“So so sorry,” she said.
I was a tall building crumbling. I was a tall building with the insides ripped out. I thought I might faint.
Once, years ago, I fainted. I never told Joseph. Couldn’t. It might have been dehydration. That’s what the doctor insisted. I’d been in the hospital. I’d given birth. Given. Funny, you give. I gave birth. I gave her up. A few days later, I was walking down the street alone—I saw a child, I smelled dairy, the baby smell, and the blackness came. The sudden wispiness of the world around me. The chilly cold. And down I’d gone, collapsing like the ingénue in a musical. When I came to, a stranger told me he’d thought I was faking. My hand went to my forehead, he said. A high-pitched sigh. I fell as if I were dancing, as if someone had forgotten to catch me. I couldn’t tell Joseph. It would have been the crack in my armor.
Now the blackness came toward me in a sequence of shots. Ink from a squid. I felt soaked and heavy. But Ada was here. She was keeping me upright. I stepped out of her embrace. The corridor wobbled. I put out my arms for balance and whacked my wrist against the door frame. I went into the study, saw him: the cashew color of his face, the sluglike scar on the left side of his nose. The oriental carpet was a heap of autumn colors. The metal mechanism that turned the sofa into a bed was exposed where the sheet had lifted, skeletal. He was on his back. He was lying on his back.
Joseph didn’t move. He hadn’t moved. It was Ada’s fault. It had to be. I had not done this. My heart was pumping in my throat and in my wrists and in my gums and in the hairless spaces behind my ears.
He wasn’t dead. He could not be dead. I watched, waiting for his belly to lift.
“Say
Victoria,
Joseph.” I might have said this out loud, or maybe not. I might have tried it in Arabic after that. If I’d known how to speak Russian, I would have tried that too.
This is it,
I thought. The moment I’d been waiting for. I had not been waiting for him to get better. For months, this was all I’d imagined, all the time. Scenario after scenario of how I’d find out that he was gone—the sound I’d make, the socks I’d be wearing, if I’d just have opened a can of seltzer and if I’d drop it or waste time finding a place to put it down, if my heart would stop along with his. I’d imagined it, but it hadn’t come. Now it was here and I was alive.
What I hadn’t imagined was this eerie stillness of his body. The sudden absence.
“Joseph?” I said it impatiently, like I was calling him for dinner.
“He is gone,” Ada said.
“Gone where?” I said that out loud. Gone to the store. Gone to bed. Gone to heaven. Gone to the store to buy the bed that sits in heaven. Suddenly, I believed in heaven.
“I will take care of everything,” I whispered, as if words might be enough to lure him back. I promised him that I’d open an Iraqi pastry shop. I lied.
“We will sell the vanilla cake with pomegranate sauce, the date truffles, the cardamom cookies, the
shakrlama
.” All the things he loved. Things we had served night after night at the restaurant. Things that might have, if anything could have, perked him up, brought him back. I said this as if all of a sudden he might open his eyes and say he’d love a cookie, thank you very much. And I would have raced to the kitchen and there would have been a platter of them, piled high and hot.
“Everything will be all right,” I said. I was aware of the weight of the sky, the blood careering through my veins, the cold slippery feeling of my feet, a bus somewhere down the street, its long, labored exhale. Lucky breath.
And then I was saying, “I will find our daughter.” I didn’t care if Ada could hear. She’d known nothing. Now she knew everything. I wasn’t thinking of myself. “I promise,” I said.
This was where it happened—on a pull-out couch after sunset on a Friday, with the smell of latex gloves in the room, of browning garlic outside, dirty white socks on the floor stiff as old bones, our old old building clanking like a madman was inside the pipes, two books on the shelf tipped toward each other and making room for a vase of dead purple flowers, me on my knees with my face on an unbeating heart while everything else around us continued to move, in its way, or be moved, for something hopeful in the future.
“I will find her,” I said, meaning it. “It wasn’t your fault. It was mine. She will love you still.”
I
DIDN’T SLEEP
a wink. The morning after overhearing my mother reveal her favorite meal of life, I lay in bed, awake before everybody, hoping desperately that a brilliant idea about how to track down the masgouf recipe would dawn on me. My hope was that my mother had written various versions somewhere as she tried to perfect it and stashed away the best one on a tiny piece of paper so all I had to do was find it, master it, and
fini!
that would be that. But there were three problems with this. First, my mother kept very few things. You couldn’t find a single one of my kid drawings or report cards if you tried. I doubt she even had her own Social Security card. Second, what she did keep, she kept in a box below the couch where she slept. Where she was sleeping now. Third, my mother had said that even she couldn’t replicate the dish, so if she’d written it down, and if by some miracle I was able to find it, the odds of my making something halfway decent from that recipe were slim to none. Closer to none.
Still, hopelessness is about as useful as rotten eggs. I hadn’t had a good idea since the maple bacon and caramelized banana ice cream sandwiches that were now included on the brunch menu at Le Canard Capricieux, and my mother would be home all day, so I told myself that if I was going to do something, I’d better do it now. If I waited till she woke up, I’d wait for hours. When I couldn’t stay in bed any longer, I went into the living room, got down on my hands and knees, and crawled across the floor. If she woke up from my movement, I’d just say I was defuzzing the carpet. Staying flat was harder than I’d expected; my arms quivered. But at this time of day, my mother was very sensitive to light. I couldn’t move too quickly and I couldn’t stand up. If even a piece of a shadow crossed her face, I’d be toast. I put one elbow in front of the other. She hiccupped. I went flat. I waited a minute. I kept going. When I was two feet from the couch, out of nowhere, very loudly and very clearly, my mother said, “Christ.” I was sure she was awake and about to ask me what I thought I was doing, but she just flipped onto her left side, away from the room and me.
I looked at my elbows. They were covered in rug fuzz. I reached my arm under the couch. Just then, Lou’s alarm went off in her bedroom. My heart stopped. I knocked my chin on the floor and bit my tongue. Only when I heard the shower turn on and Lou get in did I resume my quest. I had to stick half my body beneath the couch to reach the little shoebox. I grabbed it and raced to my bedroom, jumping when the door slammed behind me.
I poured everything onto the bed. There were dozens of napkins stamped with the names of my mother’s favorite restaurants—most of which I recognized, none of which sounded Middle Eastern. I went through every single one. There was a replica of one of Julia Child’s mixing spoons, a tiny burned thing, that my father bought from the Smithsonian gift shop. There was a small bouquet of dried lavender whose flowers were now spewed all over my bed like fleas. The only good news was that there was a photo of my mother as a child, which I stuffed into the flap of my father’s old lumberjack hat to examine later. She hated photos of herself, and the only picture I could remember seeing was one my father had taken when they’d gone to the Berkshires. Her face was like something from an old movie. I’d found a treasure, and yet, no recipe. No restaurant. No nothing.
I shook everything out again before I put it all back, just to be sure I wasn’t missing something. I gently nudged the box back under the couch just as Lou turned off the shower and turned on her electric toothbrush.
Next, I scoured the Internet, searching for the restaurant, for any Iraqi restaurant in New York—for anything about it, reviews or photos or menus. Then for any Middle Eastern restaurant that had closed years ago. Nothing. Then for any Middle Eastern restaurant that hadn’t closed. Nothing helpful. I found lots of street carts and distribution corporations in Brooklyn.
New York
magazine mentioned a Syrian place in the theater district. So I took the portable phone and, balancing the laptop in one arm and opening the door silently with the other, went out of the apartment and into the hallway. Then I called, even though it was six thirty in the morning.
I plopped down next to the elevator.
When someone picked up and said hello, I was deep in the archives of Chowhound and almost forgot to respond.
“Hello,” he said again in a very nonprofessional, non-restaurant-host voice. He had thick throat congestion and a heavy accent. I wanted to say
A-hem
before we continued. I imagined my mother.
Lorca! Manners!
But at Le Canard Capricieux, the GM hired the hostess based on her phone voice:
GoodeveninglecanardcapricieuxhowmayIassistyou?
“Sorry,” I said. “Maybe I have the wrong number? I’m looking for a restaurant.”
“This is a restaurant,” he said. “We’re not open for breakfast. We’re not open for lunch either. And soon, we’re not open for dinner.”
“Are you closing?” I said and because I didn’t think it through, I got hopeful.
“Department of Health says we’ve got rats. I don’t think that’s the end of the world but they do and so does my wife.”
“Oh,” I said. “I’m sorry. Do you make masgouf?” I whispered the word, not wanting my mother to hear.
“Masgouf!”
he yelled back. “Syria has only forty-four kilometers of the Tigris. Iraq has the whole thing. Masgouf is from the Tigris. Fish from freshwater Tigris water. We don’t have any masgouf here.”
“Okay, and—” I started but he interrupted me.
“Are you a critic? I can make you masgouf. You want masgouf? Do you have funding?”
“No,” I said. “Sorry.”
He said, “I’m sorry too. Have a happy holiday.”
It wasn’t a holiday as far as I knew but he hung up before I could ask him about it.
Chowhound turned up nothing on masgouf. Neither did MenuPages. I searched through Indian and Turkish restaurants. I called the Syrian guy back and asked him if he knew of any Iraqi restaurants in Manhattan and he said, “First, you want Iraqi dish. Now you want Iraqi restaurant. We’re Syrian! What can we do about it?”
I said sorry and hung up for the second time.
I went back into the apartment.
Lou walked into the living room with her blouse on inside out. I was about to tell her when she put a finger over her lips, telling me to shush. She pointed to my sleeping mother. She put on her coat and rustled her keys. On her way out, she let the door slam. She opened it again.
“Sorry, Nance,” she half whispered and blew my mother a kiss.
Oh, and T.G.I.F.,
she mouthed to me before it occurred to her that I hadn’t left for school, and then she remembered what had happened yesterday. When she did, she threw her hands up as if to say that we’d once been on the same team and I’d deserted her. But we hadn’t been. Ever.
I learned online that the previous month, the restaurant in Baghdad with the best masgouf had been blown up by a car bomb. It killed thirty-five people. There was a photo of a little boy crouching next to a corpse. His knees were wide, like he was about to jump up for leapfrog. His hair was still parted perfectly like little boys’ hair can be only when their mothers spend extra time. His hands were wrapped around the dead man’s feet, covered in blood like water-soaked oven mitts.
I closed the screen.
I couldn’t look at other people’s blood. Only mine.
It was nearly noon when I decided I’d done all the research that I could possibly do at home—and I was no closer to finding the masgouf. For a moment, I wondered if somehow my mother was tricking me, trying to distract me. There might be no restaurant at all, no sacred recipe. This was all just to keep me busy and out of her way until I was sent to boarding school. You could never be sure with my mother. I wouldn’t give up so easily.
I put my hair up and down and up and down four times before I managed to get out the door and to the bookstore. I wasn’t usually so fussy, but I was thinking of Blot. Finally, I braided it tight the way that my dad used to like and then took it out a short while later so it was crimpy. I brushed my teeth and flossed and used the tongue scraper even though it wasn’t like I was planning on kissing him. Not even a little.
Before I left, I told my mother I was going out. She was lying on her back on the couch and she flipped her head toward me. It was like an oven opening, the sudden gush of flushed light. Ever since I was a child, I’d wanted to savor that exact moment when I was leaving, the brief second in which she looked at me, acknowledging that tiny bit of mystery in my departure,
my
leaving
her,
for a change, the possibility that I might not come back. It had always seemed to me that I might never see her again—even when I was with her, it felt constantly like she was just coming or going.
Of course, I’d probably do better at the library, find out more, but Blot didn’t work at a library.
At the bookstore, I collected three books: one on Middle Eastern cuisine, one on favorite fish dishes of Manhattan, and one with two hundred applications for watercress. My mother loved watercress.
It was quieter than usual even for a Friday. There was a reading going on in the children’s section. The mothers were bouncing their legs. Strollers were positioned in a line. I slunk around the store as if I might get in trouble for being school age and not in school.
I went to the third floor’s standardized-test section because it was deserted. Also because the books were big enough to reach the fronts of the shelves, so when I sat and leaned back against them, it wasn’t like leaning back against the top of a picket fence. Sometimes I wanted to say to someone—and the someone was always my mother—
Look. See? It isn’t all the time. I can help myself. I’m not a danger to myself or to others. There’s no reason to send me away. Look at me just sitting here. Look at me trying to be comfortable.