Whatcha Eatin'?

Pearl, who is sick today and will refer to herself in the third person in an attempt to distance herself from the action, is, for the second time in 512 straight posts, "re-posting". She's not proud of this and begs your indulgence.

This is from April 4.

And now I'm going back to bed, where I hope to continue the feverish dream I was having about the homeless people who moved into my backyard and wanted space in the refrigerator.





My sister and I used to live together, somewhere in our early-30s. It was a damn good time; and when our sons were away on the weekends, as sometimes happened, we’d use the quiet time to get loud.

Shots of vodka and Rollerblades. Do you have any idea how well these things go together? I do! A drunk on skates has no fear and no compunction against, saying, skating to the grocery store to get smokes.

It’s also how we both learned to spin.

We are both dancers, both “happy” drinkers, and we’d crank the music up and dance, leaving the room only to answer the phone or go to the bathroom.

I remember going into the bathroom and coming back to see her head in the fridge. There was an odd “pssssssssssst” sound coming from its interior.

“Whatcha eatin’?”

“Come ‘ere! Come ‘ere! Wanna know something really tasty?” She held up the Redi-Wip container. “Open your mouth!!”

Ah, why not?! I opened my mouth and Karen filled it full of whipped cream.

“Hey, you wanna know something else cool?”

This made me laugh. If shooting Redi-Wip is cool, what else is cool?!

We sat on the floor in the kitchen and opened a cupboard, whereupon she reached in, all the way to the back, and pulled out a box of saltine crackers and one of those cans of pre-made fudge frosting.

“Put this on ‘ere. Try it.”

Well hot damn, if fudge frosting isn’t good on a cracker!

“Whatcha eatin’” became a joke. We would call each other at work, leaving whispered messages on voice mail: Whatcha eatin’? We would yell at each other through the bathroom door: Hey! Whatcha eatin’?

We’re childish that way.

One day, I was downstairs cleaning the litter box. Exhausted from a day of work and preceding days of cleaning houses, I sat on the floor, hunched over and brain-dead, sifting through the litter box using a large slotted spoon purchased just for such occasions.

Karen walked by me, glanced, kept going – and then stopped, backed up to take a second look.

“Whatcha eatin’?”

I can never look at a slotted spoon without remembering that: the sifting of the cat poop, the look on Karen’s face as she asked me what I was eating…

The simplest memories are the best.