A Recipe for Daphne by Nektaria Anastasiadou (reading well .txt) 📕

january 8, the day Kosmas should have arrived, Daphne invited her parents to dinner at Versailles, a Cuban restaurant with chandeliers and mirrors reminiscent of those in old Istanbul pastry shops. Ilyas Badem ordered his favorite fried green plantain chips, three portions of shredded chicken and rice, a Cuban beer for his wife, and guava juice for himself and his daughter. The family spoke, as always, in a strange mix of English and Istanbul Greek with a spicy sprinkling of Turkish and Spanish.

Out of respect for her father, Daphne waited until the waiter had left their table to say: “No soup, Baba? What kind of Turk are you?”

“The soup!” said Ilyas, slapping his cheek. “How could I have forgotten?” He called the waiter back and ordered three bowls of cream of malanga. Then he looked into the wall mirror. His sweep hairstyle had been upset by the strong winds. He rearranged his strands so that they properly covered his bald spot and then, pointing at the parking lot palms whipping about in a sudden gust, said, “This hurricane’s going to be a bad one.”

“This storm,” said Sultana, rolling her eyes. “Hurricane season is over, for God’s sake.”

“In January of 1952,” said Ilyas while the waiter served the beer and guava juices “A tropical storm passed over southern Florida quite near Miami. And in late December of 1984, Hurricane Lili hit Hispaniola. So you never know.”

“You’re obsessed,” said Sultana. “Why don’t you learn to play golf?”

Ilyas shook his head at his wife and leaned toward Daphne. “So why didn’t he come? Out with it.”

“His mother’s ill,” said Daphne. She hadn’t allowed herself to complain to anyone, but she couldn’t keep from wondering whether Rea had faked the fainting episode to prevent Kosmas from traveling. “She might have to get a pacemaker.”

“What else?” said Ilyas.

“Nothing,” said Daphne, twisting her napkin beneath the table.

Sultana adjusted her rhinestone barrette. Although she hadn’t been to Istanbul in thirty-four years, her excessive jewelry, bright nail polish, and girlish hair accessories made her look as if she had been beamed into Miami from 1960s Turkey. “I hope you’ve given up that silly idea of moving there,” she said.

The waiter served the steaming malanga soup, Daphne’s favorite. She took in the nutty, garlicky vapors that reminded her of their neighbor Josefina’s kitchen, but she still had no desire to eat. Her appetite had vanished the day of Rea’s accident.

As soon as the waiter had gone, Daphne asked, “Why did you two really leave?”

Over the years, she had heard various answers to that question, the most common being that her father had received an excellent job offer that he couldn’t pass up. But she knew this wasn’t the truth: after all, Ilyas Badem had been assistant manager of the Istanbul Hilton, and he had started at the newly built Hilton Miami Downtown as a night manager.

“I don’t want to dig up the past,” said Ilyas. He pushed back his chair.

“Baba,” said Daphne. “I need to know. Will you sit down and talk to me for once?”

“Buen provecho,” said Sultana. She puckered her lips and drank a steaming spoonful of malanga soup. “Daphne, why aren’t you eating? You’ve lost weight, you know.”

“Baba?”

Ilyas took a sip of sweet guava juice. “I don’t see why we have to discuss this.”

“Baba, I’m thinking about moving there. I want to know why you left.”

“Talk to her, my love,” said Sultana. “Maybe she’ll get some sense in her.”

Ilyas looked out the window at the overcast sky. “We shouldn’t even be here. The hurricane could hit anytime.”

“Are you going to tell her?”

Ilyas remained silent.

“Fine,” said Sultana. “I will. My people—not my family, but my friends and the community—rejected me. They said I’d gone over to the other side. First I lost my job in a hat maker’s shop. Then one of my best girlfriends didn’t invite me to her wedding. Of course she said it was an oversight and apologized, but I knew the truth.”

For emphasis, Sultana gave her spoon a single shake in the air as if it were a maraca. “The other side didn’t want me either. Once I went to a mevlit prayer service with your father’s relatives. I told his cousin Ayşe how beautiful I thought the reading was. She fawned over me and said, ‘We love you so much that you should become Muslim.’ I said, ‘Let Muslims remain Muslims and Christians Christians.’ Ayşe and the other women didn’t speak to me for the rest of the evening. So you see why we came to America. It’s a place that was—and is—full of people like us. People who are neither here nor there.”

“And you were unhappy here,” said Daphne.

“Of course we were at first. Still, I don’t regret coming. We got used to it and had a life here that we couldn’t have had there. Here nobody cares that my husband is Turkish. But America doesn’t have that . . . that . . . Byzantine salt.”

Daphne turned to her father. “Baba, why didn’t Grandma Zeynep ever come to visit us? And why didn’t we go to visit her?”

Ilyas flipped his spoon from one side to the other, looking around the restaurant. Then, addressing the palms swaying in the parking lot instead of Daphne, he said in English, “We had issues.”

Sultana took her husband’s hand, held it to her lips, and kissed it. “Jealousy issues.”

“Now you know,” said Ilyas, standing. “With your permission, ladies.” He made for the men’s room before Daphne could object.

As soon as the door had closed behind him, Daphne said to her mother, “Why did you name me after Grandma Zeynep?”

“It was an attempt to appease her.”

“Did it work?”

“Are you kidding? Listen”—Sultana lowered her voice—“we’re not talking about normal jealousy. We’re talking about an illness. When we were first married, I brought Zeynep gifts, put cream on her itchy back, painted her nails . . . there wasn’t anything I didn’t do for her. But the things she said every time she got me alone! Once it