Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self - By Danielle Evans Page 0,53

She’d walk him to the downtown grocery, though left to his own devices, if he shopped at all, it would be right down the block at C-Town, the fluorescent light and big red discount signs less disorienting than the cramped aisles, dark lighting, and six-dollar heads of lettuce at the store Eva preferred. She’d make him buy food for himself, remind him that it had been a long time since he couldn’t afford to eat better. By the time she’d finished filling baskets with dried pasta and fresh vegetables and jars of floating artichokes, they had so much food they had to take a cab back, food it took him months to entirely dispense with.

Back at his apartment, she’d make elaborate salads and stir-fried vegetables and pasta that always seemed to him a touch undercooked. She ’d cut vegetables into thin slivers and squirt them with fresh lemon and tahini. It was watching her cut that made him think of the blender a few months ago. He’d searched for the right one online, evaluating the photos and assorted specifics of blender after blender the way you might compare real estate or personal ads. It would make her life easier. Maybe she would cook at her apartment and think of him while pureeing soup. She would pick up the phone and invite him for dinner. He’d imagined arriving just in time for dinner, finding the table set with her mismatched and brightly colored dishes. He’d imagined eating salads with perfectly julienned carrots.

Thinking it through, though, even if Phil let him in, he should probably leave the blender. Contamination, and all that. Besides, Eva was the type to dwell on things: she’d look at the blender and start talking about the old apartment, or gentrification, or the way they were all slowly dying of chemical poisoning. She’d never cook with it. She’d put it in a closet, or she’d take it to her studio and mount it on one of her sculptures, fence it in with chicken wire. Better that he just buy her another and hope she didn’t remember it was a replacement for the first one he’d promised her. Besides, he’d be buying himself a whole new set of kitchen supplies anyway; if Eva would come to stay with him for a bit, she wouldn’t need her own. He’d make sure she had everything she wanted; the kitchen in the new place was small, but sunny, and he’d let her pick what it was she needed. Better that he wait to see what she said this afternoon before he gave her one more thing to cart to Brooklyn.

The waiter returned with Eva’s second drink. Her father had told her this was a celebratory lunch, she reasoned, though he hadn’t said what it was a celebration for. Eva was still watching the television, but between the volume on low and the woman at the bar tipsy and giggling, she couldn’t hear a word. The president was mouthing something from behind a podium, and she supposed she didn’t care.

“What happened to our kitten?” the waiter asked.

“Dick Cheney ate him,” said Eva.

The waiter laughed.

“Are you still waiting to order?” He nodded toward the empty chair.

Eva blushed, realizing she looked for all the world like a woman being stood up for a lunch date. It had been so many years since Eva had been without at least one lover on call that she was surprised by how quickly awkwardness could come back to her. Now she had the sense again that anyone could just by looking at her see that she did not belong to anyone, anywhere. Until the last few years of her life, when she’d gone flinging herself from lover to lover like a pinball, she’d considered her not-belonging a badge of honor rather than a source of shame. It had been the rallying cry of her motley crew of high school friends—Kim, the purple-haired girl in tortoiseshell glasses and leopard-print leggings; Lenny, who’d known he was gay before most of them knew the word as anything but an all-purpose pejorative; Irene, the only other black girl in her suburban private school class—they’d sit together at lunch and watch the petty dramas of their classmates and say out loud, Who wants that? Who wants those people, anyway? But high school had turned into college and then the handful of years afterward—Kim was living in Cameroon with the Peace Corps; Lenny was a lawyer in San Francisco; and Irene was busy playing Gallant

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