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The Kitchen

When Burt's interest in his marriage to Marlene started to wane, he decided to employ a contractor to refinish their kitchen, as a gesture to impress his wife. Their kitchen was a complete embarrassment to her and maybe to him a little too -- all their appliances in their house at the top of the hill were almost twenty years old, installed several weeks before or after Fiona and David were born. The refrigerator was old and yellowed and foggy on the inside with old tape residue and faint crayon scribblings on the door, and the food inside was stale and out of date and limp-looking; both compartments of the stove were filled with metal tins and casserole dishes and you couldn't cook anything in there. Their range was grimy and gas-powered and occasionally took many clicks to ignite while all their more opulent neighbors had electric ranges on which you could cook almost instantly. When the first contractor came and offered to refinish their kitchen, they listened eagerly.

"It will be the best kitchen you've ever imagined," he said wistfully, gesturing with his hands. It was a Wednesday night and Burt and Marlene were still sitting at the dinner table, plates of chicken bones and bowls of untouched rice and peas and bottles of salad dressing and barbeque sauce before them. "You'll be the envy of your neighbors with more modern kitchens. Four weeks from now, all your worries will be over." Their young daughter Fiona listened as well, from her seat at the end of the table, but her mind was elsewhere. She was home from Sarah Lawrence for the last three weeks of summer and had already become horribly bored with her parents. Most of her friends from high school had sublet apartments in Manhattan for the summer and were interning at dot coms and drinking Cosmopolitans every night with celebrities like Julia Roberts and Noah Wyle. She found this exchange with the contractor to be horribly in keeping with what she felt her parents, this town, her parent's friends had become in their post-secondary life: totally predictable and completely insipid in every way thinkable.

"What are your credentials," Marlene wondered aloud, observing the contractor's paperwork came with no references from her neighbors or any houses in the vicinity she was familiar with or had heard things about. "Have you worked on other homes in this area?"

"Yes," the contractor said, smiling foolishly, stammering. "I mean no. I'm from the city."

"You have done a lot of kitchens," she pressed, still not satisfied with his explanations.

"I'm going to put on the radio," Fiona said, pushing her chair out from the table. She carried her plate and silverware to the sink carefully without looking at her parents. Her hair fell in her face and she pushed it behind her ears quickly. She looked at the contractor with a tired sigh.

Nobody said anything while Fiona made her way out of the room.

The contractor did not lose his train of thought. "No," he said, looking at Burt and Marlene without shifting his eyes, coaxing them back into the conversation. "This would be my first kitchen." He quickly added, "But I have been to carpenter school and I've apprenticed with two master craftsmen."

"And what is your price?" asked Burt, evidencing his renowned frugality and impatience for the small details.

"Nothing less than your daughter Fiona as my wife," replied the stranger, evenly, his voice unwavering. He stared down a corridor and into the Brown's living room, their stereo and the bookcases catching his attention. "And spring and summer, too."

The Browns were furious, and would have thrown the man out of their house and back down the hill to where he came for daring to think that their beautiful daughter meant so little to them that she could be bartered for kitchen work, but calculating Burt said, "If you can build the kitchen in two weeks, it's a deal." Marlene glared at her husband, aghast, her jaw dropped unsubtly. When the contractor started for the living room, he stopped to look at the deep shelves of CDs, clearly taken by their depth and range of musical tastes and how oddly contemporary the music seemed for a house with grown children, Burt whispered to his wife, "In two weeks he can only build half a kitchen, but at least that'll be free."

In the living room, the contractor took one more look at Fiona. Her legs were kicked up onto the coffee table and her shoes still on. She didn't notice the contractor while she pulled the liner notes out of jewel cases and looking at them remotely before placing the notes to the side of the boxes. She sneezed. Fiona was one of the most fetching girls he had ever seen. She had long blonde hair and was wearing faded jeans and a tiny blue t-shirt. There was something significantly exciting about her insouciance, the way she looked at the contractor when she realized he stood there was merely a passing sidelong glance, nothing serious, barely acknowledging him. She looked like one of those models he always sat across from on the subway when he was in college. He never spoke to those girls, but watched them closely. He loved how their eyes would seem to glaze over but they were always on and ready to lash out at anyone who might have said something or stepped too closely to their perfect shoes, with a sharpened, worldy tongue. He always wanted to follow these girls, step into their worlds, drink cocktails with them but fit in perfectly and not be anything like an outsider.

In the kitchen, he agreed to Burt's proposal quickly, making sure to stipulate that this would work as long as he could park his truck in front of the house so he could access his building materials easily. He shook hands heartily with Marlene and weakly with Burt before gathering his things.

All through the week, he worked. It was awkward for the Browns with the contractor in the kitchen pounding and sawing and hammering all day long. The family had to eat meals in the dining room and most of the time the kids chose to have breakfast in the living room, propping up cereal boxes against the firmness of the leather couch cushions, or just sitting on the floor, splashing the bright gold and green area rugs with droplets of milk and dabs of orange juice. Butter splashed off of crumbly toast slices that Marlene prepared in a corner by the coat closet because there was an outlet there. Burt had been comfortably settling into his second week of the month off he allotted himself when he doled out the vacation assignments in the office last spring. He imagined he'd have to come up with things to do with his time but he never felt like it would be this hard. He figured since he didn't spend much time with his wife during while he worked and especially before April when he practically lived in his office in Manhattan, they would enjoy the time to spend together. They could do coupley things like shop together but it wouldn't feel like shopping because they would be able to talk about other things or read books that the other had read before and talk about them together or have iced lattes at the Starbucks down the hill in town. Marlene would make her husband toast in the morning and then peremptorily announce that she was going to Judy's because Judy's kids (twin boys, Holmes attending Hampshire and Matthew attending MIT on partial scholarship) were finally out of the house but she was stranded without the Volvo and needed Marlene's opinion on a menu she was planning for a barbeque later that summer and couldn't bear to discuss it via e-mail. Burt didn't say anything; she breezed by too quickly for him to even digest what she had said, let alone what happened. At the office everything felt like it was planned months in advance: appointments were regular and systematic, always lasting the same amount of time and he approached all of his clients in a similar fashion, as if following a script which he had performed so many times the words had insinuated themselves into his vernacular.

With the help of his truck, the contractor managed to haul lumber and hinges and a range and stove and microwave up the hill and into the house. He made many trips back and forth to the lumber yard or to Home Depot as his needs or vision for the project changed. When David took the Volvo so he could go driving around with his friends who had nothing to do and were sick of swimming at the pool and tennis was just so annoying, Marlene had no way to get into town for groceries and the thought of asking Eileen or Bernadette to come over and take her seemed so demeaning that she figured she'd rather go without then burden them with her problems. When she felt courageous, she'd ask the contractor to bring back a carton of eggs or a bag of sugar. He would oblige, dutifully, and would always come back to the house with the right things. Sometimes Marlene would ask the contractor to fetch her things she really didn't need, like a certain obscure brand of sausage nobody ate, just to see if he could find it, and he always did. When he'd present Marlene with the packages, he'd always seem completely calm and relaxed, as if it were no big deal whatsoever. Burt began to drink gin and tonics at a frantic pace, as if he were perpetually thirsty or hot even though they blasted the air conditioning non-stop, even on cold nights, and Marlene barely spoke to her husband or her children. As the next week approached, disaster stared Burt and Marlene in the face. For, against all odds, the contractor had nearly completed the kitchen.

One night, after the contractor had left, Burt and Marlene examined the kichen. Things were still covered in plastic and there were paint trays full of congealing varnish and brushes soaking in turpentine in the sink and the air was heavy as if from having soaked up too many tiny wood shaving particles which were slowly, stealthily entering Burt and Marlene's lungs. They were both astonished at how far the contractor had come. Even in an inchoate state, their kitchen began to look fabulous. They were so taken by the straight lines and fresh, untormented wood that they both imagined how impressed different neighbors would be when they would tour the new facility.

"Oh, Marlene," Marlene imagined her boisterous neighbor Judy saying. Judy always wore too much makeup in malapropos color schemes and floral print dresses so frequently it looked as if she merely wore the same dress over and over but would occasionally reorient the head and arm holes, perhaps using a sleeve as a sort of makeshift turtleneck and letting the rest of the dress fall where it would. "This is stunning... superb... simply sublime."

"Really, you think so," Marlene imagined herself saying, hiding her eyes coyly, maybe looking at her nails which definitely would be freshly painted red to celebrate the unveiling. "We had no idea of how things would turn out with this contractor since he had no references to speak of," she'd admit. "But Burt and I are so pleased things worked out."

Burt's take, like on so many things in his life, was a mere pecuniary concern. He would tell Larry, "I'm telling you... this guy... somebody better fucking patent him... We got away --" he would pause, dramatically to sip his fizzy drink, swilling around the contents of the translucent pink plastic cup with the scallopy design. "We practically paid nothing for this."

"Maybe this guy is an illegal?" Larry would posit, adjusting his boxy glasses and looking at his outurned feet, gray dingy Addidas with knawed laces. "Maybe he's got a criminal record?"

"Nah," Burt said. "I doubt it. He doesn't have an accent and he does have his own transportation."

"You never know," the neighbor said, nodding his head gravely. Burt had to punch him in the shoulder and call him crazy to draw the attention away from the notion of Burt's contractor being less than reputable, at least in front of anyone.

Burt would laugh these notions off good-naturedly even though he'd probably been thinking the same things all along. Neither Burt nor Marlene could imagine how they would break the news to Fiona that she would have to marry this contractor who probably didn't even finish high school. Would the contractor insist on a lavish, ridiculous wedding and if he did who would they invite? Marlene would have to think up a plausible explanation for the unlikely union.

Something took over Marlene's attention. From across the kitchen she noticed a knob which looked like it was coming loose. It was a new knob, not a carryover from the old kitchen, and Marlene knew this because she had never seen it before. Suddenly, something became clear in her mind and she felt dizzy. She turned around to Burt, just standing there, his hands dug deep into the pockets of his jean shorts, sweat lining his brow and the expanse of forehead, which before now Marlene had not realized was so far-reaching. "You think you're so clever, Burt," said Marlene. "You got us into this; you must get us out. We cannot let Fiona marry this contractor, who must be a trained professional in disguise. We know nothing about his family or parents. And without spring and summer, a glorious life will be unimaginable. Do something!"

So Burt thought hard, and noticing a part of the kitchen which was familiar enough to remind him of when they first moved from their apartment in the Village onto the Island, before the kids, finally said, "Without the truck, the builder could not haul the refrigerator to complete his work."

Fiona was watching television in a small room on the second floor of the house. During commercials, she traveled to other areas of the house to pick up magazines or for the cordless phone so she could call her friends and find out if they were home watching the same shows (she assumed they were and was invariably right without having to ask) and during one trip into the kitchen for a soda, she encountered the contractor. She found him leaning against the side of the old, dusty refrigerator, sighing to himself, his eyes shut tightly. She cleared her throat gently to signify her presence. The contractor quickly shot his eyes open and forced his body away from the refrigerator, lowering his hand and dragging it across and imaginary line in the air to signify that it was okay for her to cross.

"How's it going?" he asked Fiona, hesitantly. His voice was uneven from having not spoken to anybody all day and having to adjust back to what a voice really sounds like from the imaginary speech which had been traveling through his thoughts up until now.

Fiona hadn't spoken to anyone in awhile either. When she opened her mouth to speak, she had to pull her lips apart with her tongue since they were stuck together from having been in the same position for so long. Her back ached from sitting for too long and her vision was a little blurry. She rubbed her eyes and yawned.

"I'm finishing up here for the night," he told her, even though her gestures and the way she stood did not seem to signify a question of propriety.

"Do you like building things?" Fiona asked, noticing the roughness of the contractor's skin, not just on his hands but his face and elbows which she could see since his wore a t-shirt with no sleeves.

"Yeah, I guess I do."

"Did you ever want to do anything else?"

"I constantly feel like I'm in the wrong place," he said, surprising himself with the candor he was putting forth given how entirely beautiful he found Fiona to be. Usually when the contractor talked to girls he found attractive he rarely mentioned anything about himself.

"Where do you want to be?" Fiona asked, cocking her head to one side, looking at the contractor inquisitively.

"I like the notion of floating," he said, satisfied with this as an answer.

Fiona began to laugh. She covered her mouth and held her cheeks in both hands. "That's great," she said. "Just great." She left the kitchen, with a can of diet Coke from the refrigerator which she dusts off with the edge of a dishtowel which lay on the table. The contractor watched her walk away, wondering if, given the chance, if he would have asked Fiona where she'd like to be, or if he would have lost his nerve so it was just as well anyway.

That night, Fiona could not sleep. She lied awake in her bed, sweating, the long blue t-shirt she always slept in felt heavy and her thoughts felt intrusive. She stared at a picture of the contractor in her head. She imagined watching him work from a great distance, not just a far corner of the house with a view of the kitchen, but miles away, other towns, maybe even a porthole in from a low embankment in Manhattan, beneath cardboard boxes and heaps of garbage, which led directly to the Brown's house at the top of the hill. The contractor worked without stopping. He sanded long planks of wood, and used a leveler to make sure things were set perfectly. He tripped over his shoelaces which were perpetually falling untied. He stopped to wipe sweat from his brow with a paper napkin since he did not have a handkerchief. Occasionally he had one but most of the time he would forget to bring one or lose the ones he had, so typically he'd just let the moisture collect on his forehead and on his neck and it would all just drip down and down until the collar of his dirty t-shirt was soaked. The next thing Fiona imagined was standing next to him. The carpenter was no longer in the kitchen, but on the back porch, smoking, silently observing the tiny vicissitudes around him. Small flickers of lights, tiny wisps of conversation which floated in from neighboring houses, clicks, crickets chirping, hinges creaking. He noticed Fiona but did not say hello.

"You shouldn't smoke, Buddy," she said, in a swaying tone, which seemed in keeping with the noises the leaves of the trees made.

The carpenter looked at his cigarette and shrugged.

"So where do you go after you leave here?" she asked.

"Home," the contractor said quickly, then adding, "usually."

"What do you do for fun?"

"I don't know," he said, touching his chin, scraping his fingers on the stubble he let collect there. "Read sometimes, I guess."

"What do you read?" Fiona asked, moving closer to the contractor, her eyes wide with a bubbling curiosity.

"Poetry sometimes."

"Other times?"

"I don't know... sometimes I find magazines or pieces of the newspaper around and I'll look at that stuff sometimes."

"I watch a lot of TV," Fiona admitted, rather sheepishly.

"Yeah, I've noticed," the contractor said quietly, but loudly enough for Fiona to hear.

"Why don't you shave every day?" she asked. The contractor touched his chin again, this time hesitantly.

"I don't know," he said.

"There must be a reason why," she said, staring at him imperiously, like when her father would interrogate her about what classes she was taking in college but he'd try to make the tone of his voice sound conversational, when really, Fiona knew, it was hard-edged and impetuous and he look at her with this profound disdain and she couldn't understand it because she felt like she had done nothing to warrant it.

"Okay," the contractor started. "My skin is sensitive. When I shave too frequently, I tend to get cuts or bumps. So, I wait a couple of days in between, you know, to give my skin a chance to breathe."

"Well," Fiona said, feeling somewhat aghast and a bit unsteady on her feet. "That certainly explains that."

"I care a lot about you," the contractor said, looking into Fiona's eyes with a great longing she had never felt aimed towards her before.

She scoffed and rolled her eyes, but felt badly about doing it right away, it just sort of came out that way though she did not mean for it to seem intentional.

"You are so beautiful," the contractor said. "I could not imagine doing anything else with the rest of my life but making you happy."

Fiona looked confused. She furrowed her brow and said, "But you don't know me. You don't know anything about me. How can you feel this way?"

"Don't you think that some things happen quickly?" he asked.

"Yeah, but--"

"But sometimes maybe things have also been planned out, maybe not by us, but by somebody else, so random things aren't really that random, because, well, because somebody planned it like that."

Fiona laughed, "What like some kind of god?"

The contractor didn't know what to say. She could tell by looking at him that he knew he didn't have the words to express what he felt so she didn't feel like taunting him anymore.

The contractor stubbed out his cigarette against one of the planks of the patio. He brushed the cigarette butt through one of the grooves and tried to scatter the ash with a paint-splattered boot. He lit another one.

"You really shouldn't smoke," Fiona said. "It's bad for you." She turned and went back inside the house.

When she woke up in the morning, she immediately wanted to see the contractor, to see if he'd be wearing the same thing as she'd imagined the night before or if perhaps he'd shaved. She threw on her bathrobe and raced downstairs only to find the contractor hadn't yet arrived. She had breakfast instead of waiting, and later, when the contractor did come and begin to work, she had forgotten all about it, already moved on to more pressing concerns.

Since Burt had a lot of disguises from so many Halloween parties Marlene dragged him to, and lately his neighbors have taken to throwing theme parties which seem to end up being just more opportunities to dress up in costume when it wasn't October, he had no trouble finding something suitable to wear. Because the yoga classes Marlene dragged him to earlier this year on Sundays, he could now contort his body into nearly indiscernible shapes. The next afternoon, disguised as a car thief, his legs wrapped tightly into a Lotus position, he snuck out of the house, rolling like a tire, so low to the ground that none of the neighbors would ever have been able to spot him from their patios or third-floor sitting rooms. Burt stole the contractor's truck while he was eating lunch on the front porch of the house.

When the contractor realized his truck was missing, he didn't know what to do. He had never lost anything in his life, not even his house keys. He found Marlene sorting through laundry in the basement and approached her.

"My truck is missing," he said, trying to steady his breathing from all the running around in a frenzy.

"Really," Marlene said, not looking at the contractor. "Now, that's awfully peculiar."

The contractor left without saying anything and searched all over the house for Burt, even knocking on bathroom doors, but the contractor could not locate him.

The contractor returned to the front porch, panting, wheezing, and looked at the remains of his lunch. While he was running around, he had inadvertently kicked over his sandwich, splaying the contents around. There was a piece of lettuce stuck to the side of the Igloo, fastened with mayonnaise and small slices of turkey and ham with a bite taken out of each slice in different places had mud and footprints all over and were squashed into the floorboards. Later he noticed that at some point he had knocked over his bottle of iced tea and the bottle had broken and there were now shards of glass everywhere and the dark, sticky liquid seeping through the porch and into the grass and dirt beneath the house, probably dripping down the big hill, maybe even following after his stolen truck.

Wondering about where his truck had disappeared to made the contractor think, oddly enough, about his mother in Miami. He remembered, with tempered whimsy, the girls he would bring home during high school, first cheerleaders, but then he started dating girls that he thought his mother would think were more significant, like girls who were on Student Council and had earnest smiles, or the girls with long, dark hair who made posters which contained politically-charged statements of amiable protest and tepid affirmation. His mother always seemed to react in the same way, however, regardless of who the girl was, whether or not she took French, or if she raised rabbits in a wooden hutch in her family's basement. His mother always smiled and quickly offered cookies or styrofoam cups of juice but the contractor knew she wasn't happy. When the girls would return to their bicycles, standing on the walkway to the house, his mother would always sigh softly and begin to busy herself with buffing, biting, or painting her nails. After college, when he told his mother that he wanted to work on houses for a living, rebuild patios, install doors, tile floors, dig up the earth for in-ground swimming pools with a unwieldy team of interchangeable migrant workers, and remodel kitchens and bathrooms, instead of being a lawyer or teacher or accountant, she had nothing to say to him.

As he swept up the glass and picked the pieces of luncheon meat from the cracks and grooves in the wood, attempting to mollify some of the intensity of his earlier rage, the Brown's son David came up the stairs from outside.

"Hi," David said, not recognizing the contractor but understanding his presence enough not to be disturbed by it. "I'm David."

"Hello," the contractor said softly, quickly returning his attention to the work before him.

"My parents are crazy you know," David said. "My sister too."

The contractor looked up and welcomed this unwarranted, unintended support which the Brown's son unwittingly provided. "Really?" he asked.

"Yeah," David laughed. "It's so obvious. It's worse than insanity, you know. They're just so dumb and rich and bored."

"Yeah, I guess I could see that," the contractor said. "I'm just here to build the kitchen."

David shrugged his shoulders and let himself into the house, leaving the contractor alone to assess the situation that had unfolded in front of him. Since he had no way home, and Burt said he was too tired to drive the contractor into the city, Marlene offered him a sleeping bag and pointed at the ample empty space in their huge finished basement. The contractor accepted because he had nothing else to do.

The next morning, after the Browns finished breakfast, the contractor realized he could not complete the kitchen in time to win Fiona. He became enraged. He shouted things and picked up his toolbox and dropped it against the floor, letting screwdrivers and bolt wrenches and nails fly all around the kitchen, denting some of the new wooden cabinets and chipping several of the shiny floor tiles. Burt and Marlene and Fiona watched him from the living room as his disguises fell away, revealing him as a sharp-tongued, well-educated, refined, professional unionized master craftsman, one of the most highly revered in the town. Burt wasn't sure but could have sworn she recognized his face from television, if not his own series than many frequent appearances on the Home and Garden Channel. Marlene cried, knowing that she could imagine nothing more depressing than to end up with just another ordinary kitchen, a carbon-copy of the kitchens her friends who had used this guy already had. Fiona was impressed that there was actually a dramatic event in their house, and not just of the mismatched place setting or summer hat summer shoe variety. Burt and Marlene called for their brother-in-law, Theo, a bodybuilder and part-time club bouncer who was married to Marlene's dour sister Phyllis. Theo and Phyllis lived in Great Neck and so it didn't take long for him to come to the house. With his fists clenched, Theo paid the contractor his wages: not Fiona, but a bodyslam and a headlock and a unnatural rotating of the contractor's arm and a tossing down the hill, causing the contractor to land squarely on the head.

During the next weeks, Fiona was immeasurably angry at her parents for causing this trouble, and found it horribly annoying that she had to push old, spoiled food out of the way in the refrigerator to make room for a half of a chicken Caesar salad she picked up during a walk into town. She didn't understand why her parents couldn't clean out the refrigerator. Because of the precarious state the kitchen stood in, Marlene simply couldn't approach it. She made Burt and the kids cook for themselves, refusing to prepare any more meals. Having to figure out what to make and how to prepare it kept them busy and Marlene liked that.

As for Burt, horribly embarrassed about everything, he stayed indoors for nearly the rest of his vacation from work, reading Cheever and thinking about things differently. When he thought it safe to show his face in town at the Shop Rite or at his neighbor's outdoor barbeques, he drove around in a new Jeep Grand Cherokee he bought from a client's dealership in New Jersey for which he received a considerable discount. Burt liked to drive back and forth down the street in front of their house, pretending to be unaware if neighbors happened to notice or not. He felt restless even though he powered the Jeep up and down the hill at speeds which made the engine whir and hum loudly enough to be satisfying. After the children had returned to their colleges, and they were alone again, he presented this Jeep to Marlene, as a gift, saying, "This has a V-8. Nobody else's Mercedes or Honda Accord will keep up with this. You can drive over the Hudson and through the fields and trees and clouds, and even to Maine to visit your father if you want." As Burt promised, the Jeep has never failed his wife, Marlene.

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