15. parking cars and pumping gas

andrea scrima

 

On a whim, I sent you a recipe for cauliflower and fennel in a coconut curry sauce; you diligently shopped for the ingredients and prepared a perfect meal. Tonight it was turnip and green beans, grated carrot and chicken with turmeric over which your mother voiced her enthusiastic approval. I am not trying to win her over, but she is under the mistaken impression that these recipes are for her, and so she is slowly beginning to like me.

I wake up early; there are so many things I still need to understand. We’ve been playing the game of where-were-you-when: where was I when you were in Athens? In Saudi Arabia? In Paris? When you returned to New York, I was checking coats uptown, waiting to hear whether or not I would be moving to Berlin to do graduate work, waiting to hear my fate. It’s not impossible that…

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13. Do you think we can go down another 75 milligrams?

andrea scrima

 

What made her want to open that 36-year-old bottle of Dom Pérignon? She gazed at the tobacco-brown label and the words Moët et Chandon as you loosened the oxidized wire and pulled out the disintegrating cork; she remembered the mahogany liquor cabinet it once stood in, the life it belonged to. I wonder if she was planning to release a genie. Shrill and acidic, but with a deep note of nectar that tasted strange and precious: you drank it, but she declined. She anticipated the hangover in store for you today, prescribed sugar and Angostura. It worked for her husbands, surely it would work for you, and it did.

I sit in the psychiatrist’s office, open the laptop, and brace myself for a long wait. The room is full of people bundled into their coats and slumped in their seats with their eyes downcast, whereas I am damp with…

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