Life Without a Recipe Read online

  Life

  Without

  a Recipe

  A MEMOIR

  Diana Abu-Jaber

  W. W. NORTON & COMPANY

  Independent Publishers Since 1923

  NEW YORK ~ LONDON

  To my daughter Gracie, my star light,

  and

  To the memory of my grandmother, Grace,

  who lit my path

  Life

  Without

  a Recipe

  Introduction

  The air was shaking. That’s what it felt like—enormous, roaring machinery, prowling over the street. And just me, six years old, limp-armed, stumped, mid-sidewalk. Usually there was a cloud of other first-graders to walk home with, drifty and school-spent. But today, alone, watching the machines rear up, I backed away in horror and turned down another street. It wasn’t the way to our house: I only knew one way—three blocks straight, turn right, three blocks straight. Nobody ever mentioned that one day the turn-right might be filled with machines.

  My thought was Not that way. So I walked farther and farther from home. Until someone’s mother looked out their window and noticed me drooping along. She took me in and called my parents on a kitchen phone like ours with a curling cord attached to the wall. Like a miracle, they appeared in the drive, asking, “Where were you going?”

  Perhaps there are other children who would have done the same thing—let their anxiety stop them in their tracks, turn them in exactly the wrong direction. Perhaps other children found the world as inscrutable as I did. As I grew up, clouds closed in—hours of running down the stairs trying to fly, of wishing for magical powers, of hunting for four-leafed clovers, not hearing the school bell, raising my head in the middle of the afternoon to find myself alone in a green field. The dreaminess, I think, was a cloak against fear, the sense of being unequal to the situation at hand.

  Some kids are flattened by depression, others get angry; for me, there was a static-filled field of uncertainty. Then what do you do? What happens when, thanks to temperament or circumstances, the fit never feels right, and you’re not at home in yourself? Underneath that is another question: Where is the other path?

  The good neighbor sat me at a round Formica table, much like the one at home, and opened the fridge with its big, reassuring suck. Among a circle of other crazy-haired kids, I received my first sacrament of peanut butter and Fluffernutter sandwich—a craving instilled for years to come. I felt better at the table, which I thought of not just as a place to eat but also as a story-telling, argument-having place, useful and plain-faced and reassuring.

  If the world is the water, the table is a raft; place your hands on it and hold on.

  PART I

  Grace

  at the Table

  CHAPTER ONE

  Crack

  Her small hand curves like eggshell: satin skin, round fingers, dimples in place of knuckles. The brown egg echoes her holding hand. My breath is there too, inside the curve of her holding, waiting for the crack.

  “Why don’t you let me, honey?”

  “I can do it.”

  “Eggs are tricky.”

  “I can do it! Me! I can!”

  I watch the small hand hover with treasure. The treasure isn’t so much the egg, it’s the cracking. It’s using the sharp knife, prizing cookies off the hot tray, flipping the pancake. If it’s difficult and risky, it’s delicious.

  “All right. But remember how I showed you?”

  The hand lifts, hesitates, then smashes the egg nearly flat against the cutting board. Crushed egg and shell everywhere. For a moment, she’s paralyzed. Then her eyes turn to mine, her mouth opens into a squared-off silent wail. Finally the sob. Friends marveled at how passionately she cried as a newborn, weeping true tears weeks before babies are supposed to be able to produce them. After the shock wears off and we clean the counters (she helps, making smooth, even lines with a sponge), she is ardent to try again.

  This time my hand rides hers, rising together. Now the crack is more temperate. Mostly egg spills into the bowl, long strings of it hanging from fingers. She wipes them neatly on my pants leg. We stare at the yolk in the bowl. “Hey, you did it!”

  “What is that? Down there?” Hovering on her step stool, she cranes her neck.

  There’s only egg in the bowl. “What do you mean? Just eggs.” But maybe I understand: Something about cracking it yourself makes you see it differently. There’s a little bit of sadness in it. She asks these sorts of obscurantist questions that are like fishing, in which neither of us quite understands what she’s after. But I try to answer anyway.

  “What does it make?”

  “You mean what does egg . . . become? Turn into? Everything. Everything comes out of an egg.”

  “What does?”

  “Animals. Chickens. Snakes. Fish. People do. You started with an egg. Just a really teensy one.”

  “No I didn’t,” she says. She sounds distracted. Tilting the big ceramic bowl, she might be considering the beginning of life, the ends of the cosmos. The whorl at the center of the batter. A bowl is a place to find meaning, I think. Stir the spoon and wait, all sorts of things rise to the mind’s surface. I used to joke that I wanted a child so I’d have someone to bake with. Perhaps not such a big joke. The first time my grandmother handed me an egg to crack, I was five. I thanked her, admired it, then tried to hand it back, wary of that hard white thing.

  My daughter asks for a fork so she can pop the eyeball.

  I hand it over and she stabs the yolk: stab, stab, stab.

  Every year between Halloween and Christmas, my grandmother Grace transforms her apartment into a bakery. Tables and chairs are covered with racks of cooling cookies, eight baking sheets slip in and out of the oven—as tiny as something in a troll’s house. The Mixmaster drones. A universe of cookies: chocolate-planted peanut butter; sinus-kicking bourbon balls; reindeer and sugar bells; German press-form cookies from her grandparents’ Bavarian village—Springerle—green wreaths, candy berries; and a challenging, grown-uppy variety named for the uncut dough’s sausage shape: Wurstcakes. All part of Grace’s arsenal: she’s engaged in an internecine war with my father, Bud, over the loyalties of the children. Her Wurstcakes are slim as communion wafers. Bud dunks them in his demitasse of ahweh and calls them “Catholic cookies.” Her eyes tighten as she watches him eat.

  “Only higher civilizations bake cookies,” she says to me, raking fingers through the shrubbery of my hair. “I don’t know how you people would celebrate Christmas if I wasn’t around. Run wild like savages.”

  My parents were married in Gram’s church. When the priest presented Dad with a contract to raise his children within the Catholic faith, Dad signed in Arabic. He nudged Gram in the ribs, as if she were in on the joke, and, instead of his name, wrote: I make no promises. In my parents’ satiny wedding photographs, Grace stared at Bud. I’m on to you, friend.

  “Never learn how to sew, cook, type, or iron.” She bends over the board, passes the hissing iron back and forth, slave rowing a galley ship. “That’s how they get you.” She pauses long enough to turn that shrewd gaze on me and after a moment I look away. There’s cooking, sure, but then there’s baking. I learn from Grace that sugar represents a special kind of freedom. It charms almost everyone; it brings love and luck and good favor. Cakes and cookies are exalted—a gift of both labor and sweetness—so good a smart woman is willing to give herself to them.

  Adversaries, even enemies, can rely on each other. My father and my grandmother teach me this by accident. They don’t get along and they agree on everything. Especially the two essentials:

  1.Men are terrible.

  2.Save your money (Gram: in bra. Bud: somewhere, preferably not at
the horse races).

  Also, they both want all the love. As if there is a limited supply and never enough to go around. They wrangle over the children’s souls and both set out food for us, bait inside a trap. Bud cooks—earthy, meaty dishes with lemon and oil and onion. Gram is more ruthless—she pries open those foil-lined tins, cookies covered with sugar crystals like crushed rubies, the beckoning finger of vanilla. I think about the story of the witch in her gingerbread house, how she schemed to push Hansel and Gretel into her oven. Gram reads me the story; I sit, rapt, watching her, her sky-blue eyes glittering. I will fight anyone for you, she seems to say. Even if it means cooking you and gobbling you up.

  Bud doesn’t quite grasp the concept of this fight; his wrath is more episodic. Anything that strikes him as American-disrespectful—say, one of us kids gives him the old eye-roll, or an “oh, yuh”—and he’ll be shouting the cupboards off the walls. Then he’ll storm into the kitchen and fill it with the scent of cauliflower seething in olive oil and garlic, the bitter, sulfurous ingredients he hacks up when he’s in a mood. Stuff that tastes like punishment to an eight-year-old. Most of the time, though, when Grace is around he forgets there’s a war on. He argues casually, conversationally, segues into offhanded, cheerful observations and questions: “Why do cookies always come in circles?” Etc. This deepens her rage and despair—he can’t even be bothered to remember that they’re fighting. So disrespectful!

  Grace is vigilant, tallying all those casual betrayals between men and women, as if she were jotting them in a notebook. It’s not just Bud, it’s all of them. Men as a general category are disappointing and traitorous—in money and family and work and power. Romantic love is another of their snares. “They tell you to wait, wait, wait,” she says. “True love will come. True love will make everything so much better. So you wait and wait and wait, and true love turns out to be a nincompoop with a venereal disease.”

  The insults, the sharp little arrows seem to be everywhere, even in places and moments that seem the most innocent. Gram will take me to see Snow White of the limpid flesh and cretinous voice—and the Prince with the powerful shoulders who must save her from another woman—an old lady!—and raise the helpless thing, literally, from the dead. Gram mutters, “Flibbertigibbet.” Afterward, we go to a café where they bring us crepes with cherries and whipped cream. “Did you see,” she grouses. “Those dwarves, they only wanted her to stay after she offered to cook for them.”

  Only a few of us in the family understand how those crisply divided feelings, love and complaint, float together, united. All grudges are softened by the approach of dinner. Those who labor with Bud in the kitchen are joined in a confederacy—cooking restores us to our senses. During the week, my father works two or more jobs. But Saturday breakfast is a profusion: the sizzling morsels of lamb on the fava beans; diced tomato, celery, and onion on the hummus; tidy, half-fried eggs bundled around their yolks. We hurry to sit and then spend half the meal begging Bud, “Come to the table! Sit down. Sit.” Always, he wants to slice one more cucumber.

  Throughout my childhood, I hear Americans joke about Bud and his harem—his wife and three daughters. He laughs, strong white teeth; he says, “Don’t forget my mother-in-law.”

  Before they’d met, neither Grace nor Bud could have imagined each other, not once in a million years. They came with their ingredients like particles of lost and opposing worlds, the dying old divisions—East and West.

  Among my father’s library of made-up true stories is a favorite, about meeting his mother-in-law:

  Grace was not pleased about her only child falling in with this questionable young man with a mustache. But that was a separate issue from good manners and laying out a nice table for company. At the time, the fanciest dish Grace knew of was shrimp poached in a wine and butter sauce. My father, most recently of the semiarid village of Yahdoudeh, studied the pale, curling bodies on the plate and saw a combination of cockroach and scorpion; he also deduced that the older lady with the stiff blonde hair and see-through eyes was some sort of bruja. He ate only the sweet dinner rolls—which were quite good—and left the rest untouched. Bud somehow had himself a marvelous time, even with the bruja’s blue eye fixed on him. Maybe because of it. Afterward, mortally offended, Grace scraped shrimp into the garbage, her throat filled with a dark will for revenge.

  A few months later, my poor mother, Patty, barely twenty years old, eternal optimist, proposed a do-over: this time in honor of their engagement. Grace decided to pull out all the stops. Telling her version, my grandmother had said, “You know how that is—the more you hate someone the nicer you are to them?” To her, there was nothing better than a glistening, pink ham. In anguish, she slathered it with brown sugar and pineapple slices, voodoo-piercing it with cloves—each a tiny dart.

  My Muslim father stood at the table, staring at the ham—forbidden, “unclean” meat. As soon as Gram saw his expression, she went to the phone book and jotted down the address of the White Castle. She swore she’d had no idea of this dietary restriction. “Who doesn’t eat ham?” she’d cried twenty years later, still in disbelief. “I was so angry, I was almost laughing.”

  Bud brought back fries for the table.

  You want most what you can’t have. Gram would fight him for her daughter, long after the fight was over.

  When I am nine, I cook a leg of lamb for my grandmother. A whole leg, just the two of us, but it’s important because, in my mind, it’s a possible culinary meeting place for him and her. When I suggest it, Gram says Oh! She adores leg of lamb. She hasn’t had it in forever. This is the first dinner I’ve ever cooked for her. All day I fan away her questions and suggestions. I’m as bossy and kitchen-difficult as my dad. For hours, the big joint burbles in wine and vinegar on top of the stove and fills her apartment with a round, heady scent that makes you weak-kneed. I set the table carefully, with napkins and water glasses. I carve and plate the lamb on top of the stove, then carry it out and place it before her.

  She lowers her fork after a few bites, her mouth wilting.

  “What’s wrong?” I’d crushed each garlic clove—a whole head—with salt, pepper, snips of rosemary, and had slipped the paste into slits in the meat, just the way I’d seen my father do. The tender meat breaks into fragments beneath the fork; I could drink the braising sauce with a spoon. “What did I do?”

  Gram takes off her glasses and knuckles the corners of her eyes. Finally she says, “I like my lamb rare. With mint jelly.” Her voice is pure pout. She sounds like my four-year-old sister, parked on the top step shouting, “Nobody loves me! You’re not the boss of me!” Rummaging through accusations until she finds whatever lines up with the way she feels inside, abandoned in the hard world.

  At nine, it’s only just beginning to occur to me that I’m on my own here. The adults give you what they can, richer or poorer. Mint jelly! It is accusation and insult. She has detected my father’s hand in the sauce. Affronted, I want to slap the table, bluster away, just like my dad does. But how do you argue with mint jelly? I took a risk and failed. It had never occurred to me that tastes and preferences could be so embedded in personality and history.

  To me, deliciousness is still a simple matter—I don’t have enough experience yet to understand how personal such things are. How you must choose the ingredients and tools slowly, putting together a palate, just as you build a life. Taste is desire, permitted or not, encouraged or not. There is no arguing it away, there is no winner in this fight, no recipe to follow. There is only blind faith and improvisation.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Work

  My grandmother has no ambivalence, no division: you answer the call of work, whether it’s the sort you are called to or the sort you have to do. She’s disdainful of housekeeping, yet her lavender-colored apartment glows, wiped down with lemon water. Hand-crank windows; a magical TV secreted inside an oak cabinet; fat, unbudgeable pieces of furniture; everything Pledged. And then the evidence of other work: her closets aromat
ic with talcs and colognes and sachets and new pajamas—gifts from the parents of her students. Neatly stacked and unopened. Years of grade-school teaching filed in pajama sets.

  The true work, the work she’s called to, is in the infernally hot kitchen.

  Grace understood herself better when she baked. She settled into herself and heard her inner voice more clearly. Baking can become a bigger conversation, in which the mind rambles far and wide; you consider not only the amount of sugar but the way it glitters, the smell of its dust as you level it with the cup. Grace spoke of the elegant process of following a recipe, step by step, to some satisfying conclusion. Of course, that wasn’t my style: I couldn’t leave a recipe in peace, but had to be continually worrying it and playing with it.

  When I’m six, she turns to study me over a recipe card. I don’t want to use chocolate chips in the batter, I want to mince a big, black chocolate bar the way I saw our Italian neighbor do it. And then I want to chop cherries and scrape those in as well. After a moment of internal struggle, Gram says, “You’re a composer-type, dahlin.” I get this is not such a great thing. She examines the stained recipe card for pudding cake and admits in a light voice, “I prefer to play it safe. I’m just a journeyman.”

  In my grandmother’s world, journeyman is a humble yet not undesirable role. A journeyman is stout and honest and brave: a hard worker. There is the fork in Grace’s road, between romance and work. Romance is beguiling, a beautiful, wicked witch. Work can be exaltation or drudgery, but it’s always finer, smarter, more soul-satisfying than the lie that is romance.

  I haven’t found out yet that people can fashion multiple lives, pile them up like china in a cabinet. Surely, Gram has always been here with her lovely tiny oven, tiny juice pitcher, and her bitty disappointing fridge, crammed with plastic-wrapped crumbs—in which we girls are not allowed to rummage or disport, for fear of disrupting her “system.”