It Looked Different on the Model

by Laurie Notaro

  Getting the KitchenAid stove to even function was a process. Before the burners would consider glowing red, there was a series of bumps, groans, and moans that sounded like it was listing and in comparison made the Titanic seem silent when sinking, prompting us to change its name to First Aid. I didn’t even get what was in the stove that was making those sounds, unless it was a portal to hell and we were roasting souls every time we made macaroni and cheese.

  I had no idea that I hated the First Aid as much as I did; it was just a stove, it served its purpose, I suppose, as long as I considered that only cooking over a hearth in my kitchen with kindling could take longer to get a heat element working. But one day I looked at it and it made me mad and I decided that I hated its stupid glowy burners, its almond color, and the arthritis it apparently had. I remembered, in pristine detail, how great the old stove looked in this kitchen, and I also missed the gas stove I’d left behind.

  I immediately went to eBay, typed “old stove” in the search box, and, within seconds, there it was: a gorgeous old O’Keefe & Merritt, the Cadillac of antique stoves, for sale, fifty miles away in Salem.

  The woman who was selling it seemed very nice and within an hour emailed that I should meet her at her storage unit. I asked my husband to come along, just in case I was never heard from again and my mummy was found a decade later in various Rubbermaid totes after an auction of the contents of #209 at Hoarder Storage in Salem, Oregon.

  “Yeah,” he agreed. “I don’t think they could fit you into just one.”

  “Did you know,” I casually mentioned, “that when the wife suddenly vanishes, it’s usually because the husband rented a wood chipper?”

  “I wouldn’t even know how to turn one on,” he replied. “Everyone would know that. I’ve broken everything with an ‘on’ button even remotely related to household maintenance.”

  “Okay, then you have fun sharing an eight-by-eight with your cellie, George the Whore, for the next ten years until they find my head in a cake carrier,” I added.

  “I’ve heard Salem has some of the most beautiful storage-unit structures in the state,” he said wearily. “Meet you at the car.”

  It became clear that my fear of being dismembered was rather empty when we spotted the stove lady, Tina, at the entrance with her twelve-year-old son. She was very nice and friendly, but we hadn’t been in the elevator for half a minute when Tina confessed that she loved the stove and really didn’t want to part with it yet had to out of necessity. I nodded and smiled, knowing a sales ploy when I saw one. The soft pitch.

  “There’s a man who’s interested in coming to see it tomorrow,” she added, putting a little bit of arm into the second ball.

  Sure there is, I thought, as I smiled and nodded at her again. The elevator doors opened and we followed her down the hall to her unit. My husband and I stood back as she raised the unit door, and I braced myself for disappointment after seeing her dilapidated stove, which probably had rodents nesting in it. Yes, the photos on eBay were beautiful, but when I take a picture of myself from a higher angle, I shave off two chins, control my nose hair, and shrink the girth of my nostrils faster than a surgeon with a beach house in Malibu who texts when he drives. Tricks of the trade, my friend.

  As the door rolled up, it revealed a hulking shape with a tarp draped over it. I held my breath, and as her son pulled the tarp off, I gasped. A harp strummed somewhere, and a chorus of angels sang that one note that they do when something incredible happens and changes everything forever.

  It did not look like the stove in the eBay photo; it looked better. It looked incredible. There was a chrome griddle in the center, a periscope window on the backsplash to see down into the oven without opening the door, a Grillevator, a warming oven, and it was all in absolutely pristine condition for a stove that came off the assembly line in 1954. When I opened the oven door, it was so clean it was almost impossible to believe that anyone had ever cooked in it. The chrome on it gleamed, the white enamel shone, and I swear the corners of the oven doors curled up and smiled at me.

  “I really don’t want to sell it, but I have to,” Tina repeated. “We sold the piano last week. This is the last thing I have left from the house I had with my husband. He was killed by a drunk driver on New Year’s Day several years ago, and this is like saying a final goodbye.”

  And then she looked at me and started to cry.

  Oh boy.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, as her son hugged her and they both relived the pain of that New Year’s Day. She patted his head. And then he began to sob, too.

  “We moved up here because my husband’s brother said he would be a father figure to my sons,” she continued, as tears streamed down her face. “But that didn’t happen. It turns out he’s … he’s not the man we thought he was.”

  Oh, Jesus, I said to myself, as I released the grip on my wallet. I thought the worst thing that could happen at the storage unit was that I’d be lured into a trap, lose my life in a valiant struggle, get divvied up like a chicken, and be left to rot in the dark, but a weeping widow clutching her fatherless son as they remembered the fun family stove time was a little bit beyond my established skill set.

  And that’s when I looked at my husband, and it looked like he super wanted to punch me in the face with that stove.

  “I’m going to cook on it a lot,” I mouthed to him.

  As far as Tina & Son were concerned, I didn’t know what to do. If it was an act, it was a good one; it had the same amounts of embarrassment, despair, agony, and vulnerability as Courtney Love’s Behind the Music episode. But it seemed real to me, and honestly, if this was a ploy, wouldn’t there be easier things to sell than old appliances? It’s not like there’s a band of antique stove bandits who will wait until you go on vacation to bust down your door to steal an heirloom that requires a dolly, a ramp, and a can of Easy-Off.

  So, believing that what I was seeing was true, and despite the fact that I am an inappropriate hugger who has trouble assessing when the time is right, I kind of reached out and tried to comfort this person—whom I had only known since the storage-place front door—and I wasn’t sure what my hand was going to do once it made a landing. At the last second, my palm sort of curled up like a claw, and then I found I was rubbing the back of my pointer finger up and down a square-inch area of her arm three times, albeit awkwardly. That really was as much as I could do, given the prep time, atmosphere, and the fact that I was getting kind of hungry.

  To jolt us back into the reality of why I drove fifty miles and dragged my husband—who was now wishing he knew how to turn on a wood chipper—with me, I spoke to Tina quietly but very, very compassionately, and I mean so compassionately it was almost a whisper, it was gentle, very soft, like baby talk. Like tiny, little—like I was breathing it but with light, airy words.

  “So in the email you said you’d take three seventy-five,” I whispered, but unfortunately, after all of that, it really did come out more like a regular old everyday whisper, like something you’d whisper to someone who probably wasn’t crying and clinging to their son but who had their foot on the back of your seat in a movie theater.

  Tina wiped the tears away and raised her head. “The guy that was coming tomorrow was going to offer me five hundred dollars,” she informed me.

  “Five hundred?” I asked, somewhat surprised, and not in a whisper. “Okay, five? We can do five; consider it part of the pain and suffering, sure. Five. We can do five. Five is awesome. It’s awesome.”

  And then I quickly counted out the $375 in cash I had brought and wrote a check for the remaining amount.

  So while I don’t want to say that I swindled a widow out of an incredible stove, I am pretty sure I swindled a widow out of an incredible stove, even if she upped the ante on that last hand. When I went home that night and did some research, I saw that the same model that was sitting under a tarp in a storage place was selling regularly for considerably more, so I didn’t exactly feel that my compassionate finge
r touch was for nothing. The stove was in my kitchen by the weekend, and I cooked pancakes on the chrome griddle that following Sunday.

  There was only one thing missing on the new old stove, and that was a working timer. It was completely forgivable and easily remedied; I went straight back to eBay, my reliable source for everyone else’s trash, and looked for a vintage one that matched the era of the stove.

  I found several that fit the bill right away, marked one to watch, to see how high the bidding went. And, at the last second, I was outbid on the vintage Lux Presto timer in chrome. I moved on to my next-favorite timer, an old Mirro aluminum one, watched it, bid on it, and was outbid. And outbid again on the aqua Minute Minder.

  Now, I have to say here that I am not an eBay novice. I found my stove on it, for shit’s sake. I know how it works, and I typically, with exceptions here and there, walk away with what I want for a fair-to-bargain price. But I was getting outfoxed every single time I bid on an old, perfect timer, and it was starting to make me mad. After losing three of them, it dawned on me that the winning bidder’s user name was becoming a little familiar.

  As I went down the list of timers I’d lost, I thought it was odd that KOOKAROO, who outbid me at the last second on the Presto, was the same one who outbid me on the Mirro. The intrigue became deeper as I realized the winner was the same for the aqua Minute Minder, too.

  What do you need with three old timers? I thought. How many stoves can one person have? How many pans of brownies is he making? Curious to see if KOOKAROO simply had the same taste that I did or if he was stalking me—because, after all, I was basically stalking him—I clicked on his profile, and that’s when I saw something weird.

  KOOKAROO hadn’t bought just the three timers that I wanted. He had bought all kinds of timers—vintage timers, plastic timers, egg-shaped timers, and darkroom timers—and then had them shipped to Germany, where he apparently lived. One hundred fifty of them, and that was only what was listed on his feedback, which most likely was a slim margin of how many auctions he had actually won. He had not purchased one single thing aside from kitchen timers, and the 150 he had collected were in the past two weeks alone. That’s more than ten times a day. That’s a lot of brownies.

  I wasn’t the only one who thought it was odd. Just to make sure it wasn’t me that the scenario wasn’t making sense to, I ran the facts and only the facts of the case by my best friend, Jamie, who is a scientist and approaches almost everything with the scientific method, except when it comes to picking a first husband. I told her everything about the outbidding, how many he bought, and that the guy had done this in the time span of two weeks. None of them were electric timers. All of them were manual, none of them programmable or digital.

  “So what do you think about that?” I questioned. “What do you think about someone who buys that many timers in fourteen days?”

  “I think he abandoned his goat herd and went to a training camp where he was told he’s going to get seventy-two virgins if he blows himself up in front of a falafel stand,” Jamie said simply. “Even though I bet his goats were prettier than the virgins. What do I think he’s doing? He’s building bombs.”

  I asked my friend Michell, who is a cop in Florida.

  I only got to the part where I said he was living in Germany when she simply said, “Bombs.”

  I asked my other friend Michelle, whose husband used to be a cop in Texas.

  “He’s eating jalapeños on top of cream cheese right now,” she informed me. “But I’m pretty sure he just said ‘bombs.’ ”

  So I called my sister to get her opinion, and she answered while she was on the elliptical at the gym, watching Tyra Banks on a wide screen.

  “So what do you think?” I asked her.

  “Why did you buy a stove and drag it fifty miles home if the timer didn’t work?” she replied between huffs. “You should have just gone to Sears.”

  So with the general consensus being that I had stumbled upon a terrorist’s nest, I wasn’t exactly sure what to do next. I looked up the address of Homeland Security, but I wasn’t all that sure what I should do after that. Did I proceed? Did I just ignore it? Was I overreacting, or was I being naïve? Was I being Mrs. Kravitz? There was no middle ground here.

  I decided the only way to know what was responsible was to make a list of pros and cons. So I did.

  Pro: You could be foiling an international plot to kill innocent people. And those people might even be Americans.

  Con: They’re kitchen timers. What if someone just got an impulse to buy every kitchen timer he could possibly get his hands on or decided he wanted to break a world record and was absolutely unskilled at anything else? Sometimes people need to feel special.

  Pro: That’s ridiculous. Kitchen timers would be one of the last things anybody would collect. If you can blink your eyes, you can break a world record, with some self-determination and Rockstar energy drinks. Eat some beans and fart a thousand times. That’s a record.

  Con: That’s precisely why kitchen timers are an excellent choice. They are unexpected. They are free-spirited and out of the ordinary. Just because they don’t fit into your box. Follow your bliss!

  Pro: How would you feel if you ignored this and next week a bomb went off in Germany? He’s probably living in Hani Hanjour’s apartment!

  Con: I would have no idea if it was KOOKAROO who used the kitchen timers to set off bombs. Everyone should be home-schooled!

  Pro: You could help capture a dangerous person who is probably on welfare and using my tax money to buy RC Cola and Little Debbies. This terrorist needs to get up off his ass and get a job and stop tinkering with little timer parts! Be a productive member of society and pay taxes!

  Con: You could be ruining a dork’s life. I wish I could breast-feed something.

  Pro: If collecting kitchen timers was a life, then being renditioned would be an upgrade. I hate you, Con.

  Con: I hated you first, Pro.

  Pro: You live in a trailer and you start drinking too early in the morning. Why don’t you go write a letter to one of your convict boyfriends?

  Con: How was your Tea Party rally? I see you have a nice little sign on the back of an old Papa John’s pizza box with the word “consitution” scrawled in black marker.

  Clearly, Pro and Con were no help. I abandoned that effort after Con tried to hug Pro, saying that they needed to come together and that diversity was good, and Pro responded by flipping the pizza box over to the other side and scribbling “We Came Unarmed—This Time.”

  I found myself wishing there was a smoking car parked at the curb or a guy looking suspicious when he asked for an extra side of tahini and a remote detonator. But all I had was a person who was buying a stupid amount of kitchen timers on an auction site, and the last thing I wanted to do was narc off some idiot who was building the world’s biggest kitchen-timer robot. I decided I would write an email to Homeland Security, just to see if once I got it down in words it sounded as crazy or as serious as I thought it did.

  Dear Homeland Security:

  This is going to sound crazy.

  I bid on a kitchen timer on eBay. A guy outbid me three times for different kitchen timers, and I clicked on his feedback to see how much he usually paid for items to judge how high of a bidder he was. On his feedback, I saw that the man buys nothing but kitchen timers. At least 150 of them since the middle of May when he joined eBay, and that’s just what he has feedback on. All kinds of kitchen timers and darkroom timers. He buys nothing but timers. If anyone went into Bed Bath & Beyond and bought 150 kitchen timers in one shot, someone would think that was odd. But on eBay, he buys one at a time from different people all over the world, mostly old ones. No digital ones. Probably nothing, but I thought I should mention it.

  Hopefully, he’s an art student working on a kitchen-timer installation. My friend Mary suggested he was boiling thousands of eggs and was perhaps the Easter Bunny. I know that’s probably not very funny. But I already feel like Lucy Ricar
do even writing this email, so that’s all.

  Thanks,

  Laurie Notaro

  And then I put the email in my “saved” folder, but after writing it, I still didn’t know what to do. One day I thought it was crazy, and the next I was convinced the person was a terrorist.

  My husband, however, was not so unsure of what to do with the email and told me point-black that he considered the whole thing “an episode of insanity.” I took his comment to heart, until I realized that we’ve lived in this town for years and he still doesn’t know how to get to the movies and is unable to change lanes without my “help.”

  “I don’t even remotely understand how someone who bid against you on eBay suddenly became a terrorist,” he argued. “For all you know, he’s building a Kitchen Timer Museum.”

  “A hundred and fifty timers, of all shapes and sizes, in fourteen days?” I replied. “That’s a pretty hasty Kitchen Timer Museum. I wouldn’t pay to see a bunch of kitchen timers slapped together. No one would, especially not Germans, who are masters at design!”

  “I think this is all crazy talk, and I, for one, am against sending that email!” my husband informed me.

  Which was fine. He was entitled his opinion; I’m cool with that. I just want to see him try to get to the 3:45 showing of the next Kate Winslet movie on his own. Especially if he has to change lanes.

  I found another kitchen timer, this one a Westclox bakelite timer that was cool but looked pretty beat up, figuring that I could not only get it cheap but that there was no way any curator of the Kitchen Timer Museum would consider it for a collection. There was no way: It was missing a hand. I positioned myself at my keyboard in the last minutes of the auction; I bid; and a second before the auction ended, someone outbid me.

  KOOKAROO knows no bounds, I thought, my fury building, my face flushing. KOOKAROO is selfish. I wonder if KOOKAROO ever thought for a moment that someone might not feel like eating burned chocolate chip cookies after forgetting what time she put them in the oven when she got a little carried away with some toenail cutting, and frankly, even though I understand it’s a matter of perspective, burned cookies are a bigger bummer than not having the right parts for your stupid bomb.