Hat Trick

We are snowed in again so we watch Voldemort remove the Elder Wand from Dumbledore’s tomb. How big my son’s feet are where they stretch past the blanket we are sharing, past the slice of sunlight casting us in sharper and sharper light. I am keeping a list of what I did today. I have showered. I have stayed in my pajamas. I have typed on my laptop in the kitchen. I have bought Girl Scout Cookies in my pajamas from the neighbor girl, Isabelle, who rang the doorbell holding bright boxes of Peanut Butter Patties and Thin Mints. I do not tell my son about my mother’s constant refrain— that Girl Scout uniforms reminded her of Hitler Youth each time we’d see a folding table of girls in their tan vests and pinned sashes outside Waldbaum’s. This is not extreme given our family history, but I think other moms on the block who post memes like “Technically, you’re not drinking alone if your kids are home” on the neighborhood Facebook Group and sell handbags or weight-loss shake mix in their spare time would maybe not understand this particular trigger. Voldemort is shooting green lightning from his wand again, and I have seen the frozen white face of Dumbledore, impassive, as the camera pans into his white marble tomb, lingers on his long white beard. He pried it from his cold, dead hands! shouts my son, at the screen, as if he’s been waiting to use this exact phrase for a long time. I have washed escarole. I have made Italian wedding soup with tiny meatballs in it. I have wondered if we will run out of food before the town plows us out. Snowzilla, Winter Storm Jonas, or whatever we name this endless stretch of white. I have sketched a picture of my son’s favorite hat: a blue faux-fur-lined Russian bomber with ear flaps that he refers to as hashtag hat. He often wears it around the house, though we keep the heat up. I get that. I have ordered myself a #hat on Amazon so I can wear it next time it snows. So I can go out at night when the whole block is orange-skied and quiet, and every house muffles itself from the street; their windows become faces I watch and watch. When it falls, the snow sounds like sugar on foamed milk, like turning a page in a delicate book. I haven’t told my son the stories about my grandparents—the ill-fitting wooden clogs all the prisoners wore through the winter and stuffed with rags for the long walk from the camps to the factory and back in the snow. When my grandfather came to America he made sweatshop hats, then opened a factory and copied popular styles from movies: Barbra Streisand’s leopard print fake fur number in Funny Girl, her plaid newsboy cap from What’s Up, Doc? He was not a milliner, but he taught me to sew, pressed puffed fabric down into a neat seam with his long pinky nail while his machine spit out fake mink pillboxes or folded Cossacks people wore to navigate the winter streets of Manhattan. Our neighborhood is whited out. Hello gorgeous, says Barbra.