Raising an Arab Father in America : Part 2

The Language of Baklava
by Diana Abu-Jaber

(Page 2 of 3)

Next, Bud pushes the big, glistening chunks of beef and onion and tomato onto skewers. The skewers are iron, with round hoops at one end and cruel, three-sided points on the other, so heavy that once they're threaded with meat, I can carry only one at a time to the refrigerator.

Shish kabob means that there will be coolers and ice chests, blankets and salads, pita bread, iced tea, salty braided cheese, hummus, maybe a visit to Rudy's stand, where they dip the scoops of ice cream into a kind of chocolate that hardens into a shell. Maybe our mother will bring frozen pound cake, because who wants to bake anything in this heat?

There will also be sisters and cousins and aunties and uncles and even more cousins, because there's no telling who's just "comeover," meaning come over from the old country. You never know when suddenly a second cousin you haven't seen in years will be standing in the living room, asking for a little cup of coffee. They'll be hungry because everyone who "comesover" is hungry: for home, for family, for the old smells and touches and tastes. If we're not at the park, sometimes these cousins and noncousins and friends and strangers will drop by the house. Coincidentally, they always come at dinner-time. Always at the moment we turn on the stove.

Bud says that today we children need to be extra pleasant, polite, and cute. Today Cousin Sami (Samir) will be with us. He is newly arrived, twenty years old, sensitive, and willowy as a deer. He walks tentatively in this new country, looking around himself as if about to break into flight; his eyes glisten, eternally on the verge of tears. I overhear Bud telling Mom that he doesn't know if Sami will "make it." Mom blows a filament of hair out of her face; she's twenty-six years old and tall, but she doesn't have much more meat on her than I do. Her reading glasses are smart and serious. I can tell that she's thinking, What is it with these sensitive, crazy men?

We pack up the family and drive the road to the north, over tiny wooden bridges, past taverns with names like Three Rivers Inn and gurgling minute creeks, up to Fair Haven Beach on Lake Ontario, thirty miles from Syracuse. After we arrive and roll along behind people walking to their car in order to secure the best parking spot, it will take an even longer time to unpack the trunk and find the exact picnic tables and get out the bags and coolers and cousins and sisters. We cover several tables with red-checked tablecloths, paper plates, plastic containers full of everything. Bud piles briquettes into three different grills, and Uncle Hal adds more and more lighter fluid - usually while it's burning - so the flame roars right up at him in a fabulous arc. I draw in the rich chemical aroma: Barbecues are the smell of lighter fluid, dark and delicious as the aroma of gasoline.

Another car pulls up and there is Cousin Sami unfolding from Uncle Danny's Volkswagen. Sami holds out his hands as if testing the gravity on this new planet. He looks as if he might topple over at any moment. I adore him. Big, hearty Businessman-Uncle Danny, who's looking after him because his full-time father, Rich-Uncle Jimmy, lives in Jordan, laughs and calls him "a poet." I know immediately that's what I want to be, too, and I say this to my father as he's carrying a platter full of shish kabob. He looks unhappy at this news, but then Uncle Hal shouts, "Oh yes, there's a lot of money in that," and the adults laugh for inexplicable reasons and then forget about me.

The cousins - except for Sami - and sisters and I run in the frothy surf along Fair Haven's pebble beach. The water is electrically cold, threaded with mysteriously warm currents. We go in up to our necks and the waves lift us off our feet. We can do just this, standing in ice water and bobbing, for hours. A game for lunatics. We don't ever want to come in, even when our mother and one of the aunties wade out and says, "Your lips are purple, time to come in." First we make Mom demonstrate her ability to float in the water so that her shoulders submerge and her pink toes bob up and she looks as if she's sitting in a recliner. This, I assume, is a talent innate to all Americans. We all try, and our chicken-bone bodies just sink. Dad and his too many brothers don't even own bathing suits.

There's a commotion on shore. My father and the uncles are shouting and waving their arms: Shish kabob is ready! Uncle Hal is ferrying the sizzling skewers - we call them sheeshes - to a big platter on the table. Bud is turning more of them on the fire.

The shish kabob comes like an emergency. It sizzles at the table, and Uncle Hal pushes the chunks of meat off the skewers with a piece of pita bread. They all go to one central plate. He says, "This piece is for you and this one for you." It's best to wait for the second sheesh because for some reason the meat on the first always looks scrawny and shriveled and smells of uncooked lighter fluid. But there's no time to wait! You have to eat the lamb when it's hot enough to burn your fingers and scald your tongue.

"Eat it now," Uncle Hal says. "It's good right this second."

This is one of the secrets of shish kabob: how quickly it dries and hardens on the skewer. Not like a roast leg of lamb or breasts of chicken that fall off the bone when you cook them long and ruthlessly enough. Shish kabob is fierce. It comes charred and crusty outside and pink, almost wet red inside, richly redolent, in its special way, of marrow and pepper. It sizzles in your mouth and tastes faintly of the earth.

In the midst of all this drama and pageantry, however, I notice that Sami hasn't left his perch on the far end of the most distant picnic bench. His eyes are glowing as he watches us with both curiosity and aloofness. I pluck a morsel from the plate and run to him while it burns my fingertips. To my mind, this is the best way to show love - to offer food from your own hand. But he only closes his eyes and shakes his head dolefully.

Because I am six, I am typically the one being fed - I've never tried to feed anyone from my own hand like this before. But I've never had a cousin like this before. Usually my older Jordanian cousins arrive resplendent in polyester bell-bottom slacks - this being the late sixties - tall and strapping and hungry for America. With big mustaches, huge laughs, wild eyes, and big - very big - plans. Not Sami, though. Earlier that morning, Bud talked about it on the phone with one of his brothers. Sami didn't even want to come to America. In our family, we assume that everyone is simply dying to come here. It's like a law of nature: Grow up, go to America. I learn from sitting at the kitchen table, helping Bud poke kabobs onto skewers while he talks on the phone, that Uncle Jimmy sent Sami to America to "cure him" of something or other. When I ask Bud later what Uncle Jimmy wants to cure him of, he thinks about his answer for a while before he decides to say, "Of being a poet."

Copyright © 2006 by Diana Abu-Jaber.

About the Author

Diana Abu-Jaber is the author of Crescent, which was awarded the 2004 PEN Center USA Award for Literary Fiction and the Before Columbus Foundation's American Book Award and was named one of the twenty best novels of 2003 by The Christian Science Monitor, and Arabian Jazz, which won the 1994 Oregon Book Award and was nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award. She teaches at Portland State University and divides her time between Portland and Miami.