Don't Kill the Birthday Girl (19 page)

Keep playing
, I thought hazily.
Play
.

That was when the bathroom door nearly jumped off its hinges as he busted in.

“GET OUT,” I hollered, trying to yank up my underwear.

Relieved that I was conscious, Adam quickly stepped back into the hallway and closed the door.

Later, after the EMT team had come and gone, he sat down next to me on the spindly futon I was still calling my bed. He wrapped his arms around me.

“Do me a favor,” he said. “Don't die.”

My posture stayed stiff, resisting his hug. I was mortified at the view he'd gotten in the bathroom.

“Sandra,” he said. “You have to understand. I couldn't picture explaining to your mom that I let you die alone—and on a toilet.”

That was when I knew he intended to stick around for a while. Yet even after we'd known each other so long that we were ready to try sharing a household, I don't think he was prepared for the thousand minor hassles of living with my food allergies. Not just the allergies themselves but a personality shaped by a lifetime of managing those allergies.

I am a compulsive double-checker and to-do lister, a scrutinizer of labels and a labeler of file folders. In contrast, Adam followed the philosophy of open-air filing, in which anything is easier to find if you leave it in plain view. This goes for bills, socks, used water glasses, and month-old crossword puzzles. He moved through the apartment like a poltergeist, leaving every conceivable cabinet and drawer hanging ajar in his wake.

It's not as if I didn't have some warning. Throughout college, he would snack on a jar of peanut butter that he kept in his room, open, with a knife stuck into it for handy serving. Each time I visited, the jar had roamed to a different spot—the bedside stand, the dresser, the seat of a chair. I called it his free-range peanut butter.

Even as a grown-up, he was still a grown-up
guy
. He harbored half-empty soda cans, scooped with the same spoon from the Nutella to the ice cream and back again, and kept three tubs of cottage cheese in simultaneous rotation. When it was his kitchen, at his place, I could ignore a sticky counter or a dirty dish. But once his kitchen became mine, it wasn't just a
matter of habits that made my skin crawl. These were habits that could make my skin break out into hives, or worse.

“Did you get all the eggs off that plate?” I'd say. “You kind of have to scrub before you load it in the dishwasher, or else they get baked on.”

“Um, can you throw that milk away? That's still in the fridge? I'm pretty sure it has gone over,” I'd point out. “You know I can't touch it.”

For the one being nagged, it had to have been awful. My allergies leverage every concern—both legitimate grievances and, I confess, occasional mere PMS bitchery—into a litmus test.
Do you love me? Then rinse out that glass
.

Sometimes I wonder if I'm destined to live alone. Otherwise, I'll have to accept this reality in which once or twice every week I break out in hives in my own house. It might happen when I swipe away a drop of orange juice, only to realize the counter is also coated in a fine drift of whey powder from my significant other's protein shakes. It might be when I surprise him with a kiss, only to hear too late, “I had cream in my coffee.”

Then again, I'm not the only one making a compromise in such a household. Any partner has to accept a reality in which there will be many nights when I am curled up, gasping and heaving, on the other side of a door. Nights in which it flashes through his head,
What will I say to her mother if she dies?

Just a few months after Adam and I had moved in together, I went out by myself for a friend's “salon” dinner—a gathering of people from D.C.'s literary world, all friends of hers, all strangers to one another. When I came to the door, she handed me a cheat sheet that had every guest's name typed out in curly pink script. At first the guests tried to match faces to names
and names to jobs as we stood around in her cute Georgetown living room. We soon abandoned the obligatory networking and moved on to admiring her poodle, a regal descendant of a Westminster prizewinner.

Our hostess set down a plate of warm pastry puffs. The dog sniffed them delicately before turning away. I reached out to try a puff, thinking I recognized the type as one I bought regularly at Trader Joe's. Then realized these were filled with shrimp. Close call. My stomach growled.

When dinner was served, I walked over and grabbed a plate. I got the rundown on how the pork loin had been prepared. Olive oil, herbs, heat; it seemed perfect. But seconds after swallowing the first bite of mango-topped pork, my throat began to itch.

Oh no
. This was back when I still thought mango was safe. I'd had juice blended with mango and had tested out mango salsa without a hitch. But after those first two exposures, apparently my system had changed its mind. My gut cramped. I unzipped my purse, slivered the foil of a Benadryl with my thumbnail, and palmed the pill into my mouth. Looking around, I realized no one had noticed. Perhaps I could keep it that way.

I took another sip of wine, testing my ability to swallow. The hostess's poodle seemed to sense something was wrong. She settled in at my side and nosed my hand. I'd fallen silent for too long.

Taking a deep breath and turning to the playwright on my left, I asked, “So, when did you leave England?”

He answered with a long story, but it was hard to focus. The throat itch wasn't going away. Maybe I could coat my stomach with something bland, but there was no helpful bowl of pretzels
handy. This was too fancy a party for that. The French bread, handmade, was also of indeterminate ingredients. Broiled salmon?

I got up and served myself two filets, then part of a third, eating it with my fingers from a plate still full of mango and pork. I looked like a total glutton, but it worked. The itch eased.

“So you live with your boyfriend?” the hostess asked.

“Yes,” I told them, “Adam. He's a lawyer.” I talked about meeting him in college, leaving out that our first date ended with me alone in the ER. I was determined to make it through the night without being labeled the Allergy Girl.

When it was time for dessert, I oohed and aahed with everyone else at the dozen assorted cupcakes, though I couldn't actually imagine how they would taste. The thin bakery box began making its way around the table, and I noticed the cardboard bottom was seeped through with butter frosting. I faked digging something out of my purse as it passed, to avoid touching it.

The guests walked out together. I was so grateful to have held the reaction at bay that I didn't even flinch when the journalist's wife gave me a frostinged kiss good night. I settled behind the wheel, feeling the kiss-shaped hive begin to rise on my cheek.

I walked in to find Adam on the floor, playing Star Wars on his Xbox. I leaned down for a kiss hello and he gestured to the open jar of Nutella.

“I'm deadly,” he warned. “How was dinner?”

“It was fun,” I told him, “until the reaction.” There was no need to pretend anymore. The Benadryl was wearing off. I could feel a return of tickling in my throat.

“That sucks.” If I was well enough to talk, Adam had learned not to press for details. He looked back at the screen. “Want to watch me kill some droids?”

“Sure,” I said. “If I throw up, it's not editorial.” I took another Benadryl, knowing it would knock me out, and curled up in the recliner.

They don't show this in the Hollywood romances: how the whooshing of lightsabers can become a lullaby. How you hope your true love will be someone you trust to check on your breathing as you sleep.

•  •  •

In high school, I had my first hint that weddings might prove hazardous to my health. The object of my affection, a Hindu, joked one day about the Bengali tradition of the Bou Bhat ceremony. Upon arrival at the groom's house, he told me, women wash the bride's feet in flour and milk.

“Milk?” I asked, sure I had misheard.

Yep. Alternately, the bride could simply step into the mixture, imprinting her soles, before being led into the house—where she would be fed sherbet. Or, as I like to think of sherbet, “sweet icy death in a bowl.”

I went home that night and did some research. As in all cultures where food is prized, the
sanskara
of Indian weddings features allergen after allergen. The
madhupak
, in which the father of the bride was supposed to offer the groom yogurt and honey in welcome. The casting of ghee, clarified butter, into the fire we would circle four times.

None of this would come to pass. My allergy to these rites
was just the literal manifestation of a larger incongruity. His parents would never have approved of their son marrying “that white girl.”

Still I was intrigued. I'd never thought about weddings before. I began cataloguing a variety of matrimonial cultural traditions, filing each under
fun
or
fatal
. In Morocco, the bride's body is bathed in milk (to purify her) before applying henna to her hands and feet. In Italy and Greece, the couple is showered with sugared almonds as they walk to the limousine. In the Czechoslovakian tradition, they were showered with peas instead. In Hungary, the bride smashes an egg to ensure the health of her future children. In Bulgaria, the bride puts an egg in a dish with wheat and coins and tosses it over her head.

All of these scenarios were, for me, strictly hypothetical. Then, after college graduation, I had the first of my Summer of a Thousand Weddings: those seasons when it seems like every weekend involves putting on a semiformal dress, making small talk with someone's uncle, and dancing to the Isley Brother's “Shout” after too many glasses of champagne. At this point in my life I realized I had a very real, very tangible foe when it came to the battlefield of matrimony. Enemy, thy name is cake.

The tradition of wedding cakes supposedly goes back to ancient Rome, when the groom broke a “cake” (that is, a loaf) of barley bread over the bride's head as evidence of her submission. A gentler version describes him crumbling it over her to suggest fertility. I suspect the reality could go either way depending on a couple's dynamic, just as the sharing of first bites today can consist of loving forkfuls or a mutual face-smush.

By the middle of the seventeenth century, and with sugar still unavailable to many, the cake had evolved into a “bride's
pye” used in European wedding ceremonies. The Chinese took to serving dragon and phoenix cakes, individually portioned and usually filled with red or green adzuki-bean paste—a tradition that continues today. Some bride's-pie recipes ordained ingredients that doubled as aphrodisiacs, including oysters, cockscombs, and lamb testicles. Thankfully, cooks dumped in enough spice to cover the actual flavor. Simpler versions used mincemeat or fruit and nuts.

Sometimes a glass ring would be embedded inside the cake. Whoever found it would be blessed with good luck in the coming year. Unless you found it by swallowing it, in which case the luck was suspect.

Today, different cake traditions abound. The French
croque-en-bouche
is textured in chocolate-dipped profiteroles stuffed with pastry cream, or ganache-filled macarons; picture a pastry-covered wizard's hat, threaded in caramel. The Norwegian
kransekake
also takes on a conical appearance, as marzipan rings of gradually decreasing size are stacked, one on top of the other, sometimes around a bottle of wine. In Appalachia, people serve “stack cake,” a series of thin layers contributed by each of the attending guest parties, iced together with a swipe of apple butter or preserves. Stack cakes (named so because they end up looking like a stack of pancakes) double as a social barometer. The more popular the couple, the taller their cake.

These variations, plus the tiered classics of vanilla sponge cake, chocolate sponge cake, or carrot cake, all have one thing in common: they would kill me.

While passing on having a slice is easy enough, it doesn't eliminate the threat. At every wedding I find myself surrounded
by dozens of people, intoxicated to varying degrees, whose fingers and lips are now coated with something that will bring tears to my eyes and hives to my cheeks. I become Frogger, trying to cross from our table to the door without being hit by the Mack trucks of every handshake, hug, and kiss.

I approach every wedding prepared for battle. I pack extra Benadryl. I check the expiration date on my EpiPen. I say “No thanks,” over and over, to trays held out by smiling waiters. I sneak peanut butter pretzels during the appetizers. I have two men who, because we share the same crowd of old high-school friends, are frequently invited to the same weddings. They are my stunt eaters, always willing to take a few bites of my surf or turf so that my plate does not go completely untouched. Even with those precautions in place, out of the twenty-plus ceremonies I have attended, more than a dozen have culminated in an allergic reaction.

At one wedding, I took a gamble on nibbling at a slice of tomato and two pieces of lettuce that had been served to me as a “special plate.” The same knife that had sliced my tomato had probably been used on the mozzarella served in everyone else's
insalata caprese
. The band began to play, and a literature professor from my graduate program invited me to dance. We made it through one round of swing steps and slow turns.

Then I had my Cinderella moment—running from the ballroom, shawl trailing on the ground behind me, and finding the guest restroom in the hotel just in time. I'd knelt down to the toilet, ignoring the scrunch of my satin dress against the tile, and heaved.

For the next hour I would sit in the fancy lobby, a rotation of
friends and classmates keeping me company as I waited for my breath to stabilize for the walk home. Strains of big-band music could still be heard through the doors to the reception.