Our sorrow away with sprinkles of paprika, warm ourselves with too much salt, slurp oysters down with a smidge of bitter lime while in isolation.
My mother is the plantain expert. She molds the plátano like nature sculpts water into ice and snow and gas and effervescing droplets. Patacones are cut fat, cooked in oil, then flattened, dipped again into the scorching grease and served with gunks of ají. When her arthritic hands can grasp but not squash, she cuts the plantain thin and waits until they’re boiled a golden tan. Chifles. On a Thursday that feels like March, she uses pottery made of rock to concoct a plantain paste with sautéed shrimp. Sango de camarón. Some mornings the plantain is battered into a sphere with chicharrón and slivers of cheese. When her hands are as strong as ribbons, we each pitch in to mold the food into what she desires.
My father only says I love you in texts but shows it every morning. When I clack away on the keyboard in my home office, he knocks, hands me home-made juice or a smoothie, then walks away. The colors are different each day. The kiwi green overshadows the rays of crimson strawberries. The pale banana is erased by the sharp coral of melons. The orange’s pulp rises to the top with citrusy strips of yellow pineapples. I savor the fruits as the sound of cars is replaced by the chirp of birds. When he forgets to use milk, I say nothing, only gracias, Papi, gracias.
Mami and I hide the plantains when my father uses five in one day. She sighs at the fat wads of onion in the garbanzo salad he learns from social media. I laugh, but then yearn for it on days when I need the balsamic to tickle my tongue. My brother, who recovers from a cancer surgery he undergoes just a few weeks before the shutdown, gets whatever his taste buds desire. It becomes a joke. When helping my mother around the kitchen I use a whiny voice as she beats or swirls or batters over the stovetop to ask why that isn’t for me. Mija, because he’s sick, she says. Then we laugh at my fake gluttony. One day my brother overhears, and he says When you have cancer, there are perks.
Had, not have, I say. The only past in the dubious present.
By June, my mom is back as the nanny who has accidentally taught her almost-children how to curse in Spanish. I’m no longer working from home but in my work building’s one-windowed office. My father and brother remain unemployed, and Papi only makes two juices a day. For the few months we are inside, we eat, we dine, and sometimes we cry—for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. We use dense meat, copious grains, and fresh fruit to say what can’t be uttered in vowels and consonants and syllables. It’s odd, almost wicked, that a small part of me wants back the era of grim phone alerts and only the company of my family. If my warped feelings were scrumptious food, they’d be apparent contradictions. Maybe grilled pineapples with a side of honey ham. Slabs of jalapeño chocolate for dessert. Flesh-soft mangoes battered with fiery cayenne pepper flakes and a spritz of lemon. Reminders of our forced temporary togetherness, a time that all in my household exclaim and hope will never reprise itself while we’re alive. But I silently long for these moments—the laughter, the slurping, the sighs accompanying a sense of fullness—just like every so often my palate yearns for a bitter treat wrapped in a glaze of syrupy sweet.
Victoria Buitron is a writer and translator with an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Fairfield University. Her work has been featured or is upcoming in The Citron Review, Bending Genres, Lost Balloon, and other literary magazines.