Life Without a Recipe Read online

  Finally, Sitt Abdo lowers herself onto the step out front, muttering variations of the same thing. She puts her head down into her hand as if she’s only now found out she has a seven-year-old. Joumana and I sit with her on the wide step and begin peeling the tiny, tart fruit. In a bid to regain his country, to raise his daughters to be who they were “meant” to be, Bud moved us back to Jordan months ago—a relocation that wouldn’t last a year—and since we arrived, every day something surprising happens. Like this trip to Bethlehem to see Joumana.

  “Don’t worry,” Joumana says to me, right in front of her mother. “She loves to yell.”

  Without saying a word, using just her fingertips, Sitt Abdo peels the hair-fine membrane from an orange segment, then touches her daughter’s lips and places the fruit in her mouth.

  In a few days, we take the wheezing rental car across expanses of sand and road back to Jordan. Aunt Aya greets us as though we’ve escaped from a live volcano. Sitting on an embroidered couch, my auntie asks for an accounting of our visit. When I tell her about Sitt Abdo, she rocks with laughter, eyes sparkling, black wings drawn at each corner. Finally, she wipes her eyes carefully and says, “That woman was born with a mouth full of complaints. Listen, habibti [my darling]. There are two people who can stop you from getting what you want—the person outside of you and the person inside of you. Guess which is more powerful?”

  My aunt is full of tricks and puzzles: I get nothing right, but she keeps trying. Tied back with a silk Hermès scarf, her long hair is black and smooth and perfect as glass: I want to touch it, but I’m afraid of my aunt. I sit on my hands, trying to think of a good answer. After a long time, I declare, “The person outside of you!”

  My aunt’s lips pucker. I know she’s wondering why she keeps trying. She has at least thirty-four other nieces and nephews. She says, “The one inside, ya Salteeya [thick-headed woman from al-Salt].”

  Ohh! I roll my eyes and nod: that was what I’d meant to say! But at seven, all I know is my parents telling me day and night all the things I’m not allowed to do—which is everything. No standing on the table, no experimenting with the perfume, no eating the candy from between the cushions. When I grow up, I want to be a writer, like my Aunt Rachel, and tell stories like everyone in the family, and people will listen like nobody in the family. Also, I want to be constantly on an airplane, because nothing fills the air with more exciting feelings, nothing lights my parents up more than when we’re on a plane pointed either to Jordan or back to the States. When we get to either place, the lovely feelings go away, but in the air, things are very good.

  I try to explain this to my aunt: airplanes, silk scarves, black hair, travel, writing, excitation.

  “So you want to be rich.” Aya gives me a long, pleased look. “And free.”

  “No. Just write and fly.”

  She sighs, slinging one leg over the other, and bangs a cigarette out of a pack. “People don’t know what they should want. They think they do, but they don’t.”

  “Not even me?”

  She smiles so widely I can see the glint of her gold tooth. My aunt gives me so much advice you’d think there was something wrong with me. That I am one big walking problem. But I’m fine! I keep trying to tell her. Even so, she slips the cigarette behind her ear, stretches her arms wide, silk sleeves unfurling like Dracula’s cape, and folds me into a jasmine cloud. She whispers in my ear, “Habibti, especially not you.”

  With luck, a writer may have many chances, many fields to play in. You start out with one sort of plan for how this or that story will go; along the way, however, it forks, doubles back. If you’re easy about it, you learn to follow the tales instead of the other way around: Let the work take the lead and find out what sort of writer you are.

  Toward the end of my graduate work, I’d run out of funding and was eyeing help-wanted ads for fast-food “associates.” After years of studying literature, I qualified for nothing in the working world. So I dedicated my free time to writing a romance novel.

  Every English grad I talked to had heard of someone, somewhere, who’d paid for school by writing romances. Uncle Hal had given me a cache of garage-sale paperbacks: I pulled them out and read one a night, charting the plots and working on my own by day. I thought if I could nail down the formula, it just might sell. After a month and a half, I sent a story about a lovelorn composition instructor who’s tempted by a glowering Dean of Students to a post office box at Harlequin. A week later, a kindly editorial assistant wrote to say my romance novel was too clichéd.

  Next, I spotted an ad on the back page of The Village Voice. A “New York–based publisher seeks authors to write books.” Buried deeper in the ad was a note that this was a publisher of “Adult Fiction.” I assumed this was to distinguish their books from the “Young Adult” genre. My friend Liza cleared things up: “Adult means porn.” She pushed her dark hair away from her face. “Dirty stories—the stuff they publish in Penthouse Forum. Not American Modernism.”

  “They specialize in pornography?” I propped my elbows back on the library lounge step and contemplated this. We were on a “smoking break,” in which Liza smoked and I ate vending-machine candy. Over the past three years, I’d grown to enjoy inhaling her secondhand smoke, its smell a Pavlovian bell that it was time to eat a Three Musketeers.

  “‘Specialize’?” Liza had a real figure and dark Mediterranean-Jewish features that made people think, of the two of us, she was the Arab. “More like—that’s all they do.” She exhaled a stream of smoke. “I doubt, like, they’re publishing epic poetry on the side.”

  The raciest thing I’d ever read was snippets of my aunt’s copy of James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain, which required hanging around in their upstairs bathroom at fourteen, gaping at the sexual coming of age of a young gay man. That afternoon, I steeled myself and called the number in the paper. Talking quickly, I assured the man who answered that I knew adult fiction “inside and out.” The man, who asked me to call him “Big Al,” said if my work proved satisfactory, they’d start me writing in the One-A category, or what they liked to refer to as “Missionary Position.” “It doesn’t pay great,” Big Al added. “I tell my people, think of this as a writing workshop.”

  It was June, but the old mountain ridges around Binghamton were still ridged with snow, the air shining cold. Liza and I paced Front Street in front of the adult bookstore, hands deep in pockets, eyes fixed on the ice-gray sidewalk, scaring away customers. I wanted to go home, but Liza was determined. “This is too stupid. I’m going in.” She pushed through the unmarked black door. A few minutes later, she burst out with a brown paper sack like a grocery bag, eyes wide. “I can’t believe I did that.” We scurried up frost-streaked pavement. “Only for you would I do this.” She handed over a stack of paperbacks. “They had a whole wall, and a sign that said ‘Literature.’” She fished a wrinkled cigarette out of her purse, smoothed it between two fingers. “Love to attend a seminar on that literature.”

  Big Al had recommended that I “study up” on the genre. I read the books in a few nights: None were longer than 120 pages; the covers were thin, they curled softly—maybe intended for holding in one hand. As with the romance novels, each of these books had essentially the same plot. In this case, a good-looking man—sailor, salesman, garage mechanic—was constantly running into voluptuous goddesses. Within the first two pages, clothing melted away. Nothing to it! Such fluffy, paint-by-numbers stuff, it wasn’t even shocking. There was one bit of stylistic flair: the zesty references to genitalia. I started jotting down words, noting that they generally fell into two categories. In one column, descriptors like hot, meaty, spicy, raging, in the other column, nouns like staff, rod, wand, poker, etc. You could attach any of the words in column A to any of the words in column B and make a porno anagram.

  My dissertation was going to be a collection of interlinking short stories modeled after the structure of Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! But first came The Adventures of Wee Willie
. I worked and ate all meals straight from the fridge, salami, chips, grapes. Liza came over to read my latest pages, marveling, “It seems like you know how to write this.”

  One day I got a call from Zora Minske, a graduate student in women’s studies: one of my short stories—a tale about a man who constructs wings out of beer can pull tabs and flies away from his overbearing wife—had been published by MSS, John Gardner’s literary journal, and her reading group, a high-profile cabal on campus, had decided to discuss the story at their next meeting. She hoped I might like to attend. Intimidated, I yelped, “Sure!” That night I laid stock still in bed, filled with fear and regret.

  Dominated by a rectangular table, the meeting room overlooked campus and the distant blue ranges. 1986, and the women around the table in their flowing skirts were unshaven, nonwaxed, bra-free, clear of makeup or other oppressions. I was in jeans, T-shirt, and high-top sneakers. Having convinced myself that this event might involve some kind of potluck, I brought a puree of roasted eggplant with garlic and lemon, loaves of pita, and cookies. Bribes.

  A few of the women smiled, eyes glittering. Silence settled in the air like smoke. One raised her brows as I uncovered the tubs. “I’m sorry, no. I have allergies.”

  Someone dressed in dark purple moved the dishes to a table behind a podium. The handful of women there had started discussing my story before I’d arrived. Zora, the organizer, didn’t acknowledge my entrance but sat with elbows on the table, hands plunged into her hair. She looked bored and irritated, as if she wanted to be there about as much as I did. As I sat, Penny, the purple-clad student, said, “This is a vital narrative of the masculine body. The narrator an embodiment of the male gaze.”

  “No, no, no,” Zora countered. “This text subverts the dominant paradigm by deliberately co-opting the plot, making it into a feminine journey.”

  Another young woman sat across from Penny, shaking her head so her springy coils of hair trembled. “Yet another good old boy’s study—a guy hero—lousy wife. He’s the one who gets everything—it replays all the old stories.”

  “So, unless a story is promoting heroic women it’s not worthwhile?” Zora asked.

  Penny considered the question as she strolled to the front of the room, back straight, covered with a sheath of hair, and returns with a plate of eggplant dip, bread, and cookies. “It’s not a level playing field—we can’t afford to have women writers idealizing male protagonists.”

  “There are responsibilities. There are social obligations.” The woman with allergies extended one finger, pointing. “She brought food—a display of domestic labor, if you need it spelled out. It’s like a billboard for women’s objectification.”

  Most of the meeting went like this. It was too stressful to listen closely. Instead, as they toiled on, I started thinking about the growing stack of The Adventures of Wee Willie manuscript pages on my desk at home, right out in the open. I began to distract myself by wondering what might happen if any of these women should happen to enter my house and pass by my desk.

  “Is this—eggplants?” A comp lit student named Paola interrupted, holding up a wedge of pita with a swirl of the dip on it. She took another bite. “I don’t even like eggplants.”

  “My point here,” skinny allergy girl said, “is that this piece doesn’t give the slightest thought to the empowerment of women.”

  “How is this creamy like this?” Paola asked, wiping her plate with bread.

  “Come over any time,” I blurted, hoping we could wrap things up. “I can show you—”

  “Can we not talk about food?” Skinny glared around the table.

  “A text in which there is a single, unified, male heroic figure, on a quest for gratification, is by its very construction a phallocentric entity,” Penny declared, leaning against the table, exhausted.

  Afterward, rising from the table, my legs felt deboned. Zora clapped me on the back. “You survived.” Out of everything said that day, that was the bit that got to me—a fishhook under the skin. Maybe that was her intention. For the next three weeks, I sweated and sighed through three more meetings. Having pureed my story, they moved on to new writers and topics: patriarchal authority, the male gaze, the imprisonment of the eroticized concubine. Each night I went home and wrote more adventures for Wee Willie. I woke sweating from nightmares that I’d handed out pages to the women’s studies group. In my dream I saw the paper in their hands; I tried to snatch it back; I saw women turning, horrified, faces curdled. I rose from the seminar table, stammering: No, not mine, not mine. . . .

  The dream was like one long anxiety session about discovery. The meetings were a crucible of sorts. These women were authoritarian, but also serious readers—my first taste of an audience. I wanted their respect yet couldn’t live up to their expectations.

  “Maybe you’re having an identity crisis,” Liza said, an arm hooked over the back of her chair at the kitchen table. I was cracking eggs into hot linguine; lately, all I wanted was pad Thai. The recipe arrived in my grandmother’s weekly stream of magazine and newspaper clippings, along with her usual blue ballpoint notations in the margins. “Sounds spicy! Too strange?”

  “You’re pretending to be this big feminist,” she drawled. “You really don’t care about any of it.”

  “I do so.” I put my hands on my hips. That’s all I could think of to say.

  “What’re you going to do when women’s studies finds out about Wee Willie and his adventures?”

  “They wouldn’t even blink. They’d think it was a pedagogical device or something ironic or—like, Madonna.” I shrugged one-shouldered, twirled noodles. “And they are never going to find out.”

  Liza gave me a dead-eye glance, her irises nearly as dark as her pupils. “You should decide if you want to be a writer or what the hell.”

  It occurred to me, with a mild burst of happiness, that I didn’t have to keep going to women’s studies meetings. Instead, I stayed home and put Wee Willie through his paces. A bumbling traveling salesman, shy and retiring, who happens to be ridiculously well endowed, Willie’s true desire is to sell his top-notch, Swiss-made vacuums. The neighborhood ladies are lonely, libidinous souls who prey on Willie. Night after night, I lived on coffee and chocolate chip cookies, hunched before my hulking computer monitor, grinning, scribbling Willie’s story, my thesis sleeping under my desk.

  I slid a sheath of pages into an envelope and shipped it out.

  Several days later, at home, staring at my unfinished thesis, I heard a knock downstairs. In a scene straight out of my recurring nightmares, my housemate Meryl pounded up the stairs to say that “two scary girls” were there. Zora and Penny from women’s studies.

  “You haven’t been at meetings,” Zora said, cranky as ever.

  “We wanted to say hi.” Penny smirked. She was the kind of friend, my Uncle Hal would have said, you couldn’t stop hugging for fear they’d strangle you. Certain I had to have been ill to miss a meeting, they had brought a small bag of brown leaves and twigs they’d bought from the Chinese herbalist store downtown. It had a high mushroomy reek, like that of the herbal remedies my aunt smuggled through customs.

  “Come in,” I managed. “Wow. My gosh, you guys. How great is this.”

  They trooped up the many flights of stairs into our shared dollhouse, complimenting everything. Penny lingered over my pink-shag-rug bedspread and Talking Heads poster; the built-in bookshelves in the hallway; the scorched pots hanging over the stove. I let them peek into our few rooms, then led them out the back door. For a while, we stood on the landing overlooking dripping clotheslines, watching Zora smoke. My guilty old conscience flared—I felt caught—half truant and half escapee. I babbled about how crazy-busy I’d been, supposedly laboring on my thesis.

  Gradually, though, I calmed down: It dawned on me they weren’t on some reconnaissance mission, they really just came over—the way people did in graduate school. I pulled myself together and let them back inside. Feeling expansive, I settled them in o
ur two beanbag chairs in the living room. My housemate drifted through, giving everyone a wide berth.

  In the kitchen, I rattled around fixing twig tea, looking for healthy things to offer them. Which was when I realized the answering machine had clicked on. The phone ringer in our apartment had been permanently disabled by a downstairs landlord, so the only way we knew someone was calling was when a disembodied voice shouted in the hallway and everyone jumped out of their skin. I hurried into the living room, tea ball in one hand:

  “Diana? Big Al. Got your work. It’s quality. We can’t go with the name Wee Willie, though. How about Steve? Also, listen, you got to slow it down—I mean the pace, babe. You’re gonna burn out. He can’t be pumping on every page. Take it down a click. Anyway, I love it. Send me the next story by next Friday and you’ll get a bonus. Over and out.”

  I was flash frozen. I couldn’t look at Zora or Penny. Of course this had to happen. I’d smugly decided I was safe. It’s always the thing you think can’t possibly happen. I’d sent Wee Willie out a week ago, filed or scrapped any remaining evidence of writing, hidden the dirty-book “research” in a shoe box under the bed. I thought: This is what happens when you try to keep secrets! Excuses flew through my head. Confess, I thought. Tell them the truth: you needed the money.

  Zora made a little breath sound, a half-cough, and said, “Was that a publisher?” Penny’s smirk faded. Here I was, getting calls at home from an important person.

  “Oh gosh,” I stammered. “It’s—no. It’s not anything. Just a little—I don’t know. I’m working on something—on the side. It’s not academic, it’s—for fun.” I half-shrugged, squeezed the fingers of one hand in the other. I heard Penny exhale. “Just—wow.”