Simple Recipes

Harold’s mother is sick. His father punishes him by making him go up to the roof and stay there. Though Harold has a fear of heights, his father tells him it will make him stronger. After his mom dies, Harold takes her metal box, the one filled to the brim with coins, and vows never to remove a single coin. One day, when his father puts him on the roof, Harold remembers his mother’s funeral. He remembers before she died how they would walk hand in hand around Trout Lake. He tells her he will never forget her. As he thinks about this, he edges toward the cusp of the roof, then, on his stomach, slides over and slips off, landing below in the grass.

Harold knows he will always be shy around women. When he grows up and leaves his father’s house, he meets Thea and her daughter, Josephine. He sleeps with Thea and then never leaves, thinking he has woken up in a dream. He thinks, “I’ve dreamt up an entire family” (139).

When Thea meets Harold, she is working as an outreach nurse. She is 10 years younger than him. As an outreach nurse, she drives around in her van providing free needles and condoms to drug users. She is often known by her nickname, “The Protector.” When Thea was 16, she fell in love with a helicopter pilot who was 31 years old. One night, Thea lets him stay in her room, in the house she lives in with her mother and father. The next morning her mother walks in to wake her, sees him, and quietly backs out of the room. She learns she is pregnant, and the helicopter pilot takes her in. She leaves home and realizes she is young and must learn a lot to keep her man happy. The day of her ultrasound, she waits for him in the hospital. But he never shows up. Yet as Josie grows, Thea feels an inexpressible sense of love. In her mind, Josie is the one thing she has done right. “In all her failures, in all her missteps, she had finally managed to do something supremely well” (148).

One night, after Harold moves in, he collapses. Thea is beside herself with fear. She can’t lose him. Her daughter, Josephine, is surprised that her mother loves him as much as she does. Josephine remembers sleeping next to her mom. She even slept next to her when she was a teenager. Now, through the thin walls, she hears her mom and Harold having sex. Now that Harold is here, it will never be the same. Josie has a new boyfriend, Bradley. She decides she will leave with him. She feels like she is drowning in that house with her mom and Harold. One of worst things her mother ever did to her was burn her under scalding water in the shower, a punishment for losing the bracelet that the helicopter pilot had given her mother. Josie begs forgiveness. Her mother realizes what she’s done and stops, telling her daughter she is sorry. That night they sleep side by side.

After living with Harold and her mother, Josie decides it’s time to leave. She will live with Bradley. She packs her things and steals the money her mother has hidden in an empty Aspirin bottle. Harold walks in and sees Josie’s rucksack on the floor, and the money in her hand. He knows exactly what she is planning to do. He tells her she will break her mother’s heart. Josie agrees. But she has to leave. So, Harold opens the kitchen door, surprising Josie.

Josie doesn’t end up marrying Bradley. She ends up going through a lot of different men and traveling all over the world. People ask her why she doesn’t settle down and have children. Josie says she’s always been a free spirit. When she is very old she will tell people that her father was a boy who jumped from the roof and her mother was a woman who fell from a helicopter. When standing on balconies and high buildings, she always has the compulsion to jump. She wonders as she ages, how she has managed to bypass love when it was for the sake of love that she left home.

Miriam’s parents are 30 when they emigrate from Indonesia to Vancouver, Canada. Miriam is born in Vancouver, with kidney failure. For the time that it takes to recover and gain strength she becomes her father’s daughter. “In his arms I was peaceful” (164), she says. As she grew up, her father would say to her, “Ever since you were born, Miriam, my life has been terrible” (165). He always smiles when he says this.

Her parents open a restaurant, but it fails. Then her father opens a furniture store and calls it Bargain Mart. Miriam loves to go to work with her father so much that she fakes illness sometimes to skip school and be with him in the store. Sometimes, on her fake sick days, she sleeps in a makeshift closet, separated by a curtain. One day she writes her name in crayon on a couch as if to assert her identity. Miriam watches her father read the newspaper all the way through or struggle to connect with the scant few customers that visit the store. One time a man walks into the closet and sees Miriam resting there. He is shocked, and Miriam’s dad is awkward and uncomfortable. He can’t find a way to connect with the customers. At home, her father washes the vegetables, her parents ask each other how their day was, and later, all three of them sleep in the same bed, Miriam in the middle.

When Miriam is in her early twenties, she meets her soon-to-be husband, Will. He rides his motorcycle down an alley, and she stops him and tells how they should be together. “I just have this feeling that we are meant to be” (174), she says. Will agrees and jumps enthusiastically into the relationship. Miriam likes him because the daily troubles that bother most people don’t seem to bother him. He is restrained and strong. When Miriam sees his apartment for the first time, she thinks its emptiness has to do with the terrible deaths both of his parents suffered. But then she realizes that simplicity is part of his personality.

Will and Miriam get married. She tells Will it was his motorcycle that swept her off her feet. Her father doesn’t attend the wedding. By then he is living alone, having left Miriam’s mom. Though Miriam was born in Canada, her parents miss Indonesia. They are Chinese Indonesian and arrived in Irian Jaya, a province of New Guinea at the height of a violent political uprising. When the tension grew and violence reigned, her parents decided it was time to leave.

Miriam remembers the times she and her family would take long drives through Vancouver, her mom at the helm with a map on her lap, directing her father where to go. Now her parents have split, and she realizes how much everything in her family has changed. She remembers that the fighting began when the furniture store started to fail. Her mother wants her father to sell but he refuses, driving them into bankruptcy and poverty. The furniture store is the last business her father ever owns. The apartment they live in becomes an empty place. Miriam begins to sneak out at night and drive around with her friends. One night her father wants to tell her something, but she refuses to listen. Then one spring day, her father leaves for Indonesia. Miriam believes that returning to Indonesia is her father’s bravest act. “He threw caution to the wind” (198) returning to the place that has always filled his imagination. Miriam believes that Indonesia has always driven a wedge between her parents. After her father leaves, she and her mother move to an apartment in East Vancouver.

She lives with Will and finds their life comforting with its predictable routine. Will is 10 years older than she is. One day she thinks she might be pregnant. That’s when she realizes that maybe she can’t commit to the marriage. She is relieved that the pregnancy fails. Shortly after that, her father returns to Vancouver. He is terribly sick and lives alone on social assistance. There are pills for depression everywhere. Shortly after Miriam visits her father at his apartment, she breaks up with Will. Will goes to Ontario, where he is from originally, to give Miriam some space. One day Miriam is sick with fever. She has bad dreams that mix reality with fantasy. She remembers one time when it snowed, her father built a snowman, and her mother took pictures. In her sickness, Miriam now realizes that there had been something ghostly about her father outside in the snow. “My father in the snow, smiling for all the world to see” (216).

In the end, her father tries to kill himself. Luckily, a neighbor hears her father making loud noises and calls for help. The paramedics arrive to find her father dressed in a suit asking for his family until he loses consciousness. Miriam and her mother stay with him in the hospital, but he remains in critical condition. Miriam’s mother tells Miriam that her father always loved her. “He’s always had such dreams for you” (223), she says. She tells Miriam she is not trying to make her feel bad. She assures Miriam that she can never disappoint her father.

One day, Miriam arrives home to a message from her mother. Her mother says that her father is out of danger. Each day her mother sits with her father, bringing him a cup of coffee and a newspaper. Miriam is so happy to see them together. After that, Miriam calls Will and he comes back to her. One day, Miriam and Will drive to Miriam’s old neighborhood. She searches for the furniture store but can’t find it. Will suggests that maybe it’s been torn down. At first she resists this idea, but then finally admits it, realizing that there is nothing left of her old life as a child.