Correspondents, p.9
Correspondents, page 9
“You sit there,” instructed Mrs. Khoury. Honestly, thought Mary Jo. Not even a how are you? Small talk? She sat down and resigned herself to her tutorial.
But almost from the start, she could do nothing right according to Mrs. Khoury. “That’s too much filling!” she’d bark, amid aggrieved sighs. Or: “Now that’s not enough.” Or: “You didn’t snip off the stem right from the bottom.” Or: “You fold from the bottom, then the sides, not the other way.” Or: “You put the leaf in the pot with the rolled side down.” Or: “You’re not packing them tight enough in the pot! They won’t cook right.”
And then finally: “I don’t think you’re ever gonna get this. You’re not trying hard enough.”
Mary Jo finally lost it. “This is my first time,” she said forcefully, turning to the little despot in the housecoat and scuffs. “And frankly, you should be lucky I’m here because I have other things to do today, like take care of my own mother. I’m here for you. George told me he doesn’t even care if I make grape leaves because he can get them from you or his sisters. Or from Salaam’s.”
Mrs. Khoury looked horrified. “You’re going to make your own husband buy grape leaves from a restaurant?”
“He doesn’t care,” Mary Jo insisted. (Did he care, perhaps? she asked herself. Just a little?) “I’m here today to make you happy. So we can get to know each other.”
But Mrs. Khoury seemed impervious to this sentimentalism. “These are things you have to know,” she insisted.
“No,” Mary Jo said firmly. “Maybe these were things that you had to know. But George loves me for me. Not because I’m his cook. If I make grape leaves or anything else for him, it’ll be because I want to. Not because I have to.”
Mrs. Khoury now looked truly unraveled. “You won’t hold on to him that way.”
Mary Jo laughed. “Oh yes I will. And you,” she added, toggling her index finger between herself and Mrs. Khoury, “won’t win this fight. George told me so.” Jesus, she thought, I’m really bluffing now. “So you’d better back down if we’re gonna get along. I’m happy to learn recipes from you, but you’d better stop the bullying. Right now.”
Mrs. Khoury stared her down, stunned, for several seconds. Then she rearranged her face into a hurt look. “I was just trying to show you something nice,” she said.
Mary Jo managed to put a hand on the woman’s chubby upper arm. “Then let’s keep going.”
She turned studiously back to her grape leaf, rolled it, then placed it, fold down, in the pot, nestled snugly between two others.
“That was very good,” Mrs. Khoury said. “Like a Lebanese would do it.”
Inwardly, Mary Jo smiled. She’d won the day’s battle. “Thank you,” she said.
Mary Jo agreed to be married in their Maronite church, which Mrs. Khoury had insisted upon. Her own mother had balked about that slightly but ultimately relented, since Maronites were Catholic, at least, even if in the Mass they spoke a strange language that they claimed Christ had spoken, and burned an incense with a suspicious scent that hinted at rituals from faraway lands. During the wedding ceremony, Mary Jo and George had to wear golden crowns which made Mary Jo feel positively ridiculous.
George’s family outnumbered her own by about three to one at the wedding and the large, lavish reception afterward in the ornate banquet room at Salaam’s, which Mrs. Khoury had insisted on and paid for herself. Mrs. Khoury wore her own mink stole, and Mary Jo’s mother wore one borrowed from a rich old aunt. The reception was the first time, but not the last, when her own family would be pulled to the center of the room for the line dances that wound their way around tables and chairs, set to what her brother Terry called “snake-charmer music.”With the exception of her mother, though, who sat out the dance sourly, the Coughlins actually enjoyed themselves—found the whole thing a bit wild, perhaps partly because they all got very drunk.
She gave birth in a year, to a girl, Allison, and three years later to another girl, Rita. Despite protestations from Mrs. Khoury and other family elders that they had to keep pushing on until they had a boy, Mary Jo and George determined that they were a modern family who could stop at two kids rather than the three, four, or more that had been common in their parents’ generation. Mary Jo went on the pill to ensure as much; she was a medical professional, after all, not some antiquated Catholic who believed the church’s edict that birth control was evil.
Over the years, Mary Jo would note to herself with relief that, overall, she loved being a mother. George was a more affectionate parent to their daughters than her own parents had ever been to her, which liberated her to be more affectionate than she might otherwise have felt was seemly. George smothered his daughters with hugs and kisses when he got home, calling them habibti and hayati, which he told her meant “my life” in Arabic. Both Mrs. Khoury and her own mother had suggested Mary Jo take time off from work, at least until both her girls were about ten, but she had said firmly, “No, George needs me at the office,” and conscripted both grandmothers into daytime babysitting. Privately, she feared she would unravel if she were home alone all day with toddlers, cut off from the medical profession and the outside world. Thankfully, George backed her up.
They bought a large, new split-level with three bedrooms and a giant backyard in Mendhem, on the rural, affluent border with Boxford, just down the road from a horse farm. The 1970s commenced; it seemed Nixon and scandal were on the TV constantly. George advanced in his career, prospering, mastering ever more complex and specific surgeries. He had incredibly high expectations for his daughters, which came as a slight shock to Mary Jo; she’d been raised to think of children as people you fed, clothed, housed, took to church, and generally raised to be literate, industrious, moral, and polite—not necessarily as investments that you bred for success and achievement. But that’s what George wanted for his girls, which meant a great deal of planning, putting them into all sorts of lessons and extracurriculars, buying them stacks of books in the summer, getting them into the area’s best private schools.
When a high school friend informed her that Christina Kattar, after Tufts Medical School, had moved to the New York area and become a gynecological oncologist but also reportedly remained single and childless, Mary Jo had merely pursed her lips slightly and said, “Hmm. Well, that’s not a surprise. She always was very ambitious and intelligent.”
Some women might want that instead of what she had, she told herself after several days of thinking about Christina. And that was fine. But thankfully she was not one of those women, she assured herself, and she was very, very satisfied with how her life had panned out.
CHAPTER THREE
RITA AND BOBBY
(1980s)
By the time Ronald Reagan was elected president, the ebony-haired and inseparable Khoury sisters, Allison and Rita, had a total of eighteen cousins on both sides of their family, ranging from William and Caroline, who were in college and struck them as impossibly grown-up and sophisticated, to four-year-old Jimmy, their Auntie Annie’s youngest child.
Of all the families on either side, the Khourys themselves were the richest. This marker, in the Merrimack Valley generally, was measured by whose father was a doctor, lawyer, or business owner; who had the biggest house in the richest town (that being Mendhem, with West Mendhem a feeble second); who had a beach house; who drove European cars; who went to private (or perhaps the better Catholic) schools rather than public ones; and who dressed most like the Kennedys, with popped collars and shoes without socks. The Khourys met all these criteria, living well above the status anxiety that bedeviled the households of George’s sisters. Nancy and Irene were a bit too prone to bragging about their new cars, home additions, or vacations; they were extremely invested in their husbands’ success, each fearing that hers might fall short in comparison with the other’s.
This was not a worry among the Khourys. On an upward trajectory since youth, his career based on medical expertise rather than the vagaries of entrepreneurialism, George worked hard and took his success for granted, while Mary Jo chafed at it somewhat. She knew she’d married well, that her own kids enjoyed advantages she couldn’t have imagined for herself, but something stoic and suspicious in her kept her from surrendering to new comforts. She was frugal with family finances, until George could finally urge her to relax, and when her girls were as young as fourteen, she insisted they have after-school or summer jobs, delivering papers or scooping ice cream, just as any other kids would have. She would not give them handouts just because she could. And she was proud that her daughters had character, that they went to their minimum-wage jobs uncomplainingly, that they balanced school and work capably, as she had in her less cosseted youth, when she hadn’t had a choice.
The Khoury sisters were close to their cousins on both sides, partly because everyone spent large swaths of the summer at their beach house, a Dutch Colonial a block from the water in Rye, New Hampshire, a town filled with former robber barons’ mansions sitting high on manicured hills overlooking the surf. The Khourys’ house, which they’d bought in the late 1970s for less than one hundred thousand dollars, was not especially handsome, but it was large, with a finished basement where, some nights, half a dozen cousins would sleep on couches or in sleeping bags, everyone waking up in the morning to the smell of not only salt air but bacon and pancakes, which Dr. Khoury—who’d arrived late the night before after performing two back-to-back surgeries—whipped up while torturing his nephews and nieces with off-key renditions of Neil Diamond songs.
“Uncle George, stop!” they would plead. “You can’t sing!”
Rita would roll her eyes. “That never stops him,” she would say. Much as her own mother, Mary Jo, had been as a child, Rita was a serious, highly studious, and skeptical little girl with a head of dark, tight curls, never without a book. As early as age seven or eight, she had displayed curiosity about the president (Carter) and about current affairs (inflation, pollution, the Iran hostage crisis). This marked her as very odd for a child, especially a girl, but she was the undisputed pride of her father, Dr. Khoury, who would often say to her, “I expect excellence from you. Great things.”
“Yes, Daddy,” she would say, dutifully. Rita had one overarching goal in life, which was to make her father proud. This motivated her every single second of every day. When she was taking a test in school, she visualized the A-plus or the 100 percent that she would present to her father when he arrived home from surgery late in the evening. With every essay she wrote, every book she read and later discussed, she was performing mental cartwheels and backflips for her father.
“Every generation only wants to see their children do better than they did,” he would tell her. “That is the point of families, what keeps them evolving.”
“I know, Daddy,” she would say.
On the beach, the cousins of the Khourys—loudly roughhousing while Michael Jackson or the Grease soundtrack came out of the transistor radio or the boom box, disco rhythms mixing stickily in the sun with the crash of waves just yards away—looked as though they came from two tribes. The grandchildren of Marguerite Khoury, who spent her days and nights up at the house cooking in her housecoat and scuffs and waiting for everyone to come in off the beach, were dark-haired, olive-skinned creatures, the progeny of Lebanese mothers and Greek or Sicilian fathers, while the grandchildren of Meg Coughlin—who often sat up in the kitchen with Marguerite, knitting and watching suspiciously while Marguerite concocted her strange Arabian dishes—were towheaded, pug-nosed, white-skinned, and freckled.
Of all her cousins, Rita was closest to Bobby, one of the sons of her dour uncle Terry. At eight years old, Bobby had a honey-colored bowl cut and a chipped front tooth from a bike accident. There were several dyads and even one or two triads among the cousins, but Rita and Bobby were the famous pair in the family, always having their own conversations—which, heard from a few paces away, seemed to consist mostly of Rita lecturing Bobby in a schoolmarm tone.
Someone might hear Rita tell him: “I read one or two books a week in the summer, and I think you should try to read at least one a month. And then give a report on it back to me.” Or: “If they only have French or Spanish in your school, you should take Spanish because it’s more practical.”
Bobby submitted mutely to his older cousin’s edicts. There was a driven-home consensus in the broad family that the Khourys were smarter than the Coughlins, and that Rita was the smartest Khoury of all, so Bobby felt grateful Rita had taken him under her tutelage. He worshipped her, and in turn she mothered him, and everyone in the family knew that Bobby was Rita’s favorite, almost like a godchild. The first summer when she had money from a job, she took him to movies and to the amusement park and derived a tremendous feeling of maturity by paying for Bobby to go on the Himalaya, a ride that whipped around and around while a DJ played hits like “Heart of Glass” or “Centerfold,” and Rita, abstaining from the ride, waved back at him from the pavement, occasionally reading the book she had brought with her.
When Rita was fifteen and Bobby was twelve, she started having strange pangs of affection and tenderness toward him that were different from what she’d felt before. As had all the cousins, they’d tickled and horseplayed, especially in the ocean, their entire lives, but Rita suddenly stopped liking what she felt when they did this, and she started making a point of keeping a physical distance from him and often averting her eyes from him in conversation.
“Are you mad at me?” Bobby asked her once. He wasn’t feeling what she was feeling, and he didn’t know where her abrupt chilliness was coming from.
“Why do you ask me that?” she said, her arms crossed.
“You’re kind of ignoring me. Are you too cool for me now that you go to Banner?” That was the private school in West Mendhem she went to, as a day student, where Ally was a senior.
“Don’t be stupid,” she snapped. “I’m just cold.”
“Let’s go under the outside shower together!”
“No!” she snapped, horrified. “I need a real shower.”
Bobby merely shrugged and said no more.
But it wasn’t just these unsolicited rogue feelings that were putting distance between her and Bobby. She’d just finished her first year at Banner, where several presidents and vice presidents had gone, and she’d met kids from all over the country and the world. Many of them were from New York City, Chicago, or Los Angeles, and some were from as far away as London, Monte Carlo, Lagos, or Bombay, where their fathers were diplomats or owned companies.
A few such girls, extremely beautiful blond girls who’d grown up on Park Avenue, plus a Jordanian British girl named Yasmin, who was the most stunning and sophisticated person Rita had ever met, found Rita a charming local curiosity and took her under their wing, allowing her to accompany them on the bus for shopping trips to Boston, where she learned to prowl thrift stores and cultivate a look of mussed hair, minimal makeup, a single dangly earring, an oversize untucked shirt buttoned to the neck, and ripped-knee jeans, all underneath a vintage trench and pointy-toed black boots.
“You look like a witch!” Bobby said to her the first time he saw her in such a getup, which was Easter Sunday after Mass at Uncle Terry and Auntie Carol’s house, a very modest Cape Cod in the suburban-feeling southwestern corner of Lawton, the one part of the old city that remained completely white and Irish and hence was deemed the last acceptable part for such folks to live in.
“This is vintage,” Rita explained patiently. “It’s from Cambridge.”
“You’re different now that you go to Banner,” Bobby said. He never shied away from flatly assessing her to her face. This assessment would take on a smirkier, more joshing tone as they aged, but Rita still detected in it the blunt, matter-of-fact colors of their childhood, when she felt that Bobby, who loved her most, was also the person who could see right through her.
“You think you’re better than us now, don’cha? With all those Banner snobs.”
“No, I don’t!” she protested. But the accusation bothered her precisely because she had been feeling she was drawing away from her family, which had been the center of her universe for her entire life up to that point. She’d slowly been realizing there was no future for her in the Merrimack Valley and that she likely would be fleeing as soon as she could.
“You’re going to go to Harvard,” her father had said to her, with quiet certainty, at the start of her freshman year, and thereafter everything she did for the next four years at Banner was in the service of that edict. She could not let her father down. Ally had gone to Georgetown, which had made her father very proud, but he’d often said when they were young that he wanted at least one of his daughters to get into to Harvard, which was the end point, the nirvana, of the Boston-area immigrant family’s dream, and now it had come down to Rita.
She needed an area of focus, something to specialize and excel in, to distinguish her. As early as her sophomore year in high school, she started homing in on the Middle East. This was a great land, her father had told the family since they were children, a cradle of civilization, of language, science, poetry. Look at the Sumerians, the Babylonians, the Assyrians, the Persians! And of course the Phoenicians, the ancient, great seafaring people of early Lebanon, from whom the Khourys descended. There was a saying, her father told them: “Egypt writes, Lebanon publishes, and Iraq reads.”This showed just how cultivated, how literate the region had been, earlier in the twentieth century, when its people modeled themselves and their behavior after their colonizers, England and France, when anyone who possibly could left the region for a time to study in those countries. And look at Lebanon now! Her father would nearly weep, looking up from the TV news or the newspaper. Chaos, war, destruction, fighting . . . and all for what? It was barbarism. And it was their fault.
