Fiction
Season to Love
We expressed our feelings through food — until we didn’t
My wife, Ayu, expresses her feelings for me through her cooking.
I first tasted this behavior at our wedding. That day, possibly the happiest of her life, she arranged a whole tray of sushi — salmon, sea urchin, herring roe — to rival those served in fancy restaurants. It stirred me. Who cooks right after exchanging wedding vows?
When upset, Ayu’s culinary choices become stingy. On one occasion, after we’d had an ugly fight, she gave me an apple with a fork stuck in it. She had eaten dinner first.
Wide-eyed, I asked her, “Is this a joke?”
“It’s called a diet.” Readjusting her sprouting bun, she sat across from me at the kotatsu table. We always pulled it out during winter to eat cozily in its futon.
“I only weigh 70 kilograms.”
“You’re right.” She bit the corner of her plump lip, her guilt-is-eating-me-alive gesture. “I’ll make it up to you tomorrow. I promise.”
Ayu kept using this seasoned form of communication throughout our marriage.
The time I surprised her with a gift at Christmas, she prepared a steamy oden pot — boiled eggs, fish cakes, soy-flavored broth.
