The Abramovitz House: Amanda, Bryan, Tebow and Zuzu the dogs
Location: Conway, Arkansas
Menu: Creamy Tortellini and Sausage, Sauteed Squash and Zucchini. Recipe here.
“We are on the back side of the building facing a small open field and then some woods. Our apt (#8) is on the bottom floor in the middle. There’s a doormat and a door hanger with an ‘A’ on them.”
Amanda’s directions to the apartment where she lives with her husband were impressively thorough, but she’d left out the part explaining the dark sidewalk leading to the back side of the building might be blocked by a 30-pound dog of an unknown breed, pretending to be friendly. The dog barked incessantly at me from a few feet away until Amanda opened the door to their apartment, giving me asylum.
“Oh! Is Preston out there? I’m sorry,” she said.
Inside their one-bedroom apartment, Bryan slices zucchini and squash while Amanda prepares something at the stovetop. She looks on the bottom shelf of the refrigerator and runs down the list of available beers—Shiner, Ruby Redbird, a milk stout.
“Do you think this is enough?” Bryan says, holding a mixing bowl full of the vegetable slices. It’s clear this is her kitchen.
After Amanda approves of Bryan’s work, he sets his beer on the table across from me and sits. Amanda slices Kielbasa on a plastic cutting board and puts it into a pot on the stove. She opens a can of peeled tomatoes and dumps its contents onto the cutting board. The way she pushes the knife into the tomatoes is oddly reflective of her personality—cautious, but trusting.
“Amanda is a people-pleaser,” Bryan says. “She’ll do anything to try and keep everyone happy. I tell her she should stand up for herself more, and--”
“I’m getting better,” she interposes from the kitchen. The statement itself evidence of its own truth.
I laugh at the way Zuzu—named after a character in It’s a Wonderful Life—stands on his hind legs to be closer to Amanda.
We talk about the theory that we all communicate love to our spouses using--primarily--one of the five love languages. Bryan, like me, needs physical touch. Amanda needs quality time. Bryan says a lackadaisical approach to that time won’t do any good—“It has to be quality time,” he says. Amanda nods to reiterate the emphasis on quality.
“Dinner is ready,” she says, inviting me to help myself.
Amanda moving around the kitchen kept the dogs scurrying about the apartment, but when we all sit at the table to eat, they lie down. The way dogs sometimes look like they just fell over, mid-stride, almost too cute to bear. I stretch my arm out from the table and hold my phone over Zuzu to take a picture.
After dinner, Bryan and I split the one milk stout in the fridge, Amanda pulls brownies from the oven, and the three of us allow ourselves to drift into a conversation about Making a Murderer and the terrifying reality of the wrongly accused, which leads to conversation about politics and war and ultimately to that moment when we all remember how scary the world can be sometimes. But then we remember how we share this planet with dogs. Bryan picks up Tebow and Zuzu stares at him with his tongue out and somehow this makes all the terrible things we’ve been talking about suddenly seem like no big deal. At least for the moment.
On my way to the door, I take note of the pictures they’ve got on the wall. In their wedding photos Bryan has no facial hair, which makes him look so much younger than he does tonight. They’ve also hung some of Amanda’s art on the wall; two pieces—one a glittered up piece in the shape of Arkansas, another in the shape of Minnesota, Bryan’s home state.
No matter where they each came from, now they both live here, in this apartment in Conway, on the back side of the building facing a small open field and then some woods. There’s a doormat and a door hanger with an ‘A’ on them.
No matter where you are, if you want to invite me and Liz to dinner, we’d love to come. In return, we’ll do our best to be good conversationalists and I’ll document a small piece of your everyday life. We’re fun dinner guests, people. Kids are sometimes skeptical of me, but they love Liz. I’ll give your pets a lot of attention, though. I’m good at that. If you want to invite your weird uncle over for dinner, too, so he’ll stop bugging you, now’s the time! I’ll talk to him so you don’t have to.
We live in Little Rock, Arkansas, but we’re soon moving to Morristown, Arizona, and potentially doing some traveling next summer, so I’ll keep a list and when we’re traveling in your area, we’d love to meet you and your family/roommates/cat and enjoy a home-cooked meal. Email me at gchoate17 (at) outlook [dot] com with the subject line: Dinner at Our House.
