quiche

I'm fairly convinced that I have a brain aneurysm, or maybe a stroke, I'm not positive. I was lifting weights in the gym on Monday, and suddenly got hiccups. Nobody's ever died from having hiccups; I'll be the first, which only provides dubious comfort. I automatically held my breath -- not the smartest thing in the world -- and kept lifting weights. Sudden sharp, stabbing pain in the head. I hiccuped some more.

The pain hasn't left yet, though it's muted itself to a relatively dull aching most of the time. It's especially bad when I've been lying down for a while and get up. For a few moments the entire world goes sort of black while Mr. Pain does a little tap-dance on the optic nerves. "Here I am, pay attention to Meeeeeeee!" Then it starts all over again.

I'm dying. I'm always dying. Now I'm dying faster.

Out of the four journal entries that I've started writing since I returned from Oregon, exactly one of them is more than halfway finished. My attention span has been permanently stunted by my apartment, more specifically by the Sony Playstation that The Guy brought over for me to play with. Diabolical bastard. He already owns a Playstation Two. "It's important to me that my girlfriend likes video games," he said quite gravely. "I'm not using my old Sony. I'll bring it over." And just like that, he ruthlessly sacrificed me to the death of all productivity for the next few months.

The only time I'm able to actually work on an entry without feeling the tug of the damn machine, (damn! damn! damn damn damn!) is when I'm at work, so here I am, taking a break from documentation to do...well, documentation.

...And, oh, but I had to. I have to tell everybody about Mom.

And The Guy.

I've always talked about my family to The Guy, because I love to talk and tell pointless stories, and if anything's more pointless than my family, I've not encountered it yet. They're dippy, tweaky little people; more like caricatures than real people, sometimes. My sister, for instance, is climbing Mount Rainier to commemorate my father's death some six years ago.

"I'm doing it in July," she said, "because I can't remember when Dad died. I mean, I know it's the 12th sometime, but I don't know which 12th. I keep thinking June, but it's actually July. At least, his gravestone says July, which probably means it's July. Mom wouldn't have been mistaken with that, would she?"

No, she wouldn't.

"...so if I climb Mount Rainier in July, I'll remember that it's in July."

(Actually, it's working. I can now remember that Dad died on July 12th as well. I couldn't, before. Mount Rainier, Dad, and July are inextricably linked in my mind.)

The Guy has met my sister. Insofar as I can tell, he likes her. "But I barely know her," he qualified just now over Yahoo Messenger.

Fair enough.

Over the last few months, I think I've built up my mother in my stories as a larger than life, quixotic, devious, manipulative, machiavellian puppet-master with a heart of gold. In fact, I know I have, and I can't say that that's far wrong. We sat down and watched the movie Shall We Dance one night -- a great movie, by the way; a feel-good movie, in a fashion that Hollywood is incapable of creating -- and I pointed to Tomoko Sensei, the older dance teacher. "That. There. See her? That's my mother. She's just like that."

Thus, when my mom came down to visit me for a weekend, The Guy was strung tighter than a piano string. He vibrated whenever I touched him.

"What if she doesn't like me?" he asked, his eyes shiny.

"She'll like you. She likes everybody." Which is true enough, with caveats. She likes everybody worth liking. "Plus, you're dating me."

"What does that have to do with it?"

I gave it a little thought. "She'd approve of anybody I was dating. The simple fact that you managed to get me to go out on a date with you at all is enough to vault you into the top of her favorites list."

He grinned. "So I could be a lesbian sado-masochist with piercings and a tattoo?"

"Pretty much," I admitted. "Yes."

Oddly enough, this didn't comfort him.

I told my sister and her boyfriend that I thought The Guy might be a bit nervous about meeting mom. They giggled their way through the rest of the week. We made arrangements, between the four of us, that we would have dinner at my place on Thursday night; mom was scheduled to come in that evening. The Guy would cook, I told them all. "He'll make quiche," I promised. "He makes fantastic quiche."

"Um, okay," said The Guy, when I told him. "I guess I could...."

Thus, the day before, we made a test run of it; rather, he made a test run of it, experimenting with my oven in order to make a quiche for a barbeque party we had promised ourselves to. He was gnawing his lips in frustration by the end of the experiment. He's a perfectionist in the kitchen. He stared down at the finished quiche, beautifully risen and perfect save for the fact it was completely brown on top.

"Look at this," he grumped. "I hate your oven. The heat's all wrong."

He rolled his shoulders and stomped around moodily, crashing into me every few seconds. I have a very small kitchen.

Not being so high a critic myself, I made enthusiastic sounds over the pie and promised him nothing but sunshine and roses for the next day. "It'll be great. Mom will love it. She loves quiche."

Mom, when she arrived, came trotting into the apartment trailing a massive suitcase that probably weighed more than she did. She's a scrawny woman: five-foot six and 93 pounds. She looks like a Bosnian refugee. The Guy could snap her in half with two fingers. Maybe three, just for leverage. He came creeping out of the kitchen to greet her, shyly, nearly blushed in her presence, then scurried back to hide in the kitchen. He's five foot nine and 190 pounds.

Everything went wrong for The Guy that night; the oven wasn't heating properly, and the middles of his quiches weren't cooked right. He stuffed them back into the oven, swearing horribly under his breath. My sister and her boyfriend looked on, hugely entertained, while he crashed about in the kitchen cooking up mushrooms and criticizing my asparagus. "Get out," he said at last, desperately. He swatted me away from the stove, where I was muttering over a pan and my unevenly clipped asparagus spears. "I'll do it. Trust me. Just ... get out. You're making me crazy."

I slunk out of the kitchen and curled up at mom's feet, looking forlorn. My own fault. I should never have admitted to him that I have problems boiling water for tea, even.

Despite all of his woes, dinner was a smashing success. Everybody ate too much; after his initial shyness and usual paeans about his bad cooking, The Guy settled down to try and socialize. He made a manful effort. My sister and her boyfriend helped out; her boyfriend has already gotten over the 'meeting mom' anxieties, and was quite comfortable conversing with her. Eventually, we played board games, and he loosened up even more. It helped that later on, my mother got quite tipsy on wine, and wobbled happily around the table playing Jenga and Chinese Checkers. There is nothing quite as comical or entertaining as my mother, tipsy.

"He's very nice," my mother decided the next day, while we strolled around San Francisco's J-Town (Japan-Town) looking at little bells. "He was a little shy, neh? His quiche was very good. It's nice that he can cook." It's possible that I imagined the slight emphasis she placed on the 'he' in the last sentence.

My sister started to giggle. "We laughed all the way home," she told me. "My boyfriend was, like, 'he was so stressed.'"

I made his excuses for him as best as I could. "He's not really like that. He was just nervous."

Mom opened her eyes really wide, and just for a split-second looked like a Hello Kitty doll gone terribly, terribly wrong. "What, of meeting me?"

That night, I invited him over for dinner. "Mom's cooking Japanese food, and we want to know if you want to come over and eat with us."

There was a small silence on the phone. I could almost hear him thinking, 'Oh, God.'

"Sure," he said, sadly. "I'll be there in half an hour."

It was the same voice Socrates used to say, "Fine, already. I'll drink the damned thing." Posted by yhirata at July 11, 2001 11:22 PM