Stroganoff

I get home with the same groceries as always: milk, ground beef, and two boxes of stroganoff. It’s the prepackaged kind of stuff that is a simple mix of dried pasta and powdered spices and dairy. I set the wet bag on the kitchen counter and set to work: click-click-click-foom goes the stove as I turn the knob and the burner comes to life.

“How was work,” calls out a weak, raspy voice from the couch just outside the bar of the kitchen. It’s more of a yell than a question. Grandmother has to yell to be heard, she thinks— over the sound of the black and white movie playing on the classic movie channel.

“Fine,” I half mutter, half yell back. I squeeze the contents of packaged beef—on sale—  into the pot, log sizzling the moment it hits hot aluminum coating. Fleshy plops of meat ease themselves from pinkish-gray to brownish-gray.

“Oh well that’s good,” yell-calls grandmother. She turns back to her classic film, arms crossed, satisfied she’s made an attempt at pleasantries for the evening.

After a few minutes of sloshing meat around in its own oils, I pull out a colander from the lower right cabinet, making a racket as it scrapes the metal of several Dutch ovens. The colander gets placed in the sink and piping hot brown grease leaks out of it, down the drain.

“You’re not letting the grease go down the sink, are you?” Grandmother angles her head, blue-veined and wrinkled hand hovering over her fuzzy, crinkled mouth,  twisting back to look at me accusingly. She already knows the answer. We’ve had this conversation more times than I can count.

Usually I say “yes, grandma,” and she launches into a lecture about pipes. Always the pipes. Today, I feel spicy.

“No, grandma,” I say.

She twitches and a deep “v” of her brows wrinkle impossibly further. 

“Then why didn’t I hear you take out the second bowl to catch the grease?”

“I don’t know, grandma,” I say.

She harrumphs, turning back in her seat again, this time tension plain as day in her shoulders. She is silent, thinking. She can’t stand that I’m lying to her. She can’t stand that she’s unable to bend me to her will. But mostly she can’t stand that she’s unable to do any of it herself. She tsks. 

I contemplate how she is still alive on a diet of stroganoff and cola. It’s all she will eat and drink. Occasionally, hot chocolate and cinnamon-sugar toast for breakfast.

Nutritional deficiencies aside, I wonder how she can eat the same thing over and over again. Brown and white meat and pasta for dinner. Brown and white liquid and bread for breakfast. Brown and white cabinets and countertops. Brown and white hair and skin.

The drained meat is returned to the pot, then I stir in wet and dry ingredients and wait until everything starts to bubble.

As all parts come together, the smell of stroganoff begins to form and permeate the room. It smells halfway between human food and cat food. As I’m stirring cooked pasta squelching against dairy, I see a flash of something that looks almost like a nail bed. If I’m being honest, it looks like an entire finger. I stir around, squelching this way and that, without further discovery. I smile to myself. What a grotesque imagination. Perhaps when grandmother goes, it would honor her to take a piece of her, just a piece, grind her to bits in the old fashioned stainless steel meat grinder in the cabinet next to the Dutch ovens, add it to her favorite meal, and consume it— her. I do not say this aloud. It would probably freak her out. 

I place the lid over the pot to let the concoction simmer and thicken, “stirring occasionally,” the boxes instruct. I sit on a bar stool at the outskirts of the kitchen counter, scrolling on my phone while we sit in silence, the old black and white film playing unassumingly in the background.

“Oh, Bogey,” grandmother sighs eventually. I look up from my phone. I see Humphrey Bogart in a snazzy white suit, as Audrey Hepburn comes out, also in an immaculately white dress. She’s all clean and proper and bright. He is too, despite his wrinkles. It sickens me how she was always paired with men twice her age. My eyes return to my phone, scrolling across a cute kitty video one moment, a violent paragliding accident the next.

“Is it almost done?” Grandmother calls from the couch, without turning around. She always asks exactly two minutes before I take it off the burner. I wonder if she notates the time when the lid clanks on the pot, to when I stir it once and watches the time like a hawk. Or perhaps her body simply feels when it’s time. Muscle memory maybe. Either way, she already knows it’s done— she simply likes to ask.

I scoop a small helping onto the plate and bring it over to her. This will be her dinner for days. She mumbles a “thank you,” and begins to eat. Gums smacking with false teeth. It’s not exactly the same sound as when I move the wet mixture around in the pot, but it’s similar. Moist. 

I return to the pot in the kitchen, putting the lid back on to keep warm in case she wants seconds (she usually wants seconds). I open the fridge to bring out my own dinner I made this morning before work. It’s all balanced between lean protein, veggies, complex carbs and healthy fats. My body can’t process dairy, and I’ve gotten things down to a science. When I veer from it, my body retaliates. The macro nutrients change, but the formula stays the same, always the same. As I clink a small bowl of plain white china into the microwave, the lid of stroganoff bumps once beneath me, though, I didn’t touch it.

I frown and cast my eyes downward as my fingers still hover over the microwave numbers. I see the pot lid move again and I jump a whole foot backwards. Then the pot lid continues to lift and bump and rattle and racket. 

“What is that?” Grandmother calls out, annoyed, through a mouthful of stroganoff.

“The— the pot lid,” I say. What else do I say?

“Well, make it stop,” she says. 

I look around, unsure what to do. I grab a kitchen knife from the knife block on the counter next to the stove. Knife raised in a murderous position in one hand, the other reaches out, shaking, to the violently active lid before me. I start counting backwards from ten.

“Make it stop!”  shouts Grandmother.

Finally I lunge for the lid and snatch it away, leaving the open mouthed pot exposed. Brown and white dinner sits still and well-behaved. I lean over it, still holding the lid in one hand, knife in the other.

Suddenly from the center of piping hot and wet tooth-colored sheets and brown crumbles, an entire hand reaches out from the bottom of the pot and grabs my face forcefully, pulling me down into the muck. Lid and knife clatter and bang to the floor as I flail my arms,  skin burning and boiling, unable to pull myself from the grip of the stroganoff hand. As my screams muffle and my lungs fill with milk and fat— my last thoughts are of whether grandma will eat me. If pieces of flesh cut into noodles and boiled in water and mixed with processed spices would make her mouth water. If ground up fat and gristle from my cheeks would make her stomach growl.