Rootie Kazootie by Lawrence Naumoff

Author:Lawrence Naumoff
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2011-08-30T00:00:00+00:00

Cynthia served. If she’d been playing tennis, every shot would have been in, every stroke perfect, every ace a breathtaking act of precision and grace. Her footwork could have inspired a dance, a ballet as light and effortless as the flight of a bird soaring on the currents.

Cynthia served. Richard received. At the end of the meal, Cynthia had won. Richard hadn’t even figured out what to do, or where to stand, or how to hold the racquet. He’d just sat there and watched this woman and wondered at his luck.

A week or so ago, he’d been chased around by this sad and crazy person he’d married. She’d run at him like a duck, armless, and quacking and clumsy.

He ate the food and sat in the chair and leaned on his elbow and smiled and watched this woman dance for him, and he wondered, marveled, at his luck.

“It’s the quiet, you know,” he said soon after they finished.

“I know. You’ve told me.”

“She was always talking. I didn’t know. I thought, well, maybe they’re all that way. I didn’t know.”

“It’s always something,” she said. “It could be talking, it could be not talking. It’s always something.”

The house was so quiet that the only sounds were the refrigerator and the central sir-conditioning turning on and off. The refrigerator was frost free. It ran a lot. It had a system that heated up parts of it quickly and melted away the frost. Then the compressor cycled on again and cooled everything off again. After it turned on and the motor and compressor smoothed out, you could hear the water dripping into the pan underneath the unit.

Outside, the heat pump did the same thing. It was like a refrigerator itself. In the winter, the pistons went one way and took whatever heat it could extract from the air and blew it back into the house. In the summer, the pistons reversed direction and somehow took the cool from the air and gave it back to the house.

It was a little bit magical. Technologically speaking. It was the emperor’s new clothes of heating and air-conditioning. Everyone believed it would work, so it did.

It was the kind of thing that, if studied real hard, didn’t make sense. It had a logic and operating rationale that went beyond the everyday life experience of turning steering wheels, for instance, in which it was easy to understand that turning the thing around moved the wheels and the car followed.

The heat pump, which pumped the heat either in or out, had an invisible life, like the insides of any guarded construction. It was fragile behind all that sheet metal. A little shock on the Freon tubes and the whole thing would shut down. It could be damaged easily, but left to its own it would magically continue.

It sat there, like a house sits on a piece of land, like people sit in a house, only as safe as what does not happen, only as safe as what does not go wrong.

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