Three Micros: Soup Baths, Children's Food, Beef Sausage on a Pink Leather Couch

Soup Baths

Rico, our wine guy at the Safeway in Seattle’s Central District, once told us that every Sunday a woman came by for a case of Moët & Chandon.

“Host a lot of parties?” he asked her.

“Oh, no,” the woman said. She was a maid. Her employer was a Madison Valley widow who bathed in a case of champagne once a week. Immediately, I pictured the Madison Valley cafe with marble-top tables where I imagined hung-over millionaires submerging themselves in tiny cups of strong espresso, which reminded me of Garfield the cat inching into his mug of coffee, which reminded me of the days when there isn’t one thing that hurts a lot, but everything hurts a little a bit, and I want to live inside a bowl of Pho the size of Lake Michigan.

Rico was gone from the supermarket for a while, and when he returned, he told us he’d had shingles. I couldn’t help myself; I took one step backwards. I hope I didn’t hurt his feelings. I have been on the other end of contagion-fear, not invited to an elementary school pool party because of the appearance of my skin, even though it is my body attacking itself and not a danger to others, the same cause of the everything hurting a little bit bit—joints, mouth, swallowing, what-have-you. But I think of bathing in oatmeal to soothe chicken pox (poor Rico, he suffered so), of bathing in tomato soup to expunge skunk stench.

The Countess of Bathory, it was said, bathed in the blood of virgins to stay young. Cleopatra was famous not just for suicide by serpent at the breast but for bathing in milk. Beer-as-shampoo is said to make locks glossy, but what about the smell? In Chicago, I bought homemade bath salts from a woman at an arts fair who called the concoction “Ohhh, my dog is howling!” To be honest, I’m afraid to let it touch my skin, nor could I feel good re-gifting it, say, to Rico. We tried to visit him at the Safeway when we were back in Seattle again “after” the pandemic, but the guy working the wine section wasn’t Rico, had no clue who he was.

Children’s Food

Dad told of Lapte de pasăre, bird’s milk, the whipped egg white treat of his kindergarten in Romania. I imagine it fluffier than meringue, akin to foam on a cappuccino, drinkable and soft, not something crumbly.

Trifle was the ardently desired treat of my childhood: whipped cream, strawberries, custard, angel food cake, and red Jello in repeated layers. A dessert my Great Aunt Myra picked up in her ten-year sojourn in London, after fleeing from wartime Vienna and before emigrating to Queens.

“I can see why babies would like this,” my friend Marleigh said at a picnic in Seattle’s Volunteer Park, spooning soft sweetness into her mouth. Myra’s daughter Susie had died that summer at the age of 55, and I went sobbing into the QFC for trifle supplies, went for everything ready-made, except for the cream, which my husband willingly whipped. I don’t know if Susie loved trifle as a child, but I didn’t know what else to do with my grief. We ate trifle and visited Golden Gardens, a beach she would have liked.

Thirteen years later, in Chicago, I expressed my condolences to a cousin on the loss of his centenarian grandmother. “It doesn’t get easier, does it?” he said, and I didn’t bring up Susie, whom I still think about often, and surprise my parents by remembering her birthday, June 8, and her death day, August 10.

I wish she could meet our son. For his second birthday yesterday, we took him to La Baguette, the neighborhood panaderia, and picked out a tres leches cake with peaches. “Mmm!” he declared. A child at his birthday party was distressed by the peaches. My husband took away her plate and excavated them out. Her slice looked like an archaeological site—and she was satisfied.

“More birthday?” my son asked the next morning. “More ice cream?”

Beef Sausage on a Pink Leather Couch

At Mars Cheese Castle in Wisconsin, beef summer sausage is the purchase I always feel compelled to buy yet immediately regret. It brings me back to our first month in the Midwest. Moving to Chicago without solid jobs in hand (I was teaching one 10-week graduate-level online class for $2500) was a high-wire act, necessary for mental health but potentially devastating.

How happy we were, on May 1, snapping a selfie on Lake Michigan, the drive from Seattle behind us. Friends we met in Seattle sublet their condo in Rogers Park to us for just $25 a night. A lucky stopgap. The catch: their condo was on the market—we’d have to leave for any showings, would have to leave once the place was sold, and the very pretty, staged rooms (the dining room and the front room receiving the most natural light) were off limits. We blew up our air mattress in the empty bedroom and had access to a pink leather sofa they’d left behind in the otherwise empty family room.

In the early heat of Chicago summer, our legs stuck to that sofa. We’d shop at Cermak and City Fresh, supermarkets brimming with Eastern European goodies we couldn’t find in Seattle, loading up on kashkaval cheese and disappointing wine and beef sausage. Upstairs, a child screamed and wailed and, it seemed, hurled furniture across the room. We’d hunch forward on that pink sofa, plastic plates in our laps, forlornly cutting beef sausage with inadequate plastic knives. Oh, that sausage, seemingly squat, never seemed to end! The guilt of buying other groceries, of spending money on takeout, even plentiful, affordable biryani from Ghareeb Nawaz around the corner, all wrapped up in that intestinal lining packed with processed meat.

A friend with family in town visited and sat on that couch, which she called “Barbie flesh pink.” And I can never separate that couch from that beef sausage and that transient time we’re so lucky to have leapt from.