Wyonia McLaurin
Dairy Pure
Excerpt
She needed milk. Milk because it was thicker than water but thinner than Merlot, milk because it reminded her of her childhood, of the sea that once drowned her Fruit Loops and brightened her hot chocolate, milk because there were more good memories in a single carton than there were in all the wine bottles below her kitchen sink, milk because her mother once told her that a glass of it can heal the heartburn and if it can heal the heartburn then it can heal the heartache, right?, milk because her husband, who’d finally admitted to his affair this morning as she quietly stirred soy vanilla creamer into his coffee, was lactose intolerant.
She wasn’t going to poison him. That’s what he called lactose—poison—and on their first date, when she fixed him fettucine Alfredo, extra parmesan, extra mozzarella, and the heaviest cream she could find, she had to mask her disappointment when he suggested they order Chinese instead. “I just can’t do dairy,” he told her politely. On their next date, she made him the same meal but with coconut milk and some strange cashew goo that tasted better when she closed her eyes. She always viewed this dinner as the moment he fell in love with her.
Twelve years later, she was still cooking with coconut milk. She’d come to master the art of dairy substitution—her squash mac and cheese was almost the exact replica of the original thing. Almost. Though she had no lactose problem herself, she treated dairy like it was discount perfume. Her husband could smell it on her. Every kiss, hug, and exhale gave her away. “June, did you eat something with cheese in it?” with a wrinkled nose and an I-have-work-to-do excuse.
She didn’t know what she would do with the milk. As she walked to the back of the Walmart Supercenter, navigating through rejected carts and neglected kids, she thought that maybe she’d just drink it herself. Make him smell it on her breath when he returned from work later. She slouched, a sloppy habit that her mother always hated, and let the refrigerator air cool her exasperation. One percent, two percent, three percent, skim, part-skim, whole—there were so many labels, so many ways of saying the same thing. Wasn’t it all just milk, regardless of the percentages? And even if she felt one percent or three percent, skim or whole, wasn’t she still his wife? She reached for the highest percentage she could find. DairyPure. She liked the sound of that. Dairy-pure. Daiir-y-puuuure. Dairy Pure. Two things her husband opposed.
On paper, Richard was perfect. He was a nurse at the clinic downtown—the clinic that most people avoided because it was too deep in the ghetto. “You can get shot on your way to a physical exam,” residents of the neighboring suburb often joked. But everyone loved the charming nurse who listened to their problems and made them feel sane while the rest of the health department convinced them they were crazy. Richard was committed to his patients.
In the next aisle, she wondered if DairyPure made cheese. They had cottage cheese. Good enough. She grabbed two different flavors from the shelf, then reached for a bag of shredded mozzarella.
The items were in her basket before she knew what she was doing. She hadn’t forgotten the recipe, from a teaspoon to a cup. Thanks to Richard, her brain was now an encyclopedia of recipes and nutrition labels. A recipe was simple, structured. There was one for everything.
How to Make a Marriage
Ingredients:
2 c. love
1 c. honesty
1 c. selflessness
1 c. fidelity (optional, depending on how well-done you want it)
Instructions:
prep relationship beforehand (let marinate for at least a year or so, but not too long)
have and hold from this day forward
enjoy till death do part
Serving Size: 2
Of course, she had no instructions about what to do when one offers a taste to someone else.
Parmesan. She suddenly remembered that they kept the grated kind in a different aisle.
She wished she’d been surprised, perhaps even more than she wished he didn’t cheat. When he told her, she didn’t even look up from their coffee mugs—two dishwasher-safe ceramics that they’d gotten on their tenth wedding anniversary in Bermuda. He constructed an excuse like it was a Jenga tower, stacking “it-just-happened” and “I-didn’t-mean-to-hurt-you” on top of an already trembling foundation. Richard rambled when he was nervous and sometimes confessed details he intended to keep private. She could tell by his grimace that he hadn’t meant to reveal that the woman was a patient who’d visited the clinic six months ago for her daughter’s cough. When he said this, she’d been sliding his coffee towards him, but the word “daughter” caused her to push the mug too far. It fell off the marble island and shattered with a clunky, wet noise that forced them both to wince awkwardly at each other. “We’ll talk more after work,” he mumbled.
Noodles. Right next to the parmesan. How convenient. She grabbed two boxes of fettucine and tossed them into her basket. Did this other woman know about Richard’s aversion to dairy? Did he ever whine about the smell of her coffee creamer or the cheese in her scrambled eggs or the Neufchâtel on her bagel? Was she allowed to take a bite of her pepperoni pizza and then kiss him afterwards without feeling soft gags in the back of his throat? Or had she been willing to give up dairy too? And what about her daughter? Was she willing to trade her Kraft Mac and Cheese for tasteless mac and squash?
When they first got married, June figured it’d be a fair trade. And what was love if it wasn’t trade? Her relinquishment of dairy evinced her commitment to him—to their family. Still, she enjoyed teasing him about it. Once when they were cuddling on their mattress in their first apartment, she asked him, “What’re you gonna do when I start making my own milk? You gonna hold your breath?”
He responded, “What do you mean?” at the same time she motioned to her breasts. “You’re not pregnant, are you?”
“No, but—”
“Is breastmilk dairy?”
She hesitated. “I don’t know. Probably?”
Then he put his head over her chest as if to suppress the idea of lactation. “Guess we’ll talk about it when we get there.”
They never got there. Turned out that while his body struggled to digest, her body struggled to produce. When they found out, Richard looked at her the same way she’d looked at him on their first date—slightly disappointed yet reassuring—as if a child were as easy a sacrifice as fettucine Alfredo.
About the Author
Wyonia McLaurin is a Fiction student in Columbia University’s Writing MFA Program. Her work has appeared in literary magazines including Writers House Review, Ars Poetica, and Teachers & Writers Magazine.