Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots (16 page)

But then she found it. Her head bobbed like mad when she put a blue wrap dress against me.

“That’s the one,” she said. “It’s the perfect thing.”

“It is?” I said, but she wasn’t paying attention. I looked at her, wanted her to know that I had something to say—I wanted to tell her how important this day was, what it meant—but she was fumbling with a pile of tangled jewelry, shaking it, cursing. “Lord Jesus!” she shouted.

As quickly as it came, the urge to speak vanished. You say it and it’s no longer yours.

Dottie helped me into the dress. I held on to her. She held on to the dresser. And still, we were shaking.

“Aren’t we agile,” I said.

“Don’t I know it,” she said.

She tied a bow at my hip. She came close. I wanted to rest on her.

I sat down to stuff my feet into some slippers. She wasn’t going to make me wear heels. I stood up. She bent her knees to get a good look at me. She pulled a chunky silver bracelet from her pocket and shoved it onto my wrist.

“There,” she said. “Ta-da.”

I was pinching at the fabric, squirming in it.

“Too tight,” I said.

“Shush you,” she said.

I tried to untie the dress but she smacked me on the hand.

“Don’t,” she said. “You’re perfect.”

I acted like I wasn’t happy about it because for the moment, I was.

I let her do her thing. Fuss over my hair and apply three different lip-glosses to my mouth. I kept waiting for her to mention the slippers but she didn’t. That was the thing about Dottie. Sometimes, she was exactly right.

“Don’t come down here during class,” I said.

“Oh, please,” she said. “I’d double your attendance.” She swung her hips, winked with one eye and then the other. I liked Dottie like this. When she was jokey, not taking things personally. She had some stake in this class too, I knew. We were both less futile, less old, for it.

It was seven o’clock and no one had shown up.

It was seven fifteen and no one had shown up.

It was seven thirty and no one had shown up.

Dottie had come down twice already. She knocked on the door. Banged, really. She started yelling, “Victoria! Open the door! It’s Dottie!” She singsonged it so the neighbors wouldn’t think less of her, or that she was unloved. I didn’t open it. I heard her shoes click-clack right back to where they’d come from. Let her pout herself sick, I thought.

The phone had rung once, at about ten after seven, and I’d thought it might be one of them saying the subways were flooded or, better yet, he or she was downstairs but the dumb buzzer didn’t seem to be working. But it was no one. I raced to the phone but there was no one on the other end. I kept saying, “Hello, hello, hello.” Nothing. “
¿Hola? Soy
Victoria,” I tried.

I’d spent too much time hoping. In the beginning, I’d been skeptical. It’s better that way, always safer. It was Dottie’s fault for getting me into this in the first place. She hadn’t gotten my hopes up though. That was my own doing. I got a little dreamy. It felt nice. I let go. That’s the compromise. I forgot that. Happiness is an act of faith. But you can’t let it in and be done with it. Emotions come at you from all directions. I forgot to cover my head. It had been a while.

Now, you’d think the sadness would come from something else. From loneliness, rejection, something fundamental. But it didn’t. It was from the silly fact that I was all dressed. It took so much effort. I’d clipped on earrings. They pulled. They made my ears hot. Now my earlobes were raw and stiff. In the end, I’d taken off my slippers and put on shoes. Not only that, but I’d put powder in too. I used mouthwash. I cut my hangnails. So much for nothing.

I went back to the kitchen and looked at the stations I’d set up. I’d set up stations! One for peeling and chopping. Another for butchering the meat. Another with the food processor and a spatula. The salt was in the water. The water was in the pot. The pot was on the stove. It would have boiled. There would have been so many bubbles and that smell of starch. I loved that, cooking in the evenings. Basmati rice was my favorite smell in the restaurant. Nothing like it.

Each person was going to have a station. I would have pointed them out, like exits on an airplane. I had baked date-nut bread. The smell still floated in the kitchen. It’s the oldest trick in the book.

It didn’t surprise me. Or it did, but it shouldn’t have. I’d had this feeling it wasn’t going to work out. I imagined our daughter getting to her building’s elevator and turning around, going back inside her apartment. I imagined her taking off her coat, stuffing it into the closet. I imagined her telling her husband to sit down because she was going to prepare dinner after all; I imagined her kids cheering. She took homemade pizza dough out of the freezer. Together, they all cut the smoked mozzarella, the mini yellow tomatoes. The kids assembled them as they crouched on stools. All the while, their mother hated me. That kind of thinking was a leap of faith too. I was a pessimist. Joseph always said, “Stop hoping the sky’s going to fall.” It didn’t help when he said that, though he had a point.

Just after Joseph and I gave up the child, he took me for a picnic by the Hudson River. We found the perfect spit of grass. We bought hot dogs and soda. We even bought a kite. We were very quiet, the two of us, spinning on separate planes with our thoughts. We hardly said a word for hours, just staring, eyes glazed over, trying to get used to ourselves again. Eventually, it got dark. Joseph held my hand, put a sweater beneath my head, and we lay down to watch the sky.

“What?” I said, finally. “New York doesn’t have stars?”

He laughed.

“Come on,” he said and nudged me.

But you could hardly see them. In Baghdad they felt so close, like snowflakes on your lashes. It occurred to me that I didn’t really miss Baghdad after all. What I missed was the person I’d been when I was with Joseph there—when I’d been happy and unafraid of losing him and unaware of what could happen to a person when she refused to admit to sadness, to a gaping hole—and my former self felt like a stranger insisting that she knew me, absolutely sure of it.

“Look harder,” Joseph said. “They’re there. Look hard.”

Now I began rewrapping the lamb in some wax paper but I didn’t have enough. I’d thrown out the butcher paper, not thinking. So I had to use tin foil too. It was a mess, in the end, as if half-ravaged by animals. I couldn’t imagine what I’d do with all the food. I might cook the dishes as planned and give them away. But I didn’t think I could carry all the vegetables, rice, sauce, and so on. I’d collapse before reaching the front door.

I dumped the lamb into the garbage can. Joseph would have told me about the starving children. “I can’t right now,” I said aloud. “So cut it out. I just can’t.”

I poured the water back into the sink. It splashed against the sides and got on Dottie’s dress, but what did I care? No one to see it. I told myself that I would never have to get dressed up again. If I felt like it, I could stay in fleece until the day I died.

I went back to the bedroom. I leaned on the wall to take off my shoes. I had to sit down to get hold of the buckle. I untied the dress. The buzzer rang. One shoe on and one shoe off.

I yelled, “One minute!,” as if my voice might carry out the window and down to the street. I yanked at the other buckle. I was getting heated. I was getting winded. I yanked so hard the buckle broke. The shoe flew across the room, smacked against the wall, and then stopped. I had to smile. I wasn’t dead yet.

“Coming!” I said. I held the dress closed as I made my way through the house, leaving a trail of baby powder across the floor. Things bobbled. My skin had a life of its own. If Joseph could see me now, I thought, he’d jiggle his skin too, in soli- darity.

“Coming!” I yelled again.

Dottie heard me upstairs. She tapped with her foot.
Not now, Dottie,
I thought.
Not now, please.

“Hello,” I blurted into the buzzer, panting, letting my shoulders drop forward and my head rest on the wall. The dress was open. I could see my own underwear—and everything.

The voice, when it came through, was garbled, static.

“I can’t hear you,” I said.

Dottie would have called me a lunatic. I know what she would have said.
You’re going to let someone upstairs? You don’t even know who it is? And you not dressed? Where shall I begin?

“Come up,” I said, and pressed the buzzer to unlock the downstairs door.

I waited with my eye to the peephole, my heart pounding like an angry fist. Seconds later, a girl emerged from the stairwell, her feet barely tapping the floor. I stepped back, shocked. She wasn’t a fifty-year-old lady. She wasn’t my daughter. She wasn’t Robert either. She was fifteen, if that. Her cheeks were the color of brick. I opened the door. She was wearing a rain jacket, and her hands were hidden in her sleeves.

“Sorry,” she said. “The subway was so slow. I got out at Ninety-Sixth Street and walked.”

Her voice was deeper than I would have thought. She took off a hat that looked too big for her, all flaps and flannel. She was long-necked, reddish-haired, and freckled, but olive in the skin, as if she’d been shaded. Her eyes were light blue, like ancient sea glass. She took off her sneakers without using her hands and then leaned over and placed them neatly by the door. They were flat as pancakes, with shoelaces that didn’t match. She was wearing socks with white bugs on them. She curled her toes when she saw me looking.

“You know they eat them in Thailand?” she said. “Oven-baked with green curry.”

“Socks?” I asked.

“No,” she said and the sides of her cheeks lifted into a smile. “Crickets
on
my socks.”

I squeezed my hands to get a hold of myself. I had to. Otherwise I would have stood there, unmoving, until the sky fell.

Her eyes plucked around the small, unlit foyer while she braided her hair, fast fast fast. She had a cut below her chin. It was nothing big, but what an odd spot, I thought. What might she have been doing? I wouldn’t ask. This was the new me: this polite kind of thinking.

“Am I the only one here?” she asked. Before I could answer, she said something else.

“It’s okay if I am,” she said.

“You are,” I said.

I was still fumbling with the dress, like a ninny. The knot had come entirely undone. Here’s my bra, folks. Twenty-five cents a peek. Twenty-five years old too.

“Do you need help?” she asked. “My mom has a dress like this.”

She unknotted the thing in an instant, careful not to look where she shouldn’t. She nearly hugged me as she wrapped it around my back and tied it on the side. She was as tall as me but with lighter bones. Her jacket smelled sweet, like tea with milk. She had long feet. I had long feet too, but I didn’t mention it, not wanting to embarrass her. I knew it wasn’t the greatest feminine quality.

“There,” she said, cinching the bow. When she straightened up, she looked past me. Not at me, though she didn’t seem shy. She had a freckle below her eye. Me too. I pointed to it, realizing that I was speechless. I hadn’t said a word. She laughed.

“I noticed that,” she said. “We match.”

I could feel the cold come off her body. What was wrong with me? This was no way to treat a guest.

We stood there for a moment. It was me that was supposed to do something now but I’d been thrown off totally—and then thrown off again. I remembered that the lamb was half wrapped in the trash. What was I thinking?

“Smells like zucchini bread,” she said. “Smells really good.”

“Date bread,” I said. “From my country.” Oldest trick in the book: bake something to make guests feel at home.

I wasn’t sure what to do then so I began walking into the kitchen. She took off her coat.

“Oh,” I said. “How stupid of me. Let me take that.”

She crumpled it into a little ball and handed it to me. I unrolled it and hung it on the doorknob. We stopped at the kitchen. I looked at the mess.

“Wow,” she said. “This is really nice. Our kitchen is like this divided by four.”

She delineated the space with her arms.

“We’re always getting in each other’s way,” she said.

I thought about asking her who
each other
was, but didn’t. I wanted to. The truth was, I hadn’t had much experience with girls of this age. Any age really. That would have been fine for Joseph. He could have spoken garbage to a garbage can. But I was awkward, overthinking everything. I hadn’t taken this into account, a child. I could have known young girls like this. I could have watched one grow. We would have had birthdays for her in the park. We would have brought all the ingredients for falafel sandwiches. Her friends could have made them however they liked and wrapped them in wax paper cones. Pickles or no pickles. Tahini sauce or no tahini sauce. Her birthday parties would have been a hit, I thought. All the kids would have liked them best.

“What’s your name?” I asked her.

“Lorca,” she said. And I slumped inside just the tiniest bit. I’d never read Lorca. I should have. He’d been on my list.

“I’m sorry I didn’t call ahead,” she said. “I called a little while ago but I couldn’t hear anything. I wanted to ask if it was okay that I showed up.”

“Of course it’s okay,” I said.

I introduced myself, thank goodness, unsure of whether to shake her hand or kiss her on both cheeks, so instead I said my name as I took the meat out of the garbage can.

“I’m Victoria, nice to meet you. This was wrapped,” I said.

“Great,” she said and I believed her. She was biting her thumb.

She slid onto one of our barstools, as gracefully as I’d ever seen it done. She untied a scarf from her neck and held it to her stomach, slouching in a way that came easily to her. I could imagine her sleeping in the tiniest coil.

“There were supposed to be others,” I said, wiggling out my fingers from beneath the heavy meat and putting it onto the butcher block again. “They didn’t show.”

For a moment, as she turned her head, I thought she was going to suggest that she leave. Then we caught each other’s eye. I hope. I hope. I hope. What a pretty face she had, the kind that was unnerving in a child but always would be too. The kind that you could swear you’d seen before, but only because you wanted to. She was a composite of startling things. Cheekbones like you read about. Eyelashes that tickled her brows. A disproportionately large upper lip. She slid off the stool. I thought she was going for her coat.