Still protesting but unwilling to squabble with them, Armanoush headed to the bathroom, only to find Uncle Dikran there, his head inside the cabinet under the sink, his bulky body on hands and knees.
"Uncle?" Armanoush almost let out a shriek.
"Hellooo!" Dikran Stamboulian hooted from the cabinet. "This house is full of Chekhovian characters," Armanoush muttered to herself
"If you say so," echoed a voice from under the sink.
"Uncle, what are you doing?"
"Your grandma always complains about the old faucets in the house, you know. So this evening I said to myself, why don't I close the store early, stop by Shushan's house, and repair those damn pipes?"
"Yeah, I can see," Armanoush remarked, suppressing a smile. "Where is she, by the way?"
"She's taking a nap," Dikran said, worming his way out of the cabinet to get the pipe bender and crawling back inside. "Old age-what you gonna do? — body needs sleep! She will be awake before seven thirty, though, don't worry."
Seven thirty! It looked like every person in the family had set a biological alarm for the moment Matt Hassinger would ring the bell.
"Give me the smooth jaw wrench, will you?" came a frustrated voice. "This one doesn't seem to be working."
Armanoush pouted at the bag on the floor, in which glinted over a hundred tools of all sizes. She handed him a chain tong, a pipe reamer, and an HTP300 hydrostatic test pump before she chanced upon the smooth jaw wrench. Inauspiciously, that wrench too turned out to be "not working." Seeing the impossibility of taking a shower with Uncle Dikran the Impossible Plumber on the job, Armanoush moved toward her grandma's bedroom, opened the door slightly, and peeked inside. There she was sleeping lightly but with the blissful placidity found only in elderly women who are surrounded by their children and grandchildren. An elfin woman who had always had a flimsy body and too much to shoulder, she had been shortened and slimmed down by old age. As she had aged she had grown more and more in need of some sleep during the day. At night, however, she was as awake as ever. Old age had not diminished Shushan's insomnia one tiny bit. The past didn't let her rest for too long, her family thought; it allowed her only these fleeting catnaps. Armanoush closed the door and let her sleep.
The table was ready when she returned to the living room. They had also set a plate for her. She wondered how she could possibly be expected to eat if she was going to have a date in less than an hour, but preferred not to ask. To be too reasonable in this family would be a blunder. She could nibble a little so that everyone would be happy. Besides, she liked this cuisine. Her mother in Arizona wanted to keep Armenian cuisine as far from the borders of her kitchen as possible, and profoundly enjoyed vilifying it to her neighbors and friends. She was especially fond of drawing attention to two dishes, which she publicly disparaged on every available occasion: cooked calf's feet and stuffed intestines. Armanoush recalled how Rose once complained to Mrs. Grinnell, the next-door neighbor.
"Gross," Mrs. Grinnell exclaimed with a trace of disgust creeping into her voice. "Do they really eat the intestines?"
"Oh yeah." Rose nodded heartily. "Believe me, they do. They spice it up with garlic and herbs, stuff it with rice, and wolf it down."
The two women unleashed a condescending snicker and would have probably snickered some more if at that moment Armanoush's stepfather had not turned toward them and, with a jaded look on his face, remarked: "What's the big deal? That sounds just like mumbar. You should try it sometime, it's really good."
"Is he Armenian too?" Mrs. Grinnell whispered when Mustafa left the room.
"Of course not," Rose said, her voice trailing off. "It's just that they have some things in common."
The doorbell rang shrilly, snatching Armanoush out of her trance and making everyone else jump in panic. It was not even seven o'clock yet. Punctuality, apparently, wasn't one of Matt Hassinger's merits. As if a button had been pressed, all three aunts scampered to the door only to stop short of opening it. Uncle Dikran hit his head on the cupboard he was still working in and Grandma Shushan opened her eyes in fright. Only Armanoush remained calm and composed. In intentionally measured steps she walked to the door under the fixed gaze of her aunts and opened it.
"Daddy!!!" Armanoush fluted with delight. "I thought you had a meeting this evening. How come you're home so early?"
But before she reached the end of her question, Armanoush had already sensed the answer.
Barsam Tchakhmakhchian smiled his soft dimpled smile and hugged his daughter, his eyes glimmering with pride and traces of anxiety. "Yeah, but it didn't work out, we had to reschedule the meeting," he said to Armanoush. As soon as she was beyond earshot, he whispered to his sisters: "Is he here yet?"
The last thirty minutes before Matt Hassinger's arrival were marked with escalating apprehension on the part of everyone but Armanoush. They made her put on several dresses and parade around in each one, until they unilaterally reached a decision: the turquoise dress. The outfit was completed with earrings that matched, a burgundy beaded purse that Auntie Varsenig claimed would add a feminine touch, and a fluffy dark blue cardigan, just in case it got cold. That was one other thing Armanoush knew she should not question. Somehow the world outside the family house had an arctic character in the eyes of the Tchakhmakhchians. "Outside" meant "chilly land," and to visit it, you had to take your cardigan, preferably handwoven. This she partly knew from her childhood, having spent her early years under the downy blankets Grandma knit for her with her initials stitched at the edges. To go to sleep without anything covering your body was simply unthinkable, and going out into the street without a cardigan would be a blunder. Just like a house needed a roof above its head, human beings too needed an additional skin between them and the rest of the world so that they could feel safe and warm.
Once Armanoush agreed to put on her cardigan and the dressing part was over, they came forth with another demand, one that was fundamentally paradoxical but not to the Tchakhmakhchians.
They wanted her to sit with them at the table and eat, so that she could be ready and strong for tonight's dinner.
"But honey you are just nibbling like a bird. Don't tell me you are not even going to taste my manta?" Auntie Varsenig wailed with a scoop in her hand and such severe dismay in her dark brown eyes that it made Armanoush wonder if something far more life-anddeath than a bowl of manta was concerned.
"Auntie, I can't." Armanoush exhaled. "You already filled my plate with khaday f Let me finish this, that's more than enough."
"Well you didn't want to smell of meat and garlic," Auntie Surpun chimed in with a hint of mischief in her voice. "So we served you ekmek khaday f This way your breath will smell of pistachios."
"Why would anyone want to smell like pistachios?" Grandma Shushan asked amazed, having missed the first episode of the debate, not that it would have made sense to her anyway.
"I do not want to smell like pistachios." Armanoush widened her eyes with desperation and turned to her dad, flashing a distress signal, waiting to be saved.
Before Barsam Tchakhmakhchian could utter a word, however, Armanoush's cell phone started to ring a classical melody by Tchaikovsky: "Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy." She picked it up and pouted at the little screen. Private number. It could be anyone. It could even be Matt Hassinger, calling to give her a weird excuse to cancel the dinner tonight. Armanoush stood there, holding the phone uneasily. On the fourth ring, she answered it, hoping it wasn't her mother.
It was.
"Honey, are they treating you all right?" was the first thing she asked.
"Yes, Mother," Armanoush muttered tonelessly. By now she was kind of used to it. Ever since she was a little girl, whenever she stayed at the Tchakhmakhchian domicile, her mother acted as if her life was in danger.