The Language of Baklava (8 page)

We yawn and slide out of the warm caves of our beds. Monica looks tousled and sleepy as a small animal, her cropped silky hair spun to a froth on her head. But Suzy is wide awake; she gives me a darting, uncertain look—what are these so-called parents of ours up to now? The unlit house is watery, and my limbs feel soft and weak, as if I’ve been running in my sleep. Our parents guide us out the front door, their laughter lowered and mesmerizing. Then we hurry across the stone courtyard, Suzy, Monica, and I barefoot in cotton pajamas, the stones cool and waxy beneath our feet. The neighbors and the street are all asleep, the buildings shut up, rose tinted under a brassy round moon. I have never seen a sleeping street before, never known what secret intimacy could rise from the pavement like steam. In one corner of the courtyard, tilted under the staircase to the upper floors, is the red scooter, its bold shine muted now. For a moment I think of my grandmother back in New Jersey, who wears a lipstick in the same fluid tones: red shot through with an undercurrent of blue. I look back at it as my parents open the car.

We drive through parts of the city I’ve never seen before, where the lights glow like melted butter and the girls on the sidewalks are wearing hats and high heels. Men smile and turn to watch our car passing, my hands pressed to the window. Everyone is awake! Then we race beyond the glowing streets, and the road ahead of us is long and dusty blue and smells like the woolly heat of a sheep’s back. Bud snaps on the radio, its slim red line twirling through static, and then there are songs from an entirely different planet that have bounced around in the ocean for years and finally found their way to our radio: “Downtown”; “Chelsea Morning”; “To Sir, with Love”; “Georgie Girl.”

When we finally get out of the car, there’s a gravel lot, an expanse of folding chairs, patios, sparkly restaurants wedged in a long crescent along a glittering flat blackness. Bud holds his hand out toward the gleam. “And what did I promise you kids?” he asks, though I recollect no promises related to anything like this. “It’s the Dead Sea!”

We’ve come, as usual, with no preparation, so my parents let us run into the water in our underpants like the Jordanian kids around us. The salt water is satiny, so soft and dense that it seems to bend beneath our arms. Bud, who is generally afraid of the water, comes out and shows us how this water is so rich with minerals that you can sit in it like a lawn chair. He lies back in it, and Suzy tows him around by his hair while he makes boat sounds.

One of the restaurants on the shore has a string of red lights that drop their reflection in the moonlit water like maraschino cherries. These make me think of the lonely red scooter. I straggle out of the water, yanking up my soggy underpants with their sprung elastic waistband. Mom is stretched out on a canvas chaise longue, holding a drink with a little parasol on the side. She wraps me shivering into a beach towel and makes room for me beside her on the chaise.

I blink out of my towel cave at this astounding new place around us, then touch my mother’s ribs through her cotton shirt. “Mom, how long do you have to be best friends with someone if you’re best friends?”

She flitters at my bangs; they’re stiff with salt. “Well, honey, I don’t think there’re any rules about that. I guess you can be best friends your whole life if you’re lucky.”

“Are you and Dad best friends?”

It’s hard to make out her expression under the cherry lights along the shore. She appears to be thinking about it, staring out to where Bud is still drifting around, piping and tootling like a tugboat.

“You have to do whatever your best friend says, right?”

Now I can see her face—a little amused and wary. “Why do you say that?”

“Dad said to come to Jordan, right?”

There is even less sound now than before, if that is possible, just a slight slip of waves on the shore, a sighing wash like the sound of someone saying “Hush, hush” or the papery rustle of the palm fronds arching over the sand. “Your father . . . needed us to come here, he needed to see—what it felt like.”

Now we seem to be whispering.

“What does it feel like?” I ask quietly, not quite knowing what I’m asking, just following the path of the questions.

“I don’t think—” She stops, glancing back. Bud is climbing out of the water. “I don’t think it feels the way he remembers it.”

I put my clammy hands on her waist—something that feels a little like a spark of alarm bounces through me. “Does he know that? That it doesn’t feel the same?”

She looks over her shoulder, Bud’s shadow falling toward us in a long, cool slip as he walks beneath the neon lights. “He’s finding out.”

The medicinal waters of the Dead Sea roll behind us, and the wild, heavy scent of honey, rocks, and thyme tempers the air. People come to dip themselves in these waters, to be cured of everything from skin ailments to spiritual wasting. The air here is active, undeniable. I breathe it in deeply and sense a sort of dawning sweetness—of loss and nostalgia. Mom must feel some of this as well, because she draws her hand around a ripple of sand beneath her beach chair and says dreamily, “It’s lovely here. Just lovely.”

I touch the liquid sand as well. It turns from beige to amber. It is that simple. Just lovely.

I know the story of their first meeting by heart. My father was working at a malt shop called Cosmo’s in the student-busy section of town near Syracuse University. He wore a long white apron and swabbed a heavy string mop all over the tiled floor, trying to eavesdrop on the conversations in mysterious, hard-sounding English, the language striking in right angles all around his head.

Bud wasn’t supposed to be there. He was supposed to be streaking through the bruised light over Jordan, a pilot in the king’s air force— he and his friend Mohammed (“Mo”) Kadeem, two impatient young men with a flair for scary, last-second decisions. But then Bud’s cousin Soraya turned down Bud’s marriage proposal, and his dignity was so injured that he did the most dramatic thing he could think of and moved to America. In a flash, he was here in this palace of ice cream, lightning-white tiles, and ice-smooth floors, mopping and mopping, wringing his bold youth into a bucket of suds.

Until he saw my mother, and there went the mercury of his heart again. “She was as tall as a goddess,” he tells us in the story of the Day. “So smart, I could take one look at her”—he points to his eye—“and see it right on her face!”

My father slicked in between her and her date, the much-mourned Billy Murphy. (“
Such
a nice, nice, handsome boy,” Gram says, very sad.) He eased her coat off so it seemed to float from her shoulders. She turned to stun him, once again, with her ocean blue eyes, a fringe of mahogany hair, and a slow, secretive smile.

Were they supposed to come together? I don’t know. Bud didn’t really speak English, and he wasn’t actually a waiter. His Greek boss, Cosmo, watched, bemused, as Bud leaned over their table with a pen and pretended to write down their order. “I thought, What is that nut doing now?” Cosmo says. But Cosmo knew what it was like to be too young, skinny, and crazy in America and was always hiring “special cases.”

Bud ran over to the grill while Cosmo stepped back, folded his arms, and watched Bud rush around with the spatula and bread.

“She want grill-chee-sanweesh—what is grill-chee-sanweesh?” my father lamented, running between ingredients. And even though he didn’t know what white bread was, didn’t know what margarine was, didn’t know what American cheese was, he made her some sort of grilled cheese sandwich. He brought it out to her on a white plate with a sprig of parsley—the way he’d seen Cosmo do it for the daily specials. He didn’t make anything for Billy Murphy.

When I ask Mom how the sandwich turned out, she smiles her drowsy blue-eyed smile, chin on her hand, and says,“I don’t remember.”

The morning after the Dead Sea, I wake with a wonderful hankering for gray gum. I feel as if I’ve been away on a month-long vacation to a cool, distant country and it’s great to be home again. I run to the
dukana
and buy a piece. As I stand on the corner and start to chew, my friends begin to saunter over—Mai and Rafat, Belal and Hisham. They greet me as cordially as if I haven’t been away at all. We spend the day on foot, running along the alleys in our old style. I am set free. At the end of the day, Hisham and I race to my house. I have flying hair, a skinned knee, and grubby nails—I look like every other child in the streets of this neighborhood. Hisham, as usual, gets there first, but then he pulls up short. Bennett is standing just inside the courtyard, still as stone.

Suddenly the door to a steep place that I didn’t know was inside me has been thrown open. I know I’ve done something wrong, though I can’t put a name to it. “Hi,” I say, guilty and angry.

Hisham looks as shocked as if Bennett is a statue come to life. He takes a step back and bumps into me.

“Don’t touch her!” Bennett snaps at him. He shakes a finger at Hisham. “Do you live here? I don’t believe so! This is
our
courtyard— not
your
courtyard.” Bennett’s face is a streaked, liverish color, as if he’s just been slapped. He shrieks at Hisham, his voice leaping into the highest registers, his body rigid and doll-like. “I think you’d better get out of here. I think you’d just better get out!”

Hisham’s mouth opens and closes, as if he can barely get enough air. I grab Hisham’s wrist and am about to suggest we go play in another courtyard, but Hisham turns to me and whispers in Arabic, “Something is wrong with this boy—I’ll go get my mother!”

“No,” I answer, though I’m frightened of the sharp, thin line of Bennett’s mouth. “I’ll stay here. I’ll talk to him.”

After Hisham has gone, for a long moment, Bennett doesn’t speak and doesn’t even give the impression of seeing me there. Then quickly he says, “You know, that isn’t proper. It isn’t proper, and it isn’t done. It isn’t done at all.”

I take hold of the iron spikes of the courtyard railing; they feel cold and rough in my hands. I wish that Hisham hadn’t gone away. “What isn’t?”

The color starts to subside in his face, and I can see him collecting himself. He purses and unpurses his lips, he crosses his arms in a businesslike fashion. Finally he slits his eyes at me as if admitting to himself, at last, that I really don’t know much of anything. “You don’t belong with them! You
know
that. You know that. The sort you are belongs with the sort I am. Like belongs with like. Father says. No in-betweens. The world isn’t meant for in-betweens, it isn’t done. You know that.”

He speaks as if this is a conversation we’ve had countless times and he’s tired of going over it with me. I lean back and swing on the iron railing while he stands like a stake in the ground, glaring just past the top of my head. I’ve started attending a private school run by the French nuns, and what Bennett says reminds me of something the nuns say. We are forbidden to speak Arabic in school because, according to Sister Hélène-Thérèse, “Arabic is the language of animals.” She taps the list of three languages on the blackboard, explaining that English “is the language of mortals” and French, she says with a satiny smile, “is the language of the angels.”

“No in-betweens.” My voice is a pale vapor.

“They belong with their own kind. You with me, they with them,” Bennett sums up. “No in-betweens. It’s not allowed.”

I squint at Bennett; his face is blotted out by the sunset behind his back. I don’t know what these in-betweens are exactly, but I feel sorry for them. They might look like the embroideries of the sad-eyed sheep—the solitary ones, apart from their flock, trapped inside the circle of Munira’s embroidery hoop, stitched eternally apart. I imagine them walking the earth, friendless, lonely, and improper,
not
allowed,
lost somewhere in the embroidered corners between the animals, the mortals, and the angels.

“How do you know it?” I press. “How do you know that I belong with you?”

He rolls his eyes. “Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it?” He thrusts out his arm. “Look at the color you are!”

He presses his arm to mine: His is a gleaming, nearly bone white, dotted with freckles and a faint sheen of burn. Mine is grimy and golden with a telltale greenish cast I’d never noticed before, not till I’d compared myself with someone like this. I’m not like Bennett, and he yanks his arm away as if I’ve just done something unexpectedly wrong. But in that moment I realize I’m not like Hisham, either. Not dark. I think about the way the relatives come to visit, standing in our bedroom doorway, appraising me and my sisters, the way their words trickle through the air, dividing us. “There’s the dark one,” they say. “And she—she’s the light one. . . . That one is American, that one is Arab. . . .” I’d never before thought to wonder which of us was which.

Despite Bennett’s decree, my interest in the red scooter has miraculously dried up and gone. I’m once again running up and down the steps with Hisham and my old group of friends. When Bennett approaches me in the courtyard, pushing the red scooter before him like a sacrifice, offering to let me ride it alone for the entire day, I walk past him without a word. Is it possible that I am this heartless? Bennett turns into a shadow and then disappears just as suddenly as he appeared. He slips completely out of my mind and imagination, as do his native foods, his nutritious Horlicks, and his in-betweens. I forget him so quickly that his memory now comes to me in grainy, half-dissolved strokes, like an image made of powder.

Weeks after forgetting him, I am swinging on the iron railing with Hisham, negotiating the details of our engagement, when Mrs. Haddadin calls me over to her chair near the flowering mint plants. She swirls her cup of tea and informs me that “my little English friend” and his mythical parents have moved back to Singapore. It takes me a minute to understand whom she is talking about. Then she gestures toward the staircase and there it is, where it has been all along, ever since I abandoned him, yet somehow completely invisible: the red scooter. “He left that behind.”