Green Shakshuka
A short but delicious story
I had the naked dream: all the professional contacts I’ve made in the past ten years were sitting together at the table. They laughed when I pushed open the door. “What are you doing here?” they said. Or maybe they weren’t laughing at me; maybe it was joie de vivre.
I spent the morning eating stale rice crackers in front of my computer, reading posts on the local parents’ Google Group, looking for ways to be helpful, hoping to be helped. With pic!: Three barely worn nursing bras for sale. Help! Lost Our Beloved Cat (near Parc Lafontaine). Seeking YOGA/PAINTING/HEBREW or HUNGARIAN TEACHING JOB. More talkative/friendlier spaces in Montreal. How to diagnose a tongue-tie? Where to sell used cookbooks? Squirrels destroying garden!
On my way to the market to buy ingredients for a dinner I knew my kids wouldn’t eat, I craved a coconut-peanut mochi ball and stopped in at the dépanneur that sells them. Three young black men were ahead of me and a tired-looking blonde white woman pushing a stroller, holding up the line; I couldn’t see what was happening — I heard the sound of a bank card being rejected repeatedly by the card reader. When they got through at last, and it was my turn, the Chinese woman behind the register told me those men weren’t normal. “Oh, je ne sais pas,” I said. “Je ne sais pas.”
The leaves were out on the lilacs, and there were acid-green pompom clusters of blossom on the maple trees, but the lilacs hadn’t yet flowered. At the market, most of the stalls were still empty. The stallholders were scrubbing and refurbishing their furniture. I bought Swiss chard from Chile, serrano peppers from Georgia, USA, and dill and cilantro from a greenhouse somewhere. I annoyed the Québécoise woman at the caisse when I had to ask her to hold my things while I went to the ATM to get money; she tightened her lips and lowered her eyes as she reached wearily across the counter for my produce bags. “Désolée!” I said, “Désolée!”
A skinny, white-haired man with a withered neck and large, pale eyes behind glasses stopped me on my block. The ribs of my umbrella streamed raindrops onto the edge of his umbrella. “A Jewish boy,” he said, “a nice young boy!” He continued with an incomprehensible anecdote.
“Ha ha!” I said, hoping it would suffice.
“Exusez-moi,” my neighbor said, “Peux-tu me rendre un service?”
He was walking with his young son beside him and his baby on his chest in a carrier he was struggling to fasten. I happen to know he is the Anglophone author of several books.
“Sure,” I said.
“Could you just do this buckle for me?” he said, “The Hasidic women, of course, won’t touch me.”
“No problem,” I said, and did it.
I like this village we live in. It’s a real Jane Jacobs situation. My friend Melissa once told me that if she ever saw my kids smoking pot — not now, not any time soon, we hope, but in a few years, maybe; if then — she would tell me. “Thanks,” I said, “I would tell you, too.”
The kids who smoke cigarettes behind the high school watched me skate around the moat at the park last winter. I scratched away on a sunny day, swinging my arms with my jacket open, my pockets, heavy and fat with my mittens, wallet, keys, coin purse, old shopping lists, store receipts, and a packet of tissues hitting my thighs, front and back. Maybe they were laughing at me; maybe it was joie de vivre. I kept passing my boots, empty and alone under the bench in the snow in front of the chalet. A pod of preschoolers in snowsuits leaned against the fence of the playground above me. “Allô!” they said. “Allô!” I said back; I would have waved, if I had not been afraid of falling. A four-year-old of my acquaintance once said of my skating, “You’re not very good at this, are you?”
Years ago, I told my husband I wanted to send our son and daughter to a school where the kids are enthusiastic about, but bad at, sports. Yesterday, the fifth and sixth graders lined up in the schoolyard by the gate on their way to play soccer in the park. Most of them wore white shirts, most of them wore black shorts, but none of them matched. The second and third graders, meanwhile, were holding a funeral for a bee. She must have flown down from the hive on the roof of the school too soon and been killed by the cold. My daughter brought me to see her, laid out in state on a patchwork coverlet of new-leaf fragments within a ring of pebbles and twigs under a bush on the hill. “Isn’t he cute?” one girl said, gently touching the soft, tawny abdomen. The kids all crouched around. My daughter dug a grave. The bee was interred, and a community of small fingers smoothed the dirt over her. It had been raining for days. When the rain stopped, we watched two live bees suck moisture from a seam in the rock.
I stripped the leaves from the stalks of one bunch of chard, as the recipe said. I blanched them and chilled them in ice water. I squeezed them and chopped them, and put them in the blender with toasted caraway seeds that my daughter had ground for me with the mortar and pestle, and olive oil, cilantro, salt, seeded serrano peppers, and a cupful of ice, and blended it smooth. I separated the leaves from the stems of the remaining bunches of chard, chopped the stems and tore up the leaves. I sliced an onion and sautéed it in olive oil. I added the stems to the pan. I put the torn leaves in and let them wilt. I mixed the blended sauce in, added salt and pepper, and cracked six eggs onto the surface, and put the pan in the oven. My husband made quesadillas for our son, and gave our daughter a soft, thick pita sprinkled with za’atar. I gave them cucumber spears and slices of red bell pepper. After 25 minutes, when the eggs were cooked, my husband and I sprinkled them with salt, Aleppo pepper, and snipped dill fronds, and we ate the dish with warmed pita bread.
