family portrait

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Today, I was clearing clutter, and an abandoned sketchbook turned up under two inches of old bank statements and water bills. I opened it and this was the first thing I saw:


James drew the picture when he was six, nearly seven. He had been recently entrusted with the care of a betta fish that developed dropsy three days after it joined our family. This was not a first-grade assignment. This was done in his spare time, to capture his entire family (P.J.’s name is protected), all God’s creatures included.

I notice a few things. P.J.’s foot is mutated and she is holding a purse, unlike the rest of us. Holly, a rather nondescript black cat, is drawn as a mitotic cell. Rose is sniffing the butt of a stick-figure Chester, who looks none too happy about this.

I have a mean left hook on me. And I am holding his hand.

Ye gods. The feels. This is getting framed.

why I don’t hang out with cows

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Today I bought a bundle of asparagus. Asparagus is the primary way that we accumulate rubber bands in our household.

I’m not big on vegetables.

I first tried asparagus when I was twenty-three. Hell, I first heard of asparagus when I was twenty-three. That’s the age when Those Weird Green Sticks in the store became something not just edible but enjoyable. We microwaved the asparagus back then. Now, I brush it with olive oil and roast it under the broiler and P.J. sprinkles flaky sea salt on it.

I did not try most vegetables, save for the Holy Canned Trinity, until I was appointed as a teenager to run the salad bar at Wendy’s in the summer of 1993. A manager had to patiently drill into my skull the proper names for broccoli (“little trees”), cauliflower (“white broccoli”), chickpeas (“slimy nuts”), Romaine lettuce (“dark green pieces”), sunflower seeds (“the grey ones”) and croutons (“crunchy square things”). I knew the little orange sticks came from carrots, but that summer was the first time I dared to taste carrot, or any of the other mysterious items I was tasked with stirring and filling and scrutinizing for freshness (a task for which I was, to say the least, ill-suited).

I liked most of them, except for the chickpeas and the pickled beets, both of which tasted the way dirt smelled.

Someone was kind enough to warn me about bleu cheese dressing before I made the mistake of sampling it.

It was even later in life when I learned what a zucchini looked like, and that fresh French green beans cooked with some garlic and oil in no way resemble anything in the Holy Canned Trinity. A few years ago, I experienced a road-to-Damascus conversion when I walked into a grocery store where an employee was cooking a stir fry of sweet peppers in the front lobby, and the pepper smell that had once disgusted me was now inexplicably appealing. I bought some and took them home and P.J. stared at me like I had sprouted an extra head when I proffered the peppers and pointed to an onion on the counter by way of a hint.

They were delicious.

The Holy Canned Trinity contained all vegetable matter of my childhood. That’s not entirely true. Sometimes, when we had thin, crispy, well-done sirloins as a treat, we would have little bowls of “salad” that contained iceberg lettuce, bits of broken-up Kraft singles, and dressing my mother made by combining Miracle Whip, ketchup, and pickle relish, to which I was allergic.

The Trinity consisted of Le Sueur early peas in the silver can, canned green beans, and canned corn. It was like owning three pairs of shoes that would go with any possible clothing one could wear. A brown pair, a black pair, and maybe some white Keds. Unless it was spaghetti night, the chain-shaking ghosts of vegetable matter would visit in one of these three forms.

The corn was okay. I could manage.

The peas were iffy. I initially refused them, but after my mother taught me how to take real adult aspirin instead of the chewable orange-flavored baby aspirin, I learned that one could shovel a forkful of peas into one’s mouth while pinching one’s nose with her left hand, set the fork down on the side of the plate, grab a cup of tea, and wash the peas down like pills. To this day, I credit my ingenious technique with my ability to take all my meds with a single sip of milk. My mother was not impressed and was torn between exasperation and resignation, because in spite of the shredded table manners, I was at least getting down a small serving of vegetables. I think she chose to pick her battles.

The battle she picked was over the green beans. I was seven years old, and I had watched an awful lot of Dr. Who up to that point in my life and that’s how I knew that anything gray-green was obviously sourced from alien life and not meant to be eaten in any form.

One night, I dug in my heels and declared that I would not be consuming the small pile of alien dung sitting on my plate beside the erstwhile pork chop and Rice-a-Roni. My mother said yes, I would, and I said no, I wouldn’t, and she said I had to, and I said no, I didn’t, and she said I had to sit at the table until I finished them, and I said okay, and she said no, really, I wasn’t allowed to leave the table until the alien-beans were in my stomach, and I said yes, that was fine, I’d just settle in for the evening.

Honestly, you’d think we had never met.

At 9:30 that evening, well past my bedtime, after machinations that had included begging, bribery, blackmail, and a trip through the drive-thru at McDonald’s where we never ever went in the first place so how did she even know they were on the menu for hot fudge sundaes that they brought home and ate in front of me, mine melting on the counter, she conceded defeat. I got up from the table, put on my pajamas and brushed my teeth, and wandered off to bed, where I would sleep the sleep of the smug.

I was never served green beans again. We had an understanding.

I grew up.

Now I eat corn on the cob. Now I eat parsnips. Now I think cauliflower is awesome roasted with Gruyere on top. I’ll even tolerate a black bean in my chili now and then.

Someone recently asked me, though, if I would be able to eat a vegetarian diet. They pointed out my tender heart toward animals and asked how I can cry when animals suffer and then turn around and eat pieces of them with various sauces on the side.

My brain skitters away from the idea of vegetarianism for two reasons. First, I would die of malnutrition, because I need the protein chains post-gastric bypass and because there is still a whole world of things that grow in dirt that I consider unfit for consumption. Take kale and Swiss chard. My Grandma taught me not to eat the garnish on the plate.

Second, I really love meat. I love rare steak and P.J.’s sous vide machine and raw tuna and brined chicken breast on the grill. I love lamb and leek stew and shredded-up barbecued pig. Remember asparagus? My favorite form of asparagus now is when it has bacon wrapped around it.

I know the vegetarians are right, though. If I hung out on a farm for more than half an hour, I’d end up going soppy and feeling sorry for cattle and pigs and anthropomorphizing the fuck out of them, and possibly doing some research and learning things inconvenient to the carnivorous brain, and then I wouldn’t be able to eat them any more. I already buy cage-free eggs. The situation is tenuous at best. I have to remain callous and unthinking and willfully ignorant. If I don’t, I’ll die of beri-beri or kwashiorkor or just plain boredom.

So when I cook dinner for P.J. and James, I serve fresh vegetables as a side to large, rare to medium-rare rib-eye steaks, and as P.J. and I cut off the first bites of our steaks and dip them in horseradish or steak sauce, we look at each other and say, “Moo.”

red-eyed rhino

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P.J.: “I’ve tried everything I can think of. Nothing’s getting rid of them this year.”

Me: “We need to do the bananas. You remember, the bananas and soapy water in tin cans? That caught a lot of gnats last year, even though they were gross as shit.”

P.J.: “Yeah, and then the bananas gave us fruit flies.”

Me: “They did not! We bought that fruit fly trap and it didn’t catch a single thing.”

P.J.: “I caught one and its eyes were red. That means it was a fruit fly.”

Me: “You don’t know that. It could have just been possessed.”

P.J.: “What?”

Me: “A possessed gnat could have red eyes and then it would look like a fruit fly, but it would still be a gnat and the soapy banana would hurt it.”

P.J.: “Well, I didn’t ask it if it was a fruit fly or a possessed gnat. You know why?”

Me: “Why?”

P.J.: “BECAUSE FRUIT FLIES CAN’T TALK.”

Me: “Neither can possessed gnats. I think you should call up our local Catholic church and ask them about how to tell if a tiny bug with red eyes is a fruit fly or a possessed gnat, on account of you can’t ask it because it can’t talk, and let’s see what they have to say. Be very specific.”

P.J.: “Look, if I was going to possess something, I wouldn’t possess a thing that’s completely defenseless and tiny like that.”

Me: “What would you possess?”

P.J.: “Like, a rhino.”

Me: “And what would you do as a possessed rhino?”

P.J.: “I dunno. Skewer as many people as I could with my horn before I was shot down by poachers, I guess.”

Me: “They’d have to be skinny people, so you could stack more up.”

P.J.: “Good point.”

Me: “That’s why I’m getting seconds on these hush puppies. So I can avoid being skewered by a possessed rhino. It’s the only way, really. See? I can be good at self-care.”

letter to jeff

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Dear Jeff,

The tops of your heads, three of them, were singularly familiar, arranged in a row in the theater. I’m guessing you were as surprised to see us as we were, you. None of us was surprised that we sat pretending it wasn’t happening, this double blade of long-evaded proximity.

It was already a brave act for us to have purchased the tickets, driven there, come inside the popcorn-infused lobby. Fellowship of the Ring was released just after our firstborn infant son died. We saw it on the big screen eighteen times, escaping to Middle Earth time and again. We knew every word, every leaf in the forests, every blade of Shire grass. And today, in select small theaters across the country, it was shown again, and the lure was too great for me. I was giddy. I was terrified. I knew it would serve as a trauma trigger, but I longed to hear Cate Blanchett’s first whispered words of Elvish. When I did, my Kleenex couldn’t keep up.

But you know that story, the one about John.

I did not know there would be two deep losses sitting on my chest, squeezing out tears.

Jeff, you and I are cowards. You ran out of the room as soon as the credits began, citing an aversion to Enya (fully credible yet punctually convenient) and I did not follow you. Instead, my heart commandeered my feet, and P.J. watched in awe as I walked over and took your empty seat beside your wife and daughter. I looked them both in the eye and wordlessly threw a wide-armed, imbued hug around each of them.

Their replies were contained in this: They hugged back. I leaned over and whispered something. Then I turned away, and P.J. and I left the theater.

Perhaps the hugs were a manifestation of the bond they and I share in being, not civilians, but the close cabinet advising you during your lifelong internal war, destined to receive the brunt of the fallout.

But you know that story, too.

The only sensible reason to write this letter to you, then, is to fill you in on the stories you don’t know, things that have come to pass in the two and a half years since our estrangement.

Chester died. If you had exercised the courage to ask after him, P.J. would have shown you the hand-blown crystal pendant she wears that contains some of his ashes. She would have spat, “He’s right here,” because you weren’t there for us when he died. We have Molly now. You wouldn’t like her. She licks faces joyfully and you’d find the germs repulsive. I think sometimes your extensive understanding of biology serves you ill. Dog slobber can be wiped off but the unmerited, boundless affection of a dog heals. It helps with the internal war.

We still have the cabin that caused you to resent our families’ financial disparity, our anxiety over your resentment, your overly vehement denial of the resentment. I consider it ironic that the minivan you saw us drive away from the theater yesterday is the one we bought so that the six of us – kids included – could visit the Blue Ridge Parkway for picnics, Pilot Mountain and Hanging Rock, without having to carpool. We have a van without you in it.

James’ sixteenth birthday was yesterday. I have to believe you noticed, when he went to the bathroom during the movie, how tall he’s grown since you last saw him at thirteen, how he carries himself now. He dances at school. You’d be proud if you knew that. Your favorite movie is Billy Elliott. He rarely sees your daughter in the halls at school because their schedules differ. They smile and speak and don’t mention the war.

We’re both still in our jobs, though I’m thinking of leaving mine for a new role. It’s a god- damned shame I can’t tell you about my co-worker, because you taught me almost everything I know about bitterness and cursing, and the things you would have to say about her would be gloriously colorful. Yet as I write this, I’m smiling sadly, because one of the things helping me endure her is wanting to be utterly unlike you, driven from place to place by your intolerance of those less brilliant than you. Jeff, you are never going to get away from stupidity. It’s endemic. You’re older than I am. You should have learned this by now.

The house looks mostly the same. I tried to change the light fixtures in the hallway, but now one doesn’t work and we need a real electrician. We have an espresso machine that you would want to marry. The place mats on the table are a bit more frayed now than they were when we played table games, and we put in a wireless mesh system, which would make your phone work better if you were sitting in your customary spot on the sofa, next to one of the nodes. I remember how you’d look up funny things for us on your phone while I curled up on one end of the sectional sofa and listened until I was muzzy and fell asleep. I was so comfortable around you that I could allow myself to be that vulnerable. We were tribe.

We don’t clean any more because no one comes over to visit now. The pain of the break-up was intense and we have since been in strong accord that we don’t want friends any more, not the kind who become like family, the kind you see almost every weekend, the kind you gladly help move in and out of houses and put as emergency contacts on your kids’ school forms. We would rather be alone.

Our therapist says this isn’t healthy. So once in a while, we consider couples who might replace you. The candidates are scant and have turned out to be too busy in life, saturated, or overtly religious upon closer inspection, or mismatched in little ways that would matter more than a little. You spoiled us. Unattainably stringent criteria serve our unwillingness well. Our therapist throws up his hands and has probably given up on it.

Yesterday, I came home from the theater and vacuumed the whole house for the first time in many months, as though someone would be coming over to visit soon. I got dirt out of the corners and made sure the coffee table was clean enough for sock feet that would not be placed there.

Then I cried.

You were a coward in the end, too. There were months of irritation, characterized by vague excuses, preceding your relief when I finally asked if you were weary of us. You could not bring yourself to tell us that you had become averse to spending time in our company.

Then you said that I needed to get my head fixed and check back in with you when that had happened.

I know you had to push me away because of the insanity during my hypomania, before the suicide attempt, before I knew I was bipolar. I know you lost your partner to suicide decades before, and that I landed a massive bomb in the no-man’s-land of your internal war.

I also know we had been through strikingly similar episodes by your side, when your head was a war zone, and we had not defected. We had stayed.

I did get my head fixed. As much as it could be fixed.

We loved you. We loved you like siblings, like chosen family. Our kids were in diapers together. We considered you when making future plans for our lives because we could not countenance you not being in them. We loved you for your imperfections and struggles.

That is why we sat at our dinner table stunned, loving you, angry as hell, bleeding, scarcely able to speak to each other, aching nigh-unbearably from the break and the knowledge of what the future would bring: A slow, more graceful death of the friendship, a drawn-out version of the pain we were feeling.

We spent weeks deliberating and recognized in the end that we could not, would not, endure that pain a second time. I wrote you the goodbye letter.

I think I told you everything. I’m a good writer.

We have spent two years avoiding restaurants you frequent, looking out for your bright blue car in parking lots.

Jeff, you and I are cowards. We send the other parents with our children to school events. I dream about running into you somewhere, and sometimes there is reconciliation and sometimes there is rejection. Both sting when I wake and remember.

We still love you. We miss you madly. We ache for you sometimes, our missing family. I shouted that in the language of untamed hugs yesterday.

I leaned over and whispered to your wife, “Give Jeff one from us, too.” Those were the only words to say. There were no others.

I still think we made the right choice, the choice to euthanize the friendship. If seeing the top of your head hurt this badly, imagine looking into your eyes. Maybe I would see love. Maybe I would see hatred.

Today, I will get out the Swiffer and dust the main floor of the house, knowing no one will be coming to visit.

Love,
Amy

jesus hid my coffee cup

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P.J. wiped her mouth with her napkin. “I’m just saying that even though we’ve both been irritable lately and had a few spats, I think that most couples argue more than we do.”

“Our arguments bother us more than their arguments bother them,” I countered.

“Yeah, but while they get worked up over the other one blowing the bank account or leaving the gas tank on empty, we … get worked up over more trivial things.”

“Like eating your crackers upside-down.”

P.J. stared at me. “What did you say?”

“Like eating your crackers upside-down,” I repeated.

“That is so weird because just the other day, I was thinking about crackers and how they always have one side that’s saltier and just better than the other side, and I made a resolution to be sure to put the toppings on the bad side so I’ll taste the good side first when I eat the cracker.”

“Sounds dead reasonable to me. Good thing you fixed that problem,” I said, “otherwise I might have to get worked up.”

“Glad we got that settled. Where’s my cup?” she asked.

“Your coffee cup or the other coffee cup or the stupid little demitasse or your Kool-Aid cup?”

“The not-coffee cup.”

“It’s over there, right under your nose.” I pointed.

P.J. grabbed it and walked over to the water dispenser. “Jesus,” she muttered.

“Why Jesus? He had nothing to do with your cup,” I said.

“Well,” she said, “He’s with me always, isn’t He? So He should be helping me find my cup.”

“Just because He’s always with you doesn’t mean He’s helpful,” I said.

“What, you think He just follows me around and laughs at all the stupid shit I do? Or plays pranks?”

I shrugged. “Maybe.”

“Huh,” she mused. “Probably just stands there scratching His balls.”

“I really wish you hadn’t said that,” I moaned. “Jesus’ balls. Great.”

She stopped and had a thinky-face. “Wait, as a product of an immaculate conception, why did Jesus even have balls?”

“Of course He had balls! Why wouldn’t He have balls?” I exclaimed as I hunted around the kitchen for my coffee cup.

“Well, I mean, procreation wasn’t part of the divine plan, now, was it?” she asked.

“I don’t know! But it’s DNA and shit. He had balls.”

“Look, if you don’t believe in the Holy Spirit, then it was obviously parthenogenesis, so where would the balls even come from? There would be no Y chromosome.”

“But do you know how fucking rare a male gamete is in that scenario?” I countered in a raised voice. “Look, the odds are fairly high that Jesus had balls, even if He didn’t use them. Okay?”

“Your coffee cup is right there, behind the cutting board,” she said quietly.

“Oh.” I snatched up my cup. “Anyway, yeah, we’re lucky we don’t fight over anything really serious.”