My old friends guilt and shame followed me around. I could always count on them to show up whenever I didn’t have my nose to the grindstone. I doubted they would ever go away. Having been trained at such an early age to believe that anything that made you feel good was inherently evil was impossible to completely root out. About as easy as straightening a bone that had grown crooked. Any attempt to fix it was unlikely to succeed and with the trying would come a lot of pain.
“Would you like to come in and take a closer look?” a man in his mid-fifties with a bushy red beard and a happy twinkle in his hazel eyes said to me. He stood in the doorway of one of the galleries, hands in the pockets of his khakis leaning against the doorframe. Either the owner or manager, I assumed.
My eyes drifted back to the surrealist painting in the window. It was large, spanning the entire storefront. The background was a collection of scenes painted in sparkling jewel tones––a jungle scene, a city, a beach, and more. The naked female figure, however––the one in the middle suspended amongst the colors––was painted in shades of gray. The skin on my arms broke out in goose bumps. The image hit way too close to home.
Most of my life up until the day I left Pennsylvania had been a black hole of anything that remotely resembled pleasure. The food my grandmother cooked was purposely bland and tasteless. Boiled chicken with no seasoning. White rice with no seasoning. She made sure to only buy the pieces of beef at the local supermarket that nobody wanted even though we could afford better; my grandfather owned a local car dealership. She’d then cook it until it was as tough as shoe leather and serve it up with a smile as if it were Michelin-rated fare.
“Find pleasure in uprightness, Sydney,” she’d say over and over.
Most of the time I choked it down only to avoid a beating.
And the clothes? The ones my grandmother bought me could’ve come from an Amish fashion catalogue, if there was such a thing. White long-sleeve blouses and black pants. Wool for winter and cotton for summer. Calf-grazing dresses. I lived in a pretty remote town. My high school was relatively small and not at all on the cutting edge of pop culture. But even in a town where some guys routinely came to school dressed in deer hunting fatigues I stood out as “one of the weird ones.”
“Come take a closer look,” he urged.
“No…I…” I glanced over and met the patient gaze belonging to the man in the doorway. “It’s beautiful but I…I wouldn’t know what to do with it.” A pressing need to get away, to get back to the safety of routine, had my feet moving before I’d finished speaking.
By late afternoon I was back at the cabin and immediately started on dinner for the both of us. A peace offering of sorts, let’s call it. I was determined to show Scott that there were a few perks to this marriage.
So we didn’t get along. So he held a grudge. I’d dealt with worse. Much worse. How hard could this be? What were three years in the grand scheme of things?
As soon as I’d moved out of my grandparents’ house, I developed a rabid interest in all things food related. Having been denied the good stuff for so long, I made it my mission to learn how to cook, teaching myself how by watching YouTube videos and reading cookbooks. And since it had more to do with my palate and less my stomach, it resulted in piles and piles of food my roommates and neighbors were more than happy to take off my hands. By the time I was working full-time for Blackstone, cooking had become my happy place, a safe way to turn my brain off and act on impulse, my way of decompressing from all the stress of the corporate culture Frank fostered.
“People are at their best when pitted against each other, Sydney. They either excel or break.” Frank’s exact words. I didn’t agree, but I wasn’t about to argue with a man that had already built a global empire by the time he hit fifty.
Aside from my house being overrun with sweets and baked goods––baking was my favorite by far––there was very little downside.
Scott walked in around early evening already freshly showered. Which, frankly,