…is wanting to tell people what you’re interested in. Even when you sure they won’t be interested. And I’m talking about your close friends.
You want to send them:
Instead you send them:
Last week, when I was out with Binda, I ordered a square pizza. It was quite by accident. We’d swept into one of those dollar pizza places on the Upper West Side. When I see too a variety of anything, I get decision paralysis. So I just the chose pizza that looked different. The square on.
No, this isn’t a call to “Do Something Different.” Fuck that.
But it just made things easier, choosing the thing that looked different…and yet recognizable. And then I remembered the pizza we ate in grade school. It was always square and yucky. And then I thought of all the mostly yucky food I ate in school. And then how I was admonished for using the word yucky instead of politely saying “I don’t care for (fill in the food item).”
Man, all this from a pizza square on the Upper West Side. This is your fault, Binda. You bring out the kid in me. I don’t care for that. Just kidding. I enjoyed my current square of pizza. I will choose it more often. Not to be different. But just to be easy.
Everyone goes around thinking that it won’t happen. But they know it will. They see it all around and they know that it will happen to them. But they just don’t think about. I think it about more than I should.
Pastries.
Unavoidable.
Dayum
Burgeoning of air, that grips a certain place inside you. This region says Yes, Yes, Yes. It isn’t far from the place that says No. A pool develops between the two, a lake so shallow and muddy that–why call it a lake? It’s a puddle of mud. The good thing is you won’t drown, when you cross it. You’ll get dirty but you won’t drown.
Why Us, Lidia?
Here are your reasons:
Okay. I’ll buy that.
There is something heart-wrenching about eating pizza with your family. It’s sad enough to have a crush on your pastor. And “your’ is a tangled enough possessor but mostly it can mean nothing. Like your typical teenager, which I don’t think I was, except for the crush part.
We prayed over our pizza, right there in Pizza Hut, on Highway 9, i.e. said Grace, i.e. I listened to Pastor Glenn give thanks for our Pizza, in which he also mentioned me, to God, that I might find members of the opposite sex attractive.
Amen.
It was an excrutiating session. Just prayers and speaking in tongues and everyone laying hands on me. My stomach growled. No one remarked.
Afterwards, we all took out Pastor Glenn for pizza.It was surreal. Having talked about my weight and then gorging on pizza. I guess this was part of the treatment.
I realized a couple of things during this:
There was no such thing as anorexic rehab back in my day, in my home town. Thank God.
So when my mother became concerned, downright enraged at my weight, she had to take matters in her own hand. With my older sister’s help, I was hitched to her little orange Chevette and driven to a Pentacostal church a few miles outside of town. Pastor Glenn was good at these sorts of things. Eating disorders, boys who could not stop masturbating, homosexuals; noncompliant teenagers. I happened to be all those things.
I had a crush on him. Who wouldn’t? He was tall white, with a reddish-blond beared and he’d gone to college. I knew I’d be humiliated seeing him, with all these problems–even though my mother would only tell I had the one.
His answer of course, was the one he’d given her so many times. “He needs to spend time with members of the opposite sex.” Which of course, being a Hispanic mother with great fluency in the English language, but lacking its subtleties said “But he is with those members. Me and his sister.”
“He means I need to go out on a date,” I told her. We were all sitting in a pew. Lined up, like specimens. I was trying not to be a specimen. That actually is the most humiliating part about this intervention: trying to be something your not. Perpetrating, it used to call it, at least by some rap songs of the time.
“But he’s lost so much weight,” my mother intoned behind a new ball of tissues, blowign her nose. This made me look away and roll my eyes.
“He looks fine to me,” Pastor Glenn said.
My eyes rolled back, to him, to his small smile.
Heart poundingly good hugs abound. Has it been awhile since a strong man has hugged you? Inhale and think of all the times you’ve wanted affection. when you finally get your arms around them, you aren’t exactly looking at them, are you? You are over their shoulder or in their shoulder. Air or skin or clothing.
Your jaw tickles, you want to sneeze, but you don’t because underneath that is all the heart really wants. Touch. Amen, you, touch. God bless flesh and bone.
Jouncing along afterwards, you enter the grocery store and think of all the questions you are going to ask your husband, to cover up the fact that you hugged another man.
But the best way to end the guilt is just to hug your husband. For longer than a few seconds. And just things happen from there.
Tickling sensation. It wakes me, draws me up and out of bed. My bedroom window is open. Cool air spills in like heavy syrup. It is fall. ‘Bout time baby, I say to myself as wobbled in my morningness, toward the kitchen for coffee.
The coffee cannot compete with air. I shove in gulps of autumn air, make imaginary plans, plans to reconnect with old boyfriends, one by one and revisit those first fluttery moments of hardnosed, deep, muscular, sweat sex.
And so the softness of waking is now replaced by coffee breath and horniness.
My perfect autumn awaits.
Who What When Where Why Us? 