Simple Recipes Read online

  “No? Oh, well, how about —”

  “Three-fifty you say? For this side of town?”

  For years, my father wore the same suit, loaded the same signs into the trunk of the same car, and drove away. At first, he was optimistic. If he was on the verge of a sale, he paced nervously around the apartment. “We’ll buy a new television,” he promised my mother. “We’ll finally take a vacation.” My mother would smile, hopeful. But time and again, his sales fell through. Perhaps he was too polite, too restrained. He could never close the deal, to use his words. My father pored over real estate listings, read articles and books, attended seminars. He labored over the wording of his pitches. But if there was a housing boom, it bypassed him. My father looked on, uncomprehending, while the tide of wealth and prosperity passed before his very eyes.

  One afternoon, he quit. He came home from an Open House, laid his signs and business cards, his book of listings beside the garbage. To my mother and me, seated on the couch, he said, “I’m through.” He left her sitting there, wordless.

  In their difficult times, at the first mention of money, my father would shut down, close his eyes and ears. He told my mother, over and over, that it had always been her decision to leave Indonesia, and never his. She had separated him from the country he loved. My father once told me that when he came to Canada, his luck had run out. Everything he touched turned bitten He looked around at our apartment, the old, sagging couches and plastic runners, and blamed himself. He believed his lack of luck, of ingenuity, had done this to us, forced us to struggle for what he failed to provide.

  Our apartment became a silent place. My parents chose not to speak, rather than risk an argument that would shatter their fragile peace.

  I longed to be free of them. Some nights, I climbed out my window, inched my way to the fire escape. I dropped silently down to the ground. In those still hours between midnight and dawn, I stepped into different cars. Out on the empty highways, my friends and I sped until the trees and the lights ran together. Some nights I let a hand stray across the seats, find its way to the small of my back. A triangle of warmth on my skin.

  During these car rides, I thought of my parents fast asleep at home, tossing in dreams. I was glad to be outside, fully awake, racing away from the example of their love. It did not have to be that way, I thought. I could set myself on a different course, walk in the opposite direction.

  One night, my mother heard me climb back through my window. She came into my room just as I was getting into bed. “Where have you been?” she asked, exhaustion lining her face. Outside, the car circled the block, around and around, the sound reminding me of wild animals protecting their young, wordless comfort. I didn’t answer her, and she rested her warm hands on my forehead. Whatever protection, whatever security they once gave me, was fast disappearing. My mother must have known that, too. She stroked my hair until my breathing slowed. I feigned sleep while she watched over me.

  If I walked with my father then, we walked in almost perfect silence. Through the vegetable stands, my father walked ahead of me, his eyebrows creased in thought. He lifted stalks of broccoli, bags of snow peas, weighing them in one hand and then the other. He would ask me, “Which do you prefer?”

  And I would shrug, impatient, pushing the grocery cart straight ahead.

  “Where’s the fire? You’re like your mother. Always in a rush. Always needing to be someplace else.”

  I was fifteen years old and couldn’t understand what he wanted from me. I kept on walking.

  Each month, I watched my mother sort through the bills, her face blank. She’d open her checkbook, hold the pen in her hand, then stay that way, unsure. My father began swallowing pills, Aspirin or some kind ofanti-depressant. His actions became slow and meticulous. He said my mother and I made no sense to him. We rushed everywhere, we didn’t have a moment to lose. He, on the other hand, stopped answering the phone. It drove my mother mad. “What if it was important?” she asked him oncef after trying all day to reach him.

  My father shrugged.

  “An emergency? What if Miriam was hurt?”

  He looked at her with an expression of complete and utter indifference.

  She held her hands up to her ears. “I cannot speak to you. I cannot get through to you. Where have you gone?”

  One night, at three in the morning when I was up late, reading, he knocked on the door of my room. “Come in,” I said.

  He pushed the door open and stood waiting, old and tired. It bothered me to see him there, his disappointment so plainly evident.

  “Are you all right, Miriam?” he asked.

  “I’m fine.”

  “I saw your light on. Why are you still awake?”

  “I didn’t feel like sleeping.”

  He said, “You shouldn’t be staying out so late at night. It’s dangerous.”

  I nodded.

  “There’s something we need to talk about,” my father said*

  He stood there waiting for me to answer. I lifted my head up. “I don’t want to talk about anything right now.”

  “Listen.” My father’s expression, as if on the brink of speech. He looked so soft, standing there. I could touch him and it would hurt. “There’s something I need to tell you.”

  “Not now, please.”

  “Are you sure?”

  I lowered my eyes again. Whatever it was, I didn’t want to know. My parents seemed so childlike to me, so in need of love. I thought they only had themselves to blame that I didn’t know how to give it to them. For too long, I had been the line between them, the message carrier. Suddenly, I wanted no part in it. I was willing to cut the string and see where we landed. “Yes,” I said. “I’m sure.

  My father turned around. He went into his bedroom and shut the door behind him.

  On a windy, spring day, my father left. He packed a suitcase, bought a plane ticket to Indonesia, and disappeared.

  That afternoon, when I came home from school, I noticed that my father’s bedroom door was ajar. I stood in the hallway listening for him. There was no sound, so I walked inside. The room was neat and clean, the desk bare. For a second, I thought I should turn around and leave. There was something so personal about this abandoned room, so private. But I went to the closet and pulled the doors open. There were two shirts hanging at opposite ends, and nothing else.

  I sat down on my father’s bed. After a moment, I reached across and opened the desk drawer. There was an envelope with my name on it, as if my father knew, instinctively, that I would do this, look for some clue from him. Inside the envelope was a birthday card. It was early. My sixteenth birthday was still two weeks away. My father wrote that he had returned to Indonesia and that he would call me. There was nothing else.

  I opened the curtains, afternoon sunlight filtering in. At that moment, I tried so hard not to be disappointed — in him, or myself, or all the years that had brought us here. Of course, I thought. of course he would leave. So would I, given the chance. I would take that plane ticket and travel far enough away that the present would obliterate everything I knew.

  That night, my mother called from work. “Do you know?” she asked.

  “I came home and he was already gone.”

  I heard a piece of paper shifting, my mother adjusting the phone in her hands. “Your father called me from the airport.”

  I waited,

  “So he’s gone back.” She paused, a break in her voice.

  The moment hit me hard. I took a breath and then I told her, “He was miserable. I’d rather he was gone than miserable.”

  “Would you?” She didn’t speak for a moment then she cleared her throat. “I don’t blame you for thinking that. I suppose, in the end, I’ll feel the same.” We spoke for a few moments more and then she said, “I’ll be home soon.” We hung up the phone.

  Later on, we found out that my father had taken care of everything. He had sold his car. He had moved the credit cards and bills to his name, so that when he declared ban
kruptcy for the second time, which he did just before he left, he would not drag my mother down with him. He had done all these things in consideration and politeness, but he had neglected to leave her a note. My father left her only the quiet of his departure. He must have known she would just let him go. She was never the type to follow, to beg him back.

  That night, I climbed down the fire escape, let my body hang for a moment before letting go. I went next door to the IGA parking lot, where the neon lights lit the concrete pink and yellow. Turning south on Victoria Drive, I walked from streetlamp to street-lamp. On an upstairs balcony, two men sat playing cards, their voices drifting down. “That’s the last I heard.” The sound of the cards shuffling. “Up in smoke.” I walked until the wind and the distance exhausted me, then turned around and headed home again.

  In front of our apartment, I lost my strength and sat down in the cold grass. I thought of my father standing in the doorway that night, one unspoken conversation. As if I could have changed the outcome with some small, simple act. If there were words that could have kept him here, if I had been the kind of daughter who would say them.

  In some ways, leaving was my father’s bravest act. He threw caution to the wind. The country that loomed so large in his imagination finally drew him back. Despite family, despite our hold on him, in the end, that place won out.

  When I met Will, he was thirty-one years old. There were whole lives behind us both. With him, I hoped, at first, to become someone changed. The kind of person who lives with only the present in mind, who knows in her heart that no failures, however great, are immovable. When Will first asked me to marry him, I was exuberant. I said, “I’m so happy, I want to jump out this window.” He smiled and said, “Don’t.”

  For three weeks one summer, we thought I was pregnant. I was twenty-three years old. One night, I nudged him awake, whispered, “Maybe we need counseling,” and he rolled over to face me, hands on my stomach, our breaths held, “Maybe there’s been some kind of mistake.”

  Will smiled gently. “I don’t think so.”

  “There’s so much to know. I’m just not prepared.”

  “What are you afraid of?”

  I moved my hands on his skin, then looked up at him. “That I won’t be able to get the hang of it. That I’ll do something wrong.”

  “I’m scared too.”

  “But you wanted this, right?”

  He nodded. “You say it like you didn’t.” The question in his look was unmistakable.

  “I do want it.”

  “The truth?” he asked.

  I didn’t think, then, of the consequences of what I was saying. One more half-truth seemed so easy, when I had always been so reticent with him about what I needed. “The truth.”

  On a summer afternoon when the rain was pouring down in sheets, I went to the doctor complaining of back pain. “I was right,” I told Will, when the results came back. “There’s been a mistake.” It’s what the doctor told me. A kind of natural miscarriage, most common in the first trimester of pregnancy. “These things happen.”

  He said, “It was too good to be true.”

  That night we drank a bottle of wine, followed in quick succession by several more. Afterwards, giddy, we took the motorcycle out and raced to the university, me holding on to Will’s chest. When we leaned into a curve it was pure joy. I closed my eyes, tuned to the rush of oncoming traffic, the air shattering. For the first time since I left home, I felt loose and uncontrolled. I pushed my weight back on the motorcycle, releasing my grip from Will’s chest, speed tumbling through my body. Will’s face, glancing back, alarmed.

  That night, all our clothes left on the floor, I sat up in bed, unable to breathe. Will put his mouth to my sternum, calming me, as if he could catch the words I refused to say. And what words were they? Stop. Go back. I put my hands to his chest, pressured him gently away from me. Then I stood and walked out of the bedroom. Moonlight flooded our apartment, settling over everything like varnish. The furniture, distant as objects in a rear-view mirror; with each passing moment, they seemed farther behind me.

  Once, walking along the suspension bridge in Lynn Canyon, I froze and couldn’t move. Will stood beside me, hand on my back. “Try running all the way to the other side, without stopping,” he said. “You can do it, if you don’t stop to think.” He went to demonstrate. My husband sprinting across Lynn Canyon, scattering children and tourists. The bridge swaying like a high-wire rope. His body safe on the other side, chest heaving, looking back for me.

  When my parents left Indonesia, they walked away from a familiar life, but one foreign to all I know. Some years ago, the students in Jakarta took to the streets, protesting the government. Had my family remained there, would I have been among those students, one more in that sea of faces? Or those nights when rioters set the Chinese shophouses on fire, that bitter violence, what might have become of us then? I did not know where we fit in, or on which side of the line we might have lived.

  That country lay like a stone between my parents. Once here, my mother did not look back. She worked herself to the bone but set her sights on the future. But my father could not see so far ahead. He held on to those old photographs of Indonesia, and when he pulled them out, he examined them with an appraising eye. As if to see whether the photographs were true to the memory he carried, if a picture could ever do his country justice.

  The bad luck of his life was not, as he thought, a lack of opportunity or ingenuity. It was the tragedy of place. To always be in the wrong country at the wrong time, the home that needs you less than you need it.

  After my father left, my mother and I moved out of the apartment in East Vancouver. We spent a month packing, emptying closets and drawers, sorting through forgotten belongings. One night, she showed me the photographs she had found in my father’s desk — my parents, young and serious, in a formal portrait; their old house, lifted up on stilts. My father no longer needed to carry these, I thought. I looked at the plantations and wide skies, their unfamiliar beauty.

  I set the photographs down. “Do you miss him?”

  My mother touched her face, as if feeling for some emotion. “I suppose so. But what good is it? That won’t change anything.”

  That year, there was unrest in Indonesia. Small pockets of violence erupting, then brutally dealt with by the military. I saw clips of it on the news, a few seconds, a tiny window. The Irianese were still organized, still fighting Indonesian occupation though it seemed like no one noticed. I thought of Indonesia as the place of tumult, of unrest, where a military dictatorship muscled these disparate islands together, no matter the cost. For my parents, though, no other country will ever do. Even my mother, so at home here, thinks back to those humid nights, that once-spoken language.

  After we finished packing that evening, my mother fell asleep on the couch. I haunted the bedrooms, the stacks of half-full boxes, stopping for a moment to watch my mother, her chest lifting up and down, her graying hair spread out against the cushions. For the first time I pitied my father. He had gone away from us and perhaps we would not let him come back again.

  From Java, Irian Jaya, then back through Sumatra, my father sent me postcards. I marked his progress through those vivid pictures, the water buffalo and padi fields. Once, he asked my mother to wire money to him, and she obliged. We could not guess his circumstances in those years and he did not confide in us.

  One Sunday morning, four years after he had gone, my father called and said, “I’m home.”

  “In Jayapura?” I asked.

  He paused for a moment. “No, no. Here. Vancouver.”

  “Where are you exactly?”

  My father laughed, as if this was the question he’d been waiting for. “I’ve got my own bachelor suite,” he said. “I’m a new man.”

  By that time, I was living on my own. I called my mother to give her the news. “He’s back, is he?” she said. “Living in some hotel, I suppose.”

  “He has an apartment.”
r />   “Is that right? Well. That’s a good sign.”

  I went across town to see him. His apartment building, near Commercial Drive, stood out, gray and rectangular. I hesitated outside. From the sidewalk, I thought I glimpsed him — this elderly man in jogging pants and a sweatshirt, standing at a fourth-floor window. He was looking out to the shipyards, the tankers on the water, the rooftops muted of color.

  When my father opened the door, he was wrapped in sweaters. Vancouver was taking the bloom from his tropical tan but he looked relaxed. “You’re here,” he said, smiling broadly.

  I smiled back, trying to feel at ease. “I’m here.”

  We embraced very briefly, and I noticed then how thin he had become. He had aged, and his face was dark and lined. Standing in the entrance, I could see the entire apartment. It was small, a kitchen and a living room in one. My father ushered me inside. He gave me the tour, laughing as he did so, saying, “I’m living the bachelor life now. I don’t need much more than this.” I glanced at his furniture — a table, a mattress, and one plastic chair.

  He busied himself at the stove, disappearing behind the steam. The air in the apartment was rich with the smell of spices, ginger, lemon grass, hot pepper. “Chilli kepeting” he called to me, over the sound ofthe food frying. “I remember how much you liked this.”

  Up in the corners, the walls were moldy and gray and the carpets had a lingering scent, part cigarettes, part damp. He’d done the best he could with decorations. There were Christmas cards, hung up along a line of string, and certificates from the real estate office framed on the wall. For Devoted Service. For Congeniality. I walked onto his tiny balcony, looked across the road at the ramshackle apartments, the wet leaves running bright along the gutters. Out on the harbor, two yellow sulphur hills glowed neon against the clouded sky.