Out Tonight
He Will Be Taking Her Out To Dinner On Her Anniversary
Being eight months pregnant in no picnic, no matter what the magazines try to tell you. A woman’s back aches, her feet bloat, and her stomach gets so big she can’t even see her toes anymore. Despite feeling like an aerial blimp, though, she’ll still insist on preparing a special home-cooked meal for two, to mark her anniversary.
You go to all the effort of planning a nice, but not too elaborate meal. A roast, perhaps, with baby carrots and mini-potatoes, and a green salad on the side. For desert you chose something simple. An apple pie with scoops of ice-cream sounds good. Not a very ambitious meal-plan, but one as distant as Mount Kilimanjaro for all the effort that it’s going to take.
The problems began almost the moment Suzanne started taking the ingredients from the refrigerator. The meat, which she had removed from the freezer and left to thaw on one of the top shelves, was not a problem. The vegetables, however, were an entirely different matter. Despite her husband’s reassurances that he would not forget to take them out of their drawers at the bottom of the fridge before leaving for work, he had most obviously forgotten. Only with a gargantuan effort was she able to bend down low enough to reach them on her own, let alone get them out of the drawers and onto the counter.
Now that she has her vegetables, she carries them over to the counter, where she starts to clean and peel them. It is no small feat, considering how much distance her swollen belly adds between the counter and herself. She starts to wish that her arms were at least a foot or two longer. As she reaches for the knife set she notices something she is almost certain was not there before. Stuck to the side of the block are some sort of instructions.
Curious, she held it up to the light in order to see them better. What she saw caused her to immediately put it back down in confusion. The instructions were a notice warning her not use the knives when pregnant or on an anniversary.
Strange, but not as strange as the one she had found on the microwave instructing her not to operate it within a one hundred-foot radius of the coffee maker. She decided she would ignore this one just as she had that one. Instead, she went to get out the roasting pan, only to discover that she could not reach it, no matter what she did or tried. It kept dodging from her fingertips, as if refusing to be captured by them. She huffed, she puffed, she tried; all to no avail.
As the pan slips away from you for what must be the fifteenth time, you suddenly picture yourself bending over the roast as you baste it, your back aching so badly it brings tears to your eyes. It’s at that moment that you understand why pregnant women should not be using knives on their anniversaries. And, like a lightening flash from the sky, you recognize the strange way that the letter ‘g’ was printed in the warning stuck to the knife block. It’s not a co-incidence at all that your husband chooses that moment to call and tell you he’s taking you out tonight.
Out Tonight and Another Day From RENT
