The Cohabitants 19

Often when she was in the kitchen, he put his hands on her and kissed her neck, teasing her while she was occupied washing dishes, stirring a pot, or preparing vegetables. She treasured those moments. 

“No one ever cared what I ate before,” he whispered in her ear. “When you cook, I know you’re loving me.”

Those words were an engraved invitation to cure his sugar habit. He had a ritual of making their morning coffee the night before. Last thing before bedtime, he ground the beans, filled the coffee maker, and set the timer so when they got out of bed the brewed coffee would be waiting. That dawn slow dance was when she noticed his French Vanilla sweet cream consumption. It was alarming.

To convince him to drink coffee with less sugar, she sent him texts and emails with links to articles about sugar addiction and inflammation. When he didn’t comment on her missives, she tried to talk about it, but an invisible wall came up between them. The Cone of Silence. Conversation about food choices was a dead end. Eventually she surrendered the chat and brought home samples of other creamers she thought were a healthier choice. When she poked him with the presence of these other options neatly arranged in a row on the kitchen countertop, he turned his head sharply and said, “It’s my coffee.” He spoke in a quiet voice, but his eyes yelled.

Manipulating him was not going to be as easy as she thought it would be. To nudge him toward fewer calories, perhaps a demonstration would be more effective. Using the calculator on her phone, she stood in front of the refrigerator and totaled the amount of sugar he was consuming on a weekly basis with his French Vanilla sweet cream. Then she went to the grocery store and purchased a five-pound bag of white sugar and a clear glass bowl that would display its contents. 

She filled the glass bowl with the actual amount of granulated sugar he was consuming each week and set the bowl heaped full of sugar in the center of the kitchen table where he couldn’t miss it. But he did miss it. He completely ignored it. Her shock-and-awe strategy was a failure. He simply didn’t take the bait. 

Finally, she had to say something. “This is how much sugar you’re eating every week in your coffee,” she blurted.

His eyes bounced from her to the bowl and back to her. “No, it’s not.”

Don’t argue.

This is bullshit. 

If he was going to live in a pretend world, she would pretend, too. She went to the grocery store and bought a carton of milk. Every day after he went to work she added a glug of milk to his bottle of French Vanilla sweet cream and incredibly, the bottle never ran out. Days passed and she just kept adding milk to his cream waiting for the man to say something. Then one morning, he got a teaspoon out of the drawer and dipped it in her sugar display bowl to add a couple heaping teaspoons of sugar to his coffee.

She gasped.

He sighed like a sad man loaded down by the weight of the world. “I wouldn’t have to do this if you would stop adding milk to my cream.”

Holy shit.

He didn’t even bother insulting her. Her pitiful ruse was exposed for the stupid idea it was. She hadn’t thought about how she insulted his intelligence. She hadn’t cared. It was a two-person household, and there was a carton of milk in the refrigerator. It was a well-known fact that she did not drink milk. Yet she had purchased milk and the milk carton was slowly draining of milk while by some miracle the French Vanilla sweet cream bottle was always full. They both knew it was a game. He won by not playing. 

Fuck him.

He’s so much smarter than you are.

No, he’s not.

Obviously, you have mental problems. 

She turned away from him to look out the window as he sat down with his tablet to play solitaire while he drank his very sweet morning coffee. It was barely daylight. A chiffon mist draped the valley. The deck was slick. A woodpecker pecked at the suet. The dog paced. It was time to go for their morning tour of the property. On the hillside trail, the man inspected porcupine scrapes on the trees, then he took her hand and held it as they walked. Later she packed his lunch, and he kissed her goodbye before he left for work. Nothing had changed. The day was her blank page.