Sandwich

by Catherine Newman

you are on unceded wampanoag territory, someone has written on the door in Sharpie.

i wrote a report on the indigent Wampanoag tribe in elementary school growing up near their lands.

“Check your privilege,” Willa says, and I can’t tell if she’s teasing or not—but she’s right. “That’s fair,” I say. “Is it check like check it at the door? Or check like take a good hard look?” “I don’t know,” Willa says. “Just pick one and do it.”

half pound of rocky-road fudge

fudge from candy shops in cape cod brings back my childhood memories of summer family trips

This candy store! The kids used to vibrate with excitement if you even mentioned it. It’s almost painful, the way little children just trustingly hold out their hearts for you to look at—the way they haven’t learned yet how to conceal what matters to them, even if it’s just chewing gum or a plush dolphin or plastic binoculars.

Nick, Jamie, and Maya are out in the waves with their boogie boards.

grew up on boogie boards in summer waves

“Mom, try not to hurt your own feelings for no reason,” Willa says. This is sensible advice.

I want to complain about my knee, but Nick is a physical therapist and if you’re not careful you’ll find yourself on the floor performing a series of terrible exercises.

Also he will get out the innocuous-sounding foam roller that is actually a complex pain device designed by people who hate everybody.

Foraging is my birthright. It might also be a weird kind of inherited trauma.

Our food is arriving now because we are the kind of people who like to eat one meal while planning at least two other meals that are occurring in the future.

sounds like my family

Maya is, I’m sorry to note, picking at her salad when she makes eye contact with me and laughs. “What?” I say, and she says, “Remember when Jamie and I were first dating? When you liked my Instagram post?” I slap my own forehead. He had told me about her—they’d met at a party—and I’d been stalking a little and accidentally hearted something. “Oh my god!” I said to Willa, who was lying in bed next to me. “I just liked Jamie’s sort-of new girlfriend’s photo of a crab cake.” “No, no, no,” she said, and grabbed my hand. She was laughing. “Mama. Mom. Don’t. No, no! Don’t unlike it now.

lol

I don’t mention how just last night, in the scrolling insomniac dark, I’d read a vague Facebook post from someone I went to grad school with about a person in our cohort—his ex-partner, maybe? His best friend?—who had killed herself. I couldn’t remember her full name, but when I googled “experimental poet Gabriela suicide Iowa” I got zero results. Because I’d actually typed this set of words not into a Google search but as a comment on my grieving classmate’s post. I deleted it and held Chicken under the covers while I finished having an imaginary stroke. “Why am I like this?” I asked Nick in the dark. But he was sleeping, like people do.

How am I a feminist, an advocate for reproductive rights, Our Bodies, Ourselves, hear me roar, blah blah, and I am only just now learning about vaginal atrophy?” “I don’t know,” she said, and I could hear her sigh. “Because they hate us, I guess. But also? Can we just, like, call it at some point? We’re sticking shit up our twats and the guys are taking boner pills—I mean, could we take it all as a sign to just, like, give it a rest? Could we just not? I just saw an ad for men who want to last longer. Who wants a guy to last longer? Finish up is my feeling. My library book’s not going to read itself!”

“You basically never need to replace your toothbrush,” I say, and she says, “That would be interesting advice if it weren’t coming from a person whose teeth are basically in ruins.”

lol

“Mom,” Willa says from the bathroom. “Mom, Jamie’s on a work call. Don’t go in there.” I pull the bedroom door closed and say, “Yes, I see that.” “At least you have a T-shirt on,” she says, laughing. “Oh my god, Mom.” If these guys ever etch me up a tombstone, I hope that’s all it says. Oh my god, Mom.

Willa waits patiently with my dad’s phone in her hand. “Grandpa, do you want me to show you how to delete these?” “Oh, would you please just do it for me? I don’t care enough to learn how.”

He probed me roughly with a lubricated wand, like he’d zipped down in a spaceship to learn about female earthlings and their proclivities.

“Grandpa, can you tell us more about your family?” Willa asks my dad. She’s nibbling an olive pit. She’s recently done one of those mail-away DNA tests and has become very interested in her ancestry. According to her results, I am sixty-one percent Ashkenazi Jew,

Willa bursts into tears, says, “Sorry. I’m sorry. I don’t understand what is happening.” My father pats her back. “I am not trying to cause a problem here. But yes, Treblinka, the extermination camp. Rocky, you know this.” “Dad, no. I don’t.” “How do you not know this?” I’m crying a little bit too now. “I mean, I really have no idea. I guess I don’t know because nobody ever told me. Although I definitely asked. I asked more than once. Did you”—it’s not going to be the right word, but I can’t think of a better one—“lie to me?” “Lie? No. I don’t think it was a lie. Not exactly. And besides, you must have wanted to believe it. You’re not stupid, Rachel. How did you imagine two Jews died in occupied Poland under Hitler?”

“Hey, Mama?” This is Willa, gentle. “This is a lot. It’s so, so much. But I wonder if you want to shift gears? Grandpa is telling you something about—about himself, really. More than he’s telling you something about you, I think.” “Thanks, honey,” I say, and Jamie smiles, says, “Did you just low-key roast Mama for being a narcissist?” I love these kids more every day.

lol

Life is a seesaw, and I am standing dead center, still and balanced: living kids on one side, living parents on the other. Nicky here with me at the fulcrum. Don’t move a muscle, I think. But I will, of course. You have to.

I have had many ideas about myself—and many of them have been ruined. I do not share this thought with my daughter.

“What do you feel like, Mom?” I say, and she says, “Fine, fine. Just a little dizzy. I suppose I’m a bit warm.” Her skin is actually weirdly cool, though. Clammy. “Perhaps I should drink something.” “I told you to drink something!” Willa says, because her genetic inheritance includes scolding the people you’re worried about. “I know, darling,” my mother says. “I should have listened to you.”

There is so much more I want to ask him. About the texture of grief in the household of his childhood. About being a Jew. About his cranky joie de vivre. There’s time, though. I mean, I hope there’s time. Because this week! What on earth? And at the end of it, we’ll all go our separate ways.

I realize I don’t know if my parents are still going to leave today like they’ve planned to. Regular people would stay at least until we have to check out tomorrow, given the whole ER situation yesterday. But my parents have a strict two-night policy. If they traveled sixty million miles to visit you on Mars, they’d bring Zabar’s whitefish salad in a cooler bag and they’d stay two nights. Also, they’d complain about the traffic, the parking.

lol

And this may be the only reason we were put on this earth. To say to each other, I know how you feel. To say, Same. To say, I understand how hard it is to be a parent, a kid. To say, Your shell stank and you’re sad. I’ve been there.

“Or throw them away,” Jamie says, laughing. “I mean, not to be all Bill Gates about this. But seriously, Mom. It’s eggs.” I drop the carton directly into the very full trash, but just to make everybody laugh—which they do—before I yoink it out and return it to the fridge.

lol

“Is it actually pitch-black on the ocean floor?” I ask Maya now, in the car, and she says distractedly, “In the abyssopelagic zone, it is.” “Obvs,” I say, and she laughs. welcome to the abyssopelagic zone! The sign nobody ever sees.

Here’s what foragers know: Most of what grows is neither delicious nor toxic. There’s a whole world between what we call the choice edibles—the hazelnuts and porcini and black raspberries—and, say, the destroying angel mushroom that will shut down all your organ systems after a single nibble. You can eat the grass, the lichen, the inner bark of most trees, a thousand kinds of leaves. Not that you would, but you could.

“Remember that summer you baked a lemon cake in a litter pan?” Willa says now. She’s already laughing again, biting at the end of her cone and pressing a napkin against the corners of her eyes. “I didn’t bake a cake in a litter pan,” I say. “Did you or did you not bake a cake in a pan that had had cat litter in it?” “It had cat litter in it for, like, a minute—just while I was dealing with the real litter pan. It was that summer Chicken was sick. It was a disposable aluminum pan and I washed it really well and threw it out after.” “Threw it out after what?” “After baking a cake in it,” I concede. The kids fall against each other laughing.

lol

Maybe grief is love imploding. Or maybe it’s love expanding. I don’t know. I just know you can’t create loss to preempt loss because it doesn’t work that way. So you might as well love as much as you can. And as recklessly. Like it’s your last resort, because it is.

A transition is so much gentler than an ending—and in a million ways, my mother is here with us still. In our photographs and our memories. In our hearts and even our lungs because she is the air we breathe.

When she was in hospice, her heart failing quickly while ours beat on and on, we watched the birds outside her window. The kids came and went, loving and devastated, but also busy with work and school. My mom dozed while my dad read the paper and I mended my jeans. Sometimes she was in pain, and it was awful. Sometimes I looked at take-out menus with my dad and she grinned at us from her weird bed. Her strength and coordination failed, and I climbed in next to her to help with her phone, using her thumb to unlock the screen like it was a tool in my own hands. “I’m still a person!” she said, indignant, as I repeatedly jabbed her thumb on the button. We laughed so much I cried and then peed a little, and then we laughed about that too: her continent on her deathbed; me borrowing a pair of her underpants.

We spread some of her ashes in Central Park, where the daffodils first come up in April.