Chapter Text
She’d decided to seek the fridge on a whim. The woman who introduced the daytime home shopping program and had earned her place as her best friend and closest confidante in recent weeks had been smiling through the screen — that radiant, beatific beacon of a smile that inevitably beckoned for attention — as she started talking about the latest development in kitchen utensils which would normally have been enough reason for Elfriede to pick up the phone and order a set, perhaps twelve, of whatever she was advertising, but in light of recent and unfortunate developments the number had been blocked out of every single device in the house. So with that out of the question, going to the kitchen and shifting through the fridge seemed like the next best thing. She wasn’t hungry, but it turned out to be a good idea anyway.
The cabbage was tucked away in a corner behind a pile of several plastic boxes containing something edible with the likely caveat of questionable quality, therefore it made sense that this was the first time she noticed it. She tossed the boxes aside and ignored the ugly splatter their contents made as they toppled off the shelf and onto the floor. The refrigerator light formed a delicate halo of warmth around the closed-up leaves with an angelic quality like she had never seen before.
Surely this cabbage had, up until now, led a miserably lonely existence. Her fingers brushed along the veins as she let the thought sink in. This was the first thing they had in common. In a state of utter calm, the mansion felt quieter than ever.
It made plenty amount of sense to carry it to the upstairs bedroom. Elfriede held the cabbage in her arms with the amount of care a mother would give her baby, and seated on the edge of the bed with it cradled on her lap like this, it really did feel as though she was one, truly, her ruined present and future chances of achieving real motherhood notwithstanding.
The television woman was still there to greet her at noon. She failed to acknowledge the cabbage occupying the other half of the grandiose couch, but Elfriede chalked it up to professionalism. In the times the announcer wasn’t talking, she allowed herself to fill the ensuing lull. She started by expressing her approval regarding the carved marble table that had just been displayed, touted about its sensible elegance, and then how it reminded her of the pillars she attempted to have installed in this very house just last week.
“The construction didn’t look sturdy enough,” she echoed to the cabbage, who would certainly have nodded along to the story if it were able, “so I was doing him a favor, you see? I mean, you couldn’t—” She flustered at the faux pas, “but, you understand, don’t you?”
That it did.
Other things came out of her quickly, and with surprising ease: the knife, the summer night, the death of the patriarch, both hers and her family name’s, and in this part she kept her voice level and looked straight at the floral vase she could only admire and not purchase without permission, and pretended that it was the reason her jaw clenched. She talked about the balcony of her childhood bedroom and how she used to watch the stars from it, about how pretty the night sky always looked to her until one day it was overrun by light and sound, artificial ones, the frantic glow of battleships fooling her into thinking the world was about to end, just for a moment, even though it turned out not to, just hers, and now she wished it did.
“I’m sorry.” Elfriede’s wan smile reflected dully onto the television screen that had long since gone blank. There was an urge to laugh, but she bit it down, and let it dissolve into something ugly and not entirely unfamiliar coiling in the pit of her stomach. “I—I spoke too much. That was selfish of me. I’m sorry.” She held the cabbage closer for lack of anything else to salvage the situation. She could say it felt like the right thing to do.
That night she sobbed into the cabbage — who had forgiven her — after it was over, and the night after that, and in the morning of the third she kicked at him when he said with utter lack of remorse that he’d thrown out that green thing under the bed that was starting to smell strange and called her a delusional fool. She’d ignored him and kept on shouting, about the injustice of it all, how it wasn’t fair that out of all the things he chose to deprive her of, it would be that, wouldn’t it?
That day she sat in front of the television like usual and greeted the announcer with her usual vigor and with such mournfulness walked into the kitchen so she could destroy the plates in the dishrack like she usually did, instead of confiding her sorrows to the cabbage that now only lived on fondly in her memories like everything else that had been irreparably tainted and destroyed.