The Monday Night Cooking School - By Erica Bauermeister Page 0,13
women looked at each other. Carl’s wife nodded, then resolutely reached down, scooped the underside of the shell, and pulled it off the body. She looked at Claire.
“You can do it,” she said.
Claire turned to Ian. “No, thank you,” she replied, “I’m going to try this myself.” She walked over to the sink and picked up a crab. It was lighter than she had imagined, the underside of the shell oddly soft and fragile. She took a breath and put the crab down on the butcher block, facing away from her. Closing her eyes she slid her fingers under the side of the shell. The edges were knobby, cool against her skin. She gripped the shell and pulled. Nothing happened. She clenched her teeth against the thought of what she was doing and yanked again. With a wrenching sound, the shell came off in her hand.
“Give me the cleaver,” she said to Ian. With a sharp whack, she cut the crab in two. She walked over to the sink, her hands shaking.
THE LEATHERY PETALS of the crab’s lungs came loose between Claire’s fingers and flowed away with the cold water. As she stood at the sink, Claire’s body was shivering and yet—and this ran counter to everything she thought about herself—deeply stirred. It was like jumping off the high diving board when you believed you couldn’t, hitting the cold water and feeling it fly over your hot skin. Claire the bank teller, Claire the mother, would never have killed a crab. But then again, Claire thought, these days she was a lot of things she didn’t recognize.
When exactly had she become the human bundling board in her own bed, Claire wondered. She didn’t know. Well, no, that wasn’t true—she did know. The first time she held her daughter and their bodies curled into each other. The forty-fifth time she read Goodnight Moon; the morning James touched her breast and teasingly told their nursing son, “Remember, those are mine,” and she wondered when those breasts, whose firm and luxurious weight she had loved to hold in her own hands, had ceased in any way to be hers.
How could she explain to James what it was like—he who left the house every morning and cut the physical tie with his children with the apparent ease of someone slipping off a pair of shoes? He was still separate—a condition she viewed with anger or jealousy, depending on the day—and she was not.
When they were in bed at night and she felt James turn away in resignation, a movement as heavy as the flipping of a stone slab, she wanted to yell that she did remember, she did. She remembered watching James’s mouth long before she knew his name, imagining her finger along the smooth upper curve of his ears, her tongue traveling the hills and valleys of his knuckles. She remembered the shock of their first kiss, although they had known it was coming for days, moving toward each other slowly until it seemed there was no space left and yet still it was a surprise, how suddenly her life shifted, how certain she was that she would do anything as long as it meant she didn’t have to move her lips, her tongue, her body away from James’s, whose curves and rhythms matched her own until it didn’t matter that they were right outside her apartment and the keys were in her hand, thirty seconds was too long to stop.
She remembered his long fingers slipping lower on her waist as they danced at her younger sister’s wedding. The backyard as the sprinklers ran and the neighbors had a party next door and she had rolled on top of him while the water fell on her hair. The endless winter mornings in bed as the gray light slowly brightened and James caressed her bulging belly and assured her she was the sexiest woman he had ever seen. She remembered, she did. They were the memories she played in her head these days as she soothed herself to sleep, long after his breathing told her it was safe.
It wasn’t just that she was a mother now, or in need of some good lingerie, as her younger sister had recommended. She realized, standing there at the sink, that when she replayed those scenes in her head, she was trying to find someone she had lost, and it wasn’t James. James was still the same.
. . .
“THAT’S PROBABLY CLEAN NOW.” Carl’s wife was standing next to