Diana Abu-Jaber: Birds of Paradise

ACOOKIE, AVIS TOLD HER CHILDREN, is a soul. She held up the wafer, its edges shimmering with ruby-dark sugar. “You think it looks like a tiny thing, right? Just a little nothing. But then you take a bite.”

Four-year-old Felice lifted her face. Avis fanned her daughter’s eyes closed with her fingertips and placed it in Felice’s mouth. Felice opened her sheer eyes. Lamb slid his orange length against her ankles. Avis handed a cookie to eight-year-old Stanley, who held it up to his nose. “Does that taste good?” she asked. Felice nodded and opened her mouth again.

“It smells like flowers,” Stanley said.

“Yes.” Avis paused, a cookie balanced on her spatula. “That’s the rosewater. Good palate, darling.”

“Mermaids eat roses,” Felice said. “Then they melt.”

THIS MORNING’S PASTRY poses challenges. To assemble the tiny mosaic disks of chocolate flake and candied ginger, Avis must execute a number of discrete, ritualistic steps: scraping the chocolate with a fine grater, rolling the dough cylinder in large-grain sanding sugar, and assembling the ingredients atop each hand-cut disk of dough in a pointillist collage. Her husband wavers near the counter, watching. “They’re like something Marie Antoinette would wear around her neck. When she still had one.”

“I thought she was more interested in cake,” Avis says, she tilts her narrow shoulders, veers around him to stack dishes in the sink.

“But really — look at this.” Brian holds one on the palm of his hand; it twinkles with the kitchen light. “Shame to eat them.”

Avis had shopped for the ingredients two days earlier, driving to Fort Lauderdale, to an Italian import store, to buy the rock sugar and flour. The outlying regions of downtown Miami, Hallandale, Hollywood, seemed esoteric, scribbled over — inscrutable as an ancient desert. She was offended by the ads painted on the sides of warehouses, hawking lamps and furniture, medical treatments and ice cream, a thirty-foot naked man reclining, selling God-knows-what.

Yesterday she crystallized the ginger, then mixed the ingredients slowly, not to disturb the dough. But even after one full day’s work, there were still more steps to complete this morning, including baking and cooling. Avis had hurried, not wanting Brian to notice how much labor has gone into this. Her assistant won’t be in for another hour and there’s a tower in the sink, open bins of pastry flour, the hair dryer on the counter (just a blast of cool air, to ward off the humidity, before slipping the cookies into tins). Brian slips one of the half-dollar-sized pastries into his mouth. Avis knows it will dissolve mid-chew, fleeting as a wink. “Have I had these before? Do you sell them?”

“Not for years.” Avis can’t help boasting a little, “Last time I made these, Neiman’s sold them for $4.95 apiece in their case.”

Brian eyes the three remaining on his plate. “We should stick them in a safe.”

Avis admits, “A little labor-intensive.” Gingembre en cristal was Felice’s favorite cookie; Stanley’s were homely, proletarian Toll Houses. Avis remembers toiling over the delicate ginger coins for Felice’s tenth birthday, only for her daughter to thank her politely and then refuse to eat them. She’d said, “I just like the way they look.”

Avis had felt singed by the rejection. Yet there was also a pang of admiration: the purity of Felice’s desires — preferring beauty to sugar!

Avis had started baking because there was never anything to eat when she was a child. Her mother — head lowered over Dante, Hegel, C. S. Lewis, reading Voltaire, Bakhtin, Avicenna, in French, Russian, Arabic — would murmur, “Go get yourself something.” Avis would hang on the refrigerator door, staring at cans of tomato juice, sticks of butter, bags of coffee. She went for days at a time eating only jam and slices of bread. The women at the Redbird Bakery on the next block gave her free muffins and scones whenever she came in. Her mother was busy: she taught and wrote about private and cultural representations of Heaven, the phoenix, the transformation of base materials into gold. Instead of reading storybooks, Avis stood in the kitchen studying the pictures in cookbooks, a more immediate form of alchemy.

Avis asked about the identity of her father when she was ten: Geraldine waved her off, saying, “Oh, who keeps track?” When Avis persisted, she shook her head: “No, no — don’t be tedious, dear.”

The first time Avis knelt on a chair and stirred eggs into flour to make a vanilla cake, she had an inkling of how higher orders of meaning encircle the chaos of life. Where philosophy, she already intuited, created only thought — no beds made, no children fed — in other rooms there were good things like measuring spoons, thermometers, and recipes, with their lovely, interwoven systems and codes. Avis labored over her pastries: her ingredient base grew, combining worlds: preserved lemons from Morocco in a Provençal tart; Syrian olive oil in Neapolitan cantuccini; salt combed from English marshes and filaments of Kashmiri saffron secreted within a Swedish cream. By the time Avis was in college, her baking had evolved to a level of exquisite accomplishment: each pastry as unique as a snowflake, just as fleeting on the tongue: pellucid jams colored cobalt and lavender, biscuits light as eiderdown.

Brian edges in front of the sink, trying to stay out of her way. “Like you don’t have enough to worry about today.”

“Yes, yes.” She glances at him: he’s holding the counter as if it were keeping him steady. He’s in the kitchen, she knows, because they’d fought earlier — or had what passes for a fight between them — the dart of words: Why are you still doing this? I just don’t think…

I’m aware of what you think.

Now he looms, big as an obstacle. Not sure where to put himself. She doesn’t like having people in her kitchen, but she does feel a lilt toward him, grateful that he hasn’t run out yet. They’re trying to stop fighting, but can’t quite leave each other alone.

“That kid never ate anything anyway,” he says darkly.

Avis begins the cautious and deliberate transfer of cookies to tin, using just the tips of her fingers. “Yes, and I’m crazy to go meet her.”

“Now you’re angry again.”

“No I’m not.” Avis places the cookies in concentric rings on parchment layers inside the tin. “I know just what my husband thinks, thank you very much, and I’m not angry. I’m fine.”

Brian crosses his arms, the suit fabric bunching in fine soft ripples. She knows he can’t stop himself. “But, please, admit it . It’s what? The first time all year we hear from that girl? Light of our lives. You’re already exhausted, at your wits’ end. Finally you’ll see her— if she comes. I don’t get why you knock yourself out even more —making some impossible dessert that — I’m sorry, but she probably won’t even eat. Am I wrong?”

Avis touches the sides of the tin. Her ribs feel compressed, like a whalebone corset. “No. No. You’re right.”

He stares at her, a weight in his gaze. He turns and his eyes fall on the Audubon calendar hanging near the door — the only ornamentation in Avis’s kitchen. The month of August, Snowy Egret. He looks away.

Avis sees this and smiles. Her hands are steady and cool as she lays down another round of parchment. “Felice never liked cakes,” she says. “Even for birthdays.”

He tucks in his chin, silent.

Avis finishes the layer and fits the lid on the tin, inhales the kitchen’s gingered air. Flour and yolk and cream are all coarse — of the earth. But sugar and air and vanilla are elements of the firmament. Avis used to tell her kids: Sweets should be an evanescence: cakes and pies represent minutes, cookies and mille-feuilles are seconds, meringues are moments. “I actually haven’t made these since she left,” Avis says. If a voice could be inspected under a lens, the first tiny crack of the day would be detectable. “I thought these might be—” She’s gone too far — pretending to be braver than she can manage right now — and there’s no good way to complete the sentence.