A few weeks ago, our TV was doing its thing where it carousels through our camera roll while idle, indoctrinating us into our own family with endless blurred images of ourselves plus the occasional child butt rash pic. I realized that the best day of 2020 involved me watching semi-professional wrestling in a garage in North Philly. Yikes, read that one back.
In the photo, it’s early January and I’m standing in front of the ring before the card started. Snowflakes had melted into tiny orbs of dew in my hair, I’m wearing my favorite sweater, red lipstick, and my complexion looks almost lavender under the fluorescents. I’m giddy because we are about to do the funnest, dumbest thing you can do, which is watch wrestling. I’m giddy because it was our first overnight away from the kids since we moved to Maryland when I was six months pregnant and now our baby was already one year old. I’m smirking but it reads like a scowl, the way it does in my driver’s license photo, my passport photo, the reason people tell me they didn’t expect me, with my long, serious Modigliani face, to be friendly. And I say to them, “I know! It’s because of my face!” I’m scowling in the picture on the screen but I know that it’s really a smile.
The morning after the wrestling match in the garage in North Philly, we had coffee together in Center City near our hotel and I felt something lift off of me as we watched the city’s morning movements through the plate glass. In Columbus, I used to go to spinning classes in the evening and I’d get so hot that I’d walk to my car afterwards in just my sports bra and leggings, even through the worst of winter. Steam would rise off of my arms and I would imagine that the steam was all the shitty little resentments that had found purchase within me throughout the day. My collection of bad vibes getting cooked out of me, the YMCA cycle room as temazcal. In the coffee shop in Philly, my accumulated post-Christmas negativity and anxiety was once again vaporized into mist, and all it took was 20 hours away from my kids.
I wonder when next I will enjoy 20 hours away from my kids. We spent our honeymoon in the Andes mountains and next year is our tenth wedding anniversary. At one time, I thought we could go to Patagonia, the Paine mountains, as a sort of honeymoon redux. Now I feel that staying in a Holiday Inn Express one night and watching the last half of “What About Bob?” on cable is more the level I should be targeting.
***
We heard last week that the college that employs my husband was looking to eliminate 14 faculty positions by January 1. I don’t know if that will happen, if 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 people will lose their jobs, I don’t know that if it does, that Nick will number among the poor bastards who get catapulted into the dirt. The future has always been unknowable but wow does it ever feel like a grab bag lately.
We had discussed such contingencies already, back in the first weeks of the pandemic when the writing on the wall regarding budgetary calamity was more of a flashing neon sign. Nick and I had some charged, heavy, but ultimately life-affirming conversations. Then I set the thought aloft like a stray eyelash plucked from a friend’s cheek, too busy trying to keep all the moving parts of our home life in motion. But the news of 14 people on the chopping block brought it all back into focus.
January 1. Not to be dramatic but what’s better, getting hit by a bus or withering away for the six months the doctors give you to live? Job loss isn’t death, I know that, but for us it would be the death of something.
***
June 20 was the summer solstice, the longest day of the year. We all woke up late and were thinking about taking a bike ride somewhere, but the skies opened up and we abandoned our plan. The kids were starting to get mid-day feral and we finally decided to just chuck them in the car and go for a drive in the rain.
We stopped at the thrift store, poised to do the thing where one of us stays in the car with kids while the other one goes in and shops, then we switch. Nick went first and emerged a few minutes later shaking his head. There wasn’t anything good, plus the employees weren’t wearing masks. I decided not to chance it and called in an order at the dispensary the next town over. I hadn’t patronized the dispensary since the pandemic hit but had heard they were doing curbside pickup. We crossed the river that bisects our town, dividing Kent County where we live from Queen Anne’s County which takes you all the way to the Chesapeake Bay Bridge.
When we got to the dispensary, we parked and a woman in a mask brought my order right out to me. I felt like Cleopatra, Queen of the Nile. What is this world where you can have a carhop for drugs, where you can get them hand-delivered to your station wagon in broad daylight while your children moo from the backseat.
The sun came out and burned up all the mist. I pitched driving to my favorite beach in Queen Anne’s County since we were already more than halfway there, thinking maybe the stormy morning would mean fewer beachgoers. We had suits for the kids in the back of the car, and towels, from our last beach trip heat-dried and starched in the oven of the car. There wasn’t a swimsuit for me but I figured I’d just hang out with Jane on the shore.
But Jane didn’t want to hang out on the shore. The sand was fine and sugary soft, and an expansive sandbar meant our open-water-phobic four-year-old lunged into the meekly lapping waves. He would scoop up pebbles for the baby, and hand them to her. And the baby, fat and perfect in her sunhat, happily chucked them back into the water. The Bay Bridge rose up behind them in the background, the fencing to our vast watery backyard.
I stood on the shore in my clothes, so content that I didn’t feel the urge to take a photo and my mind was emptied of the normal din of dinner bath bedtime grocery run dashboard warning lights work emails I was pretty sure I responded to but what if I forgot to hit send and it’s festering as an Outlook draft. Nick saw me mooning at them and told me just to get in the water.
"I really don’t want to sit in wet jeans all the way home."
"You can take them off in the car!"
I waded into the bay and it was like a baptism, everything wiped clean. I suddenly, overwhelmingly, had to pee and before I could consciously decide to do it, I created a pair of leggings underneath my jeans, composed of hot urine. I made a face and Nick asked me if I was peeing. I felt both debauched and wholesome and happier than I’d been in months. It occurred to me that Cleopatra died by suicide to avoid giving up her power. I would give up anything to get to be with these three people, I’d give up a tenure-track job, I’d give up our house, I’d give up a 30 minute ride home in jeans that aren’t soaked in polluted water and my own pee.
***
On January 1, Jane will turn two and we will celebrate that at one time we wanted another baby but I was so uncreative that I could not imagine what another baby would be like. I just pictured her brother, Xeroxed, and we picked out a girl name but didn’t really mean it because I was sure it was a boy, because I was sure that I didn’t make girls due to my rigorous airtight sample size of 1. It’s not better to have a girl or a boy, I just definitely thought she was a boy.
And then she arrived on January 1 even though I tried to make her show up on earlier, all nine and a half pounds of her. I don’t believe in God as officious project manager or in God at all, I can’t help but believe sometimes that there is an autonomous decentralized cosmic scheduler who has to move you back because someone else got double-booked reply C to confirm reply CANCEL to stop receiving these messages. The New Year’s Baby herself. And anyway, once she was here, everything was different, and the past was not colorless without her, it was colored differently by the her-ness that exists now. And so no, not even the threat of austerity cuts can make January 1 anything less than a perfect day for this family but nice try.
***
Eventually, our beach bubble burst: Desi got hungry. We hauled back to the car and I peeled my jeans off in the parking lot for the trip home. The kids passed out immediately and Nick and I got some lousy cracker-crust pizza from a strip mall pizzeria and pass it back and forth over the center console all the way home. That night, Nick and I watched a movie on my laptop on a slowly deflating air mattress on the back porch. By the end of the movie, we’re just fully on the concrete slab of the porch. I don’t even remember to eat half a gummy like I’d been planning to do all day. The stars literally twinkled all around us. It was the best day of 2020.
yr mate,
Evie
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