we flew out to arizona for my stepsister's wedding at the beginning of the month. she's the last member of my immediate family and stepfamily to marry, a detail most of us don't think about very much and a couple of us think about so intensely that i imagine one of those movie scenes where a bunch of buzz-cut, midcentury-ed-harris-y dudes in a control room applaud a wall of monitors and slap each other's backs and shake hands with cigarettes dangling out of their mouths, and also they are all simultaneously jane austen characters. the wedding was in sedona, a place joe and i lunched in with my in-laws maybe 15 years ago that i am old enough to consistently associate with axl rose and stevie nicks' fajita roundup. it was very scenic! we didn't see very much of it, as we drove up from phoenix midday on a friday and decamped in the early afternoon on a sunday, but i appreciate why people associate it with vortices and very much appreciate that it's home to the flagship location of the rock store i favor when we're meeting joe's family up in flagstaff. my stepfamily is...colorful, and i've spent a lot of time on the metaphorical and literal treadmill over the last year thinking about what i would or wouldn't say to the estranged member of it who crashed my grandmother's memorial service during the first trump administration (he served in that one and is serving in this one, and though he is too stupid to be effective at much of anything i resent quite energetically the way others have stooped for him); that time he and his wife approached me and, off guard, i chatted politely with them. joe feels very strongly that i should hold my tongue in person for the sake of the mutuals i esteem, and i feel that's how we slide into fascism and fantastize about picking pieces of his equine teeth out of my knuckles. one of my sisters and i talked about this at length and she was going to wear a rainbow pin to wedding events to telegraph, among other things, her disinterest in engaging; ultimately she did not, but her sons and i did. i couldn't tell you if someone told the garbage relative that i wasn't interested in interacting with him; i moved to the other side of a few rooms out there in arizona, and ultimately i'd decided that if i had to say anything to him i would just say no.
my father gave a speech the night of the rehearsal dinner, which was maybe a big deal or maybe not; we met the bride when i was in my twenties and she was barely a teen, so i think there was a lot more riding on how everyone else moved through that event than on how i did. i love her, and i'm glad for her that she's had someone other than her own terrible father to help her figure out how the world is put together; i'm proud of him for standing up for her in ways said terrible father couldn't or wouldn't. i think my empathic imagination is respectable, but i don't have any idea what it would be like to be her, not really. when she was in college she got a tattoo on her instep that says INHALE / EXHALE, but thanks to the dodgy script and, you know, this universe's dodgy script it appears to read INHALE WHALE. that's what i think it must feel like to be her; inhale whale. at a post-rehearsal reception she told me very sweetly that i was welcome to take molly with everyone at the afterparty the next day, and i leave it to you to decide whether or not that is something i did. speaking of choosing one's own adventures, the sister who pussied out of wearing a pin to wedding stuff (i kid, mostly, she is a kinder person than i am) got this bracing library book in which one of the decision-tree outcomes was getting enslaved by christopher columbus, a work that could be in some peril now that the administration is purging public collections. i am rooting for the woke choose-your-own-adventure book; hopefully someone sneaks it to the little girl whose horse-faced dad is dead to me, a towheaded little sprite who skipped down the aisle at the wedding with her anti-vax mother, who sported a slit-to-the thigh, sheer and boned layer cake of nude tulle like the onlyfans tooth fairy.
04.26.25 [on the F train]
we flew home from portugal via toronto this past sunday on the first flight that has ever given me occasion to resent canada (we were delayed for flimsy-sounding reasons that kept changing; we had to transfer from one toronto airport to another that was, inexplicably, just offshore in lake ontario; we were assured many times that our luggage would be checked through and transferred without our having to collect and haul it across town, an idea so lovely and hard to believe that we visited the first baggage claim anyway and found our suitcases circling the chute like orphaned ducklings). our two weeks abroad were unusual ones: i thought to look up local protests the night we arrived on the eve of the "hands off" actions april 5, and was delighted to discover democrats abroad were planning an action in the praça dos restauradores, which was a five-minute walk from our hotel. i found an art store with poster supplies, holed myself up in the bathroom as joe slept off his jet lag, and made a double-sided placard: THEY ARE JOKERS, NOT KINGS and MAKE AMERICA CONSTITUTIONAL AGAIN (NAZI DOGE FUCK OFF). duolingo had been doing its best to teach me some portuguese and i considered cutting my sign in the shape of an apple (MACA = maça), but i checked myself before i wrecked myself. about 700 people gathered at the plaza—i actually believe this figure, a few diligent souls moved through the crowd counting us head by head—and drew comparisons with portugal's carnation revolution 51 years ago, yelled earnest things about social security (many expat retirees on the scene), sang leonard cohen's "hallelujah," which i have accepted as something we're going to hear everywhere on all occasions for a little while longer. (i kind of hope his estate is litigious?) we spent the subsequent week engaging in light tourism, with my mom and stepdad joining in a few days later, then took a train up to porto and boarded a riverboat, where in retrospect we really shouldn't have killed an albatross. it seems someone ele boarded when they weren't at their best, for norovirus whipped around the decks over the next week like me at the local roller rink when i was nine. joe went down early saturday night, mom and doug joined him in the wee hours, and at least four waves of contagion rolled over us as we tried and failed to sail up to spain, thanks to once-in-a-decade heavy rains that confounded the douro river's locks. we were stuck in the same valley town for four days, and the invalids couldn't even open the drapes in their cabins, as we were parked between other stranded vessels. the sandwiching was so enthusiastic that we accessed the beleaguered valley town through a couple of other ships, so i'm beginning to think they got a few turns with saramago's revenge as well. as that happened i learned that my cousin's brain cancer had accelerated and he was likely to die before we could get home, before i could get there if i bolted and brought him portuguese norovirus, and so he did. i spent my days joining various hikes and bike rides by myself watching fog roll through terraced vineyards in the rain and imagining what it would be like to be 40 and give birth to my second daughter right before my husband died. in my mind's eye my cousin is a little boy with a san francisco giants tee shirt hanging past his knees and ears like pennants, and i don't know when i will think of him as someone who isn't going to write back. our last interaction was his laughing at my enthusiasm for enrique iglesias's "escape," which is an easier place to leave things with someone than where my sister had to try to steer things at his bedside for all of us. joe came to the deserted patio where i'd been assembling a huge puzzle all week to say that it was time to come back and pack, it wasn't fair for me to clang around when he was sleeping, and i caved, then tantrumed: i'd had a rough couple of days, all i wanted was to finish a fucking puzzle, if he wasn't going to offer any comfort why couldn't he just leave me alone. so that's how i sobbed over a thousand pieces of the mona lisa while the night crew played eurovision pop, her right shoulder fused together where my mom had spilled nonalcoholic prosecco on it a few days earlier. i wish you were here.
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