Too Much Happiness

Dishes and Fresh Surprises
, assembled, tested, and created by Bett Underhill.
    Once they had got the kitchen finished Nita had made the mistake for a while of trying to cook like Bett. For a rather short while, because it turned out that Rich did not want to be reminded of all that fuss, and she herself had not enough patience for so much chopping and simmering. But she had learned a few things that surprised her. Such as the poisonous aspects of certain familiar and generally benign plants.
    She should write to Bett.
    Dear Bett, Rich is dead and I have saved my life by becoming you.
    What does Bett care that her life was saved? There’s only one person really worth telling.
    Rich. Rich. Now she knows what it is to really miss him. Like the air sucked out of the sky.
    She should walk down to the village. There was a police office in the back of the Township Hall.
    She should get a cell phone.
    She was so shaken, so deeply tired, she could hardly stir a foot. She had first of all to rest.

· · ·

    She was wakened by a knocking on her still unlocked door. It was a policeman, not the one from the village but one of the provincial traffic police. He asked if she knew where her car was.
    She looked at the patch of gravel where it had been parked.
    “It’s gone,” she said. “That’s where it was.”
    “You didn’t know it was stolen? When did you last look out and see it?”
    “It must have been last night.”
    “The keys were left in it?”
    “I suppose they must have been.”
    “I have to tell you it’s been in a bad accident. A one-car accident just this side of Wallenstein. The driver rolled it down into the culvert and totalled it. And that’s not all. He’s wanted for a triple murder. That’s the latest we heard, anyway. Murder in Mitchellston. You were lucky you didn’t run into him.”
    “Was he hurt?”
    “Killed. Instantly. Serves him right.”
    There followed a kindly stern lecture. Leaving keys in the car. Woman living alone. These days you never know.
    Never know.

Face
    I am convinced that my father looked at me, stared at me, saw me, only once. After that, he could take for granted what was there.
    In those days they didn’t let fathers into the glare of the theater where babies were born, or into the room where the women about to give birth were stifling their cries or suffering aloud. Fathers laid eyes on the mothers only after they were cleaned up and conscious and tucked up under pastel blankets in the ward, or in the semi-private or private rooms. My mother had a private room, as became her status in the town, and just as well, actually, seeing the way things turned out.
    I don’t know whether it was before or after his first look at my mother that my father stood outside the window of the nursery for his first glimpse of me. I rather think it was after, and that when she heard his steps outside her door and crossing her room, she heard the anger in them but did not know yet what had caused it. After all, she had borne him a son, which was presumably what all men wanted.
    I know what he said. Or what she told me he said.
    “What a chunk of chopped liver.”
    Then, “You don’t need to think you’re going to bring that into the house.”
    One side of my face was-is-normal. And my entire body was normal from toes to shoulders. Twenty-one inches was my length, eight pounds five ounces my weight. A strapping male infant, fair skinned though probably still red from my unremarkable recent journey.
    My birthmark not red, but purple. Dark in my infancy and early childhood, fading somewhat as I got older, but never fading to a state of inconsequence, never ceasing to be the first thing you notice about me, head-on, or are shocked to see if you have come at me from the left, or clean, side. It looks as if someone has dumped grape juice or paint on me, a big serious splash that does not turn to driblets till it reaches my neck. Though it does skirt my nose pretty well, after dousing one eyelid.
    “It makes the white of that eye look so lovely and clear” was one of the idiotic though pardonable things my mother would say, in the hope of making me admire myself. And an odd thing happened. Sheltered as I was, I almost believed her.
    Of course my father could not do anything to prevent my coming home. And of course my presence, my existence, made a monstrous rift between my father and mother. Though it is hard for me to believe there had not always been some rift, some incomprehension