Dead Housekeeping

Your husband is out at the bar again. The house is clean. You’re hungry, but the pantry is empty.

Clip on your best earrings. You love a good piece of jewelry, even of the costume variety. Apply some red lipstick. Spritz some floral perfume. Slip into your trench coat and pearl-dotted gloves.

It may only be Toledo, and it may only be the grocery store, but you never know. Elvis could make an appearance in produce.

Plus, even when money is scarce, it’s important to always look your best.

Begin your one-mile walk downtown.

At Tiedtke’s, add Spam, Kraft American Cheese, and Wonder Bread to your cart. Pay with change from your pocketbook.

Head home, sandwich ingredients in hand.

Once there, open your bag of bread and can of meat. Add slices of each straight to a warmed skillet with a bit of butter. Let your ingredients sizzle and brown before flipping. While it’s cooking, place a piece of cheese on top of one piece of bread. After both sides of bread and meat are cooked, smoosh the slices of toast together around the Spam. Open a can of peaches for dessert. Leave your dishes. Maybe on purpose.

Apply rouge and settle down to watch the latest wrestling match. It’s scripted, but you still love watching muscly men like Buddy Rogers duke it out in the ring. Take your first bite, savor it before your husband returns, blitzed and ready to argue about a woman's place.

- Danielle Dayney was born and raised in Ohio, and got her start writing rock concert reviews for a Toledo-based music magazine, The Glass Eye. Today, her work has appeared in the Fredericksburg Literary and Art Review, online at Huffington Post, Dead Housekeeping and The Mindful Word, and in several anthologies. These days, you can find her chasing her kids and furbabies somewhere in the rolling hills of Virginia, or online at https://danielledayney.com. Her book is forthcoming from Brandylane Publishers in 2021.

Begin early in your arranged marriage to your farmer. Sprinkle a little bit of soda, literally on top of the newly growing corn stalk, ruining the whole row, but not the field, before he stops you. Misunderstanding the difference between sprinkling around and on turns out to be just the thing to ensure you’re put out of the fields forever.

Now the kitchen is your domain. Be sure to always have cornbread cooked and greens simmering in the pot in case time gets away from you. Pile high all of your books, various versions of the Bible for cross-referencing, sheet music you never use, several years of yellow pages, cookbooks full of recipes you can’t get the ingredients for, and cartons of cigarettes. All balanced in precarious columns. Spend moments between preparing meals ordering items you don’t have the money or space for.

Find relief out of the hot kitchen by spending afternoons on the back porch reading and smoking, or playing melodies you heard on the radio, by ear and without sheet music, on the tiny upright piano you convinced your husband to buy. It entertains your children and the neighbors through the porch screen.

Make sure to do all of this in your house dress, bra off and no shoes, because none ever fit just right. As you’re rocking and reading on the porch, be sure to make notes in the margins of your thoughts and reactions, even in the Bible. Feel secure that they will always see your thoughts scribbled around passages, like a frame. Who would throw out a Bible? Surely, not your children.

- Leah Rosa O'Donnell is a native New Orleanian and Licensed Professional Counselor. She remains fascinated with observing people and occasionally writes about what she sees.

How to Eat a Spam Sandwich

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