The Language of Baklava (5 page)

I am dumbstruck. I gaze after Jessica, who’s already abandoned me and is off jumping rope, making her death seem all the more brutal and senseless. I realize that I’m what my uncle Hal calls a “fancy idiot.” Why did I ever think I could play Mom! My body seizes into a terrified semi-crouch. Perhaps it is the look on my face, or perhaps her passion has simply spent itself, but abruptly Sister John softens. She asks my name, age, height, and address, she asks about my sisters, parents, my cousins, and my grandparents. When I tell her my father is from Jordan, her eyes narrow and I see myself come into focus.

“The
Holy Land,
” she breathes. “The
river Jordan.
” She holds her cross in both hands.

I don’t say anything, but I’m pretty sure she must have a different place in mind. Bud never mentioned anything about a Holy Land. Despite this, it turns out we are now best friends. She hooks one sharp arm around my shoulders, and since she is tiny and I am already getting tall, there isn’t much difference in our height. We traipse around the play yard linked like this, going nowhere in particular but doing it fast, because, as I discover, Sister John does everything fast. It’s a little off tempo, like a three-legged race, as I rush to keep up with her, but she never lets go of me. This becomes the new game during recess. Francis gazes after me wistfully in the play yard, but I barely have time for a backward glance as we rush past.

Sister John has me moved to her classroom that day. She rhapsodizes to the class about how my father is from the
Holy Land.
He’s just like the
baby Jesus,
she tells them. Can you imagine? she asks them, and points to me. “Diana’s father!” Puzzled, I think of the ceramic baby Jesus in my grandmother’s crèche with his creamy, rosy porcelain face and swirls of blond hair. I’m the teacher’s pet. This is widely acknowledged in class. It means that I can get away with memorizing only half the prayer, that I get to sit at the front of the classroom with Sister John and listen to the other children stumble their way through poorly recalled prayers. “You’re so lucky,” my classmates say to me. Yes, they’re right, I think. For the school’s spring pageant, I am mysteriously elected to be the one to carry the crown of daisies down the aisle and set it upon the pale Virgin Mary statue in the chapel. I glow with privilege and responsibility, holding the fresh white flowers on the tips of my fingers like a sacred relic, walking alone through the center of the church. The other children watch in silence.

But sometimes I reflect on the days when I could play Mom’s Home! with Francis—when I wasn’t locked in this perpetual three-legged race—and I feel an absence, as if I’d lost track of something important.

During the spring the air swells up, huge and hot and humid, glowing. There’s often a storm coming in. The late afternoon swirls in the house with shadows, and in the kitchen it smells like onions frying in butter. There have been some changes at home since I’ve started school. For one thing, there’s a new baby in the crib, grumbling, a big, loud complainer. One-year-old Monica has a special way of rocking her crib so it chugs through the room on its wheels like a train engine. And the other baby, my sister Suzy, has been displaced. She’s nearly three, barely able to amble around, but she frequently points to the second baby and says, “Get that kid outta here!” One day she actually pushes the wheeled crib to the head of the tall stairs and is about to give it a good hearty shove—I look up at this, chortling—before our mother sprints out of the bathroom and intervenes.

Since I’ve acquired my newly elevated status at school, I’ve lost interest in family disputes. I’ve got new concerns. For instance, a small corner of our refrigerator is now reserved for food for Sister John. I have noticed Sister John sitting with the other nuns in the cafeteria, hunched over, picking silently at her horrible food tray. I cull bits of stuffed grape leaves and diamonds of baklava from family meals to bring to her. Sister John unwraps these various offerings in class and proclaims, “Food from the Holy Land!” She has the students pass the morsels around our classroom to examine, then she reclaims the food and eats it all in front of us while making voluptuous little sounds of appreciation, her lips bright with oil.

When I brag to my parents about Sister John’s new dining habits, they glance at each other. They decide to invite the sister over and have a good look at her. My father roasts some stuffed eggplant with garlic and rice. She sits with us at the formally dressed-out dining room table, poking her face at everything in the room.

“So,” Mom says tentatively. Sister John faces her with those rivet eyes. “Diana says you and she have become great friends.”

“Diana”—she fans the air—“is an
angel from heaven.
”

I have the uncanny sense of having left the room. Mom examines her with one eye a little tight, as if to say
Are we talking about the same
person?
But Bud nods approvingly. “Oh ho ho ho,” he says, and heaps Sister John’s plate with slices of dripping garlicky eggplant. He plays Santa Claus at the local hospital each Christmas, and he sometimes slips back into character.

First Sister John cuts all the food on her plate into a thousand tiny pieces; then she begins eating with her eyes closed. She makes deep, fluttering sounds that seem to emanate from the center of her chest. Her hand floats to her sternum. I have never heard her make these particular sounds before and stare at her openly. She relaxes her mouth mid-chew and releases a sighing exhale. I am enthralled. This is the most openly sensual display I’ve ever seen from an adult, and my mother taps at my fingers to make me look away.

“So,” Mom says, breaking into Sister John’s reverie, “Diana tells us you’re interested in Jordan.”

Sister John’s face pinches into a smile as she chews. She bats her eyes and cranes her pleated neck at my father. “Well, my goodness, who wouldn’t be?” she asks in a new voice, as if this were a private joke between her and Bud.

“Oh ho ho,” Bud says, scooping up more rice for Sister John. “That’s a good point!”

Sister John ducks her head and titters. Mom gazes off in the distance, her face drawn up as if she were pleading with invisible entities.

“It’s where anyone who’s holy goes,” Bud expounds. “It’s true— Jesus, Moses, Muhammad. All of them guys, they’re somewhere around. They’re hanging all over the place.”

“Oh,
you,
” Sister John says, as if they’ve been best friends for just ages. She spoons up great mounds of Bud’s special rice for company—steamed, then drizzled with cinnamon and pepper and pine nuts toasted in butter.

Bud and Sister John linger at the table forever, Sister John eating and asking my father question after question about the Holy Land, my father in turn making up answers, waving his spoon, and weaving his theories-in-progress about “the beginning of the world” and “what it all means” and “the difference between men and women” and so forth.

Eventually my mother gets up, clears the table, and does the dishes—muttering darkly under her breath the whole time. She puts a half-thawed pound cake and some forks on the table and goes upstairs to bed. Suzy and I hang over the back of the couch, watching everything we can on TV while Monica chugs and fusses in her crib in the nursery. When Sister John finally stands, after what seems like the end of time, her whiskery, paper-bag face is lit up. She totes a sack full of leftovers. She wrings Bud’s hand and says, “Oh, how can I thank you? Tonight has meant everything—everything—to me!”

Bud laughs and shakes his head and says, “Well then come back here for dinner again tomorrow!”

And her face flashes as if this is the most brilliant idea. “Oh, Gus,” she croons, curling one veiny hand against her chest. “I’d be honored!”

The next day, Mom stands at the kitchen counter and writes a long note for me to give to the Mother Superior. She comments—not exactly to me—as she seals the note, “Once again,
someone
will have to draw the line
somewhere.
”

Later at school, I stand fidgeting before her desk while the elderly, lipless woman reads it, whispering faintly, then turns it over and back, then reads it again. She closes her eyes. She says something to her secretary, then asks me to go to the outer office. I sit there, swinging my legs and sucking on a lock of hair. After a few silent, solitary minutes, I hear the too-quick footsteps in the hall. Sister John enters. She walks past me with her hot eyes burning through the floor, and I know not to say anything. Mother Superior closes the door to her office, and for a while all I hear are the dreamy, pillowy sounds of voices through the glass. Then Sister John comes out, her eyes burning another trail up the floor as she goes. Mother Superior comes out and looks at me. “Miss Abu-Jaber,” she says, “why are you crying?”

I snuffle, I rub the back of my hand against my nose. Tears! My head is an absolute blank. “I don’t know,” I say.

That morning, I am back at my old scarred wooden desk, back in Sister Paul’s room. Someone named Dolly carved her name into this desk with a black ballpoint pen. There are no more three-legged races at recess for me and no more lunchtime rendezvous. I realize that I am relieved. I start avoiding the rooms that I think Sister John may be in: I imagine her hiding, waiting for me behind doorways like a ghost. Whenever I play Mom’s Home! with Francis, I imagine her watching me, observing the way I pretend to be Mom.

Only on rare occasions do I glance up and catch her looking at me from across the cafeteria, silent among the group of other nuns, her tray of food untouched, her eyes burning as if with some sweet but dimly recalled memory.

BUD’S SPECIAL RICE FOR SPECIAL COMPANY

In a medium saucepan, bring the water and salt to a boil, add the rice, and boil for 2 minutes. Turn down the flame, cover the saucepan, and simmer for 20 minutes; the water will be absorbed. Turn off the heat and let stand for 10 minutes.

Melt the butter in a frying pan. Sauté the pine nuts until they are golden.

Place the rice in a serving dish, sprinkle with the toasted pine nuts and butter, and dust with the cinnamon and pepper to taste.

SERVES 4 TO 6.

THREE

Native Foods

Mom and I float alone in the darkened living room, watching TV. The dangerous jagged music of the nightly news with Huntley and Brinkley and the mournful, escalating music of Perry Mason both fill me with anxiety and a lonely ache. There are serious things on TV, reporters running through jungles and children starving and American Indians weeping. Mom leans forward, brushes aside the hair that is always in my eyes, and tells me that Bud has gone to Jordan looking for a job and a place for us to live. “Don’t we live in America?” I ask. I try to read her expression, but Mom’s soft, pretty face is calm as pond water. Her eyes are tinged with the faintest anxiety—possibly caused by her marriage to Bud—an eternal sort of anticipation that gives her an air of tragic beauty. In photographs, Bud makes monkey faces, flexes his biceps, makes horns with his fingers behind someone’s head. Mom holds one of his arms and looks at the camera as if to say
I’m sorry
.

My mother’s quiet presence is subtle yet familiar to me as a texture of air, like the fullness that lifts a room when the windows open after a long winter. Her eyes are like mine in the way we both have the dark rings around the irises and the lighter insides, and it is hard to truly see what color our eyes are because they are so flecked with other colors and odd bits of dimensions. But her eyes are blue, and mine are a murkier green: A person would either have to be very rude or somewhat in love in order to study them long and closely enough.

Where Bud is hot and worked up, she is clear and cool and waiting. Where Bud is talking all the time, she listens. Where Bud knows exactly where he is from, starting a thousand thousand years ago in the same place, Mom shrugs and says, Irish, German, maybe Swiss? Or Dutch? And she is taller than everyone in the room, with high, level shoulders. Her hair is short and quick and sleek as a bird’s wing. She grew up in a shared bedroom with her own mother in an old New Jersey house full of extended Irish-German-Catholic family, so there is a deep, private center to her. She didn’t expect to marry this antic, atomic character, and I think she has vowed never to let anything else surprise her again—only she is married to Bud, once and for all, so it’s difficult.

But she is not serious or gloomy or hard—her voice is young, her face will remain smooth and unlined. She can enter a room without anyone seeing, entering consciousness pale and quiet as sea foam, the lacy edge of a dream. She does not struggle and grapple with the world; unlike Bud, she is at ease.