In my apartment in Brooklyn is a blue-and-white china vase. It once held a geranium but is now a receptacle for my wine corks, which overflow onto the lightly worn oak of my kitchen table. I assume it is still there, anyway, the corks lying scattered as they fell, as I haven’t been in that apartment since the beginning of February. For four months, I’ve been on a long and unanticipated hiatus at my mother’s home in Maryland. I came here to help her through cancer treatments, a bag of laundry in the car, anticipating months of back and forth during her long battle. But she was hospitalized three days after I arrived and I had to go on immediate leave from work. The laundry was done and packed in my trunk, where it has been ever since; the pancreatic cancer claimed her life in six short and vicious weeks. When we buried her on March 10th, the country was beginning to shutter. So I stayed, confined to and quarantining in my childhood home, forced to use my time to go through her things, our things, my family’s things, room by room, with many tears. In some ways it’s been helpful, confronting all that grief head-on. In others, it is a hell I can’t escape. (...)
Martinis are really the only cocktail I drink. I am not a cocktail person, and I never make them at home. A martini is a mood—a treat at a bar, ordered on specific nights at specific New York institutions with specific friends; Minetta Tavern, to start the annual holiday dinner with my father; Long Island Bar, with the double-fried fries; Bobby Vans, where they are icy and wildly overpriced and my best friend and I had to kick them back fast once to run away from a stout and over-served Wall Street man.
But I can’t go to any of those places. None of us can. Our bar rituals are part of the Before Time, which for me looks even more starkly different than now—in the Before Time, I had a mother. I’m not the only one who has lost someone; as of writing this, nearly 100,000 people in the US have died from COVID-19. For all of us, the life after this, whenever it comes, will always contain that loss, even as we gain back our rituals.
There is so much we can’t control. The martini, I realized, was something I could. Now, once or twice a week, I get out the shaker and ice, the dwindling handle of Bombay, the comically large and cheap steakhouse-style martini glass I ordered just for this purpose, the olives and the bottled brine—a lifesaver when you’ve already drained your olive jars of their liquid. I dribble in the vermouth and swirl it around the glass, measure the gin and olive juice (2:1), and stir the long cocktail spoon with my middle and ring finger until I feel the metal grow cold. I pour it in a gold-green stream over the olives waiting in the crook of the glass’s V and watch it fog, then take a quick sip to be sure I’ve done it right. I am somehow always surprised that I have; I didn’t mean to acquire this skill.
I can make this martini thanks to the cocktail stylings of my other best friend, Sarah. (Her words and others will follow mine below.) Sarah is a pro home bartender if there ever was one, and often the person I meet to share a martini with in Williamsburg, where I live and she works. Now, we cheers over Zoom, her glass a pretty coupe with a toothpick of olives resting just so on the rim. I’m impatient and will fish out my olives before I’m finished my drink as she neatly pulls hers off with her teeth and we talk about all the things we would talk about in person: Writing, not writing, books, Twitter, partners and exes, small and petty dramas. My mother. Our late-afternoon conversations see more sunlight these days, outside of our usual dark-ish watering hole, and the scarred wood my glass finds is not a bar but the blonde planks of the dependable old kitchen table. We remember to hydrate from our Swell bottles instead of free pints of that sweet New York water, and run through every topic imaginable and more, trying to find a reason to have another round. We don’t want to go home, to leave the bar, to shut the screen and find ourselves back in exactly the same place we have been every single day for months. We text when the call is over: I miss you. That was so much fun.
I mentioned the unusualness of this new routine to her and we agreed that we were supplementing, missing what we can no longer go out to enjoy. And so I wanted to ask other writers about this. Are you, too, changing your routines? Are you wining and dining yourself? What are you drinking? Is it helping? (I did not ask them if they’re writing—we know the answer, and we don’t want to have to say it.) Some of them indulged me, and below, you will read the answers to those questions. We are all going through it right now, all finding ways to soften the sharp edges of reality and the constant ache of grief. I hope these little stories can do that for you too, and perhaps help you feel a little less alone.
— Mickie Meinhardt
It started with red cups, the kind we all drank beers out of when we cut class on the vacant lot across the street from my high school in the Bronx. I’d long left them behind because of ecological reasons, but stocked up in a buying frenzy in early March while staring at empty CVS shelves just before I got sick; they were some of the only things left for sale so I bought them. Then I spent two weeks in bed self-isolating. The solo cups were one of my better moves. (Not stocking up on toilet paper was one of my worst ones.) Our dishwasher broke just as my fever went up and I was paranoid about hand-washing glasses with COVID, so, recycling be damned, it looked like a little keg party had taken place in my room. After I recovered enough that I could walk from our building the three blocks to the park, I’d make myself a G&T with lime in one of those remaining disposable frat-boy cups after work. (My legs still wobbled when I stood up but, you know, it was five o’clock somewhere). There was something steadying about watching that steel gray Hudson River move, and the “mostly gin” helped me to get my shit together before going home. We’re four adults now in a small apartment, my grown-up kids and my husband. Compared to the suffering of our neighbors we’re doing fine, but it is still easy to feel trapped. (Sometimes, in desperation, I go out on the street and sit in our car just to be alone.) Finally, when the weather got warmer, our nearby burger joint reopened and started selling takeout frozen watermelon margaritas and guac and chips. One day, when my daughter and I were curled up on the couch together in a cocoon of shelter-at-home despair, we ordered the whole package, picked it up at the restaurant’s doorway and headed to my spot in the park. The sun was shining, kids were riding their bikes, there were too many people with masks hanging off their chins and not secured on their faces, but we were far enough away to spread out and drink and talk. My daughter started to cry, but not from despair. “It’s the first time I’ve felt normal,” she said. And it was true. We were just hanging out, being ourselves. We were relaxed. Margaritas and chips, the sunset, and then at 7pm all of New York cheering our first responders. Alone together. The “new” magic hour.
Martinis are really the only cocktail I drink. I am not a cocktail person, and I never make them at home. A martini is a mood—a treat at a bar, ordered on specific nights at specific New York institutions with specific friends; Minetta Tavern, to start the annual holiday dinner with my father; Long Island Bar, with the double-fried fries; Bobby Vans, where they are icy and wildly overpriced and my best friend and I had to kick them back fast once to run away from a stout and over-served Wall Street man.But I can’t go to any of those places. None of us can. Our bar rituals are part of the Before Time, which for me looks even more starkly different than now—in the Before Time, I had a mother. I’m not the only one who has lost someone; as of writing this, nearly 100,000 people in the US have died from COVID-19. For all of us, the life after this, whenever it comes, will always contain that loss, even as we gain back our rituals.
There is so much we can’t control. The martini, I realized, was something I could. Now, once or twice a week, I get out the shaker and ice, the dwindling handle of Bombay, the comically large and cheap steakhouse-style martini glass I ordered just for this purpose, the olives and the bottled brine—a lifesaver when you’ve already drained your olive jars of their liquid. I dribble in the vermouth and swirl it around the glass, measure the gin and olive juice (2:1), and stir the long cocktail spoon with my middle and ring finger until I feel the metal grow cold. I pour it in a gold-green stream over the olives waiting in the crook of the glass’s V and watch it fog, then take a quick sip to be sure I’ve done it right. I am somehow always surprised that I have; I didn’t mean to acquire this skill.
I can make this martini thanks to the cocktail stylings of my other best friend, Sarah. (Her words and others will follow mine below.) Sarah is a pro home bartender if there ever was one, and often the person I meet to share a martini with in Williamsburg, where I live and she works. Now, we cheers over Zoom, her glass a pretty coupe with a toothpick of olives resting just so on the rim. I’m impatient and will fish out my olives before I’m finished my drink as she neatly pulls hers off with her teeth and we talk about all the things we would talk about in person: Writing, not writing, books, Twitter, partners and exes, small and petty dramas. My mother. Our late-afternoon conversations see more sunlight these days, outside of our usual dark-ish watering hole, and the scarred wood my glass finds is not a bar but the blonde planks of the dependable old kitchen table. We remember to hydrate from our Swell bottles instead of free pints of that sweet New York water, and run through every topic imaginable and more, trying to find a reason to have another round. We don’t want to go home, to leave the bar, to shut the screen and find ourselves back in exactly the same place we have been every single day for months. We text when the call is over: I miss you. That was so much fun.
I mentioned the unusualness of this new routine to her and we agreed that we were supplementing, missing what we can no longer go out to enjoy. And so I wanted to ask other writers about this. Are you, too, changing your routines? Are you wining and dining yourself? What are you drinking? Is it helping? (I did not ask them if they’re writing—we know the answer, and we don’t want to have to say it.) Some of them indulged me, and below, you will read the answers to those questions. We are all going through it right now, all finding ways to soften the sharp edges of reality and the constant ache of grief. I hope these little stories can do that for you too, and perhaps help you feel a little less alone.
— Mickie Meinhardt
It started with red cups, the kind we all drank beers out of when we cut class on the vacant lot across the street from my high school in the Bronx. I’d long left them behind because of ecological reasons, but stocked up in a buying frenzy in early March while staring at empty CVS shelves just before I got sick; they were some of the only things left for sale so I bought them. Then I spent two weeks in bed self-isolating. The solo cups were one of my better moves. (Not stocking up on toilet paper was one of my worst ones.) Our dishwasher broke just as my fever went up and I was paranoid about hand-washing glasses with COVID, so, recycling be damned, it looked like a little keg party had taken place in my room. After I recovered enough that I could walk from our building the three blocks to the park, I’d make myself a G&T with lime in one of those remaining disposable frat-boy cups after work. (My legs still wobbled when I stood up but, you know, it was five o’clock somewhere). There was something steadying about watching that steel gray Hudson River move, and the “mostly gin” helped me to get my shit together before going home. We’re four adults now in a small apartment, my grown-up kids and my husband. Compared to the suffering of our neighbors we’re doing fine, but it is still easy to feel trapped. (Sometimes, in desperation, I go out on the street and sit in our car just to be alone.) Finally, when the weather got warmer, our nearby burger joint reopened and started selling takeout frozen watermelon margaritas and guac and chips. One day, when my daughter and I were curled up on the couch together in a cocoon of shelter-at-home despair, we ordered the whole package, picked it up at the restaurant’s doorway and headed to my spot in the park. The sun was shining, kids were riding their bikes, there were too many people with masks hanging off their chins and not secured on their faces, but we were far enough away to spread out and drink and talk. My daughter started to cry, but not from despair. “It’s the first time I’ve felt normal,” she said. And it was true. We were just hanging out, being ourselves. We were relaxed. Margaritas and chips, the sunset, and then at 7pm all of New York cheering our first responders. Alone together. The “new” magic hour.
--- Helen Schulman
