Vinyl Cafe Unplugged (23 page)

“Not there,” said Bert Turlington. “Here.”

“Coming. Coming,” said Carl, moving around the kitchen like a mass murderer. He cut a second hole five feet down the wall.

Sam’s eyes were as wide as saucers.

“I’ve got a fire extinguisher in the truck,” said one of the men Dave didn’t know.

They found the remnants of the fire with the third hole. A mouse nest leaning against the overheated wires. It had burned itself out. The man with the fire extinguisher gave it a blast.

“Just in case,” he said.

At twelve-fifteen Dave took stock of what they had accomplished: the broken window, the chipped sink, fifteen holes, the sodden plaster where they had used the extinguisher.

Arnie Schellenberger looked at Dave and said, “Uh, Dave, when’s Morley coming home?”

Dave said, “Not until tonight, not until ten, eleven.”

Arnie said, “There’s an electrician I know from the plant. He might come over. If you did the window he could do the wiring and we could patch the holes by”—he looked at his wrist —“ten?”

The electrician, Ted—black jeans, black jean jacket, earring—arrived at five. He looked around the kitchen and pointed at the knob-and-tube wiring and crossed his arms.

“I can’t repair that. It’s the law. Whatever you’ve exposed I have to replace.”

He looked at the expression of horror on Dave’s face.

“You need this done tonight. Right?”

Dave nodded.

The electrician looked around. “You guys got a reciprocal saw?”

Carl Lowbeer’s hand shot into the air like a schoolchild’s. “I do. I do,” he said way too fast and about an octave too high. Everyone turned and stared at him. Carl looked down and said it again, this time slower and a register lower. “I do,” he said.

The electrician pointed at the back wall of Dave’s kitchen. “We’re going to pop out the drywall,” he said. “Take the wall down to the studs. That way I can get at everything at once.”

Dave was frowning.

“It’s the fastest way,” said the electrician.

He looked at Carl.

“Cut around the top by the ceiling and along the baseboard. We’ll pop it out, nice and simple.”

Carl was beaming.

He was about to sink the saw into the wall when the electrician held up his arm.

“You guys turned the electricity off. Right?”

Everybody stopped and looked at one another.

Morley came home soon after nine.

When she turned onto their street, she noticed her house looked strangely dark.

She pulled into the driveway and parked the car and gathered an armful of junk, her purse, a sweater, some files. She headed toward the back door. She was exhausted. She dropped a file and stooped to pick it up. It was only then that she noticed the warm glow of candles flickering through the back window. She felt a wave of affection wash over her.

She had barely eaten all day. She was smiling as she opened the back door. She put her purse down and called, “Hello.” She stopped dead in her tracks.

Sometimes you are confronted by things that are so far from what you expect that your brain is unable to process what it is looking at. There is a momentary disconnect between what you think you are looking at and what you are actually looking at. Morley looked around her kitchen. There were candles everywhere. And flashlights and snake lights. And men. There were four men in the kitchen. All of them on their hands and knees.

The four strangers on their hands and knees were staring at her the way a family of raccoons might stare at her from the back deck. She thought,
This is not my house. This is not my kitchen. This is a frat house. This is a fraternity party
.

As her eyes adjusted to the light, she took in more details. The men were holding tools. There was a pile of pizza boxes on the floor. And an empty case of beer. Sam, her son Sam, was sprawled beside the pizza boxes. Asleep. What was he doing in a frat house? This couldn’t be her kitchen—two of the walls were missing. She looked at the men again.

One of them stood up.

“Hi. I’m Ted,” he said, “the electrician. We’ll have this cleared up in just a minute or two.”

And then she saw Dave, her husband, crawling toward her. He stopped about ten feet away. “Hi,” he said.

He waved his arm around the room—at the broken window, the holes in the wall, the back wall that had completely disappeared—and he said, “We’re fixing the toaster.”

This
was
her kitchen.

Morley’s mouth opened, but no words came out. It closed, then it opened again. She
seemed
to be trying to say something. Dave nodded, trying to encourage her, as if they were playing charades. Her mouth kept opening and closing, opening and closing, but no sound came out.

Then without saying anything—not one word—Morley turned around and walked out of the house. She got in her car and backed out of the driveway.

Dave said, “She’ll be back in a minute.”

Bert said, “I think I should be going.”

Carl said, “Me too.”

Dave said, “Maybe if we could just get the power on before she comes back.”

Morley wasn’t back in a minute. She wasn’t back for nearly an hour.

When she did return, she walked across the kitchen and opened the freezer door. About a cup of water trickled onto the floor. She let out a muffled sob.

Dave helped her empty the freezer. They deposited plastic bags of food in an assortment of neighborhood fridges. “They’re all within easy walking distance,” Dave pointed out helpfully.

When they had finished unloading the fridge, Morley went into the living room and met Jim Scoffield’s two friends. They were still sitting at her coffee table. They had a naphtha gas camping lantern resting on the arm of a chair and were playing cards in its garish light. When Morley came in the room, one of the men looked up and said, “Are there any subs left?”

The renovation took six weeks to finish.

Dave worked on it alone until the middle of the next week. He reconnected the electricity on Tuesday, but when Morley came home she got a shock when she tried to open the refrigerator, which, unfortunately, was the first thing she tried to do. So he shut the power off again and rechecked everything and turned it on the next morning. Everything seemed to be working fine until Sam came home from school and showed them how he could turn the microwave on with the TV remote.

There was a thunderstorm that night. Morley became increasingly agitated with each lightning flash. She had read stories about women washing dishes at the kitchen sink and
whammo!
they get hit by lightning. Cows, golfers, people in boats—why not her kitchen? She didn’t trust the wiring.

They called an electrician to finish the job: a methodical and trustworthy man. It was the electrician who spotted the lead pipes running into the upstairs bathroom, and he said, “If you want to have them replaced you might as well do it while you have the walls down.”

So they had the plumbers in and had the entire upstairs bathroom redone, and downstairs, where the back wall was, Morley had one of those bay windows put in, which is something she has always wanted. She has a herb garden going in the window space.

It was six difficult weeks and they had to get a new vacuum because the old one got clogged with plaster dust, but the upstairs bathroom is lovely and so is the bay window with the plants in it.

Dave was admiring the plants two weeks later, standing in front of the window and looking out into the yard, enjoying the new view. You can just see the alley over the back fence. He was standing there staring out the new window and into the alley when Ted Bescher drove by in his TR6.

But it is a beautiful window . . . and Dave likes it, especially in the evening when the light is soft. In the morning too, especially Saturday mornings, when the kids are still in bed. It’s lovely to sit in the kitchen together—the sun drifting down on the coriander, Morley and Dave sipping coffee and reading the paper. They were sitting there one Saturday morning in October, two months after the renovation was finished, when Morley stood up and walked over to the counter to make some toast. She turned and smiled at Dave and said, “Don’t you think it would work better if we could plug it in at the table? So we wouldn’t have to get up and walk across the kitchen every time someone wanted toast?”

The Razor’s Edge

It was about ten years ago that Dave came home from a visit to Cape Breton with his uncle Jimmy’s electric razor. He didn’t steal the razor—his aunt Elisabeth, Jimmy’s wife, Jimmy’s
widow,
gave the razor to Dave. Elisabeth, who is eighty-seven years old, lives alone in Halifax, in a rambling wooden house on Chestnut Street, a stone’s throw from the university.

Elisabeth, who Dave tries to visit every time he is in town, has been parcelling out Jimmy’s possessions to relatives for twenty-five years. On previous trips and trips subsequent to the electric razor, Dave has walked out of Elisabeth’s with a wooden-handled hairbrush, a wool jacket, a thick black-and-gold ballpoint pen and a stuffed duck.

“This used to be your uncle’s duck,” Elisabeth said, as she handed it to him.

Dave stood dumbly by her door, holding on to the duck, his suitcase at his feet. What else could he say except thank you? What else could he do except march up to airport security with a duck under his arm?

They X-rayed it.

“It seems to be dead,” said the security guard as he handed it back.

So many years have passed since his uncle Jimmy’s death that Dave has wondered if some of the stuff he has lugged away from Elisabeth’s
wasn’t
in fact his uncle’s. After twenty-five years you had to wonder if Elisabeth might have acquired some of these things since his leaving—at church sales perhaps, or maybe at Frenchies. It was entirely possible these things she was handing out weren’t Jimmy’s things at all. But whether they were or whether they weren’t, it didn’t really matter. They were heirlooms just by virtue of the way they had arrived in his life, and Dave could hardly drop them in a garbage can at the airport. So each time Elisabeth handed him something, Dave thanked her earnestly and dutifully lugged it home. Which is why he has a stuffed duck on the shelf in his bedroom closet. That’s where he put the hairbrush and the electric razor too—on the shelf in his closet, out of the main current, but not out of the river of his life.

Dave’s father, Charlie, was from a family of five children. Elisabeth is the last one of them left. Visiting Elisabeth is one way Dave can still visit his father, one way he can still reach out to Charlie. Elisabeth’s children, Dave’s cousins, have been trying to get her out of her house and into a home for almost a decade, ever since she began boiling all the tap water before she’d use it. Elisabeth started this a year or so before her eightieth birthday. At first, she only boiled drinking water, but now she boils everything. She boils the water she is going to cook in before she boils it for cooking. She boils her bath water. She has two power bars in her bedroom and eight electric kettles in a row. It takes her an hour to fill a tub.