“You need to be nicer to me,” The Girlfriend says.
“I’m mostly nice to you,” I say.
“I mean right now.”
“Oh. OK. I’ll try. Starting: Now!”
It’s Thursday evening. Tomorrow we’re leaving Brooklyn for a few days. We found a small Catskills cabin where no one has stayed for more than a month and that the proprietor has pledged to clean top to bottom. We’re taking The Girlfriend’s son, to celebrate completion of his third college year.
We have no CoronaWorld complaints to speak of. The Girlfriend and I are weeks past relatively mild symptoms of what we assume was Covid-19. (Except The Girlfriend’s antibody test, taken last week, comes back negative; her doctor tells her to test again in a few weeks: results may differ. When it comes to Covid-19, certainty is a sand pile against a rising tide.) Our families remain healthy. I need a job, but neither I nor anyone in our families faces imminent financial distress.
Still, we’re tapped out. The Girlfriend has been shuttling back and forth between my apartment, where she sleeps, and hers, further south in Brooklyn, where her two children and her eldest’s partner are ensconced. She’s helping The Son through his end-of-semester stretch, making meals, cleaning. (“It’s disgusting,” she says one night after an 8-hour domestic shift. “Well, not disgusting; I’ve cleaned it. But I can’t keep up with the mess. There’s shit everywhere. I can’t do any work there; I can’t think.”)
In one of his five classes The Son has waged a semester-long battle with the professor. Unlike most educators, the professor seems to be cutting him no CoronaWorld slack, sending his stress to the top of the charts. Still, in his third year, The Son is learning to advocate for himself; a school counselor is helping him manage his work flow, interceding with the prof. He’s also asked The Girlfriend to help by making two or three meals a day. It all works; he learns this week he’ll pass the dreaded class (the college is offering Pass/Fail options), while excelling in others. The Girlfriend shuttles home each night exhausted.
Thursday, I'm reasonably productive. I cross off most items on my pre-trip To Do list. (For about the 14th time, I bail on making sourdough starter; turns out you have to stir it every day or two; I don't want to take it upstate.)
I decide to spend the afternoon making Samin Nosrat’s Big Lasagna. It’s vegetarian, so The Kid can eat it. But I start too late. I have store-bought noodles (I own no pasta machine), but I need to make tomato sauce, which I start after I mix the ricotta filling. Then there’s the béchamel, which I end up stirring in between softening three lasagna noodles at a time in boiling water, two minutes each.
The Girlfriend steps into the kitchen. “Can I help?”
“Sure.” Usually I say no, but as it is we’ll be eating after 8 p.m. I wouldn’t care, but I’d prefer to keep The Kid off Spanish dining hours; she’s had a hard enough time getting to sleep this week. “Help me assemble.”
I’m finishing the béchamel. The Girlfriend takes a third of it to coat the pan, tops it with pasta. Nosrat calls for 18 ounces of dried noodles. I’ve used a 16-ounce package, about 25 sheets, each half the width of a magazine; it takes six to cover the bottom of my 9-by-13 pan. I’m wielding my immersion blender on the tomato sauce. She layers ricotta, tomato sauce, six more noodles. Then: béchamel, Parmesan, six more noodles; ricotta, sauce, six more noodles. We’ve used two-thirds of the béchamel, ricotta, and sauce, and we’re out of noodles. Damn.
I read the recipe, which includes a note at the end of the 15th of its 18 steps: “If using store-bought or dried pasta, you can skip the noodle layer between the ricotta and tomato sauce as needed to prevent the lasagna from stretching higher than the top of the pan.” Or, I think, to make sure you maintain the proper noodle-to-filling ratio. Damn.
“This isn’t a big deal,” The Girlfriend says. “Let’s just top it with the rest of the béchamel and Parmesan and put it in the oven.”
“Not only are we not using a third of the ricotta and sauce, we’re also supposed to have enough noodles to create a ‘sealed pasta layer’ on top!”
“I don’t know why you’re so upset.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“You’re right. It doesn’t. This is going to be fine. It’s all layers; the flavors will blend. I thought you were learning how to be flexible in the kitchen.”
“I still like to follow a recipe the first time I make it.”
At some point in the afternoon I tweaked a muscle in my upper back. My forearm tendonitis hasn’t improved much. But my main problem in CoronaWorld, I realize: lack of resilience. If all goes well I can manage my days OK, if without much joy. But if things go south — a paucity of pasta, say — my equanimity snaps like a dried twig.
“You need to be nicer to me,” The Girlfriend says.
I call The Kid to set the table; I make a salad. After a couple of conversational forays she says, “If you’re just going to be nasty about everything I say, I won’t say anything at all.”
I thought I was being patient. “Sorry. Recipe mishap. I’ll be OK in a few minutes.”
The lasagna turns out to be good.
“I thought it might,” The Girlfriend says.
“I’d like it better without spinach,” The Kid says. “But it’s still pretty good.”
“It’s better than that,” The Girlfriend says. “I don’t think I’ve ever made lasagna this good.”
The Girlfriend gets a few texts. She steps away from the table; it’s her Southern California Realtor with bad news. She calls. The buyer of her house, an engineer, just lost his job. He’s backing out of the deal. They’d already agreed on the purchase price, were ready to close the next day.
“He had our papers in front of him when he found out,” she says. She rests her arms on her knees; her head hangs. “Didn’t I say it last night? That I’m not going to get excited about this until it’s finally, finally done?”
Later, she tells me where her brain traveled: “Why did I leave my job in Southern California? [That was four years ago.] Why did I come to New York City? I had a house; I could sit outside any time I wanted. I had a garden. I could have retired there. Now I’m in a crappy two-bedroom apartment. What am I doing with my life?”
“OK,” I say. “Sure: you lost out on a million-dollar home sale. But I couldn’t follow my lasagna recipe. It’s been a hard day on everyone.”
We go to bed, wondering if CoronaWorld getaways restore resilience.
(New York state numbers on Thursday: 345,813 diagnosed with Covid-19, up 0.8 percent; 134 dead, to a total of 22,304, up 0.6 percent. Overall U.S. deaths: 1,858, to a total of 79,899, up 2.3 percent.)
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