PLAYING HOUSE
SOMETIMES, WHEN SHE is feeling particularly whimsical, Charlotte imagines herself a scientist.
Trade her apron for a lab coat, steak knives for scalpels. Sensible heels would echo more in a laboratory than in this picture-perfect house, but she thinks she would grow to love the sound. Especially if it came with a relief from this heat—tight collar, closed windows, and an oven that likes to take hours to come to heat.
Then she laughs and goes to make sure her fantasizing hasn’t let the roast burn.
Science is for discoveries, for finding the new. Her job is to keep up the appearances of the old. Comfort, familiarity. It’s a lonely job, one that leads to days of puttering around the living room, hours spent making sure it looks as unlived in as possible.
Not that it’s a difficult task. Her husband works so hard. He has little time for trivial things. For her.
Does she look unlived in too? she wonders, as she dabs at the sweat collecting on her neck. Good wives don’t perspire.
He doesn’t care what she does, as long as it’s the same as it was the day before, and the day before that. No children, because he needs his quiet. No love to fill her empty heart, because that’s for fairy tales.
As long as dinner is on the table, he hardly notices she’s there at all.
So tonight, Charlotte is cooking dinner.
Her cleaver makes quick work of bone and fat, the crack of exposed joints hidden under her light hum.
This recipe’s new. Something she’s been—ha!—experimenting with. Sinew for strength, marrow for memory.
She should name her, this creation coming together under her careful hands. All good dishes have a name.
The movements are by rote, now. Cream for the roux, some blood for colour. If she’s not paying attention, her quick work of the vegetables could leave her with too few fingers, but who would notice?
A timer goes off, and she bends to pull the twin cakes from the oven, risen like lungs.
She used to think marriage meant freedom.
But there are many ways to bake a cake.
Her nails are sharp, as she drums a pulse into the counter, waiting for the cakes to cool. Waiting for the gravy to thicken. Waiting for the sound of her husband’s car in the driveway.
She is no scientist, but her precision is unparalleled. Everything comes together, and by the time she can hear his keys in the door, all that’s left is the garnish.
Her wedding ring will do nicely.
The memory of their vows tastes like fine wine, like the wine in her hand as she listens to her husband enter, already complaining.
When your heart is empty, it’s no trouble to rip it out of your chest.
It makes the perfect appetizer, tender and mild, and she watches his face twist into something like shock.
Something new.
“Welcome home, darling,” she says, and the body she’s assembled on their fine mahogany table sits up, just as she shoves her husband into his seat.
“We made you dinner,” Charlotte says. “Hungry?”
“Starving,” her dish replies. She thinks she will call her Penelope. She is beautiful.
Charlotte is a good wife.
Doesn’t she deserve something good in return?
The meal is good. And her husband, in his shock, is delicious. Every shared bite.