Valley of the Trolley Dollies

L’objet

“So?”

“Hmmm.”
”What?”

“Where’d you get it?”

“Marve and Carole.”

“Ah. The In-Laws. Well…”

“I know.”

“May I ask…?”

“It’s for flowers.”

“Of course. I was thrown. The shape. Those protuberances. That – what is that?”

“Rock Crystal. It’s hand-blown.”

“From Marve? Quelle surprise!”

We’re in the kitchen. Vince is looking at the objet. It’s obviously fabulous. And obviously designed to reside on a long, polished, mahogany table in a Hyannisport dining room, as the sun streams in through clear antique glass windows, the New England light making the abstract archetypes – Adam and Eve? Rock and Doris? – dance, as the spectrum waves around them distractingly.

Distraction. That’s what we need. Vince and I. I have no idea what the houses in Hyannisport are like. Have never seen the New England light. Am unlikely ever to understand why my in-laws saw fit to gift my husband and me with “A piece in Crystal entitled Ennui and Avocado by the Icelandic surrealist and glass-sucker Ivor Sakkascchitsonnn,” as the label from Christies New York describes it.

Look at it. As the dingy Crawley sunlight sadly squints at it, like a drunk pissing on a bin-bag. Gape at it, as my ex-boyfriend and I stand in the kitchen, Tesco’s Finest Rioja swilling around our glasses.

“So what’s Bryan say?”

Bryan’s my husband. Or, more precisely, my registered Civil Partner. Whatever: He’s the man whose parents have left myself and the lovely Vince with the overwhelmingly important issue of just where to park Ennui and Avocado.

“Bryan says we should put it on eBay.”

“And Marve and Carole? I didn’t see them at the Swan Lake Suite last July. They missed their own son’s wedding?”

“Well, Carole was in L.A. doing a lyric for a tune that might end up on an album of songs from and inspired by a film starring either Julia Roberts or that bird who wasn’t Phoebe in Friends. And Marv was stuck in New York trying to ‘move from A Flat to G minor without it sounding obvious, clashing, or dissonant’.”

“And, one supposes, without a bridge or a rope ladder. I repeat: What’s Bryan say?”

“Bryan says The Dow’s up.”

“Nice. Decent Holiday this year, then.”

“Mauritius. Private Islet.”

“Nice.”

“Still… What do I do with?”

“Shove a Lily in her hand and a Gerbera in his gland. That is his gland, isn’t it?”

“But where do I put it? I mean, it’s a one-bedroomed flat. Where do I put a vase like that?”

“A vase? Oh, sweetheart, that’s not a vase: That’s a hate crime.”

This entry was posted on Friday, December 15th, 2006 at 8:33 am and is filed under Fiction etc.. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.