Simple Recipes Page 2

  Shaking her head, my mother takes her jacket off. It slides from her shoulders. She says something to my father in the language I can’t understand. He merely shrugs his shoulders. And then he replies, and I think his words are so familiar, as if they are words I should know, as if maybe I did know them once but then I forgot them. The language that they speak is full of soft vowels, words running together so that I can’t make out the gaps where they pause for breath.

  My mother told me once about guilt. Her own guilt she held in the palm of her hands, like an offering. But your guilt is different, she said. You do not need to hold on to it. Imagine this, she said, her hands running along my forehead, then up into my hair. Imagine, she said. Picture it, and what do you see?

  A bruise on the skin, wide and black.

  A bruise, she said. Concentrate on it. Right now, it’s a bruise. But if you concentrate, you can shrink it, compress it to the size of a pinpoint. And then, if you want to, if you see it, you can blow it off your body like a speck of dirt.

  She moved her hands along my forehead.

  I tried to picture what she said. I pictured blowing it away like so much nothing, just these little pieces that didn’t mean anything, this complicity that I could magically walk away from. She made me believe in the strength of my own thoughts, as if I could make appear what had never existed. Or turn it around. Flip it over so many times you just lose sight of it, you lose the tail end and the whole thing disappears into smoke.

  My father pushes at the fish with the edge of his spoon. Underneath, the meat is white and the juice runs down along the side. He lifts a piece and lowers it carefully onto my plate.

  Once more, his spoon breaks skin. Gingerly, my father lifts another piece and moves it towards my brother.

  “I don’t want it,” my brother says.

  My father’s hand wavers. “Try it,” he says, smiling. “Take a wok on the wild side.”

  “No.”

  My father sighs and places the piece on my mother’s plate. We eat in silence, scraping our spoons across the dishes. My parents use chopsticks, lifting their bowls and motioning the food into their mouths. The smell of food fills the room.

  Savoring each mouthful, my father eats slowly, head tuned to the flavors in his mouth. My mother takes her glasses off, the lenses fogged, and lays them on the table. She eats with her head bowed down, as if in prayer.

  Lifting a stem of cauliflower to his lips, my brother sighs deeply. He chews, and then his face changes. I have a sudden picture of him drowning, his hair waving like grass. He coughs, spitting the mouthful back onto his plate. Another cough. He reaches for his throat, choking.

  My father slams his chopsticks down on the table. In a single movement, he reaches across, grabbing my brother by the shoulder. “I have tried,” he is saying. “I don’t know what kind of son you are. To be so ungrateful,” His other hand sweeps by me and bruises into my brother’s face.

  My mother flinches. My brother’s face is red and his mouth is open. His eyes are wet.

  Still coughing, he grabs a fork, tines aimed at my father, and then in an unthinking moment, he heaves it at him. It strikes my father in the chest and drops.

  “I hate you! You’re just an asshole, you’re just a fucking asshole chink!” My brother holds his plate in his hands. He smashes it down and his food scatters across the table. He is coughing and spitting. “I wish you weren’t my father! I wish you were dead.”

  My father’s hand falls again. This time pounding downwards. I close my eyes. All I can hear is someone screaming. There is a loud voice. I stand awkwardly, my hands covering my eyes.

  “Go to your room,” my father says, his voice shaking.

  And I think he is talking to me so I remove my hands.

  But he is looking at my brother. And my brother is looking at him, his small chest heaving.

  A few minutes later, my mother begins clearing the table, face weary as she scrapes the dishes one by one over the garbage.

  I move away from my chair, past my mother, onto the carpet, and up the stairs.

  Outside my brother’s bedroom, I crouch against the wall. When I step forward and look, I see my father holding the bamboo pole between his hands. The pole is smooth. The long grains, fine as hair, are pulled together, at intervals, jointed. My brother is lying on the floor, as if thrown down and dragged there. My father raises the pole into the air.

  I want to cry out. I want to move into the room between them, but I can’t.

  It is like a tree falling, beginning to move, a slow arc through the air.

  The bamboo drops silently. It rips the skin on my brother’s back. I cannot hear any sound. A line of blood edges quickly across his body.

  The pole rises and again comes down. I am afraid of bones breaking.

  My father lifts his arms once more.

  On the floor, my brother cries into the carpet, pawing at the ground. His knees folded into his chest, the crown of his head burrowing down. His back is hunched over and I can see his spine, little bumps on his skin.

  The bamboo smashes into bone and the scene in my mind bursts into a million white pieces.

  My mother picks me up off the floor, pulling me across the hall, into my bedroom, into bed. Everything is wet, the sheets, my hands, her body, my face, and she soothes me with words I cannot understand because all I can hear is screaming. She rubs her cool hands against my forehead. “Stop,” she says, “Please stop,” but I feel loose, deranged, as if everything in the known world is ending right here.

  In the morning, I wake up to the sound of oil in the pan and the smell of French toast. I can hear my mother bustling around, putting dishes in the cupboards.

  No one says anything when my brother doesn’t come down for breakfast. My father piles French toast and syrup onto a plate and my mother pours a glass of milk. She takes everything upstairs to my brother’s bedroom.

  As always, I follow my father around the kitchen. I track his footprints, follow behind him and hide in the shadow of his body. Every so often, he reaches down and ruffles my hair with his hands. We cast a spell, I think. The way we move in circles, how he cooks without thinking because this is the task that comes to him effortlessly. He smiles down at me, but when he does this, it somehow breaks the spell. My father stands in place, hands dropping to his sides as if he has forgotten what he was doing mid-motion. On the walls, the paint is peeling and the floor, unswept in days, leaves little pieces of dirt stuck to our feet.

  My persistence, I think, my unadulterated love, confuse him. With each passing day, he knows I will find it harder to ignore what I can’t comprehend, that I will be unable to separate one part of him from another. The unconditional quality of my love for him will not last forever, just as my brother’s did not. My father stands in the middle of the kitchen, unsure. Eventually, my mother comes downstairs again and puts her arms around him and holds him, whispering something to him, words that to me are meaningless and incomprehensible. But she offers them to him, sound after sound, in a language that was stolen from some other place, until he drops his head and remembers where he is.

  Later on, I lean against the door frame upstairs and listen to the sound of a metal fork scraping against a dish. My mother is already there, her voice rising and falling. She is moving the fork across the plate, offering my brother pieces of French toast.

  I move towards the bed, the carpet scratchy, until I can touch the wooden bed-frame with my hands. My mother is seated there, and I go to her, reaching my fingers out to the buttons on her cuff and twisting them over to catch the light.

  “Are you eating?” I ask my brother.

  He starts to cry. I look at him, his face half hidden in the blankets.

  “Try and eat,” my mother says softly.

  He only cries harder but there isn’t any sound. The pattern of sunlight on his blanket moves with his body. His hair is pasted down with sweat and his head moves forward and backward like an old man’s.

  At some poin
t I know my father is standing at the entrance of the room but I cannot turn to look at him. I want to stay where I am, facing the wall. I’m afraid that if I turn around and go to him, I will be complicit, accepting a portion of guilt, no matter how small that piece. I do not know how to prevent this from happening again, though now I know, in the end, it will break us apart. This violence will turn all my love to shame and grief. So I stand there, not looking at him or my brother. Even my father, the magician, who can make something beautiful out of nothing, he just stands and watches.

  A face changes over time, it becomes clearer. In my father’s face, I have seen everything pass. Anger that has stripped it of anything recognizable, so that it is only a face of bones and skin. And then, at other times, so much pain that it is unbearable, his face so full of grief it might dissolve. How to reconcile all that I know of him and still love him? For a long time, I thought it was not possible. When I was a child, I did not love my father because he was complicated, because he was human, because he needed me to. A child does not know yet how to love a person that way.

  How simple it should be. Warm water running over, the feel of the grains between my hands, the sound of it like stones running along the pavement. My father would rinse the rice over and over, sifting it between his fingertips, searching for the impurities, pulling them out. A speck, barely visible, resting on the tip of his finger.

  If there were some recourse, I would take it. A cupful of grains in my open hand, a smoothing out, finding the impurities, then removing them piece by piece. And then, to be satisfied with what remains.

  Somewhere in my memory, a fish in the sink is dying slowly. My father and I watch as the water runs down.

  Four Days from Oregon

  I

  Once, in the middle of the night, our mother Irene sat on our bed and listed off the ways she was unhappy. She looked out the window and stroked our hair and sometimes she lapsed into silence, as if even she didn’t know the full extent of it, where to finish, when to hold back. And all the things that made her unhappy were mixed in with things that made her happy, too, like this house. It was full to the brim. Sometimes, she said, she sat in the bathroom because it was the smallest room with a door that locked. But even then she could hear us, me and my sisters Helen and Joanne, and our father, all of us creaking the floorboards and talking over the television and filling the quiet. Hearing us pulled her out every time. She would come out of the bathroom and track us down. She said she wanted to tuck us under her arm like a rolled-up paper and run away.

  We were just kids then — Helen was nine, Joanne was seven, and I was six — but we thought of our mother as a young girl. She cried so much and had a temper. She joked about running off on her thirtieth birthday. “Almost there,” she told us, joking. “Better pack your bags.”

  When our mother was unhappy, she broke things. She slammed the kitchen door over and over until its window crumpled and shattered to the floor. In our bare feet, we tiptoed around the pieces. Our father ignored it. He said, “Tell your crazy mother there’s a phone call for her.” He said crazy with a funny look in his eye, like he didn’t really believe it. But we saw it ourselves, the plates flying from her hands, her face empty. Our father turned away and left the house. He walked slowly down the alley.

  Only once did Irene leave us. We waited for her tirelessly. In the middle of the night, in our bed wider than a boat, we listened for her car on the road. We fought sleep, but she didn’t come that night or the next. While she was gone, our father sat at the kitchen table like an old man. Already his hair had tufts of gray and his skin hung loose around his mouth and eyes, “Like a dog,” he said, running his hands over his head. “Don’t I look just like a dog?”

  My sisters and I rode our bikes up and down the alley. When we were winded, we played in the garage, climbing up onto the roof of our father’s brown Malibu. He poked his head in, said, “What’s this, now?”

  “Tea party,” Helen told him, though we weren’t really doing anything.

  He nodded. “You like it better in the garage than in the house. It’s your mother. There’s something wrong in her head.”

  One day after school, she was back on the couch, her fingers ragged from worry. “I missed you,” she said, pulling us in. My sisters and I sat on top of her body. We held her arms and legs down while she laughed, struggling to sit up.

  Sometimes Irene was well and she put on the Nutcracker Suite, twirling us around the room. At times like this, she would embrace our father. She would kiss his face, his eyebrows and mouth. They waltzed around the living room. She kept stepping on his feet. He shrugged. “It’s not the end of the world,” he said.

  Our mother shook her head. “No,” she told him, it never is.

  The first time Tom came by, he shook our hands. He said, “So you’re the Terrible Threesome,” winking at us. Irene told us he was someone she worked with in the department store. He worked in Sports and Leisure. The second time he came, he brought three badminton rackets and a container full of plastic birdies. He and Irene sat on the steps drinking pink-tinted coolers. We batted the rackets through the air, knocking the birdies from one side of the lawn to the other. Joanne, always moody, aimed one through the tire swing. Another cleared the fence and landed in the neighbor’s yard.

  “Can’t you hit straight?” Helen said, impatient.

  Tom stood up on the balcony, waving his arms in the air. “I can bring some more tomorrow!”

  Joanne turned her back on him and whipped one into the hedge.

  Afterwards, Helen pocketed the last remaining birdie and we went down to the storage area beneath the porch. We planted the birdie in a cinder block, covered it with mud, then left it to bake in the afternoon sun. Through the floorboards we could hear Irene’s voice, shy and laughing, and the long silences that came and went all afternoon, interrupted by the creaky sound of the screen door swinging shut. We watched Tom drive away, his hand stretching out of the car window, waving back to us.

  Our father came home at six o’clock. Helen told him the screen door needed oiling again and he took us out back, oil on his hands. He rubbed the oil along the metal spoke so that when he threw the door open again it closed slow as ever, but without a sound on the wind, just the quiet click of the latch closing.

  My sisters and I sat outside with him, our bare legs dangling between the porch steps. Our father pulled a photograph from his pocket. He’d come across it at the office, he explained, a picture of Main Street from a hundred years ago. In the photograph, there were no cars, just wide streets but no concrete, dirt piled down, women in long dresses, their hems bringing up the dust. I told my father I couldn’t imagine streets without cars, trolleys and everything, horses idling on the corners. He said, “It’s progress, you see, and it comes whether you welcome it or not.”

  Our father laid the photograph down. He said he could stand on the back steps and stare out until the yard fell away. He could see the house where he grew up, plain as day. It was in another country, and he remembered fields layered into the hillside. A person could grow anything there — tea, rice, coffee beans. I would always remember this because he had never talked about these things before. When he was young, he wanted to be a priest. But he came to Canada and fell in love with our mother.

  We spent that summer sunning in the backyard. Helen would grab the tire swing and hurl it loose. Joanne and I lay flat on the grass, fighting the urge to blink, watching it swoop towards us. The tire raced above us, rubber-smell fleeting and then blue sky.

  We were there the day Irene came running out in her bare feet. She was wearing a white flowered dress, and her hair, wet from the shower, had soaked the back. My sisters and I stood up uncertainly when we saw her coming. She grabbed our wrists and dragged us into the house and upstairs to her bedroom. Through the window we saw our father turn into the alley, then drive straight onto the back lawn. He climbed out, forgetting to slam the car door behind him. We heard him running up the stairs. “Irene!�
�� he yelled. “Irene!”

  She looked at us. “Tom will be here soon.”

  “Irene!” Our father pounded the door with his fist. “Open this goddamned door!”

  She shook her head at us. “He wasn’t supposed to find out until later,” she said. We stood beside the bed, next to her luggage, three plastic-shell suitcases, pale green, lined up all in a row. I went over to Irene and pulled at her arms, trying to get her attention. She looked past me, then stepped up to the door, unlocked it, and our father burst inside, his arms swinging. He was still in work clothes, suit pants and a white dress shirt. He was raging at Irene, saying, “I know, I knew it all along! You think I didn’t know?” My father drove his fist into the closet door and the wood splintered. Then he turned around and grabbed the curtains and pulled them off the rod and the fabric balled up on the ground. We heard tires on gravel, turned to look through the window and saw Tom’s car pulling up against the curb. Our father sank down, crying. “Do you know what I’ve put up with? Everything you do. All your crazy talk. Is this what I deserve?”

  Irene folded her arms across her chest and stared at her feet. I wanted to go to my father but I could barely recognize him. His face was red and puffy, streaked with tears. We heard the front door open, Tom coming up the stairs. All of us listened to him and waited and then he was there. He held his back straight, looked right at Irene, and came into the room.

  I thought my father would stand up, come at him, splinter his face the way he’d splintered the closet. He would tell Irene that enough was enough. But my father got to his feet, his face slick with sweat, and walked towards us. He crouched down to touch us but I backed away from him. My sister Helen said, “Dad, what’s happening?”

  He looked at her, his face old, suddenly. “You’re going with them,” he answered, his voice barely audible. “That’s what your mother wants.” He turned away from us and said to Irene, “Go wherever the hell you want.” He never even looked at Tom.