Creature Comforts

Love is a feeling of home

Good sleep, lots of water, yoga, and sun in my face have fallen into one another like dominoes, a modest chain reaction of possibility. I am doing pretty good.  Since both my grandfather and my best friend died, “doing pretty good” over the last six months means a couple of days when I don’t ugly cry myself into a fetal position, or cookie-and-Netflix binge myself into a stupor. As I put away my groceries, I can feel a welcome lightness in my chest. Then I notice that I brought home the wrong flavor of LaCroix sparkling water. I meant to get orange but got grapefruit instead. Large on the box, is the blush pink French word for it, pamplemousse.

Suddenly, I distinctly hear that word in my grandfather’s voice. He says it in his perfect-but-still-accented French.  My grandfather took great pride in his British-accented English and his French-accented French, all languages that he taught himself to speak fluently despite never going to college, having a wife and a full-time job since the age of 19 and a house full of six children and one grandchild by the time he was 37. In Cabo Verde, grapefruits had to be imported, so they were a real treat for my Papa Xande. Some of his other imported treats: Portuguese presunto on the bone and cheeses, newspapers from Portugal, Reader’s Digest, National Geographic, Time magazine, a projector for Laurel and Hardy reels and later, an AFI-worthy collection of American films on videotape. I am little but I know this: what Papa Xande likes, I either like or happily pretend to like. I abhor cold water but endure our early dawn ocean dips because he loves them. I think champagne tasted bitter, but I always drink the tiny fun-size flute he hands to me on special occasions. Speaking of bitter, I can never fake it with grapefruit, as much as I try—it tastes worse than all the sour things. Mama Nica, or “Manica” for short, my grandmother believes love is food and sugar. She puts sugar in everything she gives me.  I am trying to eat the wretched wedge of citrus, the pamplemousse, and Papa Xande is laughing hard at the face I am making. 

We both give up on the pamplemousse. “One day,” he says, “you’ll like it.” I am seated to his left, in my mother’s old seat because she is now away at university. I can smell his bacon and eggs, his extra dark over-buttered toast, his cologne and the almost imperceptible whiff of Marlboro Reds. His hands are beautiful and move beautifully, as in a dance (When I am 23, I will fall in love instantly with a man because when he lights up his cigarette, his hands remind me of Papa Xande’s hands). Papa Xande eats by building perfect bites: a small piece of toast, a small piece of egg, a perfect square of bacon. Though I have my “Nestum” cereal in front of me, Papa Xande sneaks me some bites. We both know I am not allowed to eat his bacon because Manica says that his almost-burned bacon gives you cancer. He wears his gold Cartier watch and lets me grab his wrist and look more closely at the watch whenever I want to, which is often. He does the same when we’re driving. Whatever I do just flows into what he is doing, like I just belong in the world according to him and I could never be a bother. We are in each other’s moment completely: he eats, I eat, his hand, my hand, our little secret rule-breaking with the bacon.

The beeping refrigerator door brings me back to my kitchen full of groceries that I have not put away. I am crying and smiling at the goddamn wrong box of LaCroix.