When my mother died and my sister and I sorted through her possessions, we found, in the back of the cellar, a pile of shoeboxes with numbers written on the top: 80, 100, 75. When we opened them we found the figurines. The numbers on top corresponded to the number of figurines inside.
It wasn’t like our mother to keep things; she was no pack rat. Because of this it seemed right to take out the figurines and count them, which we did. There were 420. Sitting there in the dusty cellar, I calculated: fifty tea bags times 420 boxes of tea was 21,000 cups. If each cup held about eight ounces of tea, that made 168,000 ounces, which divided by 128 ounces per gallon was more than 1,300 gallons of tea. In my head I expressed this in fifty-gallon drums, about twenty-five of them, stacked up in a big pyramid, and I pictured them stored out in the wind and cold on a cement lot, in back of an airport or warehouse somewhere, behind a tall chain-link fence.
It occurred to me that this was a measure of loneliness, all the tea my mother drank during the twelve years between my father’s death and her own. I wondered if she herself thought of it that way. In any event, when I am lonely, it is the pyramid of fifty-gallon drums that I think of, standing in a light snowstorm, with perhaps a little creamy brown tea leaking from the bottom of one of the drums and frozen into a dull, irregular pattern on the pavement below.
Deaf Child Area
At a bend in a winding country road outside town, there once lived a family whose only child, a girl, was born deaf. When the girl grew old enough to play outside on her own, the family had the county erect a yellow sign near the house which read DEAF CHILD AREA. The idea was that motorists would drive more slowly, knowing that a nearby child could not hear their approach.
By the time I was a boy, the deaf child had become a teenager, and after a while left town for college. She returned occasionally to visit, but for the most part was no longer around. Eventually she married and settled in a faraway city. Her parents, aware of the sign’s superfluity, wrote a letter asking the county to come take it down; and though the county promised to see to the matter, no workmen ever arrived.
At about the time I myself married, the deaf child’s parents retired and decided to move away to someplace warmer. They sold their house, and it was promptly bought by a local professor. The professor, however, was soon offered a position at another university, which he was obliged to occupy immediately. With no time to sell the house he had just bought, the professor hired a property management company to offer the house for rent. At this point it caught my attention. My wife was pregnant with our first child, and we had begun to worry that our small apartment would be unsuitable for raising a family. After a look at the house in the country, we decided to rent it, and soon moved in.
For several months we ignored the sign, which had grown old and battered, and at any rate had nothing to do with us. But as winter approached and my wife’s due date drew near, I noticed that her eyes lingered on the sign whenever we pulled into the driveway, and more than once I caught her staring out at it from our future child’s bedroom, which we had furnished and filled with colorful toys. One night, as we lay awake in bed, my wife turned to me and asked if I might remove the sign somehow. She realized she was being irrational, but nonetheless feared the sign might bring some harm to our baby, and she didn’t think she could sleep until the sign was gone.
This seemed perfectly reasonable. I got out of bed and dressed, then brought a box of tools out to the roadside, where I examined the sign. I saw that it had been bolted onto a metal post, and that I could simply remove the sign and leave the post where it stood in the ground. I did this quickly, and prepared to go inside.
But something compelled me to go out behind the house and find a shovel, which I used to dig the post out of the ground. The ground was cold, and the work slow going. When I finished, I took the sign and post and put them in the back of the car, and drove down to the lake, where I threw them out as far as I could into the water. They splashed onto the surface and sank out of sight.
When I returned home, my wife didn’t ask me where I’d driven. After that we slept comfortably, and did so every night until our child was born without illness or defect.
The Branch
A young man, while hiking, found a crooked branch that had fallen from a dying tree. The branch was nicely balanced, with a fine heft and a stout base that did not sink into the ground as he walked. He held it just above a knot in the wood, and used it to steady himself when he encountered difficult terrain or a steep grade.
When he was through hiking, he paused, considering whether he should toss the branch back into the woods. After some deliberation, he decided to bring it home with him.
One bright afternoon some months later, the young man found the branch and decided to put some additional work into it. He sawed off the cracked shaft above the knot and carved the knot into a handle; then he sanded the entire branch. He hiked with the branch a few more times, then forgot about it. It only crossed his mind when he moved from one apartment to another, and had to pack it with his other belongings.
The young man married and had children, and the children grew to school age. One day they found the branch lying in the attic, and with help from their mother cleaned it up, stained and varnished it, and gave it to their father for his birthday. He was pleased to see that the branch had been so lovingly finished, and for several years used it whenever he went hiking. For a few weeks, after he injured his knee playing touch football, the man used the branch to help him navigate sidewalks and the hallways of his office. When a few co-workers commented on what a nice cane he had, he corrected them, saying that it was simply a walking stick.
After a while, the man grew old, and his knee injury, from which he had never fully recovered, began to give him more trouble. He took to using the branch again. On some days his knee hurt less than on others, but even on these days he carried the walking stick, as it had become a kind of personal trademark, and he would have felt more self-conscious without it than he did with it. People still commented that he had a nice cane and asked him where he had gotten it, and while he was always pleased to tell them the story, he was nonetheless compelled to correct them, saying that it was a walking stick, not a cane.
Then one day the branch slipped on a wet patch of pavement while the old man was getting into his car, and he fell and bruised his hip. On his lunch hour he limped to the hardware store and found a bin filled with rubber caps, and rooted through them until he found one that fit snugly on the base of the branch.
Since then, he has invariably referred to the branch as his cane. We know this man, and can confirm that he corrects people with considerable vehemence whenever they mistakenly call it a walking stick.
Kiss
Our daughter attended a preschool overseen by an attractive, friendly young woman, a professional caregiver who, far from considering her job a burden, seemed to regard the children she supervised with genuine affection, even love. When I dropped my daughter off in the morning, the caregiver welcomed her with open arms, enthusiastically shouting her name; and when I picked her up in the afternoon, she hugged the caregiver and told her she would miss her when they were apart. In addition, I truly liked the caregiver and was always pleased to know that my daughter was with her.
One busy afternoon I arrived flustered and late to pick up my daughter, and after thanking the caregiver for waiting, I kissed her full on the mouth. As if this wasn’t enough, I put a firm hand on the small of her back and pulled her close while doing so. It was a fine kiss, sensuous and arousing, but only when I noticed the unfamiliar smell of the caregiver’s hair did I realize that, momentarily confused by her obvious regard for my daughter, I had mistaken her for my wife. I released the caregiver, embarrassed, and took my daughter’s hand.
To my surprise, the caregiver acted as if nothing unusual had happened. She said bye-bye to my daughter, told me she would see me in the morning, and turned back to her remaining students, who had continued their play oblivious
to my gaffe. My daughter, far from confirming my suspicion that she would relate the incident to her mother, also behaved in typical fashion, and showed no signs of emotional distress. My subsequent encounters with the caregiver were cordial, and the kiss was never mentioned again. My only conclusion can be that this sort of thing happens all the time, though when I think about the incident, as I often do, it is generally with enormous guilt and shame.
Coupon
When we thought my mother was dying, my sister and I established a system of shifts in the hospital whereby one of us would be with her at all times, while the other could relax or straighten our mother’s affairs, staying within reach, of course, of a telephone. The hospital room itself was gray and bleak, with a television always on and silent nurses moving ominously about, and our mother slipped in and out of consciousness there for several days.
One night my sister fell asleep on her shift, and when she woke, our mother was conscious and lucid and engaged her in conversation. Her surprising recovery was swift, and within a week she was home again. She would live another four years in reasonably good health.
Soon after she was released from the hospital, she told my sister and me that it was because of us that she had returned from the edge. The night before she regained consciousness, she said, she heard us talking to one another in bright, youthful voices, and our optimistic tone had convinced her that she should fight for life. She described our conversation. My sister was said to have greeted me, and I apparently told her she looked wonderful and commented on her clothing, and she then told me about a party she was planning on attending, and I said that I, too, was going to that same party. Our mother attached special significance to the party; she laughed and recalled wanting to attend it too. Aghast, we thanked her for acknowledging us. We didn’t tell her the truth, that my sister had been asleep and that I had been at home on the telephone, calling caterers for what we thought would be her funeral.
Some time after my mother did die, I watched a television movie I’d videotaped around the time of her illness. During a commercial break there was an ad for laundry detergent. Two good-looking young people, and man and a woman, engaged in some flirtatious banter at a public laundromat, and I recognized their conversation as the one my mother had attributed to my sister and me on the eve of her recovery.
I promptly wrote a letter to the detergent company, telling them the entire story. Not long afterward I received a coupon good for a free box of detergent. No other reply was provided.
6. Artists and Professors
Our friend, a sculptor, told us that sculpture cannot be taught; rather, it can only be experienced. Similarly, another friend, who is a writer, told us that it is impossible to teach anyone how to write; the writer must learn by doing. Presented with the comments of the other, each insisted that only he himself was correct, the writer stating that sculpture was an elitist and wholly artificial endeavor, whose existence depended solely on its institutional perpetuation, and the sculptor insisting that writing, far from being a true art, was a purely academic exercise. Each man heads the department dedicated to his specific field at our local university.
The Obelisk of Interlaken
Some years ago an article appeared in the newspaper of a village a few miles north of here, claiming that a local farmer had unearthed a large object believed to have originated with a pre-Columbian Indian tribe, or even possibly with the Vikings. The story was generally thought to be improbable, but many of us made the short drive to the village to see for ourselves. Though most came away from the object convinced of its fraudulence, few were disappointed to have seen it. Particularly satisfying was meeting its caretaker, a diminutive, knobbly man of about seventy, who enthusiastically told the story of its discovery beneath his potato patch, and even displayed a piece of metal from his tractor that he claimed the object damaged as he turned it up. The object itself was a four-sided column standing more than twenty-five feet high, the corners converging to a point at the top, which the farmer had marked with a customized brass plaque reading THE OBELISK OF INTERLAKEN.
It did not take long for the obelisk to capture the attention of a pair of academics from our university, an anthropologist and a historian, both renowned for their work at home and abroad, and for their books, considered by others in their fields to be excellent. The two traveled to the nearby village and were dismayed to find that the obelisk was composed of poured concrete. Furthermore, the anthropologist, upon walking out behind the barn to urinate, discovered the plywood molds the farmer had used to make the obelisk, and surreptitiously took photos of them.
The professors’ exposé was received, to their surprise, with derision, and our own local paper proclaimed the farmer a folk hero, running a front-page story on the man and his creation that included a large color photograph of the two. In fact, the professors’ attempt to discredit the farmer only seemed to fuel his popularity. When the professors persisted in their smear campaign, a protest was staged outside their building, in which students and local residents alike demanded their dual resignation.
Mortified, the professors begged the protesters to listen to reason. They had meant no harm, they said; they only wanted to set the record straight. The farmer, after all, had lied.
The protesters, however, replied that the farmer was nice, whereas the two professors were spoilers. Upon hearing this, the professors gave up their campaign, and the protesters left them alone. Today, the farmer is a local celebrity, much loved by the residents of our county, while the professors, abhorred throughout the region, have continued their careers in much the way they had before the obelisk was discovered.
The Nuns
On a trip to the city, we took in an art exhibition that featured, among other things, a videotape of an artist painting yellow lines on the city’s streets with a hand-propelled industrial line-painting machine. The lines he painted did not demarcate lanes of traffic or parking spaces; rather, they took the form of geometric designs of no apparent utility. The lines veered around stationary cars or passing pedestrians, and traced the outlines of oil stains and puddles. In an accompanying printed statement, the artist referred to the lines as “drawings.” The video was filmed from a high window above the street, and the time and date flashed incessantly in the lower right-hand corner of the screen.
It happened that the artist was present at the exhibition, and he told us that not once in his years of line-painting artistry had he been caught, or even questioned, by city officials for what was clearly an act of vandalism. He said that motorists frequently asked him if they should move their cars, city workmen waved to him from trucks, and policemen appeared occasionally to direct traffic around him. His only explanation for their cooperation was the fact that he wore a hard hat and orange vest, and demarcated his “canvas” with striped sawhorses. The uniform and props carried more weight, in the onlookers’ minds, than the inappropriateness of his actions.
Later that night, in a bar in Little Italy, two nuns approached carrying wicker baskets filled with dollar bills, and asked us to contribute “to the St. Joseph’s Orphanage.” We immediately gave them two dollars apiece. As they accepted the money, the nuns said, “God bless you.”
Not until the nuns had left the bar did it occur to us to question their authenticity. Once we did, however, it seemed clear that they were not nuns at all, but hoaxers dressed in rented costumes. There was a seediness about them; in fact, we seemed to recall slurred speech and bleary eyes, which suggested, in retrospect, that they were drunk. They might even have been men. This revelation ruined our evening and we left the city in a foul temper.
Days later we wondered why we had given nothing to the artist, whose performance had enlightened and amused us, while to the false nuns we had handed over four dollars. The only explanation we could come up with was that the nuns had asked for the money and the artist had not.
Short
The famous linguist came to lecture at our town’s university. His speech, delivere
d from an illuminated lectern high on a carpeted dais, was very impressive, expanding upon some of his most profound and widely taught ideas, and many of us left the auditorium shaken to our very foundations, confident that every time we carried on a conversation we would hear as if through new ears, and understand with astonishing clarity the deep roots of our own biological, psychological, cultural and sexual realities. Every word, we were certain, would seem new.
A lucky few were invited to the cocktail party following the lecture, which was held at the monumental home of a university dean, and which the linguist was expected to attend. And in fact he did arrive, late in the evening, accompanied by his wife, a middle-aged woman of great beauty who stood almost twelve full inches above her husband. It was not that the linguist’s wife was especially tall, we quickly realized, but that the linguist was unusually short.
As the evening wore on and each of us bent the linguist’s learned ear, we also discovered that his voice, which had sounded imposing and clear through the auditorium’s excellent sound system, was in fact small and shrill, and as the linguist accepted drink after drink from passing caterers, he began to slur his words and lapsed into Walloon, the near-extinct Belgian dialect of his childhood and occasional subject of his essays.
In the days that followed, those of us who attended the cocktail party began to see the linguist’s ideas in a new light; they no longer impressed us as particularly original, and even struck some of us as obvious, the sort of ideas we ourselves might have come up with eventually if we’d just put our minds to it.
Conceptual
Our local museum, as part of its recent “Century of American Art” exhibition, commissioned a famous conceptual artist to create a large-scale work that would illustrate the state, in her opinion, of American art at century’s end. The artist accepted, and began what she claimed would be a full year of research and contemplation of the work.
Pieces for the Left Hand: Stories Page 9