Interior Design (16 page)

*

Fern is soon accustomed to finding her accomplished domestic face on TV, in the center of animated kitchens of nervous color and edgy chiaroscuro.
Artforum
runs a review of her latest commercial and hails New Wave Domesticity.
TV Guide
reports that housewives buy whatever Fern sells, just so the spots will continue to run. Dougie keeps calling to tell her that
People
will be happy to proclaim her the National Housewife, if only she'd grant an interview. Fern is glad she can't. She doesn't feel very housewifely, even after devouring women's magazines, memorizing newspaper recipes, and trying to learn knitting.

She clicks away with her long needles during afternoon soaps, but the repetitive weaving of her hands lulls her too easily. She looks up at the television: a glamorous blonde hides a letter behind a sofa pillow just as a lushly handsome man enters the room. He greets her and sits down right where the letter is hidden. His thin smile defies interpretation as he stares into the camera. The music swells.

Then Fern's face is in close-up, her features filled with sudden surges of twitches and grimaces, while behind her is yet another animated background: a succession of homey meals prepared by invisible hands. The sound track is the grunt of the dishwasher, the groan of the vacuum cleaner and the drunken whoosh of the clothes dryer, and every image and sound seems to change with each new flicker of pain on Fern's face, until she reaches for a floating bottle of aspirin.

Fern sets down her tangle of yarn and glances about her living room. If only I could make
this
writhe around me, she thinks. She scrunches her face, warps her lips at the inflexible furniture, and the phone rings.

“Doll? I've got a bit part for you on ‘Home Improvement,' and it's just the beginning—”

“Dougie, you
know
I can't.” She contorts her cheeks and buckles an eyebrow at the all-too-solid coffee table.

“Doll. It's time to renegosh.”

“Please, I don't want to jeopardize—”

“Okay okay okay. Remember, when you're ready, I'm ready.”

“I know.” Fern says good-bye, and she looks down at the confusing knot of her unfinished sweater. The phone rings again and Fern hesitates before picking up the receiver, she's had enough nagging. But it's Marjorie.

“Fern? We have a shoot lined up for tomorrow morning—sorry it's such short—”

“That's okay,” Fern says. She pauses. “Uh, Marjorie?”

“I'm still here.”

“I'd like to push myself more. How about telling me ahead of time what's up so I can prepare?”

“
Prepare?
I don't know, kiddo, we're doing so well the way we—”

“You're probably right,” Fern sighs. “It's just that I had this impulse—”

“An
impulse
. Well, why
not
take a chance? How about I give you a teeny hint?”

Fern grins into the receiver. “Let's hear it.”

“Tomorrow you'll have a co-star. Female, and
much
younger than you.”

“How much younger?”

“Oh, don't you want even a little surprise?”

After saying good-bye Fern wants to treat herself to the biggest piece of chocolate she can find. She walks to the grocery around the corner, and in a cramped aisle of sweets she notices a graying woman peering intently at boxes of pudding on the shelf. Fern stops: it's a pudding she did a spot for. She remembers how a spoonful of vanilla transformed itself into enticing, shivery shapes in front of her continually amazed face.

The woman hesitates, her nail tracing the spoon on the cover of one of the boxes, but then she grabs it and drops it in her cart. How often do I hold that spoon in her mind? Fern wonders. She follows the woman to the checkout counter, then out the door and behind her on the crowded sidewalk. Fern imagines that she's somewhere inside everyone walking by her, multiplied like the repeated images in a row of department store TVs. And where do I go when they stop thinking of me? A bit woozy at this thought, she stops at the edge of the park and sits down on a bench. Fern closes her eyes, and through the dull hum of traffic she hears the distant sound of laughter in the park. A girl's laughter. That could be my
co-star
, Fern thinks.

She follows the voice, each new happy burst leading her to a shaded clearing. A young mother lies on the grass while her daughter squirms all over her, transforming her into a shield, a ladder, a cushion. The mother seems to be snatching ten, fifteen seconds of sleep at a stretch. The girl awkwardly slaps her palms together: “Clap hands! Clap hands!” she sings out, her face alive with delight. Fern watches carefully and cups her hands around her eyes, creating a screen around them.
Aha
, she thinks—whatever I'll be during tomorrow's shoot, I'd better be tired.

When Fern returns to her apartment she stands in the living room and tries to imagine a little girl at her side. What should they do together, and with what product? If only Marjorie were marching toward her, about to divulge the secret. Fern strains to hear whispered words that don't come, and when she turns to the darkening window she can only see herself.

Watching her reflection, she reaches her hand out, as if squeezing the shoulder of a child beside her. Pretending her knuckles are tickled by the girl's long hair, Fern twirls a finger at an imagined strand. Then she hears David at the door, the bolts unlocking, and he's walking down the hall, swinging an air freshener by its string. “Just one sniff and you'll be mine,” he sings. He nuzzles Fern's neck, and her almost invented child fades to nothing.

Over dinner, while Fern tries to concentrate on the empty chair she's pulled up to the table, David scats “Gimme gimme good margarine.” Later, his hands in the soapy sink, he serenades the stacked plates in the dish drainer with “Let's dry off together tonight,” and he looks over his shoulder for her approval. Fern almost asks him to stop, but hesitates. Even if they
do
sound too much like jingles, she can't help feeling pleased that she's inspired David to create all these new songs.

That night, with her musical David finally asleep, Fern lies beside him and again tries to conjure up the girl. What might a child want, so lonely in her own room—a glass of water? What might be keeping her awake—a strange sound in the toy chest? Or perhaps the carpet has come alive under the night light, making strange, barely visible ripples. But instead of hearing a girl's pleading voice, Fern is filled with the thought of the rug under her own bed, its woolen weave disentangling itself, wriggling ominously and ready to reach out at the foot of anyone foolishly considering escape.

*

Fern crouches exhausted before the camera and, searching for an idea, she tangles her hand in the blonde hair of the little girl standing beside her. But the child can only offer a precociously well-choreographed smile and wait, and all of Fern's inspiration is parked on the other side of sleep.

Marjorie quickly calls off the shoot and sits beside her in a corner. “Did we over-prepare last night? A mistake, perhaps.” She shakes her head and her earrings, two bright plastic sailboats, bobble and sway. “Oh, storm-tossed waves!”

Fern says nothing; her jaw hurts from stifling so many yawns.

“Okay,” Marjorie says, and her fingernails flick at the air, as if any difficulty can be easily brushed aside, “we can continue in the afternoon. In the meantime, why not a little nappy? You can crash in my apartment.”

So ashamed of her failure, Fern can't even look at Marjorie. “I think I'd rather go back to my place, thanks.”

“Compromise. A drive home.” Marjorie isn't asking.

In the car they're both silent. “Hey,” Marjorie finally says, “you think you have troubles? Haven't you noticed that Mick isn't around any more? We broke up.”

“You and Mick? You were—”

“Yeah yeah. He wasn't much, believe me, but I don't like being dumped.” She pushes in the cigarette lighter with a deft slap of her palm. “Could you open the glove compartment, please?”

Fern pulls on the tiny door. Inside are cans of imported cocktail sausages.

“I'm absolutely starved. Would you be sweet and open one?”

Fern pulls the tab and lifts off the aluminum top. The sausages are packed together in a viscous gelatin and she struggles to pull one out.

Marjorie pushes Fern's hand away and expertly lifts a sausage from the thick goo. The cigarette lighter pops back with a click. Her knees balancing the wheel, Marjorie pulls out the lighter and presses its red coil against the sausage. Fern hears sizzling.

Marjorie eats the singed tip. “Revenge and protein, all at once. Want some?”

Fern shakes her head no at the acrid smell and looks away.

They're at her block. Marjorie scribbles on a piece of paper. “Look, just in case you lose the keys to your apartment—here's my address.”

That afternoon, still under the spell of the odd hum that lingers after a nap, Fern hugs the little girl too tightly before the cameras, wanting so hard to possess the motherly moment that eluded her last night. This is the scene that David later can't help but gape at in front of the TV: in a photorealistic kitchen that is alarmingly antiseptic, a daughter tucked in a mother's enveloping arms reveals the urge to pull away when her smile erupts into a fleeting wince. But Fern won't break her grip. David presses the Rewind button and starts it again.

“I pretended you were leaving me,” Fern lies, anticipating David's question, “but I wouldn't let you go.”

David pulls away from that startling hint of secret distress flickering on the screen and turns to Fern. He grins and then walks slowly toward her, his arms outstretched in reconciliation. Laughing, he clutches and swings her around, and the apartment becomes a dizzy backdrop for the story she just made up. “How could I go when the floor shines so?” he sings, and Fern flinches in his twirling embrace.

*

Fern rushes toward the camera, her hair uncombed, her eyes puffy and slightly wild. She holds her hands up to her unsettled face. She is remembering her dream: returning from work, she discovers David's clothes on the couch, arranged as if he had just disappeared. His shirt is stuck against the back cushion, the empty sleeve resting on the armrest, and the legs of his jeans hang down off the couch to the carpet, his hollow socks nestled in and dangling from his shoes. She pokes among his clothes and finds his underpants, slightly soiled. She feels the irresistible urge to do a wash, and as she gathers up his clothes she feels something crawling in them and realizes it must be David, tiny and naked. She drops the bundle.

“Terrific,” Marjorie says, “we'll keep that.”

Fern blinks at the lights.

That evening over take-out Chinese, David humming his latest little ditty across from her, Fern is certain she knows what the new commercial will eventually look like: she'll be menaced by something like Unsightly Kitchen Mold, her mouth will be half-open in horror while the shadows of tentacles shift across her face. It seems so predictable now. With her chopsticks she picks a Szechuan peppercorn away from the Cashew Chicken and she deliberately chews on it, hungry for a nice sharp ache.

“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.