Aimee Bender - Willful Creatures

Back to the dilemma of the spices. I finished my lunch and called up both their hairdressers, and spoke to one very unfriendly sibling, and no one had any interest in discussing these salt and pepper shakers, and in fact I could feel a stirring annoyance in the voices of the questioned, one which I am used to but still resent. I went home to shower, and spoke briefly with my girlfriend who was half asleep, and seemed distracted, and only right before I dozed off in my own bed did a phone call come in and tell me that the missing bottle of poison had been discovered in the chef’s quarters, underneath her bathroom sink. Curious. I had not met her yet; she had taken off several days to grieve, and was returning the following morning to begin the slow process of packing up her bags. This couple had not been exceedingly wealthy, but the luxury of a live-in cook was something both felt was important to their happiness. So they shared a car, and rarely ate out or vacationed.

I found the cook in the kitchen, making afternoon snacks. Nothing was packed yet, and the house was just as I had left it. The couple had been married for twenty-five years and the cook was older than I expected, with a head of silver hair, although her fingers were still swift and nimble. She seemed saddened by the loss of her employers, but perhaps not sad enough. I was not ready to rule her out as a possible accomplice, particularly now with that poison bottle, wrapped in plastic, sitting bulbous atop the coroner’s desk. While we were talking she made us a perfect turkey sandwich, on a triangle of bread, grilled lightly on the stove.

“The wife liked salt and the husband liked pepper,” she said, “and the salt and pepper pair served as a symbol of their relationship.” She briskly flipped the sandwich on the grill and then scooped it onto one yellow plate and one red plate which she handed over to me.

“Thank you,” I said. The bread had crisped to a fine golden color around the edges. I waited until she took a bite of hers until I tried mine. “How so?”

“Well,” she said, swallowing carefully, “they used salt and pepper as their model ideal. In their wedding vows, they said she was salt-she intensified the existing flavor-and he was pepper-he added a new kick-and that every fine table needed both.

“In fact,” she said, leaning in, “instead of a man and woman atop their wedding cake, they had a pair of miniature salt and pepper shakers.”

“No kidding,” I mumbled, chewing.

She nodded. “I can show you photos.” She started toward the living room, and before I could take another bite, she had the white wedding album open, full of smiling attractive faces, and there was the cake, with those shakers on top. “It was a white cake with strawberry cream filling,” she said. “Quite light.”

“Did you have any reason to dislike either one of them?” I asked casually. “Were they good employers?”

“Yes,” she said. “I liked them just fine. Isn’t the case solved?”

“Seems to be,” I said. “It’s just that no one else remembered the shakers.” I tried to keep sandwich crumbs off the photos. “This is delicious, by the way.”

She shrugged. “I’ve been here since the wedding,” she said, pointing to herself with a full head of very brown hair in the photo album, serving plates of cake, “and that was their gift to each other every single anniversary.”

She shut the book. “Case closed,” she said.

I opened the book back up. “Except,” I said, pointing to the date on the invitation, “there are only fourteen pairs of shakers, and I believe they were married for twenty-five years …”

“Twenty-six,” she said, pulling a clear bag of lemons up from the floor. “Well.

“What happened,” the cook said, now slicing lemons in half, “was that after about fourteen years of marriage, he, as people do, grew sensitive to spicy food, and her blood pressure went up so high that she had to abandon salt. She could only use pepper, he only salt. He did not like the salt, it seemed to him redundant, which hurt her feelings. She did not like the pepper, as it seemed to distract from the true nature of the dish. This made him feel discounted.

“After some time, she grew less vibrant, and he less stimulating.”

“Truly?”

“From my perspective,” said the cook, “it actually seemed to be true.”

I pressed my finger into the plate to pick up the last crumbs of sandwich.

“And did this fill you with a strange hatred?” I asked.

She smiled at me. “No,” she said. “Why, you don’t believe they killed each other?”

“We found the bottle of poison in your room,” I said.

She sat back down in her chair. I said nothing. At moments like this, it is always best to say nothing. Her eyes faded and lost focus.

“I’m not so surprised,” she said softly after a while. “I’m sure he put it there on purpose. He had always hoped that I would be able to fix it all. I tried,” she said. “It is a chef’s job, this,” she said, squeezing lemon juice into a pitcher.

She sighed now, with some elegance in her shoulders, and stirred the growing pitcher of lemonade with a wooden spoon.

“But a good chef must let go of the salt/pepper ratios,” she said. “It’s uncontrollable. It is a chef’s nightmare to see the saltshaker dump itself all over a perfectly salted piece of meat or to see the pepper dirty up what is an ideal wave of béchamel. It is a chef’s sleeplessness, right there,” she said.

“So let it go,” she said. “I cannot worry about it excessively. I simply Can Not.” She poured herself half a glass of lemonade and took a sip. “Too sweet,” she said, cutting four more lemons precisely in half. “And if lemonade is too sweet,” she said, “then we are somehow lost to the crush of anonymity.”

Her face struck against itself, and her eyebrows folded in.

“Sir,” she said, “I was here for twenty-six years. Had they trusted my expertise, perhaps none of this would have happened.”

I found I wanted to comfort her but her eyes had shut down, and after I finished spiking the last crumb, I tried to thank her sincerely, but she had lost herself in thought, at the kitchen table, stirring four grains of sugar at a time into the pitcher, and tasting, repeatedly, with the large wooden spoon.

“Thank you for your time,” I said, then, to no one.

It was not the chef. I believed her fully. The evidence was in. But if the mystery was solved, both big and small, then why was I still on it? That was what my boss kept asking over and over. He had a new case for me. This one involved a homicide on the west end of town, of a very old rich codger who had seven children and it seemed likely that one of the seven had killed him. But I was bored by that one. It will solve itself, like a hose releasing its pinch and letting the water flow. I bought some orchid food instead and went to see the coroner again, because my mind would not stop thinking of that end, when the husband and wife realized they were dying together, each by the hand of the other. In a way, they actually had swapped personalities, by killing the other in the manner of his or her favorite spice. The wife chose knifing, which is certainly “pepperlike” in its spicy attack on the body, and the coroner thanked me for the orchid food and confirmed my suspicions about the poison, by explaining how the one the husband had chosen killed by increasing the saline level of the bloodstream to such a degree that the person essentially dehydrated.

I myself have a girlfriend, as I have mentioned, which is perhaps why the salt and pepper pair do not leave my mind. The case is closed and the file cabinet locked but I still think of them all the time. The ranch-style house sold for cheap to a small family who moved here from Michigan and didn’t hear the history. I believe the chef retired from family work, and now is doing private catering on her own, and if I ever get married, I will surely hire her, although my superstitious girlfriend might not approve. I do love my girlfriend, for her differences and her similarities, but I do not know if one day the item that defines me in her eyes will no longer work. If my body will fail. If I will face her in bed and not know what to do, when now her body still seems infinite. If she will stop having that bright look in her eye at the parrot store, and instead lose herself circling letters in word searches. There are couples who commit suicide together and they are in line with Shakespeare’s greatest lovers, but those who murder each other precisely at the same minute are written up in all the papers as crazy. Even their family members coughed and got off the phone as fast as they could. They would like to erase the whole rigamarole. I picked up more than one tone of disgust and superiority in my many interviews. But it seems to me beautiful. How right at the end, when everything was over, they realized they had reached the ultimate gesture of compromise, that their union had come full circle, and perhaps it was the sting of that bittersweetness that killed them most, crueler than any knife or poison.