Pussy Willow, Pizza, and Teapot

Last Night...

When you flipped the light switch right next to the door, one tiny light in the ceiling came on, a spotlight on a vase of pussywillows next to the TV cabinet. My room was huge, twice the size of the room across the hall that my dad and brother were in. The bed was oriented wrong, i.e. differently from in Holiday Inns, where we normally stay. All the new clothes I had just tried on had been horribly unflattering and depressing--and I'd been so excited to get them. They were now strewn around the sideways bed, on which I sat crying uncontrollably. Fortunately I had only thrown my cell phone, the clothes, and my book. I had resisted those damn pussy willows.

Dramatic, huh? In my defense, for whatever it's worth, it was already late, I was exhausted, and we'd been driving around for an hour finding hotel after hotel with only smoking rooms available. This one had only kingsize bed rooms left, and my dad had given in to the idea of sleeping on a pull-out sofa bed, after a minute of sighing and groaning. But of course, I should have reacted more calmly. There's no doubt of that. Somehow I had pinned all my real hopes, all my best daydreams on that baseball game, and everything had gone so well so far, it seemed such a reasonable proposal, that I hadn't really considered the very real chance that it wouldn't happen.

Turns out, it won't happen. Not the baseball game. Not the aquarium. At that point, as I sat there crying into the phone, it seemed like all I was driving across the country for was a half-hour lunch with Andrew and his parents. And Andrew gave in so easily, spoke so calmly, like he didn't mind. Oh, I knew that he wanted to see me. I knew he'd have preferred to see me for longer. But why wasn't he as upset as I was? Why wasn't he insisting on finding some way to convince his parents? Why couldn't he just reason with them, make bargains, plead, talk, explain? What is so damn hard about that? I wanted to scream at him but I couldn't; I maintained enough sense to know that if I yelled all the things I was thinking it would hurt him deeply and unfairly. I had already hurt him by getting upset and acting disappointed, by saying bitterly and almost seriously that maybe I should just turn around and forget it. What an ungrateful jerk. We were yelling at each other again...I didn't understand, he said. He needed to be alone, he said. He hung up.

He's absolutely right that I don't understand. I have no idea what it's like to feel you can't ask your parents for anything, can't reason and bargain and make your case to them even if they might not agree. He tells me, and I believe him, but of course I'll never understand. But I understood that I'd put him in an impossible position by getting upset. Confront his parents, or disappoint me. I wanted to just take it back, say "never mind, I'm not upset, I'm not disappointed, it's fine." Yeah right. Kind of hard after you've just cried for half an hour and flung things around the room. I know from experience of being on the other side, that sometimes an apology means nothing at all; once a reaction happens, it's happened.

I'm really very immature sometimes.

He went to bed early, although it took me a while to let him go, even though all we were doing was snapping at each other or crying (me). Don't worry, he said. Seriously, just don't worry, for this one night, just stop thinking about me, just read your mystery story, think about other things, and sleep, he said. But that's so hard for me. I tried. I did pretty well. I emailed his dad back, trying to keep the option of the baseball game open even though I know it's really closed. (Oh, that's too bad about the baseball game! If it's a logistic problem, we'd be happy to pick people up or drop them off. We can talk about it on Saturday...) I read of murder and gold and disguises and tombs and Ramses (ahhh Ramses...), and ate pretzels. I finally fell asleep.

My mom had gotten me the Compendium for the Amelia Peabody series. It has (supposed) pictures of the characters. There's a picture of Ramses as a little baby. It made me happy.

The pillows at this non-Holiday Inn hotel were amazingly comfortable.


Today...

I woke up miserable, after insisting on sleeping an extra two hours because I was up so late. When I am a parent, I hope I inherit my dad's abilities at cheering my children up. There's some combination of taking someone seriously (validation) and simultaneously making the situation feel brighter and less hopeless (cheering up). By the time we got to the car I was laughing, but still sighing between laughs.

Into Ohio and the Good Service Areas! Ohio's been rebuilding the service areas along I-80 for the past several years, and the new ones are beautiful low round domed buildings that are airy and clean and cheerful. Some of them have Sbarro, and we stopped at one of those. We wanted five slices of plain cheese pizza. You can get a whole pizza, six slices, for the same price (actually, four cents more, said my brother). We noticed this, but since we didn't actually want six slices and we didn't want to risk overeating, we decided against it. Overhearing us talking it over, a guy behind the counter pointed out that we could get a whole pizza for the same price. We nodded and smiled. We gave our order to another guy (the first was busy putting together the pizzas or something). "Why don't you just get a whole pizza? It's the same price." We know, we said, but we only want five slices. Take the extra one with you, he suggested. We said we were on the road and couldn't store it. "I can give you a box..." No, we just want five slices. He seemed very confused. "We're willing to throw out a slice of pizza for you if you really want," I said cheerfully. He seemed more confused.

We had to wait a few minutes for a new plain pizza to come out, since there were only two slices left of the existing one. While we were waiting the girl at the register suggested we ring up our order. "Five cheese slices," my dad told her.

"We'll just give you the whole pizza then."

"No...we only want to eat five slices. You can sell the other slice to someone else."

"It's the same price..."

"Yes." My dad smiled at her. "But you see, we don't want to eat six slices of pizza. We would have to throw out the last slice. This way someone else can have it."

She stared at him. "Sorry, I don't understand what you're talking about..."

The pizza was ready. The guy we had ordered from brought it over to the counter. "So you want...?"

"Five slices," I said firmly. He and the girl exchanged a look of uncomprehension, and with a shrug he put five slices onto plates and gave them to us.

When we got back to the table we looked at our receipt. One cheese pizza, it said.

-___-;;

At the moment that we passed into Central Time, I lost vision in half of my left eye. First I was just conscious of blurry gray spots. When I closed my right eye, the entire right half of my vision was opaque light gray. I freaked--my vision is really important to me, and weird medical things scare me disproportionately. After another second, it switched--now it was the top half of my vision that was gray, and only in the left eye. I prayed I wasn't going blind--which, really, I knew, because who's ever heard of someone just riding along in a car and suddenly going blind without anything happening? After another minute, the gray patch was moving off to the right, until it finally vanished altogether. I called my mom, who confirmed that it was almost certainly a migraine, just a different kind from what I usually get. She read me a website describing exactly what happened to me, which is always comforting. (Usually, my auras take the form of a small patch of shimmery blurry lines just to one side of my focal spot, which gradually expands in on direction or the other into a semicircular arc of flashing colorful lines, until it falls off the end of my vision--much prettier than a big gray rectangle!) So I squirted some Imitrex up my nose.

Damn Central Time.

Just as the Imitrex was starting to drip down into the back of my throat and make me gag, Andrew called. It's impossible to control how our conversations will feel the day after some big drama. If it's still tense or awkward, we just have to wait for it to pass. I wasn't sure how it would go today, but luckily, it went great. He was still stressed, tired, sore from Friday, dealing with allergies, feeling guilty about last night...but he was ready to talk and laugh and give himself a shot at cheering up. I was still sad, and also feeling guilty, but more than happy to just tease and chat and feel normal. Besides, it wasn't going to be as bad as I'd imagined last night. The email his dad sent me suggested we meet at ten Saturday morning. Andrew has tennis at two in the afternoon; that's four hours. Besides, he's got a tournament for tennis that day, and I'm going to watch him, no matter what his dad or anyone says. That's perfectly reasonable, isn't it? Andrew says I'll just distract him, but I say he can deal. And I'm not giving up hope yet about that baseball game...even though I should...

So we talked, and teased, and laughed, and normalized. He wanted to play Teapot to cheer up. I love Teapot!! Here's how it goes: You pick a verb, an activity or action. Then people ask questions to figure it out. For example: Teapot = sing in the shower

Q: Can you teapot by yourself?
A: Yup.

Q: Can you teapot indoors?
A: Yes you can.

Q: Have you ever teapotted?
A: Sometimes, yeah.

Q: Can you teapot during a power outage?
A: I suppose you could...

Q: Do you use your hands to teapot?
A: Not really.

And so on and so on. Of course, as my brother kept pointing out from the back seat while Andrew and I were playing, the game is, as he put it, "just an excuse for making lots of ambiguously dirty statements in a short time period." And what's wrong with that, I say? Making lots of ambiguously dirty statements is a great way to cheer someone up, especially teenaged boys. Andrew's verb was "forging a signature", and then mine was "singing in the shower". Then we spent a few minutes talking about various designs for showers and bathtubs. And then he had to go.

Gary, Indiana is the most dirty-looking place I've ever seen. The Skyway into Chicago was crawling along, and even over Chicago there was so much haze that from a mile or so away the Sears Tower was only a faint dark rectangle against the brownish sky. Sad. Also sad to pass so quickly by Chicago, especially since my brother's never been there. Maybe on the way back, we'll give ourselves more time there...

We hadn't eaten since the adventure at Sbarro, but my dad suggested that instead of trying to get off in Chicago and deal with parking and all, we keep going on I-90 into the northwestern suburbs, where, he was sure, there'd be plenty of little roads filled with nice Italian or Chinese restaurants.

He was wrong.

As we left the city, I-90 passed through mile after mile of hazy, desolate land, spotted with big business headquarters, warehouses, and occasional hotels. Nothing residential, nothing commercial, no nice family Italian restaurants jumping out from amongst the hills and driveways. It was getting darker and darker, and although we'd gained ourselves an extra hour--yay Central Time!--we were nearing the time when most restaurants would be closed, even if we could find them. Indeed, when we got of at one exit because we could see a large shopping center, all we cound find in it were a sandwich store and an express Chinese place, both empty with employees sweeping the floor and emptying the garbage. They'd closed at nine, ten minutes before. I was hungry, and hence, crabby. We were over three hours behind the schedule we'd sketched out for the day. It looked like it would be peanut butter and jelly for dinner, with a side of potato chips. And did I mention it didn't look like I was even going to have a minute with Andrew without his father around? I was not in a good mood.

The next exit had a Holiday Inn. Why do we always stay at Holiday Inns, you ask? Because of a certain small dog show held near Albany in late May of 1995. Held, in fact, on the grounds of a Holiday Inn. It was to that dog show that my dad and I drove to pick up our second dog, a puppy. Polar. We've favored Holiday Inns ever since. And this was a nice full-service one, likely to have some sort of restaurant.

In fact, there was a free-standing restaurant right next to it, in addition to the Bennigans attached to the hotel. Alexander's, it was called. I was still grumpy and inclined to see the worst in any random restaurant that crossed our path, but my dad investigated the menu and said it looked good. And they were open until ten--half an hour longer. We went in. We ordered--mozzarella sticks and penne with butter for my brother, an order of potato skins for me and my dad to share, a garden burger for me, and fettucini marinara for my dad. The mozzarella sticks came first, eight of them, while my dad was outside calling my mom. I'll just try one, I told my brother. I tried one. It was amazing. One of the best mozzarella sticks I could remember; in the Friendly's genre, but thicker and more flavorful by far. I grabbed three more. My brother objected. He tried to steal them back. A fierce battle ensued. Finally I let him take one, while I took a big bite of each of the other two. They were so good! When my dad got back my brother accused me of stealing his food. I had done no such thing; he had no legal claim to ownership. My dad ordered another serving.

The rest of the food was amazing too. Apparently it's not a chain, which is too bad--we were hoping it would turn out to be a midwestern chain, so we'd bump into more of them. Next to the register they had a plastic dog and cat into which you could put money for various humane animal shelters. We're going to go back for breakfast tomorrow morning.

As my dad says, you just never know. Things happen the way they happen, and barring an actual tragedy, it's always for the best. We're lucky the Panda Express had just closed.

Now I'm in my room at the Holiday Inn right next to the restaurant. We're still three hours behind where we'd planned to be, but we're in fine shape to get there by Wednesday evening. Tomorrow our goal is a Holiday Inn in Chamberlain, South Dakota. New states for me! My brother got two today, Indiana and Illinois. Right now I'm farther west than I ever have been. Well, unless the restaurant was farther west, I suppose.

Andrew says he's with the Sbarro people. Who turns down free pizza??

Goodnight!