Double Yolks + Jersey Shore + Toxicity
Nine days before J’s death I went to the grocery store and bought a carton of local organic large brown eggs. I had recently changed brands — Hudson Egg Farm in Elbridge, NY: nice, large, brown, fresh, organic. Eight days before J’s death I woke up and cracked an egg; a double-yolk spilled out. The last time I’d had a double-yolk was in March, right before lockdown. Even then, I wondered what the odds were since I’d been cooking eggs for many years and had never gotten a double-yolk before. As it turns out, 1/1000. Not totally uncommon, but as writers do I searched for meaning.
Some sources say double-yolks are a sign of twin births or pregnancy.
Some sources say double-yolks are a symbol of good luck.
Some sources say double-yolks are a sign of death, and death that’s close.
One source claimed double-yolked eggs were a sign the egg was removed from a coop in the dark and that’s very bad luck.
I lingered on that last superstition. The darkness creates a doubling? Or the act of stealing in the dark creates a doubling? Or because a doubling is present you get the urge to take in the darkness?
The morning of J’s death I cracked two eggs from the same carton and they were also double-yolks. That’s three double-yolks from the same carton. I searched again. Turns out some hens only lay double-yolks and those that do, often get into the same carton, especially on organic farms that don’t remove double-yolked eggs. Because of this, the chances of getting multiple double-yolks in a row is quite high. The odds of three in a row are roughly 1 out of 27,000. I tried to visualize, if you went to a football game at an average stadium, only two people in that full crowd would have gotten 3 double-yolks in a row.
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I was sleeping when the phone call woke me, “S AND ONE THOUSAND TWO HUNDRED AND TWELVE OTHERS MAY BE CALLING.”
What?
Surely this was some kind of technological glitch. I watched it ring all the way to voicemail, the phone blinking and bumping along my couch-side table. I rolled over to listen closer. The robotic female voice chirped the phrase on repeat. And others are calling? What others are calling? I was still so groggy I didn’t know if I was imagining it. I sat up. S doesn’t normally call randomly, but when she does it’s usually to talk about writing. It was finals week and I was napping between grading stacks of papers. Might be a good distraction. I picked up the phone. And that’s the moment I learned about J’s death. Her difficult road trip, her last walk on the beach.
“No,” I kept saying, “No, no, no, no, no, no.”
“I know,” said S, her voice breaking.
J wanted people to be connected. The last time I saw her she encouraged me to mend a broken friendship. “Do you even remember why you were upset in the first place?” she had pleaded. Another time, years before I sat on her couch in tears over other strained relationships in my life. She had sat right next to me on the couch and encouraged me to let things go, not cut people out of my life and hold grudges. “That’s going to require a lot of energy, and don’t you want to give yourself and others room to change?” I was young and stubborn; I wasn’t sure change was possible in anyone. I hadn’t even seen it in myself. I hadn’t then lived long enough to know how long life really is and how cutting people out of it is actually quite difficult. How like people make pathways back toward one another always, even years apart. How communities are small, how you’ll forget the pain, and really only vaguely remember the disappointment. I made it right, I reached out, and after I made it right I could see how happy it made her. “See,” she had said, “it’s better to be connected.” I won’t forget that. That she helped me to do that right thing. She also believed in me, in my writing, before hardly anyone did. The last poem I sent her she had laughed about: “I don’t know what the hell is going on in this poem, but I love it.”
J was forever young, forever the young person whose mother had died, and I am forever the young person who fell in love with a person with an addiction. Our wounds met and circled one another. Sometimes we laughed about them. Grieved different iterations of our lost selves. We were both searching with writing, trying to understand ourselves with writing.
After I hung up the phone I sat bee-stung on my couch for a moment. I had imagined J visiting my home post-pandemic. Writing at the desk in my guest room. Just a few months ago we were reading one another’s work, commenting, giving feedback. I was still learning new things about her, even after all these years, through her writing. The sobs started coming, large and thrashing, like blackbirds trying to flush out of my body, my spine hitting the back of the couch as I shook. I spoke into the empty room as if it were J.
The next morning after all the talking into space I got out the egg carton and picked up an egg. If you’re here, show me, I thought. A fourth double-yolked egg slid into my blue ceramic bowl. The odds of that, I don’t know.
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A few weeks later, I spent Christmas eve and Christmas day alone marathoning Jersey Shore. Sometimes you just need to go numb with other people’s bad decisions. A show from my youth that I actually didn’t watch in my youth. I was too busy living in crappy apartments in NYC with no television or cable, and then I swiftly ended up in graduate school in a similar situation where I missed out on pop culture for a few years. Even though I wasn’t watching, I’d heard all the criticism and outrage around the show, and was well-versed in other kinds of reality TV. Claims that it heightened stereotypes of Italian-Americans, or made a whole generation look like sex-crazed alcoholic garbage. When I finally sat down to watch my millennial brethren and figured out what all the hubbub was about, I realized there is something especially gleeful about Jersey Shore. It’s not just the ways in which Pauly-D has a preternatural gift for catchphrases, or the constant antics with a side of some idea of tradition. It’s also that this group of people, more than any other reality ensemble cast, likes to be watched, and likes to watch. The exhibitionism is high with this group, and they get off on it. The height of this might be a scene where Mike “The Situation” Sorrentino makes a sandwich and heads into Pauly D’s bedroom to watch him have sex with a girl he’s brought home from the bar. The night-vision cameras show Mike’s green eyes fixated as he mindlessly chomps cold cuts while the comforter goes up and down. I once sat at a faculty dinner and had an anthropology professor talk my ear off about how common and normal group sex was in cultures all over the world, and how prude Americans were for pretending they didn’t participate. Reality TV has captured our interest in watching others; they hit gold when they found a cast who liked to be watched and watch each other. Tanning, bad fashion choices, group sex, binge drinking, and sometimes an occasional hot tub shows up. But friendships, traditions, connections, remain at the center of the story. Even when the cast decides Mike “The Situation” Sorrentino is “toxic,” they stick by him and he heals, becomes better — inspiring even, after his sobriety journey.
What is it with this word “toxic?” It’s a word that did, at some point, have a scientific definition, but now it’s permeated our culture via new-age and holistic medicine to become less and less precise over time. Now, anything is toxic, from small minerals in your water to human beings. Your job, your friends, your non-organic lunch, a vaccination, stuff your yoga teacher talks about, all of it is toxic and you’re supposed to cut all of it out. I want to encourage a full moratorium on using this word for any and all things that aren’t actual substances chemically proven to degrade organisms. Why? Because the body is not some rotting cesspool that requires constant cleansing, it is a miracle that cleans itself.
People who are convinced they’ve cut toxins, toxicity, and toxic people out of their lives, wholly and completely have an underlying mentality — that they think they’re special enough to go through this life so protected that they’ll never have to face damaging things. The underlying message is purity. They will live a pure life. They deserve a pure life. To think they are so special to float through this life and avoid adulteration when no one ever has, is some serious delusion, and serious entitlement. Life is cruel, and maybe the cruelest part of all is that you cannot protect yourself and the ones you love from its cruelty, even if you think you can. The best you can do is prepare yourself and others for cruelty and teach resilience. How resilient can you be in the face of all the “toxicity.”
J visited my dreams recently. She burst through some surreal scene on a rollercoaster, and cracked eggs into a bowl in one. “You have to finish your book,” she’d said in the dream, stirring the eggs together. When I woke I couldn’t remember the transition between images. Me, on a rollercoaster, then J suddenly there. I was served an omelet by an unknown hand. When I cut into it, pulling back the spongey cooked egg, an avalanche of raw egg yolks poured out into my lap. I looked around for J. The moment I said her name I opened my eyes.
The last time S called, the phone rang, “S AND FIVE OTHERS MAY BE CALLING.” I still can’t figure out why every time S calls others are with her? But I see it as comforting now, maybe J is calling too. And any other entity who wants to know what two writers fumbling through grief say to one another for comfort, in the middle of an unfair February, trying desperately to keep connected through that vibrating space where our friend used to be.
