The Buttons Keep Coming Off

Playwright and author of light prose, ROBERT FONTAINE lives in Springfield, Massachusetts.

I live in a mad world where the buttons keep coming off my shirts, my shoelaces keep breaking, and my neckties unravel before my eyes. Perhaps you’ve had a taste of this sort of thing, too. Everything you buy has to be readjusted, reinforced, revitalized, and refinished, if not rejected and returned.

Even the people they turn out these days are deficient or negligent, incompetent or lazy. I know a good carpenter who can’t come this week. He may not be able to come next week, either. He doesn’t know for sure. He may be fishing next week.

I wouldn’t need the carpenter if the furniture we bought some time ago hadn’t developed bow legs and sunken seats. The man at the furniture store said it’s all coming through that way. The manufacturers sent me a nice letter. The general idea was that we aren’t getting the kind of trees we used to, and so the lumber is faulty.

A friend of mine bought a new compact car to save money on gasoline. The car has a gasoline heater that uses more fuel than the car does. They’re all coming through that way, the dealer says. Any time you buy a new model, the dealer explains, it has bugs in it. By the time they have a chance to straighten out the bugs, a still newer model is on the lines. Our industry is so efficient, so beautifully automated, so streamlined that when you make a mistake you have to make two million of them.

Even the simple things have bugs. If I go out for a cup of coffee, the coffee is lukewarm, half in the saucer, and the sugar shaker is empty. Sometimes the sugar shaker is full, but the sugar is stuck and won’t come out. It sticks like the salt and the ketchup. The waitress is sympathetic and the boss is in Florida.

We have a girl who comes in once a week to clean. She comes in once a week when she comes in. Every other week she is at a picnic for the church or a mass baptism. Now and then she sends her younger sister, who always has to leave early for a barbecue, a fish fry, or to meet her boy friend — who, by the way, is supposed to come and wash our windows, but when he wins on the numbers, he doesn’t come. When he loses, he doesn’t come either. He gets depressed.

Neither of the girls will dry dishes. They say the dishes dry themselves, don’t they? That’s right. They do.

When either of the girls does come, she has trouble washing my shirts. The seams come apart when exposed to water. I don’t know of anything else to wash them in. Long threads appear as if by magic. Detergents work hard at going down deeply into the hidden dirt and dislodging the pockets at the same time. I checked with the haberdashery. They say all the shirts are coming through that way today.

I checked with the factory. They admitted that they had trouble with the seams and threads in the new miracle fabrics, which are so new and so miraculous, no one really understands them. Another few years and everything will be all right as far as men’s shirts go. After all, I shouldn’t feel hurt. Women’s dresses come apart at the seams, too. It isn’t that they’re just picking on me. We’re all in this thing together.

Many errors made in manufacturing today are the result of the machines being almost human, I’m told. To err is human, and these machines err. One machine does as much work as twenty men and makes more mistakes. That shows how human they are.

Then, again, when I take a bus downtown (because my new car has a bug in it), the bus is ten minutes late and the driver cannot change a dollar. I have to borrow from fellow passengers while the driver rants about people who do not have the exact change ready. While he is thus remonstrating he passes three stops, leaving six people stranded (people who, when they finally get to work, will take their revenge by making shirts that come apart at the seams and furniture that comes unglued, or even rockets whose third stage just laughs).

Nor is there any hope in the younger generation. Take a few girls I know who are college age. They transferred last year from Gates to Jaswell because, say, at Gates the crew is no good and the boys from nearby Klunk Tech are drips. At Jaswell they drop French for ceramics and English Lit. for Bronze Dipping. But they are not satisfied at Jaswell because the only place where there are good schools is Europe. So they go off to Milan,

Paris, or Edinburgh. European schools are tough; seven majors a day and no fooling around. So our girls drop all that nonsense and take gouache painting, music appreciation, gastronomy, and found-object sculpture. In the end it will take them seven years to graduate, but meanwhile the living is easy, and only hard-pressed Papa with his seams coming apart and his table legs coming unglued need worry.

It’s the same with the boys. Most of them are in Germany living with quaint little families, speaking bad German and learning dueling in order to bring home some scars. Others are roaming about with knapsacks on their backs, sampling Switzerland and Yugoslavia and writing sharp letters home about why are we behind in the missile race and how come we have no great poets like Dante and Goethe?

We are living in a culture entirely new in the world, a culture of responsibility dodgers and corner cutters. Nobody cares if a thing is right or not. In fact, if you try to trace a poor job of craftsmanship back, you will find, inevitably, that nobody did it.

It infuriates me terribly, and meanwhile my buttons keep on falling off.