Esteban comes into the computer room where I am reading Sundry’s diary, and places one of our juice glasses down on the desk in front of me. It is filled with dark liquid that could be grape juice, used motor oil, or bloody runoff from the leg of lamb in the refrigerator.
‘Try that.’ He says.
Those are frightening words. ‘Try that.’ It’s a game he plays with me. He expects me to do it, blindly, obediently, without question. I used to play along until one day he handed me a Keebler Clubhouse cracker with some gelatinous grey thing spread upon it.
‘Try that.’ He had said.
I tried that. It tasted like pickled boogers. On a Keebler Clubhouse cracker.
‘Mott Eth It?’ I said through a weak spray of crumbs, trying to stop myself from spitting pickled boogers on the carpet.
‘Sulze.’ He replied.
Sulze is Belgian for pickled head cheese.
‘Brainth!? You gaff me brainth?’
‘I think I’ve decided that I don’t much like it.’ He shrugged and walked back into the kitchen, leaving me running for the bathroom to shave former pig thoughts off my tongue.
This should be a warning to anyone who ever expects to have any interpersonal relationships ever. With anyone. Don’t feed them grey matter on a cracker without providing a warning of some kind. Preferably from the Surgeon General, the way they do for packs of cigarettes. No wait, people still smoke regardless of what it will do to fetuses. Put one of those mattress tags on them, because no one removes those damn things.
But back to the juice glass. It was just wine. Mogan David, to be precise. Esteban has heard that drinking a glass of purple wine a night is good for your heart and since this is the first healthy thing that he actually might like, he’s embraced it very scientifically. He doesn’t want to buy good wine for this for fear that he might enjoy it a bit too much and drink far more than the prescribed 6 ounces. Because he is two steps from being Otis on The Andy Griffith Show.
I wouldn’t drink it, even after he told me what it was. Something about purple wine in a juice glass bothered me. I just shook my head and said ‘Uh-uh. No way. No thanks.’
‘You’re supposed to drink a glass of wine every day!’ He sniffed, snatching back the juice glass.
I want to point out that he ate macaroni shells with melted cheese and sugar cookies for dinner and I, on the other hand, had broiled salmon, wild rice and green beans with lemon juice (and no it WASN’T a frozen dinner, I actually made that and he didn’t want it). I want to point out the fact that he had just come in from smoking outside while I have never smoked but for a short three week period during my senior year in high school and have been paying for that in limp asthmatic lungs ever since.
Instead I muster up all of my self-righteousness and sputter ‘I am not SUPPOSED to do ANYTHING!’ And then sat there looking at him with my eyebrows raised as though I had just said the most profoundly wicked thing in the history of the universe.
Chalk up another scathing remark in the history of my razor tongue. I swear, “You’re not the boss of me” would have been a more intelligent comeback. I think I used up all of my wit this afternoon when I suggested to Jake that if one could poop out Nordstrom gift cards, diarrhea would result in Old Navy gift cards. I’ll probably think of the perfect Mogan David retort tonight at 3:34 a.m. when Esteban is blissfully knocked out and snoring in a cheap wine stupor and I’ll only be able to tell the cat. And she’ll just look up from my crumpled sweatshirt on the floor that she’s been kneading for the last hour and then go back to trying to nurse from it.
Gah.
