Lilly’s visiting. She’s just like she always is. I haven’t seen her in a year. We’ve been separated by the pandemic. She’s long and lean and lovely and therapy-ed. Her face has changed a little. Something in the relationship of the cheekbone to the corner of her mouth. A little thinner or harder. She has endless energy for pondering, chatting, musing, listening. The first week, she sort of collapsed and reverted to her 11 year-old self, but now she’s more adult. Taking the dogs on walks, working from the upstairs bedroom, zooming with her sweetheart. For my part, her presence is a deep and lovely comfort, and I feel a little thrum of happiness which seems to be a baseline, background comforting hum, like a purr.
Already I regret her absence. I regret not looking at her deeply enough, not inhaling her, spending more time with her.
I’m trying to keep my weight under control. I’ve signed up for an online program called NOOM on the advice of my acupuncturist. I lost 20 pounds doing keto for a year, but then, at my last check-up, my liver was funny, so I’m backing away. I feel guilty doing this, given Lilly’s problems with anorexia in the past and I know how she views this sort of thing. So I feel funny over this separating force. I need to mention that I am eating Cheez-Its as I am writing this and it’s 838 am on a Sunday morning. That’s like waking up and putting gin on your grape nuts, as far as I’m concerned. One of the things Lilly does is have snacks all over the house, so she can just munch on things mindlessly, which keeps her weight normal. Who on earth gets to do that?
Jay likes Lilly, too, but the walls are thin in this house and you can hear what goes on in the other rooms. So sex has been rare. He got so frustrated he rented a room in the Hampton Inn across from the hospital last Thursday. It worked out. We made love, sat in the whirlpool tub in the room, felt sneaky and guilty. It was lovely. We were home by 8.
She’s writing. Comedy bits, since the stand-up has come to a (rim shot) stand still. She’s also done some videos. Her stuff is hilarious. Zany, pee-in-your pants stuff. She was reading one of her bits to me in McDonald’s (Lilly goes to McDonald’s) and I laughed so hard my stomach hurt. It’s about a guy who uses his pandemic time to go into the woods and write a rock opera, and he comes up with a character named O’Reilly and, when he performs it for the first time, he realizes that he’s actually re-written the Macarena and the O’Reilly auto parts commercial.
This place can really knit you back together. Potato, the very present Australian Shepherd, Latke, his scrappy lab-esque girlfriend—the three cats, the hill that rolls away from the house and pond. The fields greening up around us. Peepers at night, birds in the morning, owls at twilight. Tulips on the table.
New York assumed this terrifying chaotic impenetrability in my mind this year. I couldn’t get Lilly to leave. It was the city of death. How I longed to have her here, safe. So one month of quiet for Lilly, home to heal. Nick’s 30th birthday was on Friday. Jay was on a shoot, so it was just the three of us. I got out the old dragon table cloth, the one we use for every celebration, that I made for Nick’s third birthday out of an old sheet, when we didn’t have any money, and he requested a birthday with “dragons and trains.” I spread the project out on the courtyard of our apartment in Little Havana, and at one point, 2 year old Lilly ran across it, dipping her tap shoe (and Lilly’s tap shoes are a story in and of themselves) in the paint. The print’s still there. I made a strawberry buttermilk cake, and picked up Popeye’s. And it was just us three again, with the early spring night outside, frog song rising, and our voices wishing, hoping joy.
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