Beneath all of the hurt there was the beautiful reality that she had gotten exactly what she wanted. That the beige-gray-blue-gray cake frosted new walls in the new house buoyed by the white plastic oak counters and steel handles were hers now, and so was the too-dry organic pre-cooked unseasoned roast chicken she placed on them. And only she could choose it that way. And though she didn't pay for it, she had still picked it out, so it was hers.
Five years ago, she stepped into an older house, in an older neighborhood, that was more "charming", and the inside was painted red beating heart red and flooded with quaint children's drawings hung up all over. She lingered by the front entrance, because the hardwood floors seemed nice and she didn't want to scratch them with her heeled boots. But she also lingered because it wasn't her house, and it wasn't her life, and if she stepped further into it she would feel that she was stealing. She watched the man who had no intention of staying long, who didn't even bother to turn on the hallway light as he ran down and into a room around the corner and came back out in seconds, wristwatch retrieved. She watched him reemerge from the dark hallway, and in an instant they were back outside and locking the door and on their way to dinner. And it was the only time she saw the house, and they both more or less wanted to keep it that way, and neither of them thought much of it at the time, but over the years she could never forget that, even though she wanted to.
She had seen too much — the outdated tan marble countertop where for sure they had laughed with all of their friends over until so late into the night that all the kids fell asleep on the couch and had to be dragged back to the car. The wine glasses they imbibed from. And she had seen the little spot in the doorway with little pencil ticks on the paint with little names and dates to show how tall they were getting. She wanted to forget those little names written in pencil and the woman who wrote them.
The wine glasses had been thrown out the drawings moved to storage quietly cleanly and when the house was put up for sale, she saw on Zillow that the red was painted over. Her taste, impeccably modern and inoffensive, had picked the right property, a fit, outwardly joyous and superficial Goliath who could not be taken down. And a nice building for him to sleep in. And furnishings, finishings, finishing, four bedrooms for the two of them, three bedrooms eerie downstairs and vaguely referential to the three people they were replacing. Cake frosted new walls forever uncorrupted by tick marks, unclaimed and so belonging to no one, and at night suburban streetlights spotlit beige-gray-blue-gray—now silver, but they were silent and always would be. The house was, mostly, empty, a testament to its excessive breadth and impenetrability, vacuous and highly pressurized.
She occupied herself, deeply familiar and deceptively inconstant, who seemingly had always desired the same things. Yet somehow she was also stitching on top of someone else's pieces; adorning what had already been there. She thought she knew how to cook, for example — a deeply Midwestern trait that didn't carry over into a cosmopolitan setting, a fact that was at once embarrassing and slightly endearing. A sterile and perfectionist atmosphere craves glimpses of tolerable imperfection like the constrained ripples of water on the placid pond-fountains of a golf course. And her every tendency to buy pre-cooked food in microplastic bags and aluminium tins could be indulged and accommodated within the bank-vault Smart Refridgerator, where ranks and files of portioned Kombucha and Yogurt sat tidily obeying their own bland neutrality. But it gestured at a maternal form of homemaking, and just vaguely enough recalled a mother's rotation of recipes that takes years to perfect, and behind it was the shadow of something that had been real, intimate, and warm. This, she figured, was exactly what she had wanted.
He, meanwhile, was deeply interested in being perceived as an easygoing and simple man. He approached everything with a radical uncriticality and lack of discernment, except in crucial moments when he pursued relatively spontaneous changes of course. There was his past marriage, past children, past jobs, past houses, past dogs, past parents, past hometown, which all went mostly unacknowledged, as if it goes without saying. The pristine chlorinated pool in the back courtyard was unused, though pictorially pleasant, behind the sliding glass doors of the kitchen.
The kitchen.
He sat in a lawn chair on the back patio while she was inside, in the kitchen, preheating the oven and bringing a tray of pre-cooked chicken to a thaw. Two off-white cats stirred in the next room over. The plastic oak mantel was striped with brown-scalloped garlands and topped with a paper turkey invitingly presenting a sign that read Happy Thanksgiving. Plastic pumpkins sat ineffectively in the foyer, brought in from the month before. Anonymous smooth jazz played from a hidden speaker. The mini-fridge in the wine cellar mulled over some frosted glass bottles of vodka, awaiting ice and tonic water. One of the faux-leather stools at the plastic oak counter was draped over with an androgynous black hoodie, returned from the gym but not showing any physical signs of sweat or exhaustion.
She sprinkled some dried rosemary, halved some organic shallots, pulled out aluminium tins of stuffing, green beans, dinner rolls, opened the freezer to verify that the pint of pumpkin frozen yogurt was still there, for later. Everything got doused in a bit of very-very-extra-super-virgin-olive oil. Swiftly, the whole dinner seemed to be done. She poured two glasses of vodka tonics. "Baby," she called absentmindedly, "it's ready!"
He slid the glass door open, dance-walked up to the dining room, and called, "Smells amazing!" This was a constitutive statement — like an emcee announcing a musical guest, this suggested the presence of an amazing smell that wasn't obviously there before.
He pulled out his phone, checking his texts. Earlier, he had sent out an image of an illustrated cooked turkey, captioned with Love you guys!, to which he received Loved an image and a text that read, heartfelt, Love you too! Happy Thanksgiving from Florida. He looked up from his phone, and mentioned, towards the kitchen, "The kids say hi."
As the table was set, the cats came out from hiding and circled like vultures. The two humans sat down and dished up a couple plates of everything. The tradition, in years past, had been to go around the table, holding hands, and give thanks one by one. Young people often try, but ultimately sound unpoetic or trite; thanking for food, for education, for support from parents, for safety and comfort, for family and togetherness.
"Thank you, this is all so delicious," he assured, rubbing her arm. She smiled lovingly in return. They decided on a movie to watch later. He retold some story from his high school life that undoubtedly had more than a few fabrications and misrememberings. They bemoaned his coworker, a neighbor. He remembered what he was going to ask her earlier. "Oh, was that the right frozen yogurt from the store? They had Pumpkin, and they had Pumpkin Pecan."
She adjusted her hair, and scraped a small forkful of stuffing from the white plate beneath her on the table. She crossed her legs. "Yes! That was exactly the one I wanted."
