I'm doing laundry today. My husband, Josh, hates shopping for clothes more than anything in the world, so I line dry the stuff we'd rather not ruin in the dryer, the t-shirts and underwear from places like H&M that usually unravel quicker than couples who get married right out of high school. We've been able to extend the life of some of these cheap clothes for going on ten years. Only now is the wear starting to show under the arms and at the hems. We don't have curtains, but on days like today, we have clothes hanging where curtains could be. Most everything was dirty, now drying, so I stand there in the window completing the chore in my worst underwear. No one sees me but the cat who has taken to sitting in Josh's office chair, the one parked at the head of the dining room table since the pandemic began. Shawn, our boyfriend, is taking a nap.
Josh goes into the office once a week. All other days he works from home. The cat sits in his lap for hours at a time then. He's a distraught little animal from having to wear a cone around his neck. His head pokes out barely sometimes, like the inside of a sunflower that has suddenly gained the sweetest face you've ever seen. In those moments, I want to remove his cone and feed it to a fire. He has to wear it because he licked a spot on his body too much and caused a horrible sore. It's almost healed. Some wounds haven't. The loss of our dog three years ago still hurts enough for Shawn to have fully believed the cat was next. I don't know how to console someone when they're like that, when they're sobbing over something that hasn't happened yet and isn't likely to happen anytime soon. The best I came up with was to help keep the cat alive by inventing new ways to trick him into eating his antibiotics.
Because this year is a knife that stays twisting, Shawn discovered last night that he's developed a shellfish allergy. He grew up in the Dominican and later in Florida, so he's lived not far from fresh seafood all his life. When we first started dating him, he made us impressive seafood dinners, and we would talk about how good the oysters were in places not in the middle of the country. Now, he can't eat a single shrimp without his lips going numb. How else can time rob him? He already suffers from a chronic digestive illness. With the restaurant reopened in a small, limited way again, his livelihood as a server has been chopped into bits tiny enough to taste but not to fill. I think we're all starving to have a closer world again.
A lot of people on our street believe that world is already here. So much so the news did a report on all the maskless jerks who hang in crowds outside the bars in our neighborhood. Josh and I take walks into the dark and silent residential areas at night. We don't encounter anyone but rabbits and fireflies. Still, just in case, we wear our masks.
Sugar is a way to distract at least a full two minutes out of the little daily horrors. I made a banana upside-down cake last night. This morning, I stood nude in the kitchen and ate a piece. God, it was so good and sweet, like candy.