Sundays

Sundays, especially Sunday evenings, can be achingly sad. If you don't love your job, you hate and dread Sunday evenings intensely. Your life can seem small. Smaller than usual even. Another week over, another week to get through.

I tend to deal with this sadness by cooking a nice Sunday dinner. My favorite is a roasted chicken, with gravy (always), stuffing (occasionally), greens, and a salad. Perhaps this goes back to my childhood, when I would spend certain weekends (the custody agreement varied through out my childhood: one weekend a month, every other weekend, three weekends a month, etc.) with my father; separated from my adored mother, and stranded alone with an adult completely bereft of any culinary skills. My father's idea of a balanced meal was a fatty steak, shoved under the broiler, with no seasoning, for a minute, or a half an hour, depending on when he remembered to pull it out, a few potatoes, cut into quarters, boiled in plain water, and a packet of frozen veggies - lima beans, corn or "French cut" green beans, only - also boiled, and also cooked for an arbitrary amount of time, based on his ability to remember that he is, in fact, cooking. My father owned very few pieces of cooking equipment: a dented double-boiler, with an irremovable black crust caked on the lumpy bottom, a cast iron skillet, used exclusively for frying hot dogs, a simple, dull, knife, and a pig shaped cutting board, marked with knife marks, some darkening mildew, and bowed, as if it were arching it's flattened porcine back against the disgrace of our kitchen.

Have you ever smelled a forgotten pot of frozen corn, burning and smoldering over a gas flame? Let me tell you, it is not a smell you can ever forget. This was the smell of dinners at my father's house. It wasn't always corn, but every time, something - a pot of boiled potatoes, all water evaporated, potato starch blackened into a thick crud on the bottom of the pan, smoke (smoke, not steam, smoke!) billowing out from under the lid - had to be held out the back door by one of us, while the other raced up stairs, with a dining room chair, climbed up on it, and fanned the screaming smoke detector, until it finally stopped. Then it was time to eat.

We ate at an old pine table, seated opposite each other, silent and cautious. We both drank milk from tall, plain glasses and ate off of blue plastic plates, with years of knife marks and fork scrapes recorded in their surface. The unsalvageable bits burnt onto the edges of the food would be carefully cut off (by me, at least) and I would try to fake my way through the meal. It was typical kid stuff - pushing the food around the plate, stacking items here, spreading them around there, forcing gag-inducing mouthfuls down with a big gulp of milk. Screaming, fists pounding on the table top, tears - pretty standard. Once it was finally over, and I had eaten at least three bites of this, and two of that, I would drag the little wooden stool to the sink and wash the dishes. Or, try to. To this day, two decades later, my father still uses that double boiler, with all of its nasty, blackened crevasses.

I don't remember how it started, but somehow, getting back to my Mami's house Sunday evening, after a weekend with Papi, felt like a celebration. From Friday afternoon when he picked me up to Sunday afternoon when she did felt like an eternity. I was completely cut off from the person by whom I measured myself, and during those days away, I felt completely lost. I feel almost embarrassed to admit this now, but when I was little, my mother was my best friend, and over those weekends when she wasn't with me, I called her three, four, five times a day, and cried myself to sleep when she wasn't there to tuck me in and stroke my hair and sing to me as I fell asleep.

But, back to dinner... When Mami and I would get home from my weekend at Papi's, we would have a proper Sunday dinner. Sometimes it would have to wait until Monday, if we go home late, but we always had a special dinner together, with multiple courses, fancy dishes, a house filled with lovely smells, and the two of us, both so happy to be able to get back to being ourselves together. We ate off of fancy dishes, drank plain tap water out of wine glasses or even champagne flutes, all at a dining table spread with linens and illuminated by candle-light. As a kid I never noticed that those accoutrement's were second-hand, or shabby, or that my Mami had picked them up at thrift stores and yard-sales. To me, they were the epitome of elegance, and they made me feel like I was finally home.

So, now, as an adult, I feel sad on Sunday evenings. I don't want to go back to work tomorrow. I don't want to be alone at my office, with my husband at his. I want it to be the weekend all the time, with friends, and people, and nice, fun things, always. So every Sunday, I make too much food, drink a little too much wine, and stay up too late; trying to keep the next day from coming.