Coronavirus reunion edition: Jenny and Gargantubaby visit Gramps and Nonna
On Saturday, May 22, 2021, I take Gargantubaby, who is three and a half, to visit my parents in Evanston, Illinois. It's the first time we've all seen each other since January 2020, when GB was two and my parents came to San Francisco from Evanston and my brother and sister-in-law flew in from China.
SATURDAY
It's been long enough that my parents forget that when they pick me up from the airport, I sit in the backseat writing down everything they say.
They have an age-old dynamic where my mom tries to tell my dad directions, and Dad tries to quiet her with a dangerously calm, "Rose." She's never right, but she never stops trying to give him directions. It starts before we're even out of the airport, on our way to the elevator to the parking garage.
Mom: It's Comiskey.
Dave: Rose.
In the car, Dad drives:
Rose: Are you going to make a salad?
Dave (readies himself): No. I didn't make a salad.
Rose: What? Why didn't you make a salad?
Dave (low voice): There's nowhere to put a salad.
Rose (incredulous): What do you mean there's nowhere to put a salad?
Dave (voice getting lower): The refrigerator is completely filled.
Rose (to herself): We need a salad. We'll wait until everyone's settled and then we'll make a salad.
Dave: (Adjusts to the reality that "we" will be making a salad)
They switch seamlessly from trying to silence the other person to commiserating on the faults of the outside world.
Dave: Car on the left.
Rose: Yeah.
Dave: No lights.
Rose: Yeah.
Rose: When I was in Kaufman's, I saw these pies, David, oh my god. Oh, we gotta call John tomorrow, it's his birthday, Jenny. (Looking out the window) People are eating inside. Hmm. I have no desire to do that.
Dave: Me, neither.
Rose: The menu for the week is, I'm going to do salmon. And risotto. And eggplant with ground lamb. It has spices on it. The chicken tomorrow. Did I miss one, David?
Dave: We have it written down. I'll do the za'atar tomorrow with sesame seeds.
Rose (pointing to a stop sign): Watch it, David.
Dave: I see it!
Rose (murmuring): It's just so hard to see.
Gargantubaby: Can you open the window?
Me: Not right now.
GB: I was asking Gramps.
Gramps: (Rolls down the window)
Me: (Aghast that I have been superseded so easily)
GB (somewhere south of the Loop): Did you know ... that some people can't walk ... and so they have to ride in a big chair with wheels?
(My brain screams with pleasure: TEACHING MOMENT. I talk at length about the wonder of wheelchairs and why people use them.)
Dave: Gargantubaby, tomorrow we'll make pickles. I have some already, but we'll make new pickles, and then in three days we'll be able to eat them. Does that sound OK?
GB: Ooooookay!
Dave: The itsy bitsy spider went up ... Gargantubaby!
GB: (Listening)
Dave: Went up Gargantubaby's nose.
Rose: (Hoots laughing) GB laughs. Dad goes on making up the rest of the song. Mom is delighted.
Rose: There's a bicycle!
Dave: Where!
Rose: Right in front of you!
Dave: Yeah, I see him! It's really irritating!
Me: What's irritating? (Thinking maybe he's irritated with Mom.)
Dave: The guy riding in front of me in the dark!
Mom has cleared out their back room to make a bedroom for me and Gargantubaby. She’s moved her workspace for the week but not her latest art installation. This is what it looks like where GB and I will sleep.
SUNDAY
Sunday morning my brother calls from China. He's just spent six hours grading papers. When he adjusts his screen, we see he's wearing a Hawaiian shirt. We all exclaim. My dad started wearing Hawaiian shirts about ten years ago and my mom has never recovered. I also kind of don't get it because the rest of the time he wears twenty-year-old L.L. Bean. Jesse tells us he started wearing Hawaiian shirts because after wearing collared shirts for work, he can't stand T-shirts around his neck, and his only choice where he lives in China for short-sleeved collared shirts that aren't polos (or so he says) is Hawaiian shirts.
Dad runs into the bedroom to fetch a loud shirt with pineapples and parrots on it and holds it up to the screen.
But do you like them? Mom and I press Jesse.
I get a lot of compliments on this shirt, he says, laughing.
Yeah, says Mom. When your dad wore his to the Botanic Gardens, I can't tell you how many times we got stopped.
This is obviously something that delighted my dad and did not delight my mom.
Mom tells me a long story about an odyssey of trying to get diagnosed with acid reflux but can't stop calling it reflexology. After the second time, I stop correcting her.
We sit on the couch talking about our bad experiences with the medical establishment. It turns out we have a lot to share. She says that in her day, after childbirth, she stayed in the hospital for five days as opposed to two, like me, and they gave her a steak dinner with wine. I attempt to process this. We talk for a solid hour and there are no trapdoors.
Finally, though, Mom and I get in a fight while we're taking a walk with Gargantubaby, who watches us uncertainly with his hand on a fencepost. Back at their apartment, Mom and I sit in the backyard and talk using nonviolent communication (NVC), something I've been learning from the therapist SJ and I see. It works because we're both trying. We hug.
GB bonks my nose with his head so hard I have to put ice on it. Although I heard it crunch, nothing seems broken.
My cousin “Agata,” who lives downstairs and owns the two-flat, yells at GB through the floor, "No running in the house!" Normally I visit her every time I'm in Evanston because I'm afraid that somewhere in her inscrutable brain, her feelings will be hurt if I don't. This time I don't visit and it feels like a revelation not to feel guilty or as if I'm being passive-aggressive. I'm not mad at her (I never am), and I'm not drawn to see her. It just doesn't matter if I see her or not, so I don't.
Note to self, 8:30 p.m.: "I'm really high and following this kids' movie better than my mom is."
MONDAY
Worked all day. Dad takes GB to Fireman's Park, a neighborhood park with a decommissioned fire engine where I played as a child, to meet my cousin Tim and his five-year-old daughter, Toni. They come by the apartment afterward, and Dad offers Tim a beer. Tim and I talk about our shared philosophy of not abusing kids at sports games. As usual I am grateful and proud to be related to him.
At dinner, Dad talks about how the grocery store is his social outlet. Mom lights into him. Rose: Who needs a lifetime supply of cannoli? (She means cannellini beans.) We have nine cans of cannoli beans! We have a lifetime supply of pasta! I could open up a shop. I could hang a sign that says Pritchett Market on our door.
Dave (low voice, defending his shopping choices): I made cod chowder. I made gumbo.
Rose: We could have invited the neighbors over for how much you made! The only reason we don't have more fish and meat is there's a limit on what can go in the freezer.
Dave to GB: Your Nonna has a sense of humor that is very pointed. Do you know what that means? It means she's poking Gramps with a handle. She's sticking Gramps with a stick.
Rose: What was that phrase you used? You couldn't get any bigger? (Dad has said something about how he wants to eat more dinner but he can't get any bigger.)
Dave (to GB): Look over there (points in the opposite direction and, when GB looks that way, gives Mom the finger).
Dave (pulling something out of his arugula salad, which Mom made): Rose, look. This is a piece of plastic. It's not food. It's a piece of plastic.
Rose: Oh, god. I'm glad YOU got it.
TUESDAY
I dream that my mother and I are in love with the same priest, who is dying and who my mother is ministering to. In the dream she mistakes him being kind to her as accepting her feedback on the book he is writing. Every time she leaves the room, the priest and I make out. It's hot.
My nose still feels kind of numb from the bonk.
GB wants a smoothie, but the only person for whom the novelty of making him something he wants outweighs the labor of washing the blender is Dad, and he's out having coffee with his group. Mom decides GB should call him to ask him to come home to make him a smoothie. They sit on the sofa and call him twice, but as usual, Dad doesn't pick up.
Rose: What if I had a heart attack? What if I had to go to the hospital? Dad walks in a half hour later. Rose: What if I had a heart attack? What if I had to go to the hospital?
I run out to meet some of our oldest friends, Susan and Dillard, at a breakfast place. We sit outside under an umbrella and I talk about how overwhelmed I always seem to be.
Susan (boiling it down for Dillard): She craves order. And her life is chaos.
On the way home I drive past my old apartment from senior year in college. As I'm idling outside, trying to figure out if it's the right place, a young woman, obviously a student, walks outside to move her car. The place is nicer than when I lived there, the front yard beautifully planted with tons of flowers. I think about taking a picture and sending it to my old roommates, but I can't think of why, so I don't.
I take a mid-afternoon walk to the new dispensary in town, which happens to be on the same street my parents live on. I discover that pre-rolls are twice as expensive in Illinois. I buy one anyway and, later that evening, sit under the tree in the backyard, completely hidden, and smoke weed, somehow 14 and 44 at the same time.
Dad sits with GB on his lap in front of his computer, watching an animation of the orchestral arrangement of Percy Grainger's "Children's March," old videos of Victor Borges (GB LOVES these, giggling at the pianist's silly faces), and Camille Saint-Saëns's Carnival of the Animals with Daffy Duck and Bugs Bunny. I remember my first visits after GB was born, when I would whisk him off Dad's lap as Dad tried to show him the Muppet Show and other evil screen time. Now I feel grateful.
WEDNESDAY
Since the pandemic started, my parents have taken to listening to music during every dinner. It's mostly easy listening. One night it's a YouTube mix that includes the sound of waves hitting the shore. Another night it's "Happy Italian Music."
I tell my mom I'm in the running for something really cool. Rose (age 79): Well, you do look a little Latinx (laughing at how clever she is). How can we elevate that?
SEVENTY-NINE. "LATINX."
At dinner Mom valiantly tries to impress upon me how much I need to watch Shtisel but never once even accidentally lands on the right pronunciation. Shit-l is my favorite. The other series I need to watch are Call My Agent, Borgen, and Lupin.
THURSDAY
There is trauma that lives in my body. I have had waves of two bad feelings this week: one when I was wearing shorts and thinking of looking at myself in my parents' mirror, after eating bacon and scones for breakfast. I haven't had that feeling in a long time about food/body. I recognize it and breathe through it. I'm reading Girlhood by Melissa Febos, and she has the best line about eating disorders I've ever come across: "You choose it, and then it chooses you." That's what it was like, for more than fifteen years. It's been another ten years of being able to say I'm not bulimic or anorexic anymore, but being in this environment, which hasn't triggered me consciously, reminds me that the trauma lives on.
Second, when I'm in my parents' bathroom washing my hands, I get that gross feeling about water. It always happens when I'm wet, and I've never been able to figure it out, but I finally have a theory: I was molested once, outside of my clothes, by a stranger in a restaurant in Saudi Arabia. I was about eight. My family was in a town far from Ras Tanura and Rahima, and we had gone into the bathrooms adjacent to a restaurant before lunch. I wanted to be the first one done, so I ran out of the women's bathroom by myself into an empty lobby, where a young man stood behind a curved wooden counter and invited me to come behind it, where he put his hand between my legs and then invited me to follow him into a room behind the counter, where a mattress lay on the floor. Something broke in my brain—I didn't understand what was happening, or that what was happening was possible. Somehow I pushed away from him. I must have gone back into the bathroom, because I remember coming out again and that the man was gone. It was like he never existed and what had happened hadn't happened. I didn't eat any of my lunch, and I remember my mom being upset with me about that and about my sudden change of demeanor. Later she would be upset because I would never wear those salmon-colored coveralls again and I couldn't tell her why.
My theory is that my hands were still wet from the bathroom when the man touched me, and that that, thirty-five years later, is why I sometimes have this overwhelming feeling of disgustingness when I am wet. I recognize it and breathe through it.
FRIDAY
On the way to the Field Museum, I talk about how concerned I am about the possibility of a recall election in California. I mention that Caitlyn Jenner has offered herself as a potential candidate for governor.
Dad: What was this about her coming out against trans people in sports?
Me: Oh, I don't know. I hadn't heard that.
MY 79-YEAR-OLD MOM ON CAITLYN JENNER: If you're a jerk when you're cis, you're a jerk when you're trans.
SATURDAY
I finally sign my parents' books for them, one for Dad and one for Mom. I think about signing the same thing to both of them before visualizing how my mom will complain. To my mom I sign, "For everything you taught me that isn't listed here." To my dad I sign something like, "Thank you for the memories, for the old ones and those yet to come."
She and Dad sit on the couch. I sit in the chair.
So, says Mom. What are the things that aren't listed?
This is it. I finally have my chance to tell them all the things I was saving for their eulogy, rather than doing what I imagine I normally do, which is come home, criticize everything, then leave.
First, I tell them, in the book I say (when I acknowledge them), For teaching me to be loving and unafraid. Loving is Dad, unafraid is Mom.
They nod.
I say:
You taught me to recognize when things weren't equal for girls and women. I'm reading a book right now that talks about how we're conditioned to accept subhuman treatment from men. I wasn't the kind of girl who sucked it up. I got in the opposite kind of trouble, never letting anything go and always calling out unfair treatment. (We reminisce about how, after I brought up a sexist mnemonic device my physics teacher gave the class to remember something color-coded—he was a nice guy who'd been in the running with Christa McAuliffe to fly on the Challenger—he never taught it that way again.)
I say:
You taught me to be curious about the world and other cultures and other people.
I say:
You taught me not to have guilt in pleasure, that good food is good food, to be excited about music or a glass of wine or travel or second-hand finds.
I say:
You taught me healthy habits. Even after the wasteland of my twenties, I believe I have healthy (mmmm OK healthy-ish) habits because they were modeled for me.
I say:
You taught me to stand up for myself.
I say:
You read all the time. So I read all the time.
I say:
You taught me to laugh. You laugh all the time. I do, too, and I found a partner who does the same.
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We ate like royalty because my parents are really good cooks. Pictured below are:
My Dad's cranberry and walnut scones.
My Dad's super-moist grilled butterflied chicken, dilly beans, and potatoes and onions.
My Mom's mushroom risotto (she stirred it for AN HOUR).
My Dad's bomb-ass eggplant and lamb, from the cookbook they swear by, The Jerusalem Cookbook, which they’ve spent the pandemic working their way through. I barely eat any meat and I ate the shit out of this dish.
My Mom's walnut cake, which she had in Athens, their favorite spot, and then looked up online so she could have it at home.
My Mom's bomb-ass linguini carbonara with some leftover bucatini hidden in there, and the arugula salad that had one piece of plastic in it.
I took pictures of the recipe for "Stuffed eggplant with lamb & pine nuts," but even though my dad swears it's dead easy, it's two pages long, so I'll just say this: It's layers of eggplant and lamb with cumin, paprika, cinnamon, and tamarind paste, and my dad used walnuts because pine nuts are expensive.
Gargantubaby expresses pleasure with Nonna’s carbonara