Interior Design (2 page)
The collection's title story makes active use of the most straightforward reading of the book's title, the notion of someone who will arrange our furniture in such a way as to better our lives. However there is nothing normal about the main character's approach to her job: Josephine seeks to decorate her clients' homes using the materials of their very dreamworlds. Meanwhile, in her personal life, she is dating a man who has no dreams. She attempts to build them for him, but soon realizes that building an exterior from one's interior means that there is no escape from either.
There are three stories that make active use of Graham's scientific bent. The first is “Beauty Marks,” wherein a young husband and wife are both drawn and bound by the consequences of what they learn in the course of their anthropological research. “Geology,” meanwhile, features a woman obsessed with melding her own features with that of her husband so as to perfectly imagine the face of her unborn child. Lastly, in “The Pose,” an unemployed factory worker builds a fetish object, a talisman, a human body, out of spare wire; he then dresses it with his wife's clothes, not knowing that his wife is complicit in the act, hoping that somehow it will bring them back together.
“The Reverse,” perhaps my favorite story in the collection, deserves a paragraph of its own. In it, a small-time actress named Fern takes a gig starring in an increasingly bizarre series of television commercials for cleaning products. At home, the songs her husband writes become more and more jingle-like; the producer, Marjorie, becomes more and more seductive. It isn't until the end that Fern realizes why she was cast. At that same moment, she sees that she's been doing good work, but not at all the work she thought she was doing, which is freeing in its own way: “She presses the button again and again, and when the elevator finally arrives with a silky whoosh, its door slides open like a curtain and Fern steps in.”
This brings us to the collection's final story, “Lucky,” wherein the aging owner of a men's store has rituals of his own, mainly involving the commonplace phrases he whispers to his customers, meant to ward off the fact that so many of them are passing away of old age. Strange as the character comes to seem to himself, he is the key that brings the whole collection into its own, centered as it is on the notion that there is always something worth holding on for, something born in the interstice between fate and the qualities that keep us human, in this case generosity: “
(H)ere it comes and it's better than money, it's good luck, maybe even a new life, and I'll say the number you're waiting for, see?âI won't keep it, I'll give it to you, it's yours, not mine.”
In each of the stories in this collection, ritual is invoked: to bring sense to the past, or meaning to the present, or some sense of control for the future. Workaday objects and processes are recast in powerful talismanic light. The defamiliarized gaze of the foreigner and the power of the creative mind are brought to bear, and experience is reformed, reshaped, understood newly. The line between what is real and what is imagined is blurred intentionally with the goal of letting events slide from one side of the line to the other according to the needs of a given psyche. These are the services Philip Graham has rendered us over the past several decades, services of which we are ever more in need. How good it is at last to have this new edition of
Interior Design
in hand.
CONTENTS
To Grace Paley, Frederic Tuten, and Donald Barthelme: splendid teachers, gracious friends
I would like to express my gratitude to the National Endowment for the Arts; the Corporation of Yaddo; the Illinois Arts Council; and the Department of English, School of Humanities and Center for Advanced Study at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for generous support during the writing of this book. For their support, counsel and friendship during the writing of this book, I'd like to offer my thanks and appreciation to Robert Olen Butler, Maria Guarnaschelli, Oscar Hijuelos, Sandy Huss, Margot Livesey, Greg Michalson, Robert Dale Parker, and Geri Thoma. As always, my deepest thanks and love go to my wife, Alma Gottlieb, and our two children, Nathaniel and Hannah.
You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen
,
simply wait. Do not even wait, be quite still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet
.
âF
RANZ
K
AFKA
But then that reality suddenly turned out to be no less complex and secret, indecipherable and dark than that world of dreams
.
âN
ATALIA
G
INZBURG
The real is as imagined as the imaginary
.
âC
LIFFORD
G
EERTZ
Another Planet
Because for the longest time I hated the thought of hitting any sort of ball, I always swung wildly at even the easiest pitches. So I often trudged home through the park after school, still filled with the groans and taunts of my gym class teammates. Once, trying to drown out the laughing contempt of those voices inside me, I kicked at the gravel in the path, and after all these years I can still remember how those tiny pebbles looped in the air. My little sister Molly, following me home again, watched briefly and then she stopped to examine a twig. I stood there and tramped down on the ground until I began to enjoy those curious crunching sounds. They reminded me of the clicking odometer on my dad's latest project in the basement, his machine designed to determine just how many miles a shoe will last.
I kicked again and walked on. Molly was scribbling invisible marks in her notebook with that twig and didn't notice I was leaving her behind. So I stepped faster, and then I ran a weaving route through the park, imagining that I clicked away miles. I sped past old people and mothers with their babies as if they were trees planted in the gravel path, trees with no fruit, no blossoms, no birds' nests, nothing to make me pause, and I ran until I had to kneel in the grass, my lungs heaving. I felt as if my body could not contain me, my arms and legs potential explosions, my fingers and toes flames, and as I crouched there, trying so hard to keep still, I gave in to the forbidden thought of sneaking downstairs to Dad's workshop.
When I arrived home Molly was already settled in front of the television in the living room, and while cartoons raged she clutched the ragged whiskbroom she habitually preferred to her dolls. Mom was sitting at the kitchen table, preoccupied with one of her How-To books, her long legs crossed, a hand sweeping through her wavy hair.
“Where have you been, hon?” she asked, her book down, her arms out for a hug.
“Just the park,” I said into her firm embrace.
“Have a good time?”
“Uh-huh,” I said and slowly slipped from her arms. When she turned back to her book I darted around the door to the basement. I waited. She hadn't heard me. So I walked quietly down the steps, guiding myself by the sun filtering through the narrow basement windows. Already I could hear a muffled clatter. I opened the workshop door, quickly closed it behind me, and I flicked on the light.
There it was, Dad's Electric Shoe Scraper. The demonstration shoe in the metal harness slowly rose and lowered onto a rotating band of sandpaperâ80 grit, which Dad said was the roughness closest to concrete. The odometer ticked along, the sole and heel wearing away while the shoe went nowhere, and on the floor was an eerie halo of sandpaper shavings and rubber dust.
The sandpaper was worn, and I supposed Dad would have to change it when he came home that night. I knew that when the bottom of a shoe was finally a ragged mess he clocked the total. Then he could quote the shoe's impressive mileage to prospective customers. I closed my eyes and listened to the regularity of the machine's clank and scrape, which Mom always said drove her nuts when she loaded the clothes washer in the basement. I loved that sound, but I instantly regretted the thought because I could just make out Mom anxiously calling me upstairs as if she had read my mind.
“Sammy?”
I heard her start down the steps. I turned off the workroom light and waited for my eyes to adjust to the dark.
“Sammy?”
She was downstairs now, her footsteps approaching, and I hid behind stacks of empty shoe boxes. Hunched low in the cramped space, my hands on the floor for balance, I felt a fine grit, and I realized that I'd left behind me a line of indicting footsteps from the circle of dust around Dad's machine. Then I heard the door open and the light was on.
“Come on out, honey,” Mom said gently. I rose from behind the boxes to face her disappointed eyes. I waited, but from the way her lips were pressed together I saw that she wasn't going to say anything further, at least to me. I was grateful for that, and when we walked up the stairs I hoped for even the smallest glancing touch, on my shoulder or hair.
*
I joined Molly on the living room carpet and watched cartoons into the late afternoon. In the darkening room the black-and- white images cast swift shadows on our faces as a flying cartoon fox, eyes screaming in its sockets and tail flaming, plunged to its awful, temporary fate. Beside me Molly ran her hand across the edge of the bristles of the whiskbroom, making a dry, rhythmic sound like a movie projector.
Mom was in the kitchen, cooking spaghetti yet again, and I could tell from the sharp little bangs of the pots and the staccato crunks of the can opener that she was trying to contain her anger while she waited for Dad. My parents usually argued about why the car couldn't go into the shop this month, why we still didn't have a color TV, or how terrible it was that Molly and I had to share the same bedroom. Just the day before they had fought over the tangled web Molly made from Mom's spools of thread. Now I was sure they would soon argue over me, and I was filled with a shivery anticipation.
Dad's car slowly entered the driveway. Molly and I hurried to the window and watched, silent and motionless as if we were one child, the cartoon mayhem behind us. Dad stepped out of the car, his lips pursed from whistling some song that always stopped when he opened the front door.
“Hey, kids,” he said, glancing at the TV and then bending to kiss us, “plenty of excitement tonight, huh?” We offered our small faces to his lips. As he held us his palms gave off the faint scent of shoe polish. But what I remember most about his hands were those drastically bitten-down nails, which I worried might never heal.
We heard a crash behind us and we turned to the television. The fox lay flattened beneath a boulder, its bushy tail poking out and slightly waving, like a flag of truce. Molly flicked the bristles of her whiskbroom.
Dad stroked Molly's hair and she pressed her head against his hand. He punched me gently on the arm. “What's your secret today, skipper?”
Instead of my usual, disappointing silence, that evening I had an answer for him. “I'm sorry I went down to your workshop.”
“That's okay. Didn't hurt yourself, did you?”
“No⦔
Mom clattered a colander in the kitchen. “Well, I'll see you guys later,” Dad said, and he started down the hall.
“Daddy, your shoes,” Molly said.
“Oh, of course, honey.” He leaned down and carefully unlaced them. They were a shiny black, with tiny air holes that Molly loved. He stepped out of one and Molly rubbed her cheek against its pocked surface. Dad called out, “Allll aboard!” and he walked off in his socks to the kitchen. Molly followed and pushed the shoes across the rug, chanting, “Chugga-chugga, chugga- chugga,” racing the right against the left.
Without turning from the burners, Mom arched her head for Dad's kiss, a formality that I suspected was meant only for us. Molly circled the shoes around our parents and I dawdled at the door. We both knew they wouldn't start in until we were back among our cartoons. With a significant glance our way, Mom then stared down the hallway, where she wanted us to go. Dad, as usual, was busy with some mail lying on the kitchen table.
“C'mon, Molly,” I said, and she abandoned Dad's shoes in the middle of the floor with a sigh.
On the television a family of mice ran from a peg-legged pirate cat, and I could just hear Mom say, “I thought you promised to lock the door to that room down there.” The eye-patched cat snarled and slashed at the mice with a cutlass as they sped up the ship's rigging, and I couldn't make out Dad's reply.
“Take it to the store where it belongs,” Mom said, her voice rising.
“What, and alert the competition?” Dad replied.
Mom laughed her bitter laugh. “Who else would want a machine that ruins shoes?” The mice easily jumped on the swinging blade and slid down the cat's tattooed arm. Surprised, it gaped at the mice, who huddled and prepared their next move.
“Maggie, you just don't understand, that shoe will help me sell many more.”
I was nowhere to be found in their angry words and I turned up the sound on the TV. “Louder,” Molly said. The mice pulled the cat's tricornered hat down over his eyes. Our faces were flickering masks, continually changing as we watched that endless cartoon feuding, where no matter what terrible things happened everyone miraculously survived.
*
As always, when dinner was ready we all sat at the table as if nothing had happened. I couldn't stand the sight of the spaghetti, which we'd already eaten twice that week, and I closed my eyes.
“These new shoe styles, who makes them, anyway?” I heard Dad complain. “Each one sells worse than the last.”