Other People's Houses(21)
She decided to roast a chicken for dinner, then stood over the chicken section for two minutes, trying to decide whether a vegetarian-fed chicken was better than an all-natural chicken. How could a chicken not be all natural? Artificial hips? The butcher counter guy appeared next to her.
“Which of these chickens had a better life, do you think?” she asked, one hundred percent confident he was going to think she was a fucking idiot.
Silently he took pity on her, and pointed at one marked “humanely raised.” She picked it up, and smiled gratefully at him.
“It’s more expensive,” he said.
“That’s OK,” she replied. “I’m paying more so I don’t feel guilty.”
He turned and walked away, presumably so she wouldn’t see him rolling his eyes. He probably couldn’t even be bothered to do that. Frances looked at the chicken which, humanely raised or not, was still dead.
She occasionally went vegetarian for a while, usually because she’d unintentionally watched part of some hideous documentary about factory farming, but she found it shamefully hard to stick to. Instead she subscribed to the “one bad day” theory of meat consumption: As natural a life as possible, filled with open skies, fresh grass, friends and respect, and then one really bad day you were killed, as humanely as possible. She realized and recognized that this was utterly crap on her part. She loved animals so much, and would cry at those documentaries and genuinely feel grief, but it would fade. Was she callous, lame, or just lacking in imagination?
Then she headed back to the vegetable section, looking for potatoes that had been grown in earth that was free from pollutants but which retained their beneficial bacteria, or whatever the hell it was she was supposed to care about these days. Fuck the microbiome, she thought, I can barely balance my checkbook, let alone my invisible flora.
She got home, piled the bags on the counter, checked the message light (nothing), the dishwasher (needed emptying), the trash bags (needed changing), let the dogs out (needed to pee), and then started unloading. As usual, she had bought several of something she already had several of, and forgotten to buy several things she had none of. You would think after four-plus decades on the planet she’d be able to remember the difference between a kitchen roll and a toilet roll, but she invariably had none of one and enough of the other for a nuclear winter. She also tended to either have four tons of pasta or half a packet of elbows, three tins of anchovies or artichoke hearts or capers—none of which she used very much—and no tuna at all, which she used once or twice a week. She would run out of coffee filters one painful morning then keep buying them every time she went to the store, until eventually she had four large boxes and finally understood that she Had Enough. Then she’d assume she had enough of them forever, would stop buying them completely, and would eventually run out again at the worst possible moment. Why was this so hard?
Walking out of the kitchen she looked at her house as if seeing it in a catalog, and decided if it were a catalog it would be called House Hopeless. There were drifts of clutter in every corner, like sticks and leaves in the edges and eddies of a stream. Half-finished craft activities. Library books that had become so overdue it would have been cheaper to buy them in the first place. Invitations to parties that had taken place three years prior. Then, of course, there were the epic Pinterest fails of an actual life: a mantelpiece where she’d attempted a “curation” of photos and keepsakes, which for three days had been photo ready but then had been overtaken by school forms and Fisher-Price Little People and the registration sticker for Michael’s car, which didn’t need to go on for another month and would be every single place she looked until she actually needed it, at which point it would have fallen into a crevice in the earth’s crust and be lost forever. And everywhere, everywhere, single socks and dog hair.
Oh well.
Ten.
Sara had gone to work, and Iris had the house to herself. There was only so much tidying she could do before wanting to slam her hand in a drawer with boredom, so she called her mother. Sometimes her mother was helpful, sometimes not, but she was always there at least. Her diabetes kept her largely housebound, now that her feet were so messed up. Iris’s dad had died a few years earlier, and her mother’s life had changed in ways she hadn’t fully processed herself.
“Hey, baby.” Her voice was a little tired, but basically happy to hear from her daughter. “How’s my favorite grandson?”
“Your only grandson.”
“True, but irrelevant. Although, if you would only give me another maybe it would take the pressure off him. Think of your child, Iris.” She was joking, but only mildly.
“I’d love another child, you know that, Mom. It just isn’t happening right now.”
“What does Sara say?”
Iris clicked on the kettle and went to get herself a mug and a tea bag. “She doesn’t. We haven’t talked about it.”
“Why not?” Her mother got a sharper note in her voice. “Are you fighting?” Her mother hadn’t really had a problem with Iris being gay, and was on some level relieved her daughter wasn’t going to have to deal with the perfidy of men (as if women were immune from perfidy). She was definitely thrilled to be a grandmother, but sometimes she had to defend her daughter’s choices to the other women at her Catholic church. It helped a lot that Sara and Iris had been married as long as they legally could be, and that their marriage was happy. Iris sometimes felt gay married couples were being held to an unreasonably high standard, as if one failure would doom the entire category. Marriage had so little to do with the bedroom, and so much to do with every other room in the house. Conversations around the kitchen table, discussions about toothpaste and toilet paper, decisions about pets and children and car insurance. How you chose to physically please each other was such a small part of it, but it got all the press.