My wife is excellent at organizing
the fridge. It’s a gift. People will open the refrigerator
doors and stand in the draft of cold air, marveling at the
precision with which the food has been packed. Despite the
sheer volume of produce, the vegetable drawers are always
easy to access, and you never have a problem selecting the
carrots or the tomatoes, even if a normal person would have
just piled them in there. And the dairy and meat drawers
are a wonder of comestible engineering. A treatise or two
could be written on space-saving theories developed from
her use of the freezer.
When I say that it’s a gift,
I mean that literally, in the old sense. It was a gift from
the gods. Well, now that I think about it, perhaps “gift” isn’t
the right word. It’s not like the Greek God of Electrical
Kitchen Appliances swooped down one day and expanded her
innate understanding of refrigerator organization. In actual
fact, she had to defeat the god in ritual combat for the
prize.
Kefalotyri is his name, one
of the oldest of the new Greek pantheon. He is sometimes
known as the glow in the cold of night. The Etruscans knew
him as the Bringer of Toast. The Pennsylvania Dutch look
away at the very mention of his name. A tribe in suburban
Lima, Peru, travel every Easter to the temple they built
for him on Lake Titicaca. They speak only ancient Quechua,
but the translation of his multisyllabic and nearly unpronounceable
name is rendered in English simply as, “The Waffler.” He
has had many others names, all but a few lost over the centuries,
most of them in the back of the cupboard.
As new things often do when
they start to become old, Kefalotyri was tired and aimless.
He had lost the energy that had once driven him to inspire
innovations beyond the expectations of mortal man. He was
unable to think of the next plateau, the next bread maker,
the next microwave oven. He finally cracked after spending
weeks tormenting the dreams of a chosen disciple, letting
his godly fury pour forth to fill the mortal’s mind with
visions of domestic demons that still needed to be conquered,
the kitchen horrors that only a new electronic tool could
remedy.
His disciple had risen in the
middle of the night and feverishly drawn out the plans for
a refrigerator unlike any other. Actually, it was pretty
much exactly like every other. Except that in the door, beside
the ice and water dispensers, this one also had a vent that
shot a blast of blistering hot steam at you when you pushed
a button.
Kefalotyri hung his head. He
thought about smiting the disciple, but even that was too
much for him. He needed to prove his godly worth. He needed
to toy with a mortal. It was then that he laid eyes on my
wife, and saw that her pride in her refrigerator organization
skills could be her fatal flaw. Despite his recent setbacks,
he smiled. A short time later, through the usual Greek standards—the
appearance in a cloud, the disembodied booming voice, the
attempted rape by a goat—he invited my wife to the challenge
arena. On all sides hovered the shades of nameless gods,
indistinct through a mist that rose from the arena.
My wife was dwarfed by the
might of Kefalotyri. He stood on the packed red clay of the
arena and flexed his muscles, the wind that his greatness
called forth flapping his toga around his body in a manner
that challenged traditional standards of modesty. My wife,
on the other hand, stood in her jeans and a tan sweater,
arms folded across her chest, looking unimpressed, but willing
to allow the possibility that she might be
impressed, if Kefalotyri really worked at it. Married men
will be instantly familiar with this expression.
“Behold, mortal!” Kefalotyri
swept his hands over the arena and the ground shook as two
black refrigerators burst through the ground, showers of
dirt cascading down their sides as they rose to their full,
impressive height. Although at the time no one mentioned
it, neither refrigerator had a steam vent in the door.
Kefalotyri turned a muscled
finger towards my wife. “I challenge you to a contest of
organization. If you can better arrange this fridge, then
my godly powers will be added to your existing prowess. If
I win, then I shall have you as my eternal bride.”
“Hold on a sec.”
“You sha—” Kefalotyri blinked,
his booming god voice slipping slightly into what sounded
almost like cockney English. “What’s that?”
“If I beat you, that means
I’m better at organizing fridges, right?”
Kefalotyri paused, narrowing
his eyes as he wondered whether there was a trick in this
somewhere. “That’s right.”
“Then why would I want your
organizational skills? I mean, mine are already better.”
“Um…mine are godly.”
“And what you’re getting seems
a lot more valuable. I mean, I get your inferior skills,
but if I lose, I have to live with you forever? You’ve got
to make it more even than that.”
“Oh…” Kefalotyri seemed to
think about this more a second. “How about if I win, you
have to go with me for a year…”
“No.”
“Um, you have to go on vacation…”
“Seriously?”
“You have to go to dinner with
me?”
“Hmm. That sounds okay. But
you’re buying.” This was a reasonable compromise, so I don’t
hold it against her.
“Alright.” Kefalotyri cleared
his throat and resumed his godly boom. “You shall fill this
refrigerator with these groceries.” Two paper bags fell from
the sky and landed beside each fridge in a poof of dust. “The
first to complete the task in the most pleasing and ergonomically
acceptable way will be deemed the winner.”
As my wife approached the bags,
the doors of each fridge swung open, revealing a chaotic
mess of jars, cans, plastic bags and old produce. “Pleasing
according to whom?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Who gets to choose which is
the most pleasing?”
“Er, um, the Panel of Judgment!” Kefalotyri
snapped his fingers and a small table appeared nearby, where
three conservatively dressed, middle aged people sat, two
men and a woman, clipboards at the ready.
“Hmm. Alright.” My wife turned
back to the fridge. “The first thing I’ll have to do is throw
some of this old stuff out.”
“There will be no discarding
from the fridge!” Kefalotyri boomed.
My wife raised her eyebrows. “Judges?”
The woman in the middle smiled. “We’ll
allow it.”
“What? This is my contest!” A
note of petulance entered Kefalotyri’s voice.
“We are the judges,” the
man on the left said, peering at them over the spectacles
resting on the end of his nose.
“That’s it! There will be no
judges!”
“Judges?” My wife asked.
“We’re going to allow judges,” said
the woman in the middle.
“What the…?” sputtered Kefalotyri.
He moved toward the Panel of Judgment, then looked again
at their clipboards and thought the better of it.
“Let us begin!”
At that my wife began her impeccable
work, removing each item that held no place among the hallowed
shelves and crispers of her refrigerator, showing
mercy to those items not yet past their expiration dates,
preserving places for slightly soft fruit and cheeses that
could be salvaged if only a few spots were cut away. Kefalotyri,
unprepared for this turn of events, was forced to revise
the contents of his fridge haphazardly, discarding a perfectly
good melon and then dumping an unopened quart of milk. The
judges tutted and marked their clipboards.
Her canvas prepared, my wife
turned to the bags. She pulled a head of lettuce from one,
spun it on her palm and slid it into a corner of the crisper
without putting a leaf out of place. She flipped the mustard
over her back and batted it into its place beside the ketchup
in the door. She shook a bottle of juice as she dove and
rolled, flinging it onto the top shelf beside the milk, the
pulp spinning like powder in a snow globe. The judges cooed,
pencils scratching away.
Item by item, my wife stocked
the fridge, lining up each beside the next, sliding the butter
into the drawer, rolling the eggs into their slots, turning
the fishsticks on their sides and pinning them to the wall
of the freezer with a bag of peas and carrots.
In the end, Kefalotyri remained
standing, but barely. He swayed on his feet, hands hanging
loosely at the ends of limp arms, his once majestic toga
spattered with the food stains of his work. The judges watched,
motionless, pencils raised, clipboards readied. At last,
inevitably, Kefalotyri fell to his knees, the light from
the still-open fridge door falling across his back. The judges
made a flurry of notes on their clipboards before they began
conferring.
My wife patted Kefalotyri on
the back and was kind enough to help him organize his fridge
while the judges judged. A few moments later, the woman stood
up at the judging table and cleared her throat. Once my wife
and Kefalotyri had come to attention, they announced her
the winner and thanked everyone for a great competition.
Obviously, the prize only enhanced
my wife’s skills. It doesn’t tell you why she is so
good at fridge organization, but does explain some of the
finer nuances of her expertise. For example, the story illustrates
why our cheese drawer sometimes glows with a divine light.
It also, tangentially, explains why your fridge does not
blast hot steam at you when you press a button.
