The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch, Volume 2
Page 20
Cue laugh track, though nothing about it was funny.
VIII.
I CHOSE THE KITCHEN AS THE bright pink workbench upon which I’d hammer the dents, tighten the screws, and sandpaper the rough edges of this damaged family. From our first interview forth, Mrs. White had remained a mystery of cashmere, tweed, and rayon veiled by Chesterfield smoke and a magician’s misdirection of Corningware. My daily advance was scored by the musique concrète of modern conveniences—the whir of the Roto-Broil, the whine of the Juicerator, the grind of the Harper Food Mincer, the scream of the Sunbeam Mixmaster.
Discordant noises indeed, but I followed Clown’s example and insinuated myself underfoot until Mrs. White could not help but solicit my occasional aid. Mr. Gray, could you fetch that lemonade pitcher from the top of the cabinet? But of course! Mr. Gray, could you hold the door so I can get these groceries inside? See, I am already doing it! Mr. Gray, could you remove your hand from that red-hot burner? Oh dear, I do apologize, and do not mind the smoke—the burn looks worse than it feels!
My conservative estimate was that Mrs. White logged one hundred hours of work per week between the library and home, and yet projecting an aura of surplus leisure time was the dictate of all of her favorite magazines—Woman’s Home Companion, House & Garden, The American Home—each one packed with illustrations of stay-at-home mothers of Aryan pedigree blithely awaiting the evening returns of their genetically splendid mates. All Mrs. White had was that photograph of her husband in her apron pocket. Since his death, she’d barricaded (or, to quote the ads in House & Garden, “hermetically sealed”) herself inside the products, activities, and scruples of her decade. To be a fulfilled woman in the mid-1950s, learned I, was to complete a checklist, and insofar as Mrs. White was busy making those checks, there would be no time to process pain.
Women as discrepant as Abigail Finch, Mary Leather, and Bridey Valentine had tried, and failed, to tick all the right boxes; I could have warned Mrs. White that the checklist was infinite, mutating, and expensive, hence the terror that candled her green eyes after every Tupperware Home Party, hosted, of course, by Mrs. Shoemaker, who never quit spending the profit from her husband’s booming Chevrolet dealership. Even bulwarked by my rent, Mrs. White couldn’t afford such luxuries, but had discovered a wonderful invention called “Buy-Now-Pay-Later credit.” So Mrs. White purchased; Mrs. Mitchell purchased; Mrs. Cunningham purchased. From my Peeping Tom’s perspective, it was an orgy of consumer cupidity climaxing with gift-bag tissue paper that floated about like post-coital cigarette smoke.
What cynicism I might have managed was neutralized by Mrs. White’s hopeful reading aloud of each piece of packaging, as if through prayerful repetition they might become psalms:
Our Father, which art in Maytag, / hallowed be thy Kelvinator Foodarama. / Thy Brillo Soap Pads come, / thy Crest with Fluoristan be done, / with General Mills, as it is with General Electric. / Give us this day our Cal-Dak TV trays, / and forgive us our Speedy Alka-Seltzer, / as we have forgiven our Vicks VapoRub. / And lead us not into Owens Corning Fiberglas, / but deliver us from Armco stainless steel. / For thine is the Hotpoint, / the Frigidaire, / and the Westinghouse, / for ever and ever. / Amen.
It was after a long April day of declaring war on germs, leading the charge against bad nutrition, and being locked in hand-to-hand combat with freezer odor, all with my bumbling assistance, that Mrs. White allowed herself a moment of reprieve upon the sofa. It had been a trying afternoon, one that had crescendoed with her tearful cry:
“Oh, why is my custard so watery?”
The children yearned to suckle upon the television teat; it was time for The Jack Benny Program, sponsored by the Lucky Strike cigs they dreamed to one day smoke. But I shepherded the litter into the hall. Unlike I, they hadn’t seen, propped on the kitchen counter, a leaflet for the 1956 Pillsbury Bake-Off, a contest offering fifty thousand dollars to the housewife who proved herself the most resourceful cook. Any poor soul who’d survived Mrs. White’s Atomic Crab de Luxe (crabmeat, frozen spinach, cream of mushroom soup, Cheez Whiz) knew that it was a contest she couldn’t win. Her attempt, though, told me she was well aware of her dwindling savings.
We heard Mrs. White’s snore beneath the Lucky Strike jingle:
Light up a Lucky—
It’s light-up time!
Be happy, go lucky—
It’s light-up time!
I put a finger to my lips and shooed the children to their rooms. Clown, unshooable thing, followed me on quiet paws as I crept around the sofa, as I had around so many weeded thickets in Montana, hoping to catch that rare glimpse of an exotic animal at rest.
For the taste that you like,
Light up a Lucky Strike!
Relax—it’s light-up time. . . .
Mrs. Shirley White was beautiful in repose, her jaw unclenched, her lips unlocked, her apron lending natural curves to her breasts’ Maidenform bullets. Her dishpan hands had slackened upon her lap, releasing her pocket-weathered photograph. So snug did she appear in the Zenith’s stroboscopic light that I could not withstand the urge to lay eyes upon Mr. Charles White and draw comfort from the serviceman’s able-bodied strength.
I slid the photo carefully from her fingers and brought it close.
It was not a picture of Mr. White.
It was a cardstock promotional photograph obtained from some furniture vendor, labeled THE KITCHEN OF TOMORROW. The staged photograph depicted a spacious, high-ceilinged room dominated by a cinematic window through which sunlight gleamed. Backlit glass cabinets made every can of food easy to pinpoint, and below stretched a long, curvaceous counter that had every conceivable apparatus built right into the thermoplastic: a waffle iron that opened like a mouth, chilled circular holes in which jarred goods could be inserted for easy access, a sink revealed by lifting its cover of stained cedar. It was the kitchen of Krypton, but missing Kal-El—only a sedate housewife and her polite daughter were featured. The mister, it seemed, was at the office.
Except that he wasn’t. The mister, in fact, was dead, bled out, maybe torturously, on foreign soil. It was an objectionable thing to dream about if you ever wished to get a good sleep, so instead of Korea, Mrs. White dreamed of the Kitchen of Tomorrow, where there might just be a switch, button, or lever that would make everything upside-down turn rightside-up once more.
I replaced the photograph and retreated, suddenly, wretchedly sad for this woman whose mania for modernity now looked like a slow suicide, a mjölnir impact at one-millionth speed, the piecemeal bartering off of her emotions in exchange for self-starting, self-cleaning, self-flushing gizmos. Take it from someone who was dead: this was no way to live.
Clown, smelling my resolve, pressed her muzzle into my palm.
IX.
AS METICULOUSLY AS THE PINK house interior had been maintained, the garage on the other side of the yard had been willfully ignored. After I shouldered open the warped door and cast away the dust clouds, I saw why. It was the undisturbed tomb of Charles White. A push lawn mower stood where he’d left it in the center of the floor, and do-it-yourself projects moldered in perpetual states of metamorphosis.
Clown paced beyond the doorway, troubled by her old master’s smell.
I threw open all four windows, superficially because of the stifling heat but realistically because such spaces of manly ingenuity made citified lads like myself feel inadequate. Mrs. White’s magazines made demands of men, too; I’d read a dozen times how the modern husband’s value was tied to his “know-how.” It was precisely what the toaster and hole in the wall needed—but what was “know-how” and how did one obtain, purchase, or steal it?
I focused upon simpler tasks. I uncovered a hedge clipper and a corroded can labeled GALVANIZED GASOLINE and emptied the fuel into the mower tank. It was a blinding afternoon, and I did not relish subjecting my putrid flesh to extended sun, so I folded back quilts of spiderweb and jimmied open a metal locker, where I found Charles himself, dangling from a rod, not killed in Korea but trap
ped inside a box where no one had heard his screams.
Or so went my lurid first thought. It was Charles’s assemblage of work duds: painter’s overalls, a denim jacket, neoprene rain gear, and roughshod Army twills. I exchanged my leisure wear for the last outfit and then—anything, Reader, to delay work—added gloves, boots, and a straw panama hat.
The backyard, until then spied only through windows, was no realer to me than the Springfield of Father Knows Best. It was larger than expected, of tennis-court dimension, but impinged by neglected trees, shrubbery, and flowerbeds. It did not take know-how to see that the yard didn’t compare to the stringent husbandry of the four abutting properties. Though not as indecent as the Cunninghams’ septic bubble, no doubt it had brought Mrs. White disrepute.
Clown found a shady spot and slept. I screwed on the panama, tugged the gloves, gave the clippers a practice chomp, and advanced upon the underbrush as if it were the Kaiser’s frontline forces. The spoils of this victory, should I win it, were superficialities—Mary Leather’s beautiful lawn, you might recall, had existed only to hide her husband’s People Garden. Then again, what was I but a monster recently crawled down from the mountains? Mrs. White wanted this, and if I were to repair her family, the repair had best be to her specifications.
Decades had passed since I’d worked up an honest sweat. (I no longer perspire, but you get the idea.) After months spent typing humbug onto a sock, there was a palpable satisfaction in laboring toward visible results. The idée fixe of quality I’d once applied to Black Hand extortion notes returned to me. I chopped; I pruned; I nicked; I pared. I did not rest until Medusan greenery yielded geometric shapes.
It took Junior and Franny storming the yard after school to disrupt my absorption. Three of the four adjacent yards now had people in them, flogging dirty rugs and filling rubbish bins as they peeped over fences at the oddly colored boarder who’d graduated past pooping the White’s dog. While Junior and Franny whoopeed my unpredicted groundskeeping, I found Mrs. White watching from behind the screen door. I could not tell if she was moved by my largesse, relieved that I’d lived up to my repairman billing, or appalled that I was parading about in her dead husband’s clothes.
It was only after that’s night dinner dishes were cleared that Mrs. White, at the running sink with her back to me, made a brief, but greatly unburdening, comment.
“You might have a look, Mr. Gray, at those low-hanging branches.”
“Indeed?” I was as eager as Clown.
“Well.” Narrow shoulders shrugged beneath taut apron strings. “Mrs. Shoemaker said a little girl on Cypress Drive was running around her yard and a twig from a branch went straight through her tongue.”
It was so like Mrs. White—like all Heavenly Hillers—to masquerade personal vanity as public service. But if the remote risk of tongue-impalement brought her anxiety, I wished to deplete it! In the morning I was back at it, amputating offending branches with Charles’s hatchet. The next day, I got down on knees still gravel-scarred from being dragged to the Xenion jail in 1901, and commenced weeding. The following week, I disentangled the creeper vines that throttled, well, everything. The week after, I stumbled across old bags of cement mix and set to patching the back patio and walkway. Finally I proceeded to plant flowers I had Mrs. White retrieve from the store: asters, daylilies, chrysanthemums, irises, lilacs, and petunias. And every day, my icy flesh felt the heat of voyeur eyes—the neighbors watching me, Mrs. White watching the neighbors, and all of us wondering what would happen next.
It happened, all right, on the first of July. It was a cloudless Sunday, and backyards were abuzz with children, home improvement, and radios jousting for supremacy, the dusky doo-wop of the Platters’ “The Great Pretender” entangling with the drooping bass line of “Heartbreak Hotel,” sung by a chronic hiccupper named Elvis. I stood on the patio, contemplating a brick-and-pebble mosaic suggested in the new issue of Better Homes and Gardens, when a face popped like a squirrel over the northern fence.
“Ahoy, there, son!”
I’d glimpsed this fellow before through fence slats. He was fortyish, heavyset, fuchsia-faced, and forever strangled by one of the business world’s ubiquitous gray suits. That day, his thick neck had been furloughed by a polo shirt, from which poofed puffs of brown hair. I blinked at the intrusion while he settled his hamhock forearms atop the posts.
“Say,” said he, “you’ve really gone to town back here, haven’t you?”
No one on Mulberry Terrace had ever initiated dialogue with me.
“I suppose,” said I.
“Now where have my manners run off to? I’m Chet.”
“Chet Schmitt.” As mentioned, I knew my mailboxes.
“That’s right. What do you go by, son?”
“Zebulon. I mean, Joe.”
“Joe Zebulon! Ain’t that a corker!”
He guffawed. The fence leaned, and I winced. It was an expense we could not afford.
“You’re the hardest worker I’ve ever seen,” observed Chet Schmitt. “Every morning I leave for work, you’re out here. I get home, you’re still out here. Don’t you ever get tired, son?”
I shrugged. I hadn’t been tired since 1896.
“You know, Myrtle—that’s my little lady—she’s been trying to get her petunias to bloom for, heck, it’s got to be three years now, and every year they wither up. She says it’s the prairie dirt. But tarnation! You’ve gone and pulled it off. How’d you do it?”
Fourteen hours a day without food, water, or bathroom breaks, that’s how I did it.
“It is complicated, Mr. Schmitt.”
His grin grew crafty, and he wagged a finger.
“Trade secrets, eh? Tell you what, you explain the whole thing to Myrtle, and she’ll bake you the best red velvet cake you’ve ever had, guaranteed. Now, when should we do it? Hey, how about dinner? A barbecue—that’s the ticket! How does that sound?”
Mayday! Mayday! Mayday!
“Very fine, Mr. Schmitt, but I really shouldn’t be—”
“Heck, Charles—Mr. White, I mean—he had the best cookouts this side of Wichita. He had this grill, this big old metal grill? Out of this world, I tell ya. He’s missed around here, and I mean it. Hey, Wednesday is Independence Day. What say we do it up right? I’ll round up the neighbors and get a potluck going, and you can show off the garden here. It’s a shame only a few of us get to see it.”
“That is too kind, and while I thank you, I—”
“Best to start early if anyone’s going to make it to the lake for fireworks. Let’s say three o’clock? You let Mrs. White know. Myrtle was just saying how it’s been too long since we’ve seen her. She must be real happy about your work, son. I think everyone will be real impressed. All right, I know you like to work, so I won’t keep dragging you clear around Casey’s barn. Mighty fine talking to you, Joe Zebulon. Ha! That name’s a real corker.”
Chet winked and, for a man his size, vanished quickly.
Sunday shift at the library meant heightened public visibility for Mrs. White; the ignominy always brought her home sullen. We didn’t exchange a word until we were halfway through a dinner of Tangy Tomato Aspic (a mire of sour cream and mayonnaise cupped by a gelatinized ring of tomato sauce which hid a coeur caché tube of asparagus and artichoke hearts). Though I was petrified at the prospect of confronting judgmental neighbors, silence, I told myself, was for seventeen-year-olds. I cleared my throat and affected nonchalance.
“By the by, the Schmitts will be dropping by for a July Fourth cookout.”
Mrs. White’s fork caught in her mouth like a twig through a tongue.
“A few other neighbors as well,” added I.
Mrs. White had gone her namesake color.
I cleared my throat and indicated the food.
“My, doesn’t this gelatin look palatable!”
Mrs. White pouched her venom until said dinner was finished, upon which she ordered both children to their rooms with sharp glances. I remained at t
he table, girding for comeuppance. Mrs. White stood and crossed her arms, staring down at the ignoble worm.
“What were you thinking?”
Thinking? Woman, I am trying, in your husband’s stead, to overhaul your defective family!
“It was Mr. Schmitt’s doing,” said I. “His motives did not seem duplicitous.”
She grabbed a pack of Chesterfields. Her nervous hands rattled cellophane.
“Of course they aren’t. He’s just a stupid man. Myrtle Schmitt, though? All the wives around here? They’ve been waiting for this.” She barked laughter, billowed smoke. “To see how I’m holding up. To tally up all my mistakes.”
“I fail to see any mistakes.”
“Well, what did I just say? You’re a man, too, aren’t you? Just Wednesday I was telling Mrs. Shoemaker about the twist I’ve added to my Nescafé, how I’ve been putting a dollop of peach jam in it, and how honestly delicious it is, and she gave me such a look—Mr. Gray, you would not have believed this look. She said Nescafé was bitter and bad for the stomach and if I wasn’t buying Maxwell House drip-ground coffee, then, well, I don’t know—I might as well be drinking arsenic, I guess. And you know what I did? I drove home, marched inside, and threw out two full jars of Nescafé like it was radioactive.”
She leaned her shoulders against the wall, closed her reddened eyes, and rubbed her head with the same hand that held the cigarette. The smoke appeared to rise from her skull.
“Maybe you can’t see it. Maybe you’re too young. But there are problems here. Problems. One of them, frankly, is you. I’ve told the Lane Ladies you’re a paying tenant and you’re ill. I’ve told my canasta group you’re a writer and you keep to yourself. None of it does a bit of good. You’re new here, and they’re furious, simply furious, that they haven’t been allowed to judge you for themselves.”
I opened my mouth but had nothing of value to add; I was only a man, just as she’d said. Nevertheless I could smell, behind the blistering waves of outrage, her clammy fear that the collective was right and that part-time mothers like her could never achieve the benchmarks of their full-time counterparts.