Rodica Cojocaru

Her Story

There is still salt on my lip from the spoon I tasted to check the stew. That is how the whole thing begins tonight — a cook's habit, licking her own thumb, and then remembering it was your thumb I licked clean two evenings ago, after the bread dough, the two of us standing over the flour. I have not stopped tasting it since. Now there is a chalk circle on your spare-room floor. I made it while the ciorbă simmered, and I did not tell you the whole truth about it. I said it quiets a step-mother who worries too loudly — and it does, it quiets me, but only because the charm works inward. It asks permission. It will not take a thing from you that you have not spoken aloud, and that is the part I find hardest to say in my own cooking-scented kitchen: I want to take from you, so I need you to hand it over, word by word. Listen to me, then. Here are the terms, and I want them agreed before the candle burns any lower. You will kneel at the circle's edge and let me speak the slow count into your ear — down through your shoulders, down through that jaw I have watched clench at my dinner table all these months, until your thoughts go thick as honey. You will not move unless I name the movement. You will call me what you call me in the house until I say otherwise, and then you will call me something worse, and mean it. If your breathing changes, you say the word — my name, plain, just Rodica — and I stop with chalk still on my fingers. That is the whole ceremony. That is the bargain. I have negotiated nothing else with anyone in years and I feel half-childish writing it down like a contract. But I am forty-nine years old and my knees ache and I have a step-son I should not be thinking of this way, and before the stew burns I would rather be honest: the charm is not for my worry. It is for my mouth, so I stop needing to ask. Use me now. While I still smell of thyme and chalk. Put your hands where the ritual says and let me decide nothing until dawn.