We've been exchanging things at the door of the apartment I still have keys to. On Saturday afternoon, I biked over and put a bag of flour, a Glossier pouch full of face masks, and a loaf of zucchini bread on the doormat. The zucchini bread was from a recipe in the official cookbook of the Methodist church I went to until high school, when there was a rift between the congregation and the new pastor, who toed the line from the bureaucracy above when it came to gay marriage and other things. My mother used to make zucchini bread a lot when it was our turn to bring snacks for after-service. And I used to be very comfortable in church—as in, I would go around in sock feet and I felt no shame about using the copy machine for anything I wanted. The cookbook was assembled in 2003, I think, so it has a lot of recipes in it from old women who were scary to me at the time and are now dead. Alberta Hatch's famous hot fudge!
I sat in the yard and listened to an ice cream truck and sweated in my latex gloves while I waited for Tamar to swap the things I left for her and replace them with things for me. She put out tiny tupperwares of charoset and pre-molded but uncooked matzo balls, and a sandwich bag of homemade granola, each labeled with a piece of duct tape with my initials on them. Later, I cooked the matzo balls according the instructions that were also written on the duct tape, and ate them in a Campbell's chicken noodle soup.
I hate to cook. I am not settling into quarantine cooking. I know people on Twitter had various beefs with the recent Fran Lebowitz interview in the New Yorker but I related heavily to the sentiment of never leaving New York and to the part where she said "Last night I was peeling a cucumber and I was infuriated. Like, why am I peeling this cucumber?" I don't even have a vegetable peeler. I cook everything with the skins on. The last time I saw a vegetable peeler I had just stepped on it—it was lying in the middle of the floor of my little sister's apartment in North Carolina. I was supposed to peel the zucchini for the bread, and shred it on a grater, but I simply chopped each one into four big chunks and then dropped them into the food processor an ex-boyfriend gave me a week before he broke up with me. I didn't measure the flour or sugar, I just guessed, and everything came out fine.
For Easter, I woke up early to watch The Prince of Egypt and then I made an egg bake, which is eggs mixed with milk and cheese and ripped-up Pepperidge Farm white bread. And salt and pepper and one-eighth of a teaspoon of dry mustard, which is absurd. Why bother putting one-eighth of a teaspoon of anything in anything? That's another suburban Protestant food. Again, I hate cooking. I am so blessed that my cultural heritage is making food as easy and grotesque as possible by putting cheese in everything and using brand-name processed foods as major ingredients. But for dinner I tried to extend myself by cooking a Martha Stewart recipe for chicken nicoise salad, which required a steam basket. I didn't have one, so I just boiled water in a big pot, dropped some balls of aluminum foil in it, dropped a plate on top of those, then chicken, then the lid of the pot. It worked! There were no boneless chicken breasts left at my grocery store though, so I also learned to rip the bones off the underside of a chicken breast.
Everything works fine. My mother made 150 face masks for me and my family and the women at the grocery store, and my sister is learning to skateboard in the basement. Tamar washed her sheets in the bathtub and then hung them up in the yard, and she carried her phone around in the waistband of her underwear. The boy I keep writing about knows about this blog now because I told him in a fit of disclosure, and we had a tense conversation about it because I said "some of this is irrelevant now that you've left New York." He thought I meant I wasn't going to think about him anymore, which is hysterical. All I have is my imagination and carbohydrates to get me through the day. It's true that when all we do is text for hours and hours I start to wonder why am I doing this, but then if I pick up the phone and talk out loud I remember that I like everything he says and I also like the way he says it. Haha. I guess that will happen to you sometimes, no matter what else is going on. I shouted that exact thing at Stephanie from across her yard the other day, and I also admitted it makes me feel horribly at-risk in ways that are totally distinct from the plague.
Tonight I want Bisquick pancakes for dinner!
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