Snap, p.17
Snap, page 17
Having mastered the theory, Ida worried that her creativity was at stake. Perhaps a degree of spontaneity might prove a more successful approach.
So she hid the little booklet, promising to retrieve it only when the moment seemed right. Unfortunately, when the moment did arrive, she’d forgotten where she’d hidden the booklet and spent the evening wondering and searching and at last giving up. It seemed this too was meant to be. Perhaps the construction of cake decorations was not actually her calling but only a catalyst for new obsessions. Come to think of it, life had seemed pretty dull lately. Ida was an usher for the university orchestra and four nights out of seven dressed in black and white to point concert-goers in the direction of their assigned seats. One night a woman dropped her purse, spewing its contents under the seats in front of her. Not thinking to call for an usher or to wait for intermission, she lit a match to survey the scattered belongings. A puddle of cologne that had dripped from its cracked bottle burst into small blue flames. Ida rushed over and patted out the flames with her bare hands. This was all that was required. No one ever screamed fire. The concert continued. Anyway, this had happened four or five months earlier and seemed the high point of Ida’s career as an usher. Daytimes, Ida worked half time as a teacher’s aide at a public school, where she learned only that she hated spending time with hordes of other people’s misbehaved children. To avoid them she laminated nearly every two-dimensional paper object available, including copies of the weekly luncheon menu to be distributed among the pupils in her class. The laminating machine, located in an obscure corner of the cafeteria near stacks of dirty trays, emitted warm plastic-smelling fumes that made Ida feel she was doing something of a technical nature, therefore useful. Of course, all she had to show for it at the end of a day was a boxful of laminated bookmarks and, once, a laminated smock hem. Somehow she’d inserted her smock between the two sheets of plastic and closed the machine before backing away. The result inspired her to laminate a friend’s pantyhose for a joke. With this she was discovered, and found herself sitting in the school principal’s office waiting for admonishment. At twenty-two she felt as frightened as a first-grader. The principal was an elderly woman with a calm, gentle manner, and Ida could not bear to be the object of a patient scolding. She invented a lie. The plastic hosiery was an experimental art project and had proved successful. The children could bring in T-shirts or gym socks and coat them with plastic.
“That’s an interesting idea but far too expensive,” the principal advised. “Of course, Pamela in the art room is leaving and you may as well take her place.”
A promotion of sorts, because Ida now earned thirty cents more per hour, but work in the art room required her constant vigilance and left no time for meditation in the far reaches of the cafeteria.
Supposing, then, that it was time to decide what to do with her life, Ida lay in bed considering the possibilities. At once she decided that she would like to become a chimney sweep, and hopped up to try on her top hat, found on the sidewalk several Halloweens ago. She was surprised not to have thought before of becoming a chimney sweep. She had the ideal build, was light on her feet, had no fear of heights and loved getting dirty. She even loved the feel of ashes, like dense, chilled talcum powder, and the cool rough texture of bricks. Her favorite smell was that of campfires. She looked great in black. She did not wear eyeglasses and so could not lose them over the edge of a building. She loved echoes and was pleased at the prospect of entering the houses of strangers.
Rummaging in the shallow closet, Ida found her hat box and opened it. Inside she saw not the hat but a pair of black high-top sneakers abandoned earlier to her preference for clogs. At the time, the sneakers had seemed merely clumsy and too boyish, but now, nestled among folds of lavender tissue, they looked spirited and graceful, ideal for chimney sweep duty.
Ida put them on. Both laces snapped immediately so she pulled them free and let the tongues flap as she wandered around. The hat was in the bathroom, she recalled, upside-down on the radiator with shampoo bottles crowded inside. The silk was frayed and threadbare. The stained interior smelled of the various fruity and herbal shampoos Ida used according to mood. Ida’s hair was black and glossy, perfect for someone destined to spend much of her time on rooftops. She envisioned a satiny braid emerging from the duller luster of the hat, flashing sunlight.
The hat felt funny, though, when she put it on. Rather papery and stiff, as if the radiator had cooked it. Then she remembered. Of course. Reaching into a tear in its lining, she pulled out Audrey’s Edible Doilies pamphlet. She held this in one hand and the hat in the other, entirely bewildered. What now? She was like a person confronted at once by two lovers, between whom she must choose. Either that or give them both up in favor of a third, which seemed a shame, since there was no third. She might play around with both for a while, in hopes that they might prove compatible.
At one in the morning, dressed in top hat, flannel nightgown, apron and high-top sneakers, Ida boiled a batch of Royal icing and squeezed it first through one paper tube and then another until she had mastered the several designs. Then she squeezed a perfect round lacy-edged doily onto waxed paper. The concoction was to dry overnight. Ida wondered what “overnight” meant when it was already three-thirty in the morning. Before going to bed she switched off the light, waited a few minutes, turned the light back on and squashed all cockroaches in sight. This procedure she followed several times until no cockroaches emerged from hiding. Then she left the light on and lay down with a pillow over her head on her mattress at the far side of the room. It appalled her to think of cockroaches getting their feet stuck in the sculpted recesses of her creation. Of course, if she were to make a living decorating cakes it would be necessary to move to a better section of Richmond, where cockroaches did not proliferate. She could moonlight as a chimney sweep, in order to earn enough money for the move.
Entertaining this notion, she fell asleep, overslept, arrived for work two hours late, spilled a jar of fingerpaint and swore aloud in the presence of her pupils. Once again in the principal’s office, she was at last dismissed.
What an unusual feeling, Ida discovered, to have been “dismissed.” Her day was her own, and she did not know what to do with it. Riding home, she felt invisible and imagined that if she were hit by a car no one would know. No one would miss her, and no ambulance would arrive. She felt a great loss of confidence, so that even her hair felt limp. At home she sat around struggling to build up the courage required to peel the Edible Doily from its backing. This would be, she thought, rather like peeling an apple in one continuous spiral, a feat she had never before seen the point in accomplishing, and now despaired of. Angrily, Ida sprang from the floor, lunged for the doily and tore at it fiercely. Off it came. The waxed paper floated softly to the floor, leaving in her hand the magnificent confection, a disk of stiffened lace. Ida touched her tongue to the scalloped edge, amazed by its absolute sweetness.
Sometime later, when Ida received Audrey’s fortune cookie in the mail, she was working quite contentedly for a catering establishment called Martha’s. Martha’s specialized in seafood buffets featuring cold crab salads, bouillabaisse, barbecued shrimp kebabs, creamed chowders and fresh tuna and shark filets, pronounced fillits by Martha, who came from Australia. The business operated out of her house, from whose windows and doors hung yellow-and-white striped awnings permitted to become weathered, bleached and tatty but never muddy and never spotted with bird droppings. Martha was ugly to look at, with terrible bloodshot bug eyes and a simian posture. Her teeth were giant and nicotine stained, and her hair fell loosely in stringy bangs down a bulging forehead. Ida’s job included scrubbing clams, cleaning shrimp, deveining lobsters, slicing lemons to resemble flower blossoms, arranging platters of rolled-up cold cuts, spearing kebabs, uncorking wine bottles, rolling pastry, stuffing crabs, deviling eggs and any other mundane activity associated with the preparation of a feast. It was Ida who under rigorous instruction from Martha combed Richmond’s shops and markets in search of rare food items, and Ida who handled the banking, and Ida who washed the windows and tended Martha’s geraniums. Martha, for her part, created recipes and perfected her sauces. In fact, she preferred never to have to leave her stove and its environs. There, she was like a pianist experimenting with a melody. She ground fresh herbs as they were needed, with mortar and pestle, and dropped them lovingly into her stews in progress. Martha meant to invent entire new flavors, textures and sensations. She made her own croutons, pickles, vinegars and stocks. If she needed a break, she wrote her cookbook and smoked cigars. She did not make cakes, and warned Ida of this upon hiring her.
“That’s a lovely thing but we don’t do cakes,” she said of Ida’s proffered doily. “But I like the fact that you did it. I like your style. I like your resolve. If you want to be in charge of the drudgery here, you’re in. You wash up after using the loo, do you?”
Ida said yes.
“Good, then.’
Ida stood on Martha’s doorstep not knowing what to say, still clinging to the vision of spending her days squeezing Royal icing onto paper. With practice, she might execute her designs directly onto the slick glossy plane of the cake itself, so that triangular portions of lace, overhanging the rim of the cake, might cascade down its vertical surface. She fancied a cake of such surreal loveliness that no one would dare to eat it.
However, she was running out of money. None of the cake shops were hiring, and besides, their work was not up to her standards. They all did globs of shapeless flowers in sickening neon hues.
“You’ll help at the functions, too. You’ll be a nifty accessory, like a balloon. You go around with little trays, and when the girls want a break it’s okay with me if they drink the eham-pagne, as long as they do it in the loo.”
Loo again, Ida thought. She smelled the tobacco on Martha’s breath and, from behind, the aroma of anise.
“I do need someone. You can do the cakes as a hobby, no? Every person should have a hobby. Mine is painting. Not really,” she admitted, when Ida had followed her in for a look. “I only meant it as a ploy, to get you to come on in. Nice kitchen, isn’t it? I listen mostly to Jethro Tull. I hope you like it. I do have a hobby, really. Cooking. Work and pleasure both. Not everyone can say that. I’ve been lucky in my life. Before coming to the States I was caretaker at a ski lodge outside Canberra, in the Snowy Mountains. The ski slopes are like mole hills there, but beautiful to see, especially when there isn’t any snow. Dotted with eucalyptus. I could see it all from the kitchen windows while cooking for the guests. Couldn’t get decent seafood that far inland, unfortunately. Made shepherd’s pies, pasta dishes, veal stews, the like. Australians like horrible meat pies. I used to throw peanuts and ginger root into everything, when I was a girl your age. I used to fall in love, too, with the Americans. A very wonderful, nice-looking people. Couldn’t bear to go home, once I came here. Better lobsters, too. Ours are just crawfish. Here’s today’s shopping, and the money, of course. You’ll go for the seafood last, I trust.”
Naturally, thought Ida, leaving in Martha’s car. The shopping money was a pair of new fifty dollar bills, precisely what Ida needed to pay the month’s overdue rent. She might start a new life, a life of incidental crimes. Forget about finding another apartment. Why not camp out in Martha’s guest room, steal leftovers from Martha’s refrigerator, snitch from petty cash? She might copy a recipe from Martha’s cookbook, submit it to the Sunday magazine, appear on talk shows, demonstrating the differences between Manhattan and New England clam chowders. Imagining this, she pulled into the lot fronting the first shop on Martha’s list, thus beginning her servitude. She got a kick out of it, really. Never before had she purchased an entire wheel of brie, or been offered taste samples of smoked salmon. She enjoyed choosing between the various jars of peppercorns. Too, she liked the way Martha’s automobile handled in traffic. The car, purchased at auction, was a converted postal jeep, painted the same yellow as the awnings that adorned Martha’s house. It might flip over at any time, Martha had warned with a gleam in her eye. Three Fiberglas coolers and a picnic basket of orange wicker were stacked in the back. Martha’s leather sandals were under the seat, Martha’s smudged footprints indented upon them. Ida felt she ought to head for the beach. This might be the type of job, she thought, where she would need to be reminded she was working and not just having fun. Except she’d get paid, off the books, she supposed. Ida didn’t know how she felt about this. She’d never actively broken a law, as far as she could determine. She supposed she could live with it.
However, to Ida’s surprise, Martha not only deducted the taxes but submitted them as well, and made sure Ida filled out the proper forms. Martha was surprising in other ways, too. For one thing, she tolerated no swearing in her kitchen. Also, she had a lovely singing voice, and accompanied the John Barleycorn flute solos with a kind of ta-la-ing. She had a boyfriend named Mitch, a house painter in giant white overalls. Mitch brought Martha bouquets of cigars. He left in the mornings still wet from the shower. Ida admired their romance. It seemed casually intense, as if they’d met on a cruise ship with only a week to spend together.
“I’m not exactly looking forward to being old,” Martha remarked, “but it might be all right if Mitch gets old, too. We can go clamming together. Do all the things we don’t have time to do in our lives. But what a shame, that. I want to do the things I don’t have time to do in life now, when I don’t have time to do them. You must have a boyfriend.”
“No,” Ida said.
“I didn’t mean it like that. I mean, you should have one. It doesn’t have to be heavy. You can do it with ease, like Mitch and me. That makes it all the more important. Whatever we’re in the mood for, that’s what we do. We’re like a couple of kites in the sky, flown by children who don’t even know each other. Or by the fathers of the children. It’s never the children who fly the kites, but their fathers, who want to be children again. Mitch is the one who thought of us being like kites, while he was up on a ladder. He looked up and thought of that. I’m not poetic, like he is. Taste this. More salt?”
“No,” Ida said, slurping. Martha never gave her anything to taste unless it was already perfect. Nor did she ordinarily say things that didn’t sound both wonderful and impossible. Surely Mitch had not said that he and Martha were like two kites in the sky together. Surely Martha needed Mitch more than she cared to let on, even to herself. Ida’s curiosity was inspired. What must it be like, to be in love like Martha? Martha was the happiest person she knew.
So, Audrey’s timing was perfect. Reading WATCH FOR THE APPEARANCE OF A MAN IN YOUR LIFE, Ida felt piqued and excited. But what exactly did it mean, to watch for the appearance of a man? Audrey had touched on this, but not to Ida’s satisfaction. There were plenty of men around, hundreds of them, everywhere she went. How was Ida to know which man was the man she was to watch for — that is, if she decided to watch for one at all?
Ida supposed that the “appearance” of a man required not only that the man appear but that he do so more than once, and that Ida feel somehow in need of him. This ruled out Mitch, thank goodness, and Mitch’s teenage apprentice, and the fish man, who thought nothing of plunging his hands into a bucket of live squid. Several not unlikely candidates remained. One she ran into every time she went to the pizza parlor. When she was locking up her bicycle, he’d be coming out the door with his hand outstretched, a small pizza box resting upon it. He moved deferentially, as if the pizza itself were guiding him along. On these nights, Ida was always in a rotten mood. Martha had reverence for foodstuffs only in their pure or final form, and would not stand for food that was in preparation to be treated like leftovers. If Ida was stuffing crepes, for example, she had to stuff every one of them before leaving for home. A half bowl of creamed crab meat permitted to sit overnight in the refrigerator, Martha insisted, had lost its potential. Therefore, Ida was occasionally late upon leaving Martha’s, and, ironically, starved for her dinner. She would stop for a pizza. There would be that man with his pizza box, following it out like a mime levitated by an umbrella. He had a fine, fluffy blond head of hair, wirerimmed spectacles and black cloth Chinese slippers. Ida was moved to think of him sitting cross legged on the floor with his pizza in his lap, the television on but only for companionship. She was certain that he did this, and certain also that he did not know that he was lonely. This made her feel lonely, although she really wasn’t. She ate her own pizza sitting at a table in the restaurant, watching some students intent on their video games. Her imagined loneliness had about it a pungent, spicy flavor that caused her to forget her rotten mood, and when she rode home it was with high spirits through the darkened, rain-damp streets.
Another man played morning tennis on the high school courts that Ida passed on her way to Martha’s. He didn’t play every morning and seemed to follow no exact timetable. If he was there on a Monday, that did not mean that he would be there on Wednesday and Friday, or on Monday of the following week. To Ida such apparent spontaneity was indicative of an easygoing and impulsive nature. Perhaps, upon waking at dawn, he simply felt the need for a game and phoned his partner delightedly. He always wore white, odd for someone playing on a high school court surrounded by ratty woods where drug deals reputedly took place. His partner wore cut-offs and T-shirts more to Ida’s taste, and played a better game, but with a macho style. The man in white looked virginal and gentle. He was a clumsy player. The few times Ida saw him serve, the ball hit the net. His returns were short, his backhand off, the racket wobbly in his hand. If he scored a rare point, he stared at his racket in a funny way, with wonder and gratitude, as if it were a net with a butterfly trapped inside. The tennis courts were situated midway up a hill that Ida had to pedal, so it was convenient to pause for a while to get her breath. The partner stared. The man in white seemed barely to notice her, but once or twice they locked eyes incidentally, like two drivers exchanging stares while traveling opposite each other on a road. Such intermittent contact seemed to Ida terrifically genuine and direct. His lovely blue eyes appeared to brighten when they looked into hers. Despite his lack of skill, he had the grace of a child. Children lived always in the present, as if each moment held an instant of anticipation and one of release. Ida liked the man in white. She thought he would be childlike in bed — playful and relaxed, a bit shy and embarrassed, grateful and surprised as if the sex were a treat whose flavor he had not known existed. When he was done, the act might not seem quite real to him until it was once again in his grasp. All of this was attractive to Ida, who liked her pleasures to be circumstantial. That she was disappointed when the man in white was absent from the courts was a contradiction she chose not to avow.
