Big Summer(25)
One Saturday night she surprised me. “Hey, can I do one of these eating adventure things with you and your dad?”
I squirmed. I’d felt silly, telling Drue about our adventures: how my father and I would read the papers and the food blogs and the magazines, looking for something we’d never tried. Our roamings had taken us to all five boroughs, where we had sampled tamales, sticky rice in lotus leaves, Burmese tofu, Filipino fried chicken, Russian draniki, Polish pierogis, Georgian khinkali, and tonton dumplings filled with chopped and seasoned pigs’ feet. I’d eaten roast goat, chicken feet, suckling pig, soup dumplings and dan dan noodles, fermented duck eggs, alligator and grilled kangaroo, durian, purple yams and jackfruit.
The rule was, we’d try a new place every Sunday. My father would choose the restaurant. It was my job to plan our transportation, to read up on the country or region we’d be sampling, and to locate a bookstore or library or coffee shop near the restaurant, where we could sit and read after our meal, and maybe have dessert.
Darshi had joined us a few times, and had even steered us toward her family’s favorite spots in Jackson Heights, but I’d felt silly telling Drue about our Sundays, knowing how childish it probably sounded—an afternoon with Daddy!—to a girl who’d smoked pot in eighth grade and lost her virginity in ninth. But Drue had listened, her expression thoughtful and sincere. She’d asked me questions—What’s the weirdest thing you’ve ever eaten? What did you like the best? And it’s just you and your father, all day long?
I’d told her that she was welcome to join us, with no hope that she ever would. But that chilly, sunny October morning, she buzzed our door bright and early. Her face was shining between her pink cashmere scarf and her pink pom-pom hat. “So what’s the plan?”
Instead of trying a new place, my dad and I had agreed to break our own rules and take Drue to an old favorite, a place with an exotic cuisine that wasn’t so challenging or unfamiliar that she’d leave hungry. We took the E train out to Jackson Heights and walked along streets filled with signs in Spanish and Punjabi, advertising DVDs and phone cards, eyebrow threading and spirit baths, until we reached the Himalayan Yak on Roosevelt Avenue. The walls were draped with prayer flags and carved wooden panels, and every table was full. I knew that Drue wasn’t used to waiting, or to restaurants that didn’t take reservations, but she was patient and quiet, standing beside me until we were seated, and a waitress with a glossy dark ponytail came to fill our water glasses. My dad gave her a brief bow and a murmured “Namaste.”
“He does that everywhere,” I whispered to Drue, feeling a combination of embarrassment and pride. I thought that she would think it was corny, how my father tried to learn how to give a polite greeting in the language of whatever nation or region had supplied the day’s cuisine. “It’s respectful,” he’d told me.
“My father says everyone in America should speak English,” Drue said, a little sheepishly. Of all the many times I’d heard Drue invoke her father, this was the first where she’d ever sounded anything but proud.
“He’s certainly not the only one who feels that way,” my father said mildly. “Personally, I think it’s respectful.” I saw Drue’s eyes get wide as she noticed the entry for goat bhutan, which was a dish of stir-fried goat intestines, liver, heart, and kidneys, served with green chilies, onions, tomatoes, and herbs.
My dad ordered pork dumplings called momo, deep-fried red snapper, sautéed bok choy, yak sausage, goat thali, garlic naan, and for dessert, a kind of thick rice pudding called kheer. Drue looked around, wide-eyed, first at the diners, then at the food. I was worried she wouldn’t eat anything—by then, I’d heard her and Ainsley and Avery whispering and giggling about the lentils Darshi sometimes brought for lunch, saying that Indian food all looked like baby poop, but Drue surprised me, gamely tasting everything, even the yak, while my father regaled us with stories of students from years gone by—the girl who’d printed a final paper right from the web and hadn’t even bothered to erase the Internet Professor logo, the boy who believed that one should dress in inverse proportion to how much one had studied, and arrived for his final in a rented tuxedo and tails.
After we’d stuffed ourselves, we packed up the leftovers and took the G train to Brooklyn. I knew, but maybe Drue didn’t, that the G was the only train that didn’t go to Manhattan. That afternoon, it was filled with mostly nonwhite passengers, with a smattering of hipsters and the occasional elderly Polish woman. I noticed her staring, but if she had thoughts, she didn’t share them with me.
We went to Sahadi’s, my father’s favorite Middle Eastern shop on Atlantic Avenue. Drue and I wandered along the rows of knee-high glass jars containing every variety of nuts—pistachios and peanuts and almonds and cashews, roasted and salted or unsalted, shelled or unshelled. At the counter, the customers took numbers, and a preternaturally calm Middle Eastern man with a neat mustache took their orders, while a pair of women scooped hummus and baba ghanoush and kibbe balls into plastic containers. Drue even ordered a half pound of pumpkin seeds and murmured her thanks when my father said, “My treat.” After we’d paid, we carried out bags to a restaurant called Tripoli, where we sat, drinking tea and eating slices of sticky, honey-drenched baklava. My father did the Sunday crossword puzzle, I read an Agatha Christie mystery, and Drue, who’d come prepared, paged through the current issue of Vogue. When it was time to go, Drue politely declined another subway trip, using her cell phone to call her father’s car service instead.