The Significance of Gizzards
By Ruth Leibowitz
Their combined scents still fill the air. She stretches her limbs beneath the comforter, and a satisfying exhaustion trembles through them.
She hears him moving around in his kitchen, the bangs and bumps of cabinet and refrigerator doors opening and shutting. Next, the rattling of pans, silverware. “This guy is good at everything,” she thinks. For the first time in a long time, she feels at home in another person’s territory.
She gathers articles of clothing from their trail on the floor between the door and the bed. She wanted her nakedness to last. But the late-afternoon chill has come, his landlord is stingy with heat, and goose-bumps rise everywhere. Her nipples are hard and tight, but not from his hands and tongue on them this time.
"What's for dinner?" she calls out. After two hours of love-making she is starving.
"Chicken gizzards."
Her heart stops for a moment and she stands frozen like a gazelle alert for lions. Then she dresses quickly, joins him in the kitchen. Perhaps she has not heard him correctly.
He is a tall man with a graceful awkwardness. She thinks he has what her abuelita would call a verdadero corazón, true heart. So when she asks for clarification, she wants to be standing close to him, to trust her vision as well as her ears.
"What did you say?" she asks, and studies his face intently.
"Chicken gizzards, at your service," he says, while he empties a bag full of small dark shapes onto a greased pan. Breaded digestive organs, livers, and hearts, she supposes. She saw them once among other, far more appetizing foods at Heb’s market. She wondered what sort of person would buy them, let alone eat them.
"They’re not fancy, but they're all I've got right now." He stoops to open the oven door and places the pan inside. The oven door closes with a loud bang. She feels her brain twisting inside, like a frightened caterpillar.
"How's about if we make a salad?" he asks. "I've got some plum tomatoes, cucumbers, nice crisp romaine and some organic Caesar dressing. And we could make some garlic bread. Wanna stay?"
She attempts to remain in visual contact with him. She knows he is there, somewhere. But it’s as if she is searching through a wall of thick, wavy glass.
"You know what, Charlie, I don't feel very good."
"Oh baby, you feel VERY good," he replies, cupping her breasts and leaning down to nuzzle her hair with his face. She backs away.
"I mean it, Charlie, I’m not very hungry."
He steps back now too, banging into the oven, wincing. Yes, her olive complexion is a bit pale.
"Juanita? Is something wrong? Have we been going too fast?"
"No, not that. I just don't feel good."
"Look, I know we haven't known each other for very long, if you don't want to stay tonight it's OK..."
She is gazing in his general direction, just past his left ear, at things he knows are not in this kitchen. He searches her face for a hint or a story but can’t fathom the subterranean message. He’s never been good that that, never. Though he has tried so hard.
He only sees her face, with the serious, large dark eyes he felt immediately drawn to when they'd met two weeks before. They have grown up in different worlds and walked different paths to arrive in this university town in the middle of the country where neither belongs and both study hard as if their lives depend on it. Something about her has already come to feel like home.
"Thanks for a wonderful afternoon," she says. "I’m tired, and I have a poly-sci exam tomorrow morning. I’m going to call it a night."
He accompanies her to the closet, gets her coat and helps her on with it.“Walk you to your car?” He tries to be the gentleman he imagines some men were taught to be by their fathers. He never gets it right. He knows she will say “no” and she does. They kiss good-bye at the door, more a light lip bump than a kiss.
She descends the creaking stairs. She halts every few steps to stave off waves of hopelessness that engulf her, like high tide reclaiming a shore that once invited quiet sunbathers to breathe deeply in the sun’s warmth. Like the beach where she played as a tiny girl, before her parents were taken.
He returns to his kitchen. Puzzlement shifts to a quiet, familiar pain. He recites, first quietly and then aloud, the words of Hafiz:
Admit something:
Everyone you see, you say to them, "Love me."
Of course you do not do this out loud, otherwise someone would call the cops...
Why not become the one who lives with a full moon in each eye
that is always saying,
with that sweet moon language,
what every other eye in this world is dying to hear?
He sits at the table to cut vegetables, pauses with a half-peeled cucumber in his hand to ponder why love is so hard to find when it ought to be all around, like air. He remembers all the women in all the places and all the times, and wonders why none of them can see his true heart.
He forgets the oven is on, until the piercing siren of the smoke detector startles him from reverie. The stench of burnt gizzards fills the air.
THE END