Pizza, with my mother.
It is a Saturday night, I think, or a Friday, around 6 (which is well toward the night in Chicago’s cold November). I walk downstairs, wondering at the quiet, finding only my mother, in the kitchen. I open the refrigerator, looking for a quick dinner before I have to leave to pick up my friends – who, at 17, were not all lucky enough to have their own cars at their disposal. Finding nothing fresh appealing, I turn to the freezer. I take out a microwave pizza, and my mother—whose apparent sadness had been peripheral until now—says, “Jordan, I have to tell you something.” I say, “Ok,” wondering at her “have to,” and start to open the pizza box as she begins to ramble something or other about not intending to tell me this way, and she’s not really supposed to tell me, and he’ll be angry, but he’s going to do it tomorrow and that’s not right. At this point, though I wasn’t sure at first, I know she’s talking about my father, who had earlier asked me to go to breakfast with him the following morning so we could discuss something he refused to specify to me but apparently had to her. I remove the plastic shrink-wrap and place the pizza on its box, atop its silver paper heating disc, and then reapply the frozen cheese that fell off in the plastic, careful to fill any obvious distribution holes. I set the microwave to 3 minutes and 45 seconds. She’s still talking, and as I hit START, she gets to: “He says he’s not going to, but he won’t say what, and I know he’s going to.” So, I think, apparently he didn’t specify the future conversation with her either. I open the cabinet over the microwave and take out a dinner plate – solid black, except for white painted swirls in a ring around the edge, a choice of my mother’s that I didn’t realize was unusual until college. I search the utensil drawer for the pizza cutter, and say, my profile to her, “Mom, what’s going on?”
She starts to cry as she lets out what, she tells me, has been eating at her for weeks, months, years even. It’s been so hard, she tells me, and—because of the microwave’s timer, and my memory of burning my mouth on the pizza’s first slice—I know it takes her a bit over 3 minutes to tell me, in really no detail at all, just how hard it’s been. I stand, leaning on the counter, my elbows on either side of the pizza cutter resting on the plate, facing her, as she sits at one end of the rounded-corner rectangular table, askew a bit, her left side against the table’s edge, facing me, her left arm resting on the table’s corner and her right forearm resting on her thigh. This position allows only sharp movements as she speaks, jaggedly matching the stops and starts of her words: the motion of her right arm limited, as though by a puppeteer’s rod, to the upturning of her palm by a twist of her wrist as her forearm remains on her thigh, and her left arm, constantly moving, as by the strings of a marionette, in a sort of pulling forth motion as her elbow brings her hand forward toward me and then returns it to her chest or her mouth. The combined effect of her tears and the hum of the microwave forces her voice to a higher register than normal, and that, along with what she is saying and the fact of her crying, somehow makes it hard for me to look at her for more than brief intervals. I intersperse my glances at her with long gazes at the pizza in the microwave, spinning and warming and cooking. She is telling me—in multiple and synonymous and repetitious sets of phrases—that “things” haven’t been right for a long time, that “we” still love “you” and “your sister” very much of course, that “that” will never change, that none of “this” is “your” fault at all. The pizza is making noise in the microwave, drops of sauce spurting from beneath the covering of now melted cheese. Looking at the microwave, I think, I tell her, “It’s ok, Mom,” and, turning to look at her—and lying, really—“I guess I knew something was up.”
The microwave beeps the pizza’s completion, startling us both: I turn too quickly to it and knock the pizza cutter to the ground; my mother lets out a gasp that frees a loud sob. I interrupt the microwave before its third beep and remove the pizza as my mother tries to calm her lungs. She wipes tears, careful not of preserving her makeup but of getting it in her eyes, and says, raising her voice above the sound of the sink as I rinse invisible dirt from the floored cutter, “It’s just gotten too hard, and we all need something to change.” I start to cut the pizza into slices—it’s only an 8-inch circle, but I have a habit of cutting it into 16 bite-size slices, quartering it, and then quartering the quarters—and she gets to the point. It’s difficult (in the way small things are sometimes difficult) to cut a soft-crusted, microwave pizza into so many small pieces—the slices stick to the cutter as it runs back and forth, they curl up and want to somersault over each other, and you need your other hand to keep them in place—and so I’m concentrating mostly on the cutting as my mother says, “Your father’s going to move out soon, I think, as soon as possible.” It must appear as though I don’t react at all—though this is, somehow, amidst what seems now obvious family turmoil, an enormous surprise—because I simply continue to make my cuts, looking down. Then, finished slicing, I bring my fingers to my lips and raise my eyes, as my mother stands and walks toward me, crying still, or again, as she reaches for a hug. Still holding the cutter, with pizza entrails still on its blade, I hug her, careful not to stain the back of her shirt. It’s a brief embrace—though longer than the hellos and goodbyes that would become common in my college years to come—and as we pull away, her wiping her face, and me licking the blade of the cutter before I put it in the sink, I tell her, “It’s going to be ok.” “Yeah,” she says under her breath, still trying to sigh away sobs, and I pick up the plate, grab a paper napkin, and walk to the family room to eat.
