customers in their real moment of sorrow, when they open their Visa statements and see how much they’ve blown on these calls.”
“You have a point,” Fern says. This is one of the stock phrases she uses to sidestep arguments with her mother. The best thing to do with her mother, she has found from hard experience, is not hand her anything she might later use as a club. And that could be anything—an interest in something new, a person Fern might find attractive, a book or movie she might have enjoyed. So the trick is not to give up anything of herself to her mother, ever.
This is especially easy today; she can hardly come up with conversation, let alone confrontation. The heat makes even the gathering of thoughts difficult. It is all she can do just to lie in a torpor, the chenille of the bedspread blotting up her sweat.
Then the house, which has been silent except for Lucky panting in a mildly alarming way on the floor next to her, is suddenly alive with action. Nora is dragging an old metal box fan across the floor of Fern’s room, into the tiny bathroom at its far end. She then turns the shower on full-blast, puts the fan up on a wooden chair she drags in from the kitchen, then stands looking with pride at her handiwork, which she presents to Fern as the “Turbo Cooler.”
Fern can see that her mother is trying to make amends for clipping her about her job. Instead of apologizing, though, or not clipping Fern in the first place, she’s trying to make it up with charm. In moments like this, Fern can see her mother as Harold’s sister, products of the same improvisational childhood that makes them subtly different from everybody else. And this is the very stuff she loves best about Harold. If
he’d
rigged up this contraption, she would have sworn it worked even if it hadn’t. In fact, though, the Turbo Cooler works fabulously. The sea breeze she imagined on her Greek island is suddenly, deliciously wafting over her.
“So...?” Nora says.
“Whatever,” Fern says. She knows this is her mother’s most hated response.
“Then we shouldn’t waste the water; I’ll just turn it off.”
“No,” Fern says. “Leave it on. It’s better than nothing.” Then she wonders if she might have come across as too enthusiastic.
Gadget
THE HEAT WAVE BREAKS in the night between Thursday and Friday, with a terrific storm that whips against the house and down the street. Nora leaps up to close windows, then decides against it.
“It just feels so great,” she says to Jeanne as she presses her palms to the screen. “So things get a little wet. So what?”
Fern’s dinner on Friday feels like a celebration, a thanksgiving to the gods of rain and coolness. Nora brings home a kitchen gadget, a present for the cook. She doesn’t want the already touchy relationship she has with Fern to degenerate into snappish little scenes like the one they had last night. She’s hoping she can change the tone.
“Somebody’s going to make a million bucks on this gizmo—the Miracle Garlic Peeler.” Nora demonstrates. It’s a soft rubber tube. “Put in a clove,” she says, lifting her voice into a pumped, infomercial tone. “Roll it back and forth on the counter, and it’s done!” She shakes out the clove, neatly shed of its skin.
“Cool,” Fern says, as though she means it. Nora watches her daughter looming over the kitchen island, her height giving her a cheflike majesty. She has a style all her own, although Nora suspects she isn’t very aware of it. She pulls from the grab bag of visual rhetoric available to girls her age and makes it look completely like her own idea. Her confetti hair, the ironic way she wears lipstick only with the most non-lipstick-compatible outfits, like today—a dark red that’s comic in combination with a T-shirt, a pair of plaid Bermudas, and a multipocketed fishing vest.
This nose-thumbing approach to fashion is part of a complex joke Fern seems to be assembling about the universe
“You have a point,” Fern says. This is one of the stock phrases she uses to sidestep arguments with her mother. The best thing to do with her mother, she has found from hard experience, is not hand her anything she might later use as a club. And that could be anything—an interest in something new, a person Fern might find attractive, a book or movie she might have enjoyed. So the trick is not to give up anything of herself to her mother, ever.
This is especially easy today; she can hardly come up with conversation, let alone confrontation. The heat makes even the gathering of thoughts difficult. It is all she can do just to lie in a torpor, the chenille of the bedspread blotting up her sweat.
Then the house, which has been silent except for Lucky panting in a mildly alarming way on the floor next to her, is suddenly alive with action. Nora is dragging an old metal box fan across the floor of Fern’s room, into the tiny bathroom at its far end. She then turns the shower on full-blast, puts the fan up on a wooden chair she drags in from the kitchen, then stands looking with pride at her handiwork, which she presents to Fern as the “Turbo Cooler.”
Fern can see that her mother is trying to make amends for clipping her about her job. Instead of apologizing, though, or not clipping Fern in the first place, she’s trying to make it up with charm. In moments like this, Fern can see her mother as Harold’s sister, products of the same improvisational childhood that makes them subtly different from everybody else. And this is the very stuff she loves best about Harold. If
he’d
rigged up this contraption, she would have sworn it worked even if it hadn’t. In fact, though, the Turbo Cooler works fabulously. The sea breeze she imagined on her Greek island is suddenly, deliciously wafting over her.
“So...?” Nora says.
“Whatever,” Fern says. She knows this is her mother’s most hated response.
“Then we shouldn’t waste the water; I’ll just turn it off.”
“No,” Fern says. “Leave it on. It’s better than nothing.” Then she wonders if she might have come across as too enthusiastic.
Gadget
THE HEAT WAVE BREAKS in the night between Thursday and Friday, with a terrific storm that whips against the house and down the street. Nora leaps up to close windows, then decides against it.
“It just feels so great,” she says to Jeanne as she presses her palms to the screen. “So things get a little wet. So what?”
Fern’s dinner on Friday feels like a celebration, a thanksgiving to the gods of rain and coolness. Nora brings home a kitchen gadget, a present for the cook. She doesn’t want the already touchy relationship she has with Fern to degenerate into snappish little scenes like the one they had last night. She’s hoping she can change the tone.
“Somebody’s going to make a million bucks on this gizmo—the Miracle Garlic Peeler.” Nora demonstrates. It’s a soft rubber tube. “Put in a clove,” she says, lifting her voice into a pumped, infomercial tone. “Roll it back and forth on the counter, and it’s done!” She shakes out the clove, neatly shed of its skin.
“Cool,” Fern says, as though she means it. Nora watches her daughter looming over the kitchen island, her height giving her a cheflike majesty. She has a style all her own, although Nora suspects she isn’t very aware of it. She pulls from the grab bag of visual rhetoric available to girls her age and makes it look completely like her own idea. Her confetti hair, the ironic way she wears lipstick only with the most non-lipstick-compatible outfits, like today—a dark red that’s comic in combination with a T-shirt, a pair of plaid Bermudas, and a multipocketed fishing vest.
This nose-thumbing approach to fashion is part of a complex joke Fern seems to be assembling about the universe
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