“My mother hosted bigger parties than this. On her own. For years.”
“Your mother,” I said, “wasn’t in a cast.”
“She would’ve managed.”
There it was. Complete. The comparison he pulled out like a trump card whenever he needed to make my limits look like failures of will. His mother would have managed. His mother had endured. His mother had made it all look effortless, and if I could not do the same, then the problem was not the thirty guests or the broken leg, the problem was some deficiency in me, some lack of the strength and grace and selflessness that real women, mothers, wives of a better generation, apparently possessed in endless supply.
I did not know, that afternoon, everything I would come to learn about what it had actually cost Diane to manage. I did not yet know what she would say to me in my own kitchen a week later, with her son laughing outside the window. But I knew, even then, that his mother would’ve managed was not a compliment to his mother. It was a debt he was assigning to me, drawn on an account of another woman’s silent suffering.
“Call the guests,” I said. “Tell them the plan has changed. Tell them we’re doing a smaller thing, or that you’re ordering in, whatever you want to tell them. But I am not cooking for thirty people on this leg.”
“I’m not canceling.”
“Then you’re cooking.”
“I can’t spend my birthday in the kitchen,” he said, and the speed of it, the reflexive immediacy of that answer, told me everything I needed to know. He understood perfectly well that hosting a party for thirty people meant a full day of labor. He was not confused about the work. He simply believed, all the way down in a place that had never once been examined, that the work belonged to me. That the kitchen was my room and the pool was his. That his birthday was a thing that happened to him and was produced by me.
We went back and forth for a while longer. I was tired, and my leg hurt, and some part of me, the old exhausted part that had run our life for twelve years, wanted the fight to be over more than it wanted to win it. And so, eventually, we reached what I told myself was a compromise. He would order the main dishes, the ribs and whatever else, from a restaurant. I would make three appetizers and the cake. Only that.
“That’s all,” I said. “Three things and the cake. You handle everything else. The mains, the drinks, the ice, the setup, the cleanup. All of it.”
“Fine,” he said.
“Say it back to me.”
He sighed, the put-upon sigh of a man being subjected to unreasonable bureaucracy. “Three appetizers and the cake. I order the mains. I know, Talia.”
I should have known, when I had to make him say it back, that the agreement was already dead. You do not need to make someone repeat a promise they intend to keep.
Two days before the party, I crutched my way into the kitchen and found him leaning against the counter, scrolling through his phone, a cup of coffee going cold beside him.
“Send me the confirmation from the restaurant,” I said. “I want to make sure the timing works with when people are arriving.”
He did not look up from his phone.
“I didn’t place the order,” he said.
I stopped. I tightened my grip on the crutch, the rubber handle suddenly slick under my palm.
“Why not?”
“It was too expensive.” He shrugged, still scrolling, still not looking at me. “And honestly, you cook better than any of those places anyway. It’ll be better this way.”
“That was not our agreement, Donald.”
“I already told everyone about your ribs,” he said, as if this settled the matter, as if the fact that he had made promises to other people using my labor was a force of nature I was now obligated to accommodate. He gestured with his chin toward the corner of the kitchen, where I now saw, for the first time, the grocery bags. Bags and bags of them. Racks of raw ribs. Bags of potatoes. Vegetables, cheese, the whole architecture of a party’s worth of food that he had ordered delivered and left sitting there for me to find and, apparently, to transform.
