Tinderbox Page 5

  At “brilliant,” Uri slammed his fist on the table, toppling his glass of wine. Raquel reached over to right the glass and blot up the wine. Esther froze, a forkful of couscous midair, and Rachida pushed back her chair, mumbling something that Caro was sure must be fuck you in Arabic.

  After the meal, Rachida reappeared. She grilled Caro about New York City, where—she lowered her voice to tell Caro, her parents didn’t know yet—she was applying to medical school.

  A year later, Rachida began medical school in the Bronx. She had been living across from the school for a month when she first called Caro, home for the summer with a job at a Head Start program. They spent several evenings together, the first of which was marked by what Caro knew was Rachida’s surprise to see the changes in her, her curves hidden beneath the twenty pounds she’d regained on her return to Harvard, when, unable to sleep, she’d begun the secretive night eating in her dorm room as she tried not to think about what had happened with the chubby engineer in Paris and then afterward.

  The evenings with Rachida passed with awkward pauses, continued on Caro’s end out of a sense of guilt at the thought of abandoning a foreigner, but also due to a begrudging admiration of Rachida’s frank bitterness—about her father’s misogyny, that he never got over not having a son; about the foolishness of her mother and sister, who couldn’t understand Rachida’s lack of interest in clothing and domestic adornment; about the other medical students, who awkwardly avoided political conversations in her presence, assuming her to be a Muslim foe of Israel.

  A few days before Caro returned to Boston, in a last-ditch effort to be hospitable, she introduced Rachida to Adam, about to start his first year at N.Y.U. Perhaps he would take Rachida on as a movie partner—his ironic love of lowbrow movies companionable, she thought, with Rachida’s enjoyment of them for exactly what they are. Romance between the two of them never crossed her mind, not only because of their age difference, Rachida’s twenty-two to Adam’s eighteen, but also because it was hard to imagine physical contact between them, Rachida too brusque to seem amorous, Adam looking like a kid whose hand needed to be held.

  By the time Caro came home for Thanksgiving, Adam and Rachida were a couple, even then, though, more like an old married couple than young lovers. When Rachida left for her dermatology residency in Detroit, still believing she would ultimately return to Morocco, Adam followed—neither of them prepared for the other female residents with complexions out of cosmetic advertisements and tight skirts worn under their lab coats, all headed for lucrative nine-to-five practices that would require no evening beepers and permit ample time for family ski trips and home-beautification projects. They married three months before Omar’s birth, after which Rachida gave up the idea of going back to Morocco. In the fifth year of her shopping mall practice, she devised the plan of a respecialization fellowship in primary care that would allow her afterward to work at a clinic serving the Arabic community in Detroit.

  Now, in two days, Rachida, Adam, and Omar would be here. You should be happy, Caro tells herself. She pinches her arm. You really should.

  20

  “It’s the summer solstice,” Omar announces as he tumbles out of the backseat of the stuffed Honda wagon. His bangs, navy-black like his mother’s, hang over his forehead. “Rachida explained it to me. The way that the axis of the earth to the sun changes with the seasons.”

  Rachida had given Omar her mini-astronomy lecture somewhere around Ohio, part of her scientific education program, prophylactic, she believes, to a vulnerability to religion. She dislodges herself from behind the driver’s seat and glances at her son. Like her, he rarely smiles, his seriousness so familiar to her, she had never thought about it until Omar’s preschool teacher mentioned it—not with alarm, she was careful to say, Omar is passionate about so many things and plays so nicely with the other children, but rather because it is so unusual to see a child so lacking in, well, she blushed as she said it, childishness.

  Standing on the steps of the brownstone are Myra, Caro, and a girl with stringy dark hair who, Rachida realizes, must be Eva. In one hand, she is holding a blue helium balloon that says WELCOME, in the other a stuffed animal.

  “It’s the longest day of the year! Rachida said I could stay up as late as I want.” Omar disappears into the arms of his grandmother and aunt. Adam groans as he unfolds himself from the passenger seat, pulling on his beard and his wrinkled khaki shorts. Caro hugs him, a hug that ends in a little poke to the belly that in the last year has begun to overhang his belt.

  Rachida cocks her head in Omar’s direction. She can feel the circle of perspiration that has formed on her back. “He slept all afternoon.”

  The rounds of hugging with introductions of Eva continue until Rachida pops the trunk and begins lifting out the bags. Omar goes inside with Eva to look at the box of his father’s old toys that Eva has unpacked in the third-floor room that will be his. By the time Rachida arrives with a duffel filled with Omar’s clothes, Omar and Eva are flopped on the rug, their noses inches apart as they sort through the pieces of an Erector set.

  Myra announces that dinner will be on the kitchen deck. Rachida washes her hands and face in the kitchen sink, aware that it would be more appropriate to go upstairs to wash up and change her shirt with its slightly unpleasant odor—that she is under the sway of the oppositionalism her mother-in-law’s graciousness sets off in her, Myra’s good manners eliciting her own rudest inclinations. When she’d once mentioned this to Caro, Caro had laughingly chided, “Trust me, I understand. But you’d better get over it. There’s so much my mother does well. If you become a contrarian with her, the only things left for you to do will be to suck your teeth and play poker.”

  With her face still wet, she steps onto the deck. Votive candles are perched on the railing. From the garden below, she can hear the fountain, a hypnotic gurgling that brings her back to an afternoon in Fez with her father and sister, a square with a blue-and-white-tiled fountain where students from the nearby madrasa would come to wash.

  Eva has come downstairs and is now helping Myra carry the food to the outdoor table: shrimp done on skewers on the grill, baby potatoes roasted with olive oil and dill from one of the terra-cotta pots, a corn-bread and green salad that Myra says are both Eva’s doing. Eva beams. With each platter she places on the table, she looks up at Myra to check her reaction. Rachida counts the plates. Six. She knows there is no acceptable alternative to having Eva eat with them, but it will be a chore to carry on a conversation with her, grating to see the glances Eva gives Myra, Myra’s small nods of encouragement.

  Myra sends Eva to get the others. When everyone is on the deck, she motions for Rachida to take the seat at the end of the table across from her, Omar and Eva along one side, Adam and Caro on the other.

  “I can’t believe you’re from Iquitos,” Adam says, looking at Eva. “Fitzcarraldo is one of my absolute favorite movies. I’ve seen it and Burden of Dreams, the documentary about Herzog’s making of the film, dozens of times. You probably know some of the people that were in it. There were over a thousand extras. My God, Herzog, the megalomaniac, actually dragged that ship over the mountain. Everyone thought he was insane. He makes his character Fitzcarraldo seem like a measured man.”

  Rachida feels her irritation rising, her impatience with Adam’s cinematic obsessions. If they were not at her mother-in-law’s table, she would tell him to zip it. Eva looks at her plate, which Rachida notices has no shrimp. Does Eva keep kosher?

  “Perhaps Eva doesn’t know about the film,” Myra says.

  “Impossible. Herzog took over Iquitos. The Amazon was filled with canoes confronting the steamship, which they really drove over the rapids.”

  Eva continues to stare at her plate. Rachida sees Omar reach under the table to take Eva’s hand, the way she once saw Caro do with Adam when their father, Larry, had launched one of his bellicose lectures on the grandeur of a man riding a horse.

  “It’s a movie, Eva,” Myra says, “that
was filmed in Iquitos. When was it made, Adam?”

  “It was released in 1982. But they began preproduction in the mid-seventies. It took so long because Jason Robards, who originally played Fitzcarraldo, got sick and had to resign, and then Mick Jagger, who played his sidekick, a Sancho to Robards’s Quixote, quit because he’d run out of time before his next tour. Herzog had to virtually start over. For a while, he planned to play Fitzcarraldo himself, but then Kinski insisted that he would be better and had to do it.”

  “Eva would have been a young child while they were filming. It’s unlikely she’d know the extras.”

  “I am very sorry. My parents never go to the movies. My father drive a speedboat for one of the jungle lodges, and he always go to a bar after work. For fun, my mother play this tile game with the ladies on our street. She is a very religious person. The only movie she ever watch is The Sound of Music. We watch it on television every year together.” Eva’s face brightens. “Do you know the movie? I know all the songs!” Softly, Eva begins to sing: “The hills are alive with the sound of music / With songs they have sung for a thousand years…”

  As a child, Rachida had loved that movie. She, too, can remember watching it on television with her mother and sister, Julie Andrews singing in a dubbed French. “Collines que j’aime / Vous chantez au monde / Des airs qu’autrefois / J’entendais chez moi…” Once, she’d tried to get Adam to watch it with her, but he’d said, “You’ve got to be kidding. It’s kitsch through and through.”

  “You must have heard people talk about Herzog making Fitzcarraldo,” Adam persists. “Your parents or other people who were involved?”

  Her annoyance like a sneeze that can no longer be controlled, Rachida blurts, “Stop interrogating her. Can’t you see that she doesn’t know anything about it?”

  Now it is Omar’s turn to look into his plate.

  “Oh Jesus, I’m sorry.” Rachida sighs. “Just, Adam, enough already.” She looks at Omar, but when he lifts his face, his expression is impassive, as though he long ago resigned himself to his mother’s sharp tongue and his father’s way of never seeing that he is annoying the shit out of everyone.

  “We’ll have to watch it after dinner,” Adam says. “It opens with this fabulous scene of Klaus Kinski and Claudia Cardinale, both in gorgeous white finery, racing to get to the Teatro Amazonas in Manaus in time to hear Caruso sing.”

  21

  When they are done eating, Adam goes to look for his copy of Fitzcarraldo. Rachida and Myra take Omar upstairs to help him get ready for bed, and Eva clears the table. Caro follows Adam into the music room, where her mother has set up a table under the window for him to use as a desk. She watches her brother rifling through the file boxes he has brought with him, wondering if she should ask how things are going with Rachida.

  “It’s got to be in here. I’d never have left it behind.” Adam splits the tape on a box labeled The Searchers and begins emptying out cassettes and files. Caro examines the labels on the other boxes: Contracts & Bills, Screenplays/Books. Only one is unlabeled.

  “How about this one? Could it be in here?” she asks, tapping the box.

  Adam intercepts her arm so quickly, he lands her a shove. Their eyes lock and her hands clench. It shocks her, this taste of sibling violence that for them had been blessedly rare, squashed by her feelings of pity and protectiveness toward her scrawny brother.

  “It’s not in there.” He pushes the box out of her reach, his clutter having already defiled their mother’s serene order, so that Caro has to fight an urge to chastise him, to order him to put his things away—the vestigial, bossy, older-sister feeling that he is hers but also that he is her responsibility.

  “I’m going to call it a night,” Caro says.

  22

  “We’re doing great,” Myra reports when Caro telephones a few days later to inquire. “On Sunday, Adam took Omar to the park, where he met a child who’ll also be in first grade at City. The mother told Adam about the camp at the school. Adam and Omar went over to see if there were any openings, and there was one space left. They let him start right away. He loves it. They’re doing a unit on reptiles and have two snakes and a gecko in a terrarium. Adam was thrilled, because it means he can get down to work now rather than having to wait for September. I was going to call you tonight to see if you wanted to do pickup on Friday.”

  Something about the way her mother’s words are inflected leaves the impression of an imperative rather than an interrogative. Only once has Caro heard her father, who has never let go of his mantle as the aggrieved party, as though it were her mother, not he, who’d busted up their marriage, voice anything that sounds like a criticism of her. The softest-spoken tyrant you’ll ever meet, he’d said. A will of steel.

  On Friday, Caro meets Omar in the classroom that serves as home base for his camp group. He is sitting at one of the child-sized tables reading a junior encyclopedia, his head arced over the book so she can see the cowlick at the top of his soft neck. He doesn’t notice her arrival until she kisses his hair.

  “Auntie Caro, can I finish my page?” Caro glances at the book, open to a section on insects and spiders. A diagram shows the butterfly life cycle: egg, caterpillar, chrysalis, adult.

  “Okay. Where’s your stuff? I’ll gather it up.”

  Omar points to a wall of cubbies where a group of boys are gathered like a squirming beast, poking one another with the action figures they are allowed, with the day now over, to remove from their camp bags. She retrieves Omar’s bag, damp, with a faint scent of chlorine from the balled-up bathing trunks inside.

  Once they are outside, Caro takes Omar’s hand. They walk to Broadway for ice cream while Omar describes the way a caterpillar makes a chrysalis, and how when it splits open—he unfurls his fingers so his hands are pinwheels—there’s no more caterpillar, just a butterfly!

  She watches her nephew’s ice-cream cone, expecting the splatters to which she is accustomed from her preschoolers, but Omar manages his cone with careful expertise so that the only residue is a pale vanilla spot on his nose. With it half-uneaten, he hands it to her. “I’m full. I’ve had enough.”

  Is there something worrisome about a child not finishing an ice-cream cone, something too restrained for his age?

  “Do you know how many horns the styracosaurus had? Six horns on its head plus one on its nose.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “Do you know which dino is my very favorite one?”

  “Let me think. Mmmm … The polkadotateratops?”

  Omar looks at his sneakers, as though sparing her the humiliation of discovering that her joke is not funny. “The parasaurolophus. It had only one horn on its head and it was a herbivore.”

  He stops—so suddenly Caro nearly drops the remains of the now dripping cone—and leans over, pointing at a chewed-up piece of gum on the sidewalk. “A bird or a squirrel could choke on that.”

  “Don’t touch. I’ll get it.” She picks up the gum with one of the napkins she’d wrapped around the cone. At the corner, she tosses the cone and the gum in a trash can.

  “Eva is a vegetarian,” Omar continues, slipping his hand into Caro’s now empty one. “Did you know that some vegetarians don’t eat anything that comes from animals?”

  “They’re called vegans. Is Eva a vegan?”

  “She doesn’t eat meat or chicken or fish. Rachida told me it’s not because of her religion. She just doesn’t like it.”

  When they arrive back at the house, Eva is in the kitchen washing lettuce and boiling water for pasta.

  “Hi, Miss Caro. Hi, Omar. You like something to drink?” Eva asks, having been carefully instructed, Caro imagines, by her mother to offer Omar plenty of fluids.

  “Yes, please. What are you making?”

  “Macaroni and cheese pie.”

  Eva tilts her head toward an index card propped against the tile backsplash. She looks at Caro. “Your mother write the recipe for me. She is teaching me how to cook. Did sh
e teach you?”

  “A few things. Omar says you’re a vegetarian.”

  Eva wipes her hands on the hips of her pants. “The smell of cooking animal, it makes me sick to the stomach. Your mother is so nice. She says it is okay if I prepare everything else, she will make the meat. She washes and seasons it so I don’t have to touch it.”

  “Are you allergic?” Omar asks. “There’s a boy in my camp who’s allergic to nuts. He has to keep this special pen that’s really a needle in his backpack.”

  “I don’t like the smell.” Eva crinkles her nose. With a shudder of her shoulders, she turns back to the stove.

  23

  Over dinner, Adam announces that he has begun a new project, a remake of The Searchers.

  “I’ve been thinking about it a long time, debating the dramatic circumstances. Then this week it came to me. Eva inspired me.” He smiles in her direction, a smile she responds to with what strikes Myra as a look of frozen fear.

  “I’ve been reading about the boomtown atmosphere of Iquitos in the 1890s. All of these people descended on the town to make their fortunes with rubber, with no regard for the people who’d lived there for centuries. I’ve recast Ethan Edwards as a Jew from Tangier searching for the missing daughter his brother had with a common-law Indian wife.”

  “The Searchers,” Myra says. “I must have seen the original, but I can’t remember it.”

  “It’s fabulous! We can watch it after dinner. I have a copy upstairs. It’s John Ford’s finest film. You could learn how to paint, how to photograph, how to be a novelist just by studying that film.”

  Rachida, who has made an extra effort to be home for dinner since she was on call the night before, rolls her eyes, but before she can make a caustic remark, Myra says that would be lovely and Omar is pleading to watch too.