kitchen talk

what's on your fridge!!!

His name ends in something that trails off. Daniel, maybe. Or Richie, or something ending in -o.

Either way, he said something about Pirandello and then something about Tarantino and you couldn’t say with confidence how one led to the other, only that they had, audibly, in the same sentence, in a kitchen, after a party, at some o’clock.

The fridge hummed. It has been humming since before you arrived, and it will hum after, and in between it hums, and that is the fridge’s whole thing.

He was holding a passion fruit yoghurt, which he had probably found in the fridge, and was now eating it very slowly, gesturing with the spoon in-between mouthfuls, and saying:

The teaspoon is the object most at home in the kitchen. It disappears into use, never a thing the way a broken chair is suddenly, terribly, a thing. Which is why, he said, when you find a teaspoon in an unexpected drawer, the shock is existential. You may become rather excited, nervous. You have met the teaspoon for the first time.

Is that right? you thought, trying to keep your eyes level.

“Right”.

He set his yoghurt down, nowhere near done. The fridge, he was saying, doesn’t stop entropy, per se. Nothing stops entropy, that’s not on offer, but it may slow it to a degree, and in doing so it makes a claim that no other domestic object makes, which is that the contents inside it are worth the energy required to keep them as they are. The fridge becomes a commitment device, a pinky promise.

Someone must’ve given him that idea. His mother, maybe, who would’ve once stood in a similar kitchen at a fridge not unlike this one and said if you open it, you eat it, Danielichieo.

You looked at the fridge, which had four magnets: Amsterdam’s skyline, a lemon, a cow in a knitted jumper, and the number for an emergency plumber. You looked at this number for quite a long time. You didn't need it, but it was easier to look at than the fridge, which had all of a sudden become a lot.

The cow’s jumper was small and red. Round neck. No buttons. The kind of jumper that is knitted by someone who loves you and has slightly misjudged your size. And there was a whole life in that, wasn’t there, you thought — not the cow, the jumper, the fact of it — because someone had decided that a cow needed a jumper, which means someone had looked at a cow and thought it looked cold. Someone had extended toward a cow the same domestic instinct they extended toward the people they fed and worried about and checked on. Had taken up their needles and worked at it, not quickly, you can’t do a jumper quickly, even a small one, and done the neck shaping and shoulder seam and maybe got the tension wrong once and had to undo it and start again, and when they finished they had a small jumper for a cow. Then that jumper went on a magnet. Then the magnet went on a fridge in, presumably, a city, next to an emergency plumber’s number, and it occurred to you, you thought, standing here at this hour, that the jumper was perhaps the most tender thing in the room, possibly in the building, possibly going quite far out from there in most directions.

Was the cow warm, where it was from? It was hard to know. It was a magnet. It had never been anywhere cold. And yet the jumper. It had been given something it did not need, out of love, by someone who imagined it might.

There is something in that, you thought. Though that’s the sort of thing he would say. Nevermind. You had been in this kitchen a while.

Daniel (for arguments sake) was still talking, about whether a kitchen is a room. In what sense, he was asking, is the kitchen experienced as a room and not as a function? Because a corridor isn’t a room. A corridor is a becoming, providing simple direction. But a kitchen is where the private and the appetitive meet. It’s the room that knows things about you. It catches you at your most vulnerable. Snacking, wet hair, maybe sneaking a cigarette with the fan on. This is how you first presumed that you were, in fact, in a kitchen.

“Yes, exactly,” he said, and looked at you with an expression signalling oh, you’re here — though you could’ve sworn you didn’t say anything.

He finished the yoghurt. Put the spoon in the pot.

“Kafka” Then a sentence. Then: “which is also, actually, what the gate is actually doing in that passage, if you—”

You took a sip of water. You had stopped following the argument and started following his hands, which moved in a way that seemed connected to what he was saying but also had a big ink stain on them which was annoying you. He was clumsy and probably didn’t shower before the party.

The oven clock blinked 00:00.

It had been saying 00:00 since you’d been in here. Either it was midnight, repeatedly, or someone had unplugged something years ago and it had just been wrong ever since.

You wondered whether this kitchen talk was in your head or wine was in your bloodstream, whether Daniel was a prophet or an echo, or a man who does this specifically in kitchens, after parties, to anyone who has the misfortune of entering. You thought about the emergency plumber’s number. You thought about the teaspoon heaping and heaping.

And Daniel is still speaking. But it’s softer now. Or perhaps you have curved, finally, into your own question mark, on the floor.