1 When I was little I had thought a fair amount about the finger-joint effect; I assumed that when you softly crunched over those temporary barriers you were leveling actual “cell walls” that the joint had built to define what it believed from your motionlessness was going to be the final, stable geography for that microscopic region.
1 For several years it was inconceivable to buy one of those periodicals when a girl was behind the counter; but once, boldly, I tried it—I looked directly at her mascara and asked for a Penthouse, even though I preferred the less pretentious Oui or Club, saying it so softly however that she heard “Powerhouse” and cheerfully pointed out the candy bar until I repeated the name. Breaking all eye contact, she placed the document on the counter between us—it was back when they still showed nipples on their covers—and rang it up along with the small container of Woolite I was buying to divert attention: she was embarrassed and brisk and possibly faintly excited, and she slipped the magazine in a bag without asking whether I “needed” one or not. That afternoon I expanded her brief embarrassment into a helpful vignette in which I became a steady once-a-week buyer of men’s magazines from her, always on Tuesday morning, until my very ding-dong entrance into the 7-Eleven was charged with trembly confusion for both of us, and I began finding little handwritten notes placed in the most widespread pages of the magazine when I got home that said, “Hi!—the Cashier,” and “Last night I posed sort of like this in front of my mirror in my room—the Cashier,” and “Sometimes I look at these pictures and think of you looking at them—the Cashier.” Turnover is always a problem at those stores, and she had quit the next time I went in.
1 When I pull a sock on, I no longer pre-bunch, that is, I don’t gather the sock up into telescoped folds over my thumbs and then position the resultant donut over my toes, even though I believed for some years that this was a clever trick, taught by admirable, fresh-faced kindergarten teachers, and that I revealed my laziness and my inability to plan ahead by instead holding the sock by the ankle rim and jamming my foot to its destination, working the ankle a few times to properly seat the heel. Why? The more elegant prebunching can leave in place any pieces of grit that have embedded themselves in your sole from the imperfectly swept floor you walked on to get from the shower to your room; while the cruder, more direct method, though it risks tearing an older sock, does detach this grit during the foot’s downward passage, so that you seldom later feel irritating particles rolling around under your arch as you depart for the subway.
1 When I was little I thought it was called Scotch tape because the word “scotch” imitated the descending screech of early cellophane tapes. As incandescence gave way before fluorescence in office lighting, Scotch tape, once yellowish-transparent, became bluish-transparent, as well as superbly quiet.
1 Staplers have followed, lagging by about ten years, the broad stylistic changes we have witnessed in train locomotives and phonograph tonearms, both of which they resemble. The oldest staplers are cast-ironic and upright, like coal-fired locomotives and Edison wax-cylinder players. Then, in mid-century, as locomotive manufacturers discovered the word “streamlined,” and as tonearm designers housed the stylus in aerodynamic ribbed plastic hoods that looked like trains curving around a mountain, the people at Swingline and Bates tagged along, instinctively sensing that staplers were like locomotives in that the two prongs of the staple make contact with a pair of metal hollows, which, like the paired rails under the wheels of the train, forces them to follow a preset path, and that they were like phonograph tonearms in that both machines, roughly the same size, make sharp points of contact with their respective media of informational storage. (In the case of the tonearm, the stylus retrieves the information, while in the case of the stapler, the staple binds it together as a unit—the order, the shipping paper, the invoice: boom, stapled, a unit; the letter of complaint, the copies of canceled checks and receipts, the letter of apologetic response: boom, stapled, a unit; a sequence of memos and telexes holding the history of some interdepartmental controversy: boom, stapled, one controversy. In old stapled problems, you can see the TB vaccine marks in the upper left corner where staples have been removed and replaced, removed and replaced, as the problem—even the staple holes of the problem—was copied and sent on to other departments for further action, copying, and stapling.) And then the great era of squareness set in: BART was the ideal for trains, while AR and Bang & Olufsen turntables became angular—no more cream-colored bulbs of plastic! The people at Bates and Swingline again were drawn along, ridding their devices of all softening curvatures and offering black rather than the interestingly textured tan. And now, of course, the high-speed trains of France and Japan have reverted to aerodynamic profiles reminiscent of Popular Science cities-of-the-future covers of the fifties; and soon the stapler will incorporate a toned-down pompadour swoop as well. Sadly, the tonearm’s stylistic progress has slowed, because all the buyers who would appreciate an up-to-date Soviet Realism in the design are buying CD players: its inspirational era is over.
1 Sneaker knots were quite different from dress knots—when you pulled the two loops tight at the end, the logic of the knot you had just created became untraceable; while in the case of dress-lace knots, you could, even after tightening, follow the path of the knot around with your mind, as if riding a roller coaster. You could imagine a sneaker-shoelace knot and a dress-shoelace knot standing side by side saying the Pledge of Allegiance: the dress-shoelace knot would pronounce each word as a grammatical unit, understanding it as more than a sound; the sneaker-shoelace knot would run the words together. The great advantage of sneakers, though, one of the many advantages, was that when you had tied them tightly, without wearing socks, and worn them all day, and gotten them wet, and you took them off before bed, your feet would display the impression of the chrome eyelets in red rows down the sides of your foot, like the portholes in a Jules Verne submarine.
1 Not liking when you end up with only one of the two bunny’s ears that make up a normal bow; for if for some reason the lace-end forming that one ear works free, you have no backup and you end up with a granny or square knot that you have to tease untied with your fingernails, blood rushing to your head.
1 Too modern-looking, really, to be called a doorknob. Why can’t office buildings use doorknobs that are truly knob-like in shape? What is this static modernism that architects of the second tier have imposed on us: steel half-U handles or lathed objects shaped like superdomes, instead of brass, porcelain, or glass knobs? The upstairs doorknobs in the house I grew up in were made of faceted glass. As you extended your fingers to open a door, a cloud of flesh-color would diffuse into the glass from the opposite direction. The knobs were loosely seated in their latch mechanism, and heavy, and the combination of solidity and laxness made for a multiply staged experience as you turned the knob: a smoothness that held intermediary tumbleral fallings-into-position. Few American products recently have been able to capture that same knuckly, orthopedic quality (the quality of bendable straws) in their switches and latches; the Japanese do it very well, though: they can get a turn-signal switch in a car or a volume knob on a stereo to feel resistant and substantial and worn into place—think of the very fine Toyota turn-signal switches, to the left of the steering wheel, which move in their sockets like chicken drumsticks: they feel as if they were designed with living elbow cartilage as their inspiration. But the 1905 doorknobs in our house had that quality. My father must have had special affection for them, because he draped his ties over them. Often you had to open a door carefully, holding the knob at its very edge, to avoid injuring the several ties that hung there. The whole upstairs had the air of a nawab’s private chambers; as you closed a bedroom, bathroom, or closet door, a heavy plume of richly variegated silks would swing out and sway back silently; once in a while a tie would ripple to the floor, having been gradually cranked into disequilibrium by many turnings of the doorknob. If I asked to borrow a tie, when I was tall enough to wear them, my fathe
r was always delighted: he would tour the doorknobs, pulling promising ties out carefully and displaying them against his forearm, as sommeliers hold their arm-cloths. “Here’s a beautiful tie.. . . Now this is a very subtle tie.. . . What about this tie?” He taught me the principal classifications: rep tie, neat tie, paisley tie. And the tie I wore for the job interview at the company on the mezzanine was one he had pulled from a doorknob: it was made of a silk that verged on crepe, and its pattern was composed of very small oval shapes, each containing a fascinating blob motif that seemed inspired by the hungry, pulsating amoebas that absorbed excess stomach acid in Rolaids’ great dripping-faucet commercial, and when you looked closely you noticed that the perimeter of each oval was made of surprisingly garishly colored rectangles, like suburban tract houses; a border so small in scale, however, that those instances of brightness only contributed a secret depth and luminosity to the overall somber, old-masters coloration of the design. My father was able to find ties as outstanding as that even though he was himself slightly color-blind at the green end of the spectrum; on days when he was pitching a big client, he would appear in the kitchen in the morning with three ties he had selected and ask us—my mother, my sister, and me—to choose the one that went best with his shirt: this constituted a sort of dry run for his imminent meeting, where he would also present three choices, mock-ups of eighteen-page sales promotion pieces or themes for trade-show slide presentations. When I had dinner with him and other relatives in the first year of my job, I wore the best tie I had bought to date; and as my uncle conferred with the hostess about the table, my father turned toward me, caught sight of my tie, and said, “Hey, hey—nice,” fingering the silk. “Is this one of mine or one you bought?”
“I picked this one up a while ago, I guess,” I said, pretending to think back with effort, when in fact I remembered every detail of the transaction; remembered carrying the very light, very expensive bag home not more than five weeks before.
“A ‘neat’ tie—a ‘neat’ tie.” He lowered his glasses and bent to examine the pattern more closely—rows of paired lozenges intersecting like Venn diagrams, mostly red. “Very fine.”
I said, “This is one I haven’t seen before, have I?” fingering his tie in turn. “Really nice.”
“This?” he said. He flipped it over, as if he too had to remind himself of the circumstances in which he had bought it. “I picked this up at Whillock Brothers.”
As we were all seated at the table, I looked around at my male relatives’ ties: at my grandfather’s tie and my uncle’s tie and my aunt’s father’s tie—and it was clear to me that my father and I were without question wearing the two best-looking ties at the table that night. A sudden balloon payment of pride and gratitude expanded within me. Later still, when I went home to visit, I swapped a tie with him, and when I visited the following Thanksgiving, I spotted what had been my tie hanging over a doorknob in the midst of all the ties he had bought himself, and it fit right in, it fit right in!
1 Though by then it was by Tina’s own desk clock 12:04 P.M. I was always touched when, out of a morning’s worth of repetition, secretaries continued to answer with good mornings for an hour or so into the afternoon, just as people often date things with the previous year well into February; sometimes they caught their mistake and went into a “This is not my day” or “Where is my head?” escape routine; but in a way they were right, since the true tone of afternoons does not take over in offices until nearly two.
1 Really it wasn’t blue sky at all, but green; the reflective layer of the glass shifted colors from true, and that change, combined with the hiss from the registers below each window, made the sky seem very distant, and the outside temperature hard to guess. I had noticed that it was not considered cool to make any remarks about the window-washers if they rose past while you were talking to a co-worker; everyone was supposed to be so used to them that they couldn’t possibly elicit a joke or a comment.
2 There are two ideal ways to wind up a light conversation with a coworker; one is with a little near-joke, and the other is with the exchange of a piece of useful information. The first is more common, but the second is preferable. The chat with Tina was the longest conversation I had had yet that day (and, as it turned out, was to have that day, until L. called at nine in the evening—more than enough talk, though, oddly enough, to satisfy my midweek socializing instincts); and I was pleased that it had ended with her telling me that I could get shoelaces at CVS. It made us both feel we were moving ahead in our lives: at random, on errands of her own, she had learned something that other people apparently didn’t know, and she was now passing the knowledge on to me.
1 At the time I was riding the escalator to the mezzanine every day I didn’t own a car, but later, when I did, I realized that escalatorial happiness is not too far removed from the standard pleasure that the highway commuter feels driving his warm, quiet box between pulsing intermittencies of white road paint at a steady speed.
1 I was especially interested that the food service had inserted “sliced” in the title of their sandwich, perhaps on the model of “sliced egg sandwich.” You don’t have to say “tuna and sliced celery,” or even “tuna and celery”; the reason we flag the existence of olives is that while the tuna is tan and crumbly and therefore aggregative, cream cheese is a unitary scrim, and the olives inset into it demand an equal billing. In truth, the question is less subtle than this: olives are a more powerful taste in a bed of cream cheese than celery is within the tangy disorder of tuna: celery is often used simply as an extender, texturing and adding a cheap chew-interest, while olives are more expensive ounce for ounce than cream cheese, and therefore demonstrate higher yearnings, nobler intentions. What can freshen and brighten that blandness? the food scientist asked himself, assigned the task of making a simple cream cheese sandwich appetizing. Mushrooms? Chives? Paprika? And then—he sliced one olive, worth maybe two cents wholesale, into six pieces, spaced them evenly in their white medium, and suddenly all the squinting, cackling, cocktail-wickedness of a narrow gourmet jar of Spanish olives in the door shelf of your refrigerator inhabited the cheapest, most innocent, most childlike sandwich you can make.
1 For example, I feel no loss that doctors don’t perform house calls: only one house call was ever paid on me, after I had been hallucinating in a measles fever that the motionless flame of a bedside candle had bent toward me and flowed like some very warm drink along the roof of my mouth, and I was so young when it happened (three, I think) that the black bag with its interesting pair of circular hinges is almost mythological now; certainly not missed: the real beginning point of the history of medicine for me is in doctor’s offices, waiting to have shots. Likewise, I don’t grieve over the great shift in library checkout procedures that happened in the sixties: instead of a due date stamped on a card that held earlier due dates (allowing you to learn how frequently a particular book had been checked out), the assistant librarian laid out (1) the typed title-card for the book, (2) your own library card, and (3) a computer-punch card that bore a preprinted due date, next to each other within a large gray photographing box, and pressed a worn button; for me the history of libraries begins with the shutter-flashes in that gray box. (Having not seen one in a long time, I may be fusing some details of the gray microfilm reader in with it.)
1 The ice cube tray deserves a historical note. At first there were aluminum barges inset with a grid of slats linked to a handle like a parking brake—a bad solution; you had to run the grid under warm water before the ice would let go of the metal. I remember seeing these used, but never used them myself. And then suddenly there were plastic and rubber “trays,” really molds, of several designs—some producing very small cubes, others producing large squared-off cubes and bathtub-bottomed cubes. There were subtleties that one came to understand over time: for instance, the little notches designed into the inner walls that separated one cell from another allowed the water level to equalize itself: this meant that you could fil
l the tray by running all the cells quickly under the tap, feeling as if you were playing the harmonica, or you could turn the faucet on very slightly, so that a thin silent stream of water fell in a line from the tap, and hold the tray at an angle, allowing the water to enter a single cell and well from there into adjoining cells one by one, gradually filling the entire tray. The intercellular notches were helpful after the tray was frozen, too; when you had twisted it to free the cubes, you could selectively pull out one cube at a time by hooking a fingernail under the frozen projection that had formed in a notch. If you couldn’t catch the edge of a notch-stump because the cell had not been filled to above the notch level, you might have to mask all the cubes except one with your hands and turn the tray over, so that the single cube you needed fell out. Or you could twist all the cubes free and then, as if the tray were a fry pan and you were flipping a pancake, toss them. The cubes would hop as one above their individual homes about a quarter of an inch, and most would fall back in place; but some, the loosest, would loft higher and often land irregularly, leaving one graspable end sticking up—these you used for your drink.
Mezzanine Page 12