lycanthropia

Oh shit, this doesn’t mean I have to start writing something interesting now? Because I don’t think I can actually do that.

So I won’t try. Caveat lector. Move along now.

Today’s another gray day, with those low fast-moving wispy-curdled Gulf clouds scudding overhead. If my childhood memories of Texas winter are at all accurate, I can expect more such in the next couple of months. If I get to stay here. Pye sits in the doorway and looks at me like there’s something I could do, if I only would. I pet her, tell her I’d make it sunny if it were up to me. Though I’m starting to like lying in bed half-asleep listening to rain.

Last night I discovered that if you go running when you’re terrified, you actually run a lot faster and farther! Which makes sense—it’s what all that adrenaline is meant for, after all. I’m nearly back up to where I was when I arbitrarily quit running August 1. I will never stop again, unless I break a leg or something. My goal is still to be able to circumnavigate the dirt path around Rice University (3 miles) by the end of the spring semester. Be nice if I could do it at a pretty swift clip, too.

After I showered, the neighbor and I went for half-price Tex-Mex at the glorious El Real, which is housed inexplicably in an old movie theater, then came back to my place and drank beer and talked &c. assiduously, taking breaks to watch Fearless, a Jet Li wuxia flick, ostensibly for my Women & Gender in World Cinema class? though that’s weird because there aren’t actually any women in the movie? just talking girl-shaped fortune cookies wearing Chinese kimono?

The word “spinster” is in my head a lot lately, and I can remember when I was a fiery second-wave undergraduate and I was all WOOOO YEAH BABY LET’S RECLAIM SPINSTER AS MEANING A COOL WISE INDEPENDENT WOMYN! and now where did that go? Where’s all my Adrienne Rich when I need it? Why is that word so cobwebby and chin-hairy and ringing in my head like unto the knell of doom?

Besides if spinsters spend the evening the way I did last night, I can’t really complain.

So, okay, my days may be numbered. Our days are numbered anyway. If Maman’s death taught me nothing else.

On Saturday I got to spend a couple of precious hours with my blonde Amazon godsister Z. We hadn’t seen each other in maybe five years. I was over an hour late, thanks to Google Maps having sent me to another restaurant called Santa Fe Flats in a totally wrong part of the city. So I drove furiously up the 249 to Tomball, fuming and cursing and half-weeping, having to stop at Target in the middle of urban nowhere and buy an actual paper map, I was so lost (everyone in the store looking at me blankly, “Where are the maps?” um yes well we don’t have an ANTIQUITIES department).

But when I parked and got out of the car and saw her face, looking so damn much like her mother’s, I burst into tears. I think I hid it pretty well, but maybe not. Her children both beautiful, flawless the way toddlers are. Her two-year-old daughter’s enormous blue eyes and textbook blonde curls. As a family they make my heart hurt, in a good way. And Z. is hilarious and sharp-tongued and wry and brainy in all the same ways she always was. She should be the state governor.

Coincidentally Santa Fe Flats turns out to be the only New Mexican restaurant in town, which meant they have real Hatch green and red chile, and I ordered huevos rancheros Christmas-style and blasted out all my sinus cavities, and then my headcold was GONE. Just GONE. Chiles are magic.

Z. told me she comes to Houston a couple of times a year, so I didn’t hug her goodbye as desperately as I wanted to, like clinging to her clothing and refusing to let go etc.

Driving home weeping, I found myself strangely missing that horrible time in the hospital, and the long months afterward. I don’t even understand how that’s possible, but there you have it. I remember these size 2 shorts I bought for like $5 at K-Mart one afternoon because it was so unbelievably hot in San Antonio. I’m sure they wouldn’t even fit on one leg now. I remember locking myself in the bathroom so I could methodically beat my face and upper body. I remember reading all five Harry Potter novels in four days (an exercise in escapism which I do not by the way recommend). I remember long whispered phone conversations with various boys, mostly conducted in the laundry room with the door closed and the air conditioner roaring. I remember trying to write about it, and never succeeding (though I still have it in the back of my head to try again). Everything that happened so visceral and on the surface. Everything so painful but extremely alive and real.

(S. and I dancing manically, totally silently so we wouldn’t wake her, in the hospital room when we realized Maman hadn’t thrown up for nearly six hours. Grimacing and flinging our arms around in joy.)

Once you’ve mopped up her radioactive urine, once you’ve wrestled her delirious and naked back down onto the gurney, once you’ve helped buy her two years of time but ultimately lost her, does other stuff really matter? Probably not. It’s become my guideline for life. Kind of like my friend’s criterion for a bad day: if a PortaPotty hasn’t fallen over and trapped you inside, you’re going to be fine. (True story!)

Whatever happens to me academically, professionally, personally, at some point I’ll stop breathing and then none of it will matter, only my friends will have to throw out a horrifying number of notebooks, and I sincerely apologize to y’all for that right now, but I just can’t bring myself to get rid of them yet.

Not sure what I’m trying to articulate here, but then I never really have been. Only I have to say somehow, although it’s embarrassing, that I’m grateful for all the support. I now understand why they call it a wave. It has been like a wave, a benevolent tsunami (which, that’s just a gross metaphor) of messages and comments and emails and it’s exactly like they say, I actually can’t respond to them all, but your kindness in writing/sending them flabbergasts me because it’s so undeserved. Okay this paragraph is really starting to make me writhe. I’m just trying to say, thank you; and now there’s nothing to see here, move along. My solemn vow to my loyal readership of 10 people is that I will now get back to the usual uninteresting posts about psych meds and weight gain and cat hair. (Seriously, you wouldn’t believe the state of the carpeting. I haven’t hoovered ONCE since I moved in. You can see Pyewacket’s favorite places to sleep, because they are all soot-colored.)

And here, to start us off in the right direction, is last night’s completely pedestrian dream: I was jogging and my ex’s little white Honda pulled over, he wanted to talk to me. For some reason I got in the car, sat down in his passenger seat and we spoke briefly; I was sweating and out of breath. He said sadly, I still think all the time about getting back together with you. I looked at him: But then you apparently always decide not to. Him, weakly: Yeah, I guess so. Me: Huh. Sucks to be you. Then I got out of the car and went back to my run. Woke up to the sound of rain and the sharp smell of another man’s sweat.

One bashes on regardless. Love you.

Makes about seven or eight or nine pots de crème; serves three, one patient of delicate appetite and two hungry caregivers, for a couple of South Texas summer days.

1. Pad into the kitchen around midnight, when it’s finally cool enough to turn off the air conditioning and open the sliding glass door. Wear only your nightgown. Turn on the noisy box fan and let Calpurnia out, because she’s climbing up the screen already in hot pursuit of gigantic flying stick insects.

2. Take out of the fridge: milk, half and half, eggs. Sneak a spoonful of Mexican chocolate sauce.

3. Put two cups of whole milk, of which a little more than half is half-and-half (don’t think too hard about it) on the stove in a saucepan to scald. Scalding milk is mystifying; you take it off the flame just before it starts to boil, which sounds like a joke but isn’t. Scalded milk has a very particular smell, almost custardy, and a fine foam of tiny frothy bubbles appears just barely at the rim of the pan.

4. While the milk is heating, separate three or four eggs, putting the yolks in one glass mixing bowl and the whites in another. You could just use whole eggs for the pots de crème, but you’ll make coconut macaroons with the whites, because these are the two things Maman will eat. And macaroons are simple: egg whites, sugar, coconut, about three big tablespoons of flour and a pinch of salt.

5. Whisk the yolks with maybe 1/3 cup white sugar and a big splash of vanilla flavoring. Be extremely approximate and generous about all this. Hum “Hello, Young Lovers.” Drink ice water out of a wineglass.

6. Take out all the little porcelain pots de crème pots from the china hutch and arrange them in a baking dish with about two inches of water in it. Take off all their little white lids, and set them aside.

7. Now that your milk is scalded, pour it in a very thin, slow stream down into the yolks, beating thoroughly as you do so, so that the yolks don’t get cooked at all. Do this until all the milk is incorporated seamlessly. There shouldn’t be a single fleck of yolk visible.

8. Divide your custard mixture evenly into the little pots. Believe it or not, you could microwave them to decent effect; but instead you are going to cook them in the oven for 30 or 40 minutes, which also gives you time to make the macaroons. (You’ll use the recipe on the blue Baker’s coconut package, and you always read the ingredients list and laugh to yourself, because the coconut has propylene glycol in it, also an ingredient in the lubricant your boyfriend brought on his one memorable visit.)

9. Instead of starting the macaroons right away, curl up in the white wicker chair, read a glossy fashion magazine and exchange patient updates with Z., who has come into the kitchen for more fizzy water.

10. You make the fizzy water cocktail with a citrus reamer, while Z. uses one of those cast-aluminum Mexican scruncher-things. But either way, Maman likes it with at least half a lime. Y’all use up a lot of limes.

11. Pots de crème are done! Take them out before the middle is quite cooked, because they will probably continue cooking despite your best efforts, and they should stay tender. The fewer eggs you use, the more tender they’ll be. Put two in the freezer to chill right away and the rest in the fridge, lids slightly askew so condensation doesn’t rain down inside them.

12. Go sit in the master bedroom with Z. and Maman, who are watching either Cold Comfort Farm or As Good As It Gets or Something’s Gotta Give. Play a dab of something wistful in B minor as you walk past the Steinway.

13. Find your journal and your fountain pen tucked into the loveseat cushions where you left them an hour ago, and write several lines of a poem, which you never finish. Remember all this vividly six or seven years later, and think to your astonishment what you never would have guessed you’d now be thinking: that you would give anything, anything, to be yourself at that time walking through that house with those people again. Your cute little size two shorts. Your abandoned marriage, waiting for you to put the stake in its heart, which you are too cowardly-cruel to do. Not to romanticize it, that time, because it also includes your tendency to lock yourself in the bathroom and weep and slap your own face or cut yourself whenever you do something you don’t like, which is pretty much daily. Still. Your blonde-Amazon godsister, pitiless and glorious in her bossing-around of hospital administrators. Your indecently young Buddhist-monk boyfriend, and your beloved distant friends, whispered to on the phone in the middle of the night from the back of the linen closet. And your beautiful godmother, naked to be comfortable, tucked into her white Egyptian cotton sheets, asking Z. to fast-forward the video through any scary parts, asking you if the cat’s come in, her deceptively pink cheeks and the soft white-blonde baby fuzz on her head, asking you with a shy smile if the pots de crème are ready yet.

Lie on your sofa in the fading afternoon light, savoring a tiny morsel of François Pralus Le 100% Criollo chocolate, which is, as its name would in fact indicate, 100% chocolate, which explains why it is a tiny morsel. No sugar, no dairy, no any blooming thing, just dark glossy waxy pungent heaven—sent courtesy of the charming Ms. Dianne Cowan of Cambridge, MA, who gamely engaged in chocolate swapping before it grows too hot here in Phoenix for you to put anything in the post that melts (and who further sent a bar of grainy, sugary Taza 80% Stone-Ground, in partial exchange for some locally produced, magical-herbal-essence-infused Wei Relaxed 68%).

Consider, as you allow the almost black, slightly acidic and flowery François Pralus to melt in your mouth, that what it would really be good for, would be making truffles. Decide that you have two things to celebrate—first of all, you somehow managed to get admitted to the University of Houston’s five-year PhD program, with a five-year teaching contract and various bits of financial extras; and second, you recently engaged in yet another profitless email back-and-forth with your ex, with one big difference: This time, you feel emotionally unencumbered and untortured now that it’s over. You feel, in fact, light and free. Which is probably because you know you’ll be moving away soon. Lurch up from the sofa abruptly, causing the cat to lift her head and complain.

Walk slowly into the kitchen, because both your feet are asleep, and make

IMPROMPTU MAMANESQUE MEXICAN TRUFFLES

1. Break the remaining chocolate into a small saucepan and put the heat on low. Very, very low. Cocoa butter melts at skin temperature. Do not rush this. Do not, do not.

2. Drop a good-sized chunk of unsalted pasture butter into the pan. Jab at the whole thing with a fork, sliding around the melting chocolate and remembering Maman’s wicked chocolate ice-cream sauce, which involved a whole stick of butter and an entire can of condensed sweetened milk (aka “Eagle Brand”). Remember how, whenever she was putting most of a stick of butter into something, she would say, in dulcet tones, “Look away, darling….”

(Pause for a moment, rubbing one tingling foot against the other, remembering you and Elizabeth both sneaking spoonsful of the sauce straight out of its jar in the refrigerator, without even heating it up first, much less bothering to pour it over ice cream. It melting in your mouth as you moved back to Maman’s bedroom, a brief time-out during a long day or night of nursing her as best you could, not knowing what you were doing but learning how to do it as you went, changing linens, changing wound dressings, changing meds, flushing out her J-tube, flushing out her Hickman, S-A-S-H, Saline Antibiotic Saline Heperin, flicking the bubbles out of the line because she hated to see them, flushing the blood out of the line because she hated to see it, salty-sweet almond-fragrant chocolate still melting in your mouth, soft South Texas air coming gently in at the French doors—)

3. Open the cupboard and take out the vanilla and almond flavorings, both of these now alcohol-based, since you no longer live with a recovering alcoholic and therefore no longer have to use the glycerin-based flavorings that are weak by comparison, and require about four times as much. Congratulate self on this, as well as on the fact that you can have wine with dinner and it’s no big freaking deal.

4. Go back to the cupboard for the cinnamon. Dust melting chocolate with a disappointingly small amount, and upend bottle, peering in to verify that, yes, it is all gone.

Wonder how it is that cinnamon is always purchased for you by men—this bottle having come from the boyfriend before the ex, the one who dumped you because you were too crazy for him. Or really, you were too crazy together. Which wasn’t untrue.

Remember that when you moved into the house with your ex, the one where you lived together for three years, it was a sign to you of great domestic companionship that you each had brought your cinnamon and now they would be blended. Remember photographing the two cinnamons side by side and planning to use this picture to illustrate a blogpost about the delights of harmonious cohabitation. Remember not ever writing this blogpost because you were too busy having fun living together.

Be momentarily stricken as you remember coming home the day after he had abruptly moved out without telling you and finding your cinnamon all alone in the cupboard, and feeling outraged, and thinking blindly How could he, how could he just take his cinnamon just like that, without so much as, as, as—

Decide you are going to buy your own damn cinnamon at the next available opportunity.

5. Put a frozen gordita in the toaster to toast while the chocolate melts. Eat it when it pops up even though it’s too hot and the molten refritos burn your tongue. Sniffle when the jalapeño hits your soft palate. Eat tiny bites off its edge with the chocolatey fork. Tell yourself defensively it’s like molé.

6. When the last bit of chocolate has melted, beat in the flavorings and a goodly quantity of dark organic agave nectar. Then start pouring in a thin stream of heavy cream, beating, beating, beating. Taste. Add more agave. Add more cream. Beat until the cream has turned the mahogany-black chocolate into more of a, well, chocolate brown color.

Contemplate most recent series of communications with ex, which began under the evil influence of the supermoon and went like this:

You text: I love you.
[Furtively, romantically, beneath supermoon with friends.]
He texts: I love you.
[Pause.]
He emails: Yay we can be friends!
You email: Um, not likely, for as already stated I still love you.
[Pause.]
You almost: Run into him in a parking lot.
You don’t: Speak to or look at him, but hurry past, head down. It is the closest you have been to him since last August and the breakup.
He doesn’t: Speak to you either.
You agonize: About this for several days. What if he thinks you were snubbing him! What if he’s mad at you.
Your sponsor: Tells you not to do anything.
You finally email: So, Sunday night was awkward, huh.
He emails: What are you talking about?
You think: OMG HOW FUCKING TYPICAL, I HAVE BEEN WRINGING MY HANDS FOR DAYS OVER WHETHER I HURT HIS FEELINGS, I WALKED RIGHT PAST HIM AND HE DIDN’T EVEN NOTICE BECAUSE HE WAS TALKING TO A WOMAN, HA HA! HA HA! HA HA, HA HA!
[Pause.]
He emails: Blah blah blah me me me so yeah I do still love you too but hey listen [insert very fancy reasoning/mentation about why he can't be with you], in summary because I have not yet learned to tell right from wrong I therefore have no business being in a relationship with anyone at this point in my life, even though almost fifty, and also in case you hadn’t noticed me me me me me more about ME!
[Pause.]
You email: Nothing.
You start: Looking on craigslist for a flat in Houston.

Will you move August 1? It looks increasingly likely. Frankly you kind of wish you were moving tomorrow.

7. Transfer pan into the refrigerator so the truffles can start setting up. Get out Dagoba unsweetened cocoa powder to roll truffles in. Wonder how Ms. Cowan liked the Wei Relaxed.

Prop open the back door for the cat, using the empty green recycling bucket which you have had for a decade now, it being a reclaimed pickle bucket from a bagel place in Santa Fe. Wonder what it’s like to live somewhere that’s not the desert Southwest. Allow yourself to become prematurely nostalgic. Watch amused as the cat races from front door to back door, back and forth, back and forth, her claws scrabbling on the dark hardwood floor, as the sun sets and the lingering traces of chocolate cycle in your mouth through their different flavors, turning from sour and bitter to sweet, sweet, sweet, sweet.