Zahara! Eat your whole-wheat pasta or else. And all six of you scram out of the family bed-NOW! Hey, why don’t you be Brad?
William: I am not a role-playing sort of man.
Me (
William: Jesus, Alice. Go to sleep.
62
I wake in the late morning with a terrible headache. William’s side of the bed is empty. I check his Facebook status.
William Buckle
One hour ago
Either he’s on his way to Paris or he’s gone for a ten-mile run. I lift my head from the pillow and the room tilts. I’m still drunk. Bad wife. Bad mother. I think about what embarrassing things I did last night at the potluck and cringe. Did I really try and pass Ikea meatballs off as my own? Did I really crawl through a hedge in Nedra’s garden looking for a portal into Narnia? Did I really admit to our friends that we have sex only once a month?
I fall back to sleep. Two hours later, I wake and weakly call out “Peter,” then “Caroline,” then “Zoe.” I can’t bring myself to call for William-I’m too humiliated, plus I don’t want to admit to him I’ve got a hangover. Finally, in desperation, I yell “Jampo” and am rewarded with the immediate frantic pitter-pat of tiny feet. He rushes into the bedroom and hurls himself up on the bed, panting at me as if to say “you are the only thing in this world I love, the only thing I care about, the one thing I live for.” Then he proceeds to pee all over the sheets in excitement.
“Bad boy, bad boy!” I shout but it’s useless, he can’t stop in midstream, so I just watch him dribble. His bottom lip has somehow gotten stuck on his teeth, giving him a pathetic, unintentional Elvis sort of sneer that could be read as hostility but I know is shame. “It’s all right,” I tell him. When he’s done, I drag myself out of bed, strip off my clothes, the duvet, sheets, and mattress cover, and make a mental list of things I will do today to set myself right.
1. Drink room-temperature water with lemon.
2. Knit a scarf. A long, thin scarf. No, a short, thin scarf. No, a coaster, i.e. an extremely short, short scarf.
3. Take Jampo on a brisk walk outside: 30 to 45 minutes minimum without sunglasses, perhaps in a low-cut V-neck, so I can fully absorb optimal daily dose of vitamin D through my retinas and the delicate skin at the tops of my breasts.
4. Plant lemon verbena in the yard so I can start drinking tisanes and feeling organic and cleansed and elegant (providing 1. lemon verbena is still alive after buying at Home Depot a month ago and then forgetting to water or repot AND 2. if able to dip head below waist without puking).
5. Laundry.
6. Make Bolognese sauce, simmer on the stove all day so the family comes home to homey smell of cooking.
7. Sing, or if I’m too nauseous to sing, watch
8. Remember what it felt like to be sixteen going on seventeen.
It’s a good to-do list-too bad I don’t do a thing on it. Instead, I make another mental list of things I absolutely should NOT do and proceed to knock off every single item:
1. Load the washer but forget to turn it on.
2. Eat eight bite-sized Reese’s peanut butter cups while telling myself they only add up to half of a regular- sized cup.
3. Eat eight more.
4. Put a bay leaf (because lemon verbena very clearly dead) in some boiling-hot water and force myself to drink entire mugful.
5. Feel great because I picked that bay leaf while taking a hike in Tilden Park and then dried it in the sun (okay, in the dryer, but I would have dried it in the sun if I hadn’t left it in the pocket of my fleece and then stuck it in the wash).
6. Feel really great because I am now officially a forager.
7. Contemplate a new career as a bay leaf forager/supplier to Bay Area’s best restaurants. Fantasize about being featured in the annual food issue of the
8. Google California bay leaf and discover it’s the Mediterranean bay leaf that is used for cooking and while the California bay leaf is not poisonous, ingestion is not recommended.
9. Go online and reread all the communication between me and Researcher 101 until I’ve read between all his lines and sucked every bit of titillation out of his words.
10. Exhausted, fall asleep on the chaise in the sun, Jampo curled up beside me.
“You smell like booze. It’s oozing out of your pores.”
I open my eyes slowly to see William looking down at me.
“It’s customary to give a person some warning when a person is sound asleep,” I say.
“A person shouldn’t be sound asleep at four in the afternoon,” William counters.
“Would now be a good time to tell you I’d like to change schools and enroll at the Pacific Boychoir Academy in the fall?” asks Peter, he and Zoe strolling out onto the deck.
I raise my eyebrows at William, giving him my see-I-told-you-our-son-was-gay look.
“Since when do you like to sing?” asks William.
“Are you getting bullied?” I ask, cortisol flooding through my body at the thought of him being picked on.
“God, Mom, you stink,” says Zoe. She waves her hand at me.
“Yes, your father already informed me of that. Where have you been all day?”
“Zoe and I hung out on Telegraph Avenue,” says Peter.
“Telegraph Avenue? The two of you?
Zoe and Peter exchange a furtive look. Zoe shrugs. “So.”
“So-it’s not safe there,” I say.
“Why, because of all the homeless people?” asks Zoe. “I’ll have you know our generation is post- homeless.”
“What does that mean?” I ask.
“It means we’re not afraid of them. We’ve been brought up to look homeless people in the eye.”
“And help them panhandle,” adds Peter.
“And where were you while our children were begging on Telegraph Avenue?” I ask William.
“It’s not my fault. I dropped them off at Market Hall in Rockridge. They took the bus to Berkeley,” says William.
“Pedro sang ‘Ode to Joy’ in German. We made some guy twenty bucks!” says Zoe.
“
“There’s a ‘You Can Sing Ludwig von Beethoven in German’ channel on YouTube,” says Peter.
“William, should I start with the potatoes?” Caroline shouts from the kitchen.
“I’ll help,” I say, hauling myself out of the chaise.
“No need. Stay here. We’ve got it under control,” says William, disappearing into the house.
As I watch everyone bustling around the kitchen, it occurs to me that Sunday afternoon is the loneliest time of the week. With a sigh, I open my laptop.
John Yossarian
3 hours ago
