Farmer John’s breakfast sausage smelled like divorce. As a child, the aroma of all that hot grease in a cast iron pan was both delightful and terrifying.
Mom would pull the tidy pack of sausages from the refrigerator, the little fingers snuggled close to each other beneath a thin sheet of plastic. They were considered a treat because they took time to cook, unlike the instant oatmeal that was served on school days. They also had the distinction of being offered only on the occasional weekend when Baba was out of town and unable to hold up his end of the custody agreement.
As part of the divorce, Mom had moved us to a duplex apartment in North Torrance, an industrial city south of Los Angeles. We never fried pork products in West Los Angeles, where Baba still lived, in the house we all used to share. Baba didn’t eat pork. It was haram, after all. Never mind the strips of bacon that appeared on heavy platters when we were eating out.
Mom placed the sizzling sausages on a plate. A thick, slightly rancid mist clung to the kitchen, like the marine layer of fog that sometimes made it as far as our duplex, close to the Mobil refinery with its sensuous cooling vats and the rectangular block of the Ball aluminum plant.
Breakfast at Baba’s was sweet, not savory. It often consisted of a pink box of donuts that he would bring home after an early morning tennis game at West LA Community College. I would wake to the modulated voice of a radio announcer and follow that sound, accompanied by the soft rumbling of a boiling water kettle, into the kitchen. The donut box would be left flagrantly open on the table, snail tracks of sugar glaze climbing up the sides.
~
I don’t remember what we ate before the divorce. I remember other things, like the gamey smell of Baba’s pipe tobacco and the party dress Mom helped me retrieve from its hanger in my bedroom closet. There are no memories of eating.
“Eating and cooking brought with it an odd sense of reconciliation,
a comfort in belonging.”
I was seven when Mom and I moved out. I think of my post-divorce food memories as an attempt to weave together what had already been broken. When we were a family, there was no need to remember how we filled ourselves up. But now, in our reduced capacity, I looked to food as a stand-in for whichever parent was absent. Eating and cooking brought with it an odd sense of reconciliation, a comfort in belonging. Our little mixed-race and multifaith family was still intact, albeit in my stomach. Sh’ia Islam and American Protestantism were at my center, gurgling and sated.
~
Donuts were one breakfast staple at Baba’s, but there were others. On mornings he didn’t play tennis, he would make khagineh, a sweet omelet that we both adored. Mixing eggs, water, and a handful of flour, it made a squirrely sizzle when the batter hit a buttered pan. After flipping the spongy circle so that both sides cooked evenly, he’d liberally dust cinnamon over the top and divide it into triangles with his spatula. After another flip, the liquid gold of honey was drizzled into the pan and the air immediately caramelized. My nostrils tickled with warmth.
He continued to flip and divide until it resembled a brown, speckled mass, like pancakes after a collision with a helicopter blade. Baba would offer a giddy bite on a fork. It was so hot that the khagineh would spit in my mouth. I let the crackle subside and rolled the morsel around on my tongue. I heard the radio announcer, felt the rumble of planes reversing engines as they began their descent into LAX. For a moment, this was home again and I wasn’t split in two.
~
Baba tells a story about his first breakfast in America. He’d landed here proud of his English proficiency, and with his infamous sweet tooth, never forgot the crepes topped with sugar back home in Iran. He knew there was an American version of the dish, but he didn’t know what to call it. He’d seen pictures. They were thicker than crepes, golden and stacked one atop the other with a thick pat of butter on top. He’d been traveling for over two days: a flight from Tehran to Istanbul, connecting flights to Berlin and New York City. The dawn of Chicago streets, filled with a dank smell notable for its absence of diesel fuel stench, overwhelmed him.
He needed to eat. He slid into the counter seat of a Chicago diner and attempted to make eye contact with the waiter.
He had been practicing how to ask questions. He pulled apart the words, dipped his hands into the reflecting pool of his mind and a question arose. He asked the waiter if he could have cake. A plate containing a fat slice of layer cake was placed in front of him. It was dark brown in color, but not chocolate. At least that’s how Baba remembers it. Maybe ground walnuts or pecans? He wondered about the color, even years later.
By the time Baba recovered from staring at the breakfast he hadn’t meant to order, the waiter had already turned away. Baba picked up the spoon that was placed next to his coffee (he’d had no trouble ordering that; the word in Persian—ghahveh—is very similar to the English pronunciation) and began to dip it into the dense layers.
~
A rabid optimism runs between Baba and I. We eat what is offered. Maybe it is God’s Will that we don’t always get what we hoped for. We eat what is offered and pray that this small act will make other wonders possible.
~
Sometimes, I’d bargain with God. If we could be a family again, I’ll only eat carrots. I’d say this in my head, a prayer on repeat. When my hands and feet turned bright orange, Mom noticed and made me stop. I’ll subsist on alternating soup spoons of Jiffy peanut butter and mint chip ice cream. If we could be a family again. But my friends in middle school laughed at my diet, so I stopped.
I returned to eating what was offered at kitchen tables and diner counters.
~
Mom had a soft spot for the counter at Norm’s, close to Old Towne Mall, where, at the start of every month, she would order a chicken-fried steak dinner. It was our girls night out, usually on a weekday evening, and might include a stop at The Dress Barn afterward. Norm’s had dark paneling and brown Naugahyde upholstery. I felt grown-up, holding the large heavy menu, my feet dangling off the padded seat.
At Baba’s, we would drive the five blocks to Pann’s, a storied Los Angeles diner, every week, usually on Saturday afternoon, and sit at the counter, right in front of the fluttering order tickets and the red glow of heating lamps. Our backs were to the wide wall of windows that looked out onto the convergence of two streets roiling with cars: La Tijera and Slauson. The sun cast every surface in a buttery light. Baba would order black coffee and two Dream Burgers, one for each of us.
As we waited, I would watch the fry cook’s covered head pop in and out of our vision behind the high chrome counter. Our burgers arrived wrapped neatly in white paper sleeves. We didn’t order fries. They were unnecessary, Baba told me. American starch. No nutritional value. For dessert—the Dream Burgers now reduced to crumpled white paper balls—we would share a tall ceramic mug of egg custard, sprinkled with nutmeg and swimming in amber liquid.
It was this same egg custard, which is no longer on the Pann’s menu, that Baba brought to the hospital—packed in five large styrofoam coffee cups—when I lost my four front teeth in a high school bike accident. I couldn’t eat solid food for months. By that time, Mom had bought a home in a tony beach community with her fiance, and we didn’t go to Norm’s anymore.
When we still rented in North Torrance, Mom would attempt to prepare Iranian food. It usually bore no resemblance to what I ate at Baba’s house and even less to the elegant food that Baba’s sister Sima prepared every day. Sima made a career of caring for her family’s palatial home in the hills. I was vaguely aware of my hunger to live there, to eat Sima’s food, to sleep in the fluffy beds my cousins inhabited, where they lay in passive certainty that their parents (both Iranian) would never divorce, where they would always be fed, always be surrounded by dozens of family members.
I wanted to pad down their long hallways, my bare feet making no sound on the thick carpet. I wanted to eat rice dishes that were a jewel box of textures and scents while sitting at the round kitchen table in the alcove of Sima’s kitchen. I wanted to watch the ships visible along the coast, passing from the choppy Pacific into the harbor’s calm, a wide triangle in their wake.
“Maybe food truly was the intermediary, the thing that helped me come to terms with this split that would forever mark me.”
In the first empty months of our move in an effort to calm myself, I imagined sitting in that alcove, my hand in a death grip on a soup spoon, a serving dish of shirin polo in front of me. To procure the flowery basmati at the heart of the dish, Sima made deals with the immigrant grocers down the hill from her palatial home.
Mom didn’t have the time or the language facility to do that. Instead, she would use bland toothy Uncle Ben’s. My stomach would cramp when Mom served her version of shirin polo. Food could no longer serve as a stand-in for Baba, not when served with such a disregard for the original. Her aspirational dish was a reminder of all the loss I had borne; my favorite food transformed into something I didn’t recognize. My favorite food rendered foreign.
~
At Baba’s, as the months of living apart lengthened, our dining world expanded. Maybe food truly was the intermediary, the thing that helped me come to terms with this split that would forever mark me.
There was the Mu Shu Chicken, eaten at the same mini-mall near the Culver City Library where Baba got our donuts. We sat at a glass-topped table and piled the filling onto thin pancakes smeared with plum sauce, the juice dribbling down my chin after each bite.
There was the Sierra Club Singles hike on Friday evenings that Baba led for almost twenty years, even after he remarried. I was usually the only kid in attendance. During middle school, I remember one hike when I tried to walk and do Rocky Horror’s “The Time Warp” simultaneously, stopping in my tracks only to complete a series of pelvic thrusts while yelling, “That really drives you insane y-ane y-ane y-ane ane.” That was probably one of the last times I joined him.
After hours of trudging up and down fire roads in the Malibu hills, Baba ordered several pizza pies for the group. My tennis shoes scuffed the sawdusted floor, and I set the large metal pans down on picnic-style tables where hike participants had gathered. Then, settled at a table of my own, I dug in, lips slicked with peppery oil as Abbott and Costello cavorted silently on the wide screen across the room.
My eyes flicked between the black and white film, the pizza slice in my hands, and the adults who were at once distant and comfortably close. Several of the women hovered near Baba, laughing at his stories or refilling his glass of root beer.
We would never reunite as a family again. The warmth of the room, my body’s release after a long walk made this thought settle more comfortably in my gut. The prayers and bargaining hadn’t worked.
It was time to eat what I was offered. The impossibility of reconciliation. The dizzying sensation of being in two places at once. The knowledge that there was nothing I could do to change the outcome. For now, I’d just keep chewing and swallowing, filling myself up, little pieces of home lodged inside me.
~~~
Mahru Elahi is a VONA alum, a Hedgebrook Writer-in-Residence, and a 2023 finalist for the Allegra Johnson Prize. Known for her big laugh, Mahru serves youth in Bay Area public schools and as a foster parent. A student in Antioch University’s MFA in Creative Writing, Mahru writes from Oakland, CA.
the museum of americana: A LITERARY REVIEW 