Life Without a Recipe Page 13

  Each outing reveals undiscovered countries.

  Today, for example. I hear the whoosh before I see it.

  Gracie stands frozen, little hands still curled in the shape of the plastic container she was recently holding.

  For a moment it’s as if my eyes refuse to focus, refuse to take in the Pollock splatter of mango-colored slush all over white marble. Somehow the stuff has traveled amazing, inconceivable distances—from espadrilles on Doric column to Hermès display case to Tiffany silver. One tremendous orange iceberg melts at our feet. The mall has transformed into another dimension, another planetoid, the far side of Mars, perhaps.

  We had ducked into the chic department store for their restroom. After that, we dawdled our way, disheveled and food-stained, through Women’s Shoes, the stroller a glorified purse-holder—the toddler won’t stay in it: Its wheels move too quickly through interesting places. Then we’d made our way past the sporty $500 designer-sneakers area and into the snazzier section where a salesman once explained to my husband that a pair of feather-covered stilettos were “inside shoes,” meant never to touch pavement. That was around the time when I heard Gracie say, “Uh oh.”

  The enormous, devious, plastic take-out container lies on its side a few feet away. She wanted to hold the cup and I, maniacally enough, let her do so. My daughter’s eyes roll from the cup to me: She’s waiting to find out how one reacts to this sort of thing. I’ve heard children will look at their parents’ faces after an injury to learn if they’re in pain or not, if they should freak out or not. They watch and adjust, calibrate the intensity of the tears or the laughter. A parent must step outside herself, gather her wits, recall that she no longer simply reacts but models, that someone nearby is studying every breath. It takes all my nerve not to throw up my hands and sidle away, whistling. It’s our mess now; we’ve made it together.

  “Ah ha!” I manage, berating myself. Tricked again by a plastic container. “Well, well!” I try to sound somehow interested, as if this is a kind of scientific experiment or medical study. “Look at that.” Her face relaxes as she studies the scene. “Wuh!” she says, almost proudly.

  I pinch the cap between two fingers and try to scrape melted smoothie back into the cup in what can only be described as an exercise in futility. We’d already, somehow, used up the twenty-seven napkins I’d dug out of the dispenser before we’d left the coffee shop. Outside of a mop and pail, this situation is irredeemable. I look around, praying one of the beautifully dressed, terrifying sales clerks is a mother.

  But no one is there. In fact, there is scarcely a soul in the entire store. I can hear myself breathing. Someone, her back to us, appears to be rearranging perfume bottles at a counter about a football field away; she doesn’t look over. They all apparently vacated the premises, fleeing up escalators and crouching in Men’s Formal Wear, perhaps just a few seconds after the cap burst open.

  I tear a page out of the notebook I keep in the despised stroller and scrawl, “SO SORRY. We had an accident.” It’s all I can think to do. Something about doing this reminds me of lighting candles in church with my grandmother—leaving messages in small bottles. Consciousness folds at such times—it is one in a series of moments when you discover another layer of parenting: standing together, no matter how disgraced, sharing the moment in this human project. There are a few singles in my wallet, so I throw those in as well. I fold the note into its own crude aerogram and prop it by the mess. The person who cleans this—I can almost see her bending slowly, sighing—will surely be a mother.

  My parents, my grandparents—indeed, most everyone of a certain time and place—grew up within extended family. Support—emotional, material, even spiritual—was all around. As my Aunt Aya said, “The good thing about the olden times is you were never alone. The bad thing about the olden times is you were never alone.” For both Bud and Gram, religion was part of this family. Bud had grown up in an Arab-Christian family, but he’d lost both parents as a young man. While in the military he converted to Islam, drawn to its codes and regulations—the sort of careful instructions—everything from diet to charity to etiquette—a boy might receive from his parents. His commanding officer, whom Bud had admired and leaned on after his own father died, had been Muslim. For Bud, Islam was a channel between America and Jordan, a touchstone to nation and identity.

  Grace lived her Catholicism through rituals. The hinge in each week was a shared ride to church with a gang of old gals, a couple of her sisters, a few of her friends—all had outlasted their husbands. Sometimes I joined them to sit in the cloud of nylons and permanent waves, face powder, clip-on earrings, Sunday coats, inside allusions to bridge games and bowling league. The big church interior was dark and intense, with a grand organ, a baritone priest, slow, patient readings and hymns, occasionally shouted sermons. Afterward, we walked out into a cold, bright world, snowflakes stirring overhead, and the promise of stopping at the Russian bakery for babka.

  In their turf wars, Dad let Gram have the religion. My sisters and I were raised within the church—whenever Gram visited. The notion of the mystical or metaphysical, the life beyond or divine will was always sublimated within a host melting on the tongue—the elements of body and spirit whirled around each other, entwined. You had to feed the body to polish the soul. Home from Sunday church, Gram’s apartment smelled like roast beef, so rich and unvarying, you could almost taste the marrow releasing, the flour and mushrooms in the brown gravy. My grandmother said, “Ain’t that a smell?”

  Often, her sisters joined us: Aunt Helen in veiled hats and lacy hankies, using delicate, educated-Jersey vowels; Aunt Alyce, who couldn’t hear a thing and laughed with a tremendous hoot, and who barreled everywhere but to church in a rattling, uninspected vehicle nicknamed the Deathmobile. They compared notes on mass, took themselves out for chocolate éclairs, showered each other with unlistened-to advice, and helped school and raise their pooled children. Days were built on the Sunday ride, a constant reason to be together. Church made the spiritual material, the wide world a little more manageable.

  “Grace was our in-tell-ect-ual,” Alyce shouted over Sunday dinner. “She had the white gloves and the prayer book.”

  “So refined and dainty,” Helen jumped into their weekly communal boasting.

  “I was always a size six, no matter what I ate,” Gram said.

  “Not me,” Alyce boasted. “What do I care? I only dress for church.”

  “I don’t care what you believe,” my father jumped in, generally missing the gist of the conversation. “As long as you believe in something bigger than you are.”

  “And as long as it’s Catholic,” Gram added with a sniff.

  It’s a splendid May morning, the sun burning a hole in the blue sky. A mariachi car horn bleats in the distance. Gracie and I are out for our morning stroll: I sing a passionate rendition of “Old MacDonald,” trying to distract her from the humidity. Most mornings, we pass a bevy of Spanish-speaking nannies who smile and nod and conjecture as to why the gringa pushes her own baby. I admire and envy the Cuban families of Miami. They remind me of the Jordanians, the way everyone picnics and visits en masse, and if there isn’t an abuela to watch the children—and often when there is—there will also be support staff. Today, one of the nannies strikes up a little conversation, starting with the basics in Spanish: Que linda! Quanto anos tiene? My resources extinguished, we switch to English:

  “You are enjoying yourself?”

  I smile, considering. “Sure. Well, I suppose. . . .”

  “You do some kind of working? Beside baby?”

  The air has a shiny quality, like the inside of a seashell. I push Gracie’s stroller back and forth in place. “I write. I used to. I haven’t since . . .,” tipping my head toward the stroller.

  The woman’s chin rises. She curves one hand over mine for a moment. “So you know what you do? You hire a nanny.”

  We live in a shoebox in Coral Gables—a famously upscale neighborhood. I’m constantly te
lling impressed acquaintances that we barely cling to the middle class. “We can’t.”

  “Not live in.” She shakes a finger. “Just work hours.”

  I shrug, arms out. “Even if we could, with our house? We’d be standing on top of each other.”

  “It will work.” Now she squeezes my elbow. “In Cuba, my uncle is a writer. I know how it is. You have to get some help. Arrange things. You see. Even if you go in debt. You have to do it anyways—when you are happier. . . .” She shrugs. “The baby? Becomes happier, too.”

  Gracie begins fretting, kicking, tiny bouncing feet, complaints starting in little gusts. The woman gives me a look. “In my country, I’m psychologist. Here, I start at the bottom again. It’s normal. Everyone has to start somewhere, right? That’s how it is with a baby—you’re starting back in the beginning—for both of you. On the floor.”

  When I get home, I put Gracie down; the walk and the sunlight have made her dopey. She drifts on her mattress, face down, bottom up, knees curled in like a pill bug. For once, I think I will also take a nap, but I just stare at the lunar map of the ceiling. I muse over the nanny-psychologist’s advice to get help. The idea of starting from the beginning—or the floor—depending on your angle. Instead, though, my mind roves around, considering: My grandmother Grace taught, but she lived with her parents and siblings—there was always someone on hand to help out with her daughter. When my mother went back to work, her teaching schedule matched our school hours. And there was my other grandmother, ensconced at home with eight children. Would she have been appalled at this weakness, the very idea of enlisting help? I see her again in that wonderful library, her private land whispering with stories, running her fingers over the spines, titles like wishes, like half-true dreams.

  Her name, Aniseh, my father said, means “Lovely young lady. Just like your other grandmother’s name.” Two graces: one seen, one unseen, one heard, one silent. And yet both quite present. Both of them, I think, are telling me the same thing.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The Servant

  The child’s voice has come loose.

  It is somewhere at the center of the night, a lost thing, this imploring cry: Mama, Mama, Mama.

  Daddy gets up and goes to her, wandering through the nightlands. But tonight she sobs and says, Mama, Mama. And then there is nothing to do: Hand finds its way to the covers, peels them back, the warmth coming away in a soft, thick layer. Feet find their way out of dreams, midair to the floor. Pushing up, assembling bones upright, pushing against the downward currents of sleep. Push, push. Bones straightening. The rooms shifting to starboard as if in a gust of seawind. Wavering in her doorway, whisper, “Yes, Baby?”

  “Mama, I’m hungry.” Plaintive.

  The kitchen at the other end of the nightlands, barely lit: a digital clock, a computer switch, scattered and rare dots of light, the windows of a small town in the evening. Pat the counters, half-blind, eyes nearly shut, until hand closes on something.

  Back in her room, soft with the smell of sleep. “Here, Baby.” Give her the opened banana.

  She pulls back the covers. “Mama, come in,” she murmurs.

  Obey. This is who I am now: My service has sunk into me, deep down, knit to the bones, to my very name. I am hers, possession and servant. Lie down. Her head rests on my shoulder and there are the tiny sounds of eating. Neither of us speaks. We belong to each other. Within six bites, she melts back into sleep. Her hand and half a banana float on my ribs.

  Both of us asleep.

  But what is her title—babysitter or nanny or caretaker? She is not family or even, yet, friend.

  Her name is Soledad, but she says we should call her Janet. She’s twenty. She’s attending Miami–Dade and wants to be a doctor someday, or a flight attendant, maybe—she is having some trouble in organic chemistry. Her hobbies include swimming and shopping online. She cooks, she tells us, ticking off her kid specialties, “macaroni and cheese—frozen and box types; chicken fingers—just frozen; and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.” Her smile draws her face into deep dimples. She comes bequeathed to us from a friend of a friend, who calls her the “Cuban Mary Poppins.”

  “Can you speak Spanish?” I lean forward on the couch.

  She crosses her arms and legs, foot bobbing. “Like, if I totally have to?” Her mother is from Cuba, her father is Nicaraguan, and she is “one hundred percent Miami-girl.”

  I nod with enthusiasm, tell her about my dread of Bud’s daily Arabic lessons—the rote memorization and repetition of formal phrases; his attempts to enforce our identity. I sling my legs over the couch arm, act like we’re already pals, have known each other forever. Grace lounges on the couch cushions, twinkling at the new sitter. Janet pounces on her. “Look at the princess!” She lifts Gracie, nuzzling her neck. “I can’t wait to have kids. I’m gonna have a million!”

  She shows up for work swathed in perfume, outfitted in Miami-wear I describe to a friend as stripper casual. Clinging T-shirts with plunging necklines and Versace-esque cutouts. Miniskirts of layered fishnet with opaque leggings. Painted-on jeans, nude heels, glittery bangles, as well as baby-exciting necklaces known around here as mommy-nooses. She pushes Gracie—wailing—up the street in her stroller. Riveted to the window, we watch them amble away.

  Scott puts an arm around my shoulder. “There goes our daughter with a total stranger.”

  I stare until they turn the corner at the end of our block and briefly consider tailing them in the car. I go to my office, sit bolt upright at my desk; next thing I know, I’m in the kitchen making pretzels.

  Over the years, I’ve lost the habit of eating ice cream for breakfast, but my baking has only increased. And this process feels as good as a stretch—all that kneading, squashing, smashing, rolling dough on the cutting board, tying pieces into knots, throwing them in boiling water. It’s one of Grace’s old anxiety cures. Out of the oven, the tray of pretzels gets brushed with butter, sprinkled with coarse salt. When they return, Janet leaves Gracie in her stroller and heads straight to the kitchen. She eats three pretzels in a row, murmuring, “You made these?” During the first week with Janet, I bake pretzels every day. Very slowly, my fretting dissipates; my head wanders back to the new novel, working out questions of motivation and structure. I push the dough, fold it, push, and the mindless movements draw the thoughts forward through my arms. On the third week with our babysitter, I skip a day of baking. Janet stands in the kitchen, staring as I pour a cup of tea, and finally says, “Where are the pretzels?”

  I am learning something about serving, which is that when you become a good servant, it is tempting to bow to everyone. Especially when you’re new on the job. I try not to be obvious when I tidy up after her—wait till they’re on their walk before collecting the dishes she leaves here and there, little piles of crumbs like the Hansel and Gretel trail. She straightens not a thing, leaves mostly ruin in her wake, and during the hours that Gracie sleeps, she stretches out on the couch, languidly clicking through shopping websites. I half-admire her; she might be a babysitter, but she is not a servant.

  I stock Janet’s favorite coffee, call her mother if she’s caught in traffic on the way home, worry if she’s forgotten her umbrella, buy her a pair of more comfortable shoes. There is also a lot of listening. Janet has personal problems. Her boyfriend has moved in with her and her family and he’s “causing issues” with her mother. Her mother’s own boyfriend is, she says, “a boss” who tells her to study more. Her father wants her to move back to Nicaragua and wait on him. One day she arrives red-eyed and sniffling: Her family is maybe about to be evicted. Her mother’s second ex-husband is demanding an equal division of all their assets. Her mother isn’t able to afford to buy his half of the house; unless she allows the ex-husband and his mother to move back in, the eight of them must go.

  “Go?” I perch on the footstool across from her. “To where?”

  She rubs the back of one plump hand under her nose. She has a lavish figure, her skin
smooth as an olive. When she’s agitated, she draws her black hair forward on to one shoulder and pulls it through her fingers as if stroking a cat. She tips back on the couch, stroking her hair, skirt inched up her plump thighs. “My mom’s got a friend in Kendall with three-bedroom apartment over her garage. She says we could move in there.”

  But there are so many of them! Later, I wonder quietly if we should offer to let Janet sleep on our couch, and Scott smiles and says, “Absolutely not.” He doesn’t like the “endless problems,” her “telenovela life.” For all our talking and proximity, we are still scarcely more than acquaintances. Recently, when Janet was out walking Gracie, our excitable neighbor Ines—whom Scott and I call “the neighborhood watch,” came rushing over.

  “Some girl has gone off with your daughter!”

  “No, that’s Janet. The babysitter.”

  Ines scowled. “She’s from where, that girl?”

  “Here. Hialeah.”

  Ines stared at me.

  “Her father is from Nicaragua, her mother is Cuban.”

  Her scowl deepened. Ines is Cuban. “That is what she told you? With hair like that? She’s some kind of Indios.” She pulled down one lower lid with an index finger. “Keep an eye out.”

  The telenovela continues. We don’t know from one day to the next if Janet will show up for work with a mascara-tracked face or even show up at all. Scott begins to say things about “moving her along.” But after several months together, I’m used to her. Spending entire days with someone in your house is a lot like living with them, even if you don’t know each other very well. Almost without noticing, and against my better judgment, I’ve developed a fondness for Janet. I’d seen it in all sorts of families—it’s the child with the grubby, teary face, the unemployable cousin, the trying auntie who gets the most money or help or love. The virtuous ones are too self-sustaining, too functional—what do they need? The ones with the problems always have their arms out for hugs.