Dean Martin Sings and I Dream of Eating
My stomach and mouth are furious. My eye is misbehaving, and the doctor says, “Do not fly.” This also translates to: You cannot fly . . . to New Jersey . . . to eat!
She is Asian, like me; a food freak, like me. She knows the enormity of her words.
Covid did this to me. I am vaccinated, I am boosted (twice!), I wear a mask in public (even now when most people have cast them aside), and yet here she is again—this unwanted guest, showing up at the dinner party of my life, just as dessert is being served. She enters without knocking, upsets cups of espresso, plucks plums from the cake, sticks her fingers into the bowl of whipped cream. Then she steals sight, weakens lungs, lines skin, streaks black hair white. This blowzy broad has been stalking me for the last three years, trying to destroy me, and my travel plans. This time she is keeping me from celebrating the 80th birthday of my boyfriend’s mom. A blowout planned by her husband at her favorite restaurant, Justin’s (goodbye, long black dress with a slit up the side; hello, black patch over my left eye).
There will be no celebrating with the family for me, nor daily worship with my boyfriend at his holy trinity of childhood haunts. So long, Pizza Town (slices and birch beer, a bag of zeppole). So long, Hot Grill (fried hotdogs All the Way: mustard, onion, Greek chili; roast beef and gravy on a hard roll; fries—well-done!). So long, B&W Bakery (a rectangle of vanilla cake with a tower of butter and brown sugar crumb topping. Meant to serve four, five, six—or one Italian-American cook, never chef, “Too pretentious,” he claims, and his always hungry girlfriend).
There will be no visit to the rosary of shops on Arthur Avenue, in the Bronx, to pick up provisions (another word he hates): cans of late-summer tomatoes, bottles of volcanic wine, a tin of golden-green olive oil, sticky bars of spun sugar spiked with pistachios, a triangle of sharp, salty cheese, Italian bread (to be sliced and buttered. Nothing more, nothing less), the cookies crowned with pine nuts. Ingredients my cook planned to alchemize into a week of dinners for all; plus, sweets for me for when my mouth got lonely.
Instead, I will tuck away inside my Portland apartment and eat Hershey bars from the grocery store down the street; drink Mexican Cokes from the tienda around the corner, avocado toast and a black drip coffee from the moto cafe across the street, smoky mac and cheese from the vegan BBQ joint at the end of the alley, and dream of all that I am missing on the other side of the country.
Late one afternoon, in the middle of my week alone, I warm a bowl of leftover pasta fazool (made for me by my cook before he left), and click until I find Moonstruck (Nicolas Cage plus Cher plus bread, bread, bread. What more is there to say?), but when I hear Dean singing about the moon, an eye, and pizza pie—what normally sounds like a promise, turns into a taunt.
It has been months since I cancelled my trip due to the sucker punch that ill-mannered bitch Covid landed to my eye. My stomach and mouth are still furious.
Carla Crujido is the author of the short story collection, The Strange Beautiful (Chin Music Press). Her work has appeared in Crazyhorse, Yellow Medicine Review, Ricepaper Magazine, Tinfish Press, and elsewhere. Carla is the Nonfiction Editor at River Styx Magazine, and holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the Institute of American Indian Arts. She lives in the Pacific Northwest.
