I suppose it’s a cultural thing. Perhaps eating dinner at midnight and taking a nap in the middle of the workday gives you a high tolerance for weird, and I think we can all learn a valuable lesson from that.
After a day touring the city, we found ourselves near the waterfront and—realizing we were all tired and peckish (a potential disaster for any group touring a city, because it is during those times of exhaustion and low blood sugar that things are said that cannot be unsaid and relationships end)—we popped into the nearest café we could find.
It, like virtually every other restaurant, bar, or gas station in Spain, served tapas. The Spanish invented these small dishes—usually tiny snacks speared on a toothpick—presumably in order to make amends to humanity for the Inquisition.
“Sorry we murdered and tortured everyone in the name of Christ. Here, try this ham. It’s made from a pig that spent its life drinking port wine while being read the works of Cervantes.”
The café was clean and had a view of the Mediterranean—two factors that caused us all to ignore the rather alarming fact that it had absolutely zero customers. Also, the proprietor may have cackled with glee when he saw that we were all Americans, though I may have imagined that.
So, against my better judgment (which, I’ve come to believe, may not exist at all) we sat down and looked at the menu. The prices weren’t unreasonable, and so we ordered a few dishes.
“Pan con tomate?” the waiter suggested.
“Si, si!” someone shouted.
“Sangria?” the waiter offered again.
“Si, si!”
It was only after we ordered that I realized neither of these items appeared on the menu. I nervously pointed this out to Rand. My dining experiences in Europe had taught me that whenever the staff suggested something off-menu, it’s best to just hand them your entire wallet and whatever jewelry you might be wearing, because whatever you just ordered is going to cost an absolute fortune. I usually like to throw my pants in, too, just for good measure, at which point Rand tells me I’m being melodramatic and to stop shedding my clothes in public.
In this instance, though, we were with his coworkers, so I kept my pants on and instead just voiced my worries quietly and nervously to my husband.
“It will be fine,” Rand told me. Which is also what people probably said when Franco rose to power.
Our waiter returned a short while later with a plate of cured ham, some blistered padron peppers sprinkled with sea salt, and massive goblets filled with red wine and fruit. After a few tentative sips, I’d decided that he was my best friend, even if he was buying a boat at our expense.
And then the pan con tomate arrived.
Now, my memory is a bit hazy—I’m not much of a drinker and I’d already had two tablespoons of sangria—but I seem to remember that the pile of doughy slices was roughly the size of a Volkswagen, sloshed with what appeared to be ketchup, and looking thoroughly unappetizing.
The waiter scurried back into the kitchen before we had time to stop him or to communicate, in broken Spanish, that he’d given us enough bread to kill an elephant with celiac disease.
And then I realized: we were about to be charged an exorbitant amount for that pile of bread. And I had let it happen.
Now, usually, usually, when you order pan con tomate in Spain, you will find that it is something that far transcends the sum of its parts, not unlike a 90s-era boy band. You find yourself biting into a crusty piece of fresh bread, onto which the inside of a ripe, juicy tomato has been vigorously rubbed. A drizzle of fruity olive oil and a sprinkle of salt and freshly ground pepper go over the top, and it tastes not unlike a cold piece of rustic pizza.
My point is that done properly it is very, very good.
I took a tentative bite of one slice, realizing that sometimes looks can be deceiving. In this instance, they were not.
“This is awful,” I said, swallowing a doughy lump. “And I bet they’re going to charge us a fortune for it.”
“It’s fine,” Rand said.
“It is not fine,” I snapped, loudly enough for the others to hear. I’d screwed up again.
He stared at me, pleading, while Joanna and Kenny stayed silent, watching the drama unfold while nibbling on tapas.
“Baby, please,” he said. “Don’t get mad about this. It’s really not a big deal.”
“But they’re going to overcharge us—” I began, and that’s when Rand pulled out the heavy artillery.
“So what? I’d gladly pay three times whatever the bill is, if it meant that you weren’t upset.”
See how terrible he is? He’s constantly trying to deprive me of my own rage, even if that rage is directed at myself. And he was right. It was a plate of bread. There are bigger battles to be fought, ones far more important than those waged over carbohydrates.
But I couldn’t let it go. It was a minor thing, but this only frustrated me more because I hadn’t been able to prevent it. I’d figured the whole point of me tagging along to Spain was to make sure that things went smoothly and no one was overcharged, which I’d somehow hoped to manage with three years of high school Spanish and a phrasebook that was largely dedicated to sexual intercourse. Otherwise, what the hell was I doing on this trip? Or, for that matter, with my life? And what was I thinking when I shaved my head but inexplicably left my bangs long during sophomore year of college?
I mean, I give Rick Steves a hard time for wandering around the planet dressed like a substitute math teacher, but it’s not like he would have let this happen, right? WHAT SORT OF CRAPPY TRAVEL WRITER ALLOWS HERSELF TO GET RIPPED OFF OVER STALE BREAD?
I felt my anxiety rise, blowing the situation well out of proportion. Unemployed Geraldine had one job, and she had failed at it. I should have stayed at home. I made a lot fewer mistakes when I never left the house.
I exhaled heavily and tried to mentally prepare myself for the bill.
“Even if it it’s five euros, I will be calm,” I thought.
When the bill arrived Rand lunged for it, but I managed to sneak a glance.
Every item we’d ordered that hadn’t been listed on the menu was 2–3 times the price we’d seen elsewhere. And then I saw the last line.
Pan con tomate x 4… 12 euros.
Now, I’m not sure if you are familiar with exchange rates, and granted, they fluctuate somewhat, but at any given time in Europe, you can be confident that the exchange rate with the dollar hovers between “Oh, dear god” and “I HAVE TO MORTGAGE MY UTERUS.”
Two drinks and three small plates of tapas, including the bread, came to nearly $100.
In a span of just under two seconds, I lost whatever semblance of composure I had and began sputtering like a broken coffee maker.
“Baby,” Rand pleaded, “just this once, can you please let it go?”
I exhaled heavily. Could I? Maybe just this once? Did the Count of Monte Cristo let things go? Did Don Corleone let things go? Did Uma Thurman’s character from Kill Bill let things go? No. They killed everyone. Which, okay, granted, doesn’t really seem like a responsible course of action, but it gave them closure. And then they found peace, something that my husband expected me to somehow attain by letting it go.
But how do you explain to someone that your sense of self-worth is now tethered to your dinner bill?
“Fine. I’ll let it go.”
But I didn’t say that. Instead, I stood up and walked directly over to our waiter.
This would have, I suppose, been a perfectly good time to have used one of the two panicked Spanish phrases I had in my repertoire, but rather than wave the check in his face while screaming “CREO QUE ESTO FUE UN ERROR!” I simply inquired where the bathroom was.
I had no idea what he said in reply, but judging by his hand gestures, it was downstairs.
“IT’S FINE,” I shouted to Rand as I headed down the steps. “I JUST NEED TO PEE.”
I should tell you that I am not proud of what happened next, but I’d be lying, because I sort
of am.
I was hovering some distance above the toilet seat (which is what I do whenever using a public bathroom), thinking about the twelve damn euros. And, I realized a way that I’d be able to let go of my anger. Slowly, I began to sway side to side, like some sort of strange, urine-streaming pendulum.
By the time I was done, I had sufficiently saturated the bathroom. I surveyed the scene proudly and walked out without flushing.
I know you’re thinking: that whoever had to clean that up didn’t deserve any of it, but I’d like to defend myself with the following arguments:
1. I was drunk on sangria.
2. Peeing all over the place made me feel a lot better.
3. I didn’t kill anyone.
4. I screw up a lot (see the entire rest of this book).
When you consider that, I think my actions become morally justifiable. Sometimes, it seems, the only way to reckon with your own mistakes is to make even more of them.
I walked upstairs and found everyone seated at the table, waiting for me.
“Where’s the bathroom?” Joanna asked.
“You don’t want to use it,” I said.
“It’s that bad?”
“Yes.” (This was now true.)
I looked around—Rand had paid the bill, and the waiter had retreated to the back of the café. We were all alone.
I grabbed a napkin dispenser and shoved it into my bag.
“What the hell are you doing?” Rand asked.
“They charged us twelve euros for bread, so I’m taking this.”
“Don’t take the napkin dispenser,” Kenny said, shaking his head.
I looked at him, and at the dispenser that was sticking halfway out of my purse. I thought of how desperately I needed to regain control of the situation. How badly I wanted to prove to myself—and everyone else—that I knew what I was doing. Sheepishly, I removed it and placed it back on the table.
“If anything,” he said, picking up one of the sangria goblets, “you should take this.”
Joanna, standing nearby, was nodding her agreement.
“Do it,” she said. “Hurry.”
They helped me slip the glass into my bag while Rand stared blankly at the three of us, trying to understand when, exactly, he had lost control of the situation.
“Should I take a napkin dispenser, too?” I asked.
“WE’RE LEAVING,” Rand said, quickly pushing us out before I could abscond with anything else in the name of justice.
We walked into the night, a tiny bit of light still hovering over the horizon, turning the sky violet.
Still buzzing with energy from the thrill of my small heist, I pulled the goblet from my bag and held it up proudly.
“I can’t believe you,” Rand said, shaking his head. He was partly in shadow, but I could see he was smiling.
“I had to do it. It was the only way I could get over it. They charged us twelve euros for bread, so I had to steal their glass and pee all over their bathroom.”
“Wait, what?”
“I peed all over the toilet seat. And maybe a little on the floor. I had to. So I could let it go, like you told me to.”
“You peed all over their bathroom?”
“Yes, and now we’re even, so I’ve let it go.”
“That is not at all what I meant.”
Oh. Huh.
Later, Kenny would proudly tell everyone in the office about my drunken misdeeds while Rand repeatedly reminded everyone that my actions were not representative of the company or its executive team. He maintains to this day that conflicts should not be resolved via theft and/or urination.
And he’s right, of course. I screwed up big time on this one. I’m tempted to fixate on it, as I always do. But that never gets me anywhere.
Instead, I try to focus on one of the few things I’ve done right—I’ve surrounded myself with people in life who are far more forgiving of me than I am of myself. They remain through the mistakes, through the wrong turns and the missed reservations and the overpriced bread, through the anxiety that weaves through all of it, through the brief but powerful bouts of revenge that I enact in order to make myself feel better. I think of the time I botched dinner in Edinburgh, Wil stood in the middle of the street and started inexplicably dancing.
“Chill out, G,” he said, entirely unconcerned.
I am reminded that my mistakes don’t mean I’m a failure as a human. They just mean I’m human.
And more constant than all these unwavering people is Rand. He tells me that it will be okay. He reminds me that there are bigger battles to fight. That you can’t control everything, and if you try, you’ll drive yourself mad and have to saturate a lot of things with pee. And I try to listen, again and again, repeating what he says to me whenever I feel that I’ve committed some unforgivable sin. Whenever I’ve absconded with some item because I felt slighted or peed all over something in the name of justice.
“Geraldine, just let it go.”
On the streets of Barcelona, I tried to do just that. We passed a garbage can, and I stared at the goblet for a moment before dropping it inside. In the end, I really did let it go.
9
HOME IS WHERE YOUR MRI IS
IN THE THREE YEARS SINCE I had started my blog, we spent large chunks of time on the road. But despite health code violations in New York hotels, or pilgrimages across London to find ancient clocks, or the crimes undertaken on the shores of the Mediterranean, Seattle was always home. We left for a few weeks but invariably returned to the same place. It was always just as we left it—the overcast skies, the squeaky spot on the stairs, the potato that I refused to throw out—despite Rand’s pleas—because I wanted to see if it would grow into a tree (current status: not yet, but I have faith).
Hometowns tend to get a bad rap. I suspect it’s because most of our lives happens there. And so the good and the bad, the highs and the lows, all get attributed to a town that’s not really to blame. It’s just that you happened to live there when things started to go awry. The unpaid bills, the parking tickets, the tearful break-ups, and that driver who inexplicably gave you the middle finger after he cut you off all become symptoms of your own geography.
You become so bogged down with the difficulties of the everyday that you never step back and see it for what it is. Which is a shame, especially if you live in the most beautiful place in the world. And the subjectivity of that statement means that so, so many of us do.
Seattle was where I was born. Under a gray, cloudy sky, I learned to walk and read and ride a two-wheeled bike and drive a car. I had my senior prom at the Seattle Aquarium and ate burgers from Dick’s Drive-In late on college nights when I was hungry and my metabolism could handle such abuse. I kissed boys in the shadow of the Space Needle and borrowed their flannel shirts when the night grew cold. I once saw Dave Matthews at the QFC in Wallingford and the guitarist from Soundgarden walking by the Whole Foods on Roosevelt.
This was where I met Rand and where he first kissed me, a move that took me by such surprise that I asked him if he had just done it.
“Nope,” he lied, before leaning in to do it again.
I fell in love in this city and with this city. And in June 2012, after three years spent traveling with Rand and writing about our adventures on the road, it was here that I found out I had a brain tumor.
I’m probably breaking all sorts of rules by telling you about it up front. I’m pretty sure the laws of memoirs demand that I reveal the news to you slowly or provide some sort of buildup, or foreshadowing, or something. But that’s never how bad news is delivered in real life. It just happens, abruptly and without warning, on warm spring days when we’re still in our pajamas. So that’s how I’m telling you.
I’d been having headaches for the better part of a decade, but over the last few years they’d gotten steadily worse. By the time I was finally laid off from my job, I felt some measure of relief. The headaches had become a daily occurrence, and working at my desk or simply checking
my email had become excruciating.
I was able to step back from my computer and bask in my unemployment for a while; the headaches subsided. But in the months since, they’d returned and gotten steadily worse. By the spring of 2012, they’d gotten so bad that I could barely function. Even something as simple as folding laundry was difficult. Writing the blog was excruciating.
I hail from a long, nervous line of hypochondriacs. My mother had spent the last three decades explaining to me why everyone and everything were out to get me. So in yet another unconscious act of defiance, I had been dismissing the daily pain in my skull as nothing.
“Everyone gets headaches,” I told Rand, when he expressed worry.
“Not every day, they don’t.”
But I had long ago decided that people complained about headaches when they had no bigger struggle to worry about. This was no big deal. Then came the road trip we took down to Portland, Oregon, for a weekend. I don’t remember much of it, except for the journey home. I was hit with a headache so severe that I couldn’t drive.
“You need to talk to your doctor,” Rand said, as I slumped in the passenger seat.
I would have nodded, defeated, but I was unable to move my head or neck, so I just mumbled assent while I tried to find a comfortable position for the three-hour ride home. There wasn’t one. It hurt to lie down. It hurt to sleep.
The next week, when I went to see my doctor, she suggested an MRI.
“I highly doubt we’ll find anything,” she said, “but I’d like to do it anyway. For peace of mind.”
She gave me a list of imaging centers around the city, and the one with the earliest available appointment was in Ballard.
Ballard, a little neighborhood in northwestern Seattle, is where I lived when I was very young. My earliest memories of Seattle—and my earliest memories, period—take place there. Before the music and tech scenes emerged to put us on the map, before there were traffic jams and gastropubs and million-dollar condos, there was a Denny’s where my mother would order me popcorn shrimp and a convenience store where my uncle would buy me windup toys that would instantly break.
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