Read Online Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots by Jessica Soffer - Free Book Online Page B

the words would do the trick, but they didn’t. I had to show her love on her own terms, remind her of her kind of happiness. The masgouf was the perfect thing. The only thing.
    “Yeah,” I lied. “It’s a big birthday this year.”
    “Cool,” he said. “Let’s see what we’ve got.”
    I seemed totally normal for a minute, and, I thought, it had taken me only a million lies to get there.
     
    We spent the next few hours looking through books about New York City restaurants and then books about Middle Eastern cuisine. The most astonishing part of the whole thing was how comfortable I felt. Blot’s co-workers walked by and nodded to him and then to me, as if I were someone they knew. And I said “Hey!” to them, not even caring how high or stupid my voice sounded. We sat on the floor. Every so often, he had to get up and go to his desk, to make sure everything was status quo, and when he came back and sat down, I very discreetly watched the space on the carpet—to gauge whether he’d come closer or moved farther off. Also, I devised a way to hold my sleeves in my hands, over my wrists. My whole wrists. It didn’t look awful. It looked like a thing. I pretended I was him looking at me. I didn’t seem nuts.
    “Are you cold?” he asked at one point.
    “Always,” I said, and felt brilliant. He might want to protect me, I thought. One day, he might offer me his coat.
    “Me too,” he said. “I’m from Baltimore. The ‘South.’” He made quotation marks with his fingers.
    I laughed. And though I couldn’t place Baltimore on a map, I wasn’t an idiot. I knew a thing or two about Maryland crabs and that it had to be a tiny bit warmer there than here.
    In the end, there was nothing in the books about the restaurant. There were, however, a couple of recipes for masgouf. One said that you absolutely must catch the fish in the Tigris or the Euphrates and cook it over an open fire using apricot logs. The history books said that carp was used exclusively, but the modern recipes improvised with red snapper and salmon and, in one case, catfish.
    “How about the lake in Central Park?” Blot asked.
    “I think the Hudson would work,” I joked, and he did a double thumbs-up. We found another book that said fish from the Tigris and Euphrates absolutely should not be consumed because of the many bodies that had been dumped in those rivers. Islamic religious leaders had issued fatwas on the poor creatures. Blot gave me a little elbow jab and said, “Wowie.” The feeling of his touching me echoed on my skin for hours.
    “Your Hudson River idea is sounding better and better,” he said, and even my toes blushed.
    I tried not to examine him even when I didn’t think he was looking. One dimple was bigger than the other. One eye was slightly lazy. There was a tiny divot, like a thumbprint, in the middle of his bottom lip. His eyelashes were not only long but also wet-looking, making his eyes seem brighter, like he’d been swimming for hours in the cleanest, coldest lake.
    We learned that the fish must be cut down its back, not its belly. I didn’t tell Blot that the only time I’d ever butterflied a fish, my mother had stopped me midway through and told me I was taking too many short strokes. What was I trying to do? Make it into chum? Instead, I told him I had no idea how to butterfly a fish, had never even thought about it. He said, “Let’s find out!” And he set off in search of another book that might teach us how. Every time he came back to me, I realized that I’d been holding my breath.
    “The restaurant might have been right around here, near Eighty-Fifth Street,” I said. “That’s where my father used to stay when he came to the city, at this fancy banker’s guest townhouse. He had built all their furniture.”
    It was easy to explain my weird family to him when we were both turning pages, not looking at each other.
    “Well,” Blot said, “how about this? How about we try just walking around?