CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Powers

Almost-four-year-old Audrey has long, tapering fingers, a haughty neck, slender arms designed for pushing away dishes. “No,” she says. “No. No. I don’t eat those thing. I don’t like those thing.”

Almost-four-year-old Gracie sits close beside her friend at the picnic table, narrow legs dangling, watching intently, her face filled with pleasure at this beautiful new world of refusal. When I put out slices of cheddar cheese, a bowl of salty olives, some smoky chorizo—items my daughter loved a week ago—she announces, “I don’t like!”

It seems as if humans are born into their best, wisest selves, without fears or biases, unaware of age or skin color, indifferent to beauty or deformity, ready to absorb languages, full of curiosity and adventure. But how quickly all that vastness and possibility begin to fall away. We’d heard the tales of children who would eat only white foods, or liquids, or single ingredients—“air ferns,” one friend calls them. We’d seen these kids at the table, faces drawn up tightly, a withering eye cast upon their plate. Generally speaking, if we don’t make a production of things, if we don’t assume Gracie will turn up her nose at the radish, the aioli, the sour pickles, she will take nibbles. If not a bite, she will lick it; if not a lick, then a sniff. There’s a series of pictures of Gracie at one and a half lounging on the kitchen floor eating a slice of lemon: She bites it, then winces, incredulous, then bites again. The tasting-and-wincing goes on in several frames: When I try to dispose of the chewed-up lemon, she breaks into tears.

Bud ate the whole lemon, rind and all, biting right in as if it were a peach. He taught my sisters and me to eat the seeds, the white orange pith, the crispy chicken skin, the marrow from bones. He remembered what it meant when food wasn’t taken for granted. He was descended from a family of noble cooks and big eaters. We joked that the Abu-Jaber family crest should have a picture of a rearing locust.

Grace and Audrey chase each other around the picnic table, ignoring the food, their cries streaking the air. A week later, my daughter will forget to refuse and once again nibble the olives. But the crusts of toast will go untouched, the tomatoes will be pulled out of the sandwich, the orange segments will be sucked down to wilted little cases and left for dead. I joke ruefully that I’m going to start an organization that will feed the whole world—the Kid-Rejected Food Bank. Then I spend an extra twenty minutes removing even the thinnest pips from the cucumber, without needing to be asked, because I know—she won’t eat the seeds.

The doctor wheels the stool up close, her cool blue eyes intent on mine, and says, “Tell the truth: What did you eat today?”

My gaze loosens up: I travel mentally to our Formica and particle board kitchen with the curling floor tiles, think of pouring batter into the waffle iron. Gracie hanging onto my leg. It began nearly the moment she was ready for solid food, the pancakes and waffles, the banana breads, the baguettes and encrusted scones, pull-apart biscuits, the brownies. We stir, gazing into the bowl, inhaling whiffs of cinnamon and vanilla. Gracie’s compact body hums with an audible pleasure. There’s no fast food, but there is this steady daily procession of baked goods. And, I admit to my unsmiling doctor, not many vegetables.

Her brow is tipped forward in her hand; I see the dismay of someone who’s heard it all yet continues to hope. “Your blood pressure, your blood pressure,” she murmurs. “I can put you on medications or. . . .”

“Or?” My paper jacket crinkles as I stir on the table, a blip in my voice.

“You can lose a few pounds and stop eating all that sugar.”

The chill of the office seeps under my paper garb; my feet go cold. “Oh. Uh.” My hands snake around my middle. “Do I have to?”

I consider Lenore a friend, forward-thinking and restrained—her medical advice is usually doled out in thoughtful measures. “A little sugar is one thing—but a lot?” Her pale irises fix on mine. “It hammers you. Your body can’t handle the overload. You get inflammation and insulin problems. Weight gain is the least of it. There’s a cascade—elevated blood pressure means hardening of the arteries means heart disease.” She trails off, intimating dismal ends.

But I don’t know how to lose weight, I tell her, almost begging, feeling useless and wimpy. I literally cannot imagine not eating sugar. Our new house has a fine oven made for baking. And since Bud’s death, I’ve had trouble finding my way back to dinner: It doesn’t taste quite the way it’s supposed to anymore. The ancient war between Bud and Gram, dinner and dessert, has lost its balance. No more waking up from a nap to the scent of onions, lamb, and okra—Bud’s tender mia bamia stew, filled with tomato and garlic. Such moments were rare in grown-up life but still possible—the lure of waking into warm scents, anticipating the meal cooked by someone who loved you. Now, instead of cooking, I pull out a few quick bites of this and that for our dinner, then bake a chocolate tart and hand-whip a bowl of cream on the side.

Years ago, my grandmother’s death had taken me, like a guide, into grief, and then led me safely back out of it again. Now I lean on her ghost—the one she’d promised would haunt my messy room—for consolation.

There were times when my grandmother’s baking was the greatest good—witching hours when the colored crystals and grain of the dough were indistinguishable from brushstrokes. Which is part of sugar’s hold on me—such big pleasure, not only dessert but fairy dust. On the last morning of our trip to Paris, years ago, before my grandmother and I were to catch our flight home, one lonely pastry remained uneaten. A fluted cream puff preserved in the sort of clear clamshell box that florists used for corsages. I’d held it up to the light, peering into the box, examining the scroll of petals.

I understood Grace’s passion for baking, her art. Like painting or singing, pastry seems to transcend usefulness. The opposite of nutritious, people call it “decadence.” Or “sin.” Dessert is lovely because it’s transgressive. It exists for pleasure, for itself—echoing Grace’s instructions throughout my childhood: Create your own meaning. Wait for no one.

I’d wanted to take that frosted orchid back to America and keep it forever, but Grace had said no. “It won’t be good if you wait. Eat it now or forever hold your peace, dahlin.” In the hotel room, on the side of the bed, my grandmother and I cut into the cake with a knife borrowed from room service. We ate the crisp scrolls with our fingers, inhaling oranges and sweet cream, closing our eyes.

Lenore gives me a scrap of paper with a name and a date on it. A great speaker, she says. This will help motivate you.

I am chastened, mind-numbed, bones buzzing as I walk out of the office, recalling the mournful set of Lenore’s mouth, the way she shook her head over my test results, as if refusing them. Cholesterol, blood sugar, blood pressure: no, no, no. “Don’t you want to set an example for your daughter?” she had asked. I will change, I vow under my breath. I lower my head, repentant. I will change my ways. Vegetables, I murmur, a supplication. Vegetables, vegetables. And no more sugar. Even if offering something sweet out of an oven feels almost exactly like doling out love.

Grace was the fountainhead, the wellspring of sweetness in the world. She’d lived through the Great Depression, raised a daughter on her own, worked without respite for years. She knew the importance of a little sugar in life. It was her mission to make sure that her granddaughters never went without.

Her apartment had a crawl space in the ceiling. It opened with a neat ladder that folded up like a trick. Up the ladder went Gram, her plump hips visible as her upper half disappeared into the ceiling. She brought forth armloads of candy. In an apparently perfect union of form and function, she poured her granddaughters shot glasses of M&Ms. So easy to eat, so pleasingly crushed between molars. They were so small and so many and so colorful, it seemed you could lose entire days sprawled before her grand old TV in its cabinet, crunching, crunching.

Whenever she visited, her first order of business was to “run out for some staples.” Grace loaded a few granddaughters into a cart and wandered the aisles, picking up a loaf of bread and carton of milk before veering to the candy aisle, where she told us to pick anything. A moment of such freedom it was almost psychedelic. The cart filled: licorice whips, butterscotches, and nonpareils. We grew uninhibited and threw in all sorts of exotics—candy dots on paper, red-hot dollars, orange marshmallow “circus peanuts,” chocolate cigarettes wrapped in candy bands.

“Gracious.” She admired the bubble-gum cigars. “How cunning. What won’t they think of?”

“This is so cool, Gram. Mom and Dad never let us do this.” Bud was suspicious of sugar and loved to claim he never ate “white food.” The pleasure of the palate, for him, was all salty, bready, meaty, cucumbers and yogurt and olives. But that wasn’t the whole truth. He was often forking into a cake or pie while bragging that he didn’t eat sugar. When we were a young family, each night he brought home a chocolate bar and broke it into five pieces: one for each of us.

My grandmother would place a quart of Whoppers in the cart, murmuring, “I know how you love these.”

As we shopped, Gram treated us to a running critique of our father. “Oh, he thinks he’s high-and-mighty. So typical. He thinks he runs everything. Well, just let the Great Dictator stop me now.” Gram said exactly whatever you weren’t supposed to say. She said it like she didn’t even have to think about it first. Like she couldn’t even imagine not saying it. And this daring and this freedom was mixed up with the sugar, as if they all went together. We were a family of women, sugar fiends, shameless and unbowed.

A few days later, I sit in an audience, each of us with notebooks on our laps as a celebrated health writer leans on the podium and lifts a hand, saying, “What is food? Food is not entertainment or comfort or pleasure or love or distraction. Food is not good or evil. It’s not your friend, it’s not your mother, it’s not your enemy.” She scans the crowd, sighs at her notes. She seems to be disappointed in each and every one of us. “Food is nourishment, fuel, nutrient. Do not let yourselves become confused. It’s time to get un-confused.” She waves her diet book in the air. “Food is a tool. It can make you sick or keep you healthy, according to the choices you make—and those are entirely up to you.”

Her talk is meant to be inspiring and uplifting. Afterward, though, after the rousing applause and the chatter, the screech of folding metal chairs pushed aside, the audience rushing out to snatch her book and spread the word, I’m feeling dispirited. On the drive home, I think about stopping at the market but can’t imagine a thing to eat.

When I open the door, though I’d left only a few hours earlier, my daughter flies at my knees, crying, “MAMA!” as if I’d been away at sea. Every welcome-home is a moment of glory. I pick her up: She’s solid in my arms, filled with surprising, sprightly strength. “What’s for eat?” She holds my face with the palms of her hands, assuring that I’m looking directly at her.

It’s weird to change houses soon after losing a parent—all shelter is gone, you feel turned out into the elements, a metaphysical homelessness. Oh, how I want to retreat into old comforts; I think of sweet ginger waffles, a bowl of butterscotch pudding. I nuzzle the warm crook below Gracie’s right ear, and she chortles and shouts, “No!” Face in hands: Focus, woman. “For eat?”

Her gaze is pure and intent. It has the effect of an X on the map: You are here. I recognize this; the rest of life comes in such moments. The awareness that things are about to change. Gracie has an elemental and uncomplicated understanding of food, a sacred trust in her food-bringers. Like Bud moving between the table and the Qur’an, my grandmother going from church to oven—we tend to the body, but the spirit prevails. An old mote from Rumi comes back to me: “There are people moving back and forth across the door/ Don’t go back to sleep.”

Awaken or roll over, these are the choices. It’s my turn, not only to make dinner but also to lead a child into the kitchen, to guide her through her appetites—both at and beyond the table. Bud had trouble sharing the kitchen, though he searched for and encouraged any traces of his culture in his children—through music and language and religion and temperament—he didn’t like to give up that one power, as if it might compromise some essence of his spirit, his gift to us. But if you insist on always taking care of someone, it makes the moment when she must begin to take care of herself so much harder.

“I know a secret snack. Something the unicorns like to eat,” I tell my daughter. Yes, she is interested.

On her step stool, Gracie watches me bring out the contents of the refrigerated drawers—a little romaine lettuce, some watermelon slices. Half a goat cheese. A cucumber. She wants to assist, messes be damned. Everything tastes better when you help to make it. We pluck some mint from the garden and check the tomato on the counter to see if it’s gone mealy. She tears up the leaves, tosses the chopped pieces into a bowl, sprinkles on some pumpkin seeds we find in the back of the cupboard. In a jelly jar, I shake a deep-purple balsamic into olive oil, give it lots of salt and pepper, a bit of crushed garlic and honey and mustard, then drizzle it around. She samples some on a fingertip. We sit outside at the round iron table with two forks and Gracie eats only the cucumber and watermelon. I eat the rest of the salad with slow pleasure. We listen to the susurrus of the coconut and imperial palms, the fronds lowered, murmuring, full of secrets, like hair or fingers sweeping the air, speaking to us in forgotten languages.

You like what you like. Tastes are powerful, primal, intimate, uniquely your own. And the power to choose, to say, No, thank you, not this, is one of the most important powers—at the center of agency and pleasure. You are what you crave and fear and what you want. In a little while, I will snap a small, dark piece of chocolate in two: half for me and half for her. She tastes and hands it back: too bitter. Next week, I will pull out the jar of grape leaves, unscrew the tight lid, inhale their delicate brine, place a mixture of rice, lamb, and garlic at the center of each leaf’s outspread “palm,” and, slowly and with real care, begin rolling them up.