Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots (8 page)

“The restaurant might have been right around here, near Eighty-Fifth Street,” I said. “That’s where my father used to stay when he came to the city, at this fancy banker’s guest townhouse. He had built all their furniture.”

It was easy to explain my weird family to him when we were both turning pages, not looking at each other.

“Well,” Blot said, “how about this? How about we try just walking around? This neighborhood’s full of old folk. Someone must know something.”

I was silent. He’d said “we.”

“I just happen to be free,” he added. For a second, I wondered if he simply felt sorry for me. If he was trying to be nice and was channeling a very fancy great-aunt who had taught him well. But it didn’t seem that way. From the bottom of my heart, I swear that it didn’t. It felt honest.

I gave out a too-happy puff of air and then sucked in and kind of snorted.

“Want to go after work?” he asked. “I get off at seven.”

A chill shot down my spine. I wanted to be close to him. I wanted to tell him all my secrets and I didn’t want to tell him any. I wanted to show him my foot, my whole arm, to know if he’d find me disgusting, awful. Just to know. I wondered if everyone had that. The one thing a person always wanted to say forever and ever to get herself out of things and into things. The one thing that mattered the most.

“Okay,” I said instead. “I’ll come back.”

On the street, out of habit, I thought of ways to hurt myself. It would have been so easy to do it then. It was dark out. Our block was always quiet except in the morning, when people sat in their cars as the street sweeper passed through. But now it would be deserted.

All sorts of crazy things went through my head—me and Blot tapping on fish tanks at the pet store; me and Blot collecting lost mittens in the snow; me and Blot tangled in a big coffee-shop chair, reading about Ugli fruit and sharing a cranberry-walnut muffin. I spent what seemed like hours wondering what he liked for dinner. I imagined his apartment with a worn wooden table and huge, rickety windows that looked out onto two, maybe three bridges. I bet he cooked for his cool musician friends, mixing spaghetti and sauce and cheese in one giant pot and folding toilet paper into triangles for napkins. I wondered if he would tell them that there was some crazy girl at work who was obsessed with him. But in my true heart, that’s not what I imagined he’d say. I imagined him telling them my name, saying it just like he’d said it to me:
Lorca.
Like the
o
was a bubble that he nudged gently off his tongue.
L.
Ooorc. Ca.

I kept my mind on him, and my whole body felt lighter, like there was some strong, warm current moving around me. And I did nothing bad. For hours, I kept myself in check.

My mother had every other Friday off.

After I got home from the bookstore, I decided to make dinner for her and Aunt Lou. If they were eating or full, it would be easier for me to leave to meet Blot for our not-date. I would bustle around the kitchen and then bustle out the door. Usually, I was on the couch. If I got up for some orange juice, my mother said, “Where are you off to, little girl?” and even if it was nowhere, I’d have to do a whole song and dance.

Pasta arrabbiata. Lidia Bastianich used pepperoncini and prosciutto ends for hers. Me too. I set the table and lit candles. I was happy. I hadn’t hurt myself. I hadn’t done one thing. I even shaved my legs like a normal person. I’d kept thinking, in the shower,
Look at me! Look at me do this!
I put on clean jeans and socks that matched and I took more than four seconds to braid my hair. I didn’t put on music but I found myself humming. I kept thinking,
He’ll forget. He didn’t mean it.
But actually, in my heart of hearts, I believed he did.

I said, “Dinner’s served!” Aunt Lou told me not to shout.

Just when we were all ready to start, my mother looked at her plate and said, “You know what
arrabbiata
means, right?”

I had a feeling about where this conversation was going.

“It means ‘angry,’” she said. “Like a red-hot Sicilian woman. Aurelio made it for me the night I left him. He had no idea it was coming. So ironic. So ironic! He took the whole bowl of it and threw it against the wall. That’s how much he cared.”

Aurelio was a man she’d dated in Italy. That’s all I knew about it.

I wanted them to eat. I wanted them to hurry so I could pretend to be busy cleaning up. I hadn’t stopped smiling. No one said a thing and I was actually grateful for that. For once, I appreciated it.

“You never should have left him,” Lou said, all dreamy, picking out all the pepperoncini and making a decorative little clump of them in the middle of the table. I put them in a saucer and she glared at me.

“I know,” my mother said, and she swirled a piece of basil around her plate until I finished my pasta. “I definitely shouldn’t have left.”

The phone rang. I jumped up and then felt stupid. Blot didn’t have my phone number.

“Expecting someone?” Lou said, and I said, “No.” I made buckteeth at her. She made them back and then picked up. It was obvious from her smirk that it was Jorge, the married man Aunt Lou sometimes went away with. Sometimes he didn’t call for three weeks, and Lou went back on her diet for real, got a wax, and bought ninety-seven pairs of shoes.

She covered the mouthpiece and rolled her eyes. “So needy,” she said, and walked into the other room. Yeah, right.

It was the perfect time then. I should have gotten my sneakers and left. My mother put up her feet on Lou’s chair. She hadn’t had any pasta, and she was on her fourth glass of wine. It had plumped up her cheeks. Her mascara was in little black pepper flakes around her eyes. She let her head fall onto the back of the chair and she breathed out like she was making imaginary smoke rings.

Now.

“Oh,” I said. “Crap. I have to pick up homework from school before the weekend. If I keep up with it, I can still get grades for this semester. Principal Hidalgo said she’d leave it with the guard.”

Such a lie. Such a big huge lie that no one would notice.

I put on my sneakers and my coat and I was just about to leave when my mother said, “Come, Lorca. Just come here for a second.”

Then, very casually, like it wasn’t the point of everything, she said, “Oh, you can go. You don’t have to stay here with me.”

I went back to the table and sat down. She didn’t budge. My coat was bunched under me. Her head was still back. When her neck was long and stretched like this, I could see the structure of it, the evidence of lack of sun and air, skin like rungs on a ladder, covered in the slightest layer of dust. She was quiet.

“Let me tell you something,” she said. She hadn’t had a bite of her dinner. I’d even curled the pasta into a little linguine nest in the center of each bowl. My mother’s was still perfect and round and cold. The sauce had darkened.

“This is delish,” she said. “But it needs red wine. I tell you because I love you and you should know for the future.”

She went on about deglazing and how it brings out the earthy taste of the onions and never use wine you wouldn’t drink yourself and a young, robust wine is what you use in red sauces, nothing fortified or dry, for example.

I was sweating in my coat. My stomach was starting to itch. I should have worn an undershirt. I was thirsty. I reminded myself to remind myself to smell my armpits before I went. With her head back like this, every time she took a sip of the wine, her throat looked like a snake that was swallowing a mouse. She wanted to talk about Aurelio some more. She wasn’t looking at me. Whenever she talked about other men, I thought of my father. I didn’t hate him. There was never a second that I hated him. Sometimes the phone rang and I’d pick up and it was quiet on the other end except for what sounded like rustling trees, which I knew was absurd. It was just the way I imagined him. If no one else was home, I’d say, “Dad. Dad?” But no one ever said anything back. When I called *69, it said the number was blocked. There were a billion other people it could have been, though I’d put us on the Do Not Call list, so it probably wasn’t just anyone.

“Your father was never like that,” she was saying. “Passionate like that. Can you blame me?” She wasn’t talking to me. She was talking to the ceiling.

“I wanted him to fight for us,” she said, making figure eights in the air with her glass, and then she gave a sudden punch, like she was in some kind of rally. Some of her wine spilled out and went sailing onto the floor.

“Fight, fight, fight!” she said. “For anything. It didn’t matter what.”

I said, “I wanted that too,” but she didn’t hear me. I wanted her to fight for me. I used a paper towel and my foot to clean up the wine puddle.

“I wanted him to tell us not to go and to really take a stand about it,” she said. “But he wimped out. Like everyone, he got wimpy on me.”

“Then why did you fall in love with him?” I asked. “If he was such a wimp.”

She put her glass down, glared at me like I’d misunderstood everything.

“He changed,” she said. “I thought I knew what he was after. In the beginning, when I worked at La Grenouille, he sent back my sweetbreads. No one had ever done that. He said rosemary was a moth deterrent.”

She put back her head again.

“And he was the first man bold enough to order for me at a restaurant. He was his own person then, so into wood. He used to get totally lost looking at a barstool. You wouldn’t believe it. But then, eventually, his interest became me. I was pregnant and he wouldn’t get off my back. If it had stayed like that, I would have left him right then and there. But things ebbed and flowed. I’ll tell you what, though. If he’d liked my sweetbreads, he wouldn’t have had a chance in hell.”

I refilled her glass. It was 7:05. She wasn’t done. I wanted her to say something about how my needing her was different from my father’s needs. I was her daughter. That kind of need was necessary, biological, heartening. There were a million words I wanted to put in her mouth, but she said none of them. At 7:30, she lifted her head, disconcerted, flushed.

“Didn’t you say you had to go somewhere?” she said.

“No,” I said. “It’s okay.”

By then, I’d taken off my coat. My back was cold with sweat.

“You go,” she said. “I’ll be fine.”

“All right,” I said. I put on my coat. I didn’t even want to go anymore. He wouldn’t be there. I’d be ridiculous.

As I was walking out the door, my mother called to me. “Lorca?”

I stopped, turned around.

“I must have done something very right,” she said. “You’re the best little listener.”

I sprinted all the way to the bookstore, which was no big deal except that there had never been more people on the street and that made it impossible to run. They looked at me like they didn’t know which direction they should go and then they didn’t go in either one. They just stood there, with bags of groceries held out like broken wings. Eventually, I started running in the street, staying close to the parked cars and scooting back up on the curb when I saw the lights of a bus.

I burst into the store with my hands tingling from the cold. I raced toward the stairs and noticed that the elevator doors were open, about to close. A walrus of an old man was fiddling with the buttons. I got in.

“Terrible weather,” the walrus said, firmly reparting his hair with both hands. His belly was so big that he leaned back even when he didn’t.

They taught us in school that if you’re ever in an elevator with a pervert, you should shake and scream like you’re covered in ants. They said, “Preserve yourself, not your dignity.”

Right before I got out of the elevator, my heart started purring. Just for a second; I couldn’t help it. Sometimes, no matter how hard I tried to keep my hopes down, they popped back up like a turkey timer.

He was gone. Blot was gone. I could see that before I stepped out of the elevator. I didn’t even have to move my head. His desk was right in front of me. No coat. No stray pens or tissues. There was a neat stack of books and a legal pad and his empty teacup, cleaned. I thought,
Maybe there’s a note for me.
But there wasn’t. Of course there wasn’t.

I was standing directly in front of the elevator, blocking everything, and the walrus had to say, “Excuse me, miss,” twice to get me to move.

I told myself Blot didn’t really want to go with me. I was awful. He’d been laughing at me the whole time. I was part of some bet. That didn’t happen just in movies. That was my first thought. Even when I looked at the time and saw that I was forever later than fashionably late, I couldn’t convince myself that it was just that: it was as simple as him waiting for me and then leaving. In my head, it was something so much worse. He knew about my cuts. He hated me. He hated me. He hated me. This had all been some kind of setup and here I was, falling for it.

I could have been on the couch, eating sorbet. This was what happened when I got hopeful.

I walked over to his desk. I wasn’t going to do anything ridiculous like try to smell a pencil he might have touched. But I wanted to be close to him. He had paper clips stuck to a black magnet in the shape of a house.

Go home, Lorca,
I thought.
Enough now. That’s enough.
I was about to leave when I saw a
Zagat
from 1986 on his stool. There was a blue Post-it note sticking out. I reached for the book to see if the note was for me. I couldn’t believe this. I told myself to slow down. It was like eating a cupcake: you had to eat the bottom before the top. I didn’t want to rush everything and have nothing left. I stopped myself. I counted to three before moving an inch.

One haricot vert.

Two haricots verts.

Three haricots verts.

Okay. Enough. I couldn’t stand it. I opened the book.

There it was. A restaurant called the Shohet and His Wife at 424 Amsterdam Avenue. The review started like this: “Upper West Siders don’t come here for the ‘frightening décor.’ It is a testament to the food of this ‘outstanding,’ ‘family-owned’ ‘Mediterranean plaza’ that customers get past the door. But once they do, they ‘can’t get enough.’” On the Post-it, in boy handwriting:
Owners:
Joseph and Victoria Shohet, 203 West 112th Street.