Pierogi
My friend tells me he is dating a Russian. This, after his long stint with the woman who trains dressage horses, who carries a handbag that generates emergency electricity, who lost an eye to the hoof of a bucking thoroughbred, socket filled by a smart glass orb, who told my friend that his want of children was the product of a long-buried egoism — to see his face reimagined on the cheeks of a baby. The Russian, my friend says, wants to teach him how to make pierogi.
Good, I say. This is a wonderful sign. We’re on the phone and I am airing myself, bedside. Here, in Colorado, I dry quickly after any shower.
She moved here when she was nine. I think she wants to impress my mother, my friend says of the Russian.
My friend’s mother is Polish and enjoys many later-years occupations—for instance, discussions concerning others’ travels. She was once a renowned psychotherapist—my mother’s colleague at the treatment center.
I remind my friend, Your mother’s resentments are deep-running. The dressage trainer was a strong woman.
This time is its own, he says.
Naked, I attend to a boiling kettle. I pour hot water over breakfast oats. I’m in the kitchen again, that same narrative wherein I scale my worries via preparation for meals to come. These days, I let too much turn in the depths of cold containers. I am either underfed or gorged, and if the latter, I am likewise asleep or startled awake by the cat’s early hungers. Lately, he’s been pucking his food bowl around on the ground, a habit for which I laud him, despite myself.
My friend says, And you?
I hum a little run through the receiver. It’s the cadenza to a concerto whose name I keep forgetting.
Your current situation, my friend insists.
I say, Well — I’ve learned that a woman, especially one who takes home dozens of lovers, must own a deep-set cast iron pan such that she is able to fry one dozen eggs simultaneously, which is a sad fact about life, but one needs to accept it and move on, as I have. No — I say, The situation is well-managed.
My friend says, That’s not what I meant.
When we were children, my friend and I jumped on hotel room beds while our mothers presented important findings on sociopathy. In adulthood, he works for the right political campaigns.
I say to him, Okay, buddy — here are some clues about this person whom you haven’t met: He has varying, felt interests, is sympathetic to my immigrant experience, and sometimes fails to brush his teeth after evening meals, but he falls asleep, so peaceful after dinner that I worry about the integrity of his skull. No — I say, I’m worried that he’s funnier than I am. Or kinder.
You sound better than when we last spoke, says my friend.
God, the truths of surrogate siblings, how they quash uncertainties and implant new ones.
I’m always the same, I tell him. I am right now eating oatmeal.
Does your mother know? asks my friend. About your life?
Does your mother know about the Russian? I ask.
He says, my mother is a generous woman with many cruelties.
I say, my mother is currently playing the part of a cool pal — not asking too many questions — whereas once, she said of herself: grandparent TBD. Whereas once, she said, please: for me or for your birth parents. Whereas once, my mother said, Come home or return to any old city back east as long as it has trains and patches of good air and a nearby grocery store. Come home to your mother’s time zone because I’ll be dead in a matter of months or years and there are people here who love you, who will love you, who haven’t had enough time, whereas I, I have had enough and I’m learning to throw clay on a wheel— I’m a horrible potter, the worst in the class; I’m just auditing — and now I shelve all these uneven bowls of my own embarrassing creation, will you please take them off my hands? I’m shipping them to you; they’re yours.