Evel Knievel Days (9 page)

“I don’t know,” Wada said. “I see light. I see heaven.”

“Wada, how about this: Why not let her change the recipe?” my father suggested. “This is America—anything’s possible. This beautiful young lady deserves a chance to add to the recipe, no?”

“My grandmother,” Wada said, “is frowning down on us, God rest her soul.”

But after dinner, after the perfect
koubeiba
, after the addition (in pencil) of
star anise, 1/4 teaspoon
to the recipe card, after the tiny cups of esophagus-stripping Turkish coffee, the three of them sat in the living room and listened to a record. My father had brought it: Mozart’s
Magic Flute
. As the music filled the living room, he explained the entire opera in his luxuriant Egyptian accent, explained it image by image, threading his voice through the open spaces in the score. “Die
Zauberflöte
, in German,” he said, and told the story of the Egyptian prince Tamino and his quest to free Pamina, the daughter of the Queen of the Night. He described Papageno, the bird catcher, with his rainbow coat of feathers and his piper’s beak, long and elegant as the tendril of a vine. He described the queen’s entry, when she soared onto the stage, riding an imperious surge in the music, riding an umbrella of stars and descending from the ceiling. This, then, was a remarkable man. He argued passionately over cooking. He dissected and explained the intricacies of
opera seria
, conjuring images that were strangely beautiful.

Unfortunately, besides his language and his culture, he also brought his addiction to gambling, to casino slots and barroom pull tabs and exorbitant racetrack wagers. But she wouldn’t know this for
eight years. By then it would be much too late. The story of the night of their meeting I’d gleaned from Tante Wada. The story of the end of their relationship, however, my mother told me herself, especially during lapses in her medication. Honestly, it hurts to think about it in great detail: The restaurant that my parents opened together after he graduated from Montana Tech. The steady acrimony that built between them over his trips to Las Vegas, the threatening phone calls that he eventually couldn’t conceal, the letter on the living room mantel after he disappeared, detailing the hundred thousand dollars owed to shady creditors, the tearful conversation at my grandparents’ house, the fear for her safety and the safety of her child, the humiliating decision to close the restaurant down altogether. He’d known that her parents would settle his debts for their daughter’s sake but that he couldn’t stick around if he wanted that to happen.

I guess I’ve spent a lot of time wondering how my father could have rationalized this choice, how he permitted himself to leave his wife and his son in order to disappear from America entirely, to flee to a country on the other side of the world. I’ve imagined entire stories for him. I’ve imagined entire stories, but they lead me to the same emptiness. And the most embarrassing thing? I’ve always wanted to say
Daddy
, that infantile and diminutive word. I never had the chance to say it, never got to write it on birthday cards or Father’s Day cards or letters home from camp.

Also, I have to admit that I always wondered why a woman who lost so much because of an Egyptian man would carry on his culture, continue its customs, continue cooking its food, in such a significant way. All of her recipes came from my father’s family—I
knew this much for sure. I also knew, from what I’d gathered, that she’d reconstructed many of the recipes alone in our kitchen, Bach sonatas winding their way through the house. So: Why? Why had she done this to herself; why had she trapped herself in a world of nostalgia?

I think the answer has four parts. First, nothing is simple. There aren’t always
therefore
s in real life. In real life, there isn’t always a chain of cause and effect. In real life, people do things for messy, incomplete reasons. They act without solid motivations, or their motivations are lodged deep beneath the surface of their thoughts in the unconscious mind. Some of my mother’s motivations were beyond even her. She awoke before dawn with the garden announcing that it needed to be stripped of its walking onions. And so it simply had to be done.

The second part, I think, had to do with her parents. Though I’d barely known them, I did know that Mr. and Mrs. Clark were about as likely to eat
ful medamas
as a slab of raw tiger. If they had traveled to Asia or Africa, laden with binoculars and rifles and wearing their best safari gear, and if they had witnessed the tiger prowling in the underbrush, and then they’d shot the tiger, conquering it themselves, then they might have sent it home to be stuffed and displayed in their solarium. But that evening, the acrid scent of gunpowder still sticky on their palms, they would have ordered steak and potatoes and washed it down with a sunny California chardonnay. They were just visiting, after all; it was all very lovely, but they weren’t planning on staying.

They eschewed my mom’s contributions to Thanksgiving dinner. Their idea of Egypt was half Tutankhamen and half Ten Commandments.
They’d raised my mother in an austere, moneyed household—and she’d embraced anything that seemed like it might offend their austere, moneyed sensibilities. Hence the commitment to radical politics, the marriage to my father, the unrelenting pursuit of Middle Eastern cuisine.

Third: I think that the meals she cooked reminded her of the beginning of the relationship, of the world that my father had opened for her, of a time when she had so much hope for a shared future. The food was an elemental reminder of that.

Fourth, and perhaps most important, I think it was a challenge. She was not going to fold, to give up, to let a sudden betrayal obliterate the life she’d imagined for herself. Yes, half of that life was missing. But she wasn’t going to let herself be destroyed by that. She was just going to revise, to reenvision, to reimagine. She would reorient the narrative with a different center.

Or maybe it was because after she closed the restaurant, the orders never stopped coming in over the phone? The business started slowly, but it grew larger and larger and—I think—took up the vacancy that my father had left behind. And so, I think at least in part because of these things, I found myself every Saturday morning sitting in the passenger seat of Tante Wada’s 1973 Ford Maverick, listening to Arabic music on her cheap in-dash CD player and driving to Billings, Montana, where the Islamic Center convened a weekly Arabic Saturday school. My mother insisted I go.

“It’ll get you in touch with your broader culture,” she said on the first day I accompanied Wada on the three-and-a-half-hour drive, departing at five in the morning. “It will heighten your understanding of the size and scope of the world.”

I was six years old.

“I want to connect you to where you came from,” she added.

“I came from Butte, Montana,” I said.

“I know, sweetie. But it’s more complicated than that.”

“Why can’t you drive me?” I said.

“Mom needs a day off, sweetie,” she said.

“From what?” I said.

“That’s not important, darling. All you need to know is that Tante Wada is happy to take you there.”

I began what would be a ten-year immersion in Middle Eastern politics and religion and the Arabic language. Of course, my father had been a Christian—and not a particularly religious Christian at that. I’d had no religious guidance from any quarter. For her part, Tante Wada had a pragmatic attitude about poaching language lessons for me from the Islamic Center.

“The praying is good for your muscles,” she said. “Kneel and stand, kneel and stand. You’ll be a better soccer player.”

I had a different agenda. “You realize, Wada, that I’m missing Saturday-morning cartoons.”

“Be quiet,
habibi
,” she said, “and listen to Amr Diab.”

When I was a teenager, I’d change our musical selection to Floyd Ming and his Pep Steppers or Uncle Dave Macon or Ernest Phipps and His Holiness Singers. But when I was a kid, Wada translated the lyrics as they pumped through the rattling interior of the little two-door Ford.

Habibi, ya nour el-ain
, Diab sang, and Wada translated in a deadpan, tuneless monotone: “Dear one, you are the light in my eyes.”
Ya sakin khayali
. “You live in my imagination.”
A’ashek bakali sneen o
wala ghayrak bibali
. I curled myself in the bucket seat and put my head on my knees and listened to her intone: “I have adored you for years. Oh. There’s no one else in my thoughts.”

It’s a separate book, those Saturdays with Wada and the imam and his more or less devout Islamic brethren. In Islam, the ideal of knowledge is as important as the ideal of prayer. Who knows that here in America? Everyone knows that single word,
jihad
. It’s a common part of the American lexicon. Who knows a similar word,
ijtihad
, which means
innovative thinking
and is an Islamic ideal, one encouraged by the Prophet Himself (blessings be upon His name). Who knows that
ijtihad
drove Islamic artisans to perfect cutting-edge techniques in dozens of disciplines, techniques that revolutionized ninth-century art and architecture and mathematics and society? I do, I guess. But that doesn’t seem to be helping much.

Tante Wada would wait in the car for me or go shopping in Billings’s tiny downtown shopping district. On the way home, I’d be allowed to talk only in Arabic, even when we stopped the car to get gas or use the restroom. Mostly, I’d communicate with hand signals. Occasionally, I’d startle a pimply teenage gas station attendant. “
Aya al hammam?
” I’d demand, standing at the counter at the Arco. “
Al hammam! Al hammam!
” Somehow, almost always, he’d know exactly what I meant.

The next day—Friday, July 27, 2008—all I had to work was the private party in the evening. I always have trouble with empty time off. I never know what to do with myself. That morning I had to fight the urge to go to the museum. I hadn’t slept well, so it would be a relief
to appear behind the desk and start organizing things, straightening a little bit, making sure that everything was in order. Sorting the pencils in the pencil drawer. Color-coding the keys and arranging them alphabetically. Imagining a dozen new exhibits and writing comprehensive treatments and proposals for each of them. You know, that sort of thing.

It was still early, but I thought about calling one of my high school friends: Jeremy Dean, now studying to be a carpenter in Los Angeles. Or Brandon Baldwin, who’d recently started his first year in a Teach for America program in rural Maine. But all I’d get from calling them was nostalgia and a sense that life had started happening without me, that my friends had all moved away from Montana—to L.A. or New York City or Chicago or the pine woods of Maine—and begun their next adventure.

I checked my messages. Nothing. Not a whisper from Natasha. I turned the phone off.

I decided to drive out into the hills surrounding Butte. I was going stir-crazy in the house. The drive would clear my head, help me put things in order. I threw on some running shorts and a pair of sandals. I padded my way outside. I hit the road and drove north. Debris from Evel Knievel celebrators was scattered everywhere throughout town. Driving through the city, I must have seen three different people in Evel Knievel jumpsuits, some of them even wearing the motorcycle helmet despite the heat. Public trash cans were overflowing. Bottles littered the sides of the road like an outbreak of glass flowers.

This is a big part of what I love about western Montana. Even our cities are surrounded by thousands of acres of forestland. In
Butte, it’s a short drive to wilderness. The air conditioner was broken in my old Ford truck, but that was fine. I put in Junior Brown and drove with all the windows open. The song, “I Bought the Shoes That Just Walked Out on Me,” seemed to be based on an especially piquant cruelty. Within ten minutes, I was surrounded by nothing but old-growth forest.

For sweeping expanse, for limitless vista and broad unfolding sky, there was nowhere more striking than Montana, than the states of the northern plains, with their scrub-brush hillsides and canvaslike emptiness. There were no cities. There were a few cattle ranches. I rolled down the window. Striations of light illuminated the forest. I took a deep breath of the highway pine. My father had been here, my own father—here, here in Butte, reappeared, just like I’d imagined a hundred, a thousand, times. Except he didn’t appear at my elementary school in a white Rolls-Royce, or at my tenth birthday party in a twirling helicopter. Rather, when he’d come to see me during my tour at the Copper King Mansion, I’d had no idea it was him. He’d loomed in the back, inappropriately dressed for the weather, and I’d been too tired to understand who he was, to match the face to those few family photographs.

And Natasha.

I thought briefly of the soft pressure of her lips, the feeling of her skin against mine.

When she and I were children, we were certain of one thing other than our desire to simulate the funerals of the people around us. We knew that when we grew up, we’d move to Egypt and become deep-sea divers and search for buried treasure in the wreckage of Ancient Egyptian cargo ships, in the crystalline currents of the
Red Sea. We devised elaborate plans around this future. We planned itineraries and created professions for ourselves and studied textbooks and made sheaths of drawings. We schemed. We collaborated. We hid suitcases in my attic with changes of clothes and books to read on the road and a copious supply of airmail envelopes for our enigmatic letters home. Oh, how we fantasized about those enigmatic letters home:
Dearest Mother
, we wrote.
Dear Families: We have gone to the Red Sea to become open-water treasure divers. Do not be alarmed. By the time you get this it will be too late to follow
.

Ultimately, I drove back toward the city. There was a limit, after all, to what a single tank of gas could do. I decided to have lunch at Rafiq’s Falafel, the only Middle Eastern restaurant in town. Well, the Stop ’n Save did sell an Egyptian chickpea salad, but the only Egyptian thing about it was the picture of the mummy on the container (and possibly the mummified nature of the chickpeas themselves). Rafiq’s was real Lebanese food. But whenever I came here, a certain tension simmered beneath the surface of my meal. Farid Rafiq, the owner, was one of my mother’s oldest friends. And by
friends
, I mean
competitors
. He longed to buy her business, to fold Saqr Catering into his restaurant and thereby corner the kebab market in our fair city of Butte. So, when I came in, he always hovered nearby, checking to make sure that everything was fine and—perhaps more important—that I wasn’t trying to steal his recipes.