This Is My Brain on Stew

WILL

As bone weary as I am when I get home from the Expo, I still can’t sleep. So I open the file that I’ve titled “The Restaurant at the End of the Strip Mall” and do something I haven’t done since the creative writing module in my seventh-grade English class: I freewrite. I try to capture all the granular details of the day: the smell of sesame oil just before it starts smoking, the sound of a metal spatula scraping against a wok, the feel of a worn twenty-dollar bill as you slide it into a register.

On Saturday, the day of the race, my family drives by the restaurant on our way to Red Lobster, and I notice a few more customers than usual sitting in the red-cushioned chairs by the counter, waiting for takeout. One of the storefronts in the strip mall is vacant, and I take a picture of the sign so I can look up the developer who manages the complex.

The next day, when my family is knotting up ties and slipping on sandals as we get ready for church, I wonder whether the Wus ever have a day of rest. Unlike a lot of other small restaurants in the area, A-Plus isn’t closed on Sunday or Monday. From what I understand, their backup cook is Grandma Wu, and their substitute waiter/busboy/delivery person is Jocelyn’s brother.

Sunday night is family night in our house. It’s the one day a week my mother cooks dinner, when she’s not on call, and she uses it as an opportunity to make some of her favorite childhood dishes. It’s so my sister and I develop a taste for Nigerian food, since there aren’t really any African restaurants in our area. I’m her sous chef this week. Grace is nowhere in sight. My mother taught her to cook (after all, my nne nne would have been scandalized if she hadn’t) but recently Grace has started opting out. Part of me resents Grace for having the guts to leave and then not get in trouble for it, but in the end it isn’t half bad having some mom time for myself.

I take out one of the bags of tomato puree that my mother keeps in the freezer for jollof rice. When I measure out the actual rice grains, I’m struck by how the long-grained rice we use is so different from the stubby short-grained rice they use at A-Plus.

My mother prepares the fish and meat for the egusi stew and grinds up the melon seeds and crayfish. This is my mother at her best—relaxed, centered, and focused on a singular task. It’s when she’s cooking that I feel most comfortable talking to her; maybe it’s because her attention is turned elsewhere, so I don’t feel as much like I’m under a microscope.

Of my two parents, my mother has always been the one who expects the most of us. Unlike my father, who used to take my sister and me out for Dairy Queen whenever we got a good report card, my mother would just nod and give a faint smile at our assumed excellence being confirmed. Doubt just isn’t in her vocabulary. There isn’t a problem that she can’t solve.

My father always mentions my mother’s confidence when he’s telling people how they met—a common occurrence, because everyone wants to know how an Italian American patent attorney with male-pattern balding and a Grade A dad bod ended up with a gynecologist who’s a dead ringer for Danai Gurira.

He also says, jokingly, that it was the noodle connection.

That’s how my father describes it. He was a law student. My mother was in med school. They met at a party thrown by one of my mother’s church friends. Within a few minutes of their first conversation, they found out they lived on the same street, which was how they ended up in my mother’s apartment with her roommates as chaperones, eating glorified ramen.

This is the point of my parents’ love story where my nne nne raises her hands to her temples and moans “chineke meh.” It’s like my grandmother thinks she can use mind control to wish away my mother’s rude breach of etiquette, that she would dare to fete a potential suitor with instant noodles, even if they were spruced up with yam, carrot, and egg. “How does she expect to catch a husband by cooking indomie? Only by the grace of God.”

To which my father simply gives a rumpled shrug and a nostalgic smile. He grew up eating some variation of spaghetti with red sauce four days of the week with fish on Fridays. The indomie was a hit: “A pasta by any other name tastes as sweet.”

The only thing sweeter is the kiss that my father lays on my mother’s forehead whenever he tells the story. Their tenderness always sets off a lightning-quick pang in my chest, as if my body is processing the briefest panic that my father could’ve judged my mother by the dinner she served him. There are so many things that need to fall in place for two people to get together, and even more things that need to happen for them to stay together.

I know that you can’t go through life like that, imagining your life stretching ahead of you as a series of missed connections. I know that with so many billions of people in the world, chances are there’s someone out there who wouldn’t mind hanging out with me and maybe making out a bit. And I know that even if I don’t find “the one”—if there’s even such a thing—it’s still possible to live a fulfilling and happy life.

That’s always been my problem. Knowing something is going to be fine doesn’t ever stop my body from acting like things might turn out badly anyway. So it’s not my fault. I can’t help it: Each time I witness the force that still draws my parents to each other, I worry that the random sequence of events that leads to love will never happen to me.