I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to close the cupboard that hard! I hope I didn’t wake you up!
I’m just looking for the coffee filters. It was so sweet of you last night to say, “If you’re up before us, just help yourself to whatever. The coffee is pretty self-explanatory.”
I’m sorry, I apologize, please forgive me—and thank you again for inviting me!—but doesn’t self-explanatory mean “self-explanatory,” like it shouldn’t need an explanation? Like I should be able to just come in here and find the things I need to make coffee all together, and within a few minutes gurgling coffee-making sounds and that exciting coffee smell would start coming out of the coffeemaker?
It took me a long time to even find the coffeemaker. It didn’t look like a coffeemaker. It looked like a rocket ship. I kept passing it by on my tours of the counters, thinking it was—I don’t know, I didn’t think about it too much, but something complicated: a crème-fraîche-culture incubator, maybe; a sorbet churner; a homemade-bialy steamer-cooker thing.
Please forgive me, a thousand forgive me’s, if I seem to be rude, but the rocket-ship machine didn’t say “coffeemaker” to me, it didn’t cry out, “Here I am, groggy friend, brave traveler, you who have come to this country place far from your city home, anxious about the burdens of being a houseguest, not the least of which is having to stumble around a kitchen that is not your kitchen. Together we will make a cup of cheering, flavorful hot coffee to help you begin your day.”
I only know this machine is the coffeemaker because I’ve found this little basket in it that swings out—you have to press a hidden button to get it to pop out, like a secret tunnel behind a bookcase, something designed by Nancy Drew or (it’s German, I see by the annoying umlauts over the vowels in the brand name on the side) Stasi officers. The basket is shaped like a wide cone, and it looks like a filter should fit in there. Let us hope.
So where are the filters? I have been opening and closing cupboards for many minutes, minutes in which I have felt, unaccountably, somehow stealthy, like a prowler; and at the same time guilty, like I’ve come here under the guise of guest but I am really here to probe into your personal life. And you think I am your friend! I’m so worried—terrified, really—that you two might come downstairs and think I’m looking for something secret, trying to find something here in the kitchen that you stashed away because you’re embarrassed by it. I can’t even imagine what that would be (A cigarette from 1983? An old bong?), but that’s how I feel.
I haven’t found anything naughty—I don’t want to, believe me!—but I do feel that I’ve intruded on your personal life in a way that makes me feel ashamed. I’m sorry I discovered the Metamucil section, and the cans of Ensure.
Forgive me, but I thought the filters might be in the same vicinity as the coffeemaker. Some people find that helpful. On the counter next to the coffeemaker, for example, or in the cupboard right above it. It’s just a suggestion.
I have an idea. I am going to Turn It Over about the coffee filters. I am going to put them into the hands of my Higher Filter Power, and I am going to look for the coffee instead. Maybe, while I am looking for the coffee, the filters will show up. Near the coffee. That seems unlikely. Just kidding, mostly!
In our house we keep the coffee in the freezer. That keeps it fresh. In your house, I see, you do not. In your house, in your freezer, you keep—oh, crap! landslide!—several huge old bags of ice you got for a long-ago party that are now frozen into big blocks, and half-used boxes of Birds Eye green beans and a smashed ancient Eskimo Pie. I’ve managed to catch everything in my arms, avoiding a noisy clatter onto the floor, and I’ll just stick it all back now, in a way that will prevent another avalanche. It’s a good idea, I’ve found, to arrange heavy things, like ten-pound blocks of ice, underneath lighter objects, like crushed Eskimo Pies.
Oh, look, here’s a closet, a closet with shelves full of paper towels and laundry detergent. And here in the closet is a can of coffee! A can of Café Du Monde coffee from New Orleans! Wonderful news! But—maybe it’s not your “real” coffee, the coffee you use every day. It’s sort of in the wrong location, in this closet near the back door, away from the more active part of the kitchen, and it’s unopened. Maybe it’s for a special occasion—maybe it’s for an annual at-home Mardi Gras celebration, maybe you got it on a romantic trip to New Orleans and are saving it for your anniversary. Is it all right to open this, or not? Would that make me a bad person?
A moot point, I guess, since there are no filters in here anyway.
I want to go home. May I go home now? It’s not you, it really isn’t. I’m sorry I’m so snippy. Who am I to be snippy about anything? My own freezer is so frightening, so full of old chocolate Easter eggs and unloved Mary Janes from Halloweens past, that I don’t even like to look in there; Jeffrey Dahmer could have stored a head or a tibia in the back of it for all I know.
I’m just uncomfortable here. I’m uncomfortable not in my own home. I’m uncomfortable in my own home also, but that’s not what I’m trying to say.
I’m trying to say that I just don’t think I can do this—this being a weekend guest, this protracted socializing. It’s a strain on me. You think I’m devil-may-care and chatty and entertaining enough for an entire weekend, but truly, I am not. I am just not up to this.
What are we going to do after breakfast? Go into town and shop? Where is town? Is there coffee there? I could go there now and get some coffee, a nice hot paper cup of it, just to tide me over.
Am I allowed to take your car? I have no idea. I don’t know if I would return from town to have you say, “Of course it’s all right to take the car, don’t be silly!” or to find you sitting at the kitchen table trying to smile but hurt, surprised by my presumption. “No, no, it’s fine, did you have a good time?” you might say, and I could tell it wasn’t fine at all.
After we go shopping or whatever, are we going to be having lunch? I don’t like to admit it, but I’m not one of those people who say, “I had a big breakfast”—are we going to have breakfast, by the way? I’m starving, but you seem to be sleeping in, you seem to have been sleeping, like newborns, for something like fourteen hours, I never know how people do that, like it’s a sport!—“I had a big breakfast so I’ll just grab a snack for lunch.” I never just grab a snack for lunch. I like to have a big breakfast and a big lunch and a big dinner. But I can’t figure out how to say that to you in so many words.
What I’ll do is offer to take you out for lunch. That way I know I’ll get in a square meal before dinner. I hope it doesn’t cost that much, though, because I’m already taking you out for dinner, as we discussed. I feel poor already.
Did someone say something last night about playing bridge today if it rained? I seem to remember the husband in that nice couple who came for dinner suggesting it—it touched me how you could tell that even though he was talking about playing bridge as if he thought it were a campy idea, something our parents might do, he really wanted to do it. And did I say something like “Oh, I don’t know how to play bridge, but I’d love to learn!” If I did, that’s because I felt sorry for him. Also, I think I was kind of drunk at the time.
I would not love to learn. I would hate to learn. Bridge is unlearnable by me. You have to have a partner and strategy and write things down on little pads of paper and somehow store in your memory the previous moves of others, like a squirrel storing nuts, for use later. It sounds like a job. A job I would get fired from on the first day, before lunch.
I can’t do strategy. I can’t think four moves down the line. I can’t think one move down the line. Three-year-olds cream me at checkers. Some people know how to beat the lights walking in the city—“Come on come on come on!” they say, knowing that if you miss this light, you’ll have to stand at the next seventeen street corners. I hate that way of getting around town. I feel like I’m in some kind of race. I’d rather stand at an intersection like a bump on a log. I wait for the light to say WALK, then I walk across the street and down the sidewalk and hang around at the next corner until the next light says WALK, then I cross that street and go down that sidewalk and wait at that corner until that light says WALK. It takes me about two hours to walk twenty blocks. I don’t care. It’s all my brain can handle. And sometimes while I stand there, I remember a funny joke someone told me last Tuesday, and I crack up.
Anyway, I can’t do games of skill, only chance. Games with dice. I like dice. You rolls ’em and you takes your chances!
I like moving my guy around the board; it’s pleasant. My guy or my little Hershey’s Kiss–shaped plastic piece; I try to get a green one because green is my favorite color. But I don’t mind if green is your favorite color too—you can have the green, I’ll take the color no one else wants, usually orange. I don’t care. I’m not very competitive, as you can tell.
What I like best are games of chance where there is also a story. For example, Parcheesi has no story—you’re just going around that board—so I don’t like it that much. I like Clue—I like those tiny weapons! I like Chutes and Ladders. Chutes and Ladders isn’t much of a story—you ascend, you backslide, you ascend again, you backslide some more—but it has a visceral appeal to me. It feels exactly like every day of life itself.
I like the game called the Game of Life. The story of the Game of Life is a not-imaginative, even morally corrupt one—the point seems to be mostly to make money and buy things and end your days, if you’re lucky, living in Millionaire Estates—but it’s a story. It has tension and uncertainty, even if the uncertainty is about whether you are going to get a mortgage. Speaking of real estate, I like Monopoly—now, there’s a game with hardly any skill involved; you only have to know what every Manhattan toddler knows: Buy, don’t rent.
You don’t have an old Candy Land lying around, do you? Candy Land is the best game ever. Candy Land is a true quest, an odyssey. Candy Land has everything: exotic locales (e.g., the Lollipop Woods), peril (the looming threat of getting stuck in the Molasses Swamp), brushes with royalty (the cruel Lord Licorice, the lovely Queen Frostine) and, of course, candy. What more could a person want?
I’m also worried that, after our games-playing, we may run out of things to talk about at dinner tonight. If we do, I can tell a story. I have three stories: the time I met Philip Roth and he was mean to me, the time our cat ate our hamster, and the time I thought I had ESP for a month. Altogether, they take about forty minutes to tell, so I hope you will interrupt me a lot. Otherwise I will have run out of things to say and it will only be eight-thirty.
I guess I don’t have to tell you my feelings about the crossword puzzle, if you’re planning on doing that on Sunday morning. What’s a seventeen- or twenty-three-letter word for “I can’t do that either”? A baboon could do better. But even if I could do it, I just can’t see the point. People always say doing the crossword keeps your brain sharp, but it seems only to keep your brain sharp in the parallel reality of crossword-puzzle land, a land in which EHumperdinck is still a star and it actually matters that you know that Yale’s motto is Lux et veritas. And I’m sorry, I don’t like it when people sit there in front of you and do the puzzle in pen. I don’t care how sharp you feel; I’d enjoy your company more if you were lying in a pool of your own senile drool.
So I’m a little worried about Sunday as well.
Maybe I should just take my meals in my room until it’s time to go home. You could leave them on a tray outside my bedroom door.
Speaking of leaving, do you want me to strip the bed before I go? Maybe I’ll fashion a rope out of the sheets, like in the movies, and depart out of my bedroom window, quietly.
No time like the present.
Please forgive me. This is just too hard. Thank you very much for having me. I’m sorry. I really am.