Recipe for a Perfect Wife

by Karma Brown

  “May I see it?” Martha asked.

  “You have sticky tea on your hands,” Kitty said, and Martha self-consciously wiped her hands on the napkin. Kitty sighed impatiently as she watched her, holding the bag out of reach.

  “Do tell,” Kitty said, reluctantly passing the purse to Martha. “Is it your anniversary?”

  Nellie paused, and was grateful for the doorbell’s ring. “Oh, looks like everyone’s arriving,” she said, rising and moving toward the door with only a slight limp. “Why don’t you help yourselves to some sandwiches? I’ll be right back.”

  Soon her living room was full of women, chattering about mundane neighborhood issues such as someone’s lawn not being trimmed often enough, and a barking dog keeping children up at night, and the safety of a particular crumbling section of sidewalk. Nellie sipped her tea and participated in the conversation only when directly asked something, unable to take her eyes off the Chanel purse Kitty had left in plain sight for all the women to fawn over. As they swooned and told her they wished their husbands could be more like Richard, she smiled politely and thought about the reason for his extravagant gift. Her reward.

  Nellie was pregnant.

  28

  After you marry him—study him. If he is secretive—trust him. When he is talkative—listen to him. If he is jealous—cure him. If he favours society—accompany him. Let him think you understand him—but never let him think you manage him.

  —Western Gazette (August 1, 1930)

  Alice

  AUGUST 12, 2018

  Nate was inside stripping the last of the wallpaper in the third bedroom, which he continued to refer to as “the nursery.” He’d insisted Alice get out of the house, was worried about the fumes from the heavy-duty glue stripper. “What if you’re already pregnant?” he asked when she protested, saying if they worked on it together it would be done much faster.

  “I’m not.” She laid a sheet over the narrow bed, which they’d moved to the center of the room. The bedroom wasn’t large and she had barely enough clearance to walk past the ladder Nate was setting up against one wall. Though it was Sunday, Alice had yet to reveal what she’d done, and so the charade continued. Just say it, she thought as she straightened the sheet so it was even on all sides. Nate, I’m not ready for a nursery.

  “How do you know?” Nate pulled a mask over his head, settling it temporarily against his Adam’s apple. Then he opened the window as wide as it would go, stuck a paint stir stick in to keep it propped open. She knew he was thinking about Tuesday. It’s day twelve, babe. He’d come home earlier than normal that night and her guilt had softened her resolve. Besides, it didn’t matter . . . she wouldn’t get pregnant. “I’ll feel guilty forever if our kid comes out with eleven toes.”

  “You shouldn’t joke about that,” she said, to which he replied, “I’m not!”

  Nate was adamant, even when she offered to wear two masks, suggesting she tackle the weeds instead. So, while Nate set to work on the wallpaper, Alice toiled in the back garden. She was soon hot and dirty, her muscles screaming for a rest. Though she’d only been at it for about an hour, Alice decided she deserved a break, and settled into one of the garden chairs with the second stack of Nellie’s letters.

  She was trying to like gardening, or at least appreciate its benefits, but was more interested in Nellie’s letters than she ever would be in weeding. Especially since she’d abandoned her first idea—did the world really need another Devil Wears Prada? So, she needed to dedicate time to the letters and the magazines because if she couldn’t get traction on the writing, at least she could research, thanks to Nellie Murdoch. Alice unwrapped the elastic from the stack and opened the delicate folds of the top letter.

  From the desk of Eleanor Murdoch

  August 30, 1956

  Dearest Mother,

  I miss you terribly. It feels like far too long since we’ve seen each other, but I will visit soon. Once my ankle fully heals and I can find some time to get away for a few days. The business continues keeping Richard busy—who knew chewing gum could be so time-consuming?—so I do need to be here right now. Speaking of my ankle, it has improved greatly and I’m up and about more easily these days. My garden isn’t doing as well as my leg, I’m sorry to say, but thankfully a neighborhood boy has been helping with the weeding and pruning. The hostas are, as usual, taking over like the bullies they are, but my roses continue to do well. I will bring you some when I come next.

  I have some news to share, Mother. I’m expecting.

  Alice sat up straight and reread the line. Nellie was pregnant? But what happened to the Murdochs being childless?

  I’m feeling well, and so far, pregnancy seems to agree with me. Richard is over the moon, as you can imagine. It did come as a surprise, and I must tell you . . .

  “Whatcha reading?”

  Alice jumped in her seat, the letter falling to the grass below. The bottle of water she’d been holding in her other hand slipped, drenching the letter at her feet as the liquid glugged from the bottle.

  “Shit!” Alice quickly retrieved the sopping pages, hoping they weren’t ruined. Too late—the old paper was no match for the washing it had been given, and the ink was blurred. “Shit,” she said again.

  “Sorry.” Nate glanced at the soggy paper in Alice’s hand. He tilted his ball cap so the peak shaded his eyes to the sun. He had red indentations under each eye and on the bridge of his nose, where the mask had pinched his skin. “Was that important?”

  “Not really,” Alice mumbled, laying the paper on the table. Some of the ink had transferred to her fingers and she rubbed them against her denim shorts.

  Nate perused the garden beds, the few small piles of weeds. “Taking a break already?”

  “I was doing some research.”

  “Right,” he said, sitting in the chair beside her. He gestured to the pile of letters on the table. “Is this it?”

  “Yeah. The letters I told you about the other morning. The ones Nellie wrote to her mother, in the fifties? Sally gave them to me.”

  Nate nodded. “Cool.” He leaned back in the chair, stretched out his legs. “So how’s the garden? Where are we at?”

  Alice bristled at the “we,” because Nate had yet to do anything in the garden. But he was tackling plenty of unpleasant tasks inside the house. Plus, he left every morning at seven and wasn’t home much before eleven most nights so they could afford the house and everything that came with it. The least she could do, she reminded herself, was to pull the damn weeds without complaint. “Turns out gardening is actually weeding. Endless weeding.” She sighed, placed the elastic back around the remaining letters. “How’s the wallpaper removal going?”

  “Slow. There’s a lot of it to get off.” He leaned forward, moved to get up. “Can I help? I’m feeling a bit high from the glue remover. Could use some fresh air.”

  “Sure,” Alice said, grabbing her gloves and following Nate to the garden. He stood with hands on hips, lips pursed as he glanced around.

  “What’s next?”

  “Honestly, I’m still not sure what’s a plant and what’s a weed. So maybe let’s pull the stuff that looks like it doesn’t belong? Like these.” She crouched in front of a small patch of dandelion. “These I know are weeds. Want gloves?”

  “Nah, I’m good.”

  Alice took the spade and dug around one of the dandelion’s roots, lifting it out with a large chunk of dirt attached. She shook it to release the earth and tossed the weed onto the lawn behind her. Nate stepped to the right and started moving some of the large hosta leaves to the side so he could look for more dandelions. Alice was focused on getting the spade deep enough to avoid cutting the root too high, like Sally had showed her, when Nate said, “These are nice. What are they?”

  Nate stood beside one of the foxglove plants, reaching toward the flowers. “Don’t touch th
at!” Alice exclaimed.

  He jerked his hand back. “Why not?”

  “That’s foxglove. Sally told me it’s poisonous.”

  Nate rubbed his hand quickly on his shorts and looked back to the plant, the flowers sprouting like hanging bells along the length of the thick green stalk. “What do you mean, ‘poisonous’?”

  “What I mean is, you shouldn’t touch it with your bare hands.” Alice tossed the dandelion to the side.

  Nate’s hands were back on his hips as he looked between the plant and Alice. “We have a poisonous flower in our garden? Like, how poisonous are we talking?”

  “Sally said it can cause heart problems. Apparently, it’s used to make some sort of heart medication, but the whole thing—stem, flowers, seeds—toxic.”

  He walked the length of the garden, murmuring under his breath, and turned back to Alice with wide eyes. “Jesus. Ali. It’s all over the place.” There were three bunches of the foxglove plant, which to Alice hardly constituted “all over the place.” Nate’s mouth tightened and he held out a hand. “Give me your gloves.”

  “Why?”

  “Ali, gloves.” Alice took off her gloves and handed them to Nate. He put them on, though they were small, and grabbed the garden shears Alice used for pruning. In one quick motion, he sliced right through a foxglove stem, near the bottom, and it fell sideways. He picked it up with the too-small gloves and tossed it on the pile of weeds.

  “What are you doing?” Alice watched him repeat the process on the next stalk of foxglove. “Those are one of the few things the deer won’t eat! And now there’s going to be empty holes in the garden. What can we plant there now? Summer’s half over.” She had little appreciation for this garden but felt a strange responsibility to take care of something Nellie had nurtured and loved so much.

  Nate ignored her questions, grunting as he dug in and around the base of the cut foxglove stem. “I don’t care. Put in some shrubs.”

  Shrubs? Alice rolled her eyes.

  Nate grumbled, yanking on the stem to try to pull it out by the root. “Who cares about the deer? No way am I letting some deadly plant live in this garden.”

  “I didn’t say it was ‘deadly.’” Alice crossed her arms while she watched him remove the second foxglove plant. “And I care about the deer.”

  “Why aren’t you more worried about our inevitable baby and what happens if she gets into the garden and eats one of these toxic leaves?” Nate lost his balance as the stem yanked free, spraying the two of them with a shower of black earth. “It’s all coming out. Today.”

  “She?”

  Nate gathered the newly dug-up foxglove into a pile, careful to avoid it touching his skin. He stood and swiped his brow with his forearm. “I’d love a little girl,” he said. “Wouldn’t you? A mini Alice?”

  “Sure,” Alice said, the pang of guilt slicing through her. She almost confessed then, right there beside the growing pile of foxglove, what she had done. Nate loved her and would understand. They were young! Plenty of time still for a mini Alice, or even more than one.

  “Here, hold this.” Nate handed her a yard-waste bag.

  “What if it doesn’t work?” Alice asked, holding the bag open wide for Nate to dispose of the foxglove remnants. He was careful to keep the stems from touching Alice’s hands.

  “If what doesn’t work?”

  “This.” She withdrew one hand, drew circles in the air in front of her stomach. “A baby.”

  “Why? Is something wrong?” He was crouched, gathering another pile, but he stopped and squinted up at her.

  “No.” But she had paused too long, and Nate noticed. He took off the gloves, dropping them to the grass, and pulled the bag away from her. Then he stood in front of her and his palms were warm and sweaty on her upper arms. “You know you can tell me anything, right?”

  “I know.”

  Nate’s hands squeezed her arms gently. “I get that it has been a tough couple of months. I’ve had a lot of late nights recently and I’m tired, and maybe a bit distracted when I’m home, but I promise, it’s temporary.”

  “Maybe you could study more at home?” Alice said. “There are probably fewer distractions. Especially if I work at the same time. It will be like old times.” Back when Nate was studying for his earlier exams and Alice had endless press releases to write, and they’d set themselves up in bed with a bowl of Cheetos between them.

  He smiled, though it didn’t reach his eyes. “It’s just easier to study at the office, babe. Everything is there.”

  Alice shifted slightly away from him, and he let her.

  “Not much longer, okay?” She nodded.

  “Now, can we go back to getting rid of these evil plants?” Nate asked.

  “Sure.” Nate put the gloves back on, and she held the waste bag, opening it as wide as it would go. As Nate tossed the remaining foxglove and other weeds into the bag, Alice thought about everything she was keeping from Nate—the truth about her job and James Dorian, the smoking, the IUD, how little she’d been writing—and wondered what he might be keeping from her as well.

  29

  Nellie

  SEPTEMBER 1, 1956

  Herbed Cheese Popovers

  1 cup sifted flour

  ½ teaspoon salt

  1 cup sweet milk

  1 tablespoon melted butter

  2 eggs

  ⅓ cup grated cheese

  2 tablespoons fresh chives, or other dried herbs of choice

  Beat together just until smooth the flour, salt, milk, melted butter, and eggs. Add cheese and chives, and stir to combine. Pour into greased muffin tins to half full, then bake in hot oven (400°F) until popovers are golden brown (about 20–25 minutes). Serve immediately.

  Nellie smoked a Lucky, eyeing the teenager from behind her sunglasses as he crouched in her garden. Peter Pellosi, the neighborhood boy who did yard work to earn money through the summer, was young—only seventeen—but looked like a man already with his bulging biceps and strong shoulders. While still sweet-cheeked, he had a few shaving nicks on his chin and around his Adam’s apple.

  “What would you like done with the hostas?” Peter asked, turning to Nellie and squinting in the bright sunshine. His shorts showed off muscled legs, trickles of sweat mixing with the dirt and dripping into his socks and high-top sneakers. Nellie set the magazine on her lap and put hand to forehead to block the light so she could see the plants. Normally Nellie’s garden would be in tiptop shape, but her broken ankle meant she had done next to nothing these past eight weeks.

  “Darn pushy, those hostas are,” she said. “I’d like to wait a few weeks longer to cut them back, but fall is nearly here.” She took out another cigarette, holding the pack out to Peter. “Would you like one?”

  He paused for a moment. “Thank you, ma’am.” Wiping his hands on his shorts, he pulled his Zippo lighter from his back pocket and took the cigarette from Nellie, even though he had his own pack rolled under his shirtsleeve. He sparked the lighter, and Nellie placed the mother-of-pearl cigarette holder to her lips, leaning the Lucky’s tip into the flame. She inhaled and tapped the chair beside her. Peter obliged, taking a long drag and exhaling into the warm, late-summer air.

  “You’re back to school next week, aren’t you?” Nellie asked. He nodded. “Looking forward to it?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  She watched him as she took another pull on her cigarette. “Are you going steady with anyone, Peter?”

  He blushed to the tips of his ears, his knees bouncing with youthful energy. “No, ma’am.”

  “Well, Peter Pellosi, I can’t believe that.” His blush deepened, and he looked delighted and uncertain all at once. They smoked in silence for a few moments before Nellie pointed her cigarette toward one of the hostas, which was particularly overgrown. “Cut that one right down its center. And don�
�t be gentle. The roots are stronger than you think they’ll be.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Peter stubbed out his smoke and picked up the hoe, piled with the other tools on the patio stones. Even though he was out of range now, back in the depths of garden, his scent remained—clean sweat, plus a hint of the laundry soap his mother used.

  “Good heavens, it’s warm today.” Nellie fanned herself with the magazine. She glanced at her watch, noted the time, and smiled. Not long now. “I’m going to get us a cold drink. All right?”

  “That would be swell.” Peter positioned the hoe over the center of the hosta. “Thanks, Mrs. Murdoch.” He brought the hoe’s tip down hard, grunting, cutting the plant clean through the middle.

  Inside, Nellie hummed as she poured two ice-filled glasses of lemonade, dotting the surfaces with fresh mint leaves. Opening the refrigerator, she put the jug back and took out two of Richard’s beers—hooking her fingers around the green bottles on the top shelf. Singing softly, Nellie set the beers on the tray beside the glasses of lemonade and nudged the fridge door closed with her hip.

  “I have lemonade but thought you might like one of these as well?” Nellie said, holding up one of the bottles once she was back outside.

  “Oh, I probably shouldn’t.” Peter stared at the bottle in Nellie’s hands, licked a drip of sweat from his lips.

  “I won’t tell anyone.” She used the opener to pop off the lid, handing him the bottle. “I believe you’ve earned this. Go on, our little secret.”

  He grinned, took it from her. “Thank you, ma’am.”

  Peter put the beer bottle to his mouth and tipped it back. His nicked Adam’s apple bobbed as he drank the sparkling amber liquid. A little escaped his lips and dribbled down his chin as the screen door banged shut, and Richard—pausing to take in the scene—appeared on the back patio. Nellie wiped the dripping beer from Peter’s chin with a napkin.