Summary
The Mechanical Life and Sudden End of the Singers
Highlights
The Rhythm of the Deuce
Karen and Bobby live a life dictated by the mechanical tick of time. After Bobby brings home a car stained with the aftermath of an accident, the couple navigates a detached existence where domestic rituals, like baking and household chores, mask a deeper, underlying dissonance.
The Illusion of Progress
The Singers attempt to escape their stagnant life by fleeing to Japan, trading their routine for a brief, sensory-filled spontaneity. Upon returning, they settle back into a life of waiting—waiting for the right moment, for children, and for a future that remains perpetually just out of reach.
Silent Time and Sulfur
As the years pass and technology shifts from mechanical clocks to silent digital displays, Karen embraces a new persona selling clocks. However, a sense of decay begins to permeate their home, evidenced by flickering lights and a mysterious, sulfurous odor during a dinner party.
The Final Snap
During a game of cards, the veneer of their reality shatters when Karen commits a sudden, brutal act of violence against their neighbor. As the rhythm of their lives collapses, Bobby is left to confront the reality of their existence, leading to a tragic conclusion that leaves the neighborhood reeling.
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Original text
Karen lives like a watch spring, with a bounce and a catch and a smile like nothing time could change. Life goes on with a tick tick tick, engine cooling underneath her once the Deuce grinds to a halt.
Runnin' good? she asks and Bobby says, No, musta hit a girl or something. Stuck all over the hood. Shame, 'cause she was real pretty.
Karen kisses the windshield, driver's side, dead center. Lips touch just inside the wiper margin and she wipes the grime from the side of her mouth. Love you too.
I was talkin' about the car. Dunno if I'm gonna be able to scrape that gunk... Round to the hood, grab her tight around that hourglass middle, twirl her high high high... Off the front.
She'd kiss him now, for real this time, but she can see his watch face and they don't have the time.
Sullivan's on in five, she says and slips out of his hands like so much sand.
Karen's apron perfect, apple pies and permed blond curls and a toaster and a television both. She smiles out from photographs, churns out refrigerator ads and promos for hand mixers. She's been trademarked American Timeless, in the tradition of American Gothic but with more cathode rays and fewer pitchforks.
I'm a working woman, says Karen. Nine to five.
Eight days a week. Heard ya the first time.
Where would we get the time?
Sometimes you have to take the time, says Bobby. Sometimes you just can't care. You can't wait for the lotto or the coupon or the last will and testament of some well to do uncle.
So Bobby gets the Deuce Coupe sold and Karen's check comes in and they're in Japan before the month is out. They lick ebi and sashimi from naked bodies, lose big on pachinko but not but enough to strand them there. Some things you don't wait for. They bring home the clothes on their backs, crusted with Okinawa sunshine, and the Polaroid to prove their time and place. The Model 20 is lost somewhere. Maybe Miyakojima.
Bobby puts the folded Polaroid up on the driver's side visor of the new old Corvair someone's rolled into his lot. On Sunday he starts working to the tick tick tick of time bleeding out.
No, says Karen, because for some things the waiting's right. Gotta wait 'til we could do it right. They dance across calendar days and maybe next years 'til the seventies run out. Their neighbors celebrate fourth birthdays, grade school graduations. The Singers wait. Aprons and apple pie all decade long and they never have their two point five. They're never ready.
Spring forward into spring is Karen's new catchphrase. She's selling digital clocks. Gone is the tick tick tick that counted down the hours. Time slips away as it always has but now the going's silent.
She kisses Geraldine Williams on the cheek and hugs Oyster Williams, whose name isn't really Oyster, when they step in through the door. Aren't you glad? she says. Aren't you glad it's spring?
So glad all of that awful road salt is gone. I don't know how much more ice I could stand! With this one tracking in the wet and the salt all over the floors, says Geraldine. Is your stove on? She wrinkles her nose. She swears she smells sulfur, she says.
Bobby smells it too. Hopes the septic hasn't ruptured. But that's that.
Karen, he says. He wants to tell her she is beautiful. Six o'clock tradition.
Can you grab the devils? says Karen. They're broiled prunes in bacon. And the Jello. Then she's gone, off to the living room, where Oyster and Geraldine are waiting.
Is there something wrong with your lights? asks Geraldine when they flicker. For the fourth time within the hour, they flicker.
Four hands into Omaha hi lo, Geraldine drops dead. She's got a flush to Bobby's wheel, she's got blood running out her mouth, she's got Karen's hand inside her. It's thrust straight through.
Bobby sees her ring, that silver pockmarked band, sewn into sinew. Blood in mercurial beads across the metal.
Karen, he says though it's too late for that. Karen.
His heart beats out of sync with the kitchen clock until it's good and revved and leaving time itself behind. He makes it to the dish rack, sink still half full and everything dripping. He grabs their wedding cleaver, heavy and iron and terrible.
Karen, Bobby breathes, afraid to speak aloud. Words are real and speech is real and time is flowing out from under his fingers, red and silent. Karen, Karen, Karen.
April 29th, 1982, the watch springs snap and time, the whole infernal business, goes to hell in a Rubbermaid. So sad, the neighbors say. So sad, they all say.
She was only thirty two.