Simple Recipes (3 page)

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 point 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.

I

O
nce, 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.