was all too ready to forget her own body, which had ballooned and shrunk and which she had no time to do anything about anyway. When men did smile at her, it was with safe, benign smiles, filled with neither hope nor interest.
“You are out of circulation, honey,” Claire’s older sister had told her, “you might as well get used to it.”
James was the one person who still saw her in the old light; he wanted the love life they’d had before children, didn’t understand why, at the end of the day, she didn’t want him. When he’d reach for her, after she had finished nursing the baby to sleep and was finally, finally, on her way to shower off the day, all she could think was, “Not you, too?” She couldn’t tell him; it seemed too awful, but he seemed to sense it anyway and after a while he stopped trying.
Standing there by the chopping block, Claire realized that she was being looked at by a man she didn’t know, for the first time in years. It wasn’t an unqualified success of an experience, she thought wryly, as she realized that the sandy-haired man’s gaze had moved beyond her to halt, with an air of dumbstruck infatuation, on the woman with the olive skin and brown eyes—and yet it was exciting in its own way to be visible, Claire thought, to be tossed back with the other breeders. She had thought she was past all that, thought the needs of her children’s two small bodies fulfilled all of hers.
“HOW ARE WE DOING over here?” Lillian came up next to Carl at the sink.
“We’re ready for the boiling water,” said the man with the sandy hair.
“I know a lot of people use boiling water, but I do it differently,” Lillian explained. “It’s a little harder on you, but it’s easier for the crab, and the meat has a more elegant taste if it’s cleaned before it’s cooked.” Lillian reached into the sink and smoothly picked up one of the crustaceans from behind, its front pincers flailing like a drunk in slow motion. She laid the crab belly-side down on the chopping block.
“If you’re going to do it this way, it’s better for both you and the crab if you are decisive.” She placed two fingers on the back of the crab for a quiet moment, then gripped her long, slim fingers under the back end of the crab’s upper shell and gave a quick jerk, like a carpenter ripping a wooden shingle from a roof. The armored covering came off in her hand and the crab lay open on the block, the exposed interior a mixture of gray and dark yellow.
“Now,” she said, “you take a sharp knife.” She picked up a heavy, square-shaped cleaver, “and you do this.” The cleaver came down with a sharp thump, and the crab’s body lay in two symmetrical pieces, legs moving feebly. Claire stared.
“It’s okay,” Lillian said, as she carefully picked up the body and walked to the sink, “the crab is dead now.”
“Perhaps we should tell that to its legs,” Carl commented, smiling sympathetically at Claire’s expression.
Lillian gently ran water over the crab’s interior, her fingers working through the yellow and gray.
“What…?” said Claire, pointing at the gray sickle shapes that were falling into the sink.
“Lungs,” replied Lillian. “They’re beautiful, in a way. They feel a little like magnolia petals.
“If you want the sauce to seep into the meat, you’ll need to crack the shells of the legs,” Lillian added. “It’ll work better if you do this.” She brought the crab back to the chopping block and took the cleaver once again; she made a quick, decisive cut between each of the legs, leaving the crab in ten pieces, then took the side of the cleaver and cracked each piece with a solid, rocking motion.
“I know,” Lillian said, “it’s a lot to take in. But what we are doing has the virtue of being honest—you aren’t just opening a can and pretending the crabmeat came from nowhere. And when you’re honest about what you are doing, I find care and respect follow more easily.
“Now I’ll leave you to try.”
The man with the sandy hair looked at Claire. “My name’s Ian,” he volunteered. “If you want to clean, I can do this part. I mean, if it makes you nervous.”
Claire looked past Ian and saw that Carl’s wife had picked up a crab and was putting it on the chopping block. The two