Saturday scene

Her chair is not pushed in. Hers is the only placemat remaining on the kitchen table from the breakfast we prepared and served, a crumbled-up napkin resting atop, left out of spite at being asked to put it away when she wasn't in the right frame of mind to do so. On the kitchen counter is her work ID badge and lanyard—courtesy of the job we held her hand through finding and applying for, and which she has somehow retained despite her extreme case of RBF within the field of customer care and retail—next to a three-foot-tall brand-name water bottle that she will violently fill under duress when it’s time to leave for said job, spilling and sloshing her way toward a promise of hydration that won’t be fulfilled, in turn depleting what remains of our filtered water supply and the ice that we had to make via a separate machine because she and/or her sister broke the freezer’s built-in ice maker. There are tweezers on the counter, too, for some reason, along with a receipt for eyelash attachments and a birthday present for a girl she doesn’t know but whose party we have to drive her to tonight, which is no big deal because she only lives 18 minutes away (it’s actually 27).

In the upstairs hallway, unbeknownst to us at the moment, is a Hansel-and-Gretel-esque line of shredded and chewed tissues and paper leading from the girls’ bathroom—the undisputed most unsanitary quarters in the home—to the dog’s bed. They are supposed to leave their bathroom door closed so the dog—our eldest’s 16^th birthday present, which she promised to care for and absolutely does not—doesn’t rummage through their garbage but, shockingly, they did not do this. This particular conga line of trash is uniquely gross in that, for both of them, it's a certain time of the month.

As for her whereabouts? She’s sprawled out on a couch downstairs, face three inches from a phone that is currently connected to the wall via a charger we had to buy her because she lost her other one two. She is checking the UV although she has no plans to willingly venture outside, and snapping pictures of our ceiling that feature one-quarter of her head to people named “nanna boo-boo” and “johnnnyyyBoyyyy fire emoji.” When we remind her that it’s almost time for her to go to the job we secured for her, and she hastily and angrily stomps upstairs to change from sweatpants and a hooded sweatshirt to different sweatpants and a hooded sweatshirt (it’s July), she will leave the charger plugged into the wall, it’s sprawling eight-foot cord adding a beautiful white tripping hazard to our otherwise mundane-yet-safe hardwood floor.

Her sister, herself now on the precipice of 16, is currently in the basement melted into a beanbag, covered in several blankets and attempting to regain the sleep she lost after we woke her up too early. She will spend this summer day claiming boredom and asking if she can watch a show. When that request is repeatedly denied, she will attempt to stave off said boredom through super-productive tasks such as origami with post-it notes or making friendship bracelets for the office staff at her orthodontist. If she’s permitted to use her phone, she will play solitaire for hours until she decides to see where the ads she’s not supposed to click on lead her (most recently to a series of explicit true-crime podcasts), intermittently texting everyone in her contacts list to tell them how bored she is. She is in desperate need of a shower, and her bedroom, which contains a laundry basket filled literally halfway to the ceiling, looks like an episode of Hoarders, but she is almost impressively unconcerned. Eventually she will ask us to make her lunch because, after all, she’s no longer allowed to touch the refrigerator based on incidents that include the ice-machine fiasco and an inability or unwillingness to respect the limits of stainless steel with regard to its capacity to withstand hands caked in honey and peanut butter.

At a given point in the late morning or early afternoon, my wife and I will converge in the kitchen, each of us dripping with sweat, her from an intense Peloton ride and/or taking the dog for a walk in the summer heat and humidity, me from mowing the lawn and/or caring for the pool that the girls no longer use or even feign awareness of despite their supposed boredom and/or interest in ultraviolet rays. It is, indeed, time to make lunch for ourselves and the girls, who have also unfortunately converged, and who are arguing over who is the bigger bitch and/or who said the unrepeatable thing that is now being repeated many times. One of us, my wife or I, will flip out, releasing a tirade that, during spring and fall when the windows are open, can be heard from down the street. When finished, the girls, one of them or both of them, will ask us what our problem is and why we’re always in such a bad mood.