The Gnome Stories, page 14
Maybe there is something missing in our lives. I mean, beyond the obvious.
Our sex life founders a little as we wait for the stove. They said last night it had arrived at the warehouse—carted in by truck across the Plains from its birthplace somewhere in Colorado, land of high-altitude special cooking instructions and the Denver Broncos. My wife is asleep as I tell you this—this night I am on watch for the thing; she will take the early morning hours. But the one they sent was dented. Banged up. Dinged in a minor way according to the voice that came across the phone to me and was sometimes garbled or nearly dropped due to the spotty cellular connection. And this was important: the thing has to be perfect—as close to ideal as they can get, just like TV food. There is no room for a flaw in this, our sexy silver dream remake kitchen. It had to be returned and refurbished somewhere larger, else. But it would return anytime, they said, and we must be on the lookout for it, and when it comes, it will be—at last—Just RightTM.
Just RightTM is the registered trademark of our major sponsor. It is a slogan I’m sure you’ve heard; they are famous for their many sales. They have as many sale days per year (just under 180) as retailers are legally allowed in Michigan (any more and you can’t legally describe them as sales). Though the lawyers will probably redact this, you should know their stuff is mostly crap. It’s all veneer.
Possibly our dent is due to manufacturing error, or else it’s due to sabotage. This is one way to explain it. There are forces in our neighborhood that watch over us, are jealous of our new kitchen and soon-to-be television time. There are also other forces who are happy enough to say they know us, that they knew us before our big splash, our crash into and across their screens and digital video recorders. We have had these forces over to our house for dinner before. We have cooked them veal, and eggplant, and pork butt, and potatoes mashed with garlic and chopped rosemary. We are grateful for our friends, for those who will continue to support us. Still other forces—the authorities, for instance—may want to keep us out of the media. I am sure we are important, our names somewhere inscribed on paper.
Official meetings occur throughout the neighborhood every couple of weeks through the Neighborhood Association. These take place under cover of early darkness. Everyone is welcome, but not everyone is invited. These groups are small. You can go to them and ask for a low-interest loan to do work on the exterior of your house or fill in your backyard like a grave with a ton of fresh topsoil. You can go to them to talk about the recurring problems with tenants down at the end of the block, as in they sell drugs, as in cars come by and park for just a minute or two nearly every night, all night.
The forces that operate against us behind the scenes are happy to oppose us. They hold grudges. We hold grudges against them for calling the city on us last year when we refused to trim our weeds. They hold grudges against us because they think we—they don’t know which one of us, Jennifer or me—are criminals of some kind. And that we will be celebrities, which is one step better. It is true we have many instruments of violence in the garage: axes, bows, rototillers, and cordless circular saws.
They are correct. Both Jennifer and I have black marks against us. It is a good thing that the Television Network doesn’t do thorough background checks. Or maybe they do (the contract does not specify—an unusual omission in this otherwise comprehensive document) and we are rubes, being duped for your television pleasure. It is not impossible that there never will be a stove to fill the gap in our kitchen, in our life, and that we are being slowly pushed to frustration and then to violence. Option three: they checked, but our secrets are deep enough to resist this brief incursion. Or maybe we are average in this way, too, with our list of faults trailing somewhere far behind us.
Food you see on TV or on boxes of processed food isn’t all it seems to be: it’s never real. There is an art to food photography, we have learned from one of the producers of this program, who is also responsible for several cooking shows on a network that you may recognize—he likes to give us the inside scoop, the real shenanigan, whatever that means, to quote him directly. They omit moments in the preparation—all the tiny sloshes and spills. They pump food full of chemicals to make it act and look and glisten just like they want. Food stylists are flown in from Madrid. It is in this way just like embalming.
There have been setbacks in the kitchen completion, as I have detailed, but they are above all Not Our Fault. This has a clause in the contract too. We are victims in this, yes. We are at the Television Network’s mercy, or the mercy of the Appliance Company that Holds Very Many Sales and Shall Not Be Named. We are at the mercy of the forces iterated above. This is an important point. The trees are lovely while my wife is sleeping in the slowly growing morning light and I fear the future and what it holds for us. In the winter it is always lighter because what light there is reflects off the snow and into our windows, into our neighbors’ windows, whose blinds never close but who are unattractive, so there is only a little pleasure there for us.
We walk around naked, we meaning I.
Let my nakedness be a lesson to them.
I believe our stove is on some kind of mammoth vision quest, like that film we saw in school about the carved Native American (we no longer used the words we used then for things) in a canoe that travels all the way from the middle of the continent of North America out into the sea—as if all Native American crappy crafted crafts aspire to be released into the sea at last. I wonder how much of that was staged. What crap is adult life, I think. Aren’t we always being duped. Aren’t we always going over the lip of some sky-high waterfall.
Is that a real memory or something reconstructed from assorted real events? The film was grainy, sure, but do I remember the real grain of it or the idea of it—grain connoting age, like sometimes in commercials with their faux-old footage meant to hawk some cleansing agent? Sometimes I get things mashed up in my head. I rely on my wife to remind me which things took place and which did not occur. For instance: Did she take my name when we wed or did she not? For instance: Did we wed or did we not? And who took whose last name? I remember bits and pieces of these things. Her hands. The rings we had custom-made from gold. The cat’s claws tucked into my wrist skin in the photograph as she attacks my hand. The swell and swoon of blood. A garter belt draped across a chair. Ashes in a fireplace stirred by wind.
On the internet home page of the Television Home Makeover Show they explain how they have done what they have done. You can go there to see a step-by-step guide to how to do these things yourself if you have a load of cash and tools and no fear of either electricity or gas. They have done more than forty homes completely plus a couple of dozen rooms. It is an impressive operation. Of course they have a book that you can order on the site.
I have met the host of the show, who came through to familiarize himself with the set, as in: his set; as in: our kitchen; as in: our house. He introduced himself and said he was very glad that we were chosen. Jennifer thought he was sexy and she mooned over him a bit. She has a thing for most celebrities. It is something about being the subject of so many gazes, she said. Or maybe it’s the teeth. You gain this special glow. She has rules and lists. Whom she is allowed to sleep with without guilt if the opportunity arose. At her insistence, I have also compiled a list, though I find it creepy. Is it just a game, I think.
I have begun to enjoy watching the Home Makeover Show on television. It is almost as if the kitchens I see onscreen are mine. Tele-vision. That’s kind of a weird word for us to use all the time. Vision from afar? Like watching my neighbors through their bedroom window from my own through the slat we have turned up just enough to get a view, just enough for plausible deniability. Jennifer says we should get it all on tape for when the two of them finally combust. We should keep it just in case they get famous first and we are left behind.
It is not completely beyond the realm of possibility to say that Jennifer may have sabotaged our stove, as in she might have broken into the warehouse while it slept to hammer on the side of it, or that she waylaid the truck along I-90 somewhere in Wisconsin, as in some deserted stretch of road, as in she may have faked a flat, hijacked the thing, and taken apart its insides.
She was less sure than I that we should accept the Network’s offer to redo the kitchen. How did they find us? Why did they choose us? These are things she asked. I think it’s Grace, or Providence; they saw something in us, something like potential.
She likes the insides of things—the coils that run the stereo, the entrails of birds we find strewn around the yard thanks to the efficiency of the pack of cats that roam around the place and howl like doom at night, the housing around the pilot light on the water heater, the mechanics of our neighbors’ slowly unspooling, spoiling marriage. She writes down the screaming fights—the exact things they say to each other—as if they are gifts. She is chronicling this thing. I think she hopes (even more than I do) that one of them will hurt the other, that we will have more drama, and that it will be barer to the world. In that case, she says, she has evidence against them both. The wife is dull. The husband’s cheating. The wife’s family is always there, pressing into the husband’s space. The husband is inept. The wife never shovels out the driveway. The husband drinks. The wife drinks too. The husband killed our other neighbor’s dog a couple of years ago. The wife does not know this yet. The husband does not know she doesn’t know. It was almost certainly an accident, we hope and say. An accident is whatever will become of them. No one is to blame. Or they both are. Jennifer logs everything they do. She takes pictures occasionally and files them away by date and time and incident.
I don’t care much for dogs. I don’t like to look or think about these things. I am not like Jennifer in this, and I am not always home. My work takes me away from home for days sometimes and it is difficult. It is especially hard to return home knowing that the stove may have been delivered without my presence—that this final act of kindness or whatever you want to call it was done offstage. Or while I was offstage. I want to feel like I am in control.
So Jennifer may have broken in and crushed the main igniters on the stove to keep it from arriving when I was here. She is sometimes selfish in this way. I am also selfish in this way. This is why we keep separate watches for the stove, for the slow groan of trucks as they ease their way down our streets.
This is absurd. Will it ever come? That is the problem with rising action, why I hate books. Will it deliver, be delivered, in the end?
My brothers call to ask when we will make it on TV and I have to tell them I can’t say, as we are not officially allowed to discuss it. They pester me and ask for further definition. I demur and curse them afterward. They are okay brothers, even if their debts and desires are as deep as wading pools. Of course they did things to me and I to them when we were young. We traded injuries like baseball cards and ran up our parents’ hospital bills. Then they moved to New York and Boston and pursued Important Things. They call periodically to find out when we will be on so they can set their digital video recorders to record it all. That way they can be proud or angry forever in the privacy of their nicely furnished apartments. They can call us to complain.
The problem with our kitchen is that without a stove it lacks function, mechanism. It is all surface shine and gloss. It is not a home but a television set. It could be used easily enough for some new niche of porn. Or: it is a kind of porn.
Is it a stove we are waiting for, or an oven or a range? When I call it a oven, Jennifer corrects me. I know the thing but not the name for it. Range sounds anachronistic. As in: home on. As in: where the deer and Beverly D’Angelo play.
The sponsors call to ask if we have received it, how thrilled are we exactly to have this brand-new post-space-age kitchen, and when they can set up the aftershoot. If I receive these calls I make something up. If Jennifer picks up the phone, she tells them the truth.
I feel sometimes as if I could shed this life, this new wife, this wreath of kitchen things, this set of expectations, this gaping hole in the place of the stove, and all I have accumulated—collected true and reproduction memorabilia—like an exoskeleton and leave naked, fresh, and pink into the winter.
Would I go back to what I did before, as in theft, as in serious theft, as in before we designed our shiny new lives? This is what I did for years before I met Jennifer and our lives transformed like energy from potential to kinetic: I stole and sold the things I stole. Mostly electronics when I was younger, but then I found my way to words: I am a professional plagiarist. I run one of the websites you see demonized on the television news that buys students’ papers and makes them available for download for a price. We will make over your composition grade and make you happy with your life again.
It is not as profitable as you’d imagine, so I also do some freelance work, passing others’ words and ideas off as my own in (mainly) academic journals. There’s a little bit to be made here too. I have a hard time understanding some of the more academic language, and what it exactly means, but the surfaces of it glisten, are attractive, worth money. They carry a lot of information. There is nothing wrong with profit. Ask my brothers or the producers about this, but do not mention my name.
I hope this does not make you think badly of me. I am not sure why I’m telling you this at all. The lawyers will, no doubt, redact it before release, so I suppose there is a safety net. Which is why I speak so freely.
I feel sad for you who will have to read this abridged: imagine how much better, more revealing it was in its truer form.
All of the other appliances work. This is not some kind of joke where everything is rigged to fail, though I have thought that before, that we are on the pointy end of some long existential stick.
Tsunamis come halfway across the world and tear one hemisphere to shit, and it is morning and Jennifer is up, and we wait together. She is stunning in the morning when she’s lazy. There is mail for her. She is an Actual Writer, meaning that she uses her own words and ideas—she likes the insides of things, as I told you. Any news on the stove, Steve? she asks. And that answer is no. We both know it but feel compelled to ask each other. They said it would be another week before the new stove arrived to replace the old and busted, dented, somehow incidentally injured stove, but their proclamations are suspect. That is: they are shiny shit. They told us it would be half a year, and then a truck showed up a day later with an appliance for us. But it was the wrong stove. We do not want black or the cream color that is so popular now called bisque. It must be as white as a breast in Edgar Allan Poe or brushed and stainless steel, polished up to reflect the rest of our New Dream Kitchen. They had to take it back. There was confusion. Our stylist and makeover specialist called back to apologize both to us and to the Company. There was a mix-up on the line. There was a mix-up on the customer service end of things. He was angry, said he wanted this just to be over. And so it was—the truck took the thing away and left us with the wound, agape, again.
The massive waves and aftershocks from the quake are terrifying on television with its lower resolution. It does not look as real as it does in movies, but that they say it’s real makes it that much more so.
What are we doing with our lives? I say.
Jennifer does not respond.
She is furiously taking notes.
A fracas has begun next door.
After I have slept for three or four good hours, I go down to check. The stove is not yet there. Jennifer is not beside me on the bed nor is she at the window with her notebook. She is not anywhere inside the house. I do not panic. She is often gone when I wake up. It gives her pleasure to confound me in this way. She could be anywhere—the dry cleaners, the bait shop (she fishes avidly—one of many Authentic Things she likes to do—so this is a real destination for her), the library, or down by the docks. There is no note. The neighbors are quiet. I make coffee in the machine that both grinds and brews it from whole beans on our voice command. Is it wrong to say then that I make coffee? Then: I initiate the coffee’s preparation, most of which is completed by the machine. Still, it requires my voice to make it go.
There is a truck outside and it is pulling in. Will it stay or will it go? It is unmarked. I have twins: desire for and fear of the sight or sign of blood.
There have been no calls, so it cannot be the stove. Unless: Jennifer answered the phone but let me sleep. Unless: she went out and got it somehow, brought it home herself as if it were a pelt.
The truth is that any day could be the day. Our driveway serves another house. All driveways serve another house—the house that we inhabit and the house that we imagine. I will have to wait and wait and watch.
No—it is a moving truck, I see. Men get out and patrol like bugs up to the door next door. One or both of them are moving out, I realize, with relief. There is nothing to come between us and our future anymore.
Jennifer will be pleased at the outcome of this little drama.
Some mornings I think of myself gleaming on TV from space. All our television is refracted up there somewhere, midbeam, between satellites, and where am I, which is to say, where will I be, in it—that stream of dots or bits and such—will I be at once in more than one time zone, will I be on the edge of our great new tile floor flickering on the border of your screen?
I think of the world asleep and roaming free in dreams.
