanted to move to the country; none of this is my fault; and nothing in the world is fair! Since it’s a good twenty miles from here to anywhere, I decide to turn back toward the house, then I bypass the driveway and go into the east field, into the dense, maple-sweet trees, their feathery canopies and abundance of branches. I go deep enough to hide. I don’t have a plan, I just stand still and silent beneath a single tree. I can smell its nutty, musty bark and ripe scent. I wait to see what will happen.

Bud comes back out of the house, about to get back in the car, when he scans the road and realizes he can’t see me kicking along the gravel shoulder. He shields his eyes with his palm and turns, squinting around into the late, coppery-lit fields. He walks down to the end of the driveway, hands on hips. I stifle my laughter, bump into a tree, which leaves sticky resins on my arm. It smells drugged and over-sweet here, like a candy forest. I almost forget why I’m hiding and call out, but something heavy and stubborn and determined inside of me holds me in place. I wait and listen to the high whine of insects in the leaves, and there’s a brief flickering high overhead, wings arcing: a lonely mote of sound.

“Ya Ba!” He starts walking south, across the road into the open field, away from me. Instinctively, I take a few guilty steps forward, rustling the leaves.

He couldn’t hear this—he’s too far away. But he pauses, he seems to sense something. It’s a disconcerting thing: I feel afraid of being discovered and afraid of never being found.

From the house comes the briny scent of grape leaves, their trace of salt and the sweet tomatoes they simmer in, their centers of ground lamb and rice, the roasting squashes, their flesh turning buttery in the pan.

Bud walks back up the driveway and into the eastern slope. “You can’t hide from your
baba,
” he says, and his words settle inside me like something that was already written there. “I’ll find you— that’s it.”

And the weird dread and relief flutters around me, soft as bat wings. I hear it pass over the tops of the trees. I rub my eyes and come out of the woods. He stares at me a second, as if he hasn’t really expected me to be there. He is angry, I can tell, but more because of feeling duped now than because I left in the first place.

“Now dinner is late!” He demands, “What do you have to say?”

“Whatever you want me to say,” I mutter, infuriated and worn out, and walk past him, back toward the house, knowing there is no way out except through this door that is my father.

The space extends forever inside and outside of this house. We have to import our entertainment, so my parents invite the relatives over every weekend. My mother and aunties churn blenders full of grasshoppers or pink ladies or drink grapey wines from screw-top bottles. Bud experiments with elaborate, ceremonial dishes, sauces from Lebanon, a Moroccan style of preparing fish, a beguiling soup with chickpeas and onion. The men swirl their clear drinks in the living room, serious with man talk and politics, which seems even more serious in this setting, the far-flung philosophical landscape filling the long windows.

“LOUNGING WITH THE LADIES” GRASSHOPPERS

Shake with ice and strain into cocktail glasses
or
mix in a blender with a cup of crushed ice for a gorgeous milk shake effect.

MAKES 2 COCKTAILS.

Jess and Ed, who also live in the country, help me decipher this place. I’ve felt hoodwinked ever since we moved here, but Jess stands in the long, gradual driveway that extends from the house to the street and nods solemnly at the fields. “This is perfect—you got it just right this time.” Suddenly, after weeks of mourning the ice-cream parlor, the movies, the drugstore, there’s a better way for me to see this place. If you hang back and gaze at the fields from a distance, they look pretty and empty, yielding nothing. But enter these places and you have a new, fluid perspective, a land of leaves, buzzing walls, heat-struck mirages floating on air. With luck, you’ll get so lost that you’ll never find your way home again. Maybe you’ll be forced to live like Robin-son Crusoe in your fort made of twigs, dining on roots and berries and acorns.

We plunge into acres wallowing with cattails. Clouds laze across the sky, and humidity hangs in the tall, rough grass. We’re fearless in one another’s company, whooping like maniacs, pushing into pussy willows and Queen Anne’s lace so high, they nearly close over our heads. Crickets zoom through the air like electrons, and beetles part their shining jackets and ricochet off our arms. Whacking just past a stand of ragged bushes, I come to a stop. There’s a trickling light through the leaves—a big drainage ditch. Running through the bottom is a thin, flat creek filled with pollywogs, transparent minnows, water-walkers, bubble-rollers, and millions of roiling, minute, embryonic creatures. It’s the primordial stew. We bend over the water and slosh around in it, then turn to examine the drain.

A huge cement pipe juts from the side of the sloping ground like a hidden room in the earth. It’s big enough for children to stand in— an irresistible invitation. Jess and Ed have a cement pipe a bit like this at their place, only theirs is narrower and gets dark too quickly, and once you crawl in there you start thinking about webs and spiders and ghouls and flying mummy hands right away. This great tunnel is luxurious in contrast.

“Wanna go in?” Jess asks—a silly question, because of course there isn’t anywhere we won’t go. Fear is not allowed. Excitement is encouraged and rage is tolerated, but fear is for sissies.

Our voices echo and ripple along the pipe’s corrugated sides, the water a narrow trickle under our feet. We walk slowly, studying the place. For a while there’s a greenish light glowing at our backs and an innocent, chortling water sound. Then the pipe turns, the light falls away, and almost immediately a rank, brackish smell bloats the air. But turning back doesn’t occur to us. We walk along the curving ground, our fingers brushing the slimy cement. It feels as if each step takes us deeper into a trance. Our laughter shimmers and dissolves in my ears. The pipe narrows and we have to crouch. We bump into one another. Now there is nothing ahead but pitch black and we have to decide how curious, and how brave, we might be.

I think that walking in that black pipe takes me as far from my old life as I have ever gone before. Gradually, the redwood house and the life within it begin to dissolve into a dream—the reality is this smelly, reverberating place. We are alone, without names, just our skin and loud breath. I become aware of a distant sound like a hum that vibrates through the tube, into our feet and fingertips. It builds to something like a lower roar, then rushes away in a flood of whispers.

“What was that?” Suzy mumbles. I try to think of an answer, but language feels too far away. All of us have fallen into animal quiet. It isn’t a bad feeling. In fact, it’s immeasurably comfortable: We will never leave this place again.

Then there is the unmistakable sound of footsteps overhead. It comes to me through my haze that we’re walking under the country road. The flood of whispers is the sound of cars passing over. Suddenly I hear my grandmother’s voice above our heads, as if she’s speaking to us through a pillow. “Children,” she says, “where are you?”

Even through the layers of dirt and pavement, I can make out the fine, anxious ripples in her voice. None of us move. An amorphous bubble of time forms in the air. It expands and I watch its transparent body drift through the air. For some reason, it seems as if the children she’s calling have nothing at all to do with us; they’re people we used to live next door to. “Kids!” Her voice gets louder, more urgent. “Come on, it’s time for dinner!” A light hissing breath of something soft and cool emanates from deep in the tunnel and lures me in. We walk farther into the total dark and, quieter now, I hear through the earth my grandmother shouting: “Kids, this isn’t funny! Come on now!”

Ed, the conscientious one, observes, “She sounds worried.” His voice reverberates along the ribs of the pipe. We all stop for a moment, and I can hear Gram muttering and pacing over our heads. But I have no sympathy for her. In fact, I feel a surge of exhaustion and anger. I’m tired of being dragged from house to house and being told who to be, what to feel, how to behave. I think how lovely it could be to wander down an endless pipe and never return.

Over our heads, Gram huffs and stomps. All at once she releases a string of curse words—the sort of language, she might say, that turns the air black and blue. I’m not sure I’ve even heard her say “heck” before, and I’m startled into laughter. We all laugh, and the sound opens into something alive, a hiccup echoing a million times over the endless ridges and bends of the pipe.

Gram goes quiet, then shouts, “I can hear you!”

The spell is broken; there is nowhere else to go. But for a moment my hand still moves forward, my fingers drifting over ridges like a braille map. And then the tips of my fingers, the most sensitive points, delicate as antennae, brush lightly against something that is undeniably fur, or possibly hair. I come to a dead halt, so contracted that even the shriek is stuck in my throat. I huff a little, breath scraping, back rigid. Someone stops just short behind me. “Let’s leave,” an unfamiliar voice, possibly mine, quavers in the dark.

We turn, stumbling over our own feet, laughing with fear, and then just laughing. We are running back, into ourselves, into light, to dinner, to what is known.

MAGICAL MUHAMMARA