you’re the one who’s behaving in a demeaning manner!”
“How dare you?” Emily’s eyes were ablaze. “You think we don’t know what you’re up to here? When you contacted Daddy about doing this demo, you made it sound like it’d be nothing more than a fact-finding effort to be done privately and in good faith, not a media free-for-all! You and your employer, Mr. Joss Parker, are nothing more than a pack of PR hounds who’d roll over and play dead for extra airtime or another photo in the glossies!”
“Well, we’ve found our facts, haven’t we?” Marjorie gestured at Mr. Newcomb. “Your father got his potato chip sandwich at no risk to life or limb. Yes, the Careme 6000 does seem to be a bit of a wine snob, but if you think a mere touch of attitude is the same as hate speech, you’re not only trivializing a truly deadly social ill, you’ve also just committed it yourself, live and on the air!”
Emily gaped at the accusation. “You’re crazy!”
“And that makes your second offense,” Marjorie countered gleefully. “Casting aspersions on the state of my mental health and doing so using a term that demeans the mentally ill? For shame. Plus your previous statement, calling my respected employer and me PR hounds? Allegations of bestiality are simply not accept-”
“My apologies to the canine population,” Emily snarled. “One test demonstration of this death-tra-kitchen doesn’t settle anything.”
“Oh, I think it’s settled plenty.” Marjorie pressed the advantage, playing to the cameras. “It’s shown the world one litigious woman’s blatant attempt at extorting money from two respectable corporations on the flimsiest possible grounds. The Careme 6000 has just demonstrated that it works quickly, efficiently, and safely, that it is far from the big, bad, family-endangering oogie-boogie that you claim it is. Its grasp of so-called hate speech is about three notches below ‘I see London, I see France!” And if that makes you want to file suit against me for hate speech against your underpants, Ms. Newcomb, wait right here; I’ll alert the Supreme Court.”
Boone Newcomb finished his potato chip sandwich and tried to make peace. “Now, Miz Marjorie, you’ve gotta forgive our little girl. Maybe she did kinda overreact to the troubles we’ve been having with this newfangled kitchen, but she’s got her reasons. Something about the way the Careme gizmo talks about wine, it always set her off, carrying on about how it was an insult to the whole family, and how even though we weren’t all city-wise celebrities and such, that was no reason for us to take that kind of treatment lying down. Mama and me, we’d sooner have Merle Haggard than merlot, so we’d just laugh it off when that voice tried to get us to drink something besides an ice tea or maybe a beer. But poor Emily June took it all seriously, busting into tears at every dang meal until finally we told her to do what she wanted about it.” He looked sheepish. “So she did.”
“Daddy!” Emily’s face flooded with color. “Whose side are you on?”
“Yours, baby girl,” Boone said soothingly. “But let’s be honest: Mama and me never would’ve let you take things this far if not for all the heartbreak you were going through. We hoped it’d take your mind off the man who-”
“Man?” Marjorie stared at Emily. “There’s a man involved? You initiated this whole ugly mess-you endangered the reputations of two major corporations and my job security-not because of any real consumer safety issues, not out of simple, lawsuit-happy greed, but to take your mind off the fact that you got dumped by some man?”
And then, she did something that she knew she should not have done, under the circumstances: she looked Emily June straight in the eye with blatant, unambiguous, camera-readable pity. Not sorrow, not sympathy, not woman-to-woman understanding, but deliberate, lowdown, it-sucks-to-be-you pity.
Marjorie’s look hit Emily June like a slap across her beautiful face. Livid, she whirled back to the control panel. “Kitchen!” she yelled. “I’m hungry. Access freezer bin #4 and display the contents, now!”
What the-? Marjorie was taken aback by Emily’s bizarre reaction, but before she could say a word, a knee-high panel on the far wall moved aside and a silver platform slid up and out into the light. Upon it rested a row of furred, frozen bodies, each about the size of a small salami.
“Are those-?” A young reporter’s voice trembled. His microphone shook in his hand. “Are those really-?”
“Squirrels.” Marjorie had the guts to say what everyone else didn’t want to believe.
“His squirrels,” Emily June clarified. She crossed the room to gaze down at the row of tiny bodies. “He used to take me out to all the fancy New York restaurants. I’d tease him about how the food was good, but it wasn’t a patch on my favorite down-home meal. When he offered to get me the makings for a good old-fashioned squirrel stew, I thought he wanted to show that he cared about me.”
“Of course,” Marjorie muttered too softly for Emily to hear. “What girl wouldn’t be thrilled to have her boyfriend say it with squirrels?”
“He shot them himself one weekend when the two of us were staying at his place in the Berkshires.” Tears brimmed in Emily’s eyes. “And after he had them cleaned, quick-frozen, and packed for travel, he told me that it was all over between us, that I was squirrel, he was Sevruga; I was possum, he was pate; I was slumgullion, but he was done slumming it with me.” She raised her chin sharply. “My looks were what hooked him, but they couldn’t hold him. You see, I wasn’t a celebrity. He said that any two-bit billionaire could date a beautiful woman, but the media only cared if you dated someone famous, and he only cared about making the media pay attention to him. Well, how famous am I now, Joss Parker?” she hollered at the cameras. “Because I’ll tell you what, it’s nowhere near as famous as I’m about to be!”
“Impossible!” Marjorie objected. “Mr. Parker must’ve heard your name a hundred times since you started this mess, but he never gave any sign that he recognized-”
“He doesn’t know,” Emily replied. “I was hosting one of Daddy’s clients at Le Cirque when we met en route to the rest rooms. He presumed I was a supermodel and I let him. I told him my professional name was-” She looked away briefly. “-Grenouille. Even when he found out I wasn’t famous, he never learned my real name.”
She jerked her head up, shame ceding to rage once more. “How dare you make me relive that humiliation!” Emily June slapped the panel above the tray of frozen squirrels. “Kitchen! I want a squirrel stew and I want it pronto!”
“Y-yes, mademoiselle.” The voice of the Careme 6000 sputtered only a trifle. “A squirrel stew… Er. Mademoiselle did you say ‘squirrel’? Not… squab? My audio sensors have been a trifle undertuned of late and I-”
“Squirrel.”
“Ve-ry good, mad-e-moi-selle.”
Marjorie felt a dreadful pang of apprehension. The kitchen’s voice sounded distinctly tense, tightly strung. She recalled something from the online tutorial briefing she’d taken prior to marketing her first Mequizeen-equipped home: early detection of most malfunctions is a snap, and easily diagnosed before serious consequences can arise. Our diagnostic software is programmed to reflect incipient breakdowns via the kitchen’s vox humana. In other words, imagine you’ve got a full-time, four-star, naturally temperamental French chef working for you. Pay attention to what he says and how he says it. Above all, never presume that a potentially bad situation will get better on its own. You wouldn’t ignore a real chef’s displeasure, would you? This impish rhetorical question was illustrated with a jolly animated cartoon of a chef, white toque erupting like a volcano, flinging bloody cleavers everywhere.
“Ms. Newcomb, wait!” Marjorie cried. “Perhaps we should postpone the rest of this demonstra-”
“Emily June, Miz Marjorie’s right,” Boone said. “We shouldn’t go on with this, not with you feeling so-”
“We will go on,” Emily gritted. “Kitchen! You’ve got your orders. Get going.”
“Yes, mademoiselle.” If possible, the kitchen sounded even grimmer and more indomitable than Emily. “One… squirrel stew, tout de suite.” The tray with the tiny corpses began to retract, but Emily shot out a staying hand before it could vanish from sight.
“Not so fast.” She bared her teeth. “Aren’t you going to ask me what I want to drink with that?”
Something in the kitchen began to make a thin, skin-tingling, crackling noise. It sounded like a cross between arcing electricity and human bones slowly being crushed to powder. “Ah,” the kitchen said. “An appropriate beverage to accompany ragout d’ecuerreil, yes. My… pleasure. No doubt one of your unique palate is aware that squirrel needs a big, bold red. Something from Domaine Colt, peut-etre? A robust zinfandel which will pair the black fruit and pepper notes of the wine with the gamy taste of the meat. I will of course make sure that some of the wine is used in the preparation of the dish. It’s best if the squirrel comes from the same vineyard as the wine, but one cannot have everything one-”
“Milk,” Emily said doggedly. “Chocolate milk. Stirred, not sha-”
“I’ll give you chocolate milk and squirrel, you hopeless hick!” The Careme 6000’s overwrought shriek shook the walls. Panels slammed back, revealing rack upon rack of ominously clattering cutlery. The dishwasher opened and vomited up a sudsy tsunami. The coffee maker carafe shattered as the machine itself sent a geyser of boiling cappucino spurting skyward.
Then the frozen squirrels flew.
To her dying day, Marjorie couldn’t say exactly how the Careme 6000 managed to launch the rock-hard varmints like a flight of furry missiles. It was the most sophisticated piece of food-handling equipment on earth: it found a way. The kitchen echoed with the howls of wounded reporters, caught in the barrage. The room was crisscrossed with the same golden beams of light that Marjorie had praised earlier as a safety feature. Now they were transformed into targeting devices to make any sniper proud. No sooner did one icy squirrel hit its mark and bounce off than the kitchen floor beneath it opened. The body-cum-brickbat was swallowed up and relaunched at its next target in a glorious display of recycling gone horribly, horribly wrong.
Boone and Betsy Newcomb had good instincts: they hit the floor the instant the first frostbitten critter took wing. Marjorie didn’t wait for an invitation to join them. Top-notch New York City realtors were top-notch survivors too. The three of them cowered together while the kitchen rained rodents and the voice of the Careme 6000 called its owners everything from tin-plated, mouth-breathing hayseeds to inbred trailer-park trash to an astonishing set of verbal variations in the key of redneck. And through it all, Emily June Newcomb stood howling with glee, her point proven, her vendetta against Joss Parker complete.
She never saw the squirrel that got her. No one ever does.
*** The Newcomb-Parker nuptials were the wedding of the season. Marjorie served as matron of honor, walking down the aisle with a wreath of oak leaves perched atop her head. They were silk, of course, and the acorns a marvel of the master goldsmiths employed by Cartier. As she stood with the other wedding guests to toast
