Etiquette for the End of the World

chapter Four





As she knelt in her living room stacking the newspapers and magazines from the entire months of August and September, as well as the first half of October, into the recycling pile, Tess realized how long it had been since she had had anyone over. She usually tried to follow her mother’s rule about inviting someone for coffee or supper at least once a week, to ensure the house got straightened. “House guests, ousts mess!” her mother would always sing, as if it were the last line of a tongue-twisting TV jingle. But during the summer Tess had been too depressed for guests, and for the last month she had been focused on Etiquette for the End of the World. As a result the untidiness in her apartment had grown to epic proportions.

In fact, if Tess’s monthly women’s poker night, scheduled for tonight, October 13, had not been on the calendar for weeks in advance, Tess might have canceled it. In the end it was her fondness for the game that won out. She loved that delicious moment right before you looked at your cards, that feeling that a miracle could happen—two aces, three kings, wild cards. She loved bluffing in five card stud, and the sensation of raking in the chips with both hands over the green-felt tablecloth, as much as she loved the banter and the camaraderie of the women she’d been playing with for the last ten years. They’d seen one another through boyfriends, husbands, affairs, babies, moves, promotions, deaths—and firings.

If only it were not her turn to host. She definitely did not feel like cleaning up. It meant vacuuming and dusting and scrubbing the bathroom. It also meant she had to clear off the dining room table.

The box from her brother was still sitting there, on top of the mound of unread junk mail. It had come three weeks ago and she had not been able to get herself to open it. A big part of her did not want to find out what was inside, and yet she did not seem to possess the fortitude to throw it away or send it back to Stuart. It was like a stink bomb sitting there in the middle of the room, irritating her every time she passed it. Now she decided she may as well see what was in it, if only just to get it off the table.

She got the packing tape off, and opened the top. Inside was something wrapped in tissue paper. It was something soft. She pulled back the paper.

It was the rubber chicken.

She took it out of the box and held the limp, yellowish gray thing up in the air, by its feet.

Suddenly she was back in the kitchen at her old house in Baltimore, where the rubber chicken had hung from a big nail on one side of the antique kitchen fireplace, next to the ancient copper pots and spoons, for as long as any of them could remember. The fireplace was never used; it was just for show. As kids, neither Tess nor Stuart had given the chicken any real thought until one night when Tess was eleven and Stuart was thirteen, and she looked at this skinny, dull yellow object during dinner (they were having chicken à la king—maybe that was the impetus) and it was as if she was really seeing it for the first time.

“Mom, what is that chicken doing there, anyway?”

“Doing there?” her mom said, dishing a pastry shell onto Tess’s plate with a serving spoon. “Honey, it's not doing anything. Why would it be doing anything?”

“No, really, what is it doing there, I mean, where did it come from?” Tess wanted to know.

They all stared at it—at its defeated, deflated kind of dangling—and after a little while her father got a faraway look on his face.

“Must be an old prop from Pagliacci,” he said. “From the scene where the baritone comes into the kitchen and throws the chicken down on the table for the soprano.” His parents had run an opera company in the 1950s, and a lot of the old theater stuff had ended up in the attic. So for a second Tess and Stuart accepted this explanation. Then they caught each other’s eyes and giggled.

“But what is it doing there? Who put it there? Why?” Tess insisted. It really did look as though someone had posed it to look like a real chicken hanging up ready to go into the giant Flintstones-y copper pot to get cooked.

Her father turned his head and peered over at it again, as if he were studying a very complicated set of pre-root-canal X rays. When he finally turned back to them, he looked tired and irritated. “To tell you the truth, I haven’t the foggiest idea,” he said. “What difference does it make? For heaven’s sake, Tess, just eat your dinner. Why do you always have to pick everything apart?”

“What, I’m not allowed to ask about a stupid rubber chicken?” Tess felt her cheeks get hot and the pressure behind her eyes building. It seemed like no matter what she ever did or said, her father would jump all over it. It was so unfair. He was never that way with Stuart.

“The chicken is there, all right? It’s not hurting you, is it? Just leave it alone!” her father said, in his this-is-final voice.

“Oh, no,” her mother suddenly exclaimed loudly, looking down at the table with a worried frown.

“What?” they all asked.

Brow still furrowed, she picked up a fork and poked it around gingerly in the food on her plate. “I knew I forgot something in this recipe,” she said.

They stared at her. She looked up at the rubber chicken, her eyes wide with exaggerated alarm, and then back down to her food again. “Oops.”

This sent Tess and her brother into peels of laughter. After a moment their father got it and was chortling along too.

“Mo—om,” Tess said, rolling her eyes, pretending to be annoyed, “How could you leave the chicken out of the chicken à la king?!”

Stuart held his stomach. “I don’t know, mine tastes a little rubbery!” Soon first Tess and Stuart, and then their parents, were laughing so hard they could not speak.

From then on the chicken had been a running gag between Stuart and Tess. Stuart would wrap it up and give it to Tess for her birthday, and Tess would wrap it up and give it to him on his. When Stuart took up moviemaking with their father’s camera, he made an entire film featuring the chicken. (In this teenage masterpiece, one of Stuart’s friends, posing as a poultry-loving prehistoric man, pretends to catch and devour the chicken, then kidnaps an unwilling female—played by Tess—to drag her off to his lair.) Later, when Stuart and Tess were both home from college, they got stoned together in the old tree house in the backyard and came up with the brilliant idea to hide the chicken in their parents’ bed, under the sheets. Their mother, getting into bed after a long day and feeling it against her leg (thinking it a dead rat, mouse—or even worse, a sleeping bat) screamed bloody murder. Their parents were not amused at the prank. But Tess and Stuart were. They had laughed together for hours afterward, in secret.

Tess stood in the middle of her living room, staring at the faded, scarred chicken. Her throat was constricted and it was so hard to breathe it felt as though her lungs had collapsed. How could Stuart think this would help? This was a slap in the face, not any kind of a peace offering. All it did was remind her of the brother she had lost, the rift with her father, the family she could never get back.

Carmichael suddenly jumped up on the table and into the empty box, which tumbled noisily onto the floor with him inside. “Goddamnit!!” Tess yelled. He shot out of the box and slunk away in surprise and hurt. Wonderful, thought Tess, now I’m a bad mother on top of everything else. She followed the cat into the bedroom, scooped him up in her arms, and carried him back to the living room, soothing him by kissing the top of his head.

Later she went into her kitchen, which—thanks to her years of scouring antique stores—had a distinct 1950s/’60s motif. She took the framed Betty Crocker spice chart down off the wall. Then she put a rubber band around the neck of the chicken and affixed it to the empty nail. It actually did not look half bad, hanging there between the rack of pots and pans and her vintage Humpty Dumpty cookie jar.

The phone rang. She looked at the caller ID. It was Katie Curlett, one of the players, probably calling to confirm the game start time. Tess sighed as she reached for the receiver. She no longer felt like playing cards. She did not feel like having people over. Why in hell had she promised to host?



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