Life Lately: Vignettes
A nice thing about my new job is that I’m on the fourth floor, next to a window, and sometimes get to be eye-level with a passing red-tail hawk. Less pleasant when the turkey vultures attempt to land on our windowsill. I get to see weddings in the park below, as couples leave the courthouse and stand beneath crepe myrtle trees, pledging troth to each other. I often think how funny it is, these people living a very important, once-in-a-lifetime day while I sit and type data into the correct fields. From up here, the way she clamps a hand to her white veil against a lifting breeze is a small gesture, almost imperceptible. They are mostly young, these courthouse brides, getting married on a Tuesday in a white sundress to the boys they’ve fallen for. Down there, the group is joking about the wind, and taking photos, and making vows. The red-tail hawk wobbles in flight on a sudden updraft. If I’m very quiet, I can just barely make out the sound of laughter the wind has brought up. I wish the new couple nothing but happy memories of this moment.
Something I never noticed about myself till working beside others: I sneeze exactly once a day, without fail. There is no common denominator, no specific time of day or cause. But each morning or afternoon I will sneeze once, and receive a double “bless you” from the cubicles on either side of mine. This is my legacy. The weird, once-daily sneeze-girl.
In the lull between projects I ask few coworkers how they came by their names. The answers are wide-ranging, heartwarming, and hilarious by turns. Everyone has a name, and the reasons behind them hold stories. How many times do we skim over the stories ready to be unearthed because we forget to ask a question? I am guilty of this.
I sit across the table from my husband and we eat salty tortilla chips and drink crispy Diet Cokes in companionable silence. Sometimes I dig deep for a really hard “would you rather” prompt or ask him if he’d love me if I were a pigeon (he hates pigeons). More often I let the silence lie where it falls because we are tired and have been speaking to others all day, and I just want to dozily eat the 757’s weird white chip dip and let my mind wander aimlessly from thing to thing and be called seniorita by the proprietor even though I’m a little past seniorita age and status.
This fourth year of marriage feels pleasant and broken-in, the way a journal feels when you have finally cracked its spine and its pages lie open to receive your thoughts.
We go for walks, threaten to move abroad, watch Alone together and yap about how many days we could survive in the wilderness by ourselves. We queue up a creature flick (Tremors, 1990) and settle in for a classic movie night, even though I like sort-of-scary movies and Andrew likes slapstick comedy (Tremors is a good choice). We look at single family homes on Zillow and daydream about moving, about living in each house that’s nicer than the next. I’m picky about the way it looks and he’s choosy about where it’s located. We pretend to decide if moving is a sound idea right now, and since we know it isn’t, we tear out the boring bushes and plant perennials instead. If we’re staying put, at least I’ll have peonies and hellebores out front, and strawberries ripening in back.
Fertility treatments approach - or we plan that way- which for me means “panic about it, then block it out and fervently hope a miracle happens before we pay the first installment”. In preparation of potentially being pregnant soon, I eat danger-foods: sushi on my lunch break (raw) and oysters (raw), cold-cut turkey sandwiches on sourdough bread, swirly iced lattes made with creamy, unpasteurized milk, and any soft cheese I can find. On our anniversary I tepidly sip the complimentary champagne the restaurant brings us before pouring it into Andrew’s wine glass. I don’t think I’m pregnant but at the rate I’m going, I better not be. Anyway, I don’t like champagne. I’m pretty confident I can indulge in all of these things without worry. However just in case, I take a guilty, after-the-fact pregnancy test…
Negative.
I’m relieved, for what its worth.
Being relieved at a negative test is new.
I feel a little guilty for feeling relieved, but if I can’t be pregnant, at least I can have a poke bowl, right? I order sushi twice more for work lunches, since I’m so very unpregnant, and continue doing nothing to prepare for fertility treatments except hope and pray it doesn’t come to that (it’s coming to that).
Andrew’s sister gets married on a blazing-hot April day with a hundred relatives and another hundred friends, and we dance until our feet go numb, till we’re gasping for something cold to drink. Because it’s an Italian wedding there is a cookie table, and flutes of Moscato, and plenty of food, and we dance the chaotic, spiraling, “Lazy Mary” until someone steps on my bare foot with a high heel. The wedding is a happy occasion - they leave at night under an arch of sparkling wands and pompoms of pink cherry blossom and we limp home to shed our sweaty clothes.
Later on we eat more raw oysters at a serious, grown-up restaurant. I tip the deep, salty cups to my mouth and feel long days at beach and a good tan almost within reach. We take out-of-town cousins to eat kiln-baked pizza, the most perfect pizza: small, curled pepperonis cupping hot honey above the uncomplicated flavors of good tomatoes and real mozzarella. Want to know something magical about the pizza at Victoria’s? The crust is made with imported flour, so gentle on the body that one of our party who has celiac disease, is able to eat it with no repercussions. Her joy at participating in a real, genuine pizza slice is palpable. The pizza is such a hit, they order one for the road back to Michigan, and we drive away in a car smelling like wood-fired celebration. This is the razzle-dazzle that makes up a good life.
For exactly three days I think about growing out my hair till I can wear it long, like the hot girls. Nah. A week later, I see my stylist, Chloe, and get to work on chopping it all off. There’s a name for my preferred haircut now: the Italian bob. I like my new hair. I learn how to style it almost exactly like the inspiration photo, and feel like a grown woman.
Did you know short haircuts are (at this second) trendy? I find myself grateful that something about my appearance will be “in” since by all popularity metrics, body diversity is “out.”
Popular or not, I continue vouching for my body (a large one) and others’ bodies (all sizes). I avoid as many conversations as I can about coworkers on Ozempic, or other weight-loss drugs.
“How did she do it?” they marvel.
“She’s been so good,” one says, “I need to be good.”
Another says she never eats dinner after the gym, so as not to “mess up” her hard work.
I have privately held opinions about the widespread use of weight-loss drugs and the way they silence one’s hunger cues, the voice of one’s own body…but mostly I am saddened by the way that in the public mind, thinness once again equals health, which equals morality. The way someone thinks if you really wanted to be healthy, you would be thin, and that if you really want to be thin, you’d take a pill. God forbid a woman take up space. God forbid she have an appetite, both literal and metaphorical. God forbid she settle into a sustainable, well-fed form that doesn’t appease bored men addicted to pleasure, and starved women too kept to break free.
There is so much I want to say about this, but instead I bring hot, lemon-glazed donuts from the Mennonite women up the street. Everyone eats them, and hardly anyone says a word about being “bad.” A small act of rebellion, but I can work with this.
One night after eating dinner, we notice our resident bunny in the yard. Realistically, it’s probably not the same rabbit - the markings are different and suburban rabbits don’t have especially long lifespans - but she is “BunBun” each year, regardless. Together Andrew and I watch as the rabbit gently severs the tall, past-prime dandelions and eats them, stem first, saving the frothy seed-heads for last. With all the neat manners of a finishing school girl, she polishes off each white puff like a mouthful of cotton-candy. We are the luckiest, to have a yard bunny so quaint.
Perched on a bank above the marsh, I read about interstellar travel (Project Hail Mary) till my lunch-hour is over. The trees are very, very apple green and I want to spend all day under them, not sitting at a desk. One afternoon as I head out for my lunch break, I spy a swarm of honeybees gathered on a cherry tree. Where there are bees, there are people misunderstanding bees. I call a beekeeper and ask him to get there before they’re all sprayed by a paranoid citizen.
“Congratulations on noticing something above your head!” Hodgie the Bee-Man says over the phone. (Can he tell I usually read while walking?)
“Humans are hunter-gatherers,” Hodgie continues. “We’re naturally going to look around us and on the ground, not above our heads.”
Privately, I try a few thoughts on for size: wouldn’t hunter-gatherers want to look above their heads for the odd prey animal lurking around? Wouldn’t they - I don’t know - want to keep an eye out for a nice hive full of honey to raid in all their hunting and gathering? But I don’t say any of this to Hodgie. I am, after all, not a Master Beekeeper Who Knows Things.
Among the new things I’m attempting this spring is becoming a Virginia Beach Restaurant girl, since most of my favorite places have always been in Norfolk. First, we hit Frank & Patty’s. A few weeks later, I drop into Yorkie’s for a sandwich: ham, straciatella, and arugula on a piece of homemade focaccia just dripping with seasonal jam. A side of tots too, of course. You’d be insane not to say yes to tots. Delicious, as predicted. Although I wish I’d gotten my sandwich to go.
Eating alone is such an informative practice. I always admire those who have a solo dining experience. I got way more practice at this before marriage. Still, I try to keep it up. I think it is good to be able to keep company with oneself. I sit at Yorkie’s and try not to scroll on my phone, but this time I feel incredibly self-conscious, and that makes me uncomfortable. Why do I feel so…extra alone?
One hard part of infertility is that you always feel that someone who should be there is missing. Surrounded as I am by families out for Sunday lunch, I feel painfully, obviously unaccompanied as I take up a whole table by myself. Probably no one is thinking about me at all, but it is hard not to feel like I stand out. I guess the thing is, I do stand out; which isn’t a problem, but feels like one today. It feels like to earn a table, I should be joined by a few children, or at very least my husband or a friend. Instead, I sit by the window at the smallest table I can find, so as not to take up a space a family might want. In the end, I pick up my phone to look less lonesome, finish my tots in a hurry, and head to meet the women in my family for a coffee. When I’m with them, I never feel alone. This is a gift.
Andrew and a few of our friends are back to softball, so we girls bundle up and freeze our butts on the bleachers to watch them kick red dust for a couple hours. We are fortified with Dairy Queen Blizzards and Cava bowls as dinner. It’s nice to sit outside on a chilly spring night and watch the boys do boy things. Neither one of us is crazy about softball, but we like watching them, and having some uninterrupted time to visit, even if it is ungodly cold after sunset. Later we walk to the bathroom to warm ourselves under the sole heater at the athletic complex.
But just as it does every year, the days soar to the mid 80s before the nightly plummet. You know what this means! Andrew and I plan for the beach on Saturday, and I mentally tick off the good snacks:
dill pickles
Trader Joe’s salt & pepper ruffle chips
sour gummies
mostly, the year’s first lobster roll
I hope for a suntan, and some good shells. But more than anything, I can’t wait to scoop divots for my soft tummy and breasts so that when I lie down, the beach will hold me softly. Then I want to half-sleep and listen to the waves as I run my fingers through warm, sliding sand. This is what I want these days, mostly: to be held gently and allowed to rest, with the sun warm on my back.
It is Easter weekend, and I get to spend time with family I haven’t seen since Christmas. I am eager for that specifically-joyful worship on Easter morning, when everything bad is redeemed by Good. I’m eager for the mad rush of the all-family egg-hunt and the black market candy-trading that follows. I want to hug a small child, and have a cup of tea with my sister-in-law, and eat broccoli salad. That sort of thing.
I hope that you are looking forward to something this weekend too, whether Easter is a holiday you observe or it’s simply another weekend in a mad and merry spring. I’m sorry it’s been so long since I’ve written - each time I sit down to it I’ve been overwhelmed by all the things I am grappling with in my own life, in our country, and beyond. It’s hard to know where to start with the whole stringing-words-together thing. But know that I am thinking of you, and hope you are finding ways to take care of yourself in the thick of it all. You’ll find a way through. I know it. Take heart: wherever you are in life? There’s so much more than this.
Love,
Rachel
I believe I've told you at least a half dozen times that I would read a memoir or book of journal entries/random thoughts and essays you wrote. This. This is that. More of this. I love seeing your little glimmers, and the way you see the world, people, and experiences!
Y'all watched Tremors!! It's a fun fast paced and just all around perfect monster movie, I loved it.