Holyoke, Massachusetts
Uno Pizzeria at the Holyoke Shopping Mall
July 2015

Winnie is five weeks old. She’s in a car seat which sits in the restaurant booth next to Chris. Beside me is the diaper bag filled with wipes and nursing pads and diapers and cream – all things to keep liquid contained and under wraps. Chris and I are on opposite sides of the table, facing each other.

I am thirsty. The thirstiest I’ve ever been.

I hear this is what lactating women feel like: constantly parched. They must stay hydrated. I know about proactive hydration: drink before you sweat, drink before you’re thirsty. I’m a dancer and this is familiar territory.

But I was never this thirsty. This is a feeling I’ve never known.

It’s like I’m on safari without water. I imagine seeing mirages ahead and collapsing onto my hands and knees to lap up the water like a dog at a water bowl. My mind is incessantly thinking about what the next drink is: juice, milkshakes, lemonades, fizzy waters, smoothies, half lemonade/half iced teas. Even the peach iced tea, which I’d never considered before the past few weeks as a new mother, has become a recent favorite. On Wednesday, I took a photo of my overflowing recycling bin and the snaking pile it formed along the perimeter of the baseboard of our kitchen in our Brooklyn brownstone studio apartment.

Today we are en route to my parents’ home on Lake Winnipesaukee, New Hampshire. We had this trip planned. After Winnie’s newborn check-ups and medical clearance, we’d spend the next month with my parents. Chris would escort us up north but make his way back to the city to resume his full time work schedule. Winnie and I would remain in the fresh mountain air and spend time at the beach and on the pontoon boat, introducing her to various members of her extended family.

Holyoke is along the more scenic route from Brooklyn, NY to Laconia, NH. I always prefer to take it because it avoids all the surprises of Boston traffic as well as the all-too-familiar landmarks and congested arteries from my childhood. There is always traffic when you travel near Boston. Always some kind of an accident. Holyoke leads to Vermont and then the road winds around lakes and mountains to New Hampshire. The scenery is worth the risk of imminent car sickness.

I convince Chris to take this route.

It’s 1:30pm and we have already stopped a couple times since departing Brooklyn: I had to pee and I still have to pee. I breastfeed Winnie at a rest stop on Route 95 in Connecticut.

Now we’re at Uno’s and I desperately want cold milk. I order it. It comes in a glass that is as big as a pitcher. I take a sip and realize I’m not in the mood for it. It tastes different than I imagined it would.

Milk is peculiar at restaurants. I have a flashback to a date with my high school boyfriend at Bertucci’s in Harvard Square. He ordered milk and they served him milk-on-the-rocks. A tall glass filled with crushed ice and milk. With a plastic straw. We giggled once the waitress walked away from the table. Today, ordering milk at Uno’s was also comical – like someone opened a half gallon and poured its entirety into a massive glass-looking, plastic cup.

I decide to order a lemonade. My cheeks start salivating at the idea of it. Chris orders a pizza and we await its arrival.

In our Enterprise rental car in the parking lot are several empty water bottles whose contents I’ve already devoured. I’ve started to tire of strong flavors. After a few sips of apple or peach, I crave only water. My tongue feels strange when intense flavor hits it. But it’s hot, humid, and lemonade seems right.

The pizza comes. The lemonade too. The ludicrously humungous lemonade that I could share with four other people. Chris puts a slice of pizza on my plate. I’m not hungry but he insists Just a bite, Erin. Come on. I take a sip of the lemonade. It tastes better than the milk. But sipping from the glass bathes my tongue in tartness and I reach for a straw. Maybe the liquid will form a slim stream and go directly to my throat, avoiding my tongue altogether. I sip through the straw a few more times. I drink about a quarter of the serving. I just don’t want it any more.

Chris eats the pizza. But he won’t eat my slice. He urges me every few minutes to eat it. I hear him but I stare out the window, gazing at the sticky stillness of the summer day and tell him I’m not in the mood.

By the end of lunch, I’ve also ordered an orange juice and a ginger ale. The table is a version of our recycling bin at home: tall glasses, filled with white, pink, yellow and brassy colored liquids. I can’t finish them but I’ve thoroughly sampled them all. Like I’ve been conducting a taste test.

In my mind, I’ve already decided that I want a Gatorade. That’s what I really want.

I use the restroom three times during lunch. I keep peeing even though I haven’t had much to drink. But the glasses are so big that maybe I have had more than I think. I have a moment of confusion when I consider how much liquid is going in to and coming out of my body. I glance at my urine in the toilet, right before it’s sucked down by the automatic flush, and think to myself: when Chris pees standing up, I’ve noticed urine sometimes forms bubbles as it hits the water… the distance and the trajectory of pee creates a stronger impact…it agitates the water. That’s weird. Why is my pee bubbly? But then it tumbles into a whirlpool and disappears down the drain. I let my imagination go that route too.

Chris uses the restroom after lunch. He returns to the table and we decide that we should do a diaper change too. So he brings Winnie to the restroom to do what my father calls “an oil change.” Winnie is peaceful. More peaceful than she has ever been in her five weeks outside of my body. She hardly cries the entire time in the restaurant. She has fallen in love with her pacifier and doses in and out of newborn consciousness while sucking on it.

We pay the check.

We walk to the car.

What happens next defies any kind of explanation.

We cannot find the car keys.

They are nowhere.

Over the course of the next hour, in the baking heat of the parking lot of the Holyoke Shopping Center, we scour our bags. We lay out every item: all the contents of the diaper bag and the car seat.

The keys are not anywhere.

We trace and retrace and retrace our retracing of our route from the car to Uno’s. We talk through the original trip across the parking lot like we are doing a play-by-play recap of a game.

Did we walk on this side of that blue sedan?

Did we go up on the sidewalk here?

Did we walk over this patch of grass near the streetlight?

Did we swing over here before we pushed open the door to Uno’s at 1:30?

Some people are prone to certain types of accidents. Chris and I don’t lose keys. We step out of apartments and cars and ask each other, “do you have the keys?” every time. Losing keys is not in our accident wheelhouse. We are more of the type to purchase one-way tickets to California and then decide at the last minute (at the ticket kiosk at Logan Airport) not to get on the plane. We are responsible, cover-your-bases, keep-options-open-and-lose-our-money kind of accident people.

We know the keys are not in the car.

We ask the restaurant to look in their kitchen trash. Chris goes through the trash cans of the men’s and the women’s rooms. He finds Winnie’s dirty diaper and opens it up to see if his newly acquired sleep-deprived state made a key deposit. We ask the customers sitting in our booth if we can look under their table. We slide our hands behind cushions.

Nothing.

Nowhere.

While he is dumpster diving outside, I breastfeed Winnie on the bench by the Uno’s hostess. I’m dying for my Gatorade.

Chris calls Enterprise Rentals. It will be $75 for key replacement. But there is some other contractual rigamaroll about our distance from our rental agency origin in Brooklyn and instead it will be easier to give us a new car since we are 127 miles away.

I can’t stop thinking about Gatorade and I go into Target to buy three bottles. That seems like the appropriate amount to get me through the rest of the afternoon. They agree with my tongue. I guzzle them down.

How long will it take to get a new car? Chris paces in his flip flops holding his phone inches away from his face. He is tired. He’s mad too. But really he is just exhausted.

We will be there as soon as we can. It’s Friday in July in New England, buddy. It could be an hour. It could be five. It’s hard to tell. Stay visible so our guys can find you. I can hear the guy talking from, what I imagine, is a cubicle in an air conditioned office far away from the chaos that has enveloped us.

We sit on the curb outside Target at the other end of the Holyoke Shopping Center. We hold our heads in various positions: I lay my cheek against my palm, Chris creates a table for his head by placing his elbows on his knees. We’re quiet and despondent. Winnie is sleeping in her car seat.

It takes me about 45 minutes to drink three Gatorades. I go back to Target and make a duplicate purchase. I don’t hesitate. Chris requests a seltzer. I think to myself: He’s thirsty too. I’m not the only one.

The cashier recognizes me: Well, someone is thirsty today! Hungover? She smiles and winks.

I’m shocked. I don’t know what to say. My first thought is that she doesn’t know I am a lactating mother. I respond, I’m breastfeeding my newborn. I’m really thirsty. My second thought is unsettling: has a stranger noticed peculiar behavior that I should have noticed about myself?

I walk out of the store, suddenly embarassed of my insatiable thirst.

Strangers are noticing.

The next time I go into Target to buy the third round of beverages, I make sure to go to a different cashier.

If we had a timelapse video between 3:00 and 8:00pm, our family of three would be seen shuffling from the aisles of Target to the stonewall of the parking lot, from breastfeeding to taking turns using the restroom to hugging each other to changing diapers to sporadic phone calls explaining the absurd situation to our family in New Hampshire 152 miles away. No it doesn’t make sense for you to come – our bags are locked in the car. We have to wait for Enterprise.

It would also show Chris eating snacks from Target and offering them to me over and over again. No thanks. I’m too hot. I’m too tired. I’m not hungry. As I drink more.

At dusk, an Enterprise tow truck appears in the parking lot. It delivers a new sedan and its driver jimmies open our original rental car. The timelapse would show us transferring luggage and belongings from one car to the next. We’d be seen shaking out pockets and blankets but no keys ever surface.

That night, we resume our drive along the winding route toward New Hampshire in the new sedan. But by 9:30 we are nodding off in the car. We consider a hotel but there is a massive volleyball tournament and most of the hotels (not many on this rural route) are booked. While on Route NH-9, Chris is falling asleep at the wheel and says This isn’t smart. We have to rest…just for a little bit. So we pull into a Park & Ride parking lot in HIllsborough and rest.

Well, Chris and Winnie rest.

I have to pee every 30 minutes so I reach over Chris’s lap and turn on the headlights, walk to the front of the car and crouch down to pee in the downhill slope before the pine tree forest. It’s drizzling. Each time I pee, I squat in the rain. I start to shiver but it is not cold. Two hours pass and I nudge Chris awake: We have to go. I can’t sleep. I’m wet from peeing outside in the rain. Mosquitoes are all over us.

Eventually we make it to Laconia.

About ten days later, we have 20/20 hindsight. From the Intensive Care Unit, we realize I had been showing signs of Diabetic Ketoacedosis for weeks. I had thrush on my tongue and lost 70 pounds between June 4 and July 28.

I was sick.

There were diagnoses.

Temporarily, I had a lung infection. Permanently, I had Type 1 Diabetes.

But where were the keys? Instead of thirst, I cannot stop thinking about the keys. Who took the keys?

I want to know why those keys disappeared.

If we had had the keys, I would have made it to my parents’ home without noticing the bubbly pee and the table filled with a rainbow of liquids that reminded me of the recycling bin at home.

If we had had the keys, I wouldn’t have obsessed over a stranger’s words for the next ten days: Well, someone is thirsty today! Hungover? Because I started to feel hungover. I wouldn’t have had that interaction with the cashier – a stranger to me with the benign yet insightful, piercing observation.

If we had had the keys, I wouldn’t have noticed how many times I declined Chris’s offers of every imaginable snack available at Target. That day, I had been blessed with a sleepy newborn and a take-charge husband. Stuck at a shopping mall, conserving phone battery and relegated to the parking lot, I tuned into my own body in a profound way. This was the first day I started doubting my vitality. Something was broken.

If we had had the keys, we may have encountered something on the road.

If we had had the keys, it could have been worse.

***

October 2023
Brooklyn, NY
My Bathroom

I opened TikTok yesterday while I was sitting on the toilet. One of the videos that popped up was from Japanese Papa. It stopped me in my tracks. These are the closed captions exactly as they appear as he speaks directly to the camera.

When you
come home

you know
where you
put your

key

and you
know where
your wallet

is

and you
know where
your phone

is

but
sometime it
disappear

you can’t
find it

next five
minutes

sometime 10
minutes
you know
you brought
home but

you can’t
find it

 why is that

in Japan
that is
called

 Kamikakushi

Kamikakushi
means God
hide it

so no way
you can
find it

because God
is covering
your eyes

 in some
Japanese
people say

it’s done
by sometime

 uh your
ancestor
because

they don’t
want you to
drive

 they don’t
want you to
call 

there’s
some kind
of reason  

they know
you very
well

so have to
be stop it  

so it’s
good for
you though  

you don’t
have to
afraid

 if that
happened

just think
what you
should do

next

then
everything
will be  

okay

so this is
called

[Japanese Papa takes
his hands and places
them on his face and
mimics the playful
peekaboo gesture]
peekaboo by Japanese God

Erin Gottwald is a Type 1 Diabetic. Her essays have appeared in publications such as Yankee Magazine, Snapdragon Journal, and Pure Slush Literary Anthology. At the root of her writing is movement, informed by her decades spent as a professional dancer. She holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction Writing from Bay Path University and lives with her husband and two kids in Brooklyn, NY. You can find more of her stories (most of them true) on Substack: substack.com/@eringott.