Viewmaster

by Ferdinand Stowell

Dirty laundry list with no redeeming literary value

  After I promised not to call her Stinky, we made arrangements for her to swing by and pick me up. We got to her place, and made out briefly before agreeing to hold off sex until after dinner. We unpacked the groceries and began preparing a salmon filet and a robust salad. Then Maria asks,

  “Why don’t we talk while we’re getting dinner ready?”

  “Oh – you multi-task?” I wondered out loud. I’ve always been wary of manic types that can’t afford personal assistants who go out of their way to make sure they’re as busy as can possibly be at all moments of the day. For people like that, their busy-ness is a statement of high moral purpose – I’m busy, therefore I am.

  “Well, yeah, why wouldn’t I? I mean talking while we’re making dinner isn’t really multi-tasking.”

  “Well, there’s nothing wrong with it I guess, it’s just that you kind of soil the purity of each experience when you try to do two things at once.”

  “Interesting, you are so…..” and here she paused to think of how to modulate her gut reaction so that it outwardly expressed her contempt in a way that would be acceptable to me – “so, precious.”

  “There have been scientific studies showing that multi-tasking has severe consequences for the brain..”

  “Oh, please. Chopping vegetables and talking at the same time is not causing my brain to melt down,” she said as she placed the rest of the carrots she’d been chopping into the salad bowl.

  “Ok, but you just put half of the plastic carrot wrap into the salad.”

  “Did I? Oh, shit,” she said as she removed shred after shred of plastic from the bowl. “Oh, maybe you’re right. I feel like I’m on a treadmill 24/7 and I just can’t ever keep up. There’s always something I’ve forgotten to do, some appointment, play dates for Adam. Play dates! – What happened to just playing? You know, like, without a day planner. Why is everything so complicated?”

  “I know what you mean. It just seems that kid’s lives today are so structured and watched over and everybody is so overly concerned about their safety. I don’t ever remember anybody being that concerned about our safety when I was growing up.”

  “And you think that was a good thing?”

  “No, I don’t mean it like that, but we were allowed to roam, go off on our own to explore and just be by ourselves. Nobody handed us a schedule. Nobody came to pick us up after school, or from a friend’s house. We didn’t do ‘play dates’,” which I said with a mincing sneer.

  “Well, yeah, I mean I see what you’re getting at but let’s keep in mind that you’re from a highly dysfunctional family with socio-pathic tendencies; those were your words.”

  “Oh, yeah, I forgot.”

  Maria was starting to hyperventilate; I took her hands in mine and kissed them.

  “I want you to sit down and relax; I’m going to fix dinner.”

  “Would you,” she pleaded, “I love it when you act grown-up.”

  I picked out the rest of the plastic carrot wrap from the salad bowl and stuck the salmon under the broiler. Twenty minutes later we were seated at the kitchen table picking at our food and probing our souls.

  “Ok, let’s get our Petty, Stupid But Essential Things lists out.” Maria didn’t move, so I asked, “You did make out a list, right?”

  “Absolutely, it’s right here,” she said as she held up a tear sheet on which I read ‘butter, half & half, shitake dress., OJ,’ etc.

  “That’s a shopping list,” I said.

  “On the back! Hello?!”

  Left overs

  “Ok, I’m gonna go first: these are two separate questions but they’re really two sides of the same coin: How do you feel about cooking, and How do you feel about leftovers?

  “I’m not crazy about cooking but I love making stews and soups and leftovers are good.”

  “Ok, but are you capable of making other things? Are you willing to make other things?”

  “Does ‘making things’ include making frozen food?”

  “That’s a disturbing question.”

  “I’m kidding, of course I make other food. I have a child for God’s sake.”

  “How many days after the meal of origin can you continue eating the same leftovers? Two, three, four days?”

  “Uhmm, I don’t know. I don’t think I could keep eating the same leftovers after like, I don’t know, the second day,” she said as she stared at the ceiling.

  “I love left-overs and could keep eating them indefinitely. Why are you staring at the ceiling.”

  “I thought I saw a spider – So…So, does that mean you could eat all the leftovers yourself until they were gone?”

  “Absolutely, so, I don’t see any conflict there.”

  “Ok, I just want to be clear: so you’re saying I could make fresh food and you’d eat the leftovers.” She squinted her eyes and pursed her lips.

  “No, that’s not what I’m saying. You can’t make fresh food while I’m eating leftovers because then all you’d be eating is fresh food and all I’d be eating is leftovers. We’d be totally out of sync. You’d have to eat whatever.”

  “Ok, let’s revisit this one after we’re done eating,” she suggested and then when she saw me liberally spreading cheese over my salad, she said “Jesus, look at all the Parmesan cheese you’re using!”

  “You act like consuming large amounts of Reggiano-Parmaggiano is a moral outrage.”

  “Yeah, it’s an extremely expensive moral outrage.”

  “I love a woman with a strong set of values. While we’re on the subject of food, how do you feel about mayonnaise?”

  “Whoa, whoa, wait. Mayonnaise is not a food. Ew, it totally disgusts me. It gives me dry heaves just thinking about it. You like that stuff?”

  “Yeah. Would it bother you to have it in the fridge if it were in an unmarked container, like in brown glass so you couldn’t see into it?”

  “I don’t know, just the thought of sharing the same living space with it kind of creeps me out.”

  “How do you feel about washing dishes?”

  “I don’t mind doing dishes.”

  “Good. What method do you use?”

  “I’ve never really thought of dishwashing as having a specific method.”

  “Just describe what comes to mind when you think ‘dishwashing’. What do you see yourself doing.”

  “Well, first I fill up the sink with water and kind of let everything soak for a while….”

  “We have to talk about this. I don’t want to be judgmental or anything, but your water usage just appalls me.”

  “I’m not sure this is such a good idea, this discussing every little thing.”

  “No, we need to talk about this. This is not a frivolous issue. Look, billions of people around the world spend most of their day trying to find and bring home potable water. It’s a precious resource and Americans waste it like it grew on trees or something.”

  “Like it grew on trees?”

  “Alright, that’s a bad analogy, or a mixed metaphor, I forget which, but you know what I mean.”

  “You mean Americans waste it like….oh, I don’t know….. like it fell from the sky or something? Like manna from heaven? I mean, HELLO! – It does fall from the sky, in vast quantities”

  “You know, I think you’re right, maybe we should just table this one for discussion at a later date as yet to be determined. So moving right along,…..

  “Oh, I’ve got one: so how do you feel about bar soap?”

  “I hate bar soap. It gets so messy. I just don’t get why anybody uses it any more when liquid soap is so readily available.”

  “Ok, that’s a problem. I actually agree whole-heartedly with you…

  “So, what’s the problem,” I interrupted.

  “Wait, let me finish. I agree with you but then I read that those anti-bacterial liquid soaps are bad for kids because they don’t get exposed to enough bacteria and n
ever develop resistance to them. So, for Adam’s sake, I use bar soap.”

  “More dirt, germs and bacteria for the kid? – I’m ok with that.”

  “Good.”

  “Ok, now it’s my turn…..” I said.

  “We’re taking turns? I hate taking turns.”

  “So, my turn: How do you pronounce the word,” and here I spelled it for her, so as not to give the correct pronunciation away ‘n’-‘i’-‘c’-‘h’-‘e’.

  “A niche?” She said it like it rhymed with snitch, with a short ‘i’. It was like having two mosquitoes with chain saws, sawing away at my ears.

  “Well, how would you pronounce the word ‘f’ -‘i’-‘c’-‘h’-‘e’?” I asked her. She pronounced it correctly.

  “Exactly, it’s ‘eeesh’ just like niche. That’s how the French do it and they should know, it’s their language, non?”

  “Neesh, Neesh,” she repeated as she wrote something down. “I’ll remember that – this is good! We’re learning so much about each other. How do you feel about milk chocolate?”

  “That’s an oxymoron. We’re dealing with two distinct issues here. Chocolate is wonderful. Milk is distasteful.

  “You don’t like milk?” She smiled at the empathic waves that flowed through us. “Excellent. How do you feel about children?”

  “You mean real children or children on television?”

  “I mean Adam.”

  “I love that little guy to pieces and I’ll try to get over my fear of being intimate with children. How does it make you feel when you go into the bathroom and the toilet seat is up?”

  “That doesn’t bother me at all. I mean, why do some women get so pissed off when men don’t return the toilet seat? It’s like, ok for men to touch the germ infested toilet seats but not women? That smacks of some retro-attitude, like women are too delicate and pure to get their hands dirty.”

  “I love the fact that you’re so sensible.”

  We kissed and rubbed noses

  “You don’t jog do you?” I asked her.

  “I hate jogging,” she said with a shudder.

  “What are your feelings about ultimate Frisbee?”

  “Totally weird. Definitely not a sport – more like a nervous tic that afflicts a group of people simultaneously.”

  “Be more specific.”

  “A nervous tic that afflicts a group of miscreants simultaneously.”

  “So I can assume from that you don’t like hacky-sack?”

  “Same game different projectile.”

  “This is great, we’re really on the same page here. I’m amazed at how much we have in common. I mean I didn’t think there’d be anything.”

  “Why would you want to date someone you had nothing in common with?”

  “Sex.”

  “Oh, yeah, I forgot.”

  “I mean, more specifically, make-up sex.”

  “This is Good!” Maria said yet again. The more she said ‘this is good,’ the more doubts I had. “I like this, we’ve made a really good start,” she continued. “But now that you’ve brought up sex, I think we should crank it up a notch and bring it to another level of intimacy. So, don’t get grossed out. Talk to me about nose picking.”

  “What has that got to do with sex?”

  “Just answer the question, please.”

  “Well, I do it, of course.”

  “Everybody does it, the point is when do you do it and how do you feel about it.”

  “Well, I enjoy doing it but I would consider it shameful to do it in front of someone else.”

  “Sort of like fellatio or cunnilingus, you wouldn’t want someone else to see you doing it.”

  “I wouldn’t go that far, actually I think it’d be kind of hot having somebody watch me as I’m going down on you.” I then began putting the moves on her and our tongues began wagging in each other’s mouths. She then put both hands on my chest and pushed me away; she has her mother’s strength.

  “Wait, let’s stop doing this,” she said. “We really need to talk and I don’t want us to take the easy way out by using sex as an escape hatch from our problems.”

  “What problems?”

  “I mean issues; we both have issues, everybody does.”

  “My only issue with you right now is that you’re not naked and writhing in steamy sweat all over my body.” Reader, she soon was.

  Chapter XXV: Le Fin