I can sit on these knives?
Yes. Sit on those, but not on that one there.
These here are okay?
Yes. Sit right on them.
Like this?
Yes. You can squirm down on them, they won’t hurt you.
Are they rubber?
No, they are not rubber. God. They are just. . well, sittable knives, and that one is not a sittable knife.
Mrs. Terrell Stamp had many things on her mind, but foremost was marble cake in the morning. It was cold outside and she was happy to have her ingredients inside. She might go outside but if she did it would not be because she had to but because she wanted to. She liked to let good cold air come up her skirt for just a shot, then head back to the oven she could stand near while making the cake. She specialized in marble cake because she liked the wide tolerances involved in folding in the marbling fudge cake. There was not a right way or a wrong way to fold. If what was in one bowl got into what was in the other bowl, you had succeeded, more or less. You could do it without taking your eyes off a soap opera. There was precision cooking, and certainly other precision adventures in life, and Mrs. Terrell Stamp sought to avoid them. She liked loose, relaxed things, like popping out into the snow in a skirt for a minute, making a cake while looking at TV, leaning against the stove and thinking about nothing but how nice the stove was after the snow, how good the cake was beginning to smell, how crummy the soaps were but you kept watching largely because they were crummy. That was their point: loose art for the loose. You could have a marble cake that was not pretty, just as you could have, say, a dalmatian with heavy unattractive spots, but you liked the dog anyway, and you liked the cake too. That’s how she liked life — heavy or clumsy or inelegant or not smart, but good anyway.
When the children got home from school in the afternoon she remembered who they were and how many they were and loved them. Raising children was the loosest, most imprecise art of the widest conceivable tolerances, to her mind, of any enterprise on earth, except perhaps drug addiction of the terminal sort. Half of daily television was now devoted to the premise that already loose parents should not attempt to raise children. She’d seen a sixty-year-old mother in a bikini try to mount a talk-show host in front of her own daughter. This had of course been an attempt to tighten up the daughter. The mother was screwed up, of course, but she was not incognizant of the underlying principles at work: appear tight, stay loose. The mother had hit on the errant proposition of appearing loose as well, an experiment that was failing. The daughter was aghast at the mother though, so it was debatable really whether the experiment would fail. It was unlikely, at any rate, that the daughter was going to try to mount the host after the mother had pawed him. And she would now in all likelihood hesitate before wearing an immodest bathing suit. Perhaps the crazed mother was genius. She was a bag of frenetic cellulite with badly dyed hair. Mrs. Stamp could not see her maintaining course too much longer.
The show made her nervous, as they all did: an entire industry predicated on, and capitalizing on, the fact that Americans did not know how to properly have children or to eat. The soap operas tried to demonstrate the opposite fiction: that we were infinitely sexy and slim and in and out of love in mysterious and glamorous continuum. Television offered a dramatic commercialized equivalent to her little polar minuet between the cold snow and the warm stove.
In a contemplative penseroso of this sort one morning in her kitchen, the roof of her entire house lifted off, almost noiselessly, and spun away, up up and away as if in a cartoon. It was non-threatening, this putative tragedy, so that Mrs. Stamp had occasion to be reminded of Dorothy’s house spinning as it left (or returned to?) Kansas, for her roof spun also, that slow, screwing spin that things approaching or leaving earth do, having something, she thought, to do with the earth’s spinning beneath them. Her roof sucked off the house like a tin of coffee being opened and spiraled off, dropping on her a small gentle rain of pink insulation tufts like mimosa blossoms. A sprinkling of roofing nails tinkled easily onto the kitchen floor. She could suddenly see how filthy her kitchen was, far more disturbing than the roof’s leaving. The weather outside was pleasant; what she could see of it, brushing insulation from her face, was what they meant when they said partly cloudy. There was no wind, no darkness to account for the roof’s spinning away to Oz or to outer space or to the nearest trailer park or strip mall. It would be a fine irony, and a sure sign of the hand of God, if the roof landed in a trailer park and did damage. Over the years He had hurled all the trailers he could and He was now ripping up parts of better built homes and throwing them at the trailers. Mrs. Stamp checked out her kitchen and it was all in working order. She still had water, gas, and the television was still on in the next room. What a pleasant day it was. The phone worked too. She should call someone and report the roof but did not know whom to call. She hated decisions and she most hated decisions involving telephones.
There was no immediate problem with the roof beyond cleaning her kitchen and, she supposed, the entire house, now that it lay exposed to the light of day. Maybe she should call a cleaning service. That made some sense, but so did calling a lawyer and divorcing her husband, and so did calling a travel agent and booking a flight to Alaska, where as a young woman she had always wanted to go, but the importance of having a roof over her head had stopped that and other nomadic impulses. She had heard of families living in tents during the Depression and wondered if the tenability of that were soon to be demonstrated to her. Rather than walk outside, she climbed up on the kitchen counter and looked out of her house to see if other houses had suffered roof loss. They all appeared to be intact, and no one was out there gawking at hers. This was the first moment in which she wondered if her mental state might be not in order. Was her head really extending over the open wall of her kitchen peering at the unharmed houses up and down and across the street from hers, or was it somewhere else? Had it, her head, spun to Mars, leaving her house intact? Would a phone call prove the matter?
She decided it would not. Even if she called a cleaning service and they sent a crew of alcoholics who hauled her carpets into the yard and steamed her entire house and blew it spic and span with an industrial compressor — she imagined this with real pleasure — and they chatted about the remarkable missing roof and what a boon to true cleaning it was, she and the sots about ready for her to break out the beer in reward for their Herculean ordeal, there would be no knowing that the entire affair was not delusional.
What could she do? She had no idea, and usually having no idea what to do was a good inspiration for her doing nothing, but it felt different in this case. Sitting there in a roofless house did not speak of a sound mind. She’d look less suspicious somehow were she to bellydance from room to room in a roofless house, she thought. Yet it was also time to acknowledge that she was done calculating what was suspicious and how she would be perceived by others in what she did in life. This missing roof had put a foot down with respect to all that. She was clearly now on her own true, or false, path. She turned the TV off. Watching fat actual fornicators all day on the one hand and slender fake fornicators on the other had been fun, but it was over. The British call cookies “biscuits,” she thought, and we call cookies “cookies” and biscuits “biscuits.” She was going to be plain and correct from now on.
Bedtime
We did not know what to expect. The salamanders were cooking their own meals, having repudiated fast food with a viciousness that was surprising coming out of those soft-bodied gentle souls. They wore little chef hats and deftly used their tiny utensils and did not complain much as they burned themselves, which, given the deliquescent quality of their moist skin and the heat of the stove, was nearly constantly. In fact it looked as if what they were cooking most was themselves. The happy suffering of the salamanders in the kitchen put us into a nervous and humble and vaguely guilty state. They had devised a way of cutting a standard Band-Aid into 128 pieces for dressing their wounds. The kitchen smelled of these fresh Band-Aids and earthworms and of the odd things they cooked.