Home for Squishmish

On Tuesday we were cooking everyone-leaves-Seattle-for-the-holidays holiday dinner. As housemates sliced apples for dessert crumble and boyfriend chose proper music for festive food prep, I was trying to spin a pile of yams into yam-fries with the budget mandolin I had purchased a few days before. If you have a mental picture of me trying to cut potatos with the higher strings of a small banjo then you need a quick trip to the kitchen definitions corner (no, this corner isn't punishment for your ignorance - here, put on the cone-shaped hat of enlightenment). The mandolin is the ultimate hand-powered slicing and dicing machine. Interchangable racks of blades fit into a slanted plane that leads unsuspecting vegetables over this first set of vertical blades for dicing and then to a perpendicular blade that slices off the scored bits into a pile of julienned goodness (if you are using that rack) or french fries as is the case here.

The yam is sturdier than the general potato population and requires vigorous acceleration down the plane of the mandolin to get the half-inch fry blades through. You really have to put your whole arm into it. If that doesn't work, you have to make a blood sacrifice. On a particularly vigorous slice-and-dice attempt I successfully swiped the blades through the yam and straight into my left wrist - you know, the part with all those severable little blue veins pulsing at the surface.

Luckily, I have two housemates with seemingly unlimited first aid sense and experience, a boyfriend who can support my fainting weight, and a third housemate who can see me bleeding from somewhere between four and six hash marks in my arm and calmy drape a dishtowel over my shoulder saying, "There, that will protect your white sweater from the blood." Seriously, these people are life-savers. The cuts actually missed all my veins and only one of them was deep enough to consider stitches, but I do tend to pass out at the sight of blood flowing uncontrollably out of my body and in doing so run the risk of falling neck or headwise onto a sharp object.

The wound cleaned up nicely (the precision cutting of a QFC mandolin!) and we all enjoyed a slightly delayed, slightly overcooked celebratory meal. The bigger impacts of the injury came during my cross-country flight home two days later. With gauze wrapped around the wounded wrist and the dark eye-circles of overnight flying, other passengers could only assume that I had not only tried recently to kill myself, but had also failed at it. The fact that the cuts had entered the itchy stage of healing, causing a lot of bandage fidgeting, simply heightend the intrigue. I ended up using the drama of it all to my advantage. As usual. I was seated next to the one person who keeps their personal light on for the entire trip. Last time I went to Maine, it was a woman who wanted to take advantage of not sleeping to catch up on crocheting. This time, I was tipped off to my misfortune when my seatmate withdrew not one, but three light-reading books out of their personal item before stowing it safely under the seatback in front of them. At approximately 4 AM EST, I rolled up my sleeve and stared fixedly at the gleaming serated foil edge of my uneaten peanut pack: light off.

When my parents picked me up at the Portland, Maine airport, they did not notice the gauze like strangers had the night before. They also failed to notice my older brother, who they picked up at the same time. At lunch, my mother led conversation with exclamations like, "Sarah! What do you want for dinner? I saved latkes in the freezer for you, and I made you pasta putenesca!. And African cous-cous!" and, "Grandma has been asking me everyday when Sarah is coming, she can't wait to see you!" My mother fired off these topics while giving her order, which, as usual, she did in the style of playing 20 questions ("Do you serve coffee?" Yes. "Can you make espresso?" Yes. "Can you make a latte?" Yes. "Can you make it with skim milk?" No, no skim milk. "Oh, I don't want that then, do you have other hot drinks?" . . .)

While ignoring one of her visiting offspring seems harsh, my mother's practice is one the whole family lapses into on occasion. Being with my brother can be like lucidly dreaming your way through a Ben Stiller funny-cause-it's-so-damn-awkward movie; you can sense that he is about to break some chick's nose or light a gazeebo on fire, but you are powerless to prevent the shame and pain it will cause. Since fight is not an option, an instinct to ignore takes over, much like my losing consciousness response to watching the lifeblood leak out of me.

Fairly early into lunch, however, my brother says something that breaks through our unintended barrier. "I got presents for everyone, but it was stuff they don't let you bring on the plane, so it's all still in New York." Last year my brother had really wanted to get my cousin Kelvin a pellet handgun, until my mother's tantrum at Dick's Sporting Goods stopped him. Shopping in New York without her shrill guidance, his possible purchases were worrisome. Fireworks? Drugs? Jars of acid? Our anxiety was not quelled by the fact that his present to me, which could make the trip, was a t-shirt print titled "Get Off My Property," which treated everyone who chanced to look at my chest to a view straight down the barrel of a very large silk-screened rifle.

It took 24 hours to tease out of my brother what the untoted gifts were; bath salts and body lotions featuring various essences of the Dead Sea. Apparently, these were packaged in quantities too large for the 3-1-1 of carry-on, and in glass too fragile to check ("The bottles are really beautiful, you would have loved them if I could have brought them up here.") My dad and I were both skeptical of my brother buying bath salts, an purchase usually reserved for romantic partners too smitten to see that the gift has little actual purpose (for a fraction of the cost, Mr. Bubble will make something worthwhile in your tub rather than sit there in undissolved crystals clogging the drain). "The salesgirl was very sexy," my brother explains, "and, well, she also touched my bum."

My dad: "Touched your bum?"
Brother: "And lambada-ed me for a little bit."
Dad (to me): "Do you know what that is? Have you 'lambada-ed' anyone?"
Me: (laughing and falling off couch)
"Hey! She gave me her number, BEFORE I even bought anything."
"You going to call her?"
"Probably not, I'm worried about her morals."

Turns out that what my brother spent on Dead Sea beauty products, while small compared to his collective debt to the Federal Government and various credit card companies, was a great deal of his not-really-dispoable income. And the precious spoils of the shopgirl assgrabbing will remain in Brooklyn, far away from their intended recipients among my relations. "It's ok," my brother reasons, "They will make great gifts for the ladies."

But if my brother is the Grinch who accidentally left Christmas on the bus and while running back to get it tripped and spilled hot coffee all over Hanukah and Solstice, my mother is the Grinch who replaced the little baby Jesus in my Aunt's corn-husk nativity with a crocodile in the name of international aid. Though I will have to tell you about that later, lest I let jet-lag win.