There sure was a lot of other stuff, though. I mean, Laura’s mom—or maybe her dad, who knows—really loved appliances. Because they had every sort of appliance you can possibly imagine.
For one thing they had this great dishwasher, which was the first thing that caught my eye. It was right under the sink counter, sort of built in, and it had this nifty glass front so you could actually see inside while the water squirted everywhere.
You’ll probably think I’m lying, but the truth is, we’ve never had a dishwasher. I mean at my house.
Well, actually, we did have one.
It was me.
It was always me.
I don’t know why, but my dad and mom, they thought it was somehow good for my soul or something if I spent a half hour every night washing all the dishes by hand.
So you can imagine how much I wanted a real dishwasher, and this one would have been the best. One Christmas I even asked Santa Claus to bring me a dishwasher. I was, like, thirteen at the time and didn’t even believe in Santa Claus, but I thought my parents might think it was cute, my asking and leaving a note and all that, but it didn’t work at all. I think it just pissed them off, and all I got was this stupid video game console I’ve never even played with.
I was happy to see Laura had such a good dishwasher, a really fabulous one, and she didn’t have to wash all those dishes by hand, although when she saw in my house one day that I didn’t have one, I must admit she made some pretty cutting comments about my family’s, you know, financial status that made me feel pretty bad.
But now I understood those comments a little better. I mean, if I had a dishwasher like this, I too would probably be a bit shocked to meet somebody who’d never had one at all.
Everything in Laura’s kitchen was like that. New and the best. The island table I talked about was, like, three inches thick of granite or something. The cabinets all had these sliding drawers that sort of rolled out on these casters, making everything easy to grab. The huge fridge had four doors—four doors—and was full of organic everything; Laura had certainly told the truth about that.
My mom likes organic too. I mean she likes it theoretically. She likes it, and then she buys what’s on sale.
The floor was some kind of tile with little pictures of birds in it, and it looked really pretty.
And everything was incredibly neat.
Everything was in perfect order.
I couldn’t help thinking again of my kitchen, because I swear to god, it’s pretty rough. I mean, it’s not like it looks like a bomb went off in it or anything, but most of the stuff came from my grandmother’s house and is, like, at least fifty years old, and some of the stuff, the table we have and the rickety chairs, they once belonged to my great-grandmother. And so every time I go into the kitchen it is like my mind is literally clouded with my heritage, walking through a collection of musty heirlooms until I feel like I live in a mausoleum, for god sakes, like just when I walk in every morning I’m bombarded with the past.
But it wasn’t like that in Laura’s kitchen at all. It was all just perfect, with none of what you might call the psychology of the past just bombing you, and after checking everything out I stepped back in front of the basement door, thinking and looking around.
The door to another room was about ten feet away, just beyond the table. The door was open, but I couldn’t see much of the room.
I listened for a while to be sure I was alone. And then, just for paranoia’s sake, I checked the ceiling again for cameras, but there was nothing.
So walking really quietly I went over to the doorway and, moving super slow, peeked into the next room.
Wow.
It was a dining room.
At least I think it was a dining room.
To tell you the absolute truth, I’d never really seen a dining room like that before. Well, maybe in a hotel or museum.
The giveaway was the table, of course. It was long and black and mirrored everything in the room, especially this range of windows in the wall, which shone off the table like it was made of glass. And there were these glass things on the table that looked like frozen splashes of water; they caught the light and sort of threw this crazy dazzle everywhere in the room, and these crazy lights hanging over the table looked like they were made of metal coils.
I must admit I was awestruck. I really wondered if I’d even be able to eat my dinner in this room. I didn’t know if I’d be able to digest anything; I thought I’d be too excited.
It was all just so untouched and perfect, and there were these nifty abstract paintings on the walls. I remembered Laura saying how her mom loved to collect stuff like that. One day when we were over at my house, upstairs making out, she told me all about it. We were lying there on my bed and we started talking about art, because Laura said she wanted to go to art school—she’d told me that a bunch of times—and she said that when she went to college she wanted to study to be an interior designer, and now I understood why, after seeing how perfect her house was.
I looked around the ceiling, but to tell the truth, with all that dazzle of light reflected off the table and those glass sculpture thingies, it was pretty hard to spot anything and not just be sort of hypnotized.
But
