Chicago Diary

Tuesday

I arrive in the evening, bathed in sweat, right eye infected, wearing the seventeen-dollar knit matched separates I purchased because I wanted to look “neat” and “effortless” while traveling. They fit like a baggy sauna.

My exit from the baggage claim faces a patchy hill with construction behind it. When my family returned from our first trip to Europe in August 1999, our flight landed at dawn. As I waited with my parents and sister for the hired limousine that always took us to and from the airport, we noticed that this hillside was alive with rabbits, babies and adults hopping in and out of hidden burrows. A Beatrix Potter book’s-worth of bunnies, right there at O’Hare. At home I went to bed with my mother and my sister, cozy together in the morning light, at the start of a new day.

We had plans to go to Johnnie’s for dinner, but I am afraid it will be too cold to eat dinner outside, so my sister proposes Trattoria Peppino. Thirty years ago, this was our favorite place to get takeout. (After fourth grade, most of the dinners of my childhood were purchased from restaurants.) My standard order was angel hair pasta in marinara. When it arrived, I immediately put the aluminum container with its pinch-top paper lid in the fridge. Cold, the sauce became acid and rich.

Trattoria Peppino is still called Trattoria Peppino, but in every other way it is unrecognizable as the bustling one-room restaurant I remember as noisy and light-filled. Now it is silent and vast. A wide covered porch leads into a dark, inexplicably decorated interior rich with faux moss glued to the ceiling, banquettes spread with Big Lots pillows, gothicesque chandeliers, boxes of flame, and a pervasive blue darkness.

On the way to the bathroom that doesn’t lock I pass an empty, narrow bar presided over by a young man watching something in Russian on his phone and peer into a back room full of gaming machines.

My dad meets us for dinner. The food isn’t good. The gelato we get next door after isn’t, either. But it’s nice to be together.

My cousin drives my sister and I into the city. We drop my sister off at her friend’s apartment. I collapse in my cousin’s basement guest room.

Wednesday

I walk to the immediate care near my cousin’s apartment before nine AM, hoping I can acquire the prescription eye drops I am now sure I need before the morning manicure my sister has schedule. On the street I cast my eyes around in wonder, trying to place myself here, to feel that I know this place. Ordinary daily life in Chicago feels painfully familiar, but it does not belong to me. My partner FaceTimes me with our baby while I walk into the cold wind.

I tell the doctor that I have basically been sick for six months, acutely for the last six weeks, and he tells me that he has three children in grade school and had a cough for so long last fall that he got a chest x-ray. He tests my vision, finding it impaired, which causes me to panic because I haven’t been to see an eye doctor since getting LASIK seven years ago. It’s just the pink eye, the doctor tells me. My suffering does not impress him. He writes me a script. In a burst of victory I manage to collect my eyedrops from CVS and summon a rideshare in time to only be a little bit late to the manicure.

At first I’m charmed by the driver, a white man in his sixties who looks like one of my father’s friends and starts talking before I click my seatbelt. He is retired from working for the city; he also owned a business which neither of his children wanted to take over, go figure, so he sold it. His daughter is in graduate school in Italy. His wife is so beautiful everyone thinks she and her daughter are sisters. He loves playing the guitar. He owns nineteen guitars. His wife would love to retire because she sees what a great time he’s having, being retired. Every day is a good day. During the pandemic, it was hard, because he couldn’t keep his hands off her, when they were home together. He plays videos of himself playing songs he’s written on the guitar on his phone for me. Fuckable wife, playable guitars. What’s not to love? Every day is a good day. Anything I say in response goes in the memory hole. I feel stupid for trying to talk to him, for taking him in earnest.

When I reach the salon the nail artist is moments away from insisting my sister’s friend take my appointment because she’s tired of waiting for me. I’m glad I’m masked. I have a cough so violent and phlegmy it makes me blush. The nail artist is from Belarus and warms up talking to us about how crazy Americans are about their dogs. I see a picture of a little girl on her lock screen, want to talk about children, but I don’t. I apologize when she tells me my nails are too short.

My sister and I borrow her friend’s car and drive out to our hometown, where we meet our father for lunch at a new restaurant that is decorated like my late grandmother’s house in Joliet, which is to say in an absolutely absurd high rococco style. This business has replaced a previous tenant in the space which I vaguely remember as some kind of brandless bar and grill. There must have been something here before, some establishment I walked by most of the days of my life, but I can’t remember . Our dad admires our nails. He tells us: “This seemed like a sweet place for little girls, so I wanted to take my little girls here.”

We go to the bank to look at my mother’s possessions that are kept there in safety deposit boxes. The room is unbearably hot, and although it seems we have plenty of time when we arrive, very quickly the bank is about to close. All of us cry at different moments. I am immediately overwhelmed, but then a kind of coping mechanism, or perhaps a safety device, takes hold, a gentle resignation I am able to hold between myself and the charged objects like a psychic fur muff.

Thursday

In the safety deposit box room, my body screamed in pain. Writing above, I forgot the pain, a burn in my back and neck and shoulders and coccyx, so sharp and unrelenting I worried I had cancer. I forgot that I scheduled a massage for the next day right there in the hot bank room, a massage for today, for Thursday. But now I remember. My mother was always scheduling massages for herself, right until the last months of her life.

The massage I am able to schedule is at a chain franchise, so I am prepared for it to be weak, and because I do it under duress, I forget to request a female masseuse, which I have done as a rule since 2015, when I was sexually assaulted by a masseur at a hotel in San Diego. The pain and trauma of that assault, which changed my relationship with my body and damaged my ability to trust the space of the massage table.

I have a memory of a massage I got my senior year of college, right before leaving for spring break, from a masseur who was so skilled and felt so safe that I fell asleep on the table. He woke me by gently rubbing my scalp, saying in his thick Brooklyn accent, “Wake up, Lisa, you’re all set.” That memory too, its sweetness, the assault stole from me.

But today in Chicago, in my home city I have not visited for two years, I will be massaged by a man, and I decide it is okay. It hurts—I have to regulate my breathing throughout to keep from crying out—and is made vaguely comic by the fact that I am evidently congested and attempting to repress my terrible cough throughout, despite having signed a document guaranteeing that I am not ill. When I turn from my front to my back I can’t contain the cough and beg for a tissue, frightened the masseur will be angry at me. “Everything’s coming out now!” he says, proud. After, he explains that my hips were full of tension and stress, probably from the physical demands of caring for my toddler. Maybe, I think.

I am in Lincoln Square, a neighborhood I rarely visited when I lived here. I walk by Cafe Selmarie, a restaurant and bakery I remember my mother liking. She went there with a friend or with my father—maybe she went there with a friend and then with my father—and loved it, brought home bags of cookies. We never came here together. A sign on the door tells me Cafe Selmarie is closing after forty-one years in two days. I wait in a long line to buy a box of cookies, a coffee, and, on a whim, a tote bag. I text my father a picture of the cookies, reminding him that my mother loved Cafe Selmarie. “Sweet” he writes back.

I drive my sister’s friend’s car back to her apartment, relishing the traffic on Lake Shore Drive, and then I ride the Metra back down to Fulton Market, where we are having dinner with more cousins. I sit on the upper level of the train, looking out at the city. Across the way two women are drinking wine from paper cups. I imagine, as I always have, whenever I’ve gone back to Chicago since I moved away, what my life would be if I lived here. I listen to music that reminds me of California. I talk to my mom in my head.

Friday

Today, for the first time in twenty years, I will go to the town in Michigan that was our beloved summer vacation location. But first I will go to the storage unit where my father has staged more of my mother’s possessions for my sister and I to parse.

We do not act out the (in the parlance of my son’s daycare) "big emotions” that characterized most of our previous processing of our mountainous family archive. For a long time—beginning perhaps with my marriage to my first husband, in 2010—every trip I made home contained many days’ work sorting, discarding, attempting to sell, donating, and shipping to my apartment in California various of our family’s things. And I made many trips home. Until 2012, the year I turned twenty-eight, I spent an average of four months of the year living in my parents’ house, in what I thought of as my house, regardless of whatever apartment I had in New York or Los Angeles.

This endless purging of our belongings started gradually, in a way I didn’t even notice—it just seemed practical, at the time—and slowly took over every part of every visit home. After 2015, a dark year which turned out to be the beginning of a trend of several dark years, I simply stopped trying to see friends or do other things when I came home. In 2018 the house sold and in 2020 my mother died. We were left with the things and their vastness, the problem of their continued existence and the insult of our indelible longing for them.

I box up the LPs my father offers me, my mother’s high school collection of 45s, a garbage bag of stuffed animals, and ship them to California with my sister’s help. We make our way into the city, meet my sister’s friends, and process along the lip of the lake to New Buffalo, stopping for dinner at a restaurant we loved as children. By the time we get there I am giddy, exhausted. My eye is feeling better. I drink two beers to celebrate, even though I’m sick.

Saturday

We luxuriate in the big, beautifully appointed house rented for this bachelorette weekend. My sister’s friends decorate the living room and make delicious blue corn masa pancakes. We drive to Holland, to the Tulip Festival, and eat a picnic in the wind. We drive back in bright sun and eat dinner at a restaurant near the beach. After, we walk to Oink’s Dutch Treat, our favorite place for ice cream when we were two little girls beloved of their parents and summer was one long day under a pastel sky before we went to bed in a clean, air-conditioned room.

Sunday

The drive back to the city is so short that it seems impossible it once took all day. My sister and I have dinner at a Japanese restaurant before a late showing of Dune: Part 2 with my father and his partner. We’ve both seen it already, but we want to see it with him, the man who required each of our boyfriends read the book whose lore and logic we all knew by heart. We were such good students, but our family’s story has refused to follow the plot. Our Bene Gesserit predeceased our Duke.

Monday

I sleep in. I work, comforted by my Zooms.

In the evening my sister’s dear friend drives us to Hyde Park. We have a fancy Italian dinner and go to our hotel, where our father and his partner are also staying. At eleven PM we go to their room and visit, cheerful, easy. My father seems relaxed for a man who has to report to the hospital at five-thirty the next morning for surgery.

Tuesday

Our goal is to arrive at the hospital around eight-thirty in the morning, as our father suggested, but we get there later, via the day’s first rideshare to the hospital. In the waiting room eating and drinking are forbidden. My father’s partner is very kind to us, explaining everything the doctor has said. The surgery is projected to last an hour and a half to three hours. We become nervous as it stretches into its fourth hour.

My sister has to leave for the airport. I take a rideshare back to the hotel to collect my sister’s luggage, a second rideshare to return with it to the hospital. Finally our father is out of surgery and my sister is able to see him. Only after she is gone do I see him. He lays in a curtained-off cell, his incision superglued shut. He looks at me, squeezes my hand, closes his eyes.

“Long live the fighters,” he says.

We talk about the movie. He says that the director did a good job making it seem “very real,” which isn’t exactly fun—Villeneuve is more interested in puncturing the mystique of the Kwisatz Haderach, in the tragedy underneath, than in yielding any victory to the audience.

I say that it’s sad, how Lady Jessica and Paul both have to surrender their identities.

“One thing you can say about Paul,” my dad says, “is that he’s a tough motherfucker. He does what has to be done.”

We wait a long time for a second blood test result after there is an error with the first test, but it’s good because my father sleeps. I do too, kind of, slumped in the uncomfortable chair. Eventually we are free to go.

It seems obvious to me I should go home with my dad, but I am sleeping at my cousin’s, and I don’t have a car. I have to leave in the morning. I feel the psychic muff, protecting me from sadness.

I help my dad into the car and beckon the day’s fourth rideshare. The driver is a woman. Five air fresheners hang from her rearview mirror. The smell makes me dizzy, and I worry I might throw up. But soon enough I forget it.

We pull onto Lake Shore Drive. The lake is beautiful; the day is beautiful; the night before was beautiful, a sky full of ecstatic Maxfield Parrish clouds, the kind my sister says are a hug from our mom, and today through my sunglasses the water is teal and perfect and I wish I could live here forever. Mommy thank you for protecting Daddy, thank you for keeping him safe, I love you, I am happy he’s okay but I am so sad. I miss you so much. I wish I had never left, I wish our old life had never ended. It was impossible, it is impossible, for me to imagine how this could be, but I wish it anyway, oh Mommy, why did it have to end, why are we not still here together, I miss you so much, I am in so much pain without you—

We had it, she says to me. We had all the beautiful things you wish for.

Why did it have to end?

I wish I knew. But that’s the way it is.

I want more time with you. I want a life of those days we had in your car. Going to the museums, to restaurants, to hotels and stores and shops, it feels so fickle and stupid, so capitalist, so limited, but it was everything I knew of happiness and it wasn’t about any of the stuff, it was about you and me together in it, and Dad and Julia, and it was real—it was real—in my worst moments I think no one knows it was real, and I don’t know how to tell them, I can’t imagine how I could write anything that would make anyone care about my family. All my life in this work and I have so few words. For anything. Even thinking about writing this, projecting it forward as a goal, a release, I am critical of it before it even exists. Who cares? I spent so many years making myself a writer and the best word I have is “beautiful”?

We had it, my mother says. We had all those beautiful things you want. We had a good long time.

When she talks to me like this, I don’t know what it is. I can’t make it happen. I can’t call on her by will. Sure, it’s just me, it’s my brain doing its thing. Think that there is nothing else in it, if that’s what you want. There was always a channel between us, an opening. It did not close.

You are making your beautiful life, she says to me. Everything that we were together is in you. I’m here. I promise.

I want more time.

I don’t know why we don’t get more, she says. I just know that’s how it is.

Behind my sunglasses I close my tired eyes.

When she drops me off I thank the driver, telling her that I “just couldn’t face the El today!” which is an odd performance, and she says I helped her get home to the north side, so she thanks me too.

Tomorrow I go back to California, the place everyone here keeps asking me if I am staying. “Well,” I say to them, “I actually wrote in a journal recently, on the beach: L.A. is my paradise.” My son and I will dissolve in a circuit of milk and texture and my husband will make cauliflower adobo for dinner. I can almost taste it.

Tonight in the home my cousin has given me I think about the skyscrapers I saw downtown, their height, the sky they captured. How I thought my life would be just like that.

Wednesday

My cousin drives me to the airport. These last hours are so lovely, gliding along the long boulevards where the city turns into suburbs, the businesses I was so curious about, street after street full of houses where people live, the neighborhoods I explored once, when I was young and wanted to learn the world. I think I still know this place. Whatever story I tell myself is only the way I feel just right now.

When I thought about writing this, I knew I’d end it with a harsh reveal, some mention of my old house, how I didn’t go close to it, didn’t dare, but that’s not true at all. Of course I drove past, slowed down, looked and looked for the little bit of time I had. For that moment we were there together.