by Karma Brown
Recipe for a Perfect Wife
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Also by Karma Brown
Come Away with Me
The Choices We Make
In This Moment
The Life Lucy Knew
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Recipe for a Perfect Wife
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A N o v e l
Karma Brown
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For my nana, Miriam Ruth Christie, who was a feminist despite the confines of her generation. A “from the can”
cook, she was not known for her kitchen skills but did
make a mean Chicken à la King. Which I miss, though
not as much as I miss her.
And to all the women who have come before me, thank
you for lighting the pathway. For those coming after—
especially you, Addison Mae— I’m sorry the work is not
done. I hope we’ve left you with enough to finish the job.
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Art is a hard mistress, and there is no art
quite so hard as that of being a wife.
— Blanche Ebbutt, Don’ts for Wives (1913)
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You seem to forget that I am married, and the one charm of
marriage is that it makes a life of deception absolutely necessary
for both parties.
— Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890)
I t was late in both day and season for planting, but she had no choice in the matter. Her husband hadn’t understood the ur‑
gency, having never nurtured a garden. Nor did he hold an ap‑
preciation for its bounty, and as a result had been gently irritable with her that morning. Wishing she would focus on more important tasks instead, of which there were many, as they’d moved in only the week before. It was true much of the garden could
wait— little happened during these later months, as bulbs rested
dormant, waiting for the rain and warmth of spring. But this par‑
ticular plant, with its bell‑ shaped flowers plentiful, would not be so patient. Besides, it was a gift and came with specific instruc‑
tions, so there was no alternative but to get it into the ground.
Today.
She felt most like herself when she was mucking about in
the dirt, singing to and coaxing the buds and leaves. That had
been the main reason she loved the house when she first saw it.
The garden beds were already prepped, though sparse, and she
could envision how they could be transformed into something mag‑
nificent. The house itself had felt large and impersonal— especially 1
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Karma Brown
its many rooms, considering it was only the two of them. However,
they were newlyweds still. Plenty of time to make the house a
home, to fill it with children and warmth.
Humming a favorite tune, she slid on her gardening gloves
as she crouched and, with the trowel, dug out a large circle of
earth. Into the hole went the plant, which she held carefully
with her gloved fingers so as not to crush the amethyst‑ colored
blossoms. She was comforted as she patted the soil around its
roots, the stalk standing nice and straight, the flowers already
brightening up the garden. There was plenty of work still ahead,
but she lay down on the soft grass, her hands resting like a
pillow under her head, and watched the clouds dance in the
blue sky above. Excited and ready for all that was to come.
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Men like a clean house, but fussing about all the time, upsetting
the house in order to keep it clean, will drive a man from the
house elsewhere.
— William J. Robinson, Married Life and Happiness (1922) Alice
MAy 5, 2018
W hen Alice Hale first saw the house— impressive in size
though dilapidated and dreary from neglect— she couldn’t have
known what it had in store for her. Her first thought was how
gargantuan it seemed. The Hales lived in a teeny one‑ bedroom
in Murray Hill, which required shuffling sideways to get past the
bed and featured a bathroom door that grazed your knee caps
when you sat on the toilet. By comparison this house was a
sizable rectangle of symmetrical brick with shuttered windows
on either side of a red door nestled into a stone archway, the
door’s paint peeling like skin after a bad sunburn. Reluctance
filled Alice as she imagined walking through the door: Welcome
to Greenville, Nate and Alice Hale, she could almost hear the 3
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house whisper through the mouthlike mail slot, in a not‑ at‑ all‑
welcoming tone. This is a place where young urban professionals come to die.
The suburb was perfectly lovely, but it wasn’t Manhattan. A
town a few minutes’ drive from the better‑ known and more ex‑
clusive Scarsdale, Greenville was less than an hour’s train ride
from the city and yet was an entirely different world. Wide
lawns. Picket fences, many of them predictably white. Sidewalks
clean enough to eat off of. No sounds of traffic, which made
Alice uneasy. Her left eye twitched, likely the result of having
barely slept the night before. She had paced their shoebox‑ size
apartment in Murray Hill in the dark, overwhelmed by the
sense that this— the house, Greenville, all of it— would be a ter‑
rible mistake. But things always feel dire in the middle of the
night, and by morning her insomnia and worries seemed silly.
This was the first house they had seen, and no one ever bought
the first house.
Nate took her hand, leading her along the sidewalk to look
at the house from the side. She squeezed his fingers, followed
his gaze as they walked. “It’s nice, right?” he said, and she
smiled, hoping the twitching eye wasn’t obvious.
Taking in the home’s facade— the deep cracks in the cement
walkway, the graying picket fence that leaned askew— Alice
realized why the house was priced the way it was, though still
pushing their budget. Especially now that they were living on
one paycheck, which had been Alice’s doing and still made her
stomach ache with guilt when she thought about it. The house
was desperately in need of work. A lot of work. And they hadn’t even gone inside yet. She sighed, pressing her fingertips to her
eyelid. This is fine, she thought . It’s going to be fine.
“It’s a lot of money,” she said. “Are you sure we can afford it?” She had grown up with nothing extra and sometimes not
even the basics; the idea of a mortgage terrified her.
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“We can. I promise,” Nate replied. He was a numbers guy,
and good with money, but she remained hesitant.
“It has really good bones,” he added, and Alice glanced at
him, wondering how they were seeing things so differently.
“Classic, too. Don’t you love how solid it looks?” Solid. That was what one got for marrying an actuary.
“Think the Realtor gave us the right address?” If Alice tilted
her head just so, it looked as though the house was leaning to the right. Maybe they were in the wrong neighborhood and this
home’s in‑ much‑ better‑ shape cousin existed elsewhere. Oh, she said Greenwich, not Greenville, Nate might say as he reread the email from their Realtor.
Alice frowned at the eyesore of a front lawn, the lackluster
and overgrown grass, wondering what a lawn mower cost. But
while everything else appeared unkempt, the flowers that lined
the fence— rich pink blooms that looked like they were made
from layers of delicate tissue paper— were gorgeous and plen‑
tiful, as though they had been tended to only that morning. She
tucked her fingers under one of the flowers and leaned in, its
perfume intoxicating.
“One seventy‑ three.” Nate looked up from his phone and at
the tarnished brass house number. “Yup, this is it.”
“A colonial revival,” their Realtor, Beverly Dixon, had said
while Nate and Alice listened in on speakerphone the evening
before. “Built in the forties, so it has a few quirks, but with gor‑
geous detail. Wait until you see the stone archway and the classic
layout. This one won’t last long, I’m telling you, especially at this price.” Nate had looked excited as Beverly went on. Alice knew he
felt stifled inside their small apartment with its too‑ few windows and absence of green space and the shockingly steep rent.
Nate had wanted to move out of the city for as long as she’d
known him. He wanted a yard to throw a ball around in with his
children, the way he had with his dad. To have songbirds and
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summer cicadas wake him each morning rather than delivery
trucks. A fixer‑ upper he could put his stamp on. Having grown
up in a Connecticut suburb with still‑ married parents—one of
which was a stay‑ at‑ home mother—and two siblings as accom‑
plished as he was, Nate’s vision of family life was naively rosy.
Alice loved their perfectly cozy apartment, with a landlord
who handled leaky faucets and fresh coats of paint and a new
refrigerator when theirs conked out last spring. She wanted to
stay living ten blocks from her best friend, Bronwyn Murphy,
whose place Alice escaped to when she needed a break from
living in a shoebox with a man. Nate was, to be fair, tidier and
more concerned with everything having a place, and there being
a place for everything, than Alice was, but he still had minor
shortcomings. Drinking juice straight out of the carton. Using
her insanely expensive gold‑ plated tweezers for pulling out nose
hairs. Expecting life would give him whatever he wanted simply
because he asked for it.
Alice reminded herself she had promised Nate she’d be open‑
minded, and she wanted to get better at keeping her promises. Not
to mention the fact that if they did end up moving to Greenville,
Alice had no one to blame but herself.
A few minutes before their agreed meeting time, a Lexus
purred up to the curb, and out jumped Beverly Dixon. After
grabbing her purse and a folder from the passenger seat, she
gently nudged the door shut in a way that told Alice this car was
brand‑ new. Beverly locked the door with her key fob— twice—
and Alice looked around, seeing no one nearby except for a
woman pushing a strol er across the street and an elderly gentle man pruning a bush a few doors down. Alice thought back to Bev‑
erly’s earlier comment about the neighborhood. “Crime is non‑
existent. You’ll be able to leave your doors unlocked if you want!”
Beverly closed the gap between them on three‑ inch heels,
her body balloon‑round inside the beige skirt and matching
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jacket. Her smile was wide and warm, her hand extended long
before she reached them, heavy gold bracelets jangling. As she
smiled at the couple, Alice noticed a smear of pink lipstick on
one of Beverly’s front teeth.
“Alice. Nate.” Beverly pumped their hands, bracelets clinking
like wind chimes. “Hope you haven’t been waiting long?”
Nate assured her they hadn’t; Alice smiled and stared at
Beverly’s tooth.
“A real gem.” Beverly was out of breath, a slight wheeze ac‑
companying her words. “Shall we head inside?”
“Let’s do it,” Nate said, grabbing Alice’s hand again. She
al lowed herself to be pulled toward the house even though all
she wanted was to drive back to the city and slip into her yoga
pants and hide in their cramped apartment. Maybe order takeout,
laugh about their temporary insanity at considering a move to the
suburbs.
Heading up the front walkway, Beverly pointed out a few de‑
tails (“gorgeous stone on that archway . . . you won’t find any‑
thing like that anymore . . . original leaded glass . . .”), and Alice saw movement out of the corner of her eye. A flutter of curtain
from the top left window, as though someone was pushing it to
the side. She shielded her eyes with the hand Nate wasn’t holding
and looked at the window, but whatever had moved was now still.
Maybe she’d imagined it. Probably— she was more exhausted
than someone who wasn’t working should be.
“Like I said on the phone last night, the house was built in
the 1940s. Now, I know things are a little rough around the
edges out here, but nothing a lawn service can’t handle. Aren’t
those peonies stunning? The previous owner had a real green
thumb, I hear. What I wouldn’t do to have flowers like that in
my front yard.”
A lawn service. Good grief. They were officially going to
become one of those couples. The type who desperately wanted 7
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plush suburban grass for their kids to play on, and for their golden‑
doodle to shit on, but couldn’t actually take care of it. As they ap‑
proached the front door Alice’s stomach clenched. She’d had
nothing to eat aside from coffee and a handful of stale cereal,
but that wasn’t why she felt ill. This house, and everything it
signified— not the least of which was leaving Manhattan— was
making her nauseated. Bile coated the back of her throat as Beverly and Nate chattered on about the “bones” of the house and its
unique features, including the original doorbell, which still
worked. Nate, oblivious to Alice’s disquiet, pressed the bell and
laughed delightedly as the tinny chimes echoed behind the red
door.
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A modern woman who is of the contentious type is often ame-
nable to love and reason. If she will only listen quietly— a process that is painful to her— you may firmly, rationally, and kindly
convince her she is not always in the right.
— Walter Gallichan, Modern Woman and
How to Manage Her (1910)
Alice
I t was dim and chilly inside, and Alice tucked her hands into her armpits as she looked around. Everything was old‑ fashioned,
a layer of fine dust coating the wallpaper Beverly kept referring
to as “vintage,” as though that was somehow a plus. An old
desk was pushed up against the front window, and what seemed
to be a sofa was hidden under an off‑ white sheet in the living
room’s center.
“Do either of you play?”
“Sorry?” Alice asked, not sure what Beverly was referring to.
“The piano.” Beverly lifted the lid of a black piano, tucked
away at the back of the living room, and tinkled a few keys.
“Dusty and out of tune, but it seems in great shape otherwise.”
“We don’t,” Nate said. “Though maybe we could learn?”
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