Category: Recovery

A while ago, I came across this great list of words that mean their opposites and lately, I’ve been thinking about another one: grounded. On the one hand, this can mean “well balanced and sensible,” (thanks, Google Dictionary). But it can also, in its adjectival form, mean “(of a child being punished) not allowed to participate in social or recreational activities.” As a result of the pandemic, I’ve been living both definitions simultaneously. On the one hand, my days consist of the only things that truly matter–home, family, work, sustenance. In our nearly monastic seclusion, we’ve dropped off the hamster wheel of needless consumption, and it’s been quite liberating. Life feels pared down to its essentials (yet another word COVID has revised the meaning of). But it has also felt incredibly restrictive. And I find myself wanting to rebel against those restrictions in precisely the same ways I did when I was grounded as a teenager–namely, sulking, seething, sneaking out, acting up. The irony, of course, is that my current sentence is largely self-imposed, and I don’t know when it will end. I just didn’t expect to feel cheated out of the crime spree that would warrant this prolonged state of house arrest, though I suppose if I looked carefully enough, I could find an infraction or two.

Today I am twenty-six and wandering the steep streets of Lisbon, alone. The sun is hot, the angle of its light here, extraordinary. I don’t know if I’ve ever flexed the muscles of my memory and imagination quite as often as I do now. Like everything else, they seem to have atrophied as I’ve grown older. But some faculties remain strong–are even, perhaps, getting stronger. The anguish, for example, with which I look on my daughter as she plays, alone, in the yard. We set out the sprinkler and she runs through it in a too-small-swimsuit from last summer. It’s been so long since she’s worn one that she forgets to take off her underwear first; a soggy hem peeks out. My fantasies are only ever of rescue anymore. When are you coming for me, I imagine asking. The reply for which I steel myself: I am not coming for you.

Of a Saturday, I find myself ironing linens. This is not something I ever would’ve done P.P. (Pre-Pandemic). Generally speaking, I find the interminable housekeeping necessitated by life under quarantine obnoxious and exhausting. But pressing these napkins is somehow neither. Perhaps it’s because they belonged to my grandparents, whom I miss and think of often. My grandfather is still living and my grandmother is not, but I imagine she ironed these, lips pursed, with kids or cats underfoot and various worries on her mind, just as I am now. So the chore becomes a way of communing with her across the time and space that separate us, a kind of unexpected intimacy brought on by the stains and creases and caught threads of daily use and daily life, hers as well as mine. Were they entertaining when this one appeared, I wonder, and if so, who? What was the occasion? Was I in the world yet? Where did the napkins come from—a wedding gift, perhaps? A purchase? An heirloom?

I am also, in my ironing reverie, reminded of another time I did something like this, while working as an au pair in France. Then, at twenty-three, I found myself charged with not only napkins, but sheets and dress shirts and tablecloths, none of which I actually knew how to iron, having owned few such items, myself (I certainly never ironed my sheets). I would stand at that ironing board in vexed confusion, wondering what in the hell I was doing with my life (the refrain of my twenties, if there ever was one). And then I would botch the job, particularly if it was a dress shirt. This would invariably lead to a row with the family that employed me—mutterings from the mother, an outburst from the father—after which I would be sent to fetch fresh baguettes on a bicycle. I ordered these from the same pitiless woman in the same shop, every day, in tears. It was like living in a fucked up fairytale.

Which is a bit how the world feels now, some twenty years later, amid plague, unemployment, injustice and the abiding imperative—dare I say pleasure?—of laundry.