Leslie Pietrzyk
They pick at the dinners I pull together, so how can I mind these girls filling up on Pop-Tarts when they get home from school? Someday, possibly, they’ll regret the quantity of ultra-processed food they consume, but not me, not even now, and I’m an adult. On my deathbed I’ll request broccoli? Doubtful. Anyway, it’s not the healthiness of my dinners they object to, it’s the fact that their mother cooks food with her own two hands, that she reads recipes and keeps an organized pantry. “It’s boring to cook,” Samantha says. Morgan says, “It’s patriarchy. Kitchens are patriarchy.” Samantha says, “Food is patriarchy.” Morgan says, “It’s all patriarchy, all of it, everything. Right?”
I pretend I agree. They’re fifteen, an age where peace is precarious, where my sweetie-pie twins agree, agree, agree, then abruptly don’t, their anger launching infernos of rage at each other and me and their dad. I joke with school moms and team moms that thankfully the biting stage has passed, though scars remain, if you know where to look. Airy, self-deprecating humor wiggles us adults through. We know our girls are beautiful, and we’re not saying so because we’re their mothers, but because we understand that they are: lithe, shiny, alert, agile with words and motion, clever and earnest, fired with streaky passion, these are the girls we imagine we were back before we tipped into being these women.
In the kitchen, the toaster dings as four Pop-Tarts emerge simultaneously. “Really, one could be a serving. So why put two in a pack?” Morgan says. “Money?” Not the first time we’ve explored this safe and comfortable contradiction. After school is usually for needling at life’s bemusing questions, untroubled by the lack of answers. “Skating the surface,” my mother called it, what conversation should be, she often said, “Talking that’s nothing.” Then why bother, I wondered. She died when I was seventeen, long before I could tell her I finally understand someone choosing to talk about nothing.
“Like you two,” I say. “Coming two in a pack.”
“Ew. Just stop,” Samantha says. They’re perched on stools at the kitchen island, gigantic Yetis or Stanley Cups or whatever’s the new thing sloshed full of filtered water. Sometimes they care deeply about the earth, and sometimes the shower pelts steamy water for forty-five minutes. Sometimes they’re sobbing about polar bears, and sometimes they’re wrapping half an orange in yards of Saran Wrap.
We stare at the Pop-Tarts, memories of burned fingers embedded in our brains. Samantha’s first. She’s the tough one, stoic at surprising moments, older by twelve minutes, unafraid of math and numbers, perpetually impatient with those who don’t catch on quickly. She fumbles two Pop-Tarts from the toaster onto a plate and sits down. Morgan says, “Could’ve brought me mine, you know,” and Samantha says, “Yeah, I know.”
I arrange the other two, very hot Pop-Tarts on a plate, bringing them to Morgan who nods casual thanks. She’s the dancer, the puzzle solver, the graphic novel reader, the girl with a dozen posters of New York City, the girl people willingly do favors for. I ease onto the end stool, intertwine my fingers that way corpses do, then quickly disengage, setting my fingers flat, eyeing the skin bunched around my knuckles. It’s supposed to, but still.
Let them talk. My goal is being silent enough and still enough and lucky enough that this spell never breaks, that all of Earth’s time stops, that the three of us lock into the calm of right now forever.
But in this world there’s no “enough.” Eventually they’ll head to bedrooms and phones, friends and homework, mood boards and smoky eye videos. I’ll check emails and start dinner. Their dad will come home and we’ll be a family, which is lovely—but not what this is: a fragile magic here in the kitchen, the three of us girls.
Everything breaks, people say. To possess something is to know it’s already broken. Please don’t make me break this.
I resort to the most useless question, asked and ignored across decades: “How was school?” My voice is my mother’s. I’m not a girl. I’m an adult, and I’m breaking this thing.
“Why don’t you have a job?” Samantha says. “Like everyone else?” She snaps off a chunk of Pop-Tart, blows excessively on it, drops it onto the plate.
“My job is—”
“You’re so rude,” Morgan interrupts. She bites into her Pop-Tart—which still must be hot—and I watch her dance the chunk of food side-to-side across her mouth, too proud to reach for water or to spit it out. I admire her stubbornness, even knowing that it will be her downfall, that countless lovers and bosses will wish her more compliant.
I say, “I’ve told you ten million times that my job is taking care of our family. You know that.”
Morgan swallows. “Is that what you wanted to do all along? Since being a kid?”
“Of course,” I say.
Samantha says, “But we didn’t even exist? How could you know? Is it taking care of this family, us? Or you’d be fine with any old family? We could be someone else, and so could Dad? Know what I mean?”
I say, “This family. If I wasn’t taking care of this exact and amazing family, I would’ve gone to med school instead to be a pediatrician.”
I would’ve been an artist, painting vast and mysterious landscapes of alien lands. I would have been an astronaut hovering in inky-black space, a candymaker developing rainbows of truffles in new flavors, a clenched-fist lawyer in a tailored suit talking twenty miles a minute. I would be everything, the way a globe contains the outlines of each country, and everything includes this, what I am right now, here.
The girls scrunch their almost-identical faces almost identically. For a moment I’m overwhelmed, as if I’ve been dropped into a hall of mirrors, seeing pieces of myself, scattered and scattering. We could stop talking right now.
Morgan says, “Mom, you absolutely hate blood.”
“Yeah, doctors are around gushing blood all the time,” Samantha says.
Doctor’s a bitter word. So’s blood. A pause, and I say this instead: “You’re right. So it all worked out.”
Samantha says, “Want a bite?” and she breaks off a Pop-Tart corner for me. She eats exclusively frosted strawberry, and Morgan’s current favorite is s’mores. The picture’s in my mind of exactly where each flavor is on the shelf at Publix. People who live in this neighborhood and who send their daughters to the twins’ private girls’ school tend to shop at Whole Foods and order their secret, crap-food online. Shopping at Publix, our family’s crap-food out in the open: Is that something these girls will remember?
Samantha’s got the Pop-Tart chunk on the flat of her palm, the way you feed apples to horses, and what possesses me, what exactly’s in my mind I don’t know, because I grab Samantha’s wrist and lower my face towards her hand, slurp up the piece of Pop-Tart with a sucky sound, a tonguey motion. As if, in this moment, I’m a horse, not who I am. The twins squeal with disgust and escalate into shrill derision. Samantha scrambles to the sink, pumping a dozen squirts of hand sanitizer, rubbing her hands over and over. “Never do that again, never,” she commands. “Not! Funny!”
“Better that way,” I say, but it’s dust in my mouth. Was there a flavor, and if there was, what was it? Maybe me eating like a horse is something these girls will remember?
They eyeroll in unison, shake their heads in the casual way of twin choreography.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I don’t know what I was thinking.”
Samantha says, “This is why she can’t have a real job.”
“I bet,” Morgan says.
A phone buzzes, and they’re both animal-alert as Samantha taps and scrolls. “It’s her,” she murmurs to her sister. “If you can believe it.” Her thumbs whisk through their paces, and she tilts the phone so Morgan can read.
“Perfect,” Morgan says, nodding.
There really were all those days when I was needed.
Samantha abruptly glares my way, does a sharp tongue-tsk. “Think how many babies’ lives you could’ve saved,” she says. “Isn’t that worth more than taking care of two rich girls even if those girls are us? And Dad? I mean, for the world and all?”
I’m lost because I’m thinking then of something entirely different, something unsayable with words. Anyway, if there were the words, no one could speak them. My face must be sad and blank, because here come more eyerolls, the gentle kind.
“We’re not actually rich, right?” Morgan says.
They don’t need to see me cry.
“Mom?” Samantha says.
“She means if you were a pediatrician,” Morgan says.
“Oh,” I say. “That was a joke.”
“You’re kind of out of it today,” Samantha says.
“What’s with you?” Morgan asks.
It’s this world, I could explain, that’s interested only in casual questions awaiting casual answers like, Just a little tired, or, Kind of a headache, or, Nothing—I feel fine.
“I could never be a doctor,” I say. “No way would I get into med school.” True that blood makes me queasy. True that I’d lose it sharing bad news with patients. You’re just a little tired, I’d say, shuffling them from my office to the waiting room, you’ve got kind of a headache. They’d love me though, driving home to retreat into their still-happy, still-lucky lives.
“You can do anything you set your mind to,” Morgan says.
“Yeah,” Samantha says. “It’s patriarchy making you think you can’t. Those doubts are just stupid patriarchy.”
“How was school?” I ask.
“You believe that, right?” Samantha asks. “About doing anything? That we can do and be anything?”
What do I believe? Samantha’s a razor that slips: the instant beading up of blood. I won’t be there to see exactly how, but sharpness will be her downfall.
My turn to speak, and I should explain that the words I need haven’t been invented. Explain that my downfall is waiting, is patience, is hope, is love.
Samantha continues, “I mean, you tell us that all the time. All the time. Like, since we were babies.”
“It’s probably my first memory, you saying that,” Morgan says. “Telling us, you can do anything. Be anything.”
“So you must believe it,” Samantha says. “Because you say it.”
“She believes it,” Morgan says.
“Unless there’s something else you’re not saying?” Samantha asks.
I speak slowly: “My heart knows you two will conquer the world and be amazing. But me at med school’s just a joke. Honestly, I’m so happy here.”
“Come! On!” They tag team, fussing and protesting, bubbling cliches and banal encouragement.
So that’s what I sound like.
I imagine someone listening to this scene unfold. Let’s say a calm therapist hearing it related in a dim gray office, gliding through subterranean waters. Let’s say the twins’ father, at the head of a holiday table, wondering whether to speak, whether to listen, how to do both simultaneously. Let’s say my own mother, dead of breast cancer when I was seventeen (seventeen!), a murmur in the mysterious, violet afterlife we want to trust in; listening to this scene and all the scenes, my high school and college graduations, my wedding, her grandchildren, every Christmas and birthday, recognizing each tiny thing that made me into the me I had to become without her.
Heaven can’t possibly work. Seeing our people who passed years and decades ago, us trying to catch them up on all of it, the people they’ve never met and how the Internet works and all the things Trump wrecked and when you decided you liked brussels sprouts and the names of every pet they never got to hold and and. They can’t know us. Heaven is time multiplied by infinity folded into eternity. I imagine the dead finding it simplest to hang with Dr. King or Marilyn Monroe or Shakespeare. Throw sticks for Lassie to fetch. Pose for Michelangelo. Learn to speak Babylonian. Challenge Einstein to chess matches. Eat all the foods they were allergic to or that gave them acid reflux. And.
“What are you thinking about?” Morgan says. She’s snippy.
“I was kidding about you not having a job” Samantha says, a snippy echo. “It’s the absolute best thing that we’re your job. If my friends were smart, they’d be so jealous.”
I imagine myself in heaven, trying to remember what a Pop-Tart was: did I like them? Did I not? The sawdust crust, that slick of gluey, red sugar. Imagine from my perch in heaven, flapping my angel wings, wondering why we were content with crumbs. Why—why, why, why—why eat Pop-Tarts and not strawberry rhubarb pie, chunky fruit, hand-rolled crust, cooled on a counter? Why the imitation and not the real thing? I imagine my mother in heaven murmuring, “She wasted all she was given.” I imagine myself making pie tomorrow and every day that’s left. Ordering a marble rolling pin on Amazon. Pretty pie tins.
Don’t forget: Heaven doesn’t exist.
“Let’s have more Pop-Tarts?” I stand, tearing open another pack of two, another.
“Oh my God,” Samantha says. “Really?”
“Kind of too much, don’t you think, Mom?” Morgan says.
“Seriously,” Samantha says. “What’s wrong?”
I drop four Pop-Tarts into the toaster, slide down the spring-loaded buttons.
“We’re not eating those,” Morgan says. She and Samantha exchange tense glances. They’re nervous, flipping and fondling their hair. My hands twitch, desperate to touch their hair, their cheeks, holding back.
“What are you doing, Mom?” Samantha asks, lifting her phone and staring steadily at it. “We said no.”
A moment later she carefully sets the phone upside-down on the counter.
A certain stillness drapes the kitchen as the relentless toaster ticks down our time. I’m giving them Pop-Tarts before I ruin Pop-Tarts, before everything that’s going to happen next happens.
(Please, let me stay here.)
Morgan says, “You know, actually, school was pretty good. We talked about Andrew Jackson and everyone hates him, like they should. You have no idea what an asshole president he was.”
Samantha says, “I’m glad you don’t work. Really.”
They’re waiting for me to speak, to tell them I love not working, that I, too, hate Andrew Jackson. I thought I could wait forever, or longer, or wait whatever long enough is.
Ding. Time’s up! “They’re way too hot,” I say. “Pop-Tarts are ridiculously dangerous. Don’t they know? Careful. Everyone be careful. Just wait one minute more, just a little bit longer. Just wait.”
Right now, no one’s moving. They’re confused, worried, tilting into sighs and impatient anger, eager to avoid complicated other feelings, like dread and fear. I want to explain that it’s so simple. If we’re still enough, if we say only words we already know: this spell won’t break. I won’t die.
I reach my hands to hold theirs. I swear their fingers are the exact same temperature though they’re two different bodies, two different girls. I tighten my grip. Then say, “I have to tell you something.”
And the clock starts. This eternity of everything I’ll miss.
#
Leslie Pietrzyk’s collection of linked stories set in DC, Admit This to No One, was published in 2021 by Unnamed Press. Her first collection of stories, This Angel on My Chest, won the 2015 Drue Heinz Literature Prize. Short fiction and essays have appeared in, among others, Ploughshares, Story Magazine, Hudson Review, Southern Review, Gettysburg Review, Iowa Review, The Sun, Cincinnati Review, LitHub, and Washington Post Magazine. Awards include a Pushcart Prize in 2020.