Simple Recipes Read Free

against
     the backs of his legs. Sitting down, he makes an angry face. My father ignores him.
    Inside the cooker, the rice is flat like a pie. I push the spoon in, turning the rice over, and the steam shoots up in a hot
     mist and condenses on my skin. While my father moves his arms delicately over the stove, I begin dishing the rice out: first
     for my father, then my mother, then my brother, then myself. Behind me the fish is cooking quickly. In a crockery pot, my
     father steams cauliflower, stirring it round and round.
    My brother kicks at a table leg.
    “What’s the matter?” my father asks.
    He is quiet for a moment, then he says, “Why do we have to eat fish?”
    “You don’t like it?”
    My brother crosses his arms against his chest. I see the dirt lining his arms, dark and hardened. I imagine chipping it off
     his body with a small spoon.
    “I don’t like the eyeball there. It looks sick.”
    My mother tuts. Her nametag is still clipped to her blouse. It says
Woodward’s,
and then,
Sales Clerk.
“Enough,” she says, hanging her purse on the back of the chair. “Go wash your hands and get ready for supper.”
    My brother glares, just for a moment. Then he begins picking at the dirt on his arms. I bring plates of rice to the table.
     The dirt flies off his skin, speckling the tablecloth. “Stop it,” I say crossly.
    “Stop it,”
he says, mimicking me.
    “Hey!” My father hits his spoon against the counter. It
pings,
high-pitched. He points at my brother. “No fighting in this house.”
    My brother looks at the floor, mumbles something, and then shuffles away from the table. As he moves farther away, he begins
     to stamp his feet.
    Shaking her head, my mother takes her jacket off. It slides from her shoulders. She says something to my father in the language
     I can’t understand. Hemerely shrugs his shoulders. And then he replies, and I think his words are so familiar, as if they are words I should know,
     as if maybe I did know them once but then I forgot them. The language that they speak is full of soft vowels, words running
     together so that I can’t make out the gaps where they pause for breath.
    My mother told me once about guilt. Her own guilt she held in the palm of her hands, like an offering. But your guilt is different,
     she said. You do not need to hold on to it. Imagine this, she said, her hands running along my forehead, then up into my hair.
     Imagine, she said. Picture it, and what do you see?
    A bruise on the skin, wide and black.
    A bruise, she said. Concentrate on it. Right now, it’s a bruise. But if you concentrate, you can shrink it, compress it to
     the size of a pinpoint. And then, if you want to, if you see it, you can blow it off your body like a speck of dirt.
    She moved her hands along my forehead.
    I tried to picture what she said. I pictured blowing it away like so much nothing, just these little pieces that didn’t mean
     anything, this complicity that I could magically walk away from. She made me believe in the strength of my own thoughts, as
     if I could make appear what had never existed. Or turn it around. Flipit over so many times you just lose sight of it, you lose the tail end and the whole thing disappears into smoke.
    My father pushes at the fish with the edge of his spoon. Underneath, the meat is white and the juice runs down along the side.
     He lifts a piece and lowers it carefully onto my plate.
    Once more, his spoon breaks skin. Gingerly, my father lifts another piece and moves it towards my brother.
    “I don’t want it,” my brother says.
    My father’s hand wavers. “Try it,” he says, smiling. “Take a wok on the wild side.”
    “No.”
    My father sighs and places the piece on my mother’s plate. We eat in silence, scraping our spoons across the dishes. My parents
     use chopsticks, lifting their bowls and motioning the food into their mouths. The smell of food fills the room.
    Savoring each mouthful, my father eats slowly, head tuned to the