Scott Pomfret Appliance Love As a child, Scottie was not like other boys: he had a special way with appliances. Programming VCRs came easily and he successfully coaxed many a cranky blender through its seventeen speeds. Suspicious of his son’s early inclinations, Scottie’s father signed him up for Pop Warner, but at age thirteen, Scottie developed an incendiary crush on his family’s Craft-o-matic sixteen-gallon wet/dry SuperVac. Terrified by his own secret urges, Scottie hurled himself into the middle-school social life of his rural God-fearing town in south central Pennsylvania where JoPa was king and livestock fair game, and nobody had ever heard of an espresso maker. He tried to love girls. But Friday nights, Scottie loitered in the local Wal-Mart, flirting with a Bissell cordless Spotlifter tool that came with an adjustable spray nozzle and E-Z Empty tank. He lived in deathly fear of the appliance salesman, a polyester pimp with his blue Wal-Mart nametag, who he feared would expose him. In a well-thumbed dirty magazine he found in the schoolyard, Scottie learned there was a name for what he was feeling: appliance-love. When Scottie was sixteen, his father caught him masturbating to Popular Mechanics. Crossing himself and backing out of the room, Scottie’s father insisted that he had seen nothing, heard nothing, knew nothing. The second time he got caught, it was a Sears catalog. But the breeze from his father’s throwing the door open ruffled the pages, so instead of toasters on the open page, there were brassieres, a whole centerfold of D-cups. Scottie’s father was overjoyed. He gathered up the Sears circular and said, “Son, you can do better than that.” In an hour, a fortress of back issues of Playboy, Hustler, and Gallery were sandbagging Scottie’s bed. Scottie’s older sister wasn’t fooled. One night after they got home late, both a little tipsy, she shocked Scottie by asking slyly, “Are you kissing appliances?” Scottie gasped. He gave thought to busting out of town by the morning Greyhound and never coming back. Changing his name. Undergoing plastic surgery. “Hey,” his sister promised, “no big deal. Besides, maybe when you go all the way it won’t be what you want.” Scottie gulped. He failed to mention that he had already lost his virginity to a BagelSmart toaster oven. At school, a certain teacher took him aside. He assured Scottie that after he escaped their podunk Pennsylvania cow town and moved to New York, he’d find lots of people just like him, and a nice electric blanket to settle down with. The teacher gazed at Scottie sadly and teased his electric pencil sharpener. “Things are better now than when I was growing up,” he said. “Back in my day, an appliance-loving uncle like myself put in one family appearance a year, at Christmas. He accepted the standard air kiss-kiss, and then stood around being creepy for the rest of the day, with an eggnog mustache that made every adult in the room wince. “But in these enlightened times,” the teacher pointed out, “appliance-loving uncles have many, many opportunities open to them. They can make themselves useful by ferrying around the more genetically productive members of the family. They can be godparents to their brother’s children—which means essentially providing handsome birthday gifts, contributions to college trust funds, and a thought for the godchild when you sign the will. They can avoid disturbing the gestation cycle. And hang around and be tolerated, when people need to reassure themselves about their liberality and essential good nature. Of course, you’ve got to keep your perversions to yourself.” Scottie slipped out of the room and thought about jamming his fingers in an electric socket. In college, Scottie gradually discovered there were others who liked household appliances and there was a brave new world of appliances to meet. In the dormitory basement, he shamelessly exchanged looks with a Kenmore 4-cycle Super Capacity Plus washer with Quiet Pak insulation and four temperature settings, knowing he’d be back to help himself to some of that before the night was done. And Scottie was also into the rough trade. He became bed-buddies with a Toro 26-inch hi-wheel mulching lawn mower belonging to the college’s physical plant. The mower had its brand name tattooed on its side, and the throaty voice of its Briggs & Stratton engine rewarded Scottie’s ripping that start cord with six Horsepower of roaring pleasure. Scottie got in among a group of radical appliance-lovers, who convinced him that a necessary part of his liberation was to confront his nature. At the Thanksgiving table, in front of three generations of extended family, Scottie chimed the edge of his wineglass and announced his preference for battery-operated kitchenware. All hell broke loose. Scottie’s father accused him of impoliteness, illegality, defamation, hoodwinking, infamy, dishonesty, intimidation, extortion, hypocrisy, bait-and-switch tactics, hysteria, Marxism, wife swapping, fluffernutter eating, nose-picking, and sundry other wrongs. But he couldn’t bring himself to mention appliance-love. It was one thing to be liberated, another entirely to find a quality appliance who he could spend the rest of his life with. An appliance that would be faithful and distinguish between Scottie and a hole in the wall—notwithstanding, of course, the admitted necessity of outlets. Scottie frequented Sears showrooms and discount appliance dives and second-hand stores with battered, ancient blenders who kept referring to him as “twink.” He often woke in the morning with burns, abrasions from moving parts, slicked with WD-40, and unable to remember the appliance’s brand name, or even its factory-authorized purpose. His sister dutifully lectured Scottie about short-circuiting, the virtues of abstinence, and duct tape insulation as the best way to protect him if he insisted on having sex. For a long time, because he thought it was the sort of machine of which his mother would approve, Scottie half-heartedly dated a breadmaker, a sturdy dependable sort of machine that churned out the loaves like nobody’s business but was in the end wholesome, homely, and boring as hell. At age twenty-eight, he chucked away four years of breadmaking for a night of furious suction with a 12-Amp Fantom Fury vacuum cleaner that had double-cyclone cleaning force, an HEPA filter, 2-stage motor, thirty foot retractable power cord, a 360-degree swivel hose, on-board attachments, and a handle that converted to a cleaning wand. In the days that followed, in the narcosis of his infatuation, Scottie spoiled the Fury rotten, nearly driving him bankrupt buying it all kinds of accessories and accoutrements a modern vacuum cleaner needs. Scottie worshipped the big generous collection bag and the lubed moving parts near the coarse bristle hairs and the sweet stink of electricity. Scottie thought he would grow old with the Fury. Oil it at the joints, stand by while they replaced the engine after the warranty ran out, polish it up, patch its cord. He was devastated when, at a garage sale, the Fury ran off with a clever little bargain hunter who had transposed the $1.00 sticker from a broken electric wok, and tricked some helpful friend into selling Scottie’s Fury off cheap. His mother tried to make him feel better by ticking off the Fury’s flaws. It did a poor job with coarse dirt; its wheels had a tendency to squeak. Scottie cried harder. In his eyes none of it was true: the Fury had been perfection itself. “I still love you,” Scottie’s father offered finally to try to stem his despair. It was the first civil word he had directed Scottie’s way since that tumultuous Thanksgiving in the college years. The bitterness leapt in Scottie’s heart. But he remembered that repressed teacher from high school and resolved never to be like him. There were, after all, many kinds of love. “I love you, too, Dad,” he managed to croak out. And vowed silently that he would keep looking, he wouldn’t end up some day cynical and drunk at the end of some dark assembly line, taking appliances fresh off the line for a little spin, and then dropping an “inspected by Scottie” sign in the packing. No way. That wasn’t a life Scottie wanted. But he was gun-shy after the Fury. He hung out a lot with washers and dryers who were already paired off. So when his sister told him about the new Bissell Power Steam deep cleaner with dual motor system and Smart Mix solution adjustment, Scottie was skeptical. He was not yet sure he was ready to date. Scottie could hardly believe his eyes when the Power Steam came in the door. Sure, he knew the Power Steam had won J.D. Power Associates’ endorsement. But you had to see it in plastic really to appreciate it. With growing disbelief, Scottie catalogued the clear unblemished lid, the sinuous, undulant hose, the bulbous wheel housing, sleek lines, and the on/off light like a sparkling gemstone that winked at him from across the room. Scottie’s nose twitched: the smell of Styrofoam broken open, the rustle of plastic wrap! He took the warranty and instruction booklets from the Power Steam, and pulled out its chair. There was a low whine, a gravelly purr, and the sound of love gearing up in someone’s battery-operated heart.