Floored by New Dream Kitchen

I turned on the daytime TV of my mind and heard a game-show host holler, “How would you, Mrs. Alice Kahn, like to have a new kitchen floor ?” And I jumped up and down, sobbing and slobbering all over Pat Sajak and shouting, “Yes, yes, yes--oh, baby, don’t-stop-me-now, yes, yes, yes, this is perfect.”

As luck would have it, I find myself in the wonderful world of modern life where all that stands between the vision and the dream, between one’s fate and someone else’s factory, between telepathy and Tile Town, is a Visa card. The price is right, the wheel of fortune went my way, the sale of the century is over and-- voila !--I have my dream kitchen floor.

Put that data in your there’s-no-pleasing-a-woman computer and smoke it! Our desires are much simpler than the myths of female insatiability would lead you to believe.

Like the other night--my lover rolled over in bed and whispered in my ear, “Want a glass of milk?”

“Yes,” I said, “that’s what women really want.”

How come you never see books like “Women Who Want Milk Too Much” or “Women Who Want Floor Too Much”?--the story of my life.

You have to understand that, for 10 years now, I have been slaving away over an old kitchen floor, an ancient kitchen floor, a Paleolithic linoleum. It was a form of visual pollution. Until recently, the rest of the kitchen was a mess too. It was the kind of kitchen they locked Cinderella in.

A couple of years ago, when I--like millions of other American women--was still willing to cook, a friend walked into my kitchen. She looked around and said, “What’s a nice cook like you doing in a dump like this?”

Nothing much can happen when you’re cooking on a 35-year-old Tappan. You’re lucky if you can find the cockpit and commune with the pilot light.

And let’s not forget the orange ceilings--evidence of the previous owner’s bad trip. This ceiling hovered nightmarishly over a turquoise built-in table and pink plastic wall coverings.

A little white paint restored the room to much of its Deco splendor, but then the dreco on the floor really stood out. It consisted of cracked brown tiles that didn’t look better even when I broke down once or twice a year and mopped them.

But now I have my dream kitchen floor. It’s all aglow with black and white tiles that Alice Wonderland could have played chess on. It’s my own private Max’s Diner. These are floors you can eat off, write poems on.

My lover--or, as he’s more mundanely called, my husband--is happy that I’m happy.

These new tiles come with the illusion of dirt built in--little white speckles on the black tiles and little black speckles on the white ones. Is it a mess or is it Memorex?

Only C. W. knows for sure. Chuck (C. W.) Maston is the man who gave me what I wanted. Sure, my husband knows about it. I’m one of those women who needs two men to satisfy her--one to sign the checkbook and another to lay the floor tiles.

C. W., the man who gave me my kitchen floor as I know it, was telling me, as he was laying my tiles, that he was not born a handyman. He had, in fact, been an aerospace engineer working for the likes of Boeing, Honeywell and McDonnell Douglas, until, as he put it, “I heard the siren song of the ‘60s.”

When this Titian of tiles isn’t working on the Sistine floors, or wiring my neighbor’s study, or plumbing the vortex of somebody’s toilet, he is playing conga drums with his rock band, Paranormal Guise. This is the incident that answers the question: What did the ‘60s ever do for you?

Now, for me, only one fantasy remains. I plan to spring it on the husband tonight around a quarter to 3 when there’s no one in the place except him and me. I’m sure he’ll go for it because, the experts tell us, you gotta keep a marriage alive.

I’ll turn to him as he’s lost in dreams and say, “Honey, let’s go downstairs in our jammies and sip milk out of bowls on the new kitchen floor and pretend we’re Siamese kittens.”

And who says there’s no pleasing a woman?