All Is Vanity (16 page)

“Why do you care what others think?” This is what my mother would say. But I did care. I suppose because I, unlike my mother, would never be quite sure that I was someone to be reckoned with until someone else told me so.

Margaret
—

We have braved Circuit City on a Saturday and survived—nay, triumphed—for we parked in the nether reaches of the lot, in fact, in the far corner of the TJ Maxx lot, two grotesquely oversized stores away, our pale yellow Tercel bravely tiring the asphalt between a navy Navigator and a bronze Suburban; we slipped past those in ties who would entice us with DVD and large screen TV, stopped our ears against the siren song of Surround Sound and steered hard past Circe’s aisle from which PlayStations beckoned. For forty-five minutes, we languished among the dishwashers, searching and waiting, crying out for a knowledgeable sales associate. But, at last, guided by clues gleaned from plastic-coated cards affixed with impossible-to-remove sticky stuff to the door of each machine, we made our selection: the Maytag Superwasher, Model #1247, with pot-scrubbing, glass-shining, and copper-polishing capabilities. Obsidian, stainless steel, or faux cherry finish? Well might you ask. The choice was agonizing, rusty as our taste has become after years of avocado, harvest gold, and almond. But at last, I saw myself in the shiny one—it was I and I it; I glisten, therefore I am—and we joined the snaking line of pilgrims at the register, our yellow copy of the order slip trembling in our hands
.

Have never before made major purchase without consulting the Pennysaver
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Delivery in three days
.

Letty

P.S. Also, am beginning to research private schools for Mario. This will basically mean blowing the college fund on middle school, but she started to teach herself Latin this summer out of my old Wheelock, so it seems that now that we can afford to give her a really rigorous education, we probably should
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I’D HAD TO FOCUS SO SINGLE-MINDEDLY
on my own submission that I didn’t lift the cover page of “The Leaf Blowers: A Novel” by Zelda Jackson until late the night before class. Within two pages, I wished with a desperation so intense that it brought tears to my eyes that I could snatch my offering back from Kinko’s. Zelda’s prose read like a published book, every phrase exquisite, measured, angled together to form a gemlike whole. The story moved forward, not with the inexorable, crude pull of a thriller, but with a steady accretion of carefully observed moments. It rendered gorgeous the gritty, secret lives of Mexican gardeners in Rancho Santa Fe, who conversed in perfectly captured accents between the roars of their signature tool—the leaf blower. I wanted to hate it,
but it drew me on, through descriptions of dirt that glinted like mica under broken fingernails and pickup trucks rumbling like heartbeats through gated communities at dawn.

On page seven, I spotted a comma splice and circled it with relief. On page ten, I wrote in the margin, “Would Pablo be eating grapes in December, given the fruit’s expense, not to mention the solidarity he would feel with his countrymen laboring in northern California? Perhaps a rice and bean dish would be more authentic.” And then I crossed it out. It was obvious that Zelda knew about these people. If she said they ate grapes in the off-season, that is what they did.

In the end, I could in all honesty only gush, which I did, three single-spaced pages’ worth. The next evening, the rest of the class, including Peter Berginsky, universally agreed with my assessment. We all urged her to finish quickly, to secure an agent, to collect her Pulitzer. Some of us—Peter Berginsky, I’ve no doubt, and perhaps the retiree—probably did so without jealous claws tearing at their guts. Maybe others, too. Maybe I, in fact, was the only one who felt diminished and defeated by her talent, who in some dark, locked cupboard of my soul wished her ill.

“Where did you get all this stuff?” Bathsheba dared to ask.

I winced, waiting for some haughty reply declaring her intimacy with oppressed peoples everywhere.

“I don’t know,” Zelda answered, shrugging her slender shoulders winningly. “We had a gardener, but he was Japanese, and I never really talked to him. I guess I just made it up.”

I reprimanded myself sternly for my selfishness on the way home. Wouldn’t someone who truly loved writing feel only delight in the
presence of such obvious natural skill? Apparently not. Apparently she would find room in her heart only for bitter reflection on the unfairness of a world that bestowed every advantage on one random and undeserving creature. No, I thought, catching a glimpse of myself among the scraps of cardboard and mismatched shoes that formed a display in the window of the Parsons School of Design, that was not strictly true. Part of me could not help but admire Zelda. And, I reminded myself, as a trench-coated man jostled me off the curb in his eagerness to hurl himself into the crosswalk and elicit furious honking, that Zelda had been born with a genius for arranging words on the page did not mean that I could not also produce a perfectly readable novel.

It occurred to me that meeting Zelda might make taking this class worthwhile, even beyond the tutelage of Peter Berginsky. Anne Lamott often mentioned the value of the writing group as a source of artistic and emotional sustenance. Perhaps Zelda, after she read my chapter, would be interested in forming such a group with me. We could meet in the lobby of the Algonquin Hotel on Thursday evenings and critique each other’s work.

Letty’s e-mail that evening was a refreshing distraction.

M
,

Blue or yellow? What do you like for a kitchen? I’m also thinking about tangerine. Or we could go all sophisticated yet warm with granite and cherry, in which case I probably should have chosen the cherry-paneled dishwasher
.

Can you please get out here and help me choose a floor?

Have I told you that Michael took the job? We agreed that he’s published so much that he could always go back to the groves—or brambles—of academe, so why not take a chance, try something new?

So we got the dishwasher to celebrate, except it turns out that a dishwasher is impossible given this awkward kitchen design. There’s no room for a dishwasher, unless we install a hanging rack for the pots, which would either obscure the view of the driveway out the kitchen window or collect grease over the stove. And now it seems there’s some trouble with the pipes that we never had occasion to discern before. Apparently, the previous owner routed them in an idiosyncratic way, so as to install the hot tub that was in the backyard when we moved in
.

“Michael is going to help me re-envision the museum’s role. We’re going to make it a significant national presence,” Duncan Bishop told me yesterday
.

I was in Michael’s office to help him decide where to hang his “office art”: Marlo’s charcoal “Wild Horse,” Hunter’s tempera “Daddy in a Yellow Jacket,” and Noah’s fingerpainted “Sunset on the Pacific” or “Egg on the Carpet,” depending on your mood
.

Duncan Bishop had to stoop to shake my hand. He is tall enough to make you want to estimate—6’2“?, 6’3”?—and his fingers are so long my hand seemed not to fit properly in his. “We’re extremely lucky to get your husband over here,” he said. He was looking not at me, as he spoke, but at some spot to my right. Possibly Ivy, who was kicking at the desk from underneath, was distracting him
.

“Well, I know he’s happy to be here,” I said. Or some such thing
.

“You should take Letitia to lunch,” he said to Michael. “Copper River salmon today.”

So last night, when Michael got home, he said, “Let’s redo the kitchen!” in the happy-go-lucky way he’s had since he started working at a place that serves Copper River salmon in the cafeteria. And I said, “Whee!,” which, as you know, is not like me, or hasn’t been like me for several years now
.

Not that I haven’t been happy. You know I’ve been happy. I’ve just not been … giddy, I guess is how I feel just now, a bit as if the rugs been pulled out from under my feet, which you’d think would be uncomfortable, but it turns out that the rug was some sort of brown shag crusted with Cream of Wheat and underneath was this golden-stained, highly polished oak. (That’s one of the floors we’re considering for the remodeled kitchen. What do you think?)

I didn’t want to complain, Margaret, that we were not where we should have been in life (although, in fact, I know I did complain, it was only to you, which doesn’t count, does it?). I mean we’d made choices: academe over business for Michael, children over a career for me, and that entailed certain sacrifices. That’s the way life is. There are compromises. There are trade-offs. And yet … and yet … what had I done to be cursed with an apartment-sized electric oven? In L.A.! Almost no one has electric in L.A.!

We’re running a gas line to the kitchen, and I’m going to Koreatown to find one of those big old O’Keefe & Merritts. With two ovens and a griddle. And maybe a working clock, although those are expensive. This Thanksgiving, I’ll be able to roast a twenty-pound turkey without cutting it in half first
.

Seriously, Margaret, I need your help with this. I’m sending you some blueprints and paint chips, and a couple of pages from the Williams-Sonoma catalog (now that we have more cupboards, I might buy a croque-monsieur maker and an asparagus pot—you know, the sort of gadget that performs a single function perfectly twice a year and takes up an inordinate amount of space the rest of the time). Perhaps the children’s art will look nice in the new kitchen. It didn’t work, in the end, in the new office
.

L

Silently, I thanked Letty for allowing me to feel again like the generous, warmhearted person I hoped I was. In my imagination, I bestowed upon her the finest kitchen ever conceived. Nothing could be better for Letty than a new kitchen, a kitchen that would not do its best to thwart her every omelette. In high school, Letty had taken home ec, defying her mother, who, like mine, believed that a woman with domestic skills would end up chained to her house. (That neither of them was particularly good at keeping a house, and nevertheless both were, aside from an odd job here and there, primarily homemakers, didn’t shake their conviction.) Even in that bland environment with its exact measurements and its oversimplified substitutions Letty had shown signs of becoming a gourmet chef. While her classmates were learning to keep skin from forming on the surface of pudding, she was making pots de crème. While they mastered the twist of the wrist essential for releasing dough from a cardboard tube, she was practicing puff pastry.

In general, Letty had developed into the sort of person who appreciated fine touches. If you put a carton of cream on her table, she’d surreptitiously whisk it away and pour the cream into a squat pitcher. She knew how to garnish plates with lemon wedges and sprigs of fresh herbs from the herb garden she’d cultivated in the grassless ring that remained after they’d had the hot tub removed. On her dining room table, she kept a big bowl of oranges for juicing, their luxurious color and abundance belying their provenance: a shopping cart parked in the median at the intersection of Venice and Robertson and manned by a rotating team of Guatemalans, who pushed a bag of fruit through her open car window in exchange for two dollars while the light was red.

A gift from Letty was always small and inexpensive, but exquisite: a set of four antique linen cocktail napkins; a stainless steel
moderne key chain; art deco book plates. This sensibility had not been learned from her family. I remember hanging over the front seat of our car on the way home from a sleepover and asking my parents why the Larues had a giant teak fork and spoon hanging on their gold-flocked kitchen wall. I had recently been reading about the inclusion of useful items for the afterlife in Egyptian tombs and thought the monster utensils might have some similar significance.

“Some people just don’t have an eye for decor,” my mother said cheerfully. “Take the Chinese.”