An Excerpt from The Silence We Eat

Packages

I suggest to my husband that he register her with the knitting club at the library and he does. She skips her meetings all the time and blames it on her developing dementia. I wonder how she constantly remembers that she has dementia yet forgets her sessions. I never bother to ask. The few times I have spoken to my husband in her presence, she walks over his words and responds to me. He doesn’t complain. He stays still with his hands dangling near the pockets of his trousers like the balconies outside project houses in New York City.

PACKAGES

The farmers keep delivering my eggs to the wrong address.
 
I hear my neighbor mumbling near my mailbox but I don’t care to listen. He is an old man. He is funny and he has scanty grey hair on his head sticking out unevenly like an overused broom-stick.
 
My mother-in-law nags that I watch too many movies. She says perhaps, that’s why my ovaries are dead. Although I listen to her, I do not have enough happiness to argue with her. Sometimes, I dream of her. I see her sucking my blood and changing. I see her wrinkled face and almost bald eyebrows transforming to youth. I see her eyes becoming bold and fierce with thick dark circles around them. I see her smoothing fingers around her hair; long strands of braids, about 52 of them, wrapped around her head and her waist; slender, her hips; robust to carry twin children on her sides.
 
He comes home midday, sweeping the garage floor with his brand-new Benz. He pats the bonnet after shutting the front door at the left. He calls her Lucy and he does not look at me the same way he looks at her, with smiley eyes above his pointed nose and thin lips on his almost oval face. He is 5’8”, so it is safe to say I look up to him, literally and metaphorically. As a housewife, what other things can I aspire to other than watching movies, arranging furniture, and having my mother-in-law sweep sorrowful words into my thoughts.
 
I suggest to my husband that he register her with the knitting club at the library and he does. She skips her meetings all the time and blames it on her developing dementia. I wonder how she constantly remembers that she has dementia yet forgets her sessions. I never bother to ask. The few times I have spoken to my husband in her presence, she walks over his words and responds to me. He doesn’t complain. He stays still with his hands dangling near the pockets of his trousers like the balconies outside project houses in New York City.
 
Sometimes I imagine my thoughts to be cars, parked closed to him. Close enough to feel and see through the windows of his heart, yet, too far away to touch. I have not told him that the last pregnancy test I took came out positive and that I am two months in. He does not suspect anything.
 
I have not told him about the admission to the private college or the interview proposal to discuss one of the pieces on my blog. He doesn’t even know that I have a blog; he is unaware that I have this much to myself. He watches me intensely at night while I pretend to sleep. His stares pierce me in the same way I pierce the sky when I look at it. But he doesn’t find anything. He sucks in only what I choose to tell him, the same way he sucks a cigarette.
 
All of the memories we have shared chip off the cigarette’s lit end. They die down to ashes. He doesn’t remember our anniversaries, our birthdays, or the first date we had when he parked his car near the edge of a cliff, knowing all too well that I fear heights. He doesn’t remember the imagination that we shared while we rested our necks on each other’s shoulders with bodies lingering like tangled hair strands; how we painted imageries of two energy filled children running around our bedroom while we snuggle in each other’s arms.
 
Sometimes I wonder how I have endured this much. I think of how I have swallowed my anger in silence every time the farmers mailed my eggs to the wrong address. I think of my happiness as a broken branch from my body, bound to a strange tree. I am sad that it is broken but I am equally happy that it is growing with someone or something who can nurture it sufficiently, someone with the experience of growing things that don’t end up dying prematurely.
 
I say to myself, tonight, I will tell him everything. But something in me feels like I am selling myself to the devil, with a banner that reads,
“For Sale: all of myself,
since those who have me, don’t know me.”
 
As I speak to my husband, he doesn’t flinch or blink. His eyes stay glued to my body like it were one of the cars he is about to purchase. His reaction invade my confessions and he looks like the man I first fell in love with, again. He looks like the man whose eyes longed to behold me, whose palms craved for my body and whose ears hungered for my words. He looks like the man that went missing the first time the farmers delivered my eggs to the wrong address.

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