They were making dinner together in their galley kitchen. Set over the sink, the one window in the long room displayed the Japanese maple in the backyard, a silhouette in the setting sun. Overhead spotlights lit their work, preparations for vegetable soup—they liked light dinners—and created a reflection of him superimposed over the silhouette so that his head on the glass looked leonine with a mane of leaves. A good-looking man, he appeared vital and virile at aged forty-nine, though lately she’d noticed he shed chest hairs in the bedclothes, occasionally on the white bathroom tile floor. The stray curled hairs filled her with melancholy.
Music played in the background, the plaintive notes of Yoram Lachish’s jazz oboe rising and falling. Her mind drifted as she chopped carrots. He talked.
She loved that tree despite how its leaves littered the patio steadily in the fall. Already she’d seen a scattering of furled brown leaves over the flagstone, just this morning. She wanted summer to stay. They’d hardly had time to enjoy the season with its long evenings of light. She didn’t know why.
Thin disks of carrots accumulated on the cutting board before her, and he talked. It always took him some time to accomplish his part of the preparations. It was difficult for him to mince garlic with any speed while he spoke.
Women were the ones adept at domestic tasks. Housekeeping was simply second nature. Once she’d heard a famous poet say in an interview that she wrote her poems in her head while she washed dishes or folded laundry. The poet had lived on a farm and raised several children. She’d founded a prestigious writing program and published several volumes of poetry, books distinguished by important literary prizes. The mind was free to create while the tasks completed themselves, the poet said.
The pile of chopped onion before her was too large. She’d absentmindedly cut more than needed. Now she either would have to set aside the extra or increase the amounts of the other ingredients—the carrots, the celery, and the olive oil, in which the vegetables would sauté, along with the garlic that her husband was still mincing. She didn’t want to suggest he mince more garlic. He would want to know why and the answer would lead to a debate on the merits of cooking more than what the recipe called for.
He liked precision. He preferred to adhere closely to a recipe. She rarely followed such directions. She’d been cooking since she was ten years old. She possessed an understanding of the principles, the alchemy of combining divergent ingredients.
As well, to make the request now, she’d have to interrupt him. He was in the middle of explaining the plot of the novel he was listening to during his commute to work. He didn’t like to be interrupted. His mother had always interrupted him and in such a way that made him understand that she hadn’t listened to a word he’d said. Consequently, he carried large measures of hurt and resentment so that now his need to occupy the floor when speaking was absolute.
On the other hand, he constantly interrupted her, his wife, his partner, his lover (wasn’t she?), and this had caused trouble in their relationship. She’d wearied of his disrespectful habit and had begun pointing out his interruptions—when she remembered. Perhaps her inconsistency was the problem. Each time she did, he pretended disbelief. Or perhaps he really was surprised, as if her words were of such little consequence that he hadn’t even noticed that he’d spoken over her. Which he then vigorously denied. His vehement insistence struck her as particularly egregious, heaped as it was upon the injury of his having cut her off in the first place. And so they argued.
Sometimes to demonstrate to him how it felt to have one’s words (her words) devalued she raised her voice and spoke over his heated protestations. Though, of course, when she did this, her face flushing, a hard sensation in her chest below her windpipe, it wasn’t the same at all as what he did. What she was denigrating with her demonstration were merely his hollow words of defensiveness. Something to overlook. Out of love, generosity. What mattered, which he proved time and again didn’t to him, was the spontaneous sharing of thoughts, which one (she) imagined the other (him) wanted to be privy to. Or ought to want. As in the way of concern for all facets of their intimacy.
She considered adding the extra onion to the pot. The intensity of its taste might not even be that noticeable. But if the onion flavor was too strong for his liking, he wouldn’t eat the soup in the coming days. Already the amount they were making was larger than what they could consume in one meal. She didn’t want to see the soup languish in the refrigerator, only to have to eventually throw it away, remorseful about the waste. Wordlessly, she pushed the extra onions aside.
He paused in his story and waved his hand over the minced garlic. Was the amount correct, he wanted to know without asking. But he wouldn’t care if she were to say that it wasn’t quite enough. She knew from experience he’d argue that he’d used three cloves, exactly as the recipe stipulated, and once again she would have to counter that all garlic cloves were not equal in size.
She thanked him. “Go on with your story,” she said, while she took the bottle of extra virgin olive oil from the cabinet. She uncapped the bottle and splashed a quantity of oil over the bottom of the stockpot.
Disapproval spread over his face.
How much oil, he wanted to ask. But he didn’t want to start up that old argument again. It was as if she had no conception of repeatable results. Though he’d explained to her many times that it was impossible to reproduce a good-tasting batch of soup, or conversely avoid a poor one, if she didn’t know the amounts of the ingredients she dumped together—and dump was the right word. She’d just upended the bottle of oil over the pot, not a measuring cup in sight.
Each time that he’d asked her to see his perspective, to concede that his view made sense, she’d argued that it was scientifically impossible to arrive at the exact same soup. They cooked in a kitchen, not a lab! Factors such as the size of the vegetables would always vary, as would their freshness. And the herbs. “How old was the thyme,” she’d said once, screwing her face up in an expression to make him laugh at her corny pun.
She looked charming, his wife of almost twenty years: a few corkscrew curls sprung from the golden hair she’d piled up on her head, her complexion dewy in the humid kitchen. She thought he no longer saw her, had accused him of not really looking, of viewing her through a filtered lens of the past. Another button on her red blouse had opened above her breasts. Perhaps the small button had slipped free from its hole as she’d worked, moving from refrigerator to counter, bending down to retrieve the soup pot from its cabinet and lifting it to the stove top, sifting through drawers, selecting knives. Laying out measuring spoons that were only for appearances’ sake, to appease him.
She smiled sweetly. “Come on! Cooking is an art, not science,” she said. And he knew that in the back of her mind rattled that old squabble about teaching. Art or science. Early on, when they were new and she was looking for a teaching position, she’d confided to him that she’d replaced B.S. degree on her resume with B.A. But no one seemed to notice. Or care. She did, mightily. He had the sense that she would have preferred to have been caught in her duplicity, relished explaining why teaching was an art, as she’d so often enjoyed philosophizing to him.
The button may not have slipped open, however. She might have unbuttoned her blouse deliberately, and if so, only a few reasons existed why. One might have been for comfort’s sake. Bustling around, she’d grown too warm in the steamy room. Her body temperature always ran high. In bed at nights she inevitably threw off the covers, sometimes rose and cracked open the window, even in January here in Sierra City, so that he’d wake frigid, fingers freezing as he struggled to close the window. In the summer, she regularly dispensed with her nightshift. Not that he minded. Pure joy to awaken to the sight of her naked body beside him in the dawn, an almost visible aura seeming to hover over her rosy flesh, her flank smooth under his hand.
She knew how much allure her body held, and so the possibility existed that she’d slyly opened the button for him. Did she mean to entice him here, now? He surveyed the countertops littered with vegetable parings. The dirty orange strings of carrot shavings. A cutting board held an extra pile of chopped onion. Over there, discarded parts of the celery. It never ceased to amaze him how efficient she was in the kitchen. In front of him lay only the papery skins of the garlic cloves. Well, look at her skin moist with perspiration.
If he were to go to her now, to press his lips to her exposed cleavage, her damp skin would taste salty—salty and sweet. Her skin always carried a faintly sugary flavor, what he imagined the petals of a rose might taste like, though he’d never sampled a rose, had only heard—from her—that many people enjoyed eating rose petals. In India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, people made syrups and ice creams from rose petals. She’d suggested they might try making such a recipe themselves, but he’d said maybe. He could imagine what a mess that would turn out to be, the way she ignored a recipe’s directions.
He began to clear the space in front of him. It was entirely conceivable that she’d opened that button to lure him. But what was her underlying motive? A ruse to distract him from finishing his story? He rinsed the garlic mincer under warm water. Their counselor Hilda had suggested they each identify what she called their “triggers,” those issues that set them off, and then deploy strategies that they’d come up with beforehand to prevent them from heading down the same well-trodden paths of no-win arguments. Hilda meant tactics such as using humor. After all, at work he was known for his quick wit and ability to make people laugh, especially in defusing tension in the boardroom. Board members were always glad to see him.
His wife could only imagine this, of course, since she’d never witnessed it. At home he was parsimonious with his sense of humor. Once upon a time, he’d delighted in making her laugh. She remembered fondly the time they were on vacation, reclined on lounge chairs under a huge striped umbrella on the beach in western Maui, when he’d made her laugh so hard that a couple strolling by glared at her, no doubt thinking her drunk. She’d wiped tears from her face, and he’d thrown back his head and guffawed Oh, Madam! And that quip, though in and of itself hadn’t been funny, had set her off again. She no longer remembered what his original declaration of hilarity had been. A long time ago.
Their early years had been a regular carnival, packed with thrills, the heightened state of their pleasure in one another more than enough to buoy their boat churning through the tunnel of love. They clung to one another, while in the dark monsters and ghouls abruptly materialized before them, and the grip of his hand tightened on hers at the sensation of some unnamable creepiness dragged over the skin of their faces. Steadfastly, the mechanical apparatus hidden below the dark water in the channel churned their little vessel forward, and they exited into a daylight that stunned and stung their eyes.
She pushed the sautéing vegetables through the oil in the pot with a wooden spoon. Oh, how she’d loved him! And still did, yes, she did. Easy to admit. She’d never been one to talk herself into believing what she didn’t in her heart of hearts. Though, before him, she’d almost been in danger of that very thing she’d seen other girls do, try to convince themselves that a boy was everything they wanted him to be—a bad boy, usually. In her junior year in college she’d had such a bad boy. He’d driven his motorcycle from town to town to see girlfriends, often on the same night. But even after she’d discovered that she was one girl of three, she hadn’t broken off the relationship immediately, allowed him to return to her apartment several more times. He’d justified himself by declaring monogamy a societal construct antithetical to the dictates of evolution. But she hadn’t believed what he’d said: that was the difference. She’d known he was a knave.
She’d always been honest with herself and was now. She went to her husband and caressed his forearm, the dark hair there under her fingertips the perfect texture of substance and silk. He seemed to grasp the faucet tighter, the muscles under her hand constricting, as if he were dedicated to the trivial task by some larger commanding force.
The moist pressure of her small, capable hand on his arm set off a buzz within him. Her nearness. She smelled of onions—look at all that wasted onion—and also, faintly, of some herb. An array of diminutive glass jars of spices stood on the counter. Short thin stalks of something leafy green rested on a square of paper toweling, perhaps oregano—was that the scent?—next to the little stainless steel grinder, a device she’d tied with a red ribbon and tucked into his Xmas stocking a couple years ago. He’d had some desire then for learning how to cook, really cook, an activity that might countermand the stress of his job. But the grinder was an infuriating gadget that he’d tried to use with parsley. The teeth had mangled the parsley before the grinder clogged completely. He’d had to dig the clumps of green stuff free with toothpicks. The mechanism was a gimmick; he’d be ashamed to put his name to it as the maker. Yet, somehow she—never saying a word—had found it useful.
She leaned in closer to him. Oregano, yes, that was it.
She brought her mouth near his ear.
Pressed next to his arm, she felt the heat of his bicep. His shoulder tensed. A muscle flexed in his neck while she reached to kiss his ear lobe. He’d always loved her lips on his ear lobes. Hilda had meant that they should be creative. When they felt themselves nearing that dangerous territory promising explosive bad will, they were to dive down deep into themselves, dredge the golden pail into the waters of desire. She closed her eyes and breathed him in.
This was what she always did. He’d tried to explain it to Hilda. His wife didn’t take him seriously. She didn’t listen. She used her sex appeal to unfair advantage, to set him adrift from his point. Once again, he hadn’t even finished what he’d had to say! He thought she’d enjoy hearing the intricacies of his novel’s plot. Even if not, that was fine: she didn’t need to appreciate what he appreciated. But she needed to validate him, his interests. He needed validation. He needed acknowledgment. It wasn’t too much to ask. He turned off the water, stepped away from her to dry his hands on a paper towel.
The oil in the pot was smoking. She turned to the stove and flipped on the overhead exhaust fan to high speed. The mechanical whir invaded the room.
“Do you want to start over?” she said, her words barely audible. But he had already left the room.
~
Peg Alford Pursell is the author of Show Her a Flower, A Bird, A Shadow, a collection of fiction and hybrid prose, featured by Poets & Writers magazine’s second annual 5 over 50, December 2017. Her second book, A GIRL GOES INTO THE FOREST, is forthcoming from Dzanc Books in 2019. Her work has appeared in Permafrost, the Los Angeles Review, Joyland Magazine, and other journals and anthologies. She is the founder and director of the national reading series Why There Are Words and of WTAW Press.