The Language of Baklava by Diana Abu-Jaber Read Free Book Online

GRILLED VELVEETA SANDWICHES
     

    Melt the butter in frying pan. Place the cheese sandwiches in the hot butter. Cover and fry until golden on one side, then turn and fry on the other side. The cheese should be oozing and hot. Cut the sandwiches on the diagonal.
    SERVES 2.
    After several weeks or more of this suspended animation, Mom says it’s time. Then there are huge smelly suitcases, and hold-your-sisters’hands, and some important and constantly missing items called pats-sports. There’s an airplane ride full of milky, walkable, stirrable clouds, a ride that takes all day and all night. I am incapable of sitting still for much longer than five minutes. I stand in the aisle and push up from the backs of the airplane seats and swing my legs until everyone in a four-aisle radius is openly glaring and clenching their jaws.
    We emerge from the plane onto a steaming hot tarmac, wave at all kinds of soldiers holding big guns, pass through long, echoing glassy corridors, and there is Bud—who’s grown a mustache! Then we climb into a funny, old-fashioned car shaped like a cracker box and discover that the streets and buildings here have all turned to white stone and dust. The sidewalks are not like the orderly, straight-line sidewalks of our old neighborhood. Here, they wind around and roam this way and that, as if they’ve decided to go where they pleased.
    Our new house is actually a ground-floor flat inside a larger building. There are veined marble floors, cool underfoot in the summer heat, and a deep, moody living room crisscrossed with shadows and draped with silk curtains as long as bridal trains. All the rooms are low ceilinged and rectangular, and it seems to take a long time to get from one end of the room to the other. My sisters and I share one big, echoey room across the hallway from my parents. Directly above us are four more identical flats, stacked up like layers on a cake. Across a little walkway is a matching building; the twin buildings are encircled by a courtyard, and running along the inner courtyard is a garden thick with big, nodding sunflowers, and marigolds, and mint plants, and now it’s my duty to go pick the leaves to steep in the teapot. I’m practically eight, and I know how to do this; my sisters, on the other hand, are two and four and utterly hopeless. There are also furious-looking cats that moan and skulk all over the garden. The night comes at a new time, and the moon looks sideways like a silver cup. There’s so much to look at that for a while I feel that all I can do is stand in one place and stare. One morning, after we’ve been there a few days or weeks, a gang of grinning, dirty-kneed kids pounds on our front door. They cheer when they see me, as if they’ve been searching for me for a long time, and they pull me outside. The gang expands and diminishes like a flock of starlings. We run everywhere and into everything, up stairs and down alleys. I don’t understand anything that they’re saying, but this doesn’t matter because I know how to run.
    In a matter of days, I am familiar with the labyrinthine windings of our ancient neighborhood. There are buildings so rickety and narrow that they look as if they’re built on stilts; there are staircases leading into murky darkness that I gape at but refuse to ascend; there are apartments—many apartments—that smell powerfully of babies and dinner all the time. One day my gang of friends takes me to the roof of our building and I discover yet another world of children running around, women gossiping, clotheslines brightly draped and flapping gaily as sails. I lean over the precariously low railing, five stories from the ground, and someone gives me a play shove from behind that swipes the breath from my lungs and makes stars pop in my head. I swing around and lay eyes on Hisham for the very first time. I can tell right away that he is the one I like best of all: He is about my age, small and thin and dark with close-cropped