If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This: Stories by Robin Black

Author:Robin Black [Black, Robin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 0330520350
Amazon: B0036S4AAO
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2014-07-13T16:00:00+00:00

Pine

HEIDI’S KITCHEN FLOOR is marble tile, a hard and unforgiving platform for her clumsy gait. If it were me, I think, watching her, I would have put down pine—soft, uneven planks of gentle pine to absorb the step-clump, step-clump sound of my own feet. My foot, and then the pause that would be seared into my soul, that sad and silent pause. And then my other foot.

If it were me, I would have built a smaller kitchen too, I’m sure, a room of easy reaches and rolling carts. But Heidi, with her latest-model leg—her fourth she told me, since losing the original—Heidi is more defiant than I, perhaps. More feisty. Or possibly just more in denial. And so her kitchen is bowling-alley large. Stadium large. Superdome large. There are two cooktops, two dishwashers, two ovens, and a microwave. There are appliances so modern that their function is indiscernible, and these marvels are spread across three islands all in all, an archipelago of kitchen design, which Heidi navigates with great goodwill, cheerful as she clumps across each expanse.

Four of us, four women, are gathered here because Heidi wanted to bring together her friends who like to cook. She brightened, during chitchat at my daughter’s soccer game, when she asked me if I do and I said yes. Yes, I enjoy it.

As we empty our shopping bags onto the largest of the countertops, I learn that the other two women here are Heidi’s friends in a way that I am not. They know where she spent her vacation last August. They know where she keeps her coffee mugs. They know how she loves asparagus. They know that her husband, Roger, turned fifty last month, and they know why that fact is such a riot. Hilarious. They call her “Hei” and tease her about tendencies I cannot guess she has. “Well, you know Hei!” they say, smiling in the completely closed-circuit way of intimates. With their blond pageboy hair, their gray sweater sets, they look enough alike that I am forced to go for crude distinction at first just to remember which is which. One tall. One short.

“Well, that’s exactly Roger, isn’t it?” the short one says.

“Have you met Roger, Claire?” The tall one turns to me. “Don’t you just know what we mean?” And I tell her that I have met him, but only at the girls’ soccer games. Really just to say hello. Just as I met Heidi. My daughter, Alyssa, I explain, is on a team with their daughter, Katherine. I don’t really know Roger, I admit; and as if I have disqualified myself somehow, the tall woman allows her eyes to drift off me as she states to no one in particular: “Well, anyway.”

The thread of conversation is soon picked up, the story about Roger followed by a story about another husband, the husband of the short woman. He too has done something, or said something, worthy of their mirth. And so, it turns out, has the third. Every husband is comical, it seems, a figure of fun and yet also of obvious pride.

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