Dwelling Solo RPG Session 4: One Plate of Sugar After Another
KITCHEN
The Recall and Mark prompts here offer us a respite of sorts after the narrator is drawn into the kitchen on the tail of the Dining Room’s feast of rage. From the prompt on page 34: “In the kitchen I’m met with a hazy glow of residual heat, a welcome feeling breaking the chill that has set over the house. The tension of my body fades as I feel the warmth settle into my skin, moving deep into my bones.”
The buttermilk pancakes were inexhaustible.
My hoggery passed without comment while her mom kept piling them up. Those pancakes were the most she’d ever said to me. I felt accepted. I heard later that she would privately lobby AB to stick with me because I was in college. It felt one more way to bind AB to me and it helped me believe the college brochure stories about myself. I ate it up.
That light could only have been a Saturday morning, 10:37ish, my acme in both time of day and course of life, when an appetite and half-decent manners were all you needed to belong.
Her mom had moved to Texas after AB and her sister got out of high school, but she kept up the big house in Denver as some sort of dormitory for her girls until she could marry them off. Why not the shy boy, half of whose body weight was head and eyes? I think I was being fattened up for nuptials. Until love arrives, bet on calories.
AB took her one plate quietly in small bites. You never saw stuff on her lips or in her mouth when she laughed while countering key details of her sister’s family stories. It’s hard to even picture her eating when all I could hear was the wet chug of my own jaws. The tangy pancakes and syrup reverted to paste that glutted every receptor. I had pancakes and I went blind: No sensation except the sugar lift, the fluff and goo, a second plate, a full glass of whole milk and sausage patties besides.
I accepted her mom’s oblique offerings until I was immobilized. AB and I smoked the same brand back then. After the feed we shared one in the minimal privacy of the backyard of their big girls’ dorm in their subdivision, every young tree in sight staked and guyed. It must have been spring. I fell asleep on one of those folding chaises with the aluminum frames and saggy tube-strip cushioning.
When else do you get to do that, wake up with batter-and-cigarette mouth and find her downstairs and get as much as you want, as often as you can crave it? Our repertoire was mostly kissing and touching at length. We were quiet lovers even when nobody else was around, her candied chatter tapering off while I took time with her neck and earlobes, her arms raising easily when I lifted her sweatshirt away. Just one plate of sugar after another.
She called me Pancake Master for months after that and her little sister joined in. I stewed when I heard it, not because the nickname had bad intent, but because it wasn’t clever enough and I was already deadly fascinated by the girls in the bars on Capitol Hill who got bad haircuts on purpose and laughed at girls who dressed like AB.
Mark
Something like a grain of rice presses into the bottom of my foot on the kitchen floor. This hated ping from the sole of my foot disarticulates the smell. I dig it off in the dark, trying to guess if it is a rock or cereal, feeling violated.
I cook breakfast in this home occasionally, but I am no more comfortable wielding J’s chef-grade pans than I would be in his old pants. I have some of the ingredients and none of the touch. But those wouldn’t be enough, either. I don’t have the infrastructure: The bower of Saturdays and people who would just appear in them, or me in theirs, while I was mistaken for sweet and bankable.
Now lost touch shunts to dumb food eaten out of plastic clamshell trays in front of a computer; heft without satisfaction. “Feed the boy!” It happened so often and so easy I mistook it for the world’s natural reflex. “Give unto him rice and burritos, soda and tender thighs!” Now this is only the takeout cashier’s purview. I dress to hide the results. I don’t look good anymore when I tuck my shirt in. Fortunately untucked button-ups, flip flops and jeans are an acceptable uniform now, but I can’t hide in it for much longer at this rate.
Some nights I can claw back gristle from that banquet, if I show up at the right bar drunk enough to forget myself and catch them drunk enough on the night their fuckup boyfriend has the kids. Some rotten futon or another in building GG of a lamplit complex too grim to behold in morning. It invariably feels like work, even more work than breakfast in this kitchen and just about as satisfying. The chief thrill is getting back to J’s house knowing you somehow got to her place last night without somebody getting a DUI.
The thing I picked off my foot feels more like a rod than a disc; it crumbles after I roll it around with enough force. I dust the particles off on the right leg of my sweats. What was it, that old “MacArthur Park” chestnut…I’ll never make a pancake like that again?
Next: The Foyer