“No,” I began.
“How can I help?” she said and washed her hands in the sink. Child of my heart, she washed her hands. She used the soap and a paper towel, which she folded into a square and put into her pocket.
“Well,” I said, “we were going to make
bamia
.”
“That’s great,” she said. “Just tell me what to do.”
“Really?” I said.
She looked at me, confused.
“Really?” I said again. “You don’t mind?”
She picked up an orange and smelled the skin. I smiled. I couldn’t help it. In the supermarket, people stared. I once smelled all the different soups at Dean and Deluca, and a manager came over. He called me madam. He asked me to kindly tell him what I was up to. I said, “Kindly? I wasn’t blowing my nose into the chowder.” What was wrong with people? Smell is everything.
“Have you ever had a bergamot orange?” she asked.
And I thought,
Here we go.
I knew this was going to happen. She was going to think I was a fake.
“I don’t really like them,” she said before I could answer. “My mother uses them . . .”
She trailed off and blushed.
“Well,” she said. “They’re okay, I guess. But I like these bet-ter.”
“Did you grow up in New York?” I asked. It was a legitimate question.
“No,” she said. “In New Hampshire. Nowheresville is what my mother calls it.”
“Northville?” I said. “Oh, nowhere. I understand.”
I needed to watch myself. I hadn’t been around sharp minds for a very long time.
She put the orange back delicately, as if it were glass.
“We went to New Hampshire,” I said, trying to be breezy. “Fifteen years ago now. Not to nowhere, though. To the lake?”
I couldn’t remember its name. Joseph had planned our trips. I brought my book. I brought loads of bug spray. He did the rest. I remembered the loveliest bakery there, with peach scones. I didn’t say any of this out loud and at least there was that. At least I wasn’t a babbling duck.
She said, “Winnipesaukee.” She’d read my mind.
“That’s the one,” I said.
“It has two hundred and fifty-three islands,” she said.
“You don’t say,” I said. And then: “How did you get your name?”
She told me like she’d told it before. I felt silly for asking then. It felt like asking her to repeat herself. But I couldn’t help it.
“Your mother doesn’t like it?” I said. “What would she have named you?”
She was quiet for a moment. Her hands stopped moving. I thought she was going to get mad. She didn’t seem like the kind of girl to anger easily, to be jealous and so on. But I thought,
I’ve gone too far. I’ve asked too much.
It must kill her to have to talk to me. Stupid me with the stupid accent and the stupid dress that she tied so very nicely.
“It’s hard to say,” she said. “My mother is sort of complicated.”
After that, I did stop asking questions. I wasn’t going to make a mess. I thought,
Kitchen sounds only.
From now on, we cook. I passed her the mint and she was so adept with it, chopping it into a neat little pile. Her fingers moved dexterously around the knife, her motions smooth and steady—and I was thinking:
Don’t get your finger, you’ll never come back then; if you bleed all over, you’ll hate this place,
and, like an imbecile, I’d thrown out all the Band-Aids.
I pointed out the things I was doing. I tried not to sound formal. I was suddenly conscious of my English. She watched me, nodded, but kept chopping. It seemed adult to me, her focus. She didn’t flit around. She was calm. Was I calm like that? Was Joseph? It was as if she were at the ocean, her feet rooted deep in the sand.
I opened the can of tomatoes. I regathered the spices: paprika, celery seeds, red pepper flakes, mint, curry powder, ground ginger, salt, and pepper. I asked her to measure out half a teaspoon of each as I cut onions beside her and she said, “Do you know the wooden match trick?” I did, but I said no. And she told me. I passed her the garlic. After a little while, she lifted the grater and the garlic close to her ear and leaned into it. She looked at me as if to say,
Listen.
“It’s so funny,” she said, the silence collapsing in on itself. “Doesn’t it sound like swishing with mouthwash?”
I put my hand over my mouth. My breath. Was she making a point?
“No,” she said, laughing a little. “You don’t need it. I just think that. I think it sounds like that.”
I laughed too. I laughed at myself. I felt suddenly lighter. I laughed a little more.
“There’s no one here,” I said, shrugging. “You never know. My breath could be awful.”
We made three dishes that night. We talked about polite things. Lorca was on a break from school for the entire week. She didn’t have pets. She lived with her mother and her aunt. She told me that she loved to cook. We loved to cook! And that she’d never traveled except to Florida and went to the bookstore a lot because she didn’t have many friends.
I don’t either,
I wanted to tell her.
Joseph did but I was never social that way. It’s not the worst thing.
I didn’t say that, though I wanted to. I didn’t feel like a glowing example.
The sky was dark, and Lorca looked out the window. It was as if she were looking through a keyhole, into a fantasy book. Her face was romantic like that. She said, after the
bamia
, hummus
bi
tahini, and cabbage salad, “What’s next?” I was tired but not. It was eleven o’clock. I hadn’t been up this late for ages.
She said, “Are you tired?” And without thinking, I told her, “No.”
My goodness, my word, my heart. No, I’m not. I could do this forever. Please stay. Please stay, little child.
After Lorca left, I shuffled around in the kitchen, where life lingered. It felt like a much-needed rainstorm had passed through. I cleaned up and then stopped. I loved the nest of dishes we’d made. Just so.
I was in a daze as I undressed and put on my pajamas. I felt exhausted, but overwhelmed too. All this was so new. And I couldn’t tell Joseph, so the emotion hung about me, like a ringing phone.
I didn’t want to get ahead of myself but certain ideas had crept into my mind and were creating an odd sensation in my chest. There wasn’t much left ahead of me. It wasn’t just the freckle, or the big feet, or even the shadow of Middle Easternness in Lorca’s skin—though it was all those things too. Lorca felt so familiar to me somehow. Not like I’d once bumped into her on the street or sat next to her on an airplane, nothing as uninteresting as that. It was something smokier. It was more reflexive too, like being hungry or being stared at or waking up a minute before the alarm clock goes
ding.
It was wild, what I thought, outlandish even, but I thought it. Saying it out loud would be like trying to explain a dream.
Still, I let myself think that there was some meaning in all this. I wasn’t spiritual. I didn’t believe in fate. Once in a while, I’d toss salt over my left shoulder but then feel ridiculous. I just kept thinking,
She’s supposed to be here. She might just be someone to me.
“Joseph,” I whispered. “Can you hear me? Did you see Lorca? Did you see?”
Silence. More silence. Maybe a creak somewhere. Maybe an ambulance somewhere. Nothing to speak of. I couldn’t be sure. I sat there with a sock half on and half off until a car alarm caused me to jump.
“Joseph,” I whispered. “I was sad too.” And though nothing happened then, no bright light, no crash, I felt a vague sense of comfort that had everything to do with Lorca. Sadness, and then.
W
HEN I OPENED
the door, I found Blot perched on the railing of Victoria’s stoop, swinging his legs and whistling. I didn’t move; I considered turning around, going back inside, and waiting it out, but it was too late. He twisted his head around, his eyes finding mine, his hair twirling like a straw skirt.
“Good evening,” he said. Dimples.
“What are you doing?” I asked, unprepared.
“That was not the greeting I expected,” he said. “But I’ll take it.”
“Good evening,” I said, trying for something lighter.
Lecanard-capricieuxhowmayIassistyou
went through my head but I didn’t dare say it out loud.
Already I could feel myself soften. I smiled and curtsied, readjusting my sleeves to be sure. Of course, it wasn’t that I was disappointed to see him. In fact, if I had made a wish in Victoria’s elevator, it would have been for this very thing. But the truth was, I hadn’t wished. I’d been distracted all evening, happy. Being distracted was new. Always, real life had been disappointing. I was used to things being better in my head. When life surprised me, I didn’t know how to live it, live up to it.
“I was hoping I’d catch you,” Blot said.
“You were?” I said.
“Duh,” he said. “Tell me everything.”
He swung his backpack over his shoulder and stood up. He had on his half-gloves again. He took off one to brush the hair from his face. Feeling self-conscious, I rebraided mine at lightning speed.
“Well,” I said and sighed, closing the door gently behind me. I imagined Victoria already asleep, still dressed and with her apron shifted up, her shoes on, her body a diagonal stripe across her bed.
Moonlessness had overtaken the sky; it was so dark that it looked like a lava-cake spill. The sidewalk was slick and I willed my feet not to trip.
Blot was looking at me, waiting.
“That was the longest sigh I’ve ever heard,” he said. “I’m calling Guinness.”
“Ever?” I said.
I reminded myself to think before I spoke and to be careful not to come off as an emotional wreck. I was happy but shaky, as though I’d been jumping rope for six hours. Victoria had been everything I’d hoped. I loved her apartment: the faded wall tapestries, vases of dried lavender, art, knickknacks, silver frames balancing on every surface, the smell of baking cinnamon. It reminded me of the inside of a child’s fort—a million precious things huddled together. Victoria was wonderful too. She was like an old photograph, feathered and thinned out but mostly unchanged from what, I imagined, she’d once been. She was still unmelted, as if she’d been carved from
pain aux cereales
dough. Her old age wasn’t something she did to everyone around her, like Aunt Lou’s would be, like her middle age already was. Victoria’s smile was mini and maybe could be read as stingy, as though she were fighting against it—but I didn’t think so. It seemed more like it was wringing out sadness. When she squinted for a moment just before she spoke, I realized that I’d been doing that my whole life. And when I’d asked her if she knew the wooden match trick, she’d said no, and when I showed her, she’d said, “Fantastic. Just fantastic, Lorca,” like I’d built her a house. She’d tried it right then, and she was still for a moment, smushing her lips around the match with determination, holding her face toward the onion, unafraid. I thought,
Even if she forgets me as soon as I leave, this little thing will matter to her.
Last year when I’d shown my mother the same trick, she’d looked disgusted. “If you can’t handle the onions,” she’d said, “don’t use them.”
I’d considered asking Victoria about what I’d seen—the woman taking Joseph’s sweater from the pile to be thrown out—but I didn’t. I didn’t want to say anything that could mess things up.
When I finally spoke, a full block later, my voice hoarse from stifled emotion, I told Blot about the ingredients, one by one, and how we’d cooked them. I recalled measurements and techniques and the funny, elderly way that Victoria peered over her glasses as she chopped as speedily as my own mother. I told him that chickpeas must be soaked overnight, and hummus should be thinned out with brine, not water. I told him that Iraqi Jews didn’t eat anything black—even removed the skin from eggplant—because they considered it bad luck. Thankfully, I cut myself off before rattling off the crucial foods for those unlucky in love, which she’d told me too.
“‘Give him food so he can grow,’” I said to Blot, quoting Victoria. “It’s a proverb. Next class, she’ll teach me the Arabic.”
I told him that before I went, I’d worried she would find me frightening. My mother always said, “Lorca, don’t look so dark.” I’d make a big fake grin. She’d say, “Better.”
I knew what she meant by looking dark. It wasn’t that I was goth. I wasn’t. I wore pink sometimes. I wore lip-gloss. It was something about the cast of my face. I had a mole below my eye, and my whole life people had said it made me look like I was crying. My eyes were too light for my face. The peaks of my lips were too tall. My chin was too sharp. I looked like I was squirming out of something even when I wasn’t. Of course, what I didn’t tell Blot was that I’d prepared for the night by putting Band-Aids all over my arms. That way, if I had the urge to roll up my sleeves, I’d be stopped.
I went silent only when I realized Blot had stopped walking and was looking at me. I let him, though I wasn’t used to being inspected—not used to the person I was always looking at looking back like this.
“Before I left, I put on a turtleneck,” I blurted out, as if making up for keeping the Band-Aid story from him. “But then I took it off. I put on a sweatshirt. I took it off. I put on rain boots with turtles on them. I took them off. I told myself it didn’t matter what I wore.”
Blot gave me a big thumbs-up and we started walking again.
The thing was, I couldn’t get myself to shut up. I had so much to say. I even told him about the soap in Victoria’s bathroom, how it smelled of coriander, which reminded me of a recipe for oven fries with coriander seeds. By the time I mentioned okra, I figured he’d had plenty of time to stop me. Still, I quieted for just a second to be sure.
“What?” he said, making frantic motions with his hands for me to go on, and I did.
I felt smart then, telling him what Victoria had told me. “To avoid slime, we don’t wash the okra,” she’d said. “We flash-fry it and don’t move it around encouraging the juices.”
Finally, on Ninety-Sixth Street, I stopped my rambling. Blot’s jaw was clenched and muscled. His hands were clasped behind his back and he was pitched forward, heavy. He looked concerned.
Please,
I thought,
don’t let me have ruined everything.
I tried to recall the words I’d used. If I’d somehow said that this was the most affection I’d been shown in years, that being with Victoria had felt like standing in a lone coin of sun in the middle of winter. When I’d thanked her for the evening—about to walk out the door—she’d cupped her hand over mine. Her fingers were chilled on the outside but soft like wet petals. After a few seconds, I pretended I’d dropped something and leaned down, just to undermine the moment. I didn’t know how else to keep the tears away.