How to Make a Faux Lunch for Two Children

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9:00. First, try not to be late for preschool kiss & play drop-off. Even one minute late, you might have to parallel park your minivan, and you’re not so good at that. You might bump into that pole by the edge of the sidewalk again, and your husband will chuckle and shake his head when he notices the growing gray spot on the corner of the back bumper. He’ll kiss your temple and say, “It’s so cute how you just can’t grasp simple geometry concepts,” and you’ll mutter, “I beat you in all our math classes, asshole,” then he’ll look hurt, and you’ll feel guilty and have to make it up to him with a blowjob, which, given your slipped disc, is not such a good idea. Better to just be on time.

9:12. Late by two minutes. Knock on the drop-off door. Wait. Knock louder. Wait. When no one answers, curse (not too loud-children are parrots) and get in the car. Drive past the parallel parking spot on the street and look for a perpendicular parking alternative.

9:15. Park in the AMC lot. Walk your two preschoolers to school. The older one yells, “Look, a red leaf!” as if he’s never seen such a thing before, as if there aren’t bits of dried red leaves all over the kitchen floor from the two red leaf projects on the refrigerator. The younger one says, “No, purple leaf!” It takes eight minutes to walk the two blocks with the kids competing to pick up the most leaves. Remember your yoga chant: breathe, don’t seethe.

9:25. Back in your car. Spend the drive to Whole Foods shaking your head and thinking how preschool is supposed to be three hours, but now you have less than two and a half hours until you have to leave for pick-up. Life is full of lost half-hours. Dwell on this. Really ponder it. Until someone beeps at you to go-the light’s turned green.

9:31. Arrive at Whole Foods. While you’re parking your minivan into a space designed for a Chevy hatchback, remember back to the first time you came here, 2 B.C. You were hurrying home to make dinner for friends, and Whole Foods was on the way. As you paid over $75 for four small pieces of steak, four potatoes and a bag of organic Caesar salad, you wondered what idiots regularly shop here and vowed never to stray from your trusty Costco again. Shake your head and curse your fate for having two children with allergies to, as the allergist put it, “an unusually high number and bizarrely diverse array of foods.”

9:34. Maneuver your cart through the people squeezing melons, chatting to the fish-counter server, spreading three types of sample cheese on complimentary crackers. You do not have time to waste like this, nor would you want to; you are efficient. Pick out the fourteen things in the store that guarantee in writing that they do not contain and have been processed in plants free from dairy, eggs, gluten, tree nuts, soy, shellfish, sesame, strawberries, corn, quinoa, potatoes, and flax.

9:47. Wait at the checkout line. Think how much you hate waiting. Wonder if all this waiting is karmic payback for all the patients who waited in your waiting room with giveaway magazines like Deep River Fishing and Knit in Rainbow Colors! because you were too cheap to pay for Time and Entertainment Weekly, even with the professional discount. Wonder if there is a Karma magazine. Wonder if people who believe in karma-Hindus? Buddhists? Canadians?-read magazines.

9:51. Still waiting.

9:52. Consider moving to the “10 Items or Less” lane. Study the checkout guy’s face and try to decide whether he’s the type to actually count the number of items and, if so, what he’s likely to do in the event of an infraction: A) ignore, B) wink in a flirty I’ll-keep-your-secret type of way, C) roll his eyes and give you a you-ought-to-be-ashamed-of-yourself look, D) refuse to process your eleventh through fourteenth items, or E) send you back to the regular lane. Probably E.

9:55. Look away! Quickly! The “10 Items or Less” checkout guy has noticed your staring and is looking back with a yeah-I’d-do-you grin. Your heart thuds in your neck. You’d better stay put.

9:56. Progress: there is enough space on the checkout counter for you to place your items. Notice two women who are room moms at your kids’ preschool standing by the “Try Our New Organic Coffee!” sign. They are sipping their complimentary cups of coffee, chatting and giggling. They are what you call the “coiffed women”-blow-dried hair, makeup (makeup! Before 10 in the morning!), outfits, cute shoes with heels (heels!). Obviously, they are not industrious like you. You haven’t even showered; your hair is clipped into a bun, and you have on the same medical school sweats with built-in thermal underwear you put on every morning. Comfortable and quick, that’s what’s important in life. Roll your eyes at them and look away.

9:57. Wonder why the coiffed women didn’t wave to you. Wonder if they were talking about you. Probably they were laughing at your clothes.

10:01. Detour through the coffee section on your way out. As you pass the coiffed women, stretch your lips into a both-rows-of-teeth-showing, cheek-muscles-aching smile, and say hi in a casual tone with a hint of surprise, as if you’ve just noticed them. Their unison “Oh, hi” sounds like a duet of coloratura sopranos greeting a long-lost sister in a Verdi opera. Think how much you hate opera.

One of them says, “We were just talking about the new AMC by the school. They started a 9:30 showing for a,” she draws quotes in the air, “‘Moms’ Morning Out.'”

The other says, “Isn’t that great? We should all go after drop-off.”

Think: Yes-fantabulous. If my kids could eat normal food and I could microwave canned Elmo Spaghetti-Os for lunch, I would love to watch movies and buy cute shoes and take a fucking shower instead of searching for organic, non-allergenic food and making every fucking meal and school snack from fucking scratch!

Say: “Definitely. Sounds great. Maybe next week.”

10:06. Drive home. Try to speed through the yellow light in front of your old office building. Say “shit!” and slam on the brakes when you notice the police car stopped ahead. Your heart thuds in your palms. Look straight ahead, eyes on the road, not on the patients entering the building. No: don’t stare; don’t try to guess who’s here to see Molly, your former partner. Stare instead at the picture of your kids on your phone screen.

10:07. The kids! Focus on your adorable kids! Do not wonder how many tumors Molly’s caught this morning, how many scripts written, how many lives extended.

10:08. The light’s green. Inch forward, look around the corner, and fix your eyes on the orange awning of the daycare center where Molly’s children are, where yours used to be until the director called you in hysterics, speaking in chopped phrases like a telegram: wrong lunch, anaphylactic shock, EPI-Pen broke, ER. Even now, your heart thuds in your wrists, on the underside of your knees, against your skull. Breathe in. Out. Loosen your grip on the steering wheel and wipe your palms on your sweats, one at a time. Drive slowly down the street you sprinted down that day, praying to the God you didn’t even believe in that you’d do anything, anything, if your son would just be all right. Cross yourself and pray a quick thank-you to the God you’ve since decided you should try to believe in, or at least pray to.

10:14. Listen to the radio. Up the volume when Rickie Lee Jones starts singing about a couple driving to the hospital in labor, like you’ll be in a few months. When she sings, Said he fit an APB, a robbery nearby / Then he go for his wallet / They thought he was going for a gun / And the cops blew Bird away, squeeze your eyes shut and feel hot tears. At the stoplight, imagine you’re Bird’s wife and shout to the imaginary cops that you’ve waited your whole life for happiness and why the fuck did they shoot right when you were there? Wonder if you-that is, Bird’s wife-can ever reclaim this lost life. Drive when the light turns green and feel better about your own life. Until you realize Denise Wiles, your gossipiest neighbor, is in the next car over, pretending she didn’t see you. Turn off the radio. Consider moving.

10:21. Home. Only one and a half hours until you need to leave for preschool pick-up. You need to hurry if you’re going to make ‘spaghetti’ for lunch. (And ‘pizza’ in case your youngest decides today is a Hate-Spaghetti Day.) Remember your mother-in-law saying to you last week, “I never had problems with kids eating. I just told them, I’m not a waitress; this is not a restaurant. If you don’t like it, don’t eat.” Your husband, standing behind her, shook his head and mouthed, “Don’t respond. No, no, no,” so you bit your lip and smiled like a buck-tooth beaver.

Consider calling her. Pace around the kitchen and practice: “It would be irresponsible and unsafe to let them simply not eat. Your grandchildren are severely underweight due to food allergies and metabolic dysfunction, both inherited from Kevin.” (Say this part slowly and loudly.) Say, with just a hint of condescension, “I am a doctor.”

“Was a doctor, you mean,” she would say. She always says this.

Shout, “Fuck off, heinous witch.” Gasp at your language, and scramble to the window to make sure Denise Wiles didn’t overhear this while ‘weeding her garden.’ When you see no one, sigh and chuckle as you imagine your mother-in-law’s shocked face. Close your eyes and mouth “Fuck off, heinous witch,” over and over again like a cheerleading chant, relishing the silent words, rolling them around your tongue and chewing on them like taffy.

Focus! You need to focus! And get cooking! It’s already 10:26!

10:26. Steam a spaghetti squash. In the meantime, make a bowl of gelatin to use as an egg replacer, and mix that with peanut flour and tapioca starch to make the pizza crust. Roll out the dough and spread tomato puree on top. Wonder what you would feed your kids if the fetus kicking your bladder right now turns out to be allergic to peanuts and tomatoes. Stroke your balloon of a belly with both hands, say, “You wouldn’t do that to me now, would you, baby girl?” and giggle.

10:58. The steamer beeps. Back on schedule. Open the steamer lid and put your face at the edge of the steam billowing up. Try to decide whether you feel like a bride behind the veil or a burn victim with gauze over your face. Sigh.

11:00. Cut open the spaghetti squash, and scrape the insides with a fork to tease out the strands of spaghetti. Not too fast-remember the time you were in a hurry and ended up with clumps that didn’t resemble any type of pasta, not even shells or ravioli, and neither of the kids would eat it, and you yelled in a crescendoing voice, “You wanted spaghetti like Elmo, and I made it for you. Do you know how long it took? You will eat every last bite,” and you force-fed them and they gagged and the older one with reflux threw up and it took forty minutes to disinfect the chairs and the hardwood floors with the all-natural, unscented cleaner that, no matter how much you spray, will not get rid of the vomit smell clinging to the floor slats.

11:09. You’re getting good at this. There is a bowl of spaghetti squash that looks almost like real spaghetti. It tastes nothing like pasta, of course, but the kids have never had real spaghetti, so they don’t know. Consider: which is the real spaghetti and which is the fake-the squash strands that resemble pasta strings, or the pasta made to resemble the squash strands?

11:11. Next, the pizza. Grate cauliflower over the pizza dough, letting it flake on top of the sauce, almost like real cheese. No, don’t think of dandruff flakes on your high school lab partner’s red sweater. Think of cheese. There-smile at how the kids will run into the kitchen and clap and jump and chant, “Pi-zza! Pi-zza!” not knowing it tastes nothing like pizza. You’ve learned so much since high school, when you used to burn water. You’d put water on the stove to make ramen or rice-in-a-bag, then read a book waiting for the water to boil, and forget all about the water. The good thing about burning water as opposed to, say, Spaghetti-O’s or Dinty Moore Beef Stew is that you tend to hear the hissing and knocking of the burning empty pot before the smoke alarm goes off and three fire trucks are dispatched. Wonder: are you a natural water-burner who’s learned to cook, or were you a natural chef who hadn’t learned to cook? Is there a difference?

11:28. The ‘cheese pizza’ and the ‘spaghetti’ are ready. You’ve beaten your own record by six minutes. You have a whole 22 minutes to yourself. Think of all the things you could do in 22 minutes: take a nap (no-remember when you did that and the alarm didn’t go off and you were an hour late picking up the kids and they were hysterical, convinced you were dead?), read a book (but you’d probably fall asleep and the whole late-hysteria-death thing would happen), watch TV (what’s on TV at 11:28? Who watches TV at 11:28?). No, you should just get a head start on your post-lunch project: cutting up cauliflower into kernel-sized pieces to make ‘popcorn’ for family movie night.

11:30. Think how the florets you’re cutting off look like tumors. Take a step back, and think how the now-lopsided head of cauliflower looks like the brain you and Molly dissected in medical school. Look at the counter, at the faux pizza and faux spaghetti and faux popcorn. Think how you’re spending all your time trying to make something into something it’s not.

11:31. Put down the knife and look at the clock. You have a whole 19 minutes to yourself. Walk out of the kitchen and into the den. Take out your résumé and look at it. Pick up the phone. Dial the number that you and Molly chose, back when time wasn’t lost, when a cauliflower was a cauliflower.