Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots (10 page)

When I went, everything would be delivered to the Salvation Army. Someone else would sit on my sofa, use my jewelry box, fiddle with the knobs on my insured, antique Toastrite without knowing a thing about me. She was my only something. I’d never forgotten her; I had just put the memory somewhere, behind a box, below some clothes. Every once in a while, though, I’d move the dust. I’d come across it and it would just about make me shake. Refusing to love something is the same as loving it. “A quiet conscience,” we used to say in Baghdad, “sleeps in thunder.” I hadn’t slept in decades.

The fact was, without her, I was nothing now. And yet, all those years ago, I was afraid that keeping her would make
me
nothing, no one, to Joseph. I should have admitted that to him, told him the truth: I was afraid he would love a little baby more than he loved me. He would love everything about her that I was not. I am harder to love. I am stubborn. I am not a pretty sleeper. I get bigger, stinkier when I sleep. Red onion clings to my skin. I don’t laugh easily. In the supermarket, I never pick the shortest line. I judge everyone. I can’t sit through an entire movie. My big toes are unfortunately shaped. The city skyline doesn’t thrill me; it petrifies me. I keep waiting for things to go black. And this: She would have loved him more too. They would have been two peas in a pod. I would have been left out, no one to them, like I’d been no one to my family in Baghdad. I would have hated her for it. I could not hate her, my own child. But I believed that I would have. And he would have hated me for that. He would have hated me, but we might have worked through it. I’d refused to ever give him that chance. I told him a million lies: We needed to save money. We needed to become citizens. We needed to do great things, like gamble in Las Vegas and peer into the Grand Canyon. And until then, we couldn’t even contemplate the possibility of a child. And Joseph, bless him, said all right, went along with that plan of mine because he loved me, and his love, unlike mine, was not jealous, not insecure.

Years later, when I saw how it had worn on him, how desperately he wanted to care for a child, I nearly gave in. But I didn’t. Couldn’t. Not then or ever. I’d built such a strong case, I couldn’t falter. We came to the States, I told him, to build a life for ourselves. We had to do that first and foremost. But then, when we were established, I said there was more to do. We couldn’t stop. We, Joseph and I, were some crucial part of the American dream. Pioneers. Revolutionaries. And yet, all we encountered while forging our way to a new world was the same thing, again and again. The absence. The lack.

Finally—and it felt like it had all been leading up to this—the tears rose into my throat. I began to sigh hard, heavy, determined sighs, but I couldn’t stop what was coming. Then, suddenly, it stopped itself. What would the tears do anyway? No one was going to comfort me, bring me tissues or a cold washcloth to put over my face. I’d have to clean up the mess myself, so I diverted it somewhere.

I went into the study. Joseph’s mother’s locket was on his desk. I turned it over in my fingers. Without him, his things were suddenly grayer, lighter. Like his clothes and toothbrush and the gold lighters somewhere. I had always hated smoking; it made my throat close. But in the last few months, when all he had wanted was an unfiltered cigarette and for me to sit beside him, keeping his hands warm with mine, that smell, like burning dried leaves, had begun to comfort me. I’d find myself letting my head fall back, taking his exhaled smoke into my chest. It filled me with a feeling like the softest sand, and for a moment, I could imagine he was all he used to be again—a humming, sneezing, reaching, dancing person, grabbing life by fistfuls and tossing them like wedding rice into the air.

Everything felt sacred, having been witnessed by Joseph’s eyes, and so I didn’t want to touch a thing, afraid of ruining some delicate state. One of Joseph’s slipper socks was on the carpet and I got down on the floor beside it, picked it up, and kept it to my nose until the smell and feeling of it faded. Then I dropped it into the exact spot where it had been. Where else would I have put it? When I finally got up, my legs were numb, and my knees made a noise so terrible and loud that it scared the daylights out of me. I felt like an intruder on my own life.

From the closet in our bathroom—
my
bathroom, I corrected myself—I took out a clean white sheet and placed it on top of the bed. It felt wrong to sleep the same way I’d been sleeping for years, so I would sleep under the sheet and over the covers. I took one of the ashtrays from his study. It was silver and shaped like a man’s palm, deeply lined and shadowed. Something, I thought, that should remain in one’s family. The smell survived, though faintly, and I placed it beside my pillow.

“Where are you?” I said to Joseph, and, remembering my promise to him about finding our daughter, “Where is she?”

The next day, Saturday, passed in a blur. I drank plenty of tea, stared at the impossible crossword puzzle, watched television, although if someone had asked me what I’d watched, I wouldn’t have had any idea.

That evening, just a day after Joseph passed, the phone rang. It gave me a start. My hope that our daughter might call was ridiculous.
If this is an automated voice,
I thought,
I’ll swan-dive off the fire escape.

“Hello,” I said, crossing my fingers that it wouldn’t be a sympathy call either.

“Hello, Chef Victoria?” asked a man.

“This is Victoria.”

“Chef Victoria?” he said.

“Dottie?” I asked. It was a man’s voice. What was I saying? It just came out.

“No,” the voice said. “I’m sorry, I must have the wrong number. I’m calling about the cooking classes? The Middle Eastern cooking classes? I’m Robert?”

And then it hit me. Until then, it had totally slipped my mind. Two weeks before, when Joseph was still alive and being bathed by a nurse, Dottie had barged into our kitchen.

“Yoo-hoo,” she’d clamored while I’d ignored her, pretending to page through a catalog. Whenever she had a plan—and her plans always gave me heartburn—she’d try for mystery. She’d stand there so obviously hiding something behind her back, her face swollen with expectation, visibly atwitter. She had the patience of a jack-in-the-box. She’d lasted five seconds before she slapped a bright green sign on my lap.

“Look!” she’d shrieked. “Look what I found!”

“So?” I said, bringing the sign closer to my face, cutting myself off. “What?”

Dottie passed me her glasses and I put them on.

“Read,” she said.

“‘French pastry classes,’” I read aloud, and Dottie joined in by heart, closing her eyes and nodding her head, when I continued.

“‘By Chef Luisa,’” we said.

In the photo, Luisa wore a chef’s hat that had buckled into itself. It looked like she’d been smacked in the head. She had a triple chin, crooked teeth, and either a fever blister or a very unhappy mole.

“This?” I said. “Have we stooped this low?”

“We have,” she said.

“I don’t like sweets,” I said, because I hadn’t in my youth and would rather admit to incontinence than to the changes in my diet. “You know that. And I’m tired of cooking. Do you see what I’ve been eating around here?”

I ate Pop-Tarts. My mother, an incredible cook, would have turned in her grave. I liked the ones with colored sprinkles. They were festive.

“Oh yes,” Dottie said. “I see. I certainly see what you’re eating. It’s called carbo loading. Miraculously, you’re not a bus. You’re a beanpole.”

“What’s your point?” I said.

I was picking at my lips, taking my unlipsticked skin off in little strips. Dottie swatted at my hand.

“It’s really quite brilliant,” she said. “I don’t know why we haven’t thought of it before. It’s perfect.”

“Spit it out, Dottie.”

“Here it is.” She said each of the next words slowly and deliberately, as if she were passing out snacks to pesky toddlers.

“I think—”

Long pause.

“That you—”

Long pause.

“Should teach—”

Pause.

“Ready? Ready? Ready?” she said.

“Yes, I’m ready,” I said. “Christ.”

“A cooking class!” she exploded.

She stepped back, ready to take in my delight, full of emotion.

“Oh yeah?” I said. “And I think you should compete in the Miss America pageant.”

“I was almost Miss South Carolina—”

“I know,” I said. “You’ve mentioned it.”

“Not the point,” she said. “The point is that it would be good for you. You could make a little money. You have a great kitchen. You know so much.”

“Like what?” I said. I wasn’t in the mood.

“Like eating apples for happiness,” she said. “You told me that once.”

“Yellow vegetables for happiness,” I corrected her. The Iraqi Jews ate according to color. “White for purity. Green apples for hope and prosperity.”

She must have seen the look on my face.

“Joseph is in good hands in there,” she said. She signaled toward the only part of the apartment she hadn’t been to in years. Literally, years. Joseph’s wing. Like I said, sickness terrified her.

I half nodded. I saw her point.

“I’ll make some squash for dinner,” I said. “I will.”

“Middle Eastern is very in right now,” she continued, upbeat. “Those colored silks and the beads.”

I’d snapped my teeth at her but she was already at the door, doing a pageant wave. For just a moment, I loved her, her optimism. I appreciated it.

“I have a date with my neighbor friend upstairs,” she said, all cheeky.

“Vladimir?” I asked. Vladimir was Russian mafia. We were pretty certain.

“No,” she said. “The thirteen-year-old sign maker. He’s quite taken with me.” She batted her lashes.

“Dottie, don’t. You don’t even have a picture—”

As the door was closing behind her, she’d waved a shiny photo at me. It had tape curls on the back. It was from Joseph’s side of the headboard. He’d kept it there. Dottie must have swiped it while I wasn’t looking.

I’d hated that photo. It was from twenty years ago. I was in one of my hostess outfits, all monotone and sheen and unfortunate padding. Mermaid-y. Joseph adored it. There was something nice in that.

It felt like a lifetime had passed since Dottie and I had had that conversation, though it had been only two weeks. And not even a day since Joseph had died. I wondered if time would ever move at a reasonable speed again, if it might ever fly.

Still, I was bolstered for a moment, as it occurred to me that Robert had seen the photo—and called despite it. I wondered if he was almost blind. There could be no other explanation.

“Did Dottie put you up to this?” I asked him now.

“I don’t think so,” he said. “I don’t know any Dotties. I got your name off the flyer? The flyer at the Y?”

“Dottie!” I yelled upward. She tapped her heel. She was in her kitchen, probably watching something spin in the microwave.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I must have made a mistake. Sorry to bother you.”

He was about to hang up. But then something came over me. I remembered the buzzing yesterday after everyone left, the asking for masgouf. I remembered our daughter. This wasn’t her on the phone now, I’m no idiot. But, for a moment, I wondered if someone was trying to reach me. I didn’t want to get ahead of myself, hadn’t even thought it through, but I felt that this was my moment. My moment was about to be gone.

“No,” I heard myself saying. “No. Don’t hang up. This is me. It must be me.”

“Ma’am?” Robert asked. “I’m sorry to have bothered you.”

He seemed so kind, so concerned that he had taken time out of my day, that tears flocked behind my eyes. If only he knew. Just last week, I’d spent an entire morning poaching eggs, one after another, trying to get them exactly right. I wanted to give Joseph something perfect, to remind him of us. I’d gone through a dozen and hadn’t gotten the hang of it. I was out of practice. It broke my heart. For days, the apartment reeked of sulfury hot springs. Before I could stop myself, I was saying, “Thank you.”

Don’t be pathetic, Victoria,
I thought, and I kept quiet so I wouldn’t thank him again.

“For what?” he said.

“Nothing. Yes. I am Chef Victoria. About those cooking classes—they’ll be held where? What did the flyer say?” I was trying to be professional. I thought again about dying alone.

“Well, it didn’t,” he said. “That’s why I’m calling. It gives your name and number and time—Monday night at seven—and there’s a lovely photograph. I believe it’s of you. Is it? But there’s no location I can find.”

“This Monday?” I was shouting at him. I didn’t mean to.

“That woman,” I said. “I’ll kill her.”

He laughed like he had a beard. He was a nice man. I imagined children climbing on his shoulders and neck. Her children.

“Yes, this Monday. And obviously,” he said, “Dottie put
you
up to this.”

“I don’t know why I’m surprised,” I said. Now I was being casual. Casual was good. “But we’ll have the class here, at my apartment. What’s today?”

“It’s Saturday,” he said.

I gave him my address. For a moment, it occurred to me that I could have it all wrong. I
was
getting way ahead of myself. He could have been a con artist. A seducer of old ladies.
Well, then, let him,
I thought. Let him.

Before I knew it, I was taking down the location of the flyer and asking if he’d seen any other ones. And he was offering to write the specifics of the classes on the flyers he’d seen. And I was consenting. I was hopeful.

Later, when I imagined our daughter seeing me in that photo, I wanted to call the whole thing off. It wasn’t worth my dignity. Or was it?

I hadn’t ever envisioned where she lived exactly, only that it was in a large barnlike house with explosions of lavender and wildflowers everywhere, a place where kids left their bicycles in the middles of driveways and played soccer in the street. But now, for the first time, I wondered if perhaps she lived just down the block somewhere. Let’s say in a lovely prewar with heavy moldings and a robin’s-egg-colored foyer. She’d always been there. And we—as if we deserved credit for it—had always been here too. With her. For her.