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Everything But The Kitchen Sink by Debbie Zubrick Romani
When Mary Little walks into her kitchen on Tuesday morning, the sink is under the window.
At first she can’t even find it. She looks at the space where the sink is supposed to be, at the end of the island, and the sink is gone. Her son, Ben, sits there, spooning cereal into his mouth with one hand while his other rocks an empty mug. His long, sweaty legs stretch out past the edge of the cabinets. At the very end of the island his bowl sits on smooth counter-top, right where the sink has always been, and the mug he is rocking is hers, her favorite Seurat mug. She had left it next to the sink last night.
She always leaves it next to the sink.
Always.
Mary stands there, perfectly still, trying to puzzle things out. The only possibility is that Chris hired a contractor to move the sink during the night. What an odd and disconcerting joke. The situation reminds Mary of a nightmare reality show, where they replace everything in a woman’s closet with identical skirts and jeans and shirts, all exactly one size smaller, so that when she wakes up in the morning, absolutely nothing fits. And then they shove a camera into her face as she starts crying.
Is there a camera in here?
Mary half-turns to look behind her, sees nothing unusual, and starts wondering how Chris and Ben could possibly have pulled it off between them. A contractor would have made an enormous racket, working all night. Granted, Mary has always slept soundly, even on nights when Chris crept into bed fresh from San Diego or Singapore or Austin. But she must have been absolutely exhausted not to hear a team of men removing the cast iron sink and installing a solid piece of slate-gray granite.
Looking around her, still searching for cameras or a hidden group of friends or strangers waiting to surprise her, her eyes shift to the California live oak tree outside, and from there down to the counter in front of the window.
Her sink is there, under the window, in the middle of what had been an unbroken countertop.
“Dad’s gonna be in trouble,” says Ben, still fidgeting with her favorite Seurat mug. Mary thinks this is quite the understatement, given that her husband seems to have remodeled the kitchen without even bothering to ask.
“So this was his idea?”
“Well, I’m not stupid enough to move your mug.” Instantly there was an odd feeling in her stomach, and a pressure at the base of her neck. Ben was doing an unbelievably good job of playing the straight man.
With a strong sense that she is asking the wrong question, Mary says, “He moved my mug?”
“Well, I didn’t,” Ben says. “It was right here when I came in from practice, and I know you always leave it over there.” He glanced over at the window and the sink underneath it.
Mary never puts her mug anywhere other than next to the sink. The sink had been in the island at 10:15 the night before, and her mug had been next to the sink when she’d turned off the light. But now, the sink is under the window, and her mug is on the island.
Mary is confused, so she tries to clarify things. She is about to ask him about the sink, but can’t quite bring herself to do it. “So, you think your father moved my mug,” she emphasizes the word slightly, “because I usually leave it?”
Ben looks puzzled, but finishes the sentence anyway, “…right by the sink, under the window.”
“Are you joking?”
“Are you joking?”
“No.”
Ben stares at his mother. Mary stares back.
She really needs her tea.
Trying her best to sound normal, she says, “Handsome, will you do your old mom a favor and fill the teakettle?”
“Sure thing,” he says, and flashes her a smile. God, he can lift her heart just by looking at her, her six-foot-four baby. But she can’t ignore the strange queasiness as she turns her back on the kitchen and collapses into the couch. She feels like she’s caught on a swing, rushing down after hitting its apex, and Mary wonders how it would feel if the ropes suddenly broke and she went careening off into the unknown.
With her back to the displaced sink, she tries to recapture some sense of normalcy. Behind her, she hears Ben grab the kettle from the stove, fill it with water, and clunk it back down again. The gas clicks three times before it catches. In a moment, her husband’s footsteps are on the stairs, and then she hears, “Morning, son. Morning, Mary.” Chris gives her a kiss on the top of her head, his hand warm on her shoulder. He pauses, inhales deeply. “You smell just like you,” he says contentedly.
Pretending that her kitchen will look like it did yesterday, Mary pushes herself up out of the couch and follows Chris. She claims the mug and adds some loose-leaf Darjeeling to the tea strainer as the kettle comes to a boil. Though only the sink has moved, that one change has shifted her sense of reality, and everything seems out of place. Chris and Ben talk about how morning hoops practice has gone, and Mary pours boiling water over the tea leaves, setting a timer for a five-minute steep. They seem to be avoiding the topic of college, though Mary knows the two of them are bursting, Chris with pride and Ben with happiness; just yesterday Ben learned he’d been accepted at Berkeley. She had been delighted for him, of course, but it hadn’t made for an easy night’s sleep. Two years ago, when Janie, their oldest, had left for Iowa, Mary had learned exactly how hard it was to send a child out into the world. When Ben leaves in the fall, she will have an enormous hole in her life. What will she do with her time?
And then her mind is back in the kitchen, listening to the talk of basketball, and she has to walk over toward the sink when it is time to take the wet leaves out of her fragrant tea. She looks and looks at Chris and Ben, and at the kitchen itself, trying to understand what in the world has happened. They’re doing a remarkable job of pretending everything is normal.
Her stomach rolls again. She wraps her cold fingers around the mug in her hands, holding it like an anchor.
Perhaps I should tell you a bit about Mary’s Seurat mug. She bought it after her Junior year at Davis during a summer at an internship with a Chicago advertising agency. At the time, advertising was what artistically inclined students did if they wanted a paying job.
She really didn’t remember much about the actual internship. It had become a blur of corridors and crowded conference rooms and pianos playing at odd times while someone tried out a jingle.
She did remember her lunches outside the Art Institute, though. Mary’s office was two short blocks from the museum, and there was a cheap sandwich place tucked into one of the buildings on the way. She’d buy a pastrami sandwich and carry it to the little garden just to the right of the museum entrance. Sitting on a shaded bench in the humid Chicago summer, Mary would rustle the gravel under her feet and look at the clipped boxwood hedges and the small graceful trees overhead and be perfectly happy watching people drift in and out of the tiny space.
Her ad agency believed that good art inspired good advertising and gave all the interns a student membership at the Art Institute. She visited often. The painting she loved most was the Seurat in the Impressionist wing. The doorway to the room was right next to “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte.” Visitors approached the painting from the side. Mary would enter, turn, and back slowly into the room in order to keep staring at the pastel colors, the dream-like but highly ordered composition.
At first she found the scale of the painting overwhelming. Over the weeks of the summer, she must have spent hours simply standing as close to the canvas as possible, looking at those tiny dots, and then stepping back and back into the gallery, watching how those tiny flecks of color coalesced to form a snapshot of life on a long-ago Paris weekend. She admired the ladies in their elegant dresses, and the man lounging in his white singlet. She was most drawn to one of the little girls in the painting. The girl was supposed to be running, because her pony-tail was sticking straight out behind her. To Mary it seemed more like the girl was balanced awkwardly on one foot, the free leg bent behind her, trying to hold still while the great painter did his patient work.
Some experts were critical of the little girl in her stiff pose, but Mary just loved her. Between Seurat’s strange pointillism and the child’s awkwardness, Mary felt that Seurat was making a statement about art itself. He was proud to paint a place formal and flat, yet somehow entirely recognizable. It echoed reality just closely enough to shout out Seurat’s assertion that art was better than reality. Art was even more real than reality itself.
At the end of the summer, she carried a Seurat mug back to the UC Davis campus. That fall, she fell in love with a California boy she had met the previous spring, and the two of them married and lived only a few hours’ drive from their alma mater. Standing in the kitchen she shared with that boy and their children, Mary rubbed her finger against the chip on the bottom of her mug and realized that her Chicago summer had been a long time ago.
Ben heads upstairs for his shower. He’ll dress and be out the door for school in less than ten minutes. Chris is actually in the office today. Last week he wrapped up a six-week trial in Austin for one client, and next week Mary will lose her husband again when the MyGen trial takes over his life. She doesn’t like it when he travels.
She straightens Chris’s collar, and he seems to read her mind, saying, “I know you hate it when I’m gone, but at least I timed it well for your big night. I mean, it’s too bad that we’ll miss Ben’s last high school game, but I’m really looking forward to being there for you.” Her hand is still resting on his shoulder, and he raises his own hand, completely covering her smaller one and giving it an affectionate squeeze.
Mary has no idea what he’s talking about. Her face must have shown something, but Chris doesn’t quite understand, and he says, “What, you didn’t think I’d forget, did you?” Chris leans forward, touches his forehead to hers, and kisses her gently. “I’m proud of you,” he says, and he stops for a moment, caressing her hand. He seems to remember the time, for the next thing he says is simply, “I’ve got to scoot. See you tonight, okay?”
Breaking away, Chris grabs Ben’s empty bowl and walks to the sink. Rinsing the bowl, he looks outside and says, “I think I love this view almost as much as you do. I’m so glad you convinced me we should put the sink under the window.”
Mary’s world gives another little heave. She leans against the island, runs her finger against the chip at the bottom of her mug. The mug is real, something which is the same as it was yesterday. She stares at the painting on the mug, sips her sweet, milky tea and wonders what could possibly be going on.
At this point, I have a difficult job to do. I need to convince you, my reader, that the sink really moved, and that poor Mary is not crazy.
She isn’t.
If you looked at her life, lived straight forward in time, you would understand that until that morning, her sink had really been in a different place. If I can convince you that Mary doesn’t have sudden onset Alzheimer’s I’ve done part of my job.
I know people cope with the unexpected every day. Imagine how terribly fast life changes when you fail your graduate school qualifying exams, or when you get fired, or when the mammogram comes back with the shadowy image of cancer. These sorts of nasty changes, though, fit perfectly well with our notions of the possible. When people deal with normal tragedies, they’re not trying to figure out if they’re crazy.
Now, granted, a displaced sink is hardly a tragedy. But still, I wonder what makes Mary push herself away from the island and move on with her day. In fact, she stands there in a sort of trance until she needs to pee.
Mary makes it to the bathroom, where all the plumbing is still working. She manages to smile at herself in the mirror as she realizes she’s made a tiny mental joke. She lets her feet carry her upstairs, and there she feels her daily aggravation as she realizes neither Ben nor Chris have even attempted to make the beds. She starts in Ben’s room, straightens sheets, picks up the sweaty clothes he’d worn for his lonely early morning basketball practice, dumps his clothes in the hamper, washes away a bit of toothpaste from his sink. The everyday reality is incredibly comforting, and Mary is able to ignore the fact that during the night, her sink somehow moved ten feet. In her own room, there’s a bouquet in a vase by her side of the bed. Chris, the ultimate romantic, still brings her flowers every week. Mary smiles as she makes their bed and then, when she opens her closet to pull on some jeans, her world takes another small turn.
A new dress hangs in the closet, a dress Mary didn’t buy. It is burgundy, a color Chris has always loved on her. The dress hangs in a plastic bag, tags from the pretty shop in Palo Alto on the sleeve. She has absolutely no idea why it is in her closet, nor how she got so much paint on her white tennis shoes.
After staring at the dress, she finally pulls on some clothes, realizing she will have to face the kitchen at some point. She walks resolutely past Janie’s room, a room that’s immaculate now that Janie’s away in college, and takes herself down the stairs. One step at a time.
Mary stands in the archway between the front hall and the great room with the kitchen and family room. The sink is still under the window; she can see it from where she stands. Mary asks herself if she could be crazy, if she could possibly have forgotten that the sink was always there. She doesn’t feel crazy or delusional, but the sink is under the window, and she remembers choosing to put the sink in the island.
Early on, Chris and Mary spent five years of watching every dime. Mary worked crummy jobs to put Chris through law school and keep food on the table until Chris finally started to earn a good salary. They had stretched themselves to afford this home in the hills above Palo Alto, a house with a view and an awful, outdated kitchen. She supposed they might have talked about placing the sink under the window, but she remembers wanting the sink in the island. She wanted to be right in front of the kids when they ate their snacks after school, to be facing them when they were doing homework. She didn’t want to stand with her back to her family, not after years when supporting her husband had meant always being away from home. She craved the opportunity to be there in their midst, surrounded by people she loved, people who loved her.
So as Mary stands in the doorway, looking at a different kitchen, she takes a deep breath through her nose, blows it out through pursed lips, and steps into the room. She picks up the empty mug from the island and walks across the kitchen to the sink. She’s looking down, examining the sink itself, surprised and unsurprised to find it is the same model she picked out years ago, so deep and large she remembers the kids as toddlers, sitting together in the basin one morning for an impromptu bath.
Mary realizes she has turned on the water to rinse the milk from Ben’s cereal bowl, and finds she is jiggling the aerator to keep the water from spraying onto her shirt, just as she would have done yesterday, back when the sink was in the island. She puts Ben’s bowl into the dishwasher and squirts soap into her mug. As she works the sponge around the rim, the oak tree outside the window slowly comes into focus. The trunk is smooth and the same slate color as pencil rubbed sideways over a sheet of binder paper. Gray-green lichen in patches as large as dinner plates is scattered giraffe-like over the trunk and branches, and the edges are raised and fluted like old-fashioned lace doilies. Ancient scars on the trunk show where branches have been trimmed, rough charcoal-colored bracelets holding puckered circles of paler gray.
The leaves are mostly dark, the color of Christmas, small ovals with barbs around their edges. The green intensifies where sunlight strikes the tree, handfuls of brightness thrown like confetti against the darker color.
Mary wonders, standing there, if she has done this before, stood at this window and become fascinated by the way the light plays against the foliage of the tree. The way she remembers the kitchen, she never would have lingered here, but there is the tug of deeply ingrained memory as she stands in this place, that sense of complete comfort that floods the body when we are in the place we call home. Her body and soul recognize this exact spot as one where she is perfectly at rest, but her logical mind tells her she has paused at this window only a handful of times in eighteen years.
She pours the cold suds out of her mug, rinses it, and stands undecided. The mug belongs on the island, where the sink was supposed to be, but now her sink is here, under the window. She pulls a kitchen towel off the peg at her hip, surprised her body knows where to find it. She dries the mug and places it on the windowsill, in the center, Seurat and his art in front of the oak tree.
The mug looks comfortable. Mary’s body feels tense.
Would you be as brave as Mary? What would you do, faced with a world inexplicably changed? Would you get in your car and drive away? Would you pause, fingers over the phone, looking at the number for a mental health helpline? Would you open a bottle of Scotch, sit on the couch, and refuse to move? Mary thought of those things. But when you know you’re not crazy, even if the world has gone crazy around you, and your life and home are too precious to leave, you really only have one choice.
You need to keep going.
Mary reminds herself to breathe.
After a moment, she turns to the island, taking the sponge with her to wipe away the milk that slopped from Ben’s cereal bowl. He is eighteen and still incapable of eating cereal without creating puddles of creamy white. The milk has dried into circles, and the raised rims are hard under the sponge as she runs it over the countertop where her sink has always stood. She notices a stain on the granite, a shocking pink mark across the stone’s gray speckles, and though she shouldn’t be able to remember why it is there, a memory struggles up in her brain.
She made that mark.
The memory of events which never happened is vivid and fresh in Mary’s mind. She had been sketching costumes for the trapeze artists.
Mary shakes her head slightly, but she looks at that stain and knows she designed pink costumes for Janie when she went to Circus Camp. But that can’t be! It makes no sense. Janie never went to Circus Camp. Janie had begged, but she and Chris had said no because it seemed too dangerous, and Janie had gone to… Mary couldn’t remember where Janie had gone to camp. The sponge was cold in her hand, and Mary couldn’t remember.
And how could she have stained the counter? She hadn’t touched an acrylic paint since college. The sink had been in this spot right up until Mary had gone to bed last night, so how could she have stained a counter that had never been here before? But in another part of her mind, Mary remembered pulling the acrylics out of a drawer where her right knee is pressed against the cabinet. There couldn’t be a drawer there, though, because the sink pipes ran through the cupboards at this end of the island.
Mary steps back and finds she is looking at two deep drawers. The drawer pulls are brushed metal, smooth, identical to those she’s used daily for eighteen years, and she runs her fingers over the metal, back and forth. She cannot believe there are drawers here, and yet she knows this is a new reality. She stands in a new place that is still somehow her home, and the shift in her world is frightening.
Slowly, Mary opens the top drawer and finds it nested with open-topped containers, each one filled with an assortment of acrylics, one container of oranges, one of blues, all the colors. Even pink.
Hand on the drawer, eyes on the colors within, Mary freezes. All over her body, her skin tingles with strangeness. She can’t understand what has happened. In this new reality in front of her, there are paints where there used to be pipes, and washing dishes means looking at an oak tree, not at her family.
Mary looks down past her left hip, down along the side of the island, forcing her eyes to scan and see.
In the middle of the island, there are five wide, shallow drawers, each with two of the familiar handles on the white faces. She’d taken enough classes in college to recognize drawers like these. These drawers are for storing art.
Focus, she thinks to herself.
Moving deliberately, she shuts the drawer of colors, feels it settle soundlessly as the face reaches the surrounding cabinet. Mary uncurls her fingers, lets them drift slowly to the left. As she moves her hand, her engagement ring catches a shaft of sunlight, and Mary feels a flash of fear. She suppresses it in the face of the inevitable movement of her hand. Eventually her fingers touch the handle of the uppermost drawer. Again, she is astonished at how familiar the metal feels in her hand, how the glide of this drawer is identical to the way the drawers of silverware and napkins and cooking utensils move along their rails. In her old kitchen and this new one, these things are the same.
She looks into the drawer. From within it, the tree outside the kitchen window stares back at her.
Mary leafs through stacks of tree sketches, of splashy water colors, of vividly colored acrylics where the leaves are purple and the trunk of the tree is yellow and the sky is green and the ground is orange. And despite the odd colors, the tree is utterly itself, completely recognizable.
Mary is seeing this art for the first time, yet she recognizes each piece as something uniquely and utterly hers. This work springs from her soul and her body, yet she has never seen it before. She leans a hip against the counter and becomes absorbed in the contents of the drawer, admiring the flow of a particular line, somehow remembering the feel of the pencil in her hand as that line first arced across the notebook in her lap. For quite some time Mary stands there, shifting the deep piles, admiring the work, admiring the sheer volume of her work.
Has she really been an artist, all this time? Has she really ignored this talent for all these years? Has she been so caught up being the mother and the wife that she buried this gift and denied it? In the life she remembers living up until last night--in that life, she certainly never created these remarkable drawings. But the work is here, in her hands, undeniable. Mary closes the drawer and drapes her whole body on the island’s cool surface, elbows on granite, closed eyes in the palms of her hands.
Her sink has moved. Ben thinks the sink belongs where it is right now, under the window, and Chris remembers planning to put the sink there. The phrase, “Am I crazy?” hums like an ear-worm in her brain, “Am I crazy?” She needs something to hold on to, something to help her hold on to herself. Her breath heaves in her chest, quick sharp exhalations which never let her lungs fill.
If her sink can move, her life can be different. She knows, without a moment’s doubt, that if she needs one thing to stay sane in this world, she needs her family. Without the three of them, her heart has no home. Slowly she stands, running her hands along the counter as she turns her head to look out the window. All she has seen in this drawer is a tree. In this different world, has she been looking out the window, looking away from this precious family? Does this mean that Chris and Ben and Janie could simply disappear?
With logic that only makes sense on a day when her sink has moved, Mary knows with certainty that if her family are not in her art, they may not exist at all.
She tears open the second drawer and finds a stack of glossy cards. On the side facing up, there is a very high-quality reproduction of one of the sketches she has just discovered. Mystified, Mary turns the card over and learns she has an opening tonight, Thursday night, the night of Ben’s last high school basketball game. She will be holding a reception at a gallery in San Francisco, where she will doubtless wear the new dress hanging in her closet. The card says the artist is Mary Jenkinson; her show is being hung in her maiden name, a name she hasn’t used since the year she graduated from college.
The rest of the drawer has layers of artwork from the trail she runs on, of the grove of trees near the top of Windy Hill. She throws the topmost papers to the floor and unearths sketches of the coast, studies of birds and rocks and sand and an immense sky, towering walls of fog. Her neck suddenly stiffens, as if she slept wrong or pulled a muscle. Mary rubs at the spot with one hand, surprised at the warmth of her skin under her cold fingers.
She scatters handfuls of California behind her. Where are they? Where is her family? Third drawer, no. Fourth drawer, no.
Kneeling on the floor now, papers under her knees and crumpled against poorly closed drawers, Mary forces the bottom drawer past the mess she has made. The skin almost rips from her fingertips as she yanks the drawer to its full extension.
She stops.
There they are, her family.
The drawer is full of her family.
She takes an immense breath and forces herself to exhale before she begins to move again, slowly, lifting out a sketch of Ben asleep as a baby, round bottom in the air; a colored study of Janie at the tiny art table in her room, a long strand of pale hair stuck in the corner of her mouth as she intently strings beads. Next is another of Janie in a kiddie swing, squishy little legs trapped in the black bucket seat. She finds studies of Chris seen from across the dining hall back in college, Chris digging in the garden, Chris wearing Christmas lights like a giant necklace as he tries to untangle them one year when his hair was still completely dark.
They are alive. They are real. They exist.
Later that day, after many more cups of sweet tea, Mary is still sorting pictures back into the drawer. She pauses often, examining the art, remembering and discovering her unique talents. Rubbing her finger on the chip on her Seurat mug, one image holds her attention. It is a finished piece of Janie playing soccer, her lip between her teeth as she winds up for a kick. The ball in front of her will soon be flying, absolutely flying. Her ponytail has hitched up behind her, and she looks so very, very alive.
Mary felt that way once, years ago.
I see how Mary feels, standing there in her kitchen, the girl trapped on the mug and the girl captured on the page so alike, so different. There is a third girl, of course, the girl who grew into Mary.
The world changes us every day, you see, and our lives change us, patiently enfolding us and smothering us with love and duty. And sometimes, the world sets us free.
Let us leave her there, in the place so familiar and so changed, holding her mug, staring at her daughter, staring at her life.
Discussion Questions (Leave a comment!)
Was Mary’s reaction to the sink being moved appropriate and/or realistic? What would you have done if you had been in a similar situation?
The story says Mary only had one choice, and that was “to keep going?” Isn’t that the case with every significant change in your life beyond your control? If that is true, then what choices do we have when significant change happens?
Mary is, understandably, concerned that other things about her life changed while she was sleeping. If you were in a similar situation, which things would you be most concerned about having changed, and why?
In her new reality, Mary has taken up art in greater earnest, does that mean in this reality she is a different person, or the same person with different hobbies?
The narrator says life is “smothering us with love and duty.” What does that mean? Why would someone allow themselves to be smothered in duty? Why would Mary (or anyone) voluntarily give up their freedom?
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