November 9 - It's what I do at 2.30 in the morning when I can't sleep

“Okay, Pete in the East Village, you’re on the radio.”

“Yeah hi, Frankie, it’s me again.”

“Pete!” Frankie exclaimed. Pete cringed internally. It was one thing to enjoy talking with Frankie the Football Fan, but another to be greeted by him as an old friend. Frankie was on the radio after hours – midnight to five in the morning, to be exact – and finding his show had been a relief to Pete after years of insomnia spent watching late night infomercials or endlessly clicking through computer solitaire until his doctor informed him he had a mild case of tendonitis.

“Are you doing a lot of typing for work?” Dr. Wilson had asked with concern, then, and Pete had flushed as red as the cartoon drawing of a heart up on the wall, the aorta and ventricles marked with cheerful, bubbly letters. “No, no… not for work,” he stammered.

He never told Dr. Wilson that he was an insomniac, though he wasn’t sure why he was ashamed of the fact. His parents had always been early risers who turned in just past the setting sun and woke before its rays touched the horizon, and as a child, he could hear their snores drifting to his bedroom in a steady stream all night long, an endless ribbon of dreams lasting from when head touched pillow to when alarm rang at dawn. He wasn’t sure, then, where his own propensity for insomnia came from, but Pete had been an insomniac as long as he could remember. He had tried sleeping pills, once, but found they only caused him to sleep-walk, his body drugged into oblivion while his brain continued to tick, so he would wake in the morning to find he had reorganized the furniture in his living room or – once, and the episode that made him shudder and give up sleeping pills for good – cut out a collage from magazines using a butchers knife instead of a normal pair of scissors. He still looked down thankfully to see that all the tips of his fingers were intact.

Without sleeping pills, he had turned to red wine, hearing that the chemical compounds tended to make people drowsy. This tactic required about six glasses before his lids started to grow heavy, though, and Pete was too big a fan of his liver to stick with it for long. A friend offered pot as a solution, but that only made him cough and his tongue feel thick and gave him a splitting headache that kept him up until dawn anyway, so so much for that cure.

Eventually he had just grown resigned to it, so it became not a matter of trying to sleep before five in the morning, but a matter of filling those hours. Late night movies which were inevitably of the cheesy, unwatchable variety, internet porn which had a tendency to grow stale after staring at for three hours and only half-heartedly holding his dick with one hand while thinking, which woman’s tits will turn my brain off enough to sleep tonight?

It made dating, hard, too, since his hours were so different from the woman he wanted to take out. And if a date – thankfully, hopefully – ended up in his bedroom, he had to explain why he was walking around the kitchen at four in the morning instead of holding whoever it was in his bed. Embarrassment more often than not led Pete to avoid dates altogether.

A year ago, he had discovered the late night football talk show on the sports radio network, and Frankie the Football Fan’s reassuring, jocular voice that boomed into his apartment and kept him company while the city (some of It, anyway, this was New York) slept outside his windows.

He didn’t call in for the first time until the third month, but since then he had been a regular.

“Pete from the East Village!” Frankie would greet him like a long-lost high school friend at a reunion, as though From-the-east-village were his last name. “How’s it going tonight, my brother?”

“Well, Frankie, well.” Better for you, he never said out loud.

“And what’s it to be tonight, Pete?”

“Well, Frankie, I just don’t agree with what you were saying about trading the quarterback for our team. Look, the kid’s young, but you gotta give him enough playing time on the field to gain some experience, you know?”

“Give him some time!” Frankie had a tendency to end everything with an exclamation point.

“That’s what I’m saying,” Pete agreed.

“Ok, hold on Pete. We’ve got another caller; let’s see if she agrees. Gabby in the East Village, you’re on the air.”

“Frankie,” said a woman’s voice, deep for a woman. Pete thought it sounded strange for a minute, like there was an echo to it, but then shook his head at his own three a.m. delusions and cocked an ear to listen. “Frankie, first time caller here but I listen to you every night. You’re a life saver for insomnia!”

Frankie chuckled.

“I disagree with your last caller, Frankie. Get the kid out of their now. We’re what, two-and-seven this season so far? Unacceptable. Maybe if it was earlier in the season and there was more room to play around, but the kid has just gotta go. Put our old quarterback back in there. He might be older, but he’s got experience, you hear me?”

“I hear you!” Frankie enthused.

Pete heard her too, and he realized now why it had sounded so strange. He wasn’t hearing through the radio speakers. He was hearing through the plaster-board to the apartment next door. It couldn’t be! He turned down his radio, and crept over to press an ear against his green-painted walls. It took his ear drum a moment to sift through the sounds - the hiss of the radiator heating, the brief, fading siren of an ambulance somewhere six stories below, but then – yes! – there was Frankie’s voice, coming through the wall. Cautiously, Pete rapped his knuckle against the wall. Silence. He rapped again. Still nothing.

Perhaps he was mistaken. Looking around his small living room, Pete sighed and decided his own imagination was trying to provide companions. Best to go back to Frankie’s voice. Only what if…? This time, when he turned on the radio he carried it over to the wall, aimed the speaker next door, and turned up the volume. He played Frankie’s voice for a moment, then when it switched to commercial break, he knocked again. A moment of silence, then an answering, questioning knock. Pete couldn’t help it. He laughed! He heard an echoing laugh on the other side, a woman’s rich timbre.

Rushing to the door, he peered out into the hallway just as 6C next door creaked n its hinges. A woman with curly red ringlets peeked around at him. He remembered passing her once or twice on the stairwell, but had never realized she lived next door.

“Pete from the East Village?” she asked.

“Gabby from the East Village,” he confirmed. She laughed again and came out into the hallway. She wore a pink bathrobe and big fluffy slippers, he noted with amusement.

“You too?” she asked, gesturing a thumb back in her apartment, incorporating in that one gesture everything from Frankie’s voice to insomnia to sleepless hours spent staving off the loneliness.

“I’m telling you, this radio station is a lifesaver,” Pete acknowledged with a guilty shrug. “It’s what I do at 2.30 in the morning when I can’t sleep.” He worried for an instant that this made him sound like a complete loser, but Gabby gave no sign of thinking so, nodding enthusiastically. She was the one wearing bunny slippers, he reminded himself.

“You always up this late?” she asked.

“Always,” he replied.

“It’s a curse.”

“A curse,” he agreed. Gabby looked him up and down, taking in the college co-ed sweat pants on a man obviously into his thirties, the eyes red from lack of sleep, the little edge of pot-belly starting to stick out over the elastic band of his sweats. Pete felt naked for an instant, but whatever Gabby saw, she must have liked because she smiled.

“Well, tell you what, neighbor. Tomorrow night, since we’ll both be up, why don’t we listen together?”

“Sounds like a date,” Pete said.

His apartment felt different when he walked back inside. Frankie’s voice had been silenced; one curtain puffed importantly into the room from a breeze outside for a moment, then fluttered back and was still. Pete thought about making some eggs, but turned without really thinking and lay down on his bed with his two hands cupped under one cheek like he had as a kid. He closed his eyes, just for a moment. He was surprised to find that, when he opened them again, it was morning.

November 8 - Electricity in the air

The night was warm, under the blue-black sky of a threatening storm. Jon watched her walk up the steps to the restaurant, a loose black dress hung on her thin, pale shoulders. Although the other women had dark shawls thrown about their shoulders or draped about their necks, Martine somehow managed not to notice the chill in just her sleeveless dress, as though her body alone provided enough heat. She still made Jon’s breath catch, after all this time. He had not seen her in twenty years, not until that morning, out walking her small dog in the place Bellcour. Martine was a tall woman, and for some reason, this had always made her gravitate towards things that were constructed in miniature. He remembered well the bottles of travel-sized lotions and shampoos she used, leaving them behind in his apartment, or scattering them about her room, even at times when she wasn’t traveling. “Because the bottles are so cute!” she purred. Miniature lotions, miniature handbags, now this miniature poodle. Martine hadn’t recognized him at first; that was what hurt.

“Martine,” he said in English. “It’s me.”

“Mon dieu,” she breathed back in French. “It is you.”

The awkward silence of everything that had happened in twenty years fell between them. It was sifted through, layered, discarded like the clothes of a woman about to meet her lover in bed, then refolded, put carefully on the shelf, some of it kept, some of it thrown out.

“You’re married,” he said for her, looking at the rock on her second finger. Her nod said everything that had been in that pregnant pause.

“You too,” she said to his band of gold. They both looked away then, understanding that what hung in the air between them was too violent to act upon, had a life of its own like the feelers of an octopus, was too palpable, making the air itself a living, breathing, kinetic thing. They turned to walk away.

“Martine,” he said, whirling back, grabbing her slim upper arm. “Martine, meet me. Tonight, for dinner.”

She looked around. The poodle yipped.

“Not here,” she said. She wrote down an address. When he presented the folded piece of paper to the taxi cab driver, the car took him beyond the confines of Lyon to a village ten kilometers away. The restaurant still looked suited to Lyon’s exacting standards of taste. He watched Martine ascend the steps to the terrace under the blue-black sky.

She sat in her chair and stared at him.

“The wine list, Madame, Monsieur?” asked their server. They nodded, not breaking the filament that had constructed itself, extending from her iris to his.

A clink on a glass rim, the gurgle as the wine poured out, the deep stain of red in the glass. Only then did the spell break.

“Santé,” she whispered.

“Cheers,” he said back. The glasses clicked.

They didn’t speak the whole meal, but Jon heard the conversation. It went something like this: remember when we met. Oh yes! remembered with laughter, remembering her on a college campus in the States, furious that the bartender wouldn’t let her in when she was eighteen years old. “You have to be twenty-one,” Jon laughed at her, finding her in so much distress. “Where do you think we are?”

“France,” she shot back with a pout. He blinked at her a time or two, then burst out laughing. “Come,” he took her hand in his, the fingers slender but surprisingly long. “I know a place where they won’t card.”

She ordered a glass of cognac. She said she liked the small glasses it came in. He ordered a vodka soda and let the ice melt without sipping. He was afraid he was so intoxicated just looking at her that taking even one sip would drive him over the edge.

They made love for the first time that night in his apartment. He was a sophomore, no longer living in the dormitory, and she liked the brooding atmosphere, the maroon sheets, the way the static electricity would make blue sparks fly when she rolled back and forth on his bed like a kitten. “I think I like this better than the dorm,” she mused, propping herself on one elbow and staring about the place.

“Then move in with me,” he said on impulse. They stayed that way for two years. He would make her gourmet meals almost every night, though this was years before he chose to go to culinary school. Invariably, she liked the mini tarts, the tiny hors d’oeuvres, better than the larger plates. “Bite-sized,” she said with a nip to his neck. For two years they fucked and ate this way.

And then she left. Back to France. She was homesick, she said, no matter how she loved him. “Don’t come to the airport, my love,” she said into the phone. “Don’t you dare come wave goodbye. It will hurt less this way, you understand? A clean break.”

He threw several of the items in his kitchen, his four-hundred dollar stand mixer among them.

“Jon, Jon!” she cried. “Stop it Jon!” You’ll move on, she had told him. You will marry, you’ll find someone to love.

She was right, in a way. After she left he immersed himself in the food that he made, each recipe more convoluted and copious than the one before. He took to catering for crowds of hundreds, giant vats of things served in communal bowls, instead of dainty bite-sized one-at-a-times. He met Kara while catering her parents’ anniversary party; they had dated for three years, been married for twelve. There were two little girls now, ages six and five. Kara loved France as much as he, and they vacationed in a different city every summer. They had worked their way through Provence and into Bordeaux, up into Brittany, and through the wine-soaked towns of Burgundy and Alsace. They had spent so many weekends in Paris that each trip bled into the next. “We went to Pere LaChaise on our sixth visit, honey,” Kara would bicker. “Not our eighth.” He would acquiesce; it wasn’t worth quibbling over. Time and again, however, the one place to which he found himself consistently drawn was Lyon. He knew Martine had grown up there, but he told himself it wasn’t for that. It wasn’t that he ever really expected to see her while he walked past the brasseries and stared up at the gaudy ceiling of the Basilique, or attended tastings with the renowned chefs of the area. But she was still everywhere he looked; she was the angel glittering in mosaic tile; she was the scent of rosemary that wafted from the kitchen when the waiter brought out his roast duckling; she was the woman in a dark coat disappearing around the next corner, always a step ahead.

The check came. The wine was gone from the bottle. Jon was surprised to find crumbs on his plate because he couldn’t remember eating. Martine nodded that she understood the silent conversation that had just passed between them.

Like that they were upon one another. Her lips tasted of the Saint-Emilion they had drunk, of olives and herbs, of pink flesh, of sex. She reeked of sex. He devoured her tongue, wanted to eat every morsel of her . He was afraid to touch her skin lest electric sparks jump off.

She pulled back first, breathing heavily.

“We should go now,” she said, and Jon saw guilt flash across her face for the first time. He cleared his throat roughly and stood. The other diners turned their heads discreetly as they passed.

The thunder that had been rumbling distantly began to growl overhead as they walked from the terrace, her arm looped gently through his.

“Will I see you again?” Jon asked loudly, over the next rolling clap in the blue-black sky. With a sizzling crackle, the lightning bolts began to dance across the sky, and the clouds opened up like a sieve to let the water down on their heads. As Martine opened her mouth to respond, the lightning crashed to the earth nearby, bursting the ground into a fountain of dirt and grass. Startled diners gave a collective shriek, and the manager rushed out, ringing his pudgy hands on a white napkin. Another bolt struck, then other, still a third. Jon had his arm around Martine, who had ducked her head protectively into the crook of his shoulder, and he shielded her with his body as they rushed back indoors.

Martine pressed her face against the glass panes. Jon looked at the startled, milling diners, now all huddled inside and clucking angrily to one another. Never seen anything like it… Ever heard of such a thing… Her breath fogged the window.

“What is it?” Jon heard himself ask, frightened. “What’s happening out there?”

“Electricity,” Martine whispered. “It’s reminding you it’s dangerous.”

November 7 - Secretly, I know my name is Nadya

Secretly I know my name is Nadya, but no one here calls me that. Where is here, you ask? It wouldn’t really matter if I told you. It’s nowhere to you, so long as you are the kind of person who lives in a home with the things that a home normally has – a kitchen in which to eat, a bed in which to sleep, and if you are lucky, that thing called a family with whom you share these mundane things. You take them for granted because they have never been taken away. I did once, too. There was a village with a name attached to it, in a country that I don’t remember. Or, I do recall, but I pretend not to because it hurts less that way, if I close my eyes and say that this memory is only of a dream I had the other night, and there has never been any other place than where I am now. In the dream, there was green, there was a steeple silhouetted against a hill. De Silhouette, someone told me once, was a penny pincher who was so cheap that he made faceless portraits for his clients instead of the fleshed-out, identifying kind, but I don’t know if I believe this anecdote. Fancy stories are fine for children but eventually the real world catches up. So there; a pretty village in a pretty, fairy tale country and you don’t need to know its name.

The problem with the village is that there was not much more to it than that green and that steeple, and a whole mess of rotting sheep that were dying of some disease. They might have called in hoof-in-mouth or foot-in-mouth, the same term they use when someone makes a mistake and you yell back at them, “You really put your foot in your mouth that time!” There, yes that was it. Our sheep were dying of a mistake. Papa was dying of something more tangible but no less easy to capture in words. They could have called it cancer, but the only real doctor in the area lived a good twenty miles away and he came every once in a while, but when he did, Papa didn’t have enough money to pay him, so turned instead to the woman who peddled in herbs. After all, that was the way it had been done for centuries, by his father, and his father’s father, and his father’s father before that. The woman with the herbs could work miracles, they said – cure the big black lumps that formed along the skin or take the burn away from flesh charred in an accident over a stove, or take the quickening out of woman’s stomach when she didn’t want it there (but we had no name for this procedure; some things shall remain nameless).

Whether or not any particular nameless cure of hers worked on women, Papa didn’t have any choice but to trust her because he had no money for the other. Which was why when they offered money, I said yes. Who were they, you ask? I will spare you the names of the guilty. What you need to know is that, in my altruism, I said yes. Altruistically, the eldest daughter, because Mother by that point was spending most of her day vomiting up alcohol in the back room of the house, and my brothers had already gone off to the city where they could meet prettier women and sell their arms and shoulders (the men in my family had broad shoulders) while also selling their souls for a higher asking price. As long as manual labor was involved, they didn’t have to think about the other, higher price: it was a mask, a moniker adopted. People can wear different names and still be the same person.

A waitress, they said, and I had served food at home to my younger siblings for fifteen years, so a waitress, that was what I already was. A waiter. Yes, I waited, waited for life to become bigger than a village of steeples and green, and waited for love, and waited for fairy tales, so it would be proper to call me a waitress. But we shouldn’t put too fine a point on these things.

I don’t remember much of the journey. Long, tired, hungry. I may be confusing this leg of the story with all of my days since.

They took me to a house. I won’t tell you what they did to me there, because my story would make you cry. It doesn’t really matter where this place is to you, does it? This great country of yours, America, Land of the Free, Home of the Brave. Such pretty names you can apply to such ugly things, and I wonder, these men who walk through the front door of this shabby house that could exist on any suburban street (it could be next door to your house. Is it? Are you sure?) these men who walk through this door are able to swagger because surely they know that they are Free. I close my eyes because I am the one who is Brave. Cowards, cowards, I think, but I would never call them this name to their face.

So does it matter what they call me, in this place? If no one knows that I am here, and no one where I come from remembers that I have gone, then I am probably not even in existence anymore. Things that do not exist are not named. Secretly, I know my name is Nadya, which means Hope. Here I am called Ella, which I am told means Girl. You are only ‘girl’ in so much as you turn around when someone yells out the word on the street. So I am reduced to Girl which is the opening between my legs, and the Free and the Brave forget that I came from a small village in a small country where Papa waited for the money because I was Hope.

November 6 - You're eating breakfast

She was brushing her teeth when he dropped the bomb.

“Did I tell you that my parents are coming into town tomorrow?” Just like that, casually while he adjusted his tie and adored his reflection in the mirror.

Phoebe spit out a mouthful of toothpaste. “They’re what?” she asked around the foamy mint on her tongue, so it sounded more like this: “Thah-wah?”

“Coming to town.” Rafael patted her butt proprietarily as he walked past her and out of the bathroom, and Phoebe gaped another moment before lowering her head to the tap and swishing water around to rinse out her mouth.

“Rafael,” she whined. “What do you mean they’re coming?” She followed him into the bedroom. He was now lacing up black patent leather shoes, standing and smoothing an imaginary crease from his pants. He admired his reflection one more time, this time in the full-length mirror next to their king size bed.

He laughed at her. “I mean they’re coming to visit. Don’t you think they’d like to see our new place?”

Phoebe shuddered.

She and Rafael had married six months ago, but she had only ever met her in-laws twice before the wedding; they only dated four weeks prior to the wedding, after all, but as Phoebe liked to gush to girlfriends over coffee, after four weeks they knew. Phoebe wasn’t oblivious to their reality; he was wealthy and provided her with security (they had met at the club where she tended bar, one night when he was out after work with similar, corporate types, showing off and buying bottles of four-hundred-and-fifty dollar vodka), and she in turn provided him with a pretty woman on his arm to take to cocktail parties and trot out for the company holiday ball. Phoebe was okay with this. Rafael didn’t expect her to be the kind of wife who kept house (she had already hired a maid) or cooked (they ordered takeout or ate at neighborhood hot spots) or produced children (she adamantly did not want to ruin her figure that way, and he seemed to harbor no paternal aspirations). What she did mind was the way his parents had instantly looked down their identical, slim, patrician noses when they first met her, weighing every ounce of her flesh (yes that included the silicone) and probably gleaning what she had eaten for breakfast that morning, and lunch and dinner the day before (which, truth be told, was more often than not cocktails mixed in with some party nuts and a Caesar salad, if the day on which they met was like most days in her life). Under those stares, Phoebe could hear every thought that flashed behind their WASP-y blue eyes of not good enough and raised on the wrong side of the tracks and money grubber and bad genes. A wife, to the Martin family, was a hostess, a helpmate, not someone who went to get her nails done at a salon and spent the biggest portion of her day shopping at Barneys.

Phoebe loathed the idea of them showing up tonight. Well she wrung her fists into her silk bathrobe, Rafael’s head poked back around the door from the hallway.

“Gosh, and honey?” he said. “Wouldn’t it be nice if you had something home cooked ready to go for breakfast in the morning? My parents are big fans of the sit down breakfast, and I thought maybe they’d like to eat here instead of out like we normally do.” He winked like this was a grand idea.

Phoebe hurled a shoe at his retreating back as he took the stairs down, two at a time.

Breakfast? Her idea of making breakfast was opening the plastic bag inside a box of cereal and eating it dry by the handful; she couldn’t even be bothered with bowls and milk. She thought of dialing Rosalinda, but then remembered that the maid was out of town for her son’s wedding that week. She thought of calling a caterer, but she could just imagine Lydia Martin’s sneer at being offered someone else’s food while her daughter-in-law and (she hoped) the progenitor of her future grandchildren did no more than hand over a few crisp twenties. Panicked, Phoebe ran to the back room – it was meant to be a nursery, so the realtor had told them with barely concealed nudge nudge for their marriage bed, but Phoebe had plans to turn it into a walk-around closet and dressing space. For the moment, however, it was still nothing more than barren white walls and slick wood floors, and heaps of boxes that held the wedding gifts from Rafael’s family, waiting their turn to be unpackaged. His relatives had been horrified to learn that the couple had eloped to Vegas instead of planning a proper ceremony. Phoebe was just as happy to be wearing a short, nearly sheer blue dress with Elvis as attendant, and afterwards to drink themselves silly until five in the morning. She was pretty sure Lydia wouldn’t have approved.

Upon word of the nuptials, every long lost uncle and second cousin and niece of a niece of a sister had sent what they deemed proper wedding gifts, as though the trappings of a good 1950s housewife would take away the shame surrounding the couple. Phoebe promptly deposited all the boxes in the back room and forgot about them. Her kitchen drawers were filled with Chinese takeout menus, not pots and pans.

“I know they’re here somewhere,” she muttered, ripping open cardboard flaps and sending Styrofoam snowing down on the polished wood floor. It took four more boxes before she unearthed the cookbooks that Great Aunt Phyllis (really a childhood friend of Lydia’s, but forever referred to as great aunt) had sent.

“Baking for the Young Wife.” Phoebe rolled her eyes. She thumbed past the breads and the meats and the vegetables and the pictures of a blonde woman beaming proudly like Vanna White as she swept an arm across a table laden with her efforts. Phoebe snorted. She came to breakfasts.

Overnight Caramel French Toast.

It sounded complicated enough to impress Lydia, but looked simple enough to execute. The picture was actually rather mouthwateringly tantalizing. Phoebe scanned the ingredient list.

The first step was to figure out where the nearest grocery store was. If she shopped, it was at the deli on the corner for canned specialty olives, aged cheeses and biscuits, or at the liquor store for wine. She had never bought: light brown sugar, corn syrup, cooking spray, all purpose flour, vanilla extract, sugar, ground cinnamon.

“Excuse me?” she asked a man walking a dog. “Is there a grocery store nearby?” He looked at her oddly and then nodded impatiently, instructing her to walk one more block east. She thanked him.

“Excuse me,” she said to an indifferent looking woman in an apron at Gristedes. “Can you show me to the baking aisle?” The woman eyed her up and down lazily.

“Un huh,” she said, gesturing half-heartedly for Phoebe to follow. Ten minutes later she was swiping her credit card and clipping proudly back down the sidewalk with two plastic sacks in her hands. The doorman eyed her warily when he admitted her to the building.

“Baking, ma’am?” he asked wryly. His sardonic grin made the plastic sacks seem less glamorous.

“Don’t get to used to it,” she snapped, and swished to the elevator.

It took her hours, but Phoebe was meticulous about it. She even tied on an apron – another gift dug up from the cardboard boxes in the back room – to emulate the woman in the picture. Applying some jazz music to her speakers, she did this:

Combine one cup of packed brown sugar (packing was a foreign term, so she measured it out in her cosmetics bag, the smallest sack she had for packing), half a cup of corn syrup (dreadful, sticky stuff) and a quarter cup of butter. For this last, she used Benecol. That’s what Rafael needed for his high cholesterol. The recipe said to cook it over medium heat for five minutes, but her burner must have been on high, because within two, big thick bubbles were forming. With a yelp, she snatched the pan form the stove, then realized she’d forgotten to spray the baking dish to pour it into with cooking spray. Holding the skillet aloft in one arm, she awkwardly pressed the nozzle with her second hand, then poured with an exhalation of relief.

She arranged ten slices of French bread (she used the white wonder bread slices currently in the fridge) in a single layer atop this syrup (that was the cookbooks words. Not a sauce; a syrup).

Milk, flour, vanilla extract, salt, and eggs (these last already in the fridge because Rafael would come home with a carton of free-range from the specialty deli, to hard-boil for late night snacks when he was crunching numbers at one in the morning)were placed in a bowl. The recipe said to use a whisk. She wasn’t sure what this was, so used a knife to stir it all around vigorously, then poured the liquid over the bread slices. Now it was meant to refrigerate overnight. In the morning, she had only to slip it in the oven and bake for an hour.

“Phoebe,” she heard Rafael call, as she shut the refrigerator door and wiped a thin sheen of sweat from her forehead. “Phoebe, where are you?”

“The kitchen!” she replied happily. There was a confused silence, footsteps, then three bodies entering the kitchen, Rafael followed by Lydia and George, twin pillars of white-haired disapproval behind him.

“You’re cooking?” Lydia asked archly before even saying hello. “Darling, you’ll hurt yourself.” Phoebe removed her apron with a flush.

The night was precisely as painful as she feared. They went out to dinner, and Lydia kept leaning in to whisper maliciously, “Darling, that napkin should be in your lap,” or “Oh dear. Don’t just bite into your bread! Break it into chunks.” Phoebe was ready to spit food at her by the time the waiter removed the soup bowls. Somehow, the only thing that stopped her was the idea of that French toast waiting in the fridge, biding its time before she could show Lydia what a good wife she could be, what standards she could live up to.

With an almost conspiratorial glee, a secret only she knew, Phoebe set her alarm for six in the morning. Lydia and George woke early, and she wanted the French Toast to be piping hot from its hour in the oven when they materialized from the guest room in cashmere robes and fluffy slippers.

“What are you doing?” Rafael asked in sleepy concern when she threw back the coverlet and shrugged into a robe at the early hour. He knew her habit was to sleep until noon. In fact, Phoebe couldn’t remember the last time she had seen the sun rise. It was still dark outside the broad window of the master bedroom.

She placed a finger to his lips. “Shh,” she admonished. “Just you wait.”

Preheating the oven was an alien concept; it sounded time consuming. She figured if she skipped that step and simply cooked the French Toast at a hundred degrees hotter, it would still come out fine. Slipping the pan into the four-hundred-fifty degree oven, she set the timer n the microwave for an hour.

“You’re up?”

Phoebe gave a yelp and turned to find an already dressed and scrubbed Lydia staring at her. Had she really thought her mother-in-law would emerge in a bathrobe? Phoebe felt tousled and unkempt in comparison.

“I was making… breakfast,” she concluded lamely. Lydia sniffed and sat at the window bay, the sun just now peeking in through the window panes.

“Tea?”

“Oh, um, I haven’t made any. In fact, I’m not sure we have any. I think…” The pitch of her voice was rising in alarm when, thank God, Rafael appeared around the corner, already showered himself! She looked at him accusingly but the stare glanced off of him.

“I’m doing a Starbucks run, Mom,” he said, kissing Lydia’s forehead. “One chai tea for you coming right up.” Lydia pursed her lips and looked archly at Phoebe.

“Jesus,” she swore, stomping back to the master bedroom. She took a long shower.

She was blow drying her hair when she caught the whiff of burning. Assuming it was an idle strand caught in the nozzle, she continued her drying and brushing when she heard a shriek. Quickly, Phoebe shut off the hair dryer and tilted her head to listen. The burning scent was thicker, acridly crowding into her nostrils. There was another yelp, then a:

“Phoebe!”

“Oh shit.”

She dashed to the kitchen, where thick smoke crowded around the marble countertop, the Whirlpool refrigerator, the custom-made cabinets. Coughing, Phoebe rushed to her stove and waved one hand frantically in front of her eyes as she turned off the stove with the other.

“Pot holders, pot holders!” she cried, looking around furiously, completely forgetting where she had left them. Of course there was Lydia, standing with one hand on her hips and offering the damned pot holders casually with the other. Her smirk clearly said, I told you so. Phoebe snatched the pot holders from her and extracted the burnt French Toast.

Burnt indeed. Blackened. Phoebe stared down at the charred mass of her creation with dismay.

“Well,” she heard Rafael laugh. She looked up at him pleadingly, waiting for him to rescue her from Lydia’s words, George’s scoff, the mocking that hung thicker than the smoke in the air. “Well, it looks like we’ll be going out for breakfast after all.” George gave a soft chuckle and Lydia was already moving towards her mink coat.

“No!” Phoebe’s shout froze them all where they stood. “Enough is enough. I’ve had it with you all thinking I’m not good enough and we’re going to stay right here because I’ve prepared this French Toast and I spent all afternoon yesterday getting ready this moment and now that it’s out of the oven you’re going to EAT IT.”

There was a stunned silence. She pointed imperiously at the kitchen table.

Rafael was the first to move. He grabbed one of the four plates she had left stacked on the countertop and walked to her side. “Right,” he said firmly. “Mom, Dad?” Lydia and George lined up behind him with twin expressions of horror. Smirking, Phoebe dished out one burnt toast slice onto each plate, then primly handed each party a knife and a fork. There was an awkward shuffling of feet, the screech of chairs being pulled back along the tiled floor, the awkward crunch as the knives forced their way into the black bread.

Rafael placed a bite into his mouth. His eyes betrayed him for a moment, going first wide with shock, then tight with effort, and then he swallowed. “Phoebe!” he crowed. “It’s delicious. A budding home chef we have here. Mom, Dad? You see how hard Phoebe has worked to make you happy?” Phoebe could have kissed him.

Lydia swallowed like it was a live bug going down. George still seemed to be chuckling around his bite. “I’d say she made a valiant effort,” her father-in-law said, slicing into his piece a second time, and eyeing her with a new note in his eye. Could it be… respect? Waving away the errant tendrils of smoke that still clung to the air, he took a second bite. He looked over at her and winked.

November 5 - Divine intervention

You are my pleasure, you are my pain. Was it divine intervention that brought me to you, or the devil’s curse? I came home that night, drunk off of wine. Everything feels better after three glasses of wine. I was operating by rote, robotic, not conscious, when I locked the door with my left hand, applied the dead bolt with my right, while the left was already reaching up to perform the second motion of switching on both light switches: the top for the living room, the bottom for the kitchen. This is what I called them anyway, since it was really a studio and all the rooms were one room, but I had bought furniture that imposed these human, inconsequential divides upon the space.

When I come home, you are already passed out on the bed, and I want to ignore you with every tendon and axon and neuron in my body. But just as I flip on the lights, you let out a cough that is more of a wheeze, and it makes my heart catch and I find myself looking down on you tenderly instead of batting you upside the head. So instead I kneel to unlace your shoes – which you have forgotten to take off – unlace them and set them neatly in the corner, like two sentries standing guard for the night. I have brought you pizza in a box, two slices of cheese, which are just out of the oven, bubbling under the cardboard, only because you have requested it.

“I’m hungry,” you said over the phone. Followed by a confused, “Wait, where are you?” You got home before me and it took you several sentences to realize I wasn’t there.

“I’m having a glass of wine at the French café. I’ll be home soon,” I promise.

“I’m hungry,” you repeat.

‘I’ll being you pizza,” I promise. “I’m a block from the pizza place.”

In fact, I am not. I am a good ten minute walk from the pizza place, but I will do anything to increase your happiness. I have forgotten my umbrella, so I walk through the slanting rain that dusts down on my hair, and fetch you two slices of cheese, and shield the box with my body on the walk home so the slices do not become soggy; my body can bear the brunt.

I feel as though I should be black and blue all over, and am surprised to find, when I look in the mirror, that my flesh it still flesh-colored, that my eyes are still green, that my hair is still a matted, blondish-brown (although darker for the rain). I always hated that term, as a child. Blondish-brown. The in between-ness of it, the neither blonde nor brown, the you are a mutt, a mongrel, a hyphen. No one notices hyphens.

Nothing holds my attention like it used to. This is how you’ve ruined me, I think with a pout, as I look over at you sleepy soundly and I try to find something I can do in the studio that won’t wake you. But nothing holds my attention like it used to. Not the newspaper, which I can barely skim. Not the book I am reading, whose words might as well be written in a foreign language, for all the sense that they make. Even computer solitaire feels stale while you slumber on my bed, your snoring louder than my brain. In this moment, I think: I hate you I hate you I hate you and I know that it is the truth. You cough again and my heart catches for the second time in a span of two hours, and I rush over with a glass of water that you don’t notice because you are asleep.

The bigger fool am I.

I feel like my face is leaking. Oh no; those are my tears. Good, my skin is not yet melting off like wax. I play with a candle flame for a while.

I slice off a chunk of cheddar cheese not because I am hungry but because my teeth want to gnaw. The serrated knife finds the tip of my thumb, so discreetly that for a moment I’m not sure what I felt had been real.

“Did it get me?” I ask. The bead of red blood tells me yes, the knife got me. I have band-aids in the bathroom, but the wound isn’t deep and I’m not concerned, so for the moment, I just suck up the red in between bites of cheddar cheese. It will be my dose of nutritional iron for the day, I decide. Only once I wipe my hands of the last crumbs do I go fishing underneath the bathroom sink.

By the time I remove the band-aid an hour later (sticky and dissolved because I have done dishes in the interim) the sides of the wound have knit together like two chapped lips puckered for a kiss.

How fast flesh wounds heal, I muse. Would I could say the same for those of the soul. I hate fighting with you, but we have fought, and so tonight while you sleep soundly I simmer inside like a soup set over a low burner on the stove and then forgotten. By the time you remember it, hours later, the edges of the pan are brown, crusted. I’m surprised to note that my fingertip wound has knitted up cleanly, that it does not have this brown, crumbly puss burping out from it.

My mother always said: never go to bed angry.

My father always said: everything will feel better in the morning. I want to wake you up and ask you which you would prefer, but you look so angelic when you sleep that I go back to deliberating with my reflection in the mirror. “Mom’s advice, or Dad’s?” I ask. My reflection purses her lips. I wonder if I look as drunk as my mirrored self, then laugh with relief. Nobody looks that drunk.

I go to bed not because I am tired but because I have absolutely nothing else to do.

By morning your arm is around me; it is your tacit way of saying you have forgiven me, and therefore I have forgiven you, and I do not protest as I curl into your body with a contented sigh.

“So we’re okay then?” you ask sleepily, happily, and I purr out agreement. There is contentment in the early morning sunlight that falls on the sheets.

“Do you believe in divine intervention?” I ask suddenly, raising my head from your chest.

“What?” you say absently, not understand why I have asked this. But then, neither do I.

“Nothing,” I say, settling back into the crook of your arm.