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The stranger will attack you tonight, so rinse the stigmata of beet juice from both palms as the stove clock flashes towards seven. Listen as your ladle taps the fat, skims its bowl like a sled over the waxed crust. Your half-thawed bullion is cold. This is not Hot Borscht at the Russian Tea Room with the revolving glass bear whose jowl reminisces some overthrown czar. This is not even how you and the stranger met, fifteen years past, somewhere between sex and chicken frying. This is nothing more than you praying for twilight to turn a good man bad.
You settle into cooking the way your mother cooked, the way only teenagers and new wives prepare dinner now. Scoop lard from a bucket shaped like plumber’s cement, layer thighs, legs and wings, anticipate that first sharp sizzle. You remember being young? Pawing your mother’s waist with mud-pie fingers as chicken shimmied?
Didn’t you collect the napkins she fanned out to soak oil like blotter paper? Didn’t you dream the grease stains into countries of your own naming where strangers shouted their secrets as the sun tumbled down? At school, your pulse fluttered with the knowledge over a recess of boys chipping molars on monkey bars and girls braiding their hair. At home, napkin maps of your suitors creamed your pink nightstand.
You learned to dream from your mother. She draped the family room with Moroccan scarves and hung bronze figurines of lovers twisted in ways you still don’t understand. She played 45’s heavy with African or Indian rhythms that beat into you the way your father did when he found the maggots, the coil of parasitic life, invading your nightstand, drunk on chicken fat. He threw out your future destinations, your mother’s bells and silks and radiant blues, and became a stranger.
The borscht might look too much like blood, you think, as you abandon the menu change. Robbers devour chicken and fries. Those men on Death Row never want boiled beets for their last meal. You fantasize the stranger will risk parole for your thighs, suckle your chicken breasts. If you survive the attack, the stranger will request that you cook his final dinner. The years he sits in prison will be your practice. You will fry chicken each night, stock the pantry with every spice from black pepper to thyme; some nights blush the skin with paprika or heat it with cayenne, then step onto a summertime porch and worship bugs, dust, the crest of far-off mountains bleached like driftwood, the simple life you cherish after surviving the attack.
“He can’t let me down. How goddamn hard can it be to pretend you’re a thief?" you question the beet-engorged sink disposal. “I told him over and over. Just this one time. It’s my anniversary, too. Just do what I want. If you don’t want to do it, then lie."
Familiarize yourself with lies. Night cream guaranteed to dissolve wrinkles. Diet desserts lush as French terrines. How your husband is not really a stranger, but your best friend through a myriad of revelations harsh enough to fluster angels. His fondness for pig’s feet, internet porn, David Carradine Kung-Fu, the truth.
Your husband slams his Saab door at 8:10. The bank holds him up. A loan officer’s inside joke. There is no ski mask, no knife-blade reflection like in one of those B-movies where the victim falls in love with the hit man.
Your husband calls you to the lawn. He loosens his tie, its navy stripes curving as he offers to water your garden because cookbooks overwhelm you, especially the ones from New York City with line drawings instead of photos. What is Classic Waldorf Salad without a glossy spread of walnuts and Granny Smiths? You look so tired. Too tired for this game, he says.
“But you swore to rob me while I fry chicken. To pretend. It’s planned down to everything."
You want to say don’t be such a pussy. Act like a man. Feel me. Feel.…
Your husband says he's fatigued even contemplating how easily the two of you could stumble off the back porch steps into an August night. You are so delicate, so feminine. Your hands are so pink.
“It’s the borscht," you whisper.
Inside your ribcage a heart was supposed to beat, the five lobes of your lungs rise and fall. The knot you weave during dinner each night over the same conversation and the same salad greens tickles like phlegm. You want to cough until you hurt. You want to swear that you won’t break, won’t trick him the way sun tricks evening horizons with its slow perjure of disappearing light. The cuts won’t even need to heal, sweetheart, because this is all make believe.
He says shadows exhaust your eyes across the tips of overgrown grass. Routine as a stop sign, he will mow on Saturday. Sip pink lemonade and smile with lips plastered in pulp. Pretend not to notice how summer sticks to your skirt, roils your sea scent from beneath the thin linen because you have refused to bathe. Maybe the stranger will follow that certain smell, will lap you like an animal as you whimper for him to make you bleed. Not down there, you’ll say, but for real. My throat. Pretend to cut it, even just a little. Pretend to be terrified. Pretend to be alive.
“But sugar fawn, I could never hurt you."
“Just pretend," you’ll say.
“It’s too bright. The neighbors."
“Then wait until goddamn twilight, dear."
Twilight hides things. Exonerates rose bush thorns, gray hairs, boredom. The cigarette-yellowed moons setting at the base of your thumbnails, and how sometimes you feel so sleepy when you focus on the crescents, that you almost forget to breathe.
“Do you want to do it over fried chicken? Who likes beets, anyway? And will you steal the stereo or Palm Pilot? No, wait…I don’t want to know."
With a push your husband abandons the garden rows where ingredients for chutney push through chemically edified peat. He doesn’t ask you to fix a snack beforehand or go down on him or even double-check last night’s baseball stats.
“Remember, hon, you promised to use a knife. And wear the turtleneck, not the black T-shirt."
You trail him through the kitchen and halfway up the second landing towards your bedroom. The bathroom lock clicks as you rush downstairs, pause with a wistful gaze at the foyer where anniversary tuberoses and peonies flank the entrance table. You ordered him not to bring flowers, for how could a stranger know?
Your husband, still a stranger, introduced himself at a 4th of July picnic between plates of cold chicken and barbecue beans. He talked not just about movies, but ink and pulp books with titles too long for you to remember and settings of gold-leafed sands or Greenwich Village lofts, places you almost recalled at the musty, dog-eared corners of a dream. Places where strangers knew you preferred steak medium rare and how hard you liked to be touched.
You ached and bucked through the black powder of fireworks; afterwards, forced the stranger from your bed, scrambled his name like Scrabble tiles while fantasizing who you’d meet by Labor Day. But the stranger stayed. Crashed on your couch, rubbed his scent of hair gel and cologne on your duvet. He offered an ear during marathon phone chats, intuiting just what advice--though pat as fortune cookies--you needed. By the time conversations focused on how much royal icing frosted a wedding cake for fifty people instead of the downtown theater’s Karate double feature, you acquired a husband. You crumpled all remaining unexplored maps and crossed out a life of unmade journeys.
Now you sweat over a fryer as the lard melts clear and the chicken whines to be turned. The stranger is late. Your father, fortified with a belt or willow switch, forged the importance of time-telling in bruises that mottled your innocent behind. When you visit your mother in prison, she tells you this. Drags menthol Kools, plain mouth creased like a roadmap, and begs you to remember. The concept of self-defense never registered in your two-stoplight hometown, so your mother thumbs romance novels in a cell. She can’t even knit and purl booties for her unborn grandchildren. Anything can be a weapon in the right, or wrong, hands. When she murdered your father, you accepted the news the way you accept flowers delivered to your office.
The parlor tarts and sewing circles discussed your mother in past tense, like a life sentence was more lethal than your father’s hands around her throat.
The women whispered, “Her bouffant was so Ann Margaret in Viva Las Vegas."
“There’s kitsch, then there’s crap."
“She never could set a buttonhole."
“I heard he drank the money she saved for a Serger."
“Did you know they had to pick pieces of his brain from the garbage disposal?"
You responded to their gossip, “If you’re not supposed to talk to strangers, why would you live with one?"
Where was the stranger? Your spontaneity crumbles like the two yellow layers you remove from the oven and slather with frosting before the cake cools. Maybe your husband really is your husband and no stranger at all? He knows how to make you toss and turn like a child attempting sleep on Christmas Eve. A deviation from the plan--home from the bank at 8:05, attack at 8:15, make love at 8:25, dinner, cold chicken, at 8:35--will soak you, satiate you, celebrate the union of two paired souls mirroring each other. The stranger will vanish and your prince, fifteen years traveling, will return home and transport you to a paradise of medium rare New York cuts, steaming borscht, and living rooms where women drape Moroccan scarves without fear.
You wait until the chicken, lifted from saffron-colored oils, cools and the potato salad warms. You chop bunches of parsley for garnish. The hair anchored behind your ears seems to crackle as you pace the kitchen. The stove clock taunts 9:12, each second stifling the speculation of your future happiness.
Your hands around the knife feel comfortably happy, like when they grip your husband in bed to shove him from a snore.
“Self-defense," your mother swears during the monthly visits. “Don’t matter that he was asleep. He’d hurt one of us sooner or later. Can’t you see it was a matter of time? I just wanted to get it over with."
You wanted to whisper to your mother how your father only yelled and threw out your maps, hit you just that one time, but the glass partition between you absorbed sound as if she sat ensconced in ice. The sculpture of a stranger who stole the other stranger from you without asking.
Theft among strangers works this way, you think, as you clutch the knife and sneak up the stairs towards your bedroom. Stealing from someone who means nothing to you is the worst crime of all, because if the two of you had met, you might’ve become friends...maybe even husband and wife.
You open the bedroom door and see your husband asleep on his side of the bed. The air smells of deodorant you can’t name, two-hundred dollar cologne from an unfamiliar department store. Your husband would never disregard your anniversary plans, your dreams. Who was this snoring man? You recognize nothing but the desire in you to steal from the stranger, for your husband would want it this way.
You enter the room and slam the door behind you. The stranger jolts awake.
“Hey, hon, sorry I fell asleep. Let me change and I’ll be right down. Why don’t you let me take you out instead?"
“Take me out?" you answer in a voice you have never heard.
“But first let me hold you. Come and give me a kiss."
You creep towards the bed, blade handle snug in your palm as you answer, “Now let’s just get this over with, dear. You know I don’t kiss strangers."
Suzanne Burns's second poetry collection, The Flesh Procession, is now available from Bleak House Books (A Division of Diversity Incorporated). She has recently been nominated for her third Pushcart Prize, and is currently working on a new novel.
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