“Paper plates are flavor-mates,” David is suddenly singing.
Not again, Fern thinks, looking up, and she breaks in. “Would you like to hear about today’s shoot?”
David nods and waits expectantly, now back to humming. She wishes he would stop that, and so she decides to tell him the truth about her latest improvisation.
“I was how small?” he asks, leaning back in his chair.
“Well, I’m not sure …”
“And you dropped me? I mean, like I was a quarter or something, you just dropped me?” His face is stricken with disappointment.
Fern won’t reply. She slips another pepper into her burning mouth.
Later, David sits before the TV, the sound off, and runs through all those performances he’s taped, performances he thinks he’s inspired. Fern stands in the doorway of the darkened living room, watching, and what she sees is a guilty hodgepodge of all those false stories she’s told him. Then David is pushing buttons and her arms flap in fast-forward through an agitated laundry room, until David presses the Pause and Play buttons back and forth so that she’s creeping in slo-mo toward a basket of dirty clothes a century away. Then she’s hurtling backward, emotions rushing in reverse in fits across her face too fast to translate. Before David can press another button she leaves the room.
For a long time Fern lies in bed alone and in the dark. But she can still see, at the bottom of the door, those staggering flashes of TV light, waves and waves of it. Why won’t he stop? She buries herself under the blankets. “I’m drowning!” she calls out, hoping to draw David away.
She waits. Nothing. “I’m drowning!” she shouts again, louder. Peering through the thin weave of the blanket, she can see David finally standing in the doorway, and she knows he is watching her shifting, covered form. She lifts a hand above the blankets: three fingers extended, going down for the last time, and after her last muffled cry she hears him pad across the room. She feels him pull the blankets to the edge of the bed until she is exposed before him, but Fern keeps her eyes closed: she wants so much to believe she’s landed safe on the beach and that the sun is so bright, the sand so warm.
*
The next morning Fern crouches before the dark screen of the television, the videotape of her performances in her hand. It feels so light, so unmenacing, but she can’t bear the thought of seeing her images go awry again. She slips it in the VCR, pushes the Erase button, and the tape whirs and whirs inside. Fern is glad David is far away on his rush hour shift, because as she disappears from the tape she realizes in one breathless moment that she never wants to see him, she never wants to hear him again. Fern plops down on the carpet, her sudden sadness exquisite, and she cries oddly pleasurable tears, her hands fisting in the thick pile until she remembers David’s song about the vacuum cleaner that loves the taste of dirt.
She stands up as the disembodied lilt of his voice seems to rush at her. She hurries down the hallway, but from the bathroom she hears his jingle about the private pleasures of washing the tub. In the kitchen she leans against the counter, her hands to her ears, and she sees her unhappy reflection in the toaster. Again there is David’s voice: “Put me in the toaster, honey, and I’ll get hot for you, hot for you …” Fern can’t help herself, she places her hand against that cool silver surface and imagines bread browning inside, the heat intensifying, but she can’t remove her hand and the escaping smoke of burnt toast mingles with the smell of her own scorched flesh.
Fern shakes her head, trying to erase David’s jingles. And that’s all they’ll ever be, Fern realizes, he won’t ever find his great song because there isn’t one in him. She can see David behind the glass booth: an express train rumbles by and his face merely mouths lyrics no one can hear while he handles coins, the tips of his fingers soiled with the images of national monuments and dead presidents. Then she imagines his fingerprints all over the apartment, those invisible stains over everything.
She rushes to the closet for furniture spray and returns to the living room with a rag. The phone rings and she lets it, too busy rubbing down an end table, and she listens to her recorded voice explaining that she’s not in right now, and then after the beep she hears Dougie. “Doll, a call from Altman, he loves your stuff, wants to consider you for his next pic. You could improv your role. Listen, he wants to set up a private audition. Listen—we’re talking movies, flicks, films, motion pictures. So what’s a little breach of contract prob? Oh, I’m so glad you’re not there to argue. Think. Call. Bye.”
Oh god, Dougie, so typically ambitious. But Fern has stopped polishing, and she stares at herself across the room on the blank TV screen. She lifts the spray can and her tiny image does the same. Fern imagines behind that distant figure a stark blue background, and then she knows she’s in her own commercial. The camera moves in: her face looks haggard, and there’s a hint of that slight squinch she makes with her mouth. She seems oddly pleased with herself and she begins to speak.
“I threw the stinker out. He took all of his stuff, and now only his fingerprints are left. But not for long.” She sprays the table, and then rubs it down carefully with a cloth while staring at the camera. It zooms in until only Fern is on the screen: only her face, her bitter smile.
“Girls, are you like me? Upset that your ex has left his grimy marks all over the place? Then use Spray Away, and wipe him out of your life forever.” She pauses. “It puts a nice shine on furniture, too.”
Fern stands before her reflection on the blank screen and she lingers there for a long and satisfying moment: her commercial is over, and she did it alone. Marjorie will be so proud. Fern just has to tell her, and she searches in a drawer for a crumpled address.
*
“What a surprise,” Marjorie says, opening her door, “what a pleasure: you’ve come to see my new earrings.” A tiny triceratops sways from one ear, a stegosaurus from the other. “I love being surrounded by extinct creatures. Survivor’s prerogative, no? So c’mon in.” She waves a hand, her cigarette a smoky wand.
Fern enters and sees a Bless This Home sampler hanging framed over the TV, plastic slipcovers on a bright yellow couch, little ceramic squirrels and frogs holding poses on a knick-knack shelf. Fern stares at one of the figurines—a cat in an apron, paw to mouth as if summoning a rowdy brood of kittens. This is not at all what she expected.
Marjorie laughs at her stunned face. “Don’t look so shocked. This is my shrine to the American housewife’s most average interior. I call it Necessity of Escape.” She sits on her couch’s squeaky slipcover, she leans over the coffee table and stubs her cigarette into an ashtray shaped like a toaster. “Really, it’s taken you much too long to visit.” She pats the cushion beside her. “Come sit, tell me what’s brought you here.”
Fern tries to settle comfortably on the stiff plastic cover. When Marjorie leans back patiently against flowery needlepoint pillows, Fern is suddenly struck with stage fright. Uncertain how to begin, she picks away at the clear plastic as if she could scratch through to the vivid fabric.
“Hey, don’t be nervous,” Marjorie says. She reaches for that anxious hand and squeezes the fleshy rise of Fern’s palm.
Fern stops scratching the slipcover. But Marjorie is now lightly stroking her wrist and Fern watches, surprised at such a feathery touch, how shivery it makes her feel. Then Marjorie is whispering, “Oh, my,” and her fingers trace the pattern of blue veins, the delicate bones on the back of Fern’s hand.
“Don’t be shocked,” Marjorie murmurs, but Fern isn’t, and she lets Marjorie pull her across the cushions—it seems like their own slow, dreamy close-up. She eases into Marjorie, feels fingers brush against her breasts, and when their mouths join Fern loses herself in the fluttery touch of their tongues.
Finally Marjorie breaks away gently. “Well, I guess we could say this has been a long and unusual courtship, no?”
Still a bit breathless, Fern nods. “Uh-huh,” she manages, then she reaches out and squeezes Marjorie’s knee.
Marjorie grins and reaches for the buttons on Fern’s blouse, but Fern shifts away slightly. “Y’know, there is something I came to tell you.”
Marjorie leans back and shakes her dinosaurs. “I’m all ears.”
Fern flicks off a shoe and tickles Marjorie’s ankle. “I had this idea,” she begins, and then she’s describing her commercial, but before she can get to that last close-up of her bitter smile, Marjorie starts to laugh. “Oho, no need to go any further. It’s brilliant, for sure. But dangerous—you just can t break your role as housewife like that, at least not so openly.”
“Dangerous?” Fern gapes. “Why?”
“Why? Because all those reviews and articles about you, all that trash is wrong. You’re really quite terrible at playing a housewife … and that’s the secret of your success.” There’s not even the tiniest smile on her face, she’s absolutely serious.
“W-what do you mean?” Fern stammers, “I’m doing a great job….”
“Exactly, honey, just not the job you think.” Marjorie twirls an earring. “Your impulses aren’t ordinary, you’re not domesticated at all—just the reverse. Why do you think I chose you?”
Fern doesn’t know what to say, but Marjorie isn’t waiting for a reply. “Look, sweets, think about why we have all that animation. We add the background later so that even though on screen you’re in a kitchen, something about your body language stays rootless, capice?” She strokes Fern’s knee. “All those bored gals watching can sense that you don’t really fit in there, and so they can sit at home and imagine that they don’t really fit in either. There’s a secret part of themselves that needs to believe this. If you were truly a hausfrau they’d switch the channel.”
Fern sits there in her own silence. She starts ticking her nails at the plastic slipcover again, a rhythmic, rasping sound that reminds her of the whir of those erasing performances. If only she could make Marjorie’s words vanish, but Marjorie keeps murmuring. “Your idea is a little too over the top. Remember, the tension between housewife and not-housewife has to be finely balanced. Ambiguity is everything, or else our lucrative gig is blown. And we wouldn’t want that, would we?”
Her voice sounds so soft that Fern finds herself quietly nodding, she wants to agree, and when Marjorie says, “You’ll always be my actress with hidden depths,” Fern closes her eyes and the darkness becomes her own blank screen. She imagines this couch is just a stage, that Marjorie really didn’t mean what she said and they’re simply acting out a scene of two new lovers about to reconcile. She feels a gentle tug at her wrist.
“I hope you’ll forgive me my little secret,” Marjorie whispers, starting to draw Fern back. “It was touching to see you take everything so seriously, but you were doing so well it just wasn’t necessary to fill you in.”
So that’s what I am, Fern thinks, the clueless star? Her face flushed, she pushes Marjorie away.
“Oh sweets, don’t be upset,” she coos, but Fern shrinks from her condescension, so terribly disappointed. How can she ever work with Marjorie again?
Marjorie leans closer, her face framed by those dangling dinosaurs, and then Fern sees her revenge: survivor’s prerogative. Yes, she decides, this is a scene, but we’re not alone. A camera crew is filming us, and Altman is sitting in the director’s chair, waiting for me to improvise … and since this is my own private audition, there’s no need to fill in Marjorie.
Fern fills her face with longing and, surprised at her quick calculation, says, “I’m a little… shy. Just give me a minute alone to collect myself…”
“You wait here,” Marjorie murmurs, “I’ll be right back,” and she slips off to the bathroom, leaving Fern with the shelves of knick-knacks, the doe-eyed children framed on the walls, and a cigarette still smoldering in the ashtray. Fern supposes the camera crew, anticipating a nude scene, is ready to check the lighting for her small breasts and long legs when she stretches over the length of the couch. But there will be no nude scene. This will be more interesting, she thinks, leaning toward the ashtray, a nice surprise for Mr. Altman, and this time I know exactly what I’m doing.
Pushing the cigarette stub aside, she pokes her fingers into the ashes. Then she taps dark prints over the coffee table, and after smudging her fingers again she dabs ten ashy ovals across the brittle slipcovers of the couch. Fern regards her grimy patterns with satisfaction. She stalks the room and stains the faces of a few figurines, leaves a thumb smear on the quaint door of the quaint house of the framed sampler on the wall. Marjorie had better have a very good cleaning spray.
In the bathroom, the toilet flushes. Fern realizes she doesn’t have time to finish, but it doesn’t matter. Altman has already settled back in his chair, impressed.
She hears water running in the sink, Marjorie humming expectantly. My grand exit, Fern thinks, wiping her sooty hands together, Catch it, boys. The hushed crew pivots the camera as she strides away, and she’s sure she’ll get the part. She slips out the front door, quickly clicks it behind her, and runs exhilarated down the hallway, alone, alone. Pushing the button for the elevator, she listens to its muffled rumble rising up too slowly. She presses the button again and again, and when the elevator finally arrives with a silky whoosh, its door glides open like a curtain and Fern steps in.
Geology
Standing beside the drilling equipment, Linda stared at herself in the mirror, unable to believe that her uniform was still brilliantly white. The morning and afternoon had been a succession of endless teeth cleanings—plaque and more plaque—that the dentist couldn’t be bothered with, and she wasn’t able to comfort today’s frightened, teary child any more than she could yesterday’s frightened, teary child.
Linda washed her hands, preparing for the last patient—another cleaning—though she really wanted to wipe her wet fingers across her uniform and leave long, moist stains. Instead, she imagined she was already back home in her apartment, the nape of her neck damp from a hot bath.
But she was still at work, surrounded by the dental school diplomas that covered the walls. The only exception was a landscape print: a forested hill that sloped to an open, grassy field, with mountains and an approaching bank of clouds in the background. As she listened to the muffled sounds of drilling in the next room, Linda wished the scene before her was a window instead, so something could change, so that even a single leaf might move. When she was a child and her parents forbade her to venture outside to the dangers of invisible germs, Linda often stood by a window and watched the world pass by. But now everything around her remained suspended in a bright, unchanging light. The fluorescent bulb in the hallway hummed its familiar hum, and Linda was briefly anxious that she might never move again and would remain in this office forever.
She heard a man’s cough and turned around. The last patient of the day. How long had he been watching her? He smiled pleasantly, though Linda knew from experience what alarming surprises could hide within an ordinary mouth.
“Come in,” she said, pretending she wasn’t annoyed. He flopped down easily on the chair and fit his head between the rest pads. She dried her hands and took his folder from the files. He was a Mr. Henry Brown. Linda held his X rays to the light and let her eyes linger over them: except for a few fillings, his teeth were perfect, so straight and well proportioned. Thinking he might be watching her again, she glanced back. But he was sitting patiently, scanning the landscape print on the wall.
She began mixing the gritty cleaning paste, enjoying its thick, good smell, when he spoke. “That field—the one in the print you like so much?—it’s in the middle of a transform boundary.”
So he had been spying. “Excuse me?”
“That field in the print is right where two continental plates are shearing past each other. I’m a geologist, and that sort of country fascinates me. See those trees? Every year they’re a couple of inches farther north.”
“They move?” Linda put down his X rays.
“Well, the ground they’re on moves. In about twenty th
ousand years that forest should be in the center of the picture.”
“Really?”
“Except by that time, after hundreds of generations, they’ll probably be different trees.”
“Different trees,” Linda said.
“But by then there will have been a number of local earthquakes, so there might not be any forest at all. Maybe an inland sea instead.”
Linda looked up at the familiar print, now ripe with possibilities. It could never be the same again. Then she looked down at him, and somehow her heart fell right out of her, onto the metal tray filled with various picks and drill heads. “Tell me more, Mr. Brown.”
“Call me Hank,” he said.
She scraped around the edges of his teeth with a curved pick, and when she cleaned it with a paper towel from the tray, he slipped the suction tube from his mouth and told her he traveled a lot, doing energy and mineral research, though personally he was most interested in closing gaps in the fossil record. Linda took care to be gentle around his gums. The less he had to rinse his mouth and spit out pink water while she cleaned her pick, the more he could talk about unconformities and the pleasure of filling a fossil mold. And when Linda eventually finished with his teeth, at first she said nothing and pretended to examine his charts. She waited until he was in the middle of explaining the complicated breakup of Gondwanaland into lesser land masses, and then she announced that the cleaning was done.
“Oh, I wish we had more time,” Linda said while he carefully moved his tongue over his teeth, “I’m so curious about where those other continents will drift to.”
*
On their first date, Hank drove them along a cliff outcropping that had once been part of an ocean bed. Instead of flowers, he presented her with all of geologic time: he waved his hand, the other on the wheel, and said, “There was a sea here millions of years ago. If we were walking then, we’d be under water.”
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