Mrs. Stamp

A little dialogue played one morning in Mrs. Terrel Stamp's head:

Don't sit on that knife.

I can sit on these knives?

Yes. Sit on those, but not on that one there.

These here are okay?

Yes. Sit right on them.

Like this?

Yes. You can squirm down on them, they won't hurt you.

Are they rubber?

No, they are not rubber. God. They are just . . . well, sittable knives, and that one is not a sittable knife.

Mrs. Terrel Stamp had many things on her mind, but foremost was marble cake in the morning. It was cold outside and she was happy to have her ingredients inside. She might go outside but if she did it would not be because she had to but because she wanted to. She liked to let good cold air come up her skirt for just a shot, then head back to the oven she could stand near while making the cake. She specialized in marble cake because she liked the wide tolerances involved in folding in the marbling fudge cake. There was not a right way or a wrong way to fold. If what was in one bowl got into what was in the other bowl, you had succeeded, more or less. You could do it without taking your eyes off a soap opera. There was precision cooking, and certainly other precision adventures in life, and Mrs. Terrel Stamp sought to avoid them. She liked loose, relaxed things, like popping out into the snow in a skirt for a minute, making a cake while looking at TV, leaning against the stove and thinking about nothing but how nice the stove was after the snow, how good the cake was beginning to smell, how crummy the soaps were but you kept watching largely because they were crummy. That was their point: loose art for the loose. You could have a marble cake that was not pretty, just as you could have, say, a Dalmation with heavy unattractive spots, but you liked the dog anyway, and you liked the cake too. That's how she liked life—heavy or clumsy or inelegant or not smart, but good anyway.

When the children got home from school in the afternoon she remembered who they were and how many there were and loved them. Raising children was the loosest, most imprecise art of the widest conceivable tolerances to her mind of any enterprise on earth, except perhaps drug addiction of the terminal sort. Half of daily television was now devoted to the premise that already loose parents should not attempt to raise children. She'd seen a sixty-year-old mother in a bikini try to mount a talk-show host in front of her own daughter. This had of course been an attempt to tighten up the daughter. The mother was screwed-up, of course, but she was not incognizant of the underlying principles at work: appear tight, stay loose. The mother had hit on the errant proposition of appearing loose as well, an experiment that was failing. The daughter was aghast at the mother, though, so it was debatable really whether the experiment would fail. It was unlikely, at any rate, that the daughter was going to try to mount the host after the mother had pawed him. And she would now in all likelihood hesitate before wearing an immodest bathing suit. Perhaps the crazed mother was a genius. She was a bag of frenetic cellulite with badly dyed hair. Mrs. Stamp could not see her keepin' on keepin' on too much longer.

The show made her nervous, as they all did: an entire industry predicated on, and capitalizing on, the fact that Americans did not know how to properly have children or to eat. The soap operas tried to demonstrate the opposite fiction: that we were infinitely sexy and slim and in and out of love in a mysterious and glamorous continuum. Television offered a dramatic, commercialized equivalent to her little polar minuet between the cold snow and the warm stove.

In a contemplative penseroso of this sort one morning in her kitchen...