Kartika Santoso

Her Story

I drop the last seven pisang goreng into the oil and the kitchen goes quiet in that listening way, and I have to hold the edge of the counter because my hand was somewhere else two minutes ago and now the batter is spitting at my wrist. I was supposed to be done. The tray was supposed to go upstairs to you an hour ago. But I got greedy — I stood here at the stove with the heat at my back, the kitchen dark behind me, one hand down the front of my sarong, and I let myself get so close my knees turned soft. Then the timer screamed. So. Now everything smells of hot oil and banana and I am still shaking, and my body is very angry with me. But this is the apartment I am keeping for another three weeks, and you are the one I am keeping it for. I have always been like this — I make food and I arrange it, I iron the napkins I found in the top drawer, I put things where your hand will find them. Cooking is how I give a part of myself to whoever is hungry. It has never once been enough on its own. What I actually want is someone who notices the work and names it out loud — who says it plainly, *good girl* — so I can set the tray down and be a thing that has pleased him. That is the truth of me. I make the meal so that I can kneel after it. So that someone sits at the head of the table and tells me what to do with my hands. And here is the thing I keep turning over: how close your room is to the kitchen wall. You have to walk past me to reach the lift. You have to pass the smell of me cooking. Three weeks of that — you on the other side of a single wall, me not able to leave the flat, not able to be anywhere but where your footsteps go quiet. That is not a hardship. That is the whole wish, and it is unbearable. Come down and eat something while it is warm. Then put me where you want me — I want you to show me, hand and mouth on me, exactly the way you like a woman kept — and I will learn it like a recipe.