It could indeed be worse

The virus could have hit the US between July 5, 2018, when I said I didn’t want to be his wife any more, and January 3, 2019, when I moved out.  I would have been living — as so many women are right now — with someone who verbally abused and physically threatened me.

I wanted to leave in October 2018 — I started paying rent on my apartment then.  He convinced me to stay until Milo had taken his college entrance exams.  The idolatry of college entrance exams and achievement!  It was stupid and costly — also to Milo, because we were fighting pretty much openly by then.

So I’ll have the holiday alone.  Milo isn’t careful of my feelings, and he will spend most of the quarantine at the family home, which is 3x the size of my apartment and has outdoor space.

And yet, I have so much.  My beloved friends will FaceTime me tonight for a pre-Pesach open house, where I will show them my debut Seder plate, on my grandmother’s china, which I have never used despite having possessed it for 20 years.  I will show them the dishes I am making just for myself, but I am my own honored guest.  And then my true love Will will be with me, also via FaceTime, sending his love because he doesn’t want me to be alone.

It could be worse.  It has been worse.  It’s better now.

Pesach 5780

I started this blog post by looking back, but I get to revise it.  I get to tell the story from the start, from now, not then.

Today was the start of my Pesach kitchen transformation.  I wished today that my mother were Jewish — which I have never wished before — so that I could call her and say, “I just did my refrigerator, where are you?  What are you doing about the seder plate this year?  What are you making?  Can we stream the seder?”  But she’s not.  We don’t share the holiday back end, and I am sad, especially as I am coming to fully inhabit this holiday.

I am proud of my Pesach kitchen.  I do more a thorough changeover than I did when I lived with Daniel, lived in that narrow place, trying to find a space between his disapproval and generalized rage at Pesach, his disdain for my Jewish practice, when I was balancing the whole burden of Orthodox practice on my head.  But now, it is for me — and for Milo, for a few days, and I’m not sure he’ll notice or not.  Even alone, I am connected to Jewish women (I wish Pesach cleaning weren’t so gendered… maybe it isn’t in other households.  In my current set up, all the domestic labor is gendered.  Milo vacuumed for the first time in his life when he was here two weekends ago.  He was delighted by the novelty, but took umbrage when I asked him to do it again.  He agreed to clean his desk, which was also his dining room for his two week of post-travel quarantine with me.  He took Women’s History last semester, so he has all the rhetoric, but gender privilege — modeled to a T by his father —  is in his marrow and he has to fight to overcome it).  I am connected to all of the people who spent hours today, wiping out the fridge, switching the contents of the cupboards, scheduling the controlled landslide (right metaphor?) of Pesach through the rest of the kitchen: sink, dishwasher, microwave, stovetop, oven countertops (why do we say “won in a landslide”? That doesn’t make sense.  We don’t say, won in a tidal wave.).

I control nothing at all outside my door.  The virus will affect one in seven residents of my city, according to the latest projections.  There are 15 apartments on 11 floors in my apartment building.  One trash room per floor.   One laundry room — 10 washers, 10 dryers — for all of us.  One package room for the endless deliveries that we believe keep us safe.  The odds are not in my favor.  So how glorious (my Will’s favorite expression of delight, “glorious,” in his really sexy light Queens accent. Why yes, Will does read my blog.  Why do you ask?)… how glorious it is to declare that my kitchen is as I want it, as it should be.  My kitchen, for Pesach, is communal, connected to all the other kitchens like it until the night of April 16, when Jack in the Box of the holiday springs open and we scatter.

This constrained Pesach feels full of possibility.   I will take time off, which is counter cultural and counter-intuitive.  My boss’s confusion radiates through her email.  Why would you take time off when you can’t do anything?  Exactly.  No doing.  Reading, walking, ceasing to push the heavy boulder up the steep incline of my job, which has ceased to engage or fulfill or reward or pay my bills.  This Pesach, with so much forbidden, I will be free.

(The last time I wrote about Pesach it was like this.  And now, with everything confused and so much fear about work and money and when will I be able to free myself from Daniel legally and financially,  I have all that I need, things that were literally unimaginable when I last wrote about Pesach, two years and four days ago.  I did this.  I made this.  It’s indelible.  Whatever else happens, whatever I might lose later, I did this.  I love you, my Will.)