Free Evel Knievel Days by Pauls Toutonghi Page A

filled the living room, he explained the entire opera in his luxuriant Egyptian accent, explained it image by image, threading his voice through the open spaces in the score. “Die
Zauberflöte
, in German,” he said, and told the story of the Egyptian prince Tamino and his quest to free Pamina, the daughter of the Queen of the Night. He described Papageno, the bird catcher, with his rainbow coat of feathers and his piper’s beak, long and elegant as the tendril of a vine. He described the queen’s entry, when she soared onto the stage, riding an imperious surge in the music, riding an umbrella of stars and descending from the ceiling. This, then, was a remarkable man. He argued passionately over cooking. He dissected and explained the intricacies of
opera seria
, conjuring images that were strangely beautiful.
    Unfortunately, besides his language and his culture, he also brought his addiction to gambling, to casino slots and barroom pull tabs and exorbitant racetrack wagers. But she wouldn’t know this foreight years. By then it would be much too late. The story of the night of their meeting I’d gleaned from Tante Wada. The story of the end of their relationship, however, my mother told me herself, especially during lapses in her medication. Honestly, it hurts to think about it in great detail: The restaurant that my parents opened together after he graduated from Montana Tech. The steady acrimony that built between them over his trips to Las Vegas, the threatening phone calls that he eventually couldn’t conceal, the letter on the living room mantel after he disappeared, detailing the hundred thousand dollars owed to shady creditors, the tearful conversation at my grandparents’ house, the fear for her safety and the safety of her child, the humiliating decision to close the restaurant down altogether. He’d known that her parents would settle his debts for their daughter’s sake but that he couldn’t stick around if he wanted that to happen.
    I guess I’ve spent a lot of time wondering how my father could have rationalized this choice, how he permitted himself to leave his wife and his son in order to disappear from America entirely, to flee to a country on the other side of the world. I’ve imagined entire stories for him. I’ve imagined entire stories, but they lead me to the same emptiness. And the most embarrassing thing? I’ve always wanted to say
Daddy
, that infantile and diminutive word. I never had the chance to say it, never got to write it on birthday cards or Father’s Day cards or letters home from camp.
    Also, I have to admit that I always wondered why a woman who lost so much because of an Egyptian man would carry on his culture, continue its customs, continue cooking its food, in such a significant way. All of her recipes came from my father’s family—Iknew this much for sure. I also knew, from what I’d gathered, that she’d reconstructed many of the recipes alone in our kitchen, Bach sonatas winding their way through the house. So: Why? Why had she done this to herself; why had she trapped herself in a world of nostalgia?
    I think the answer has four parts. First, nothing is simple. There aren’t always
therefore
s in real life. In real life, there isn’t always a chain of cause and effect. In real life, people do things for messy, incomplete reasons. They act without solid motivations, or their motivations are lodged deep beneath the surface of their thoughts in the unconscious mind. Some of my mother’s motivations were beyond even her. She awoke before dawn with the garden announcing that it needed to be stripped of its walking onions. And so it simply had to be done.
    The second part, I think, had to do with her parents. Though I’d barely known them, I did know that Mr. and Mrs. Clark were about as likely to eat
ful medamas
as a slab of raw tiger. If they had traveled to Asia or Africa, laden with binoculars and rifles and wearing their best safari gear, and if they had