Page 41 - WTP Vol. XI #2

one has noticed.
Ok.
Her husband thumbs-up reacts to the message.
She was there when Paul got his first phone, a Black- berry with a keyboard like puffed popcorn kernels. While his classmates prayed for the six-month Staf- ford grace period to last a little longer, he already reigned over a cubicle with pictures of them cuddling in Montauk and his old fraternity ring hanging on the wall. She’d been excited too, even more than he was; she was applying to law schools then.
The freezer door protests on stiff, screaming hinges as she yanks it, grabbing a bundle of mozzarella sticks. A box of to-go tubes of yogurt. Non-steroidal chicken nuggets. Steamer mixed vegetables, READY IN THE MICROWAVE IN JUST FIVE MINUTES!
~
Joanna from three doors down was the first to wel- come them to the neighborhood, with a scalloped- potato shepherd’s pie. Without groceries and with every outlet broken, they had plopped down on their kitchen linoleum, using a baby food spoon to scoop helpings of the pie onto four mismatched plates.
“Oh my god,” Rose mumbled through a mouthful. “This is the best thing I’ve ever tasted.” Paul grunted his assent, already heading for the spoon lodged like a birthday candle in the rest of the pie.
“Come in,” Joanna cried when she rang the doorbell a few days later, with the bravado of correctly guessing her card. “Come in, come in!”
“I hope you don’t mind my dropping by. I brought you something.”
“Oh gosh, that looks amazing! Thank you so much!” Joanna beamed at her and set the cake gingerly on the kitchen island—shimmering granite, recently buffed.
“I made it myself.”
“That’s so amazing! It looks really homemade. So real and cozy, you know?”
“Yeah.” She had no idea what that meant.
“I always tell myself I’m going to get into cooking one of these days, but I’ve become so lazy since having Eric. I barely have the energy to come into the kitchen and see what the cook’s making.”
“The cook?”
“We just hired a new one.” Joanna gave a Shakespear- ean tsk. “The old one went back overseas to see her mother in the hospital. We offered to pay triple what she was making—the kids loved her cooking, and
Eric had just started teething and she knew all sorts of soft foods—but she insisted, so we let her go. This one’s not as good, I’ll tell you that, but his cooking is much more traditional. Beef and potatoes, that sort of thing, not noodles and fermented cabbage.”
She’d been stunned through her entire conversation with Joanna, dotted with anecdotes like her first la- bor, her kid’s teachers—Miss Willis was to be avoided at all costs, unless poor Alicia already had her, in which case it was better to stay and try to put up with her relentless butchering of common sense elemen- tary educational standards—and the HOA’s new lawn beautification fees. She was stunned after leaving Joanna’s house, all the way to her own front door and to Paul unbuttoning his work shirt in their bedroom.
“Are we supposed to have a chef?” He sniffed a sweat- shirt at the top of the laundry pile, nose wrinkling. She still hadn’t figured out the ratio of detergent to water for their new washing machine, and it was grating on her.
“Of course not,” she snapped. ~
Joanna’s cook probably uses steamer bags from Walmart too. She doubts Joanna or her family—her pinched-face husband who works at Goldman Sachs and her children-iPad cyborgs—would know the difference. Guilt grips her stomach briefly; Joanna
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