Spoilers!
Life is like — no, not that — a sandwich, inevitability too much muchness and also, not enough enoughness and yet, sometimes, the right rightness that we pine for that same combination of ingredients, texture, and taste for years after. More broadly, life is a sandwich in that our lives are mashed together between the aging mortality of our parents and the aging adultness of our insert kids, nephews, nieces, friends’ kids, etc. Through it all, we’re bursting with the beautiful, horrific pain of being alive. Catherine Newman’s lovely 2024 book, Sandwich, captures a weeklong time between a family across five (almost six) generations, replete with inherited trauma, unknown trauma, secret trauma, and the day-to-day minutia that makes life be lifing. Chewable in one-sitting like its namesake, Newman’s book is like that Cuban sandwich I had at my first job 15 years ago when they tried evening hours and dinner food: something I’ll be thinking about for a long time to come.
Rachel, who her family affectionally calls Rocky or Rock for unexplained reasons, is a 54-year-old menopausal woman with a husband, Nick, she dotes on for his calming nature, which also infuriates her. For the past 20-some years, they’ve been bringing their kids, Jamie and Maya, who are now in their 20s, to a Cape Cod beach house. This latest trip also includes Jamie’s girlfriend, Maya, and eventually, Rachel’s parents, Alice and Mort. And of course, what summer beach house trip would be complete without the family cat known as Chicken?
Back to menopause. Rachel’s a reproductive wreck, in her estimation. To pinpoint the problem, she’s experiencing vaginal atrophy. Who knew that was even a thing? Not her. Meanwhile, Nick gets to just keep being Nick with his handsome greying hair and desire to have pain-free sex. And he’s so damn analytical about not having feelings. Attentive, yes, and certainly understanding, always helpful and dutiful, but purposefully, intellectually aloof might be the word. So much so, it has Rachel wondering if their 20-something-year marriage is going to end in divorce. That their empty nest will tumble right out of the tree before it has even newly nested properly around the lack of Jamie and Willa.
Speaking of Willa, she is gay, and her parents and Jamie are all accepting, with Rachel also seeing herself as queer; it’s hinted at, though, that Willa has some past trauma of her own that is only her story to tell, which makes me think Newman’s follow-up to Sandwich is told from the perspective of Willa. Jamie is just like his dad in the feelings, or lack of expressing them, but then being upset when others don’t share feelings with them, department. Which makes the parallel to what happens with Maya all the more compelling: she’s pregnant. After Jamie and Willa’s births, Rachel became pregnant again. She decided to have an abortion, but didn’t tell Nick about it, deciding to frame it as a miscarriage. The bitter irony is not that she regretted the abortion almost as soon as it happened — which doesn’t mean she’s suddenly pro-life; regretting a decision doesn’t mean you think the decision should be illegal, as she and Willa reason — but that when she wanted to continue with another pregnancy thereafter, this time she did miscarry. Hence, again, the reproductive nightmare she has going on down there, which when Nick comes calling for sex is, to quote her, like trying to ride a Ferris wheel in a cemetery. That made me lol. What an image.
What I find so intoxicatingly simple about Newman’s book is that it reminded me a bit of, Stewart O’Nan’s book, Henry, Himself I read earlier this year. You could see O’Nan’s book as told from an aging Nick’s perspective, as long as you swap Chicken with a dog. Because like Sandwich, Henry, his wife, and their kids also gather at a summer house. And also, nothing particularly happens in the narrative way one expects from a book. That is, there’s no dramatic arcs or unexpected twists or what have you. It’s just life happening and that’s compelling because life, even in its seeming minutiae and family drama, is compelling. That’s why I’m always chagrined when someone dismisses their life as boring; there isn’t a story to tell. I betcha there is!
What else happens in Sandwich? Rachel learns Mort’s grandparents were killed in the Holocaust. She didn’t quite grasp the implications of Mort’s euphemisms about it growing up until he was more explicit at the Cape Cod beach house. What an image juxtaposition. Maya tells Rachel she’s pregnant before she tells Jamie, which he doesn’t quite like. Jamie later announces their intention to marry. In the “After” of the book at the end, we find out that Maya decided not to have the baby. Alice, who had a scare at the beach where she fainted from dehydration, does reveal to Rachel, nonchalant, as aging mothers tend to be with their anxious daughters, that she needs a heart valve replacement. No big deal, Alice and Mort assure her. But then, we also learn in that “After” that Alice quickly goes into hospice care and dies before Jamie’s wedding.
But Rachel and Nick and the family continue on. Because this is all part of life, too. The love and grief. Life and death. The new beginnings and the losing of what and who we cherish. Memory-making and forgetting. Vaginal atrophy and messy car sex anyway. Nesting and empty nesting. Acclimating to kids and then to grown kids, who can be just as difficult since they “chafe against the very fact of you, the parents,” and especially acclimating to the nest without them, “after your life has grown so quiet.” We just keep going because what else is there until there isn’t?
What a lovely ode to living and its inherent messy wonderfulness. I enjoyed Sandwich immensely.
Milam's Musings 