These People Are Us by George Singleton

Author:George Singleton [Price, Ethan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dzanc Books
Published: 2011-11-22T22:08:17+00:00

Caulk

ELAINE INSISTED ON more silicone, and I stood my ground at least twenty-four hours on how she didn't need it. I said there was a reason for honest ventilation, for breathing, and that too much silicone would hamper this process. I mentioned how it would be obvious to her both winter and summer, when everything unnatural in the world either contracted or expanded. This was fall—late October—in South Carolina. At noon the temperature got up to the mid-seventies, but the humidity was a low 60 percent. There existed no other time to paint a house.

"If you don't caulk right then you'll have to do the job again before the year's out," Elaine said. "I know what I’m doing, Louis. Remember—I lived in Mexico City the spring semester of my junior year in college."

I didn't get the connection. We stood outside. I held a caulk gun in my right hand, with about half of the tube gone. It was the first one of the third case. I turned the lever down so no silicone spilled out, so caulk didn't exude out on my beat-up no-name-brand tennis shoes, making me undergo flashbacks of a time at the Auto Drive-In with my first high school girlfriend who almost gave it up. I said, ''I've caulked every goddamn seam, Elaine. I've caulked boards that were welded together—that were petrified, by God—and needed caulk about as much as a goat needs a can opener."

Elaine held nothing. She stood with her hands on her hips and looked at the soffit and fascia. She looked at a point twenty feet off the ground and said, ''You didn't smooth that bead down. You missed a spot."

This was near dusk. Elaine had come home from work hoping to find me—I know—not working on the house like I'd promised. Some time earlier in the week I'd been drinking, and as drinkers might be wont to do I'd said the house needed painting unless we wanted someone like Andrew Wyeth hanging out in the front yard thinking we lived in a weather-beaten barn, and that I didn't have much else to do, seeing as I'd gotten mad at my last boss and quit a job driving oxygen canisters around to hackers and wheezers. Elaine said, "It needs to be scraped and caulked hard, Louis. Why don't you let me hire someone to do the job right. There's no need to even talk about it if you don't feel committed to do the job right."

Of course I took all her talk to be a challenge, and didn't understand that she knew how to wind me up like a cheap metal mouse that skitters across linoleum floors. I said, "Why would a complete painting stranger care about how this house turns out?" I felt my one eye starting to travel off. We stood outside, still. I pretended to check the soffit and fascia, too. I said, "Personally I think I'm ready to paint tomorrow. If you want, I'll go over the whole house again with caulk.

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