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Fajita Talk

Anne Macleod Weeks

    I have tolerated his obsession with Mexican food for two decades. Not that I don’t love it myself, but I enter each new restaurant with trepidation, wondering about how I’ll navigate fork to mouth with a poker face, if what’s on the plate simply sucks. Tonight’s venue tries to mask its fast food persona with a trendy name, and I’m faced with a fajita of slop on cardboard and not even the choice of a Dos Equis to deaden the taste.
    Most often, I just listen. The rants move from politics to cars to professors to housemates. Like in Ultimate, I want to use Rock, Paper, Scissors to get my chance to control the play. But then he says, “Mom, I’m in love. Her name is Emily, and she’s an artist.” This is the second time I have been told this, and the last brought two years of comfort, jollity, and extended family. I forget the meal and grasp on to this new sustenance.
    “It’s complicated.”
    “How so?”
    “She has another boyfriend at Penn. He and I are friends from tournaments. She’s moved in, but when he’s in town, she leaves me for a week.”
    Suddenly, I am not sure I want to feed my hunger.
    “She’s also bisexual and sleeps with random girls on her team.”
    My emotional response clamps my rational response, yet I manage to calmly dictate, “just don’t get any diseases.”
    That night, my husband responds, “why doesn’t he ever tell me this stuff?”
    We meet her. She sits across the booth from us in yet another Mexican place. She picks at the nachos and comments to him that they’re probably full of trans fats. She doesn’t look at us – for an hour and a half.
    Or ever, for that matter.
    Months later, we’re in the third day of a long weekend at our summer house. The men have gone electronic and have headed out to hunt wild game in the form of Bose speakers. I sleep late in the quiet and yawn into the great room looking for tea, seeing my favorite reading spot by the bird feeder window, under the warm skylight, filled with this form that has never animated in my presence. I ask her what she’s reading. She never turns to respond, saying quietly, “a book.” That’s it. It goes no further. I take the dogs for a walk.
    He calls me to tell me he broke his IKEA bed and can he have some cash to make repairs. I joke that he needs to keep his recreation under control; he says, “yeah, that’s what did it.” I want to say she should sleep on the floor.
    Two years I kept my mouth shut. I stayed pleasant. I would even say I avoided reserve. I was actually proud of my ability to avoid interference.
    One spring night he shows up alone at home, saying he wants to put on a jacket and tie and get a steak at the inn down the back road. We figure it’s just the need for real food that costs too much on a college budget. Settled in the soft leather booth below the hunt club prints, he almost whispers, “I’ve left her.”
    “Why?”
    “She just doesn’t understand commitment.”

    I think I have won, keeping my feelings to myself – letting it happen – letting it run its course.

*

    In the summer night on the back screen porch, we eat homemade fajitas and drink white wine sangria. The dogs growl cautiously and continually at the sounds in the woods, and he says to me, “you never did like her, did you.”

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