The Reverse

Still exhausted from hauling Happy Shrimp platters at the restaurant last night, Fern lingers in bed and listens to the muffled echo of David’s voice in the shower. He’s crooning a song he made up yesterday about a heart breaking into different geometric shapes, how unhappiness is only a puzzle with actual pieces that can join and heal. Fern loves the awkward quirks of his voice as he sings about a pulsating trapezoid fitting with a warm little parallelogram. She imagines him in his subway booth later in the day, selling tokens and melodically counting out change, waiting for a great song to finally strike.

Fern has an audition for a commercial this morning, but she’s wary of yet another script holding secrets she’ll probably never decipher. And today’s audition sounds so peculiar, the trade listing simply announcing, Dress for the role you prefer. She reaches across the bed for the clock—9:22, less than two hours—and then hurries over to the bathroom. Shivering from the cold floor tiles, Fern stares in the mirror at her blurry face, her flattened brown hair. With a sigh she pushes away David’s razor and shaving cream, certain that only the most inventive application of makeup can make her presentable this morning. Fern digs her fingers in her lopsided hair but she can’t fluff it. She decides to join David in the shower.

“Hey sweetie,” she says to his soapy back, and suddenly the swirl of water at her feet and the wet folds of the shower curtain give Fern a brief glimpse of last night’s dream, something about a beach. She closes her eyes and tries to hold the image, but David has turned around and is making slippery patterns on her breasts. Her back against the wet tiles, Fern smells his hair with its scent of shampoo, and her sleek arms encircle him. Now I’m really going to be late, she thinks. “Isosceles triangle,” he croons, his hands sliding down her stomach.

*

Fern stands at the edge of a large room among a crowd of actresses in costume: there’s the Slinky Diet-Cola look, the All-Natural-Cereal look, the Harried Housewife look and more. Not sure why she’s even come, Fern glances down at her plain blouse and jeans, thrown on in her rush: the Unprepared look.

Technicians are slowly swiveling large cameras into place. Why are there cameras? she wonders. Everyone is wandering about and no one seems in charge. A woman with an enormous comb in her thick hair passes Fern and trips over a cable. She falls to her knees, the comb clattering on the floor, and Fern watches it dangle from the woman’s lobe by a long silver chain. It’s an earring, Fern realizes—what is she supposed to be? A lanky man with a clipboard helps the woman snatch up the swaying comb. When she stands and whispers to him, he giggles and writes something in his pad.

Then Fern notices the woman’s clothes are inside out: loose threads hang from her shoulders, the broad, inner seams of her blouse are exposed, and from her pants the hidden flaps of pockets hang like wide, pale tongues. The inside white label on her blouse seems to shine out. Fern steps closer and leans forward, wanting to read the instructions, but instead she’s suddenly recalling her dream. She was nude and walking along a crowded beach, but no one noticed because her tan had somehow reversed. Her body was pale white except for one horizontal strip of brown across her hips that blended in with her pubic hair, and another tan line across her breasts that hid her nipples.

The woman is facing her. “Are you trying to read my label? I so much like curiosity.”

Fern nods, unable to speak, certain that everyone around them is watching. She resists the impulse to cover her chest, her crotch.

“One hundred percent cotton. I’m all-natural. And I like to be washed in warm water.”

Like a guilty child, Fern nods again.

The woman eyes her carefully. “A bit bland. But I don’t think you’ll film bland. Your name is?”

“Fern…”

“My god, what a name!” the woman laughs. “You’ll be perfect.” The man beside her scribbles away.

They lead her through the crowd and Fern realizes this has been an interview of sorts. The woman whispers to her lanky assistant. “All right, everybody,” he calls out, “we’ve found our girl. Time to go home.” Fern is almost alarmed to hear this—she had begun to think of Happy Shrimp as a career.

“What the fuck was this all about, anyway?” someone shouts.

The woman turns to her assistant. “Mick, dear, would you turn that off?” He slips through the crowd, murmuring apologies.

She turns to Fern. “I’m Marjorie, your director du jour. Now Fern, I know this sounds a bit unorthodox, but we’re going to improvise our commercial. And we’re going to do it right now.”

No script? Fern thinks, but she doesn’t have time to be relieved, because before the last actress has gone, she is standing in front of a stark blue screen backdrop and the makeup man is already blushing her cheekbones. “Nothing fancy,” Marjorie says, “just give her a touch-up.” She waves her hand at the backdrop, but Fern can’t turn to look. “Don’t worry about all that nothing behind you. The deal is, a downtown artist will draw the background later. Then we program it into a computer and everything will get, ah, frisky. But you, my dear, come first.”

Marjorie turns and slaps her palms against her dangling pants pockets and shouts, “Where’s the love interest?” She turns and whispers to Fern, “He’s a redhead. Think lots of kiss-kiss.”

Within minutes the lights are on Fern and her costar, but there’s nothing to work with, no set, no script, no product. “Get to know each other, kids,” Marjorie calls out. “Don’t mind us. Or the lights. Or the cameras.”

The redhead’s face is as blank as a plate. He must have been the worst at his audition, Fern thinks—maybe we’ve both been selected as a joke. She tries a sidelong grin as they draw closer, but when they embrace she can feel the knots in his stiff shoulders. His arms hang limp at his sides. But he’s the same height and build as David, so Fern closes her eyes and runs her finger slowly down his spine.

“Hold it,” Marjorie calls out.

“I’m sorry. I just thought that…”

“No, I like it,” she says, out of her chair and striding toward them. “It’s tender and sexy, and that’s the kind of identification we need for a drain cleaner, which is, by the way, what we’re selling here. When your finger slips down his back it gives a subliminal message of water running down a pipe.”

Fern’s chin still rests, idiotically, on the redhead’s shoulder, and she can only stare at Marjorie, afraid to admit she was merely thinking about her boyfriend.

Marjorie steps back a moment. “I think we’ll take a close-up of those fingers first, then one of your face.” She takes the comb from her hair, the thin chain jangling, and brushes back Fern’s bangs. “Keep your eyes closed first. And then open them so all our housewives at home can imagine what he’s rubbing against you down there, okay?”

*

When they’re finally done Marjorie shouts out, “All right, strike the set!” A few technicians laugh, and they gather up cords and lights.

“Thanks,” the redhead whispers to Fern before walking off, and she stands alone, still not quite believing what has happened. Marjorie approaches, talking to Mick: “Remind Pascal again that I want the animation sloppy, not slick, okay?”

Then Marjorie is beside her. “Impressive. I knew you’d be the one to come through. Really, all I wanted from that fella was the back of his head, all those nice red curls. And now, dear, there are these little annoyances called forms…”

While Fern finishes signing. Marjorie asks, “So, do you always read other people’s labels? Wait, don’t answer that. Can I give you a lift?”

“Sure,” Fern says, though she’d rather take the subway and stop at David’s station with the good news, tell him how he was her unseen partner. But Marjorie is already strolling away and Fern follows.

They walk up the block, the wind ruffling their hair. “So,” Marjorie says, the stray strings of her exposed seams fluttering, “you want to know all about me. You’ve heard about Conceptual Art? Well, I invented Conceptual Radio. I deejayed for an early morning radio program I designed, called Alarm Clock Music. ‘This show is a public service,’ I’d whisper in a husky voice that really got the letters coming in, ‘featuring music so awful it makes you get up.’ I’d flip on the Rice Krispies Snap! Crackle! Pop! theme song arranged for string quartet—the scherzo version—and then segue into a piano roll made from the Braille version of Joyce’s Ulysses. Ah, here’s my car,” she says. Fern is disappointed that it’s an ordinary tan import.

They get in and Marjorie presses the lighter on the dashboard before driving off. “I woke up the whole city. Absenteeism was zip, the Chamber of Commerce threw a banquet in my honor. And then,” she pauses, lighting her cigarette, “I quit.” Marjorie shifts gears, silent, and Fern understands she’s supposed to respond.

“Why?”

“Why, you ask? Never keep dancing while the termites are eating through the floorboards, I always say. Anyway, I hustled arts grants with the usual performance art scam. Finally I got this idea for a project on the American housewife, an adventure domestica in fifteen- and thirty-second installments, in collaboration with major corporate sponsors. I figure, what with cable, video rentals, CD-ROMs, and the Internet, it’s clear the networks’ ratings are going bow-wow, so we’re at a point where anything is possible. And I was right, because you know a company’s desperate if they hired me with complete creative control. Actually, they think they need a huge loss—all that computer stuff will cost, y’know—something that’ll help them when they file for Chapter Eleven. Ha—just wait.”

Fern wishes they weren’t nearing her block, now she just wants to listen and listen. Marjorie looks at her and grins. “You don’t talk much, but you don’t need to. Look, when I get an impulse, I follow it, and that’s what you did today. Twice. But you didn’t know it. Well, Fern, you’re going to be my ordinary housewife with hidden depths.”

*

Fern sits in her agent’s office, waiting, wishing Marjorie wasn’t so late. While Dougie reads the long-term contract Marjorie has offered, Fern glances at the walls and all the framed and signed photos of stars who seem to stare past her dreamily.

Dougie waves the pages at her. “You’ve read this carefully, Fran?” Fern nods and doesn’t correct him. Just a week ago he didn’t return her phone calls.

Dougie takes off his horn-rimmed glasses and pokes them at the contract. “This is unortho, very unortho. No script, everything improv? Only one commercial per sponsor and you don’t even know what you’re selling until right before the first take?”

She wishes he wouldn’t clip his words like that, it’s so annoying, but Fern only stares at his pinched lips and says nothing. There’s more he could question—no outside work or interviews for the term of the contract—but she doesn’t want trouble. She wants to sign.

He puts his glasses back on and sighs, his eyes larger as he stares at her silence. She can see he doesn’t think this will fly at all. “But it is your first break,” he says, “so I don’t want to push too hard, she might change her mind.” And when Marjorie finally arrives and sits before them Dougie only manages a lackluster, “Y’know, Fran and I have a teeny question about the interview clause…”

“Donnie, Donnie,” Marjorie says, “for this project to work we need to stay mysterious, nest-ce pas? So no one gives interviews. Trust me, I know.” She points to her earrings: little plastic garbage cans, the lids bulging up with bright refuse. “I can hear America singing.”

Fern giggles.

“Don’t,” Marjorie says. “It’s bad luck to laugh at earrings, didn’t your mommy ever teach you anything?”

*

“Fern, Fern!” David shouts out, and she runs down the hall to the living room, in time to see herself in the center of the television screen. Her chin is resting on the redhead’s shoulder, surrounded by a wild, animated kitchen: the edges of the cabinets and the refrigerator door are off-balance, almost ready to fly away, but Fern is the still, steady center.

As she watches the close-up of her large gleaming eyes, her little squiggle of a smile, Fern feels oddly fragile and she’s glad when the commercial ends. But David has long anticipated his invisible influence in this little drama, and he slaps a blank tape in the VCR and he won’t stop watching TV until her commercial finally returns. Then he can’t stop replaying Fern’s hand moving down that back, the widening of her excited eyes.

The commercial becomes hugely popular. Soon Fern stands again before another blue backdrop, facing the cameras. Marjorie saunters up to her wearing cut-off jeans over white panty hose, and there are stick figures painted on the bright nylon fabric, engaged in awkward intimate acts like some child’s uninformed dream of sex.

Marjorie whispers, “Liquid cleanser.” Then she sits back down by the cameras, her legs crossed. The raised arms of an ecstatic figure span her shin and one painted hand, spread across her knee, seems to be waving.

Everyone waits. Fern’s own arm rises, her hand first circling in the air as if waving back, whether at that figure or at Marjorie, she’s not sure. Then she’s rubbing her palm against the air, scrubbing at a nothing that seems to surround her. She twists about, both hands now billowing, and she’s surprised at how easy it is to move in an acrobatic, widening circle until whatever she’s washing away is finally gone.

“My, my, some great close-ups,” Marjorie calls out, and she walks over to Fern. “Now I’d like to work out some different angles.” She turns suddenly, back to the cameras. “Mick, dear, would you be a good shadow and follow me?” He just stands there by her empty chair, staring furiously at his pad. But Marjorie doesn’t see this, she is looking at Fern with admiration, and then she laughs, her lips round with pleasure. “This is just what the gals out there will like, they won’t know what you’ll do next.”

*

Fern turns off the faucet and lets the plate slip into the suds. “What?” she asks.

“I said if that wasn’t enough…” David sips his beer and leans back in his chair, “this old guy jumps the turnstile—he can barely do it—and the cop on the beat chases after him. And ‘cuffs him. An old guy.” David looks at the ceiling, sips some more. “And then some turd mouths off because I won’t take a Canadian quarter.”

Fern goes to him and tickles his knee with her damp fingers. “Poor sweetie, how are you ever going to write your great song with rotten days like this? I’m sure tomorrow will be better.”

But David is in one of his moods: he cups an ear and mouths a silent response, as if he’s still inside his glass booth. Then he wanders down the hall and hums aimlessly, jiggling coins in his pocket—his usual rhythm section—but he can’t seem to find an opening into a new melody.

Eventually he joins Fern on the couch and watches TV: two fat people wisecracking over a smoking barbecue grill. The laugh track laughs and then on the screen an acrobatic Fern is scrubbing away a malevolent cloud of grime.

David rushes to the VCR and presses the Record button. He catches her last elastic movements as the bedraggled, illustrated kitchen around her becomes almost painfully pristine. “Jeez, what gave you the idea to do that?” David asks, pressing Rewind.

Fern hesitates, wishing she had another romantic tale to tell him. “You,” she says, surprising herself. “I imagined we were washing each other in the shower.”

David watches a few seconds of the replay and then he shouts, “Okey do-key!” He jumps up and dances with Fern’s peculiar scouring motions on the screen.

The phone rings and Fern gets it. “Hello, doll,” Dougie says. “I think I can get you a spot on Letterman.”

“But Dougie, no interviews, remember?”

“What interview? There’s no interview. He just makes fun of you for five minutes.”

Fern hears David pacing in the hall, jangling coins again. “I’m just not sure it’s possible,” she says.

“You’re worried about that wacky contract you signed, right?”

“We signed.”

“Who knew, who knew?”

Fern can hear David singing. “Don’t scrub the floor, scrub me,” he begins. It’s his first new song after a month of silence.

“Dougie, look, I have to go, okay? Bye.” She listens to the unpredictable wavering of David’s voice, and she s pleased that her little lie has made him so happy.

*

Fern is soon accustomed to finding her accomplished domestic face on TV, in the center of animated kitchens of nervous color and edgy chiaroscuro. Artforum runs a review of her latest commercial and hails New Wave Domesticity. TV Guide reports that housewives buy whatever Fern sells, just so the spots will continue to run. Dougie keeps calling to tell her that People will be happy to proclaim her the National Housewife, if only she’d grant an interview. Fern is glad she can’t. She doesn’t feel very housewifely, even after devouring women’s magazines, memorizing newspaper recipes, and trying to learn knitting.

She clicks away with her long needles during afternoon soaps, but the repetitive weaving of her hands lulls her too easily. She looks up at the television: a glamorous blonde hides a letter behind a sofa pillow just as a lushly handsome man enters the room. He greets her and sits down right where the letter is hidden. His thin smile defies interpretation as he stares into the camera. The music swells.

Then Fern’s face is in close-up, her features filled with sudden surges of twitches and grimaces, while behind her is yet another animated background: a succession of homey meals prepared by invisible hands. The sound track is the grunt of the dishwasher, the groan of the vacuum cleaner and the drunken whoosh of the clothes dryer, and every image and sound seems to change with each new flicker of pain on Fern’s face, until she reaches for a floating bottle of aspirin.

Fern sets down her tangle of yarn and glances about her living room. If only I could make this writhe around me, she thinks. She scrunches her face, warps her lips at the inflexible furniture, and the phone rings.

“Doll? I’ve got a bit part for you on ‘Home Improvement,’ and it’s just the beginning—”

“Dougie, you know I can’t.” She contorts her cheeks and buckles an eyebrow at the all-too-solid coffee table.

“Doll. It’s time to renegosh.”

“Please, I don’t want to jeopardize—”

“Okay okay okay. Remember, when you’re ready, I’m ready.”

“I know.” Fern says good-bye, and she looks down at the confusing knot of her unfinished sweater. The phone rings again and Fern hesitates before picking up the receiver, she’s had enough nagging. But it’s Marjorie.

“Fern? We have a shoot lined up for tomorrow morning—sorry it’s such short—”

“That’s okay,” Fern says. She pauses. “Uh, Marjorie?”

“I’m still here.”

“I’d like to push myself more. How about telling me ahead of time what’s up so I can prepare?”

“Prepare? I don’t know, kiddo, we’re doing so well the way we—”

“You’re probably right,” Fern sighs. “It’s just that I had this impulse—”

“An impulse. Well, why not take a chance? How about I give you a teeny hint?”

Fern grins into the receiver. “Let’s hear it.”

“Tomorrow you’ll have a co-star. Female, and much younger than you.”

“How much younger?”

“Oh, don’t you want even a little surprise?”

After saying good-bye Fern wants to treat herself to the biggest piece of chocolate she can find. She walks to the grocery around the corner, and in a cramped aisle of sweets she notices a graying woman peering intently at boxes of pudding on the shelf. Fern stops: it’s a pudding she did a spot for. She remembers how a spoonful of vanilla transformed itself into enticing, shivery shapes in front of her continually amazed face.

The woman hesitates, her nail tracing the spoon on the cover of one of the boxes, but then she grabs it and drops it in her cart. How often do I hold that spoon in her mind? Fern wonders. She follows the woman to the checkout counter, then out the door and behind her on the crowded sidewalk. Fern imagines that she’s somewhere inside everyone walking by her, multiplied like the repeated images in a row of department store TVs. And where do I go when they stop thinking of me? A bit woozy at this thought, she stops at the edge of the park and sits down on a bench. Fern closes her eyes, and through the dull hum of traffic she hears the distant sound of laughter in the park. A girl’s laughter. That could be my co-star, Fern thinks.

She follows the voice, each new happy burst leading her to a shaded clearing. A young mother lies on the grass while her daughter squirms all over her, transforming her into a shield, a ladder, a cushion. The mother seems to be snatching ten, fifteen seconds of sleep at a stretch. The girl awkwardly slaps her palms together: “Clap hands! Clap hands!” she sings out, her face alive with delight. Fern watches carefully and cups her hands around her eyes, creating a screen around them. Aha, she thinks—whatever I’ll be during tomorrow’s shoot, I’d better be tired.

When Fern returns to her apartment she stands in the living room and tries to imagine a little girl at her side. What should they do together, and with what product? If only Marjorie were marching toward her, about to divulge the secret. Fern strains to hear whispered words that don’t come, and when she turns to the darkening window she can only see herself.

Watching her reflection, she reaches her hand out, as if squeezing the shoulder of a child beside her. Pretending her knuckles are tickled by the girl’s long hair, Fern twirls a finger at an imagined strand. Then she hears David at the door, the bolts unlocking, and he’s walking down the hall, swinging an air freshener by its string. “Just one sniff and you’ll be mine,” he sings. He nuzzles Fern’s neck, and her almost invented child fades to nothing.

Over dinner, while Fern tries to concentrate on the empty chair she’s pulled up to the table, David scats “Gimme gimme good margarine.” Later, his hands in the soapy sink, he serenades the stacked plates in the dish drainer with “Let’s dry off together tonight,” and he looks over his shoulder for her approval. Fern almost asks him to stop, but hesitates. Even if they do sound too much like jingles, she can’t help feeling pleased that she’s inspired David to create all these new songs.

That night, with her musical David finally asleep, Fern lies beside him and again tries to conjure up the girl. What might a child want, so lonely in her own room—a glass of water? What might be keeping her awake—a strange sound in the toy chest? Or perhaps the carpet has come alive under the night light, making strange, barely visible ripples. But instead of hearing a girl’s pleading voice, Fern is filled with the thought of the rug under her own bed, its woolen weave disentangling itself, wriggling ominously and ready to reach out at the foot of anyone foolishly considering escape.

*

Fern crouches exhausted before the camera and, searching for an idea, she tangles her hand in the blonde hair of the little girl standing beside her. But the child can only offer a precociously well-choreographed smile and wait, and all of Fern’s inspiration is parked on the other side of sleep.

Marjorie quickly calls off the shoot and sits beside her in a corner. “Did we over-prepare last night? A mistake, perhaps.” She shakes her head and her earrings, two bright plastic sailboats, bobble and sway. “Oh, storm-tossed waves!”

Fern says nothing; her jaw hurts from stifling so many yawns.

“Okay,” Marjorie says, and her fingernails flick at the air, as if any difficulty can be easily brushed aside, “we can continue in the afternoon. In the meantime, why not a little nappy? You can crash in my apartment.”

So ashamed of her failure, Fern can’t even look at Marjorie. “I think I’d rather go back to my place, thanks.”

“Compromise. A drive home.” Marjorie isn’t asking.

In the car they’re both silent. “Hey,” Marjorie finally says, “you think you have troubles? Haven’t you noticed that Mick isn’t around any more? We broke up.”

“You and Mick? You were—”

“Yeah yeah. He wasn’t much, believe me, but I don’t like being dumped.” She pushes in the cigarette lighter with a deft slap of her palm. “Could you open the glove compartment, please?”

Fern pulls on the tiny door. Inside are cans of imported cocktail sausages.

“I’m absolutely starved. Would you be sweet and open one?”

Fern pulls the tab and lifts off the aluminum top. The sausages are packed together in a viscous gelatin and she struggles to pull one out.

Marjorie pushes Fern’s hand away and expertly lifts a sausage from the thick goo. The cigarette lighter pops back with a click. Her knees balancing the wheel, Marjorie pulls out the lighter and presses its red coil against the sausage. Fern hears sizzling.

Marjorie eats the singed tip. “Revenge and protein, all at once. Want some?”

Fern shakes her head no at the acrid smell and looks away.

They’re at her block. Marjorie scribbles on a piece of paper. “Look, just in case you lose the keys to your apartment—here’s my address.”

That afternoon, still under the spell of the odd hum that lingers after a nap, Fern hugs the little girl too tightly before the cameras, wanting so hard to possess the motherly moment that eluded her last night. This is the scene that David later can’t help but gape at in front of the TV: in a photorealistic kitchen that is alarmingly antiseptic, a daughter tucked in a mother’s enveloping arms reveals the urge to pull away when her smile erupts into a fleeting wince. But Fern won’t break her grip. David presses the Rewind button and starts it again.

“I pretended you were leaving me,” Fern lies, anticipating David’s question, “but I wouldn’t let you go.”

David pulls away from that startling hint of secret distress flickering on the screen and turns to Fern. He grins and then walks slowly toward her, his arms outstretched in reconciliation. Laughing, he clutches and swings her around, and the apartment becomes a dizzy backdrop for the story she just made up. “How could I go when the floor shines so?” he sings, and Fern flinches in his twirling embrace.

*

Fern rushes toward the camera, her hair uncombed, her eyes puffy and slightly wild. She holds her hands up to her unsettled face. She is remembering her dream: returning from work, she discovers David’s clothes on the couch, arranged as if he had just disappeared. His shirt is stuck against the back cushion, the empty sleeve resting on the armrest, and the legs of his jeans hang down off the couch to the carpet, his hollow socks nestled in and dangling from his shoes. She pokes among his clothes and finds his underpants, slightly soiled. She feels the irresistible urge to do a wash, and as she gathers up his clothes she feels something crawling in them and realizes it must be David, tiny and naked. She drops the bundle.

“Terrific,” Marjorie says, “we’ll keep that.”

Fern blinks at the lights.

That evening over take-out Chinese, David humming his latest little ditty across from her, Fern is certain she knows what the new commercial will eventually look like: she’ll be menaced by something like Unsightly Kitchen Mold, her mouth will be half-open in horror while the shadows of tentacles shift across her face. It seems so predictable now. With her chopsticks she picks a Szechuan peppercorn away from the Cashew Chicken and she deliberately chews on it, hungry for a nice sharp ache.

“Paper plates are flavor-mates,” David is suddenly singing.

Not again, Fern thinks, looking up, and she breaks in. “Would you like to hear about today’s shoot?”

David nods and waits expectantly, now back to humming. She wishes he would stop that, and so she decides to tell him the truth about her latest improvisation.

“I was how small?” he asks, leaning back in his chair.

“Well, I’m not sure …”

“And you dropped me? I mean, like I was a quarter or something, you just dropped me?” His face is stricken with disappointment.

Fern won’t reply. She slips another pepper into her burning mouth.

Later, David sits before the TV, the sound off, and runs through all those performances he’s taped, performances he thinks he’s inspired. Fern stands in the doorway of the darkened living room, watching, and what she sees is a guilty hodgepodge of all those false stories she’s told him. Then David is pushing buttons and her arms flap in fast-forward through an agitated laundry room, until David presses the Pause and Play buttons back and forth so that she’s creeping in slo-mo toward a basket of dirty clothes a century away. Then she’s hurtling backward, emotions rushing in reverse in fits across her face too fast to translate. Before David can press another button she leaves the room.

For a long time Fern lies in bed alone and in the dark. But she can still see, at the bottom of the door, those staggering flashes of TV light, waves and waves of it. Why won’t he stop? She buries herself under the blankets. “I’m drowning!” she calls out, hoping to draw David away.

She waits. Nothing. “I’m drowning!” she shouts again, louder. Peering through the thin weave of the blanket, she can see David finally standing in the doorway, and she knows he is watching her shifting, covered form. She lifts a hand above the blankets: three fingers extended, going down for the last time, and after her last muffled cry she hears him pad across the room. She feels him pull the blankets to the edge of the bed until she is exposed before him, but Fern keeps her eyes closed: she wants so much to believe she’s landed safe on the beach and that the sun is so bright, the sand so warm.

*

The next morning Fern crouches before the dark screen of the television, the videotape of her performances in her hand. It feels so light, so unmenacing, but she can’t bear the thought of seeing her images go awry again. She slips it in the VCR, pushes the Erase button, and the tape whirs and whirs inside. Fern is glad David is far away on his rush hour shift, because as she disappears from the tape she realizes in one breathless moment that she never wants to see him, she never wants to hear him again. Fern plops down on the carpet, her sudden sadness exquisite, and she cries oddly pleasurable tears, her hands fisting in the thick pile until she remembers David’s song about the vacuum cleaner that loves the taste of dirt.

She stands up as the disembodied lilt of his voice seems to rush at her. She hurries down the hallway, but from the bathroom she hears his jingle about the private pleasures of washing the tub. In the kitchen she leans against the counter, her hands to her ears, and she sees her unhappy reflection in the toaster. Again there is David’s voice: “Put me in the toaster, honey, and I’ll get hot for you, hot for you …” Fern can’t help herself, she places her hand against that cool silver surface and imagines bread browning inside, the heat intensifying, but she can’t remove her hand and the escaping smoke of burnt toast mingles with the smell of her own scorched flesh.

Fern shakes her head, trying to erase David’s jingles. And that’s all they’ll ever be, Fern realizes, he won’t ever find his great song because there isn’t one in him. She can see David behind the glass booth: an express train rumbles by and his face merely mouths lyrics no one can hear while he handles coins, the tips of his fingers soiled with the images of national monuments and dead presidents. Then she imagines his fingerprints all over the apartment, those invisible stains over everything.

She rushes to the closet for furniture spray and returns to the living room with a rag. The phone rings and she lets it, too busy rubbing down an end table, and she listens to her recorded voice explaining that she’s not in right now, and then after the beep she hears Dougie. “Doll, a call from Altman, he loves your stuff, wants to consider you for his next pic. You could improv your role. Listen, he wants to set up a private audition. Listen—we’re talking movies, flicks, films, motion pictures. So what’s a little breach of contract prob? Oh, I’m so glad you’re not there to argue. Think. Call. Bye.”

Oh god, Dougie, so typically ambitious. But Fern has stopped polishing, and she stares at herself across the room on the blank TV screen. She lifts the spray can and her tiny image does the same. Fern imagines behind that distant figure a stark blue background, and then she knows she’s in her own commercial. The camera moves in: her face looks haggard, and there’s a hint of that slight squinch she makes with her mouth. She seems oddly pleased with herself and she begins to speak.

“I threw the stinker out. He took all of his stuff, and now only his fingerprints are left. But not for long.” She sprays the table, and then rubs it down carefully with a cloth while staring at the camera. It zooms in until only Fern is on the screen: only her face, her bitter smile.

“Girls, are you like me? Upset that your ex has left his grimy marks all over the place? Then use Spray Away, and wipe him out of your life forever.” She pauses. “It puts a nice shine on furniture, too.”

Fern stands before her reflection on the blank screen and she lingers there for a long and satisfying moment: her commercial is over, and she did it alone. Marjorie will be so proud. Fern just has to tell her, and she searches in a drawer for a crumpled address.

*

“What a surprise,” Marjorie says, opening her door, “what a pleasure: you’ve come to see my new earrings.” A tiny triceratops sways from one ear, a stegosaurus from the other. “I love being surrounded by extinct creatures. Survivor’s prerogative, no? So c’mon in.” She waves a hand, her cigarette a smoky wand.

Fern enters and sees a Bless This Home sampler hanging framed over the TV, plastic slipcovers on a bright yellow couch, little ceramic squirrels and frogs holding poses on a knick-knack shelf. Fern stares at one of the figurines—a cat in an apron, paw to mouth as if summoning a rowdy brood of kittens. This is not at all what she expected.

Marjorie laughs at her stunned face. “Don’t look so shocked. This is my shrine to the American housewife’s most average interior. I call it Necessity of Escape.” She sits on her couch’s squeaky slipcover, she leans over the coffee table and stubs her cigarette into an ashtray shaped like a toaster. “Really, it’s taken you much too long to visit.” She pats the cushion beside her. “Come sit, tell me what’s brought you here.”

Fern tries to settle comfortably on the stiff plastic cover. When Marjorie leans back patiently against flowery needlepoint pillows, Fern is suddenly struck with stage fright. Uncertain how to begin, she picks away at the clear plastic as if she could scratch through to the vivid fabric.

“Hey, don’t be nervous,” Marjorie says. She reaches for that anxious hand and squeezes the fleshy rise of Fern’s palm.

Fern stops scratching the slipcover. But Marjorie is now lightly stroking her wrist and Fern watches, surprised at such a feathery touch, how shivery it makes her feel. Then Marjorie is whispering, “Oh, my,” and her fingers trace the pattern of blue veins, the delicate bones on the back of Fern’s hand.

“Don’t be shocked,” Marjorie murmurs, but Fern isn’t, and she lets Marjorie pull her across the cushions—it seems like their own slow, dreamy close-up. She eases into Marjorie, feels fingers brush against her breasts, and when their mouths join Fern loses herself in the fluttery touch of their tongues.

Finally Marjorie breaks away gently. “Well, I guess we could say this has been a long and unusual courtship, no?”

Still a bit breathless, Fern nods. “Uh-huh,” she manages, then she reaches out and squeezes Marjorie’s knee.

Marjorie grins and reaches for the buttons on Fern’s blouse, but Fern shifts away slightly. “Y’know, there is something I came to tell you.”

Marjorie leans back and shakes her dinosaurs. “I’m all ears.”

Fern flicks off a shoe and tickles Marjorie’s ankle. “I had this idea,” she begins, and then she’s describing her commercial, but before she can get to that last close-up of her bitter smile, Marjorie starts to laugh. “Oho, no need to go any further. It’s brilliant, for sure. But dangerous—you just can t break your role as housewife like that, at least not so openly.”

“Dangerous?” Fern gapes. “Why?”

“Why? Because all those reviews and articles about you, all that trash is wrong. You’re really quite terrible at playing a housewife … and that’s the secret of your success.” There’s not even the tiniest smile on her face, she’s absolutely serious.

“W-what do you mean?” Fern stammers, “I’m doing a great job….”

“Exactly, honey, just not the job you think.” Marjorie twirls an earring. “Your impulses aren’t ordinary, you’re not domesticated at all—just the reverse. Why do you think I chose you?”

Fern doesn’t know what to say, but Marjorie isn’t waiting for a reply. “Look, sweets, think about why we have all that animation. We add the background later so that even though on screen you’re in a kitchen, something about your body language stays rootless, capice?” She strokes Fern’s knee. “All those bored gals watching can sense that you don’t really fit in there, and so they can sit at home and imagine that they don’t really fit in either. There’s a secret part of themselves that needs to believe this. If you were truly a hausfrau they’d switch the channel.”

Fern sits there in her own silence. She starts ticking her nails at the plastic slipcover again, a rhythmic, rasping sound that reminds her of the whir of those erasing performances. If only she could make Marjorie’s words vanish, but Marjorie keeps murmuring. “Your idea is a little too over the top. Remember, the tension between housewife and not-housewife has to be finely balanced. Ambiguity is everything, or else our lucrative gig is blown. And we wouldn’t want that, would we?”

Her voice sounds so soft that Fern finds herself quietly nodding, she wants to agree, and when Marjorie says, “You’ll always be my actress with hidden depths,” Fern closes her eyes and the darkness becomes her own blank screen. She imagines this couch is just a stage, that Marjorie really didn’t mean what she said and they’re simply acting out a scene of two new lovers about to reconcile. She feels a gentle tug at her wrist.

“I hope you’ll forgive me my little secret,” Marjorie whispers, starting to draw Fern back. “It was touching to see you take everything so seriously, but you were doing so well it just wasn’t necessary to fill you in.”

So that’s what I am, Fern thinks, the clueless star? Her face flushed, she pushes Marjorie away.

“Oh sweets, don’t be upset,” she coos, but Fern shrinks from her condescension, so terribly disappointed. How can she ever work with Marjorie again?

Marjorie leans closer, her face framed by those dangling dinosaurs, and then Fern sees her revenge: survivor’s prerogative. Yes, she decides, this is a scene, but we’re not alone. A camera crew is filming us, and Altman is sitting in the director’s chair, waiting for me to improvise … and since this is my own private audition, there’s no need to fill in Marjorie.

Fern fills her face with longing and, surprised at her quick calculation, says, “I’m a little… shy. Just give me a minute alone to collect myself…”

“You wait here,” Marjorie murmurs, “I’ll be right back,” and she slips off to the bathroom, leaving Fern with the shelves of knick-knacks, the doe-eyed children framed on the walls, and a cigarette still smoldering in the ashtray. Fern supposes the camera crew, anticipating a nude scene, is ready to check the lighting for her small breasts and long legs when she stretches over the length of the couch. But there will be no nude scene. This will be more interesting, she thinks, leaning toward the ashtray, a nice surprise for Mr. Altman, and this time I know exactly what I’m doing.

Pushing the cigarette stub aside, she pokes her fingers into the ashes. Then she taps dark prints over the coffee table, and after smudging her fingers again she dabs ten ashy ovals across the brittle slipcovers of the couch. Fern regards her grimy patterns with satisfaction. She stalks the room and stains the faces of a few figurines, leaves a thumb smear on the quaint door of the quaint house of the framed sampler on the wall. Marjorie had better have a very good cleaning spray.

In the bathroom, the toilet flushes. Fern realizes she doesn’t have time to finish, but it doesn’t matter. Altman has already settled back in his chair, impressed.

She hears water running in the sink, Marjorie humming expectantly. My grand exit, Fern thinks, wiping her sooty hands together, Catch it, boys. The hushed crew pivots the camera as she strides away, and she’s sure she’ll get the part. She slips out the front door, quickly clicks it behind her, and runs exhilarated down the hallway, alone, alone. Pushing the button for the elevator, she listens to its muffled rumble rising up too slowly. She presses the button again and again, and when the elevator finally arrives with a silky whoosh, its door glides open like a curtain and Fern steps in.