1.
The kitchen is the heart of the home, and I remember the day my parents tore ours out.
It was an ugly kitchen, with terracotta-brown linoleum floors and light blue floral wallpaper. Its oak cabinets were covered in a patina of age, and light, and cooking oils, and toddlers. A singular light fixture—plucked from the sale bin at Home Depot—clung to the ceiling, beaming blue fluorescence around the room. Mom always kept the window above the sink uncovered—that is, I do not remember there being curtains—and the door that led to the backyard propped open to catch the breeze.
It was an ugly kitchen in an ugly house. Built in 1960, the split-level ranch was not the house of my parents’ dreams, nor was it the house of their nightmares. Instead, it was the house of which they could not have conceived in the wildest of either. The pale-yellow paint was peeling off the façade from the day they signed the papers. The large, steeply sloping lawn was entirely unfriendly to children, except during sledding season. Visitors were greeted at the front door by a staircase.
I remember that staircase. I remember sitting at the bottom of it, facing the front door when I would not eat my peas, or gave my parents too much lip, or both; red-faced and puffy, tears dribbling toward my chin, mad at them for being mad at me, until Mom came and sat next to me, her hand running through my hair to make it clear that they no longer were. That they never were. I remember standing at the top of that staircase, six years old and clutching a stuffed animal to my chest, listening to my parents’ anger waft upwards from the basement. Then my big sister’s hand on my arm, older and wiser at the age of nine, pulling me into her bedroom. We played a board game and listened to CDs, loudly, until the yelling stopped, and it was safe to come out. I don’t remember what happened after that.
2.
Kitchens are where things fall apart.
A three-room apartment whose living room was its kitchen was its hallway. That home had no heart, it had no nucleus. It brought stress: I could not afford it, and I did not deserve it. A long, strange, and sad summer burst into a shiny new September that carried me with it, kicking and screaming. The tears carved canyons into my cheeks, and I could not be bothered to shovel them back in with dirt, knowing that, like the floods, they would come again.
In November I sat and listened to words that I had never heard before, tears streaming silently down my face. I told him yes, nodding, I know this about myself: I am selfish, I self-justify, I hold everything in, I hold myself together until, suddenly, it runs through my fingers and down the kitchen sink, ugly and angry, corroding the stainless steel.
I’ve heard that corpses will liquefy if they’re held for long enough in an airtight container, and I’ve wondered what this looks like. What color is a liquefied body? What consistency does it hold? What would he and I look like—both of us, our selfishness and pride and loathing; our ideas and ink and architecture—liquefied? Could we be washed down the kitchen sink?
This was a time—not the first time, not the tenth time, nor the last time, but perhaps somewhere in between—that I realized that nothing, not anything, was looking like the pictures; that I feared it might be time to burn them. That I doused them in liquid—in water, in wine, in tears—so that they wouldn’t.
Soggy pictures and sodden love both resemble a wet towel. For months I carried ours in two hands, heavy from the weight of the water, and the words. Wringing it out and leaving it to dry over the faucet. Waking up to find it stiff, and unforgiving. Thinking about how well it used to work before it was oversaturated with liquid—with water, and wine, and tears. Wondering if it was time to douse it in gasoline, and let it burn in the kitchen sink.
3.
I saw a mouse in my kitchen on the day that he said he wanted to end things, but didn’t. And that was that: we were infested. I retreated, hiding in the closest small space I could find, jamming my tiny body under doors and in between cabinets. Hiding from him, dodging him. Looking for warmth.
That fall was the season of mice: of little inklings and doubts that creep into your mind and then hide when you see them, only to creep back out later while you sleep. It was the season of nightmares and things that make noise in the dark, in the walls, unseen. Everywhere and nowhere, all at once.
Sometimes I can see us in our kitchen, twenty years in the future, and everything is bright. Our bodies are silhouetted by the light streaming in from the window above the sink, which does not have curtains. I can’t see our features, but I know that it’s him, that it’s us: the way he moves around me, leans over my shoulder when I stand before the stove, touches the small of my back on his way to the fridge. The way we move, vibrating at a frequency that even we are deaf to.
I don’t know what will happen with him and me, but I know that it will hurt. It will hurt to stay with him; it will hurt to leave him. Until then, I’m holding on to this picture that hasn’t been taken. I tuck it away under the floorboards, so that I can show it to him when everything is bright and say, Look, we’re here. We’re home.
4.
My parents’ torn-out kitchen was replaced with a newer one, coated in shiny granite, rich mahogany, and stainless steel. The shouting stopped. They recovered. Their bodies solidified, and so did the family—slowly, at first; stiffly, and on shaky knees because we did not quite trust the ground.
Kitchens are where we put things together: Thanksgiving dinner, peanut butter sandwiches, chocolate chip pancakes. Spaghetti and meatballs on a school night, and nachos on a Sunday night. Plans for the upcoming week: who needs to be here, and when; who needs to go there, and how. Puzzles on a snow day, and a tea-stained map for French class. A model of the Pantheon, the one in Paris that you thought would be so easy to make, but nothing, not even all the acrylic paint in the world, could ever make it look like the pictures.
5.
Sometimes I think that our relationship has an expiration date that we’re choosing to ignore because there is no other food left in the fridge, and we’re making ourselves sick. I think that we’re the pot on the stove that boils over even though you never touch the knob: everything is fine until all of a sudden, it isn’t. And we boil over.
And I’m standing before the stove, trying to clean up the spill with an oversaturated towel, sobbing into the steaming water, in our kitchen, alone.
Wondering where the hell the heart went.
Theresa Doolittle graduated from the University of Pittsburgh, and now works for a design firm in Boston. She is an avid photographer and intrepid traveler who sinks her teeth into art, architecture, and things that follow. Her words and art have previously appeared in Sidereal Magazine, Zeniada, and the Santa Ana River Review.
