She seemed so rational until I saw her in the kitchen.
She had given a few hints, of course. The first time she drove me around Baltimore, she let loose a sudden outburst of profanity as if we were about to die.
“What!? Where?! What’s going on?!” I asked, my head swiveling wildly as I looked for the onrushing projectile.
I don’t remember what innocuous situation prompted her overplayed alarm. We both attributed it to the fact that she lived alone and usually drove alone. She had a born and raised tendency to be dramatic. Consciously or not, after that she became much more restrained in the car. But then...she cooked.
I did not grow up in the company of passionate cooks. The food was good, but the kitchen was a fairly placid place.
Not anymore. The stove is no longer aging gently, polished and scrubbed. Its burners are rimmed with blackened lava. The oven has seen more flame than a busy dragon’s lair and disgorged more edible treasure. But at what human cost?
Cooking used to be the busy but rational preamble to eating. Only the duration of the hum would change with the size and festivity of the meal.
Not anymore. Shrieks of genuine anguish have become routine. The crash of dropped or thrown pans no longer brings me at a run.
Ah, but the food...things I used to cook for myself, things I thought were pretty creative, nutritious and tasty now seem like plaster models of food. And yet she’s nice about it. I’ll start to throw together something for dinner. It won’t be outright toxic, but it won’t be inspired. Rather than sweep it off the counter with one grand, dismissive gesture, she’ll just say something like, “Well, that’s good, but how about adding this and sauteeing that, and a pinch of this here?”
I don’t ask anymore why I didn’t think of that. Each of us brings different strengths to the cooperative endeavor of life. Would she lose her creative powers if restrained in any way? Maybe things would be more placid, but she wouldn’t be the same. The experiment does not seem worth the risk.
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