Everything Happened | vol. 185

Women in steam

The toilet bowls have freckled with mold. We have three toilets in this house, one for every person in our family who knows how to use one. It’s too many toilets and all of them are moldy.

It’s so muggy that the floors in my house feel damp under my feet. It reminds me of New Orleans, a place I’d rather be if I could be there alone. If I could drink an inky purple beverage in a plastic cup while walking around at night, squeezing the soft sides of the cup so the ice popped up to the rim and crashed back down again, that would be pretty good.

The last time I was in New Orleans, I saw a man smoking a cigarette inside a CVS and I clapped with joy. Indoor smoking is bad and gross but it felt like spotting a rare, wild bird thought to have gone extinct. I know I’m technically young but sometimes the things I remember from my youth make me feel old. Ashtrays on airplanes. My dad calling the couch the “davenport.”

If I could be in New Orleans right now, I would for sure fire up a Camel light in any chain pharmacy that would have me.

Both my kids have hyper-reactive skin. Sometimes a memory arrives to me unbidden — the pediatrician’s gasp of horror as she unsnapped my infant son’s diaper and saw the severity of his diaper rash. The shame pressure-washes me like a hotel shower head even still. And Jane’s skin is even worse than Desi’s.

I took her in for her 15-month well visit toward the beginning of the stay-at-home order, something that seemed unconscionably dumb even as I was doing it. The reason I was doing it is because though I intended to, day after day, I did not manage to cancel in advance of the 24-hour cut-off. I am risking my life and the life of others to avoid a $50 missed appointment fee, I thought as I turned off my car’s engine in the pediatrician’s office parking lot.

This is my first car where you turn the engine off by pushing a button rather than turning a key. It is as unsatisfying as trying to hang up emphatically on a smart phone. Remember slamming the phone in the cradle? That was good shit. More than I would like to be in New Orleans, I would like to encounter a bank of payphones with all the phones hanging limp in the breeze. And I would go one by one and angrily hang them all up.

My point is that it is hard to hate yourself in a specific moody, cinematic way in the parking lot of the pediatrician’s office, where you probably should not be, when you are pushing a button to turn off the car.

Jane got her immunizations and everything and the pediatrician’s office was incredibly sterile. All the children’s toys and books had been vacated from the waiting room and there was no one there except for staff. When the doctor clucked at her eczema, my glasses fogged from the hot, indignant nasal exhale into my mask. Why, in a deadly pandemic, must I get grief about her skin?

Her ankles have it the worst. On the doctor’s recommendation, Nick found luxurious silky bamboo-based socks online and bought Jane six pairs.

Do you know what I did next? I rounded up every shitty, mismatched, synthetic, little baby sock. Every single one of Jane’s dumb cheap socks heaped in drawers and baskets and corners of their bedroom. And I threw them all INTO THE TRASH.

The sensation was……well, by pandemic standards, it was erotic.

A few days after the appointment, pediatricians started recommending that well visits for children under age two should be prioritized. I felt vindicated. If you were knowingly being a bad citizen, and maybe a bad mom, but then it turns out you were actually being a good citizen, or a good mom, are you still bad? Kant would say yes. But I bet Kant didn’t raise his own kids.

The socks were good, but even with greasing her up three times a day with Aquaphor, and having her sleep with a cool mist humidifier, and just generally having the most precious skincare routine outside of YouTube, her eczema persisted. I hoped that warmer temperatures and humidity would help, as it does for my own skin. We waited out the chilly spring. Even though “school” is not out for several weeks, it’s summer in every other sense here in the mid-Atlantic.

The AC unit needs to be replaced so at the moment, our whole house is functioning as a tabletop humidifier. My hair has shrugged itself two inches shorter. The bananas start to spot brown while they’re still green somehow. I set up a box fan beside my desk which means that I still have a sweat moustache, but now I have a refreshing breeze blowing across my sweat moustache.

Nick’s and my first apartment together, where we lived for years, did not have air conditioning. To us, this was romantic and and vintage and proof that we were hard, not coddled. We didn’t even have window units because I hated the noise, even as my laptop slid on around on my thigh sweat. In Columbus, Ohio, you could almost do without, if you were going to be spending a lot of time out of the house anyway.

Not here in the swamp, where my toothbrush grew mold yesterday in the hours that elapsed between morning and night. This is what’s going on with the toilet, by the way, in case you live in a more reasonable climate. I know I can’t get on top of the toilet mold, so I’m running out of reasons to bother. No chance of an unexpected houseguest seeing us for who we really are. Shiny, sweaty, mold people.

I’ve got a couple of air conditioning guys I’m courting right now, guys with names like Zeke and JC and Wayne. In the next few weeks, we’ll get our new unit and we’ll be back to our freon-rich, coddled life.

In the meantime, everyone in my house has lacquered skin like a Glossier ad. And Jane’s eczema has never been better.

yr mate,
Evie
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