Fiction

Ashley sat at the kitchen table waiting for the potatoes to boil. She’d been ordered to watch for the bubbling scum and grey foam that, in kitchens less painstakingly guarded against mess than theirs, clanged lids and slithered down the sides of pots, collecting on the surfaces of stoves and leaving behind a starchy grime the idea of which brought a gag to the back of her mother’s throat.

This meal would mark their second night in this new house, where Ashley’s bedroom still smelled like paint and where, during the last week’s unseasonable warmth, melted snow had turned the unsodded lawn into a wormy sprawl of mud. Unlike the old house, where four generations of previous occupants (each a stranger to the rest, as generations have a tendency to be) crowded empty rooms with shadows of the stories of the things that happened there, here (in this new house), each empty room was exactly and only that, and their cumulative effect was the sensation of living in a blank paged book. These bare-walled bedrooms and three times as many other rooms; these columns of boxes; these skylights (wide open faucets of bald and naked light and, when it rained, silty roof-water) and these mice who clung to that former cornfield with seven new houses almost exactly alike, but slightly (“Adorably,” said the realtor) unique.

Ashley had nothing to watch but the flame as it did its work, turning gas into the blue tongues of heat that spent the instantaneous span of their lives manically licking the bottom of the pot. It sounded like moving water, and, when Ashley realized that it was the only sound in the room, she became aware that she was alone.

Her father had left for the nursing home to pick up her grandmother, and Ashley knew that once he loaded her (Ashley’s grandmother; his mother) into the car, he’d mistakenly drive to the old house and then, with a smile that amplified the very frustration it was designed to mask, he’d retrace his route across the city to get back. Ashley knew this because she’d noticed his new house-keys forgotten on the kitchen counter, arranged in a way that reminded her of the starved spiders (Pholcus phalangiodes) she regularly discovered in the gutters between the windows and the screens, but in an impulse whose motive she banished to the back of her mind, she just let him go.

Maybe she did it in order to secure more time alone, because solitude was a rare thing for Ashley, and it happened that her mother was in the basement which was also the laundry room and which would never quite become the laboratory, where she (Ashley’s mom) was preparing an experiment for the biology classes she taught at a community college bordered by an old cemetery on one side and a new golf course on the other.

Thus, with her father on an errand and her mother locked in quiet work, Ashley became the only person of all the people on this earth to witness this particular cloud of fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster) drift towards a bag of onions that her father had packed and forgotten in the bottom of a box in a limited expression of spite towards her mother (Ashley’s mother; his wife), who had abrasively micromanaged the details of the move.

She lobbed an inpatient glance at the pot, whose contents had only just begun to smoke, gathering a swirling dinge as the potatoes leaked the pachydermish shades that they had formed from nothing but light and water. The she opened Little Women, which her mother had been encouraging her to read, and which she (her mother; the former English minor) had never actually finished, and though Ashley was not concretely aware of this fact, the uneven wear of the book had planted the seed of a suspicion of exactly that; those tattered first few pages littered with marginalia of the “how true” variety, gradually giving way to the pristine final chapters.

Ashley hated Little Women. The civilized poverty of its characters seemed unrealistic to her sensibilities about such things, which had been influenced by nearly-pornographic accounts of the poor from a well-meaning Social Studies teacher at her (Ashley’s) progressive (private) grammar school. More than anything else, however, reading Little Women had become, for Ashley, an intrusion not only of her mother’s will, but of the words themselves; the voice of Alcott’s narrator seemed like a thin and dusty beam of light projected down some great length of hallway in an antique hotel. Simply put, Ashley bored herself with Little Women for a few boring minutes until, bored to the point of physical pain, she put it down.

She tried the newspaper, too, though it took work to find an article with the gravity to attract her attention’s very specific category of need. She settled on a description of the first all-woman expedition to the South Pole. The subject was interesting enough and sufficiently serious, she supposed, to prevent her mother from nagging her about Little Women, if she (Ashley’s mother; the scientist) happened to wander into the kitchen for a paper towel or a CD, but she (Ashley) soon gave up on the newspaper altogether, frustrated by it complimented folds.

So there she sat. Ashley. Stacked against two boring volumes on the kitchen table (the newspaper; the novel) as well as every other species of boring object in that room, including a ham glowing in the oven; a pink fist of meat like a heart hastily transplanted into the hollow chest of that new house. A spinach leaf clinging to the interior wall of the sink. A refrigerator door bare but for the logo of its brand. (KitchenAid? Frigidaire? Nobody can remember a detail so petty until it barrels back 30 years later in a dream, a lingering scrap of the past to be purged upon the instant of awakening.)

Ashley rose. She took a cylinder of Morton’s from the cabinet above the sink and dropped a fist’s worth of salt into the potato pot, because, although she didn’t know the source of the information, she somehow remembered that adding salt would accelerate the coming boil. (The source had been her grandmother, who a decade ago had cooked while Ashley watched from a high-chair, a mutilated wedge of orange sucked and gummed in her fist while she listened to kitchen advice that, though Ashley was absolutely pre-verbal at the time, would remain with her for the rest of her life.)

After clapping the last grains of salt from her palms, she turned her attention to the stacks of half-packed boxes in that room, enlisting their contents in brief scenarios born of her imagination’s whims. Oil-infusers, marinade injectors, a butter bell, mortar and pestle, egg separators, knives for flesh, knives for bone, for cheese, for vegetables and an array of digital time-savers, many designed and/or purchased with a single dish in mind, and all of them a means to an end that Ashley (who rejected all sustenance but Doritos and Mountain Dew) refused to eat. She cast a spell with a fondue fork and assaulted an imaginary burglar with a cedar-handled pastry brush. She swung a tea-bell like a medieval ball-and-chain, and though the risks she took with those utensils were mild, she derived a minor thrill from the perversion of their use, and as Ashley converted a French-made cheese grater into a walkie-talkie capable of sending messages to the moon, she felt a primal satisfaction in loosening the bind between the label of a thing and the thing itself. It was an action that, though she could not yet articulate it, she knew in her bones was the basis of all the things to which her parents objected in this world, including Ashley (her mother’s daughter; her father’s daughter; her grandmother’s descendant; the bearer of her great-grandfather’s complexion and temper; future woman and formal little girl) herself.

Burrowing through those boxes, Ashley discovered a conspicuously cheap-seeming Kool-Aid man pitcher stuffed with a sticky-handled paring knife and sauce-stained recipes. A schedule for the White Sox’ 1989 season, and a handful of homemade and half-broke magnets held together with glue so ancient that the Virgin Marry seemed stuck to the inside of a sea shell by a sloppy glob of prehistoric amber. These were items prematurely inherited from her grandmother and practically the only material evidence of her ever having lived outside a nursing facility, though she had lived there (at her house) for seven decades, two of which she (the grandmother) spent alone, and though the hands that made those magnets had since become numb gropers unable to work even a remote control, a universe of years ago and in a world where well-dressed people went to movies to sit in a story pierced darkness, tapping ashes into brass trays bolted to the arms of their chairs, that is to say, in a world whose descriptions would always seems strange and implausible to Ashley, her grandmother dropped a fist’s worth of pedals that might as well have fallen by their own volition from the twigs of lavender on the window-sill over the sink and into the sauce for a liver or kidney, a shriveled pouch of bitter juice crispy-skinned and blackened in the fat of a half-pound of bacon, heaped on a plate and served to the man sitting at the kitchen table finishing the second half of a cigar that he’d started at the same hour the previous night; this man who was, to Ashley’s grandmother, husband and friend and bitterest element in the earth and stranger and who would eventually become one of her own babies. His degenerate body was to be spoon-fed and bathed by Ashley’s grandmother while her son (Ashley’s father) watched with guilty resentment, he (Ashley’s dad) who was so young that, at the instant of his father’s death, he was outside with a bucket of chalk, decorating the sidewalk with a drawing of a house that pathetically resembled, as much as any single thing could, the house that contained the kitchen where Ashley sat waiting for the potatoes to boil.

Where Ashley skipped to the living room and dug her arms beneath a couch cushion and retrieved the copper ladle that she’d just remembered hiding there. She went to the sink to wash it, adjusting the faucet to a blood-warm trickle in order to keep the running of it discreet, and using her fingers to rub the soap against the metal, because Ashley feared her mother would notice the wetness of the sponge and ask her what it was that she (Ashley) had washed.

The ladle had been beneath the cushions since Samantha’s visit. Samantha. Who was not Ashley’s best friend, who would not be called “Sam”, and who shaved her legs with a real razor every week. At the beginning of her visit, Samantha and Ashley sat on Ashley’s bed and listened to Now This is What I Call Music while Ashley’s mother showed Samantha’s mother the house. Samantha unpacked her backpack; a half-dozen vials of perfume samples, a tree identification book, an iPod, and, swaddled in doll-clothes, her little brother’s gerbil (Meriones unguiculatus).

Ashley and Samantha, whose lives consisted of three distinct conditions (boredom, embarrassment, and unbridled delight), became bored and drifted to the backyard. Somebody (either Ashley or Samantha) had the idea to build an obstacle course for the gerbil.

“That’s how you treat it to make it smart,” said Samantha, already gathering scraps of leftover construction debris that looked useful for the task. “The harder we make it, the bigger its brain will grow.”

“How smart can it get?”

“At least as smart,” said Samantha, “as a cat. We need tools,” she, with mud-speckled jeans, proclaimed.

Ashley snuck inside to steal the ladle from the countertop, because it looked useful and versatile, and also because it looked valuable and unique, and when she handed it to Samantha, a judge of the upmost discrimination, she, to Ashley’s great satisfaction, agreed.

They scooped, dug, and mounded, using the ladle as shovel, hammer, and mold. They built a maze from branches and plywood. They dug a miniature tiger trap, arranging a sheaf of winter-pale weeds over a six-inch hole.

Samantha put the gerbil on the starting line. She said “Ready. Set. Go.” It scrambled into the folds of Samantha’s coat, instinctively terrified of open sky. They tried twice more and got the same results.

“This gerbil,” said Samantha, “is a magic gerbil.”

Ashley agreed.

“It’s an Indian gerbil. My dad bought it from a magic Indian who captured it in a cave.”

Ashley said that there could be no doubt.

“That’s why it won’t run the course. It’s not a regular gerbil that you can train and make smart. This gerbil is actually a seed, and if we plant it and do the magic, a gerbil bush will grow.”

A crow cawed from the opposite side of the house; both girls suppressed a squeal.

The ritual was simple. They circled the bag with the gerbil inside, whispering a chant that they simultaneously conceived.

“I’ll tell you what I want, what I really-really want.” They repeated the line with increasing volume and gestures. “I’ll tell ya what I want, what I really-really want, Uh-tell-ya-wuh-ah-wahn, wuh-ah-reallyreally-wahn,” distorting the architecture and intent of the song until breathy whispers blossomed into cruel edged shrieks, and Samantha, dizzy, fell, and Ashley, though sure-footed, also fell, which improved the quality of the game’s illusion because it made the fall seem part of a natural ceremony’s proper end.

Samantha lowered the gerbil into the hole. “The gerbil god will make it grow.” She barely smiled and her voice had no irony in it.

Ashley dropped a ladle-full of mud onto the gerbil, and then she dropped more. She buried it. But the mud was loose and the gerbil easily dug to the surface. Again she buried it and again it worked its way back up. Its tiny hands were efficient scoopers, and its tiny eyes were locked in an aimless and vacant gaze.

Ashley covered the gerbil with an overflowing scoop and packed the grave with her palm, and Samantha, already crying, broke two press-ons digging it up, its sides heaving with panic and one nostril clogged with the dirt in which it almost drowned, and Samantha put it down carefully in front of her and Ashley took a wide swing, the cup of the ladle catching a glint from the only shaft of light permitted by the clouds on that dark day, and she brought it down on the gerbil, missing by a foot and landing a blow against the earth that would’ve easily ruined a lesser utensil.

Samantha’s glare morphed into fear as the mothers emerged onto the deck, horrified at their daughters’ muddy clothes. Samantha punched the gerbil into her backpack and Ashley, her back to the house, slipped the ladle into the bib of her OshKosh B’Goshes.

Five minutes later the group of four stood in the doorway and said goodbye, and then, while Ashley’s mother used the bathroom, Ashley kicked the ladle from the pant leg where it had slipped and hammered it under the couch cushions just in time for her mother to reappear and give her (Ashley) instructions to monitor the potatoes while she went downstairs to prepare an experiment for the upcoming week. She told Ashley to take special care to keep the water from bubbling out of the pot and staining the surface of the stove, which is precisely what it was doing as Ashley dried the ladle with her shirt and placed it on the counter where she’d stolen it from.

She skipped to the stove and killed the heat and then she skipped to the basement where her mother was hunched over a splayed open ball of fur. She was in a white track-suit with blue stripes, and she had a cap of short and cabbagey hair. She turned her head without lifting it. She said, “What’s up.”

“They were boiling. I turned them off.”

“Are they done?”

She shrugged.

“Are they soft?”

“I don’t know.”

“You need to see if they’re done, Honey.”

“What’re you doing?”

She held up a lab assignment. “Making sure these steps line up for my students.”

“What is it?”

“Felis silvestris catus. Cat.”

“Silvestris. Like Sylvester from the cartoons.”

“Yes.” Her mother gradually positioned herself between Ashley and the cat.

“Was it somebody’s pet?”

“This was nobody’s cat.”

“Did you get it from the pound?”

“They breed them special.”

“Let me see.”

“You don’t want to.”

“I do.”

“You won’t like it.”

“Show me.”

“I’ll show you and then you go straight upstairs and make sure the potatoes are done.”

“Fine-alright. Let’s see.”

Ashley bellied up to the table, chest level with the tray that contained the cat. Orange stripes across a bed of sugar-white fur matted with glistening formaldehyde. Eyes and mouth open in an expression of curious surprise. Limbs extended in a posthumous stretch, and guts bright and crowded, like the innards of the old computer that her (Ashley’s) teacher had disassembled in front of her class, passing the parts around the room while trying to explain each component’s relationship to the whole.

Ashley’s mother used a hook-nosed probe to point out important features of the cat’s anatomy. Ashley followed along, but as she soundlessly repeated her mother’s words they lost any connection to their use, just as when, in class, she’d handled a motherboard while Mr. Byleck explained what it was, and she could not conceive how the piece of plastic and metal could have any relationship to Kelly Clarkson chat rooms or MySpace, and therefore, despite her best intentioned efforts to be a good student, she ultimately regarded the entire activity with a suspicion of its untruth.

Deep and superficial muscle. Pancreas. Diaphragm. Uterus. Each word rolled in her cheeks like stones in a cement mixer, but they became insubstantial during the translation into Ashley’s mind. She’d hoped to discover something tragic or meaningful or at least grotesque, but looking down at that cat was like looking down at the dust-caked pages of Little Women. It had as much excitement as a wad of gum flattened by half a million shoes, or a beer can tangled in the weeds along some anonymous stretch of road.

“Nobody’s cat,” she said. “A nobody cat.”

“I guess so. Yes.”

She was glad that Samantha had saved the gerbil, because Ashley knew that if she’d managed to strike it with the ladle she might as well have struck an empty egg.

She backed away from the table, dejected but composed, and just as her (Ashley’s) mother told her to go upstairs and make sure the potatoes were done, some cruel act of ventilation caused a muffled boom in the vents and both women (Ashley; Ashley’s mother) were suddenly bathed in the smell of the ham in the kitchen's oven, its meaty sweetness mingling with the weird sting of formaldehyde until both smells rolled together in the atmosphere around them, becoming an inseparable whole.

Ashley’s mother turned green. She threw a rag over the cat and leaned against a stack of boxes.

The doorbell rang. Ashley’s mother grunted. “Your father forgot his keys.”

Ashley’s stomach grumbled.

“I may vomit,” her mother said. “I’m sorry, Honey. I suddenly feel off.”

Ashley stared. The doorbell rang again.

“Get the door.”

Ashley skipped upstairs. She felt the sorry for her mother, suddenly trapped in the basement by a sickening gloom that Ashley could sense but could not understand. But Ashley felt victorious, too. She felt capable and alone and she felt entirely new. She lingered in the hallway mirror, admiring her image; she felt useful, versatile, valuable, and unique.

She opened the door. Her father grinned. He jangled his keys. “Wrong keys,” he said. He’d taken off his winter coat, revealing a faded T-shirt with a flecky bust of Darth Vader slapped against a background of star-splotched space. The armpits had holes.

Ashley’s grandmother stood in the doorway, unwilling to move without a signal from the son who held her arm. The fruit flies in the kitchen altered their orbit, instinctively attracted to the sweetness added to the air by the lavender pinned to the grandmother’s blouse.

Ashley looked at her Grandmother. She looked like a half-inflated pool toy. The grandmother looked at Ashley. Though they smiled, there was no recognition in either face. They both felt silly. They breathed. Each was a stranger to the other, and their eyes were locked in an aimless and vacant gaze.