Summary

Now living with Ciaran, the narrator happily assumes responsibilities for domesticity, delighting in her new-found “house-pride” (128). She tidies their apartment with care. She mends her lover’s shirt buttons. She curbs her smoking and all but gives up wine. She embraces cooking although for most of her life food had been a private demon and a source of unending stress. She sees the meals she carefully prepares as a way to make better even those days when Ciaran would come home from his office angry or frustrated. “Along with sex, cooking was what I did to make it up to him—whatever ‘it’ happened to be that day” (119). They never talk about the breakup save in “vague and soft ways” (115). Her attention to their shared space she sees as a way for Ciaran to accept her presence as inevitable, even necessary. She...