Better Off_ Flipping the Switch on Technology - Eric Brende [84]
One day Mary served sautéed pork as the main course of a meal accompanied by sweet potatoes and apple crisp. The chunks of pork were white, tender, and well seasoned.
“This almost tastes like chicken!” I exclaimed. Then I paused. Mary frowned. Was it chickenlike pork or porklike chicken? We didn’t know.
But perhaps it was best not to think back to the preparation of the meat. As we prepared to behead a live chicken, Mary would hold the bird’s body and wings, looking away while I stretched out the neck and lowered the axe. The first stroke was usually lethal enough, but since I was fearful of striking my own thumb, several more were necessary to sever the last connections. One time, however, I half-missed on the first stroke. The chicken sailed out of Mary’s arms with blood spurting everywhere. I don’t know why Mary chose to wear a chiffon blouse for this occasion. It took a while to catch the thing and finish the job, and it was the end of the blouse.
Our pot of boiling water for feather-plucking proved to be too small. The first time I dunked a fresh-killed chicken into it, the water overflowed all over the stove, creating a gooey and unappetizing slime. So I poured out some of the water. This left us too little. The remaining bath did not cover the dead chicken, and we didn’t have any more hot water on hand. I tried ladling water over the chicken in hopes that this would loosen the feathers. Mary, meanwhile, was becoming demoralized. Rivulets of lukewarm bloody-brown liquid coursing over the carcass of a zonked chicken emitting a chicken-death-smell made her gag. As the water cooled, rigor mortis set in. It had been difficult enough battling a chicken when it was alive and wanted to stay that way. Now that it was dead, its feathers were still hanging on.
As a musician I tended to tune in too closely to my surroundings. When there was dissonance in the air, there was dissonance in my psyche. I could even internalize changes in the weather. This made me especially susceptible in the wintertime and might have accounted for some of my sullenness. When the sky darkened, so did my mien. It was not the long winter evenings by kerosene lamplight that got to me; it was the short gray days, the low leaden cloud banks. The very heavens seemed to brood. Because of a long, low porch on the south side of our house, little light penetrated our living quarters even when the sun shone. A standard sixty-watt incandescent lightbulb might have helped.
Lacking this, I began to feel that playing some cards would cheer me up—specifically a good game of bridge. The thought hounded my light-asphyxiated brain like the craving of a heroin junkie for a needle. My parents had belonged to two bridge clubs, and growing up, I had sometimes filled in for absent players.
A retired couple we’d met once in town had mentioned that they played and gave me their phone number in case we ever wanted to hook up. We didn’t have a phone, but that didn’t stop me. “Mary, let’s go for a ride.”
“What, right now? Where?”
“To the Brailowskis’. To play bridge.”
“Who are they?”
“Don’t you remember meeting them in town? They said they’d like to play sometime.”
“But I don’t know how to play bridge.”
“That’s all right. You can be the dummy.”
“Thanks a lot. So we’re like just gonna drive over to these people we don’t even know and announce the bridge game to them?”
“We can call them from the Minute Mart.”
“This sounds a little…”
“Pretty please…”
It was twenty-five or more miles along narrow roller-coaster roads to the opposite end of the county and a small lake I had never seen before. Mr. Brailowski greeted me at the door and gaped as I rapidly repeated my gratitude for having us over. During the game I had the feeling