selfie Dewa Ayu

Dewa Ayu

The wedding itself had been inconsequential, full as it was with people she didn’t know. Joey’s dress was foamy, fizzing down her arms with spiraling sequins, and it itched at the elbows. The reception, too, was unmemorable, except when Silvie, the maid of honor, drunkenly broke down in tears while giving her speech, going on and on about how Joey and Douglas were made for each other.

Joey had never done well being the center of attention, so it worked that she kept deflecting to Douglas. Well-meaning relatives on both sides approached them at dinner, congratulating them on a beautiful ceremony and their compatibility, and Douglas was mercifully graceful, shaking hands and offering gratitudes. If there had been babies at the wedding, Douglas would have kissed them. It was times like these that Joey wondered if she had stumbled into playing the role of a politician’s wife instead of a lawyer’s. The word wife, still tangy, reverberated around her skull.

Who was this man? He looked so different when he was sleeping, not as handsome. She had met Douglas less than a year ago and now, naked under the sheets, she felt more clothed than in any other relationship, more walls up thanks to a signature on a marriage certificate. He was a midwestern-raised lawyer who made her stomach do, if not somersaults, then at least log rolls. Perhaps the more incisive question would be relative to herself: who will she be in this marriage? And, with Douglas, who has she become?

Partially to pee, partially to fend off an anxiety attack, Joey slid out from under the

cream-colored sheets and began the day. It started with a plate of rubbery eggs, Joey’s attempt at roleplaying breakfast-in-bed. She had never really made food for Douglas before — their early courtship was full of takeout and fancy restaurants. He paid for everything. But this was their honeymoon, and if Joey had to reinvent her wheel to fit the mold of a wife, then she would reinvent it.

“Something burning?” asked Douglas, rubbing sleep from his eyes as he joined her in the kitchen. Joey, in an embarrassing show of reflex, flung the eggs into the garbage can and burst into tears. Douglas, making his classic face of confusion, opened his arms and she stepped into them, letting herself be wrapped by his arms.

“I don’t know how to cook,” she mumbled into his shoulder.

“That can’t be true,” he said, smiling at her. “You’re perfect. You can do anything.”

“No,” she said, pushing out of his embrace with reticent frustration. “I really don’t. I refused to learn from my mom, and college was full of dining halls and restaurant take-out, and after graduation I ate grilled cheeses every day.”

“It’s no problem, baby,” he said, turning his head down towards hers. “It’s not an issue. I can figure it out.”

“Okay,” Joey said, putting her tears aside for now and kissing him. “Now, can we have sex again?”

“Again?” he laughed.

“Again,” she said, and so they did.

Joey had assumed his solution would be delegational, hiring a chef or one of those monthly meal passes. But it turned out she had been enrolled in cooking classes offered at Draeger’s Grocery by the wife of Alan Hill, a partner at Douglas’ firm. Daily cooking classes seemed a big leap from Joey’s hands-off expectations. She was beyond nervous for the first class, but Douglas hadn’t given her another option, and so she took the bus downtown at 5:30pm on a Tuesday.

Douglas’s boss’s wife turned out to be a 28 year old bleach-blonde named Marguerite Suzanne Laderoute-Hill. She was obnoxiously pretty, a kind of luxuriant overseas-er. She spoke in un accent charmant, wore floral jumpsuits under gingham aprons, and needled Joey steadily about the air bubbles in her pastry dough or burnt edges on her Julienne-cut zucchini slices.

Naturally, Joey hated her. It was partially her jealous nature, sure, but Marguerite didn’t make it any easier on herself, dancing from table to table and laughing with her high-register, chirpy giggle. She was over-the-top frills and annoyance.

The others in the class weren’t as bad. They were mostly couples, cashing in on anniversary present gift cards to feed each other mushroom crostinis or scoops of butternut hummus. Even though she was the same age as many of the others, she found herself — as the lone individual — being adopted by kind pairs. Gloria and Fern Boh-Kippens were especially sweet, telling Joey when to turn the oven temperature down if Marguerite was helping someone else. And Joey felt she was picking the lessons up fairly well — sure, she wasn’t a culinary genius like Martha Daughtry, but at least she didn’t catch her salmon on fire like dorky Eoin Cone.

“You know, this isn’t bad,” Marguerite had fluttered, tasting Joey’s freshly-made tortilla one Thursday night after class had ended and the others had left. “If you had taken it off the heat just a minute earlier, I think it would’ve been quite good.”

“I know,” Joey grumbled reluctantly, wrapping the rest of the scorched tortillas in tinfoil to bring home to Douglas. “I just don’t know how to know when it’s ready. I follow the same instructions you give everyone else, but they seem to have a knack for knowing when to bend the rules.”

“It just comes from practice,” Marguerite said, her voice lilting at the edges. “Have you been retrying any of the recipes at home?”

The truth was, Joey found the daily classes exhausting enough. Cooking required so much energy and detailed attention. She needed to separate egg yolks from whites while checking the chicken broth, or open the oven, slide the potatoes out, whisk the cream to stiff peaks, all while keeping her elbows in and apron clean. At the end of each class, they all gathered around and tasted each other’s results. A naturally withdrawn, introverted sort, Joey wasn’t used to the level of social intensity, and Joey started having nightmares of her classmates pulling acidic, Edvard Munchian faces at her failures.

And after the classes, Joey would drag herself home on the bus, feeding Douglas her lesson leftovers from decorated tupperwares or saran-wrapped bowls. She hardly ever ate the results herself. She found herself emotional watching her husband eat — the meals she spent hours toiling over — while scrolling on his phone or eating four, five bites at a time.

“Not really,” Joey answered.

“Well,” Marguerite said, patting Joey’s hand and getting her keys out of her plum-colored purse, “Practice makes perfect, as they say.”

“I didn’t know you assigned homework,” Joey replied, sounding snarkier than she wanted to. Marguerite took her hand off Joey’s, stood up to leave.

“Only for my favorite pupils,” Marguerite said, then nodded towards the exit. “Want me to drive you to the bus stop?”

Marguerite seemed okay, Joey thought. Not as conceited as her accent preluded.

And so, on Marguerite’s recommendation, Joey began cooking constantly. She kept going to classes, learning sauces and stews and tiered cakes. A new recipe every day was unsustainable for her memory, so she was returning to her favorites, or the challenges, and cooking them midday — zesting lemons, baking vegetables, and sauteing steak. The meat was the hardest to practice. Raised vegetarian, she was squeamish at first, prodding raw poultry and inadvertently letting the red meats go too long on the stovetop.

“I like ’em a little bloodier,” Douglas said to her one day, after cutting through a uniformly brown piece of beef. “A good medium-rare.”

The practice helped, and Joey started feeling a sense of lightness, almost elation, when tying her apron on and looking at the day’s recipe. She was still tired nearly all the time, but didn’t feel quite so crumpled when her dish needed more salt or less vinegar.

“Alan asked who I drive to the bus stop every day,” Marguerite said some Friday evening as the two of them walked onto the second level of the parking garage. She had already pulled her keys out, clicked them to hear a faint beep as the doors unlocked from 30 feet away.

“Why?” Joey asked.

“He’s very stingy about paying for gas. But anyway, it almost seemed like he was worried I was cheating on him.”

“The hypocrite,” Joey said without pause. When Marguerite frowned at her, asked if Joey knew anything Marguerite didn’t, Joey realized she had been putting Douglas’ bland face to Alan’s name, the two of them equal in their distance from her, their inextricably detached workaholic natures. Douglas wasn’t cheating on her, as far as she knew, but he possessed that certain hypocrisy nevertheless, of expecting things

of her that Joey would never dare expect of him, like unqualified affection and cooking.

“What?” Marguerite prompted again, and Joey shrugged, choosing her words carefully.

“Just that, I know you are always so diplomatic with him. We never ask them where they are when they’re working late. I don’t know, I spoke without thinking.”

They had reached the car, and Marguerite unlocked the doors again, a nervous tic. They ducked their heads and slid into their seats.

“Douglas wouldn’t know I was still taking cooking classes if I didn’t remind him every night,” Joey admitted, fumbling with her seatbelt.

“That can’t be true. You’ve gotten so much better at cooking, he must notice that!”

“Maybe. Or maybe he thinks it just comes with the territory.”

“What territory?”

“Being a wife, I guess. I don’t know. I still feel like I’m putting on a costume every morning.”

Marguerite patted Joey’s thigh, a vaguely paternalistic gesture, as she looked out the rear window and pulled out of the parking spot. “Your marriage is still so young. Besides, I know that you are a good wife.”

“You don’t know that,” Joey said. Marguerite’s hand was still on her leg, and Joey found herself holding her breath the way teenage girls do when someone sits on their lap. An attempt at taking less space, maybe, or an exercise in laser focus.

“I may not know the nuances of your marriage,” said Marguerite, pronouncing nuance with French-accented zeal, “but I do know you. And you are everything a man would want in a wife.”

One weekend, Douglas was away for a legal conference in Christmas, Florida. He promised to be back by lunchtime on their 6 month anniversary. Joey had decided to make macaroni and cheese. Discounted as simple and childish by other home cooks (an identifier she had recently started calling herself in a rare show of private indulgence), she found joy in making the cheese roux, letting her spoon linger in the pan as it paved canals in the thickening sauce. To dress up the dish, she usually

added breadcrumbs to the top and baked the whole bowl for a crispy finish. Today, though, she was running late, as Douglas had already landed, and she still needed to add more cheese. Shredding cheddar into the saucepan as fast as could, she hazarded a glance at the pasta water, which was boiling bubbles up over the side of the pot. She nudged the heat down with her socked foot, turned her head back towards the task at hand, and thwick — grated her knuckles along the sharp edge of the grater blade. Joey made a sound between an “ow” and an “oh” and an “ah,” then a sort of wounded hiss, and let the cheese grater clatter to the ground. She checked her hand. Blood scissored across three fingers, with flaps of skin covering the cuts.

“Ouch,” she said firmly, like a community theater actor hitting the consonants at the end of a monologue, then took her hand over to the sink and ran it under cold water. After she patted her hands dry with a towel, she turned back to the stove to find, in her bubbling cheese, visible streaks of red. “Oh my god,” she found herself saying aloud. She grabbed a spoon and tried to scoop the blood out, but the wooden curve was thick and hard to wield delicately, so the most she did was spiral the red to fade into the rest of the sauce.

Joey could hear the sizzle of the stovetop as she took the pan off the heat. Hands steady despite her scrambled thoughts, she strained the pasta and poured it into the cheese sauce, transferred it to a glass dish. She added the bread crumbs on top as planned and slid the dish into the oven. It felt almost normal, her heart beating against her ribs.

Douglas was starving when the taxi dropped him off at their apartment. He told Joey this the second she greeted him at the door. He said it exactly that succinctly, too: “I’m starving.” The macaroni and cheese was already out of the oven, sending curls of steam to the ceiling. They ate lunch quietly, Douglas responding to emails, Joey picking at her salad. Douglas didn’t acknowledge their anniversary. Even after the long flight and airplane aroma, Joey could smell another woman’s perfume on his body.

That evening, Joey initiated sex. This was rare; it was nearly always Douglas’s lowbrow attempts at flirty conversation that led to bed. But tonight, when she kissed him, she pretended she could taste her blood in him, and she let herself unspool.

Joey had practice in fixation, leaning into boys until they became boyfriends, calling them late into the night until they shoved her away with pleads of needing space. The words were unspoken in her presence, but they followed her: ‘clingy,’ and, worse, ‘obsessive.’ Joey had often found herself playing the role of wife, even before Douglas. In the traditional plight of young womanhood, she mothered her high school boyfriends — or maybe therapized was more apt. But college had found her

in characteristic disillusionment with herself, zeugmatically dropped off at orientation with a shoddy sense of identity and a bright red comforter. Never one to think of herself as obsessed, Joey recognized her actions for what they were: study. Sure enough, she tracked her boyfriends’ habits (7:30am showers, science fiction by Aldous Huxley, coffee with two sugars), their quirks, likes and dislikes, how they wanted her to act. She would fall into putty, let them mold her one way or the other, for she loathed nothing more than needing to make decisions for herself. With the man secured and a permanent Mrs. modifier to her tax forms, she had been free to learn from Marguerite.

These cooking classes were a study in culinary academia, an experiment in domesticity.

Sneaking her own blood into her husband’s food, on the other hand, was more of an observatory science, and like a clinical researcher, her trials started small. Tiny, negligible operations, limiting her sample size to exactly 1 subject: Douglas. After the control experiment, which she called the Mac & Cheese Incident in her own mind, she remained cautious, letting a knife catch a tip of a finger or an apple peeler snag her palm. In such small quantities, it was easy for her to ignore what she was doing. But like so many other human things — alcohol, adultery — her tolerance quickly built up, and what had initially given her a thrill no longer did the job.

Intrepidly forging her own path of inquiry, she felt a bit like a mad scientist sticking forks into sockets. More!!!! MORE!!!!! cried her personal Dr. Frankenstein, and she started aiming for veins.

While she was becoming exceedingly successful in cooking class — (several times winning the hard-earned second bite of the teacher) — she was emboldened by her extracurricular elective. Douglas remained blissfully unaware of what he was consuming, and for some reason Joey didn’t find it surprising that the only person who noticed she was acting differently was Marguerite.

“You’re peppy today,” said Marguerite, once again driving Joey to the bus station. The low summer sun filtered through the clouds as they zoomed out of the Draeger’s parking structure. Marguerite slid on sunglasses.

“I’m proud of my risotto,” said Joey, when in reality she had been mulling over the lamb she had waiting in the fridge, which she planned on spicing up with thyme and red blood cells from her fleshy left index finger.

“It was quite good,” Marguerite granted, “Eons better than your first attempt months ago. You’ve made great strides.”

“I feel like a different person.”

“No, this was always there,” said Marguerite, taking her eyes off the road and looking directly into Joey’s for a moment. “It just needed to be pulled out by a masterful teacher comme moi.”

“Don’t congratulate yourself too much,” Joey said through a smile.

“I’m not wrong.”

“You’re not wrong.”

They were silent as Marguerite pulled over to the bus stop, where a man in a vile jacket stood under the peeling shelter. Joey unclicked her seatbelt but stayed sitting in Marguerite’s car for a moment longer.

“What are you going to do when the class is over?” Marguerite asked. Joey didn’t like thinking about two weeks from then, when her evenings would be spent home alone waiting for Douglas to text her saying he was working late that night.

“I think I’m going to have a dinner party,” she said, choosing her words carefully. “Douglas will want to invite you and Alan, of course.”

“Oh, that’s wonderful! What’s on the menu?”

Joey looked at Marguerite, young and beautiful and utterly trapped in a loveless green card marriage with a man twice her age. How could she be so happy in a life as dull and draining as hers must be?

Then again, who was Joey to judge?

“I haven’t decided yet,” Joey admitted. “And my bus is about to arrive. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Marguerite stayed parked illegally at the curb until Joey was securely on the bus, as she always did.

The dinner party came faster than Joey had hoped. Marguerite’s final class was a celebration, and Joey was surprised that there were more tears than just her own. At first an attempt at caged domestic care for her husband, the cooking classes had been a welcome escape from the rest of her life. Douglas mistook her empty gaze

at dinner as reactionary loneliness, withdrawal from the acquaintance of adults her age, and so he had invited more of his coworkers — strangers — to their apartment for the party, and Joey had to expand the menu greatly. When Marguerite and her husband arrived early for Douglas and Alan to talk shop, Joey barely said hello before moving to the kitchen. She didn’t look behind her. She knew that Marguerite would follow.

“Here, let me help.” Marguerite slid neatly into the space between Joey and the cabinet and started dicing raw tomatoes for the open-faced caprese sandwich on ciabatta, Joey’s selection for an appetizer.

“Thanks,” said Joey, moving over to give her more room. They stood there in silence, sneaking glances at each other’s technique every once in a while. Eventually, Marguerite swept the tomatoes into a pile on the side of her cutting board and assessed the rest of the food preparation.

“You’re going to need more butter,” she said, raising an eyebrow. “And some heavy cream, if you have any.”

“Back of the fridge,” Joey said, seeing an opening and seizing it.

Her heart beating wildly, Joey grabbed the knife. Marguerite was still chatting away, her head in the refrigerator, and Joey slid the blade across her thumb, dissecting through the skin and sending blossoms of blood onto the turkey. Quick now, Joey drip-dropped bloodlets into the pomegranate vinaigrette, into the red potatoes.

“Joey!” came a voice from behind her, and Marguerite dropped the stick of butter she was holding. She advanced on Joey, her eyes wide.

“Marguerite, I—” Joey started, with no intention of finishing. She couldn’t explain, couldn’t explain, couldn’t explain…

Marguerite’s breathing got very loud. Even from across the kitchen Joey could hear her exhales as clearly as if she was right next to her, breathing on her neck. Marguerite’s pupils were so dilated it looked like her eyes were black discs. She stepped forward and took Joey’s hand. Joey glanced down, tried to tuck her thumb into the center of her palm, a futile evasion technique. She could feel her heart beating in her finger, pulsing small blood bubbles onto the flesh of her hand. Nervously, she tried her best to avoid smearing any blood or sweat on Marguerite’s hand, which was just as cool and dainty as the rest of her. Joey’s eyes cut sideways, to the food. She still needed to stick the turkey in the oven; it was that psychedelic raw pink.

Marguerite brought Joey’s hand close to her face and pulled Joey’s thumb out from hiding. And then, tremblingly, Marguerite took Joey’s thumb into her own mouth. Her tongue lightly palpitated Joey’s cut. This was done without breaking eye contact, and so Joey felt not only entirely unclothed, but stripped to the bone. In preparing a salmon dish, Joey sometimes went the extra mile and deboned the fish, grabbing kitchen pliers and pulling the brittle bones out through the body. She felt like this was happening to her here, like Marguerite was pulling Joey’s bones out from under the sinew and muscles and skin that defined her, like without those meaty bits Joey could be who she was meant to be: a mass of mostly blood and brain tissue and hair follicles.

There is an art to brining a turkey. First, you put your store-bought pre-decapitated raw poultry into a pot. Add aromatics — rosemary, garlic, onions, carrots, a splash of lemon juice. Heat your water to just under a boil, add salt and stir until it dissolves. Pour the salty water into the pot, taking great care to douse the turkey evenly. Add 3 times as much cold, unsalted water. This will dilute the brine solution to the proper proportions, and the turkey should be fully submerged — drowned — in the water. If needed, take both hands and hold the turkey underwater. Don’t let it come up for air, no matter how much it squawks. Brine for 15 hours in the refrigerator, or until your husband gets home from sleeping with his secretary. Take the turkey out of the fridge, wash the brine off the bird. Smell the saltflakeseawater of oceanic passages. Remember the summer romances of your youth. Stare into space for so long that you forget where you are or what you are supposed to be doing and most importantly why you do it why you live your life according to someone else’s rules and why you find waking up in the morning worthwhile at all.

Roast your turkey according to typical procedure.

Casey Roepke

Photo by Jillian Benham Model: Ayu Suryawan