Sandwich anxiety

One Saturday a while back, Marien and Phebe and I went to Multnomah Falls, to appreciate nature and be physically active. That morning, before leaving, I awoke on their couch, swaddled in three throw blankets of disagreeing shape, size, and texture, as well as the ordinary concerns that come with waking as a guest in someone else’s house (How much coffee is it okay for me to have? Was it rude that I didn’t bring my own towel?).

I had some of Marien’s cereal for breakfast (I watched her watching as I poured the milk until it became visible at the surface of the bowl between the tiles of slightly buoyed cereal, at which point I wondered if I had used too large a bowl, taken too large a portion of cereal, or too large a portion of milk, etc).

I ate alone, and wondered why no one was eating with me. I could hear Marien opening and shutting cupboards in the kitchen, and saw Phebe bustling back and forth between her bedroom and the kitchen table, and realized that they were preparing for our day trip, and I was being rude. I asked, “Is there anything I can do to be helpful?”

Marien said, “You can make the sandwiches. Want me to toast the bread? The ingredients are there on the counter.” I said okay. On the counter were: a bag of white bread, a jar of peanut butter, half of an onion, half of a cucumber, a block of Swiss cheese, a tub of hummus, and a bottle of mustard.

I had never seen a sandwich made from these ingredients before. Something happened in my brain like when a film projector winds up one reel of film from the other and spins with the trailing tail of film flapping against the metal. What could this mean? What kind of sandwich could be made from these materials? My heart descended to somewhere in my gut. The veins in my throat palpitated with fear. I said to them, “I don’t think I should be in charge of this after all.” They looked at me with eyes that said, “Are you serious?”

I was pretty sure that the peanut butter just didn’t belong. But I didn’t want to foolishly combine all of the other ingredients, lest it turn out that, by some culinary convention of which I was unaware, two things didn’t “go” together (“Ben, what were you thinking, putting the Swiss cheese together with the hummus? Are you insane?”). It seemed to me that none of it went together. I shuffled through various imaginary combinations, the way a chess player considers the potential consequences of one move or another (no: the way a passenger imagines the possible fatal scenarios as her plane lifts off the runway).

I solved the problem by asking them what exactly they wanted on their sandwiches. I put the peanut butter away to reduce confusion. Phebe wanted all of the ingredients, plus a hard-boiled egg. Marien wanted all of the ingredients, except for the mustard. Okay.

But physically making the sandwiches was even more difficult. How thick should the slices be? How thick should the layer of hummus be? My scalp was itching and my feet had gone numb with nervousness. The slices of cucumber would not stay put, slipping off the cheese with the grace of silent film comedians. The slices of onion were impossible to arrange evenly, and kept unspooling from their little discs into mayhem. All of the contents of the sandwich threatened to leap apart at any given moment, like opposed magnets held together in a clenched fist. I could hear my pulse banging away on my eardrums. I felt short of breath.

I completed all three. Zip-lock bags had been set aside, but trying to get half of Phebe’s sandwich into one of the bags felt like moving a heavy couch through a narrow doorway. I got one half in, and realized that I couldn’t get another half in there, so I zipped up the one half and put it on a sheet of tinfoil, together with the (non-zip-locked) other half. I had used too little tinfoil, and had to get a second sheet. It wasn’t until the third sandwich that I used enough tinfoil on the first try. When unwrapping her sandwich later, removing two unreasonably small sheets of tinfoil to find one half of her sandwich still wrapped in a plastic bag, Phebe must have been perturbed.

Then, when they were all finally wrapped, Marien pulled out the slices of bread that she had already toasted from the toaster-oven. “I thought you said you wanted to use toast,” she said. I then remembered that exchange, and felt bad about the wasted toast. “I picked the little specks of mold off and everything,” said Marien. “Did you pick the mold off the bread you used?” I looked at my bricks of tinfoil. I had not. “Okay,” she said. “Don’t worry about it.”