Late Stories

by Stephen Dixon

  “I didn’t want to startle you,” she says, “so I called out to you as softly as I could. You seemed so absorbed in your book. Am I disturbing you?”

  “Not at all.”

  “Nice place to read, I’d say. Quiet. Surrounded by all these lovely flowers the church has planted. Best time of day too.”

  “Yeah, it’s a great place. I come here almost every day around this time after a long walk. And I’m thinking, I don’t know if I should admit this, and it’s kind of laughable, but you’re the first person I’ve spoken to all day.”

  “Oh, that’s so sad,” she says. “You know what? Why don’t you come by our house tomorrow for a drink? Jim and I have been meaning to have you over for I don’t know how long. We’ve talked about it several times, but as you can see, we’re great procrastinators.”

  “I don’t known. Maybe another time. I’ve become such a hermit, which I know isn’t good, although it helps my work, but—”

  “Nonsense. Tomorrow. Say around six? Bring your cat. I’m only kidding. What’s her name?”

  “His. Rufus.”

  “Rufus. I see him running all around. Once up a tree. He never seems to just walk. And hiding in bushes. But it’ll be wonderful talking to you over an extended period of time instead of only these quick chats or when I run in to you at the market. By the way, what’s that you’re reading?”

  “Gilgamesh.”

  “Oh, I remember it from college. You’ll have to tell us tomorrow why you’re reading it. I mean, what made you, I’m sure, take it up again. Tomorrow then? Sixish?”

  “Yes. Thanks.”

  She smiles and goes. He reopens the book. What page was I on again? He thinks. Eighty-four, I think. He turns to it. I’m right. So, today won’t be a day where I can say I didn’t talk to a single person, and tomorrow won’t be one either. Well, it wouldn’t have turned out that way today anyway. He probably would have reached one of his daughters on the phone later. Maybe both.

  Remember

  He puts three eggs on to boil. When they’re done, he’ll dump the yolks and use the egg white in the tuna fish salad he’s making. Should take ’bout fifteen minutes altogether, getting the water to boil and then the boiling. He reminds himself again of the owner of the sandwich shop at the Y he goes to who said to get the shells off without them sticking to the whites, he boils the eggs for forty minutes, or was it fifty, drops them in cold water and two minutes later shells them. “Method’s infallible,” he said, “though it does take a lot of time.” Boiling them for ten minutes will be enough to get the same results, he thinks. He goes into the living room and reads a novel while listening to some soft piano music. A while later, he smells something funny. Goddamnit, the eggs! He runs into the kitchen. They’ve been boiling for probably an hour. All the water’s boiled out, the eggshells have split and the saucepan will have to be scrubbed and scrubbed to get rid of the eggs stuck to the bottom. He puts three more eggs into a larger saucepan, stays in the kitchen and cleans the first saucepan and reads from the novel till the eggs have boiled for eight minutes. That’s enough time. He can’t stay here forever. He pours the boiled water into the sink, covers the eggs in the pan with cold water and waits there a couple of minutes before he starts shelling the eggs. The shells don’t come off easily, but with a lot of peeling and picking he gets most of the egg whites for his tuna fish salad.

  He gets dressed and goes out around seven for his daily morning walk. Says “Hello” and “Good morning” to a few people while he walks, one jogging at a very slow pace and the others walking their dogs. Gets back home. Goes into the bathroom to pee. Sees his fly has been open all the way since he last peed. People he saw during his walk, even the jogger going the opposite way, may have noticed. Why’d he forget to zip up? Should concentrate more on it. People will think he keeps his fly open deliberately if they see it another time. Or could. Or just that something’s the matter with him. That he’s not thinking.

  Puts the tea kettle on for drip coffee. The cat. Did he let him out? He did; hours ago. He forgets sometimes where the cat is, he lets him in and out so many times in a day. There have been foxes around. He gets worried. He goes outside to see if the cat’s around. Looks; whistles for him. Calls for him a few times. Starts weeding around the blueberry bush his younger daughter put in this spring by the driveway. Likes it to stand out. Often the cat sidles up to him while he weeds. Or just quietly appears next to him, lying on his stomach. From there he weeds around the other blueberry bushes near the blueberry bush. He forgets who put them in. Maybe they came with the house. His wife was always good at knowing those things. Gets a big leaf bag out of the garden shed and puts most of what he’s weeded into it. That’s enough work outside today. It’s gotten too hot. Heads for the house. The cat. Ah, he’ll be all right. Smells burnt metal through the kitchen screen door. The tea kettle. Knows all the water must be gone and the handle will be too hot to touch. Uses a potholder to lift the kettle off the stove and put under the faucet. Steam fogs up his glasses and he has to wipe the lenses to see out of them. Kettle’s probably ruined, but maybe not. Didn’t he ruin a tea kettle a few months ago by letting the water boil out? Sometime, anyway, but hasn’t happened since. He’s been extra careful about it most times. He also has to remember to always put the whistle part down.

  Makes a frittata in a frying pan on the stove. He’ll have half of it for dinner and then some of it cold for lunch tomorrow. Puts it in the oven for about ten minutes and then sprinkles grated parmesan cheese on it and sticks it under the broiler to make it crisp on top and turns the oven knob to “broil.” Should take no more than a minute under the high flame. Makes himself a drink. A fast one: just vodka and ice in a glass. Sips it. Puts the bottle of vodka back into a kitchen cupboard. Ice container could use more ice. He empties a tray of ice into the container, drops another ice cube into his glass, fills the tray with water and puts the container and tray into the freezer. Smells the frittata burning. Damn, there goes that. Turns the oven off and pulls the pan out. Frittata’s scorched. Who knows what with the pan? And it’s an expensive one, his wife’s before he even met her, French—Creuset, he thinks it’s called; supposed to be the best. Not going to make another frittata. There’s some egg salad and Muenster cheese in the refrigerator, and with two slices of bread—don’t even toast them; the way his mind’s going today, don’t even chance it, though he’s really only kidding himself; he’s not that bad off—and lettuce and cucumber slices, he’ll make a sandwich.

  Did he take his tamsulosin pill this morning? Thinks he did, but then maybe not. Supposed to a half an hour after breakfast. Doesn’t want to take two in one day. Especially one so soon after the other, if he did take it today. So did he? Think back. Doesn’t come up with anything. Let it go for today. Not taking the pill one day won’t kill him. Get a pill holder that has seven compartments for each day of the week. Do it next time you’re in a pharmacy. Remember to. Do it even sooner. Make a special trip to the pharmacy when you go to the market later, and start using the holder tomorrow. Three carbidopa-levodopas, one tamsulosin and one omeprazole per compartment. That should do it. Prepared a lentil rice loaf and puts it in the oven at 375 degrees. Lentils and rice are already cooked, so the whole thing should take half an hour; at most, forty minutes. He’ll see when he looks at it thirty minutes from now. Has plenty of time to check his emails. Hopes his daughter answered his email about Maine this summer, a decision he has to have in the next two days if he’s to put a deposit down for the cottage they rented for a month last summer. He goes to the computer in his wife’s old study. Stares for a while at the photograph leaning against a window there of his wife and daughters, two and five years old or three and six. Tries to remember what they looked like at those ages and decides on two and five. Maine again. Wind blowing his wife’s long hair. What a smile she had. And so beautiful. On a sailboat friends of theirs took them out on. All of them in life jackets. He no doubt had one on too. His daughter writes she can’t leave
her work till July 28th. He writes back and then reads three other emails. What a drag. One’s a long one from an editor about a story of his coming out in a magazine, that needs an equally long response. Sure he wants to keep this? Is a word missing there? He’s already mentioned the color of the jug two pages earlier, and since there’s only one jug, does the color need to be given again? Her name’s Lily at the top of the page, Lila at the bottom. Surely that’s an error. Should the verb tense, line 9, page 14, be in the present, when the sentence starts off in the past? Around two dozen others. He checks the original manuscript. Makes the corrections or gives reasons why he doesn’t go along with the suggested changes, or no reasons: he just wants this and that to stay put. He’s very slow at the keyboard. Types with two fingers now, sometimes three, and is always making typing mistakes and correcting them. Then he sends it. Then thinks does he really go along with all the editor’s changes he did agree to? Maybe he answered too fast just to get it out of the way. He rereads the last email he sent the editor. Makes a few changes back to what he originally had and sends them. While he’s here he clicks on—that can’t be the right term for it; what is the right term then? He’ll remember—a twenty-eight minute dramatization, with English subtitles, of Kafka’s The Judgment, a German writer he’s been corresponding with the last few years sent him. Three minutes from the end of it he remembers his loaf baking. Turns off the computer and goes into the kitchen. It’s been more than two hours. He never checked a clock. Thought he’d just know when thirty to forty minutes were up or he’d look at the time on the computer, which he didn’t do, when he first sat down at it. Loaf’s completely ruined. God, what an asshole he is. “You’re an asshole,” he says, “an asshole.” What else is he going to ruin? He’s not losing his mind, is he? No, just his memory, or whatever it is that reminds him to prevent things like this. Maybe if he’d kept the temperature down to 325; 300, even. Would take longer to bake but give him more of a chance to remember something’s in the oven, so less chance it’d be ruined. Suppose he left something on the stove that long? Well, he thinks he would have smelled it sooner. And why didn’t he smell the loaf burning? He got lost in something else, and there’s less chance of smelling something burning in the oven than on the stove. From now on, pay attention, you hear? He doesn’t, there’ll be a real accident. He has no smoke alarm because he hates the noise it makes when just a slice of toast is getting burnt. He should think of getting one. He should really remember to. But he never will, and not because he’ll forget to, unless one of his daughters insists on it. So he won’t tell them of the burnt frittata and lentil rice loaf and the tea kettles he let boil out and other things. If he does, then the first one to visit him will go to the store to buy two or three of them and install them herself.

  He puts two rice cakes in the toaster and presses the lever down. Shouldn’t take long. The phone rings. He goes into his wife’s study to answer it. It’s his sister. “How are you?” “Fine.” “What’s doing with you?” “Nothing much, and you?” “The same,” and so on, when he smells something burning. “Hold it,” he says; “the rice cakes,” and he puts the receiver down and goes into the kitchen. The rice cakes are on fire in the toaster. Flames coming out of the slots that reach the bottom of the cupboard above them. He pulls out the toaster plug, presses the button to pop up the rice cakes, blows on the flames till the fire’s out, and then, with a potholder and dishtowel protecting his hands, holds the toaster over the sink and shakes it till the rice cakes fall out. Runs water on them till they stop smoking and are soaked, and puts them in the kitchen trash can. Now that could have been very dangerous, he thinks. Very. How stupid can he get? He goes back to the study; his sister’s no longer on the line. He’ll call her later, if she doesn’t call him first, but he won’t tell her why he suddenly had to get off the phone. She’ll say didn’t his smoke alarm go off? And then urge him to get one, at least for the kitchen. He looks inside the toaster. Nothing seems damaged. Cupboard seems okay, too. He puts two more rice cakes into the toaster and turns the timer knob all the way to the left. Stay here, and then when he thinks they’re ready, pop them. He got the idea for toasting the rice cakes from his wife. That’s how she always asked him to make them for her when she had cream cheese or butter or peanut butter put on them after they were warmed. It’d take about forty-five seconds. “Don’t let it burn,” she’d say. He likes them toasted more than warmed, even some of the puffy grains blackened, and it’d take a little more than a minute. Room still smells of burnt rice cakes. He turns the exhaust fan on. It makes so much noise, he won’t have any trouble remembering to turn it off. And remember, never leave the rice cakes in the toaster for that long again. Maybe a better idea would be never to toast them again. Let’s face it, it’s getting or gotten to the point where he’s beginning not to trust his memory that something’s in the toaster or oven or on the stove that needs checking into every now and then.

  Puts a pill into his mouth, fills half a juice glass with water, gets a large container of yogurt out of the refrigerator, lets the pill dissolve on his tongue, swallows it with water, opens the refrigerator and starts to put the glass on the shelf where the yogurt was, realizes he means for the yogurt container to go back into the refrigerator but after he has a spoonful of it, puts the glass upside down into the dish rack, has a spoonful of yogurt, puts the spoon into the sink and the yogurt container into the refrigerator. Absentminded, that’s all. Not really a problem. Was doing too many things at once and too quickly; just didn’t think.

  He goes outside for his daily run and longer walk. He runs first, just a quarter-mile or so. He can’t run like he used to not that long ago, which was about two miles every day. Then he starts walking fast. He feels his fly. It’s open; forgot again. Makes him even more worried about himself. Toaster, oven, stove, forgetting his keys when he goes out to drive the car. Goes back to get them and often gets distracted and when he leaves the house again realizes he’s forgotten his keys a second time. So: remember to check your fly every time before you go out. Remember, remember. Right. Check. Every time. Will do. At least solve that problem.

  Goes to the market to shop, comes back, smells gas. Checks the stove. He left one of the burners on though no flame. How’d that happen? What was the last thing he did on the stove? Boiled water for coffee this morning. Turns the exhaust fan on. What’s he want to do, kill himself? If not by fire, then gas? Big joke. Funny. Knows it’ll never get that bad. If his wife were alive he’d tell her it. No he wouldn’t. And what was the joke again? Couldn’t have forgotten it that fast. If not by fire, then gas. She’d get frightened for him and her both. Concentrate more. Just concentrate on everything to do with what he does in the kitchen and his fly and what he needs to have on him when he takes the car. Though how many times has he forgotten his keys and wallet? Not much but enough. Maybe once every two months or not even that. Though maybe more. Keys aren’t that big a problem. Most of the time he knows almost immediately when they’re not on him. But sometimes he’s gotten to the market or wherever he’s gone to, felt his pocket where the wallet should have been, and had to drive back home for it, a few times from miles away.

  He goes outside to get the newspaper by the mailbox. Picks it off the ground, takes the plastic sleeve off, starts reading the headlines as he walks back to the house. His fly. Why’s he think it might be open? He didn’t. Just checking. It’s open. Didn’t he tell himself to concentrate more on it? Zips it up. At least nobody was around to see it.