Realizing that you’ve been the frog in the pot for over a decade is something to come to grips with in and of itself. The level of New Ex’s non-communication is sort of shocking once away from the stove.
The boys were at their dad’s when he moved out and came home to him being gone, so after a call from me urging some contact he brought dinner for the boys a few nights ago, sat at the kitchen counter with them and, as always, said absolutely nothing. When I mentioned to the boys that, though he’s moved out he still lives close by, he turned to them jokingly and said, “do you still have my phone number?” They said yes, cleared their plates, went to do homework and that was it. Thirteen years of littermate/non-parenting followed by about a minute of departure. And they’re all OK with that, it seems. The irony being that I’d been sticking it out for so long so as not to disrupt the boys’ lives once again by removing another man of the house from the scene.
There’s a Rip van Winkle quality to all this. And I find myself going back to things I haven’t even thought about in years. Things familiar but foreign in their distance. A Joni Mitchell song from thirty-something years ago, a half-remembred recipe I’m trying to recreate, reconnecting with people and places never forgotten but avoided because, well… I’m not sure yet.
On Wednesday I came home with a big bunch of eucalyptus, which now sits across from my desk. I don’t know why I bought it and not some cheery bouquet or flowering plant. I’m not that fond of eucalyptus – the smell reminds me of my lunatic grandmother Joan, a childhood tormenter and character of grand proportion. I tried to poison her once, after I’d read an article stating that old people shouldn’t eat legumes for fear of something terrible happening internally. A Harvard study as I recall. I immediately went out, bought a large glass canister, filled it with mixed legumes and some powdered chicken stock, stuck a bow on it and took it to her as a gift with a “Mix with a small amount of water, enjoy the soup!” card attached. I called my mother (with whom one could always celebrate misfortune) and told her I thought I’d found a way to kill Joan. “Good luck, honey!” was her response before she hung up and ran to her next therapy appointment with a patient.
Joan didn’t die, not from that, and many months later when I was visiting her I noticed some of the chicken bullion-dusted raw legumes in a dish on the table by her chair. She’d been eating them raw, dried, bit by bit, and when she saw me staring at the dish she commented, “you know Marjorie, this potpourri you made me is just terrible.”
Perhaps that’s why my office now smells like Joan’s apartment, and why the big green spray feels unassailable and anchoring. Maybe the ability to rearrange reality can come in handy once in a while if you do it right. Maybe it’s not such a bad thing to be able to snack on potpourri while criticizing the cook.