In Which Our Hero Debases Herself at the Luncheon Table

Or: Let He Who Is Without Shame Cast the First Slice of Salami

The other day, my whole family came together for lunch. Isn’t that sweet? My husband came upstairs after a morning of video conference calls to make himself a sandwich. I had just finished making the kids egg and avocado sandwiches topped with a nest of fresh arugula and just a whisper of lemon. Or possibly they were eating grilled chicken breasts with sweet potatoes and steamed broccoli. Or wait—was it frozen waffles? Frozen waffles which the children elected not to toast, but to gnaw on as they thawed at room temperature? Ha ha, yes that sounds familiar. It’s all blending together, who can even say anymore?

At any rate, there they were, eating their midday meal together at the kitchen table like a goddamn Norman Rockwell painting. I stood at the counter for a moment, hesitating.

“Come eat with us, mommy,” my daughter said in between bites of quinoa flaccid Eggo. “Aren’t you hungry?”

“Yes,” I said wistfully. “I’m starving, actually.” They looked at me strangely, as one might, but then shrugged and continued eating. In that moment, I made a decision.

I would eat my lunch. Goddamn it, I would eat my lunch. The one I actually wanted to eat. In front of other human people. I set about pulling my supplies from the fridge: salami, sliced muenster cheese, deli turkey, American cheese, cole slaw, a bottle of spicy mustard. The mayonnaise. A plate, I guess, but only because living your truth for the first time is difficult and uncomfortable. Normally, I would stand over the counter with everything laid open before me, happily rolling up various combinations of meat and cheese and condiments and shoving them into my mouth one by one until a feeling of mild self-loathing set in or until the phone rang or I got distracted by a household task. Alone! I cannot stress this enough. The most important ingredient of a good lunch is an empty house. God, I miss those days. Instead, I carefully placed a polite quantity of each item on my plate and sat down at the table. I smiled. My husband regarded me with a look that was at once horror, disdain, and abject pity.

“Don’t look at me!” I yelled as I attempted to roll a forkful of coleslaw into a slice of turkey. My family cast their gazes down, not daring to make eye contact. “DON’T LOOK AT ME,” I shouted as I crumpled a salami round into my own angry maw.

There are certain silver linings that one can easily find in our new reality, the most obvious being the unprecedented amount of time each of us is finally able to spend with our immediate families. Working parents are home. Kids aren’t being shuttled around to umpteen practices and after-school programs and playdates. We’re regularly sitting down to dinner together. This is . . . nice, I think. But there are certain privileges that a stay-at-home mom of school-aged kids enjoys with her post. The days can be lonely, yes. But we can occasionally visit the bathroom alone. We can clean a room without someone dumping a bucket of leaves onto the carpet moments after we put away the vacuum. Why, child? Why did you have a bucket of leaves!

Also, we can eat a meal in peace. And that meal is one that I anticipate with relish even as my face grows flush with the idea of anyone ever knowing it exists. It is, in a phrase, my secret shame. My beautiful, hideous, repulsive, beloved shame. We’ve all got one, don’t lie. For some people it’s a sex thing. For others, it’s a personal grooming habit (or lack thereof). For me, it’s lunch. Lunch is my third nipple. It’s my S&M dungeon. It’s like instead of biting my toenails, I like to eat all the lunchmeat on top of all the cheese and I like to top it with straight mayo. Sometimes I use two different kinds of mayo! Sometimes I like to take bites out of every single thing I can bite in the fridge. Sometimes when it’s all over, I eat a scoop of peanut butter from the jar and chase it with a scoop of jam. I have a lunch-eating disorder and that is never going to change. DON’T EVEN PRETEND LIKE YOU’RE BETTER THAN ME.

Of course, I’d much prefer that my third nipple had stayed hidden in the darkness, where it belonged. No one was ever meant to bear witness to this atrocity, much less eat their own food while doing so. But I’ve been smoked out by the Covid. My marriage is far from perfect, but we’ve gotten by for the last ten years without letting every lump show. Sure, he’s held the bathroom trash can while salmonella rips through me like a hurricane flood. Yeah, he’s stood at the wrong end of the birth canal. He’s watched me ugly cry at movies and drunkenly mouth off to strangers and he knows all my embarrassing childhood foibles. It’s not like I’ve led a particularly graceful life, you know? But this. This he was never meant to see.

And yet, here we are. And what’s worse, the kids have now seen me too. Now they think it’s normal and okay to sit inside the fridge with a spoon and call it a meal. I’ve taken away a piece of their innocence! But . . . could it be . . . is this a good thing, in the end? Is this one of those turning points in a person’s life when they manage to take their taboo and turn it into an accepted practice? Have my repugnant eating habits accidentally helped to teach my young, impressionable children that it’s okay to be who you are, and it’s okay to let other people be who they want to be—nay, need to be? Have I deepened the bonds of my relationship with my husband and created an even stronger connection based on a love that at this point can only be described as profoundly and mercifully blind? Have I been . . . brave?

LOL, no. That’s so dumb. You’re dumb.  

I’m just a girl who likes cold cuts who can’t figure out a plausible way to bring the entire deli drawer into the laundry room when no one is looking. But in the end, on some level, aren’t we all? Live your lives out loud, friends. Because in quarantine, no one can hear you scream.