Simple Recipes (19 page)

When my parents left Indonesia, they walked away from a familiar life, but one foreign to all I know. Some years ago, the
students in Jakarta took to the streets, protesting the government. Had my family remained there, would I have been among
those students, one more in that sea of faces? Or those nights when rioters set the Chinese shophouses on fire, that bitter
violence, what might have become of us then? I did not know where we fit in, or on which side of the line we might have lived.

That country lay like a stone between my parents. Once here, my mother did not look back. She worked herself to the bone but
set her sights on the future. But my father could not see so far ahead. He held on to those old photographs of Indonesia,
and when he pulled them out, he examined them with an appraising eye. As if to see whether the photographs were true to the
memory he carried, if a picture could ever do his country justice.

The bad luck of his life was not, as he thought, a lack of opportunity or ingenuity. It was the tragedy of place. To always
be in the wrong country at the
wrong time, the home that needs you less than you need it.

After my father left, my mother and I moved out of the apartment in East Vancouver. We spent a month packing, emptying closets
and drawers, sorting through forgotten belongings. One night, she showed me the photographs she had found in my father’s desk
— my parents, young and serious, in a formal portrait; their old house, lifted up on stilts. My father no longer needed to
carry these, I thought. I looked at the plantations and wide skies, their unfamiliar beauty.

I set the photographs down. “Do you miss him?”

My mother touched her face, as
if
feeling for some emotion. “I suppose so. But what good is it? That won’t change anything.”

That year, there was unrest in Indonesia. Small pockets of violence erupting, then brutally dealt with by the military. I
saw clips of it on the news, a few seconds, a tiny window. The Irianese were still organized, still fighting Indonesian occupation
though it seemed like no one noticed. I thought of Indonesia as the place of tumult, of unrest, where a military dictatorship
muscled these disparate islands together, no matter the cost. For my parents, though, no other
country will ever do. Even my mother, so at home here, thinks back to those humid nights, that once-spoken language.

After we finished packing that evening, my mother fell asleep on the couch. I haunted the bedrooms, the stacks of half-full
boxes, stopping for a moment to watch my mother, her chest lifting up and down, her graying hair spread out against the cushions.
For the first time I pitied my father. He had gone away from us and perhaps we would not let him come back again.

From Java, Irian Jaya, then back through Sumatra, my father sent me postcards. I marked his progress through those vivid pictures,
the water buffalo and
padi
fields. Once, he asked my mother to wire money to him, and she obliged. We could not guess his circumstances in those years
and he did not confide in us.

One Sunday morning, four years after he had gone, my father called and said, “I’m home.”

“In Jayapura?” I asked.

He paused for a moment. “No, no. Here. Vancouver.”

“Where are you exactly?”

My father laughed, as if this was the question he’d been waiting for. “I’ve got my own bachelor suite,” he said. “I’m a new
man.”

By that time, I was living on my own. I called my mother to give her the news. “He’s back, is he?” she said. “Living in some
hotel, I suppose.”

“He has an apartment.”

“Is that right? Well. That’s a good sign.”

I went across town to see him. His apartment building, near Commercial Drive, stood out, gray and rectangular. I hesitated
outside. From the sidewalk, I thought I glimpsed him — this elderly man in jogging pants and a sweatshirt, standing at a fourth-floor
window. He was looking out to the shipyards, the tankers on the water, the rooftops muted of color.

When my father opened the door, he was wrapped in sweaters. Vancouver was taking the bloom from his tropical tan but he looked
relaxed. “You’re here,” he said, smiling broadly.

I smiled back, trying to feel at ease. “I’m here.”

We embraced very briefly, and I noticed then how thin he had become. He had aged, and his face was dark and lined. Standing
in the entrance, I could see the entire apartment. It was small, a kitchen and a living room in one. My father ushered me
inside. He gave me the tour, laughing as he did so, saying, “I’m living the bachelor life now. I don’t need much more than
this.” I glanced at his furniture — a table, a mattress, and one plastic chair.

He busied himself at the stove, disappearing behind the steam. The air in the apartment was rich
with the smell of spices, ginger, lemon grass, hot pepper.
“Chilli kepeting”
he called to me, over the sound ofthe food frying. “I remember how much you liked this.”

Up in the corners, the walls were moldy and gray and the carpets had a lingering scent, part cigarettes, part damp. He’d done
the best he could with decorations. There were Christmas cards, hung up along a line of string, and certificates from the
real estate office framed on the wall.
For Devoted Service. For Congeniality.
I walked onto his tiny balcony, looked across the road at the ramshackle apartments, the wet leaves running bright along
the gutters. Out on the harbor, two yellow sulphur hills glowed neon against the clouded sky.

“It’s ready then,” my father said, setting lunch down on the table. There was only one chair so my father sat on his mattress,
plate balanced on his lap. He looked me up and down. “Eat,” he said, smiling happily.

Through the walls, I could hear the shadow of a conversation, interrupted by the play-by-play of a ball game. At one point,
my father asked me, “How is your mother?”

“She’s fine. She’s been working hard, as usual.”

He nodded, face lifting up. “Does she want to see me at all?”

I shook my head. My mother had prepared me for this question before I came. “I don’t think so,” I told him, as gently as I
could. “Not right away.”

My father looked at me, his expression bewildered.

We ate in silence for a few moments. Then I asked him, “Will you be going back to real estate?”

He glanced at me searchingly, then dropped his gaze. “I don’t know.”

“But what will you do for money?”

My father didn’t answer. He moved on to a different topic, the cold weather, the early winter. I noticed how the cuffs of
his sweater were frayed and his hands were those of an old man, wiry and marked by liver spots. After we had finished lunch
and he was clearing the dishes, he said, “I managed to borrow money while I was away. But it ran out while I was in Indonesia.”
He turned the tap on, moving the dishes underneath. “I’m on welfare, but don’t worry about me. It’s only for the time being.”

We went outside and stood together
on
the balcony, and I told my father that I was planning to marry. He looked out at the grid of streets running down to the
docks and said, “So soon?”

It made me smile, because I knew he still thought of me as a young girl. I laughed. “Don’t worry. I’m sure you’ll like him.”

My father seemed to consider this. Then he smiled at me. “It’s good that you found someone. It isn’t necessary to be alone.”

Afterwards, when I stood up to leave, he walked me to the door. He waited there, as if he could not
step over the line that would separate him from where he now lived. One hand gripped the door frame, the knuckles white.

I leaned towards him and kissed his cheek. “I’ll call.” Then I ducked out into the hallway, down the elevator to the ground
floor. Outside, I couldn’t see straight, the rain was coming down so hard. On Commercial Drive, a man and his two Labradors
sat on the sidewalk. He held his hands out to me, asking for spare change, but I hurried by, anxious to be gone. So this was
the result, I thought, of being brave. Of dismantling your life. I walked away from my father’s apartment, under the rain
cascading off the awnings, past the barred-up storefronts. No emotion came to me, though I walked across the city that afternoon,
kept walking until my body could go no more.

Will used to say that happiness is something you just take. It’s sitting there like a package in a store and you either pick
it up or walk by. I told him nothing was that simple. Sometimes circumstances colluded against a person. It’s a nose-dive,
I told him, and you can’t pull out of it.

“Some people choose unhappiness,” Will said.

“Sometimes unhappiness chooses them.”

“Like your father.”

“Will, we’ve been through this before.”

“At some point, you’re going to have to deal with this. You can’t pretend he doesn’t exist.”

“This is not something I want to talk about with you.”

“Then what is? What do you think we should be talking about?” He put both hands to his temples and shook his head.

By that time, I had not been to see my father in almost a year. But this failing of mine was private. The grief I felt was
not open to discussion. When Will tried to talk about it, I shut down, turned and left.

Now and then, it disappeared. All that tension evaporated and we could approach each other again, though tentatively. I lay
in bed, Will’s entire body flat on top of mine like a wrestling move to pin me down. Will looked at me with an expression
I thought was long gone. Amazement, wonder. But underneath his expression there was sadness. “Don’t worry so much,” he said.
“We’ll get through this.”

He put his hand to my stomach, traced a line from left to right as if he could see that tension and he could track it down.

The night that we learned that the pregnancy was over, I finally felt released. Removed, suddenly, from the course I had set
out on. I leaned back on the motorcycle then, arms dropping, and Will put one hand to my thigh, as if that could hold me there.
He
kept going, along a curved road overlooking the cliffs. He was the kind of person who would love me despite all my failings.
But I could not continue. That image of my father remained with me, his one suitcase, his solitary self crossing the ocean
in search of things remembered. A backwards journey to remake the future.

Living alone and on social assistance, my father’s condition did not improve. During my infrequent visits, on my way to somewhere
else, I noticed that the walls were slowly emptying. The Christmas cards came down first. Then the plaques. There were pills
lined up on the kitchen counter, an arsenal against depression and loneliness. My father put on weight and lost it, put on
weight and lost it. Once or twice, late at night, he had called my mother, hoping to go back. She had let him down gently.
When he confided this to me, I could only nod, unsure what response I could give.

How could I change his circumstances? I didn’t know and so I chose to withdraw. There were emotions that he carried — disappointment,
regret — that I wanted gone from my present life, as
if
they had everything to do with him and they had no root in me. My father saw my reluctance and accepted it, as if it was
all he could rightly ask for. He did not demand more.

During our visits, he always reached for his photo album. When he bowed his head, I could see how thin his neck looked, how
precarious. That air ofresignation that he carried was still palpable, it filled the room.

We would start at the beginning. My father as a boy, standing in short pants at someone’s wedding. Then at twenty-five, my
age now, leaning against a tree, his face full of pride. He had a picture of us from years ago, blue mountains in the backdrop,
but only my father is staring straight ahead, into the camera. My mother and I are distracted, drawn to invisible points to
the left or right. When we came to a picture of my mother, alone, my father always paused to examine her. He half-covered
the photo with one hand, as if he could only manage a piece of her at a time, now her dress, now her arms, now her face.

One night in September, Will and I fell into our old habit. He brought out both the helmets and we climbed onto the motorcycle.