R. P. Singletary, author of “At Least Since The Third Grade”, is a lifelong writer and a native of the southeastern United States, with work appearing or forthcoming in Literally Stories, CafeLit, JONAH, Ancient Paths, Syncopation, The Chamber, Microfiction Monday, and elsewhere.
*****
An ancient and pedigreed family recipe, what her may-she-rest-in-peace Mama had called receipts due to her Charleston roots and brogue, had long concocted versions of itself in her dyed head’s dark kitchen, at least since the third grade once she learned how to cook a proper supper and perm her hair for church like any decent woman coming of age ought. Since that year, she’d forever wanted to showcase, put on the dog, throw out some savory spread of her own creative fashioning and commit some delicious and unique transgression all hers, serve up right, them gooey ingredients of gossip long deserved.
Catharsis! That was the word she had to look up last night after not knowing its meaning for the umpteenth time in her romance read that never put down or come to believe, damn, still more chapters? Cleansing of soul. She knew the vengeful culinary moment would last about as long as her red velvet cakes at Sunday suppers, but in none of her mental-meal scenarios since grammar school had she fully digested the dish: Both sons … both daughters gay … dear God– Verbless gossip always the worst kind, dangerous the sin, easy to miss without listening good and clean the first time. Too sad … no grands … not real ones … not fit for any reunion.+
She knew the vengeful culinary moment would last about as long as her red velvet cakes at Sunday suppers…
Whispered half-breaths and pained, plucked eyebrows arching, she imagined, would surface from the crowd, and hands like metaphorical napkins would rise from her dining audience to catch morsels of morality not wished upon each other even amid one single fleeting half-second of unadulterated hate from darkened bed on Sunday night after prayers all said and tithing counted.
More to come through that awful combo of faded speech and side-shaking head bent over in shame of the talk, of the life, the waste and abandon. She connived as cook, albeit from that tasteless, tattered book of gutless custom, but oh, how her crowd would lap it up, yes they would, she certain of that. And in her little, aged mind, she completed in grander, even more self-righteous and unaware, all-important tone: And that … um … in college … at least one … so long ago.
She liked how she’d perfected all the interrupted pauses of the short phrases, the emphatic key words pregnant and lingering, squeezing for catharsis; she loved that word most, though she kept misspelling it in her jumbled notes without realizing the irony, that word in her spelling granted extra i, and she needed it far more than she realized. All scripted but external the seriousness meant only for jolly, or so she thought.
She’d been journaling all the last two years of pandemic and this the best fiction she could devise against– Twin sister. The real, spoiled trash of fantasy she’d written and burnt like poison in the back yard, all alone after nightfall last week, scared after looking only once over the page of her book.
She would practice in the bedroom mirror every morning while her second husband Don showered. Pull out the diary from under her thermal underwear in the middle right dresser drawer, flip to the prior day’s page and whip out the calming lip stick, as she practiced upon the phrases of angry-sweet words with the attention of mirror in the dimmed light of every dawn. Both sons, daughters…no real grands…and that um…. She hadn’t planned it like this, she told herself as she asked Don to zip her up.
“Thanks, hun.”
Her aged baseball athlete of a husband had emerged from the bathroom, full head of hair wet and in the front and on the sides salt-n-peppered, his favored and stained beach towel almost unable to wrap around his pudgy, hairy waist. For a senior, he reigned a pitcher stud, she thought. She had enjoyed their love-making last night and this morning. She admired the memory. His reflection passed behind her as he walked toward their closet, and in the morning’s softness, everything in the darkened room comforted. Then Don’s reflection left the mirror altogether, as he bent over for shoes. She saw herself, her reflected solo self, and it filled up the entirety of the mirror, alone and large. Large, mainly. She hadn’t aged as well.
“That mirror-mirror treatin’ fairest fair lady of the castle ssswwwell-well today?” Lighthearted, he spoke like he lived, always a singsongy turn of phrase and ease to gait that matched his jocular persona, useful in business and pleasure as he’d learned, just as on every other playing field of this life, his good humor well-liked, if not loved by all, even his opponents who would end up in smiles.
Vanity lost her. She couldn’t answer. The journal’s litany of words seized up her brain.
“Seen my Sunday shoes, wifey?”
Eventually, she pointed but without looking away from herself, captivated by her loss. When did it leave? Her pale face said it all. And she saw it, but not the date as she’d asked.
He looked for priss, as he called it, on his side of the room. He tried to care about his choice of brown or black for church. To please her. Everything to please. To please her. He knew it made her feel better for him to fuss over fashion. One day, not able to make this choice, he thought, too soon that comin’. He sighed and told himself another joke and chuckled, but Cordelia didn’t ask if he were well or what was so funny.
All this part of their routine, too. Sadly accustomed to every familiar flavor, overly familiar their marriage, their stale love-making, the pretend. After zipping up her dress, the next of her ridiculous requests forthcoming, he would need to sit down on the bed, fatigued from love-making, shower-standing, her demanding pretense. In the coming light, Don grew too tired to eye her neck creases or hold the birthing hips any longer in his hands or mind.
Zipped chore done, he moved to the next and chose the brown shoes, which he hadn’t worn once this year. Cordelia steadied herself by studying images of her former self slid into the frame of the vanity mirror. She had but a few jewelry remnants from her mother at that point.
“At least I have these pearls and the Secret Santa make-ups from the King Street department store,” she said to the air. She caressed the fake-silver hairbrush.
“Dear, you say somethin’, Cordelia?”
She didn’t respond. Don found his brown belt and left the room. Cordelia decided the prior night’s sleep had little altered her hairstyle. She had showered waist-down in her hurry. They had finally remembered about the switch-over to daylight time. Now late, and Don was to usher.
No one, save their dead parents, knew the actual intensity of their daughters’ lifelong rivalry. The twin had not shown up for either parent’s funeral, gossip forgiving her over the new virus on airplanes and she unable to make cross-country drive at this late age. No one had seen the moved-off sister for decades, some even thought her dead, but the preacher had told Cordelia she was coming this Sunday, had some kind of business to tend to down South and was scheduled to fly in from Cali days before the weekly worship service.
Cordelia knew her sister better than the preacher or any of the other kin. All talk, never followed through on word or deed. What dear Cordelia didn’t know was the pandemic had changed her twin, that sister already at church while she had sat stuck in her lost vanity in the bedroom. Striking the honeyed resemblance across generations in that family, the twin had brought the child no one knew had grown up, and the duo greeted everyone as if nothing had changed from the week prior.
At every turn in the perfumed sanctuary, mouths put out crumbs of good taste before the Lord, “Mornin’, Cordelia, mornin’” and that twin’s sweet Hollywood tongue dished again and again with the likes of “Mornin’, mornin’, so precious that dress, hun – could – eat – it – up – just cute as Easter brunch, all the trimmin’s, my goodness” before softening to say, “Think that sister gonna show?”
*****
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