2009-05-19 - 4:49 p.m.
A reverie on a very particular, probably not-true picture of mid- to late-seventies probably-Suburban America:
When I read Raymond Carver stories, the ones where fucked-up thirty-five-year-olds sit around the kitchen table, smoking cigarettes and drinking cocktails until they say something outrageous and awful and irrevocable, I think, every time, of the kitchen table in our Cresaptown house, the one we lived in from my ages 6 to 10. My parents have never drank liquor, but I imagine that kitchen table, kids safely in bed just down the hallway a bit there, cellophane tearing off packs of Kents, a bottle of Johnny Walker red slid out of its brown paper bag, tax-label ripped, screw-top cracked. Nina Simone on the record player, or the Mamas and the Papas, or even the Talking Heads, if they're younger or cool enough.
I've never lived that kind of life--and if it's a Carver story, I'll pass--but yet I think about it more than I'd ever have thought. My grandparents lived that life, a few decades before: bridge and scotch, cigarettes and no-seatbelt-driving on the ride home, Elks Club dances on Saturday nights, Mass the next morning. And here's where that kind of never-lived-it nostalgia always takes me: Did my mom's dad, the small-town bank vice president, ever bang some other woman? Were there one-in-the-morning, where-are-my-cigarettes I-shouldn't-tell-you-this declarations of love lost? Maybe I've read too many of these kinds of stories. But, fact is, when I think of Johnny Walker scotch, or certain kinds of off-brand cigarettes, or the game of bridge, or cocktail peanuts, my mind goes to that house in Cresaptown, with its perfect little four-person kitchen table, the little limb of countertop nearby that would've been just right, perfect, for an ice bucket. I don't know why I make this connection, other than to say that the world--even Kent brand cigarettes--comes with a crayon box full of colors and a whole house full of smells.
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