I thought of all the scars, all the things I’d done to myself. I imagined they lit up like moonfish beneath the sheets. My knee, my head, my mouth, my belly—like a cat had shredded the moonfish to bits. In the daytime, you could hardly tell. You’d think I’d be covered in scabs and stitches. I wasn’t. All those splinters, they came out. They swelled up and then popped right through the skin without any coaxing at all. Still, at night, I thought about it. I had dreams that I was giving birth and the doctor saw the cuts like tally marks on my thigh and proclaimed, “This woman isn’t fit to be a mother.” My hospital gown went sideways and the nurses said, “Oh my.”
The next day, I did everything I could to keep myself from being spineless and needy and running back to the bookstore to see Blot, including writing
I will not go to the bookstore
one hundred and fifty times on paper, until my hand went numb, trying to convince myself of it or to convince someone who might be looking. I even stood naked in my bathroom and pointed out all the terrible things I saw—the new cuts and bruises; the two purple burn marks on my belly, raised and puckered like slugs. I kept looking into the mirror, saying, “Who is going to love you?” But late last night, Aunt Lou and my mother had watched a romantic-movie marathon, and I’d listened to every word. It made me sappy and got me thinking that maybe Blot did want to see me after all. Things might work out.
I needed his expertise. It was a mystery, this whole thing —Victoria being so cryptic and wanting nothing to do with the restaurant that my mother so loved. Something bad must have happened. Something juicy and full of culinary intrigue. Blot, I’d decided, was my only hope. Together, we could get to the bottom of things. Together, we could find the answers.
So I went. It was Saturday and I knew he’d be working. My mother would have said I was asking for it, just begging to be made a fool of. And she might have been right. I had a lump in my throat the size of a bundt cake pan.
I watched him for a full two minutes before he saw me. He was twirling a pen between two fingers and focusing on the computer screen. His eyebrows were drawn together so tightly, they looked like two trains about to crash, and he wasn’t smiling at all, but somehow I could still see his dimples. Or maybe I was imagining them. I was sure that there was no one who could imagine my face in a way that it wasn’t.
He caught me looking and smirked. My heart was doing jumping jacks again.
“It’s all right,” he said. “I’ve been stood up before.”
I laughed without thinking about it. Usually, it was as if my laugh had to be unhinged, like the gate into a garden. This time, it broke free.
“Sorry,” I said.
“Don’t be,” he said. “Things happen.”
I was hoping he’d say more. Instead, he was waving at someone on the stairs.
Photography?
he mouthed and pointed up and to the right.
“Why are you being so nice?” I asked. “To me.”
“You remind me of my sister,” he said.
“You have a sister?” I said, though that’s how I’d imagined it. Blot and three little sisters who loved him endlessly, knitted him things, and painted his toenails red.
“Yes,” he said, and I felt very exposed. What if his sister did what I did? I pulled down my sleeves. “And I miss her. She lives with my parents, who are not my biggest fans.”
“Oh,” I said.
“She reminds me of you,” he said. “Little but big.”
I tried making sense of that.
“Anyway,” he said. “I don’t want people to feel they have to go around explaining themselves to me. I couldn’t explain myself to anyone.”
He shook the
Zagat,
smiling.
“I’m done in an hour,” he said. “Wanna walk?”
I must have said yes. I didn’t even censor myself. Yes.
While he was getting his coat and gathering his things, I kept thinking,
I should tell him that I’ve already gone.
But I wanted us to be in on this together—the suspense, the excitement, everything. I didn’t want him to know that I’d failed. And so soon. I thought, I shouldn’t have ruined our one thing before our one thing had even begun.
“If I were you,” he said, “I would have gone already. I wouldn’t have been able to control myself.”
“I did,” I said. His face fell.
“But,” I said, a little desperate, and told him everything, hoping that he’d want to help. Hoping it wasn’t over—with him, with Victoria. I told him about how she’d laughed at me.
“That’s fishy,” he said.
“Fishy,” I said.
“That’s a weird thing for her to do,” he said. “Unless she was hiding something.”
“You don’t think she was just busy?” I asked, to be sure.
“She could have said so,” he said, “if that was the issue.”
When he said, “Let’s investigate,” I was pretty much dying: we were in cahoots.
“Onward?” he said.
“Onward,” I said, and I imagined his little sister between us, holding our hands, swinging swinging swinging along.
Outside, half-frozen puddles pocked the street like gigantic wads of spit. Whenever the city was like this, I thought of polar bears on ice floes. I couldn’t help it. Then I thought of them dying and how much blood might drain and what it would look like from a helicopter. And then I stopped myself. I didn’t do that with every animal. Just enormous ones. Horses, elephants, whales. Sometimes, I wondered what it would be like if everyone in the world did what I did—how much blood there would be if it was gathered and poured from buckets into the streets. If that would somehow drain the color from everything else. I wondered how much blood would have to be lost to make the entire Earth buzz. Buzz like me.
“What are you thinking about?” Blot said, and I swear, all that blood swarmed to my face.
“Danish salt,” I said.
He nodded.
“What’s her name?” I said. “Your sister.”
“Greta,” he said. He pointed to a poster on the side of a phone booth. It was for a show at Radio City Music Hall, and the dancers were all legs and lipstick.
“We used to come to the city for that every year,” he said. “This same week, actually.”
Because I’m an idiot, I thought about how he might like one of the dancers especially. But then I thought about him with his family: who he’d sit next to, walk next to, what they’d eat for snacks, and where they’d sleep.
We walked more slowly than I was used to. Much more slowly. Every time I tried to quicken up, I told myself to quit it. I was suddenly aware of everyone on the street. People were looking at us. And there were so many couples, which made me feel like I belonged to something bigger than myself even though most of them looked like they didn’t belong together. I wasn’t sure what made people match, though I had a feeling that if I were taller and if my hair didn’t have the texture of a frisée salad, we’d have a better chance at it. I almost said that to Blot but caught myself in time.
A little girl raced away from her mother and crashed straight into Blot’s knee. She looked up at him.
“Hey,” he said to her and she grinned, grabbed his leg.
The mother caught up, pushing an empty stroller, carrying bags in both hands as well as a juice box.
“You guys are sweet,” she said.
I didn’t look at Blot, not wanting to seem thrilled. I thought,
I didn’t make this up.
I didn’t have to.
I wondered what my mother would have said if she’d seen us. Probably she’d have asked him if he knew why I’d been suspended, and regardless of his answer, she’d have said,
Let me tell you.
And she’d have told him. And I’d have passed out, right there on the sidewalk, my sleeves and coat lifting, my hair swinging away from my neck, my shoes for some reason falling off, exposing me. All my cuts and bruises leaving no room for discussion.
I did that a lot—thought of why I might have to be naked, why people might have to see me. I got run over and they ripped open my shirt. I fell into freezing water and they stripped me down before wrapping me in a blanket. Worse, sometimes I imagined being shoved into a van and men would begin to rape me but then stop, horrified, over my body.
The truth was, telling him about what I did had occurred to me. I hardly knew him, but I’d imagined that in a dark, quiet place, an empty church, maybe, or a neat graveyard, Blot would move his finger along all my ruined parts. It was firm but smooth, like an eraser. It was undoing. He didn’t hate me for what I’d done. His thumb was on my hip, on a scar the size of a pea pod.
“Wanna grab a coffee?” he said. He’d put on fingerless gloves. They were gray and woolly, but if someone had asked me to list every detail of his hand, I would have been able to.
“No,” I said. “That’s okay.” Already I was anxious about ordering, about paying or not paying. I’d have taken forever putting whole milk and sugar into my coffee.
“Yeah,” he joked, “me either.”
As we walked on, our hands kept colliding. He didn’t seem to notice, but I did. I’d started a count. Seven. Every time, it felt as if my breath raced ahead over a hill, and I was stumbling to keep up. The wind was getting colder and stronger; it felt like it was kneading against our backs. But for once, the city wasn’t in a rush. An old man with a giant yellow hat stopped short in front of us. He laced his fingers together over his head and looked up. We stopped and did the same. The sky was dark gray and splintered like an expensive countertop. Snowflakes had begun to make their way down in inconsistent clumps. It felt as though the sky were shedding its skin.
“This,” the man said to no one, “never gets old.”
Later, around Ninety-Ninth Street, Blot said, “Why masgouf?”
I’d nearly forgotten the point of all this interaction. So rarely had this happened to me, that the thing itself was more enjoyable than the idea of it, that I was overwhelmed, distracted. Now I didn’t know what to say. Every day for as long as I could remember, I’d imagined happiness like this, so much so that the hope took on a life of its own.
“My parents met at the Shohet and His Wife,” I lied, horrified by the romance in my voice.
Blot stopped to tie his shoe. “Oh,” he said. “That’s nice.”
A few blocks later, he stopped again. “And you’ve never eaten masgouf?” he said.
I shook my head. He had a point.
“What if it’s really disgusting?” he said.
“My parents are divorced,” I said.
“Gotcha,” he said.
“Are yours?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “Last I knew.”
Earlier, I had Googled
Iraqi
+
Cooking
. On YouTube, I found a series of clips. An Iraqi woman named Violet cooked in her kitchen in Queens. She had a face like a button mushroom quenelle and she kept saying, “Can you smell that in your kitchen too?” You could tell that her son was the one taping her because he said, “Mom, your accent, your accent.”
And she said, “What do you want me to do with my accent?”
She threw her hands up. They were covered in egg and flour paste and some went flying onto the lens and he said, “Mom,” like he’d just found her lost in the woods.
In one clip, she talked about her husband, who never got out of Iraq. “They thought he was a communist,” she said. She was shaking her head, and her son said, “Cook, Mom.” She glanced away, embarrassed. She looked like she’d rather stop. But she didn’t. After that, she talked about the food. The spices. How they used to make lentils and rice on Thursday and fried fish on Friday and how they prepared sheets of tomato paste or apricots and left them to dry on the rooftops. She was wearing bright blue crumbly eyeliner and silver nail polish but aside from that, everything about her was nutty and brown. She was a sesame seed. In the end, she took a big bite out of these cigarlike appetizers and before she could say anything, her son said, “Don’t talk with your mouth full,” and she snorted at him and said,
“Bukra fil mish mish.”
Whatever that meant.
Then the camera went off.
I decided that I loved her. I imagined having dinner at her table. I bet she’d never sit down. I bet she’d lean over people’s shoulders as though she were tending to plants, asking did they try it, like it, want more—and regardless, she’d heap another serving on top of every plate. I wondered how you said
mangia
in Arabic.
I thought about telling Blot all that, but just then I saw something that stopped me. A woman was about to enter a liquor store. Her long neck accommodated many rolls of a camel-colored scarf. She was tall and thin like a saffron thread, and though I couldn’t see the details of her hands, there was a feminine quality to them, as if her fingers were the slender tails of many cats. They curled around the doorknob and she slipped inside. Her dark hair was pulled into a bun, shiny like swirled chocolate butter sauce. The rounded part down the left side of her scalp was unmistakable. My mother.
Immediately, I felt the urge to explain to her, to justify myself. I was doing this for her, you see. I wasn’t having fun. I looked at Blot and said that I’d be right back, but when I turned around again, racing to the store window, she was gone. There was no one inside but an Asian man behind the counter. He was writing something, unbothered. I stood there, my breath fogging the glass.
That’s why,
I thought.
That’s why masgouf.
“What?” Blot said, next to me now. “Celebrity sighting?”
“Yes,” I said. “Bobby Flay.”
“I’ve always wanted to try his blue corn pancakes with barbecued duck,” he said.
“Me too,” I said.
The lie about the sighting had come easily and I was grateful. I wouldn’t have known how to begin.
Blot seemed unbothered. He began walking north again, this time in the street. He tapped his fingers on car hoods as he passed them. He didn’t make a scene of it, didn’t hurt them, just did
tap tap tap
as if checking for animal life in a tree. Once, I’d closed my finger in a car door three times in a row. To this day, my pinkie looks more like a barkless twig than a pinkie. When Blot walked on the sidewalk, he tapped side mirrors one time per car. He noticed me staring.