The Morning After My Cousin’s Wedding
The Comfort Diner has the best sweet potato fries in the world. Fried twice, super crunchy with ground mustard-seed mustard and we dip it in our coleslaw for sugar mayo. I’m on a diet, but my mother says I look a whole lot better then she did when she was my age, and besides, the wedding was yesterday, no need to fit into my strapless dress, dance with 40 year old Mr. and Mrs. who met on J-Date, broke glass under a Chupa—so I go through five napkins in five minutes and toss them about my plate, translucent from the fat and fragile. We discuss this summer: Berlin. I’ve been dreaming of discothèques and ecstasy and gangly Euros with tiny mustaches and penchants for ruining young trans-Atlantic ladies—my malt slips down my throat. How far is it to Auschwitz? My mother asks my brother. He stares slack-jawed but cranks the gears inside his Britannica brain. I don’t want to go to Auschwitz, I say as I wipe the grease off my chin. There’s a freeze in the milkshake and my father says How can you be an artist if you resist facing the nexus of human cruelty? I spew orange spittle across my plate. Six eyes hold me at the booth, never mind the ketchup that dribbles down the table. Never mind bloated stomachs. There are only two more fries for four people and I don’t like to share. I’ve never learned the words for two parents with cancer and a grandfather with one leg and a dog’s ashes under a pillow in the kitchen and for my body that would swell with the nexus of humanity and might make an earthquake (who can ever make an earthquake in front of their parents?) bones breaking and towers shaking like Armageddon fires in the street people squealing like Mandrakes when their roots are pulled from the earth this fear of the letting go and reckless displays of clear diction, my stutter, the bouncing about placental and I never looked back because now I am frozen like the best milkshake in the world. Burping up potatoes is rumble enough.
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