On a Tuesday afternoon, Alice Clark takes a bite of a burrito. She sits at a weatherworn table in her backyard. Her daughter jumps on the trampoline.
Her burrito is loaded with both guacamole and nostalgia. Alice hasn’t eaten at Mad Max’s since she worked there in high school, but when a new location popped up down the street, she found herself pulling into the parking lot on opening day.
Her first bite goes down easy. But the second requires thorough chewing, an exercise that seems like it may never end. She looks down at the tortilla shell wrapped in shiny foil, strands of her own saliva stretching from one end to the other as if bridging some cavernous danger — crushed avocadoes, pulverized tomatoes, the flesh of a dead animal.
She remembers that flesh cooking in a smoker outside the back of the restaurant, ten years ago. That smoker was the prized possession of the chef who helped start the place.
She can still picture his sheepish smile. Back then, she thought it radiated purity. Really, it hid missing teeth.
The teeth left a gap she could feel when they kissed. When her tongue reticently searched inside of his mouth. She was so unsure, then, of everything, but especially of how to be with a man. She was 17, inexperienced, blushing. He was 28, insistent, adult.
It started with lingering glances. She had an age-appropriate boyfriend, but outside of him, boys and men had never paid her much attention before. The chef’s inviting stares in the blisteringly hot kitchen warmed her deeper than the sun ever could. She started to return them, and add a daring smile — learning for the first time to flex a muscle she would turn to again and again in the years to come, until settled safely in a marriage.
The flirtations culminated, finally, in a frenzied drive to his house. Her parents were out of town. His girlfriend was working late. She lied to her boyfriend on the way there, telling him she was headed home. Instead, with the top down on the used convertible her parents bought for her, she sped along streets she had never driven before, her hair blowing wildly in the air. Her skin smelled like salt and frying oil. His did too, when he took off his shirt, baring his chest in his bedroom. She felt his erection inside his pants, hot and just for her, somehow different from any she had come across before. More carnal. Animal flesh.
Alice swallows her lingering bite, and with it pushes down this memory.
When it happened, she felt silly, like a child dressing up in her mother’s dresses and high heels, only to look in the mirror and see that they don’t fit at all. She was so sure, feeling desired by an older man, that she was an adult. But it was a girl that ran from his house that night before anything more could happen.
And she knows much more could have happened. Instead, it ended with Alice speeding away in the dark night, towards the safety of her parents’ empty house. She quit her job the next day. He left town soon after. His recipes are all that is left of him now.
It’s her daughter’s cries for help from the trampoline that breaks her train of thought, jolting her back to reality. She gets up from the table, narrowly avoiding a splinter primed for her palm. She helps her daughter down the small ladder onto the soft grass, smelling the girl’s nutty, sun-toasted hair.
When Alice returns to her lunch, she finds that the crushed avocadoes appear soft and sweet. The pulverized tomatoes now look, simply, like the innocuous salsa that they are. They no longer have the power to scare or intimidate her.
For the first time in a long time, she feels happy to be older. Age has brought crow’s feet and stretch marks and tired bones. But it has also brought security, self-confidence, and just enough distance from the near missteps of her past.
Alice’s appetite returns, and with it comes a silent smile. Her third bite goes down easy.
Olivia Brochu‘s work has been featured by Five Minute Lit, Motherly, and more. Her piece “Under Pressure” was a finalist in a Women on Writing essay contest. She lives in Allentown, PA with her husband and three sons.
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