Now, We’re Cooking With Gas

We had a stove when we moved in here. Technically. Technically, we did indeed have a stove. The inspector we hired to tell us that the house was falling down before we bought it, he did warn us that the appliance wasn’t any good. He even wrote it on the big pink slip and everything. But we’d been renting our entire adult lives. Neither of us had ever experienced a brand-new stove. We thought we knew from useless. We did not.

All we really understood was that this thing was 24” wide and electric – and, according to Johnny, neither of those things would ever do. If we were going to replace it, we needed another half a foot, and gas. But our top priority back then was to get the slime mold cleared from the back room.

Perhaps the first hint should have been the fuse. The first hint that this so-called “stove” was not only, in fact, generally ineffectual at anything resembling its intended purpose, but that it also should never, under any circumstances, be put to such marginal use as it was capable of mustering.

Now, when I say “fuse,” what I mean is breaker box. I wouldn’t say the house had been rewired – there is still knob-and-tube in places here and there – but there was (and is) a modern-type box down in the basement. The kind with the black switches that you just go down and throw. And, with nineteen breaker switches available, the entire house was hooked up to one of them, the stove all by its lonesome on another. Not only that, but the stove one was labeled: “This switch stays off to insure that Rita doesn’t hurt herself.”

It said “insure.” For days that bothered me more than the stove itself did. Then we moved in, and I moved on.

I’d assumed Rita was going to hurt herself by touching a glowing coil, or by leaving a pot on until it boiled empty and started shooting off hot metal sparks. But no. It seemed the only way Rita could have hurt herself on this stove would have been to lick it, which does not require electricity at all.

Corroded, rusted, caked with years of burnt-on food, this little GE gem could not have brought good things to life without Herr Frankenstein, a certain carpenter from Galilee, and the Piemaker, all working their mojo on its behalf. We didn’t realize this, of course, until after we’d scrubbed it up as best we could with the breaker off. Then we marched downstairs and ceremoniously threw the switch.

The first burner we tried did not come on. We did the whole marching-and-throwing thing again. Still no. After a few more parades up and down with all of the requisite stomping and swearing (most of that from me) one of us (probably Johnny) finally hit upon the idea of moving the oven’s single knob around to test out all the dials. A brilliant thought! Eureka! We had heat!

From a single burner.

One of the little ones.

And that was it.

Our so-called “stove” was nothing more than a glorified, tetanus-y, hotplate. The inside “oven” part, after all the scrubbing and scraping and lockjaw-risking I had done, never did get any juice at all.

Well, not until it almost burned the house down.