So you do, giggling down to the basement, where we settle into separate beanbag chairs soft as dough, and though the conditions of you skipping mosque tonight include you praying at mine, you don’t, because by the time your prayer alarm goes off, Gordon is reaming a line cook for his kitchen hygiene, and we’re tucked like cornhusks into each other, my thumb tracing teacups down your spine.
“I don’t want to miss this part,” you say as you snooze the alarm. Gordon is pointing out all the ways the cook is lying, pretending one thing is something else—frozen rings of calamari passed off as fresh; frothy slabs of old chicken double dredged to hide their stink; bags of farmed tuna dyed pink to look wild—and you stick my hand inside your bra.
When Gordon yells “Shut. It. Down.” and makes the cook throw everything away, forcing him to restart with things that are true—fish made from fish, fries made from potatoes, greens cut from the stem and not dredged up from a freezer burial—I sigh as you segment, slick-fingered, the core of me. I don’t say anything about all I’d like to shut down, all I’d like to start over. Our principal’s ban on same-sex couples at homecoming. Our parents thinking you’re here in a neighborly capacity, as you have been for the last 15 years, and not a lover capacity, as you have been for the last six months. Our unspoken reticence towards telling them and the way my insides congeal when I imagine it.
The basement, dark and cold, seems like it should be soundproof, but it’s just another place we have to be quiet. When your snoozed alarm goes off again, our faces are pressed together and the air between us is hot enough to steam shrimp. We don’t hear the alarm or the stomping on the stairs. Only when I see the cold bucket of water that is my mother do I notice the bells pealing. On the TV behind her is a close-up of Gordon scowling. Then a cut of a cook on his knees. The cook rolls up his sleeves and drags a square of steel wool over a crusty tray of gray risotto.
“Charlotte Lee, I didn’t raise you like this.”
At the end of every episode of Kitchen Nightmares Gordon designs a new menu, axing pages of fake imitations with ten simple dishes the cooks know how to execute, but my mom gives us only one choice: “Nadia, are you telling your mom or am I?”
You cry and say we were just playing. You say something else I don’t hear. I’ve closed my eyes. I’m sketching floor plans in my head. At first, a double-shower bathroom and a big finished basement. Then I think no, it’s better if there’s no basement at all, and I put us in a long, low ranch, a wide chute of rooms with floor-to-ceiling windows, everything inside exposed to the light.
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Katherine Plumhoff’s stories have been published in X-R-A-Y, Passages North, The Forge, Flash Frog, and Best Small Fictions, among other places. Honors include Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominations and a SmokeLong Quarterly Emerging Writer fellowship. She lives in Valencia, Spain.