Aftertaste

by Regina Olga Mullen

Aftertaste

The guests stood up from the table without saying goodbye, and I was left looking at the half-moon of onion still in the fruit bowl, sliced down the middle and purple as a bruise, its white insides exposed and sweating a little in the heat. It wasn’t even wrapped in plastic; that’s how I knew it wasn’t long for this world. There was the hollow sound of the door swinging shut, then Sarah peeked her head in from the living room. 

“Harold?” she called, “They gone?” And when I nodded, Sarah slunk into the kitchen and made her way to the fruit bowl. She traced her finger down the long line of a banana, examined two lethargic looking plums, put them back, popped a burst of green grapes into her mouth (a perfunctory gesture, dispassionate even), then, as I knew she would, grabbed the onion half, and retreated into the living room. A flake of purple-pink onion skin fluttered to the floor in her wake—the only evidence that she’d been there at all. 

Sarah was an odd girl. Pretty, but odd. I hadn’t noticed the taste on her right away, the faint tang that lingered on her tongue and in between her teeth. The first time I kissed her, she was just another good-looking girl at the bar, smile like a Cheshire cat and a spurt of long red hair down her back. Nice hair, I thought at the time. Shiny hair. Thick and biblically red. The kind of hair that made you think about grabbing it. I had liked how she said my name after everything. Nice to meet you, Harold. Where do you live, Harold. What kind of work are you in, Harold. And if she tasted off in any way, there hadn’t been much reason to notice it. That would come later. 

I got up to clear the table after our guests, who had placed a few squares of cheese on their plates and not much else, picking at them politely as we chatted about the new supermarket and that one movie no one saw and who was playing pickleball these days and what on earth for. Mostly, we drank. A few beers each, then a bottle of gin with a splash of tonic. Sarah, who only had a sip of beer before letting the rest go warm and flat, had got up from the table halfway through. She’d touched the onion in the bowl, met my eyes, then put it down. Then she left. I watched our guests—Rick and Brenda they were called, friends of mine—eyeing Sarah’s retreating back. We sat in pregnant silence as the door shut behind her, waiting for the faint padding of her footsteps to fade into nothing. I watched Rick watch Brenda—Brenda, who was a woman you might feel inclined, in an old-fashioned sort of way, to call handsome. Brenda, who had a too-large nose but a well-kept face regardless. Who only ever smelled of hairspray and the four dabs of powdery perfume she left at each wrist and behind both ears. She sat suspended with Rick and me in our conspiratorial hush, until we could be certain that Sarah was gone. Rick poured more gin, more tonic, then cut lime from the bowl and squeezed it into our glasses. The lime, of course, by proximity I surmised and as most things seemed to these days, tasted faintly of onion. 

“Odd girl,” Rick said, finally. “Very pretty, but odd.” 

That was about as much as anyone could say about Sarah without really getting into it. I mean, what could I do other than agree? I sipped my gin and thought of the way she’d eat a rotisserie chicken, straight from the bag like a vulture stripping flesh off roadkill. She’d rip off a hunk of meat, then add a thick strip of onion. She liked a 1:1 ratio. Any onion would do, and she grew long green stalks of them in a jar by the kitchen sink, even as she preferred the red ones, the swift and pungent bite of them. She could eat an onion like an apple but wouldn’t do it in front of me. That was the kind of behavior she saved for when she knew I’d be out of town. Still, I’d come home and it’d be all over her—that hardy onion taste, earthy and astringent at once, undaunted by any attempts to mitigate it. Like a bad house guest, it stayed too long and left only when it wanted to.

“I think you have pica,” I said to her once, and she laughed and laughed. 

“I’m not eating the walls, Harold. It’s just a fucking onion.” 

When the gin ran out, Rick and Brenda didn’t say goodbye, not really. The three of us had reached such a saturation that it was understood that the niceties were no longer required, and they left me alone with little more than a nod and a tip of Rick’s baseball cap. Rick’s eyes flicked one last time to the living room door, still shut. 

“A nice-looking girl, anyway,” he said, and then they left. 

Before Sarah, there had been Leona, and before her, Maude. Before that, Kristi-with-a-K, and before that Christy, who retroactively had been deemed Original Christy (Christy-with-a-C didn’t roll off the tongue in quite the same way as Kristi-with-a-K). Most of my friends had settled down around the time I was meeting Maude, and Rick and Brenda before that even. It was like clockwork the way a friend of mine would hit a certain age, meet the next woman, proffer a diamond, marry her in a poorly lit converted barn or a well-lit Hilton banquet hall, and then drop out of my life completely. I imagine their freshly minted wives found me worrisome, a bad influence maybe. Or, when I was feeling more generous, I figured they just got busy with their lives, the opaque duties of marriage monopolizing their time and energies. Rick wasn’t like this though. When he met Brenda, he just started bringing her along. Given almost any other woman, this would have irked me. But Brenda was special—a hard-drinker who required no real pretense of civility, who could be present at a boys’ night without impediment to the evening and wasn’t good-looking enough to cause any kind of stir. Rick was in love with her of course, but he liked her too. So did I. It was a rarity, to be sure. 

“Janine was prettier, though,” I said to Rick once, referencing the girl he’d been seeing before Brenda. He gave me a pitying look. 

“Janine thought sunscreen gives you skin cancer,” Rick said, “And she brewed her own kombucha.” 

A small price to pay for a beauty like Janine, I thought, but I bit my tongue. It was better this way, with Brenda. At least for me. Because, as I mentioned, I liked her. 

“Kristi-with-a-K was better looking than your Sarah,” Rick offered. 

“Was she?” I found I couldn’t remember. 

“She had those legs,” Rick said.

The long line of a woman’s leg came to me, as if from a dream, my mouth pressed to its swell of ankle. 

“Good legs,” I agreed. 

I had moved Sarah in after only a few months of knowing her. Not wise necessarily, but she had asked, and I didn’t mind much—even preferred having someone to come home to. She wasn’t as clean as I would have liked. Suddenly, the tub was laced with gray at the top where her bathwater had been, and long strands of cherry-red hair coated pillows and drains and floors, and her too-full cups of coffee dotted the tables and counters with identical stamps of the same wet brown ring. Everywhere I looked, her residue. 

“You shed like a cat,” I told Sarah one morning, extracting an artery of red hair from the depths of the bathroom sink. She was perched on the toilet, one foot up on the lid to clip the toenails off, her sheath of hair curtaining the right side of her face. She had thick, unyielding nails, and every so often the staccato click of the clippers rang out like a shot against the walls, bits of toenail blasting off in all directions. 

“So I’ll shave it off then,” she said, not looking up from her careful work, “See how you like me then.” 

“I’d like you any which way.”

“Ha,” she said. Another sharp click, another toenail pinging off the wall. “Good one.” 

It took about a month for me to notice the onions. It started small, as these things often do. An extra shallot here or there. More leeks than a recipe called for. The scallions grown by the sink. At first, she tried to mouthwash it away, the taste of her like a float of mint on a briny sea. Then came the red onions on saltines—thick rings adorning each cracker, and a sprinkle of salt on top. I shook my head in disbelief as she carried them to the bedroom. Then, the drive-thru meltdown, where the onions on her sandwich had been caramelized by mistake (“It’s not the same,” she had whined, making me drive through again). I started to find fat yellow onions with bites out of them in Ziplock bags in the fridge. The first time I encountered one, I took it out to examine the toothmarks, just to be sure. The smell of them was all over her. I could taste it at her mouth, in the pockets of air between us, even. Sometimes, at her breast, or, and I swear this is true, in between her legs. Her fingertips were irrevocably stained with it, and one morning when she’d brushed the sleep from the corner of my eye, I could feel my flesh burn where her thumb had been. Some days I came home from work to find her chopping them at the counter, her eyes red and her nose streaming. This is the image of Sarah that’s stuck with me over the years, in spite of myself: all those times she stood in my kitchen, crying over a knife.

I became increasingly paranoid that you could smell it on us. I kept her away from most people. And before we’d meet up with Rick and Brenda, I’d pull Sarah into the shower and scrub her raw. She was always prettiest like that, steamed pink and wilting under the water. Sometimes the smell would only intensify in the wet heat, and—forgive me—I’d put my mouth to her anyway, compelled and repulsed at once, incapable of quelling this alien inclination to taste her boiling skin and her fetid mouth, to place my tongue at the tip of each overripe finger and the stinging center of her belly button, my body moving against hers more reflex than lucid decision—just one more incoherence in the rancid fever dream that was her presence in my home and my life. After, I’d think back to the person I’d been mere moments before and feel as if he were a complete stranger to me, a person of foreign appetites that left me anywhere from politely puzzled to vaguely queasy and always with that sweet-sour taste lingering, sometimes for days, in the back of my mouth. Clarity would descend, is all I mean to say. After, that is. 

It never felt right when Sarah went out with me and Rick and Brenda. To start, she didn’t really drink like we did. Never had the right taste for it, or maybe, not the right disposition. She’d sit on one drink for hours—let ice melt down to nothing in her vodka sodas, swirl wine in the glass but never bring it to her lips, babysit a beer until the bubbles were gone. I would spend the whole night worrying that Rick and Brenda could smell us. I say “us,” but I mostly mean Sarah, though eventually I suspected it started to cling to me too. I’d study their faces to see if I could detect a flared nostril, a curled lip—that small look of surprise and disgust that only Sarah seemed able to elicit, though polite people like Rick and Brenda would hardly show it anyway. 

One night, Sarah decided to join us at a bar a few streets over to watch a baseball game. 

“Are you sure you want to come?” I asked her, “It’s really just the boys.” 

“Isn’t Brenda going?” 

She was. I couldn’t think of any way to explain how Brenda didn’t count that sounded half decent in my head, so I shrugged and off we went. 

S coming too, I texted Rick and Brenda. Rick sent back a thumbs-up. 

When we got to the bar, I realized Sarah was dressed like an American Girl Doll—whichever was the Victorian-era one. It was a lacy little dress. Poofy sleeves and a big round collar. Her short hemline was the only thing marginally redeeming the whole thing, but I noted then for the first time, her legs really weren’t the main draw anyway. She was no Kristi-with-a-K in that department. Brenda, who smelled like her same four dots of powdery perfume, brought us over to their table. 

“Aren’t you dressed up!” she said to Sarah, giving her a kind of side hug as greeting. Sarah just stared at her. 

“I’ll get some drinks, yeah?” I said hastily, “Pitcher of lager to start?” 

“Just water for me, thanks,” Sarah chirped. I swore I saw Rick and Brenda exchange a glance. 

“The water’s over there,” Brenda said, pointing to the plastic dispenser near the bathrooms. Sarah gave her that look again, then turned on her heel toward the bathroom. I threw Brenda an apologetic shrug, and Brenda, being Brenda, was kind enough not to say anything. 

I got the pitcher of beer plus buffalo wings with blue cheese sauce and some tequila and lime. Three shot glasses for the tequila because I knew better than to offer one to Sarah. I preferred to do the ordering when she was around, picking the strongest-smelling foods and drinks as cover and careful not to order anything with onions. Sometimes I tried to get her to drink whole milk. I had this idea that straight dairy could neutralize her from the inside out—mellow the smell and maybe even the behavior. A silly thing, in retrospect, but a girl like Sarah could get you thinking like that. I watched her sitting there sipping water in her doll’s dress, eating none of the food. I thought, still, that I could smell her. 

“What?” she said to me, looking bored. 

I grabbed a fistful of her lacy hemline. “This was certainly a choice.” 

“Want to rip it off me?” She took a smug sip of water. I did. Though that hadn’t been what I meant. And the stir I felt low in my belly only annoyed me further. 

“Just stop,” I said, though my heart really wasn’t in it, and I could tell that she knew it. I made a point of looking away from her, fixing my gaze to the nearest screen, where a car ad had a silver SUV running roughshod over the mountains. Out of the corner of my eye, I could still see her, smirking at me, and then at Rick, and then particularly at Brenda, like this was all some sort of joke, like wasn’t this all just so funny. 

When I went to buy us another round, the bartender asked me about Sarah. Other men were always asking me about Sarah—who she was, if she was with anyone, what her deal was. I couldn’t even begin to describe what her deal was, but I had empathy for these men. I understood the compulsion, that is. 

“That’s my Sarah,” I told him.

The bartender kept looking at her. I watched him watch her. He had a goofy mustache and a few inches on me, his shoulders hunched but broad enough anyway. He would’ve been good looking if not for the mustache. 

“Oh, sorry,” the bartender said, “I thought you were with her.” He pointed to Brenda. I laughed before I could stop myself. 

“Her? Never.” 

“Sorry,” he said again, “It seemed like you two had a vibe.” 

I followed his gaze toward Brenda. Brenda, with her square jaw and too-short hair. Her thick wrists and low laugh and one wonky tooth. Her face, plain and warm. Rick had his arm slung around her, which I thought might’ve been a hint to the bartender that I was not, in fact, “with her.” 

“My buddy’s girl,” is all I said, rapping an impatient knuckle on the bar top, “The pretty one’s mine.” 

We got home late that night. The game lasted a few hours, and we’d stuck around after for a bit of a night cap—more tequila, more limes. Rick drank too much but insisted on driving his car back to his place anyway. “Better to just let him do it,” Brenda had said, in a resigned sort of way, climbing into the passenger seat. She was just easygoing like that. 

Sarah and I walked home, the night unseasonably warm, the stars bright and clear in a cloudless sky. I watched her dress kiss the tops of her thighs as she walked beside me, wondered not for the first time how it might feel to tear it right down the seam. A foolish thing to do—like something out of a movie, or a dream. But there it was all the same: the urge. A kind of need. I made to kiss Sarah, but she pushed me away. 

“You reek,” she said, wrinkling her nose at the sweet scent of liquor on my breath. I fingered her poofy sleeve a little, tugging at the lace, wondering if it might give. It didn’t. She didn’t. I let out a hard, mean laugh.  

Brenda texted me about the same time we got home. Made it back, she wrote. Big man’s conked out. Rick was “Big man,” of course. A little joke we shared. 

“Brenda says they made it back,” I called out to Sarah. I could hear her in the kitchen behind me, the sounds of the fridge opening and closing, the rummaging through the cutlery drawer. A sure sign that the rest of the night wasn’t heading in my preferred direction. 

“I just don’t get what’s so great about her,” Sarah said, after a while.

“Who?” I was still on my phone.

“Who?” said Sarah, “Who else? Fucking Brenda.” 

“What about her?”

“I mean, I just don’t get it. She’s nothing special.” 

I looked up from my phone and toward the kitchen, where Sarah cut a familiar figure behind the counter, knife in hand and her face hovering over the chopping block. It bothered me more than I expected. Without my meaning it to, my voice began to rise in pitch. “Nothing special?” I said. I tried to get her to understand. I put too much emphasis on the word “special,” started over, then did it again. I went from loud to yelling. Sarah kept chopping, and what had been a whole onion was pulverized into a kind of mush, stinking and wet and gleaming white. I wasn’t sure why it mattered to me that she understood. I needed her to know that Brenda was special, that she was as different as they come. Better, even. Not like the rest. Not like other girls. 

At this, Sarah raised a bloodshot eye to me and shook her head. “I’m not like other girls,” she said, pointing the tip of the knife at her chest for emphasis. It was dripping with onion. Her fingers, I noticed, had wrinkled with the juice of it. 

“No, you’re not,” I agreed, “You’re much worse.” 

For some reason Sarah found this extremely funny. So I left her there in the kitchen like that, curved as a question mark over the cutting board, her eyes streaming with laughter or onions or maybe both. 

Sarah didn’t last long after that. Compatibility issues, I told my friends, and everyone seemed to know what I meant by that. It took her less than an hour to move out, all her things in two suitcases and one lonely looking cardboard box. In the doorway, I offered her the jar from the sink, fat green scallion stalks creeping out and around it, the water at the bottom milky and braided with roots. 

“Keep it,” she said. 

“I don’t want it.” 

Sarah sighed and took the jar, the stalks shuddering as they passed between us. “Of course you don’t,” she said. I couldn’t help but notice how very pretty she looked. As she clutched the jar to her chest, the sun off the scallion stalks lit up her face with a green and otherworldly glow. 

“This isn’t about the fucking onions, okay?” I said, firmly. But wasn’t it, though? She placed one stinging finger to my bottom lip, then kissed it, leaving before I could think of anything else to say. The door hung ajar behind her, and for a while I just stood there, fingering the slickness on my palm where the jar had been. 

It took me three days to scrub her smell from the kitchen, the counters, the bathtub, the sinks. I threw out the bedsheets altogether. The walls held onto her longest, until they, too, seemed to forget about the whole thing.

Life went on and I made my way with a smattering of other women, not always as pretty, though often less odd. Sarah vacated my mind as quickly as she’d entered it, like most women do. I was never one to dwell on these kinds of things once they were over. Even so, years would pass, and I’d be at the ballpark with Rick and Brenda or another girl or someone from work and I’d take a big bite of a chili dog with all the fixings—cheese, beans, sauce. Peppers and red onions on top. And in all that the onion could still come to the fore, ring out crisp and clear like a siren over the dull roar of everything else, so that there, in the thick of the crowd, under a sweltering summer sky and as tinny speakers blared out Take Me Out to the Ballgame, Sarah’s face would come to me like a ghost, the sharp-sweet slap of onion flaring up into my nostrils once more. My eyes, already watering.

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Author Regina Olga Mullen (she/her) is a Czech-American copywriter living with her husband in San Francisco, where she is regularly bullied by the hills and the local pack of feral cats. She’s been writing professionally for a decade, and also taught English 99 at San Quentin.

Artist Serge Lecomte (he/him) was born in Belgium in 1946. He came to the States where he spent his teens in South Philly and then Brooklyn. After graduating from Tilden H. S. he joined the Medical Corps in the Air Force. He earned an MA and Ph.D. from Vanderbilt University in Russian Literature with a minor in French Literature. He worked as a Green Beret language instructor at Fort Bragg, NC from 1975-78. In 1988 he received a B.A. from the University of Alaska Fairbanks in Spanish Literature. He worked as a language teacher at the University of Alaska (1978-1997). He worked as a house builder, pipe-fitter, orderly in a hospital, gardener, landscaper, driller for an assaying company, bartender and painter. You can find more of his work on his website: https://sergelecomte.weebly.co/.