I’ve been living overseas (Prague) for more than twenty years. Each year, I visit home in the summer, and, occasionally, at Christmas. As time has worn down and travel takes its toll on me more and more (i.e. makes me her sleepless and confused and jetlagged bitch), Christmas trips have fallen by the wayside and my visits have been relegated to summer.
This is fine. Yes, I miss my family. But the video-calling these days is so accessible and free that I might be more in touch with them here than if I lived in Pittsburgh, for example. For the visits themselves, I usually make a somewhat famous-amongst-my-friends laundry list of things I’m going to do when I get home.
This list is almost completely food- and diet-based. It’s steak and Italian restaurants, cheesesteaks, Italian hoagies, pizza, and Chinese food. It’s supermarkets and their offerings. Though I have come to love my daily gastronomy in the Czech Republic and feel that the grocery-store food here is far healthier, there is simply no comparing a Czech supermarket with an American one. If a Czech supermarket is looking at a picture of Pamela Anderson, then an American supermarket is spending the night with Pamela Anderson.
I was reminded of such greatness when my dad and I went up to our local Giant in mid-August. My sister, her kids, and my mom had all gone to the shore for the week which left my dad and I to fend for ourselves. I don’t mind this at all. My dad theoretically doesn’t mind it, until it’s dinner time and nobody has put food on a table and he’s suddenly reminded of why he puts up with a house full of people.
My dad is more or less immobile due to bad knees and old age, so while other people in the house cramp the hermetic, grouse-like, old-age style he’s been rocking the last decade or so, those people also do the shopping and cook the food and make sure the dishes are clean. When he’s left alone, he realizes those things don’t happen on their own.
I represented two things to him that he doesn’t have and can’t understand: knees that bend and a genuine pleasure of walking around. Especially when that walk is done in an American supermarket.
We come up with a list together. That is to say, he writes a list of 10–12 junk-food items and cakes of various sizes, and I add actual food. I have to pull my punches with the ‘food’ aspect, as we are not sitting down to meals of chicken and rice. If I told my dad I’d made salmon and quinoa, he might literally disown me. But he would keep it quiet until after I had become his conduit to the bag of pretzels in the kitchen.
He waited in the car while I walked into the store, grabbing a tiny little cart of the way. I pushed through the automatic doors and was reminded of home. I haven’t had a sense of smell in about twenty years, but my brain went to work reminding me what baked kaiser buns and Danish smelled like. The multi-colored icing on the cupcakes dispatched a flood of waters to my mouth. The TastyKakes, the deli section, the baked goods, the literal aisles solely dedicated to cereals and crackers and snacks made me dizzy.
Though it is possible the dizziness was due to my climbing blood pressure which would have no doubt been linked to my expanding waist. As I chucked a pack of bakery-made cupcakes and bagged some fresh kaiser buns I decided that I had all of September to deal with those unpleasantries. For now, I would enjoy my kid-in-a-candy-store moment.
My Willy Wonka moment took a hit as I almost passed the pharmacy section. I ducked in and found myself Tums and Alza-seltzers, I buried a pack of haemorrhoid wipes beneath the turkey and the bologna lunchmeats. I covered that with a bag of chips. Nobody noticed and so my embarrassment was limited, I went quickly for the checkout.
It’s another reality for when I visit that a bad diet leads to a bad state of body affairs. Many years ago, in an attempt to not be miserable every day, I traded in an unhealthy diet for a more or less healthy one. Trade-offs included fish sticks for chicken breast, fries for salads, sandwiches for wraps, daily beers for not-daily-beers. When visiting home, though I try to mitigate a bad diet with some nutrition and fruit and meats, I let that diet slack. That comes with the release of endorphins and a joy that makes me question my living choices. It also comes with stomach aches, heartburn, and a . . . not so swift time in the bathroom. And I do this all without Sister Mary Annette.
Sister Mary Annette is the name I gave to my handheld bidet. It looks like a cross between a water bottle and a goose; it has a long neck that rounds at the end. Its function is clear once you know what it is. You stick that thing in the toilet, business-side up, and squeeze until you are clean. Burke got us these after we moved from out last flat to the one we own now. Our last flat had a sink in the toilet and attached to that was a hose that you could use as a very effective bidet. When we moved, I expressed genuine upset at leaving behind the bidet and so Burke surprised me with these handheld ones. This was after we’d been together for eight or so years, and, though I’m not 100% sure, I think they’ve always said that eight years is squeezable ass-cleaners.
The thing is, if you say ‘bidet’ to an American they often roll their eyes. First, it’s something we have very little experience with. A real American doesn’t squirt their butt clean, they throw down a few pounds of paper for the job. Also, it’s a French word. And right there you lose a lot of credibility. Anything French conjures pictures of men with pencil-thin mustaches and women with underarm hair smoking cigarettes and hating America. Back there somewhere is the Statue of Liberty, but it takes a while for Lady Liberty to come to the forefront. I named the bidet Sister Mary Annette because she was my second-grade nun and the last person to spend as much time up my ass as my bidet.
I got in checkout lane 11 and the cashier Brenda was having a full-on conversation with a person who clearly wanted nothing like that to happen. He just wanted to get his granola bars and his Oreo cookies and get back to his car. She was very friendly but her voice knew no volume restrictions. People over in checkout 4 knew all about the dog food the lady on front of me was buying. The deal was, she clicked items through and then bagged them.
When I arrived, I was concerned about the line of discussion that my medical purchases might arouse. She gave me a cheery greeting, which I returned. I decided to bag my groceries as she spoke in order to get her on my side. ‘Thank you’ she said with an awful lot of honey and a puppy-dog face. Brenda and I were buddies: mission accomplished.
She made a ‘yummy’ comment at my cupcakes, a ‘love these!’ at my nutty buddies, and ‘when they stop making these, I’m gonna die’ at my Tastykakes. It’s possible this woman is my dad’s soulmate. Shame.
When she came across my haemorrhoid wipes, she gave me a flat look and pursed her lips. She nodded in commiseration. ‘I hear ya’ she whispered and winked. I took a chance.
‘Well, you know, I have a handheld bidet at home.’
‘What?’
“Yeah, it’s a little squeeze bottle. I don’t have it here.’
She made a face like she’d witnessed me using it in aisle 6. “Ew.’ Her voice had raised again for the occasion.
I backpedalled. ‘Well, it’s really effective.’
‘Sideways look. ‘Whatever you say. That’ll be $7,000 (American costs).’
‘Sure.’ I wheeled. ‘Her name is Sister Mary Annette.’
‘Whose?’
‘My bidet. Sister…’
‘Great. Have a nice day, sir.’
‘Bye, Brenda.’
I made my way to the car where my dad was asleep behind the wheel listening to sports talk. I opened the back and roused him. I was putting the last bag into the back when my dad asked if I needed any help. I half considered pulling them out and saying yes to call his bluff, but I just wanted to get me and my wipes home.
I got into the passenger seat and squirmed a little. Oh, how I couldn’t wait to get back and use Sister Mary Annette again. But for September, I think I’ll call her Brenda.
