Revenge of the Paste Eaters

by Cheryl Peck

  It refused to tell me the time.

  In fact it sat there on my headboard slightly above and behind my head with just one red eye beaming the word “POWER” over my inert body.

  I stabbed its single red eye repeatedly with my thumbs. No effect.

  “Wake me up at seven tomorrow morning,” I snarled at the cat.

  There is always the possibility of operator error and I know this. Even with operator error, most power buttons I’ve pushed in my lifetime have either removed or restored the power—this one does nothing. The instructions are written in English words applied to Japanese syntax, but I believe the intended meaning is that the button will provide or remove power. I believe this machine does not work properly. I believe this machine is power-crazed. Possessed. I need to just yank the plug, deprive it of all power at the source, put it back in its box, and return it to the nice young clerk who wanted me to have a lifetime supply of timeless, hysterical alarm clocks.

  I’m looking forward to this conversation.

  I’ve been practicing.

  professionalism

  Yes

  I understand that

  but what am I to do

  with my anger?

  I am running out

  of Mason jars

  my supply of lovers

  has grown thin

  my friends all stare at me

  with fixed and wary smiles

  and yesterday my dog

  ran off.

  my valentine: the beginning

  for years valentine’s day has smelled faintly of crayons and white paste for me. A kid’s holiday. It’s been a long time since I’ve paid much attention to it. My romantic life, while rich and colorful, has also been largely imaginary. I have specialized in lusts-from-afar, those tremendously tumultuous, passionate, exhilarating, risk-free relationships a true dreamer like myself can have with people who have no idea they’re in a relationship at all. Or perhaps they are entirely aware of their relationship—it just happens not to be with me.

  Probably the last time I paid much attention to Valentine’s Day I was sitting at my mother’s kitchen table, painstakingly lettering out a cheap, gaudy card for every student in my class, taking exceptional care not to accidentally send any mushy or goopy one to a boy. (I had, apparently, even then an inkling of what was to come.) Boys were horrible things and I probably would not have wasted my good valentines on any of them, had it not been for a school rule that if you sent one valentine to anyone, you had to have a valentine for every member of your class.

  I may have been somewhat oblivious to the spirit of the holiday. Each year we would beg a good-sized shoebox from our parents and lug it to school, where we would spend several art classes covering it with colored construction paper, cut-up paper lace doilies, and sprigs of tin foil and chewing gum (someone always ate the paste) for the Most Beautiful Box competition. I was a competitive child. I was an extremely competitive child. I needed to have the most beautiful box, and I needed to collect the most valentines inside my box. I also needed to eat the most pink-frosted cookies, have the most punch, and generally suck up attention like an alligator on a log soaks up sun. Attention—positive if possible, but in a pinch negative would do—was the fuel that made my motor run, and ruthless, endless competition was the way to achieve it. (It was about this time in my life that my mother encouraged me to read The Bad Seed.)

  So it did not occur to me to give valentines to my friends because I liked them, any more than it would occur to me that people would give me valentines because they liked me. I expected valentines because I had the prettiest valentine box. I expected valentines because I needed to have more valentines than anyone else.

  Surprisingly enough, I was not exceptionally popular in grade school. If you were to hunt up some of my fellow classmates, you might be surprised to discover I have not always been known for my sense of humor. You might find the little boy in fourth grade, for instance, who remembers mostly being kicked rather soundly in the shins.

  I flirted with her the first time I met her because I never really thought it would come to much. I was just in that kind of mood that day.

  I was flirting with her the second time I saw her when I told her that the thing I missed most about male/female relationships was the fact that women never flirt with each other. She actually let me get away with that.

  And all of those interim times when we saw each other and exchanged our life histories and delved into each other’s minds I kept telling myself nothing would come of it. Someone else would catch her interest. Sometimes when I felt nervous I would take out my old “if you really knew me you wouldn’t like me” security blanket and suck my mental thumb.

  Last year at Valentine’s Day we were still feeling our way along that “I think I like her—very much—but it could all blow away next week . . .” dust-in-the-wind how-long-can-I-hide-all-my-faults stage of the relationship. She gave me a book and a beautiful card. I may not have given her anything.

  Last week I was muttering under my breath about how ill-suited I am for a long-term, long-distance relationship, and there is every chance that I will eventually find myself muttering about that again.

  But today I am thinking, “What shall I do for Valentine’s Day?” I need glue. Red paper. Some pretty lace. Perhaps I can use my Dremel or some other rotary tool. A flower or two might be nice.

  To my Valentine: I love you.

  Wanna help me decorate my box?

  living well

  babycakes is not a happy cat. He is pacing the house, voicing his discontent (for there is no reason to have discontent, he believes quite firmly, if it cannot be voiced) in each room, where he can monitor the acoustics for precisely the pitch of heartrending melancholy that will render unto Babycakes that which is Babycakes’.

  There are packages full of Mommy’s things by the door.

  This can never be good.

  In the first place, nowhere in any of these packages (and Mommy is known for her many packages) is his fine gold self. Not that Babycakes has any desire to go away with Mommy—he has had quite enough of those adventures, thank you very much. Each time Mommy has put him in a package and taken him away with her, he has wound up on a big, shiny, slippery serving tray on the pointed end of Jennifer Needles. Babycakes plans never to leave home again.

  No, the crux of this problem is to convince Mommy she need never go away either. She could stay at home all of the time and be with Babycakes. She would have more time to stir his food whenever it grows stale. She would be in attendance to snatch away bad box smells and refresh them with new litter. They could sit together in the evenings and watch the flickerbox, and then in the morning they could sit together and watch the flickerbox again. Grooming a soiled ear, he rethinks this solution, examining it for unmet needs, but he can find none. The solution is perfect. Now for a plan.

  He is a cat who thinks best on his feet. Pacing from room to room, he meows plaintively, cocking an ear for Mommy’s obedient reply.

  “Now what?”

  Satisfied he has her attention, he paces to a farther room and calls again. This is a pleasant game and it passes the time nicely, but Mommy ruins it by appearing in exactly the same room he is in, seizing his fine gold self in her arms, pinching his fine white whiskers (and the one black one) in her hand as she gazes intently into his eyes and demands, “What do you want?”

  Babycakes is so unnerved by this attack that he is stricken with the dreaded bonemelt. All of his supporting muscles collapse and all parts of his body not specifically held captive by Mommy dribble down toward the floor.

  “Fine,” Mommy snaps. “You are a bad bad bad bad bad cat,” and sets him on the floor. This is the highest praise she ever gives him, and it means, “I’m sorry, you’re right, I’m wrong, and I will never touch you without your permission again.” She is sweet, but she can be a little slow.

  Babycakes walks into the next room, looks around, considers his options, and cries. He is in Mommy�
��s litter room now where the acoustics are particularly effective and carry the tone of his personal dissatisfaction all through the house. He reaches down and carefully grooms a few displaced hairs. She will come soon—if not to this cry, then the next. He flexes his toenails, eyeing them critically. If she ignores him again, he will choose something she had appeared to be fond of lately and he will dig it.

  None of this will prevent her from leaving, of course: late in the evening, when she is miles away from him and trying to enjoy the company of whatever unimaginable force that has taken her away, she will frown slightly to herself and murmur, “I wonder if he’s sick . . .”

  One works with the tools one has.

  everything i know about cars

  everything i know about cars I learned from my dad. In my late teens and early twenties my dad went from being that surly stranger out in the garage to being one of the most important people in my life. He had to be: he was the only mechanic I knew who would work for free.

  I got my first car when I was eighteen. I didn’t have to go far to get it—it was parked out in the driveway. It was a 1960 Ford Galaxie station wagon, powder blue. It had been my mother’s car but it had frozen in second and third gears simultaneously—something she insisted happened and my father maintained was physically impossible—and for the sake of their marriage they gave the car to me and bought her another one. At eighteen the last vehicle I wanted to be seen driving around town was a seven-year-old powder blue station wagon, but it was still worlds better than not being seen driving around town at all. The Ford was an instant lesson in the virtues and pitfalls of car ownership. It cost me, on average, $14 a week in repairs. Gasoline was 35 cents a gallon, but brake pads and fuel lines were nowhere near as forgiving on my budget. Like most older cars it had quirks. The flooring in the rear passenger side seat had rusted out so when I took friends with me I had to remember to warn them before they put their feet completely through my floor mat. It was an unpleasant drop that had a tendency to make them surly. The station wagon could be a little tricky about starting, and as time went by, the heater became less and less dependable.

  My father and I did not communicate particularly well. Most of our conversations started with, “Hey Dad—you know that noise my car’s started making . . .” This would be followed by a complex discussion of part names and practical functions and a lot of hand gestures where things sat over other things and even more things went through or over or around them, and eventually we would settle down to a discussion of price. The last conversation we had of this nature about the station wagon had to do with cams and rods and the joy of having a constant supply of oil in your crankcase. The wagon, for some reason, had run out of oil and now all of the cams had slid around in the wrong place and were unusually difficult to get back where they belonged. In fact, in the end, it never happened.

  My father and I discussed oil and its amazing cooling properties any number of times over the next few years, but it took me a while to get the point.

  It did not occur to me that changing the oil was a maintenance task on a vehicle. I’d never been responsible for a motor before; perhaps I just assumed they came with whatever oil they needed. My father changed the oil on the family car quite regularly—usually just minutes before we left on a trip—but my mother seemed to think this was excessive and badly timed and I assumed it was just part of their complex conversations about whether or not our father was going with us whenever we left the yard.

  Are you going with us or not? Because I really don’t care whether you go or you stay home, I just need to know if you’re going . . .

  (The sound of another oil can popping open.)

  Once it became clear that the station wagon was going to spend the rest of eternity up on blocks in the back yard because my father couldn’t fix it, I was forced to buy a new car. I paid $175 for a 1957 Chevy. Yes: I once drove a ’57 Chevy. The cool ’57 Chevy was, I believe, an Impala and mine was a Bel Air, but the models were almost identical. Mine was blue and white. It was twelve years old, but it was cool. It had a metal dashboard, and it came with a plastic coin holder that stayed on the dashboard by virtue of a magnet. It had no radio. The windshield wipers were not entirely reliable and the windshield had a tendency to steam up, but if I cranked the front vents open they would blow air on the windshield and hold back the steam. I loved my ’57 Chevy.

  Parts for the Chevy were a little hard to come by and it needed its fair share of them, but I had become accustomed by now to spending Sunday afternoons out in the garage with my dad, bored out of my mind and half-frozen, but diligently keeping him company while he fixed whatever was wrong.

  From time to time I would mention to my dad the fact that the car shook. Vibrated. The body rattled so badly that I could no longer keep any change in the plastic magnetic change holder because it would bounce out. He would listen to me and then start drawing interlocking circles and pictures of parts and pieces fitting together again.

  “Do you think it’s serious?” I would check.

  He would shrug. “I donno,” he’d say.

  My mother called square dances for years. It was a good job for her. It paid her a small income, it put her center stage among her friends where she enjoyed being, it catered to her love of music and dance. My father loves music, in his own way. Almost all of the musical artists he likes look something like Lorrie Morgan or Shania Twain. He is tone-deaf, rhythm is a foreign language for him, and he is happiest in the back of the room, possibly even with a pail over his head. Furthermore, there is not all that much for the husband of the caller to do at a square dance. He can either come up and help her demonstrate dances (see attention, rhythm, pail over head) or he can sit on the sidelines and watch everyone else dance.

  My mother would warn him days in advance that a dance was coming up, and as the actual time to get cleaned up, put on a square dance outfit, and get into the car drew near, visions of our father would become vaguer and vaguer in our memories. Sometimes he would show up at the very last minute. Sometimes she would send us out to the back barns to fetch him. Sometimes he just . . . wasn’t . . . anywhere. Sometimes they had huge fights over this, and sometimes she just spun gravel down the driveway and drove off without him.

  We all learned to keep a low profile. Our house could be remarkably quiet around square dance time, given the fact that two adults and five children lived there.

  One such storm had blown over and we children had all relaxed, assuming the adults had worked it out at least for that night, when my father appeared not far from me and murmured something about needing a ride. Could I take him out to where Mom was with her square dance club?

  I had no idea where that was, but fortunately he did, and I loaded him up and drove him there. He sat scrunched down in the seat (it took him a full ten years to convince himself that something he had sired was actually capable of driving a vehicle) and said hardly a word to me for twelve miles. I parked in the parking lot, waiting for him to get out.

  He said, “How long has it been doing this?”

  I said, “Doing what?”

  He said, “It shakes.”

  I said, “Oh, I told you about that—I used to keep quarters in the change tray on the dashboard. Now I can’t keep the change tray on the dashboard and the quarters hop all over the car.”

  He pursed his lips. He nodded. He said, “You might think about selling it.”

  “You think it’s serious, then,” I surmised.

  And—being my dad—he said, “I donno.”

  A few days after that my mother said to me, “Your father says you’re selling your car . . .”

  So I put my beloved ’57 Chevy up for sale. I sold it for fifty dollars to a kid just out of high school. He was thrilled to get it. A week later the engine caught fire in the parking lot where he worked and the resulting damage totaled the car.

  In 1969 or so I bought a 1964 Ford Fairlane. Fairlanes were economy cars for Ford, but they varied significantly in size an
d style from one year to the next. Some Fairlanes were land sharks: the ’64 was about a four-person car, small, all-metal. When I bought it the back springs had gone bad and whoever owned it had welded his own makeshift suspension on the back, which consisted of two metal posts that semi-supported the springs. Whenever I drove the car over a slight rise, like backing out of a driveway, for instance, the back posts dragged.

  I liked the Fairlane, but it taught me almost everything I know about car disorders. The fuel pump went bad. On the way through the back roads to visit a friend (I never seemed to go anywhere during normal daylight hours), for a while I was driving 60 mph and then I was driving 40 with the gas pedal floored, and by the time I got to her house I was driving 10.

  The second or third time I ever drove it I decided to wind it out and see exactly what it would do. I topped out at 85 miles an hour. And then I flipped on my blinkers and decided to take the exit, stepped on the brakes, and . . . I had no brakes. Apparently I should not have been so nonchalant about the slight mushyness the brakes had had the last time I stepped on them. I drove that car down the exit, out onto the next road, almost a mile down that road, into a roadside park, and within six feet of coming back out on the road again before it finally coasted to a stop. So I learned to respect brake lines.

  I also learned about chokes because the automatic choke on this car wasn’t automatic. It stalled on hills (it was a standard transmission) it stalled at lights, it stalled almost anytime I changed driving speeds. For a while I had my roommates all trained to jump out of the car and push it off to the side of the road whenever I gave the word. For an assignment in a speech class (describe how something works to group) I borrowed an old carburetor from my dad and demonstrated the butterfly valve and what it did, explaining to my class essentially what I did in every intersection in Battle Creek for months.