Dear Diary: Pushing and Pulling
For almost two hours this afternoon, Quatorze and I toiled in the apartment, with Q doing most of the toiling. At one point, an importunate Fossil Darling telephoned. I had to tell him that Quatorze could not take the call because he was busy screwing on the floor. Wonderful seconds of dead silence. You know, I wish I could remember how those dumb old jokes went; you know, the ones with “they pushed, they pulled, they pushed, they pulled, and then — ” but all I can remember are the “shut up” jokes. —Mommy, Mommy, I don’t want to go to Europe. —Shut up and keep swimming!
Now I remember how the push/pull jokes went. “And then they got out of the car to see about the tire.” I do love the dumb jokes of childhood. (“See this lump in my shoe?”) Not that I don’t appreciate a crackling bon mot. We used to tell one about Eleanor Roosevelt at the United Nations. She was introducing Ambassador Adlai Stevenson, “who led the Democratic Party in Nineteen-Hundred-and-Fifty-Tooooo [think Streep as Child] and again in Nineteen-Hundred-and-Fifty-Six” — at which point some character in the peanut gallery called out, with Bronx-cheer gusto, “Adlai Stevenson’s an ass!” To which the imperturbable former First Lady replied, “Nevertheless!” To tell you the truth, I had made this joke an entertaining staple of my repertoire before I realized that it probably hadn’t happened verbatim.
Where was I? Oh, yes: Quatorze was screwing on the floor. He was screwing the “bridge table” together. It would be difficult to play any game of cards, much less bridge, on the “bridge table,” which is in fact a console or sofa table, meant to stand against the wall in a corridor or behind a sofa. I think that I know why it’s called a “bridge table,” but it’s too boring to go into. The long and the short of the story is that once homes had been found for the items of furniture that were, in a sort of cold-fusion chain-reaction, displaced by the “bridge table,” the apartment looked almost exactly as it had done before the toiling and screwing. —Shut up and keep digging!
Seriously, by tomorrow afternoon, even I won’t remember what we did. So you might wonder why we bothered. I certainly do. I’d better think of something, though, or Quatorze (who did all the work, after all) will weigh in with a Comment. Did I mention the Chinese footbaths? It was so that there would be room for the Chinese footbaths behind the love seat in the window. Yes! That was it. The Chinese footbaths.
When Will paid his first state visit to the apartment last week, one of the two Chinese footbaths had arrived. I made a joke about how it was big enough to give Will a bath in, but even though I did not come out and call it a “Chinese footbath,” Megan didn’t see the humor. She missed the ha-ha. I think that all that she could see was her son’s cracked skull. I am writing this down now so that, when Will inherits the Chinese footbaths, he will have a good joke with which to entertain his friends.
We pushed, we pulled. Then I got back to work on the Book Review review.