“At least.”
Oriented once again, I quickly found my jogging route behind WB. The Grand Prix tracked along the deep grooves of the sand road like a railcar. We were back at my cottage in about five minutes.
I equipped myself with a vodka on the rocks. Amanda opted for gin and tonic.
“Kinda past season, but who’s counting.”
She dug a bottle of tonic out of a kitchen cabinet and promptly dropped it on the floor. Before I could stop her, she’d scooped up the plastic bottle, gripped it under an arm and twisted off the cap, shooting off a foamy spray of tonic that soaked the top half of her body and most of my kitchen.
“Oh shit, oh shit.” She put down the bottle and went to wash her hands. “Do you have something to clean this up with? I’m so sorry. I’m soaked.”
I handed her a dish towel, and while she dried off her hands I mopped up the devastation with a roll of paper towels.
“I hope this thing’s waterproof,” she said, looking down the front of her windbreaker. She unsnapped the snaps and I helped her slide out of it. Her yellow blouse was unscathed. Underneath, her breasts moved freely, unfettered.
“I need to rinse this off.”
“I should make a fire.”
“You stoke, I’ll rinse.”
I had the woodstove going by the time Amanda came out to the living room holding her wet windbreaker and hard-fought gin and tonic. I hung the jacket over the back of a chair and slid it up close to the fire. Amanda curled up next to the arm of the sofa, I sat on the floor.
“That was a wonderful day,” she said.
“It’s still a day for another hour or two.”
“I should go after this.”
“Your windbreaker has to dry.”
“After that.”
She’d rolled up her sleeves and bent up the collar of her yellow blouse. And unbuttoned a button. She noticed me noticing.
“I don’t mind,” she said.
“What?”
“If you look.” She unbuttoned another button and spread open the yellow blouse just enough to expose the faded tan lines. “At least it tells me you’re interested.”
“I’m interested.”
“But that’s all?”
“More than interested.”
“But.”
“There’s Roy …”
“That’s why?”
“Probably not. Though he doesn’t make much sense for you. But, then again, that can’t be a good enough reason.”
“Good enough to date?”
“Yeah. Good enough to date.”
I was grateful that she left it alone after that. I didn’t want to have to explain myself any more than I had to. Mostly because I didn’t really have an explanation. I knew there was one, I just didn’t know how to get at it. Or I didn’t want to try. Anyway, it had been a long time for me. Maybe I was just afraid. Maybe that’s what I didn’t want to explain.
I took her back to the 7-Eleven in her dried-out windbreaker. We didn’t talk much on the way over there, but it felt nice just to drive along in silence. I smoked a cigarette, she closed her eyes and sat there looking like female perfection. Luckily it was too late to turn around and go back to the cottage.
“I like you, Sam,” she said to me, getting out of the car. “Any way you want it.”
“I’m not sure what that is.”
“Then let’s play it by ear.”
“I might be tone deaf.”
She laughed, then leaned back into the car across the seat and kissed me.
“That’s already well established.”
On the way back to the cottage I swung past Amanda’s mother’s house. I went back through the kitchen door, which I’d left open, and grabbed a plastic bag out of the broom closet. I made a quick trip to the sewing room. I picked the iron up off the ironing board, curled the cord and dropped it in the bag.
Then I went down to the basement to look for the electrical panel. I found late vintage circuit breakers mixed in with the original fuses. One circuit breaker was thrown. I switched it back and it held. I got out my Swiss Army knife and unscrewed the faceplate from the box. I thought about how badly I needed reading glasses to do close-in work, especially in low light. When I was done picking through the wiring I screwed everything back together again. Then I traced one of the lines from the box, across the ceiling to a location somewhere among the bedrooms. Before I left the basement I unlatched the basement door at the bottom of the hatch. I locked the kitchen door.
I tossed the iron into the trunk. Then I went home and hit tennis balls around for Eddie until it got dark. I was glad to finally have the night to sit inside while I drank and watched the whitecaps dance across the Little Peconic as the southwesterlies gave in to the harder, colder winds from the north. I wanted to think things through, but instead I fought off images of wild-eyed dolls and smooth, olivy tanned skin, the touch of silk and the smell of possibility.
In the morning I retrieved the iron from the Grand Prix’s cavernous trunk and took it down with a cup of coffee to the basement where my father built a small workbench with a big drafting light. I put on my reading glasses.
The iron could have been almost forty years old. The handle was made of heavy black plastic, reminiscent of Bakelite. The inset Phillips head screws that held the base to the handle were slightly peened over. It had been opened up at least once, probably recently given the bright metal scratches on the screw heads. I unscrewed them and pulled the handle section up off the chrome base so I could look inside. The smell of burned insulation I’d noticed before was now far stronger. I pulled the drafting light down a little closer and deconstructed the little wiring harness that fed power through the switches and rheostat, and ultimately into the iron base, whose only job was to get real hot and boil some water for release as steam through a row of little vent holes. A fairly heavy piece of Romex copper wire had been neatly introduced into the system, connecting the ground lead from the power cord to a little threaded column soldered to the base that secured an inset Phillips head screw from the plastic handle. The original wiring and the new piece of Romex were partially blackened, but not burned through. The manufacturer’s logo and instructions for operating the iron were printed on a heavy metal plate, probably aluminum, screwed to the black plastic directly below the handle itself. I dug around inside with my long screwdriver until I identified where another new piece of wiring was soldered to the threads of a screw holding down the plate.
I reassembled the iron, sat it in the upright position and plugged it into an outlet which had a dedicated fifteen-amp circuit to run the bench and the basement lights.
I had two large screwdrivers with plastic handles. I wrapped them with old scraps of inner tube to provide an extra layer of insulation. I held one screwdriver to the logo plate and brought the other to the base of the iron.
Pop.
Even with the insulation, fifteen amps was enough to jolt my arms clear of the iron, and make a noise loud enough to set off Eddie. In the gray diffuse light from the basement windows I could see smoke curl out of the vent holes at the base of the iron.
I unplugged the iron, lit a cigarette and drank some of my coffee. My eyes slowly adjusted to the dim light.
I threw the breaker back on and went upstairs. Then I went outside to hit a few more tennis balls around for
