Eleanor "Spoons" Redux, & Shelley Short

BACKGROUND: The story, (and novel excerpt) "Spoons," below, was originally published on this scroll on May 27, 2008. Since that time, we've been introduced to a terrific new song by Shelley Short, entitled "A Canoe." (Thank You to our good friend Rebecca Knaur for sharing this with us.) "A Canoe" and "Spoons" seem to be kindred spirits, in different genres. Listen to the song first, or read the story first, doesn't matter which -- Eleanor says she hopes you enjoy both. -- Geoff

http://daytrotter.com/article/1510/shelley-short

*
"Spoons,"
from Eleanor,
a novel by Geoff Schutt

("Spoons" was originally published in The Wastelands Review 1993, in a slightly different version.)

*
You can find your friends in inanimate objects, like spoons, for example. For example, you tell a spoon a story and it keeps it quiet. For example, you tell a spoon anything you want and it will be patient with you and it will never change because a spoon is a spoon.

There are friendship spoons. You give one to your best friend, and your best friend gives you one back. The spoon isn’t inanimate anymore because it holds your deepest, truest friendship, the kind of friendship you would do anything for. Sometimes you might even think you love your friend more than your parents, because who really understands you? Who can you really talk to? Who can you tell your secrets to, and not be afraid your secrets will be stolen and shared with the whole wide world?

You can tell a spoon anything. A spoon doesn’t get angry with you. A spoon doesn’t grow up and move away. A spoon is always a spoon. It will never let you down.

*
See, the party food was meant for fingers. The guests were drinking. They would not care for spoons when they got drunk.

Eleanor knew the type of person who would come to a party given by the Spains - you must mention Nina Spain first, because party-going was always her idea, and Jay Spain was just Eleanor's father, Nina's husband. You would never call Nina Jay's wife and get away with it, not around Nina at least. Eleanor listened in to enough telephone calls to know how her mother felt, hearing Nina Spain screaming at somebody trying to sell her something as the wife of Mr. Jay Spain.

*
Eleanor had to concentrate to keep this going. She collected the spoons from the silverware drawer. She took the sterling silver spoons from the china cabinet and went through the picnic supplies (which were a wedding gift, her father told her) for the plastic spoons.

There were dishes soaking, but after several hours, the water was cold and the soapy bubbles had disappeared. A dirty ring orbited the sink. A pan extended above the water like an iceberg. A cup floated on its side. Eleanor reached into the water for the spoons she might have missed.

Her parents didn't use the little spoons. They used the big spoons for stirring things they cooked in pans on the stove. They used the soup spoons for soup and the medium-sized spoons for eating ice cream, except sometimes her father used a big spoon for ice cream.

Eleanor counted her spoons.

Somewhere out there are spoons that will tell you stories instead of you always telling them. There are spoons for everything. There are Paul Revere's Ride spoons and Apostle spoons and World Series spoons.

Eleanor's mother and father owned seventy-eight bastard spoons.

She imagined herself as a spoon licked dry because her good stuff inside had run out.

*
She watched a lot of TV, when her parents weren't looking, late at night, when they thought she was asleep. There was one show on for three days straight. She committed it to memory. It was so much a part of her, that the fake talk show host and the fake guests, who were all trying to sell some intestinal cleansing miracle drink, began talking to Eleanor.

She began to ask them questions back. She was so tired, but she had to know the answers. Except, she hated the baby talk they tried to use on her.

"Why do you stare at me?" she said.

"We like you, Eleanor."

"Why do you like me?"

"We envy you. Your beautiful face. Your incredible intellect."

"Well," Eleanor said, "I hate you."

"We're sorry, Eleanor."

"Have you been lying to me?" she asked them.

*
Spoons are different. You can't kill a spoon, can you? Spoons are survivors, not people.

She went into the den and pick up the telephone and dialed a number, just a number off the top of her head. A man answered. He seemed willing to talk to her, to play along with this wrong number.

“Hello, my name is Eleanor,” she said.

“Where do you live, Eleanor?”

“I live in a castle, way up high in the clouds. I'm a forgotten princess.”

“Who forgot you, Eleanor?”

“A nasty green dragon brought me here. I sat on its wings. I toasted marshmallows over its fiery breath.”

She hung up the phone.

*
There was assertiveness training on TV. When people at work get you down because they don't listen to you, because you're maybe a little shy, or a lot shy, the end result doesn't change, but you can change. You can meet the challenge straight on.

That morning, Eleanor's mother rehearsed her party stories for her father. Nina Spain made Jay Spain practice his party stories, too. Everything was going to be just like those parties in The Great Gatsby, Nina Spain said. Which made Jay Spain give her a funny glance. Robert Redford was so gorgeous in that film, Nina said, and so Jay smiled. You will always need pictures and movement to go along with the words, won't you? he said sarcastically.

Eleanor was sitting at the breakfast table too, feeling ignored. She watched one parent and then watched the other. They were so alike and so different. It was like their worlds were the same worlds but they each had to be the king. And since they couldn't be king in the other's world, they went back to their own world, which was exactly the same, except for the fact it was all theirs to do with as they pleased.

*
Eleanor crawled along the floor as if there were a fire and this was the only safe place to be. Then she went outside.

They were living in an apartment then. The Spains had reserved the recreation room for the party, though of course it had already spilled back over into their apartment. Nina had hired decorators. She paid people to tend bar and to serve the party food you had to eat with your fingers, or at most, with a toothpick. There was more preparation for this party than for most wedding receptions. That's what Jay Spain said. But in order for his world not to contradict Nina's world, he had to be like a neutral kingdom, like Switzerland. Be part of it but don't get involved.

Eleanor watched the guests stroll into the party. This is what they did, too, how they moved: strolled. Arm in arm. Very elegant. Everybody's a show-off, Eleanor thought. Everybody needs to be the best. Tell the best stories, the funniest jokes, wear the prettiest dress, talk about the brightest children (but children should be talked about and not seen).

*
Eleanor smiled because she had her seventy-eight bastard spoons in a paper sack under her arm. The spoons were heavy but she was strong.

She kept track of which cars the party guests drove. She wrote down the license numbers of the neighbors' cars. She had nothing against the neighbors. She didn't even know the neighbors.

She didn't know the party guests either, but the party guests knew her parents, so it was the same difference. The party guests and her parents. They were part of the same crowd.

Eleanor opened the gas tank of the first party guest car and slid in one of the spoons. It was a sugar spoon and went all the way down. She heard a splash when it hit the gasoline.

In four gas tanks, the spoons disappeared completely. In two gas tanks, the spoons wouldn't go in entirely because of their shape, so Eleanor left them half in and half out. She placed the gas tank covers on the pavement, underneath the cars.

When she finished, she began stabbing spoons into the grass next to the parking lot. She filled up a glass jar with gasoline siphoned from one of the tanks. She'd seen it done in a movie. It was easy enough to do. She was surprised by how easy it was to siphon somebody's gas. If people knew how easy it was, and how many gas tanks don't have those locks on the covers, they'd never have to buy their gas again.

She had collected her baby pictures earlier, before the party started, and now she was spreading these out on the grass in between her spoons. It was like a weird game of croquet.

The TV people were back, watching her. They were saying, Who's that on the grass? There's some girl on the grass! (Why didn't they recognize her? Eleanor wondered.)

She was a giant compared to her baby pictures. Eleanor could hear them talking among themselves. What a princess, they said. She must be one lucky girl, they said. She must be very rich and she must have many brothers and sisters, all as beautiful as she is.

Wrong! Eleanor wanted to scream. Wrong!

Her mother disowned her. She's not my little girl, her mother said.

Next she saw her father. Her father said, Those aren't real baby pictures, can't you tell? These are pictures cut from a magazine.

Her mother said, Who could have done this to our grass?

Her father agreed that it was very tragic. Her father said, Why do bad things always happen to good people like us? We're funny and people like us, so why are we so picked on?

*
She had all of the TV happy endings memorized. And she was going to be the star of this happy ending and her spoons were her friends and their kingdom was the party guests and the fortune, the gold and the jewels, was that she had forgotten to blow up the cars because it really wasn't any of their faults, not the party guests. She was so small, any one of them could have walked right by and not even noticed her.

One of the party guests was leaving early. He unlocked his car. His car had one of the spoons that wouldn't fit all the way in the gas tank. The end of the spoon was a shining star that reflected off the moon as the car weaved down the driveway.

She gathered up the spoons that were left. She pulled them out of the ground one by one, but she left her baby pictures on the grass. Maybe somebody would find her baby pictures, except Eleanor would have to break the news that she wasn't that sweet pretty baby anymore. She'd grown up along the way. Would they want to love her just the same? Or would she be like one of the leftover older girls at the orphanage.

*
She was inside the apartment. People weren't supposed to be inside the apartment but they were. They were supposed to be in the rec room. This was a party out of control. She had crawled like a commando so no one could see her. She hid under the kitchen table, which was draped with one of those plastic party table covers. She could see the legs of the party guests. The legs were circling the table. It was as if they were fighting a duel. Or dancing a tango without music. Eleanor dared not breathe. She closed her eyes. She could toss on the spoons onto the floor and what would the party guests say?

This is what they would say, Eleanor thought. They would run to her mother and say, You have ghosts or something. The legs would find her and would put her on top of the table. Eleanor was thinking about that old TV show, Love Connection, in reruns on the Game Show Channel. She liked the bad dates best when the guests got nasty and the host, Chuck Woolery, had to change the subject.

Her mother was waving her arms. Don't do this, Eleanor. You don't know what you're doing!

My spoons will protect me, Eleanor said. I watched it on TV, Eleanor said.

And the late-night TV people, if they were there too, they would say, Yes, Eleanor, you are glowing. Your reflection from the spoons is a sight to behold.

*
She crawled along the wall from the kitchen to the hallway, then to her bedroom. She didn't know why there were all these people inside the apartment anyway, when the rec room was all reserved for their party. People just naturally go where they are not supposed to go.

They will want to go behind every closed door. They will want to peek on her when she is sleeping. She'll sit up quickly and go, Boo!

She was in her own bed now. Where she started from. She had an ashtray on her lap. She struck a match and watched it flicker. Her room lit up like a cave. Just Eleanor and her spoons, spread over her blankets in front of her.

She could smell her mother's perfume.

She heard her father's muffled cough.

But in her cave, even though her matches were all gone, Eleanor felt warm. She'd gone on a mission and returned with hardly a scratch. She was stronger now than when she started. Her parents couldn't keep her from improving herself.

*
At times like this, Eleanor felt perfect. Her spoons danced for her and told her funny little stories and she could hear her mother and father snoring so loud the walls shook and no one bothered her and her TV show didn't come on for another hour and there was a chocolate cake mix in the cupboard and plenty of fried chicken in the freezer and someday she would take her spoons to Disney World to see Mickey Mouse but for now, she was all her spoons needed.