Study in Perfect

by Sarah Gorham

  No whining or squeaking or inch-long splinters; no creases, dents, or sun damage; no history at all. The house gave us a new skin and permission to explore it. The house was young, unembarrassed in its nudity, and so were we. This was horizontal living, our past and future laid out at once, in the open, where we could see it. Which doesn’t mean we were untouched by difficulty; we just had the sudden oxygen and range to consider it all.

  I grew up with a deep respect for all things antique, objects that survived fashion, sturdy enough to last hundreds of years. My grandmother gifted me a set of flow-blue dishes from the 1800s, a French writing desk from the 1700s, nine miniature portraits with piano-key frames. I tried to avoid stores like IKEA selling trendy furniture that would most likely be dust in a decade. We were both raised on the East Coast and our furniture fit well in the Rosewood place with its early 1900s atmosphere of compressed history and withheld energy. Shaker chairs with sagging cane seats, rabbit holes inside a cupboard—these objects contained centuries.

  In the new house, so tuned to the sprawling Kentucky landscape, they looked fussy and stubborn—in short, ridiculous. We used the fireplace as an anchor, threw down a small rug, shuffled the couch, captain’s chairs, and recliners around it. Seating for six, theoretically. But in a forty-foot great room, the rug felt like a raft, chairs and couch legs hanging on like shipwreck survivors. The floorboards established an east/west current, better left unimpeded—no dams or backsplashes. Without banisters, balustrades, carpeting, doors, partitions, or skid tape to keep from slipping, we slipped. The dogs spun around corners, back legs flying. At first we were disoriented, confused. How to settle, where to step first? Should we bother with furniture at all or just throw down a few sleeping bags?

  For more than fifty years, every step we’ve taken has been shadowed by 78 million fellow baby boomers. We were born in a crowd, schooled, worked, married, divorced, remarried, had 1.86 children. Now little explosions are going off everywhere as boomers empty their kids’ bedrooms, enjoy a little free time, and maybe even some discretionary income. You can track our interests by watching the Food Network or HGTV or a flock of tourists visiting vineyards. On a whim, my friends Leslie and Bill purchased land in Costa Rica and plan to spend half the year there. Stephen divorced, remarried an intelligent, gorgeous woman and finds himself a father again at fifty-five. His last email, written in a sleepless fog, announced they were calling the child Elvis. We’ll retire in a crowd and die in a crowd. When we get to that point, there’ll be a national ad campaign for ashes shot into space or your DNA mapped and published. It’ll happen. We’re already seeing “green” cemeteries, where biodegradable caskets or burial shrouds of natural fibers are used, and graves are placed randomly throughout a woodland or meadow, marked with the planting of a tree or shrub.

  The new house opened our eyes to design and, like thousands of others, we surfed the Internet for knockoff Sapien tower bookcases that would put our books within reach but not clutter the landscape of our great room. We shifted a small vase on the mantle until, slightly off center, it looked exactly right. On our backyard deck, we placed five Ronde armchairs, all facing southeast, like seagulls headfirst into the wind. Not coincidentally, our mailbox was stuffed with catalogs from CB2 and West Elm, and we understood the slick TV ad in which a black-suited woman sits before her condescending architect, pulls a Kohler faucet from her purse, and says, “Design a house around this.”

  The door is a missing piece of wall; sometimes a wall is closed and sometimes the wall is open.

  —MICHAEL BARRY

  Even where walls were necessary, Michael minimized their effect by cutouts, half-walls, artful absences, and subtle irregularity. A larger symmetry was implied, not doggedly spelled out. Wherever possible, he dispensed with traditional trim. Instead, between sheetrock and frame, he built a half-inch indentation, like an irrigation channel. It adds an elegance and depth to the joinery. It seems more truthful to the juxtaposition of two dissimilar materials, this crevice of shadow and mystery—a mixing space, as well as a little breathing room. We run our fingers inside when turning a corner, like caressing the valleys between knuckles.

  Side by side at the dinner table, my husband and I chew silently, each of us absorbed in a book. We work in separate wings of the house, but this distance can be intimate too. Across the great room, he shouts, “Can you get the phone? Please?” Or: “Do you have a minute? I want to read you something.” Sometimes we have no choice but to listen to each other. Sneezes, snores, sighs, the rattle of keypads, the dog on the couch licking a ripe spot—sound leaves its source, gullies, ambles, spreads. There’s a strange noise somewhere and, like ship radar, we rotate our heads about, trying to locate it.

  In a vertical dwelling, we stand at attention, prepared for battle, whether the conflict simmers in adolescence or the obstinacy of aged parents. We are backbones when their own skeletons are evolving or devolving. We are fence posts, traffic signs, door frames. We mark their territory and ours—this is where you should go, this not. I was always on my feet in the old house, which also was on its feet, and had been for more than a hundred years.

  Now in middle age, our vision’s softer, taste buds not so discerning, and one ear catches only a half-conversation at best. We’ve been knocked about enough to learn that no plan is a sure thing, no matter how well structured, and no body will last, no matter how well maintained. Our new house celebrates the gray areas, dissolves categories, subverts traditional outlines. A vertical house, with its right and proper posture, holds. A horizontal house releases.

  Shortly after we moved in, we discovered we weren’t the first to take residence since the sale. Twenty feet down the chimney, just above the flue, was a nest of barn swallows. Outside I watched the female swoop from sky to nest without pausing to readjust her aim. Then the thrumming of her young began, faint at first, but as the summer wore on, nearly deafening, primordial. We could hardly talk without acknowledging the famished creatures. They outgrew the nest, three of them bouncing into our living room, slamming into the windows, frantic, till we could chase them down with a thrown dishtowel. Here and there, droppings on sills, stretchers, beams—evidence of their panic. My husband bought a wire screen for the chimney, but we never got around to mounting it. We were human, after all, and rather liked the role we played in nature—this swallow drama. A small part, but essential: cupping the fledglings in terrycloth, we carried them gingerly to the porch.

  The birds did the rest.

  PERFECT

  Word

  Serendipity, tasty to look at, a bright experiment for the mouth. Leading off, the meditative hum, seren, like a flat horizon. Then the playful up and down of the last three syllables as if our boat has encountered chop.

  She flipped off the trampoline, knocking over the soldier who would soon become her lover. Isaac Newton was not beaned by a falling apple, but it’s a more perfect truth, the one we love and remember. A moon called Charon emerged from a “defect” in a photograph. Before departing for vacation, Alexander Fleming failed to disinfect his bacteria cultures, only to find them contaminated with Penicillium when he returned.

  Thoreau said, “There is a certain perfection in accident which we never consciously attain.”

  There is also a certain accident in perfection, which favors the prepared mind.

  Darling Amanita

  Noli me tangere. (Touch me not.)

  Halfway through Bo Widerberg’s 1967 film Elvira Madigan, the camera pans over a summer pasture with trees encircling. The sun is resplendent, and soon blond Elvira in her long striped skirt and white peasant blouse stumbles out of the woods with her paramour, a handsome soldier from the Swedish Army. The story is true: Thirty-four-year-old Lieutenant Count Bengt Edvard Sixten Sparre abandoned his post and family for the twenty-one-year-old acrobatic dancer, whose parents ran a small circus. Sixten and Elvira fled to the island of Tåsinge in Denmark, where they lived for barely two weeks.

  In the film, the couple
is starving, famished, and falls upon a scattering of mushrooms. They drop to their knees and stuff the mushrooms wildly into their mouths without washing or chewing. Later they are sick like animals in high grass. Perhaps Amanita fulva, or tawny grisette, was the culprit. This species is found in conifer, birch, beech, and oak woodlands in Europe, and, like most amanitas, it causes vomiting, gastrointestinal distress, and sometimes death. But the mushrooms don’t kill Elvira and her lover. After thirteen days, Sixten knows their situation is hopeless and walks to town, where he spends the small remainder of their money on wine, bread, olives, fruit, herring—a lavish picnic lunch. They meander into a nearby forest, the Nørreskov, and make love one last time. Sparre draws his service revolver, shoots Elvira, and then himself.

  It’s tragic, but not unheard of—even the most transcendent romance can double as a kind of poison, leading us to abandon our senses, families, careers, health, and sometimes, our lives.

  We recognize two types of mushroom washers: those who scrub (with water), those who wipe (with towels). The first care not for the mushroom’s integrity, only that it is clean, absolutely clean. A cotton dishtowel is spread next to the sink, the cold-water tap runs full blast. In her hand the scrubber holds a wooden mushroom brush with soft bristles, but as she plucks the mushrooms one by one from their blue cardboard box, she is not gentle. Every spot, every flake of peat is obliterated, till the mushroom, which absorbs water like a sponge, is exhausted and lies sodden on the towel. Sauté them and diners will be safe, but the mushroom turns soupy, is no longer firm to the bite.

  The second have seen the mushroom videos. A hangar-like cool space, or a cave. Tables layered with humus, stretching far as the eye can see. The “wiper” is less fearful of bacteria, convinced by these documentarylike images. No one has studied the long-term health effects of mushroom washing. Has anyone died, by either method? Suffered nausea or parasites? Holding the mushroom by the stem, she brushes off the soil with a chamois or paper towel, careful to preserve the cap’s virgin condition. A wiper relishes the spring of its flesh against her knife. The mushroom is composed almost entirely of water, quite a trick, so why swamp its accomplishment?

  In matters of love and dining, we are adventurous. Or not.

  Once there was a naturalist named L. John Trott, who taught eighth grade at a small private school in Virginia. The L stood for “Little,” to distinguish him from his father, John Trott. An unfortunate coincidence, as in fact he stopped growing at only five foot two. His science curriculum consisted of ornithology and botany, with a little textbook chemistry thrown in to please the parents. Students were deeply engaged in bird banding, plant identification, and the natural histories of a dozen species.

  In April one year, he led his class down a woodsy trail, pausing to identify rue anemone, bloodwort, and the demure spring beauty clustered at the base of an oak. “Ah,” he said, “here’s something interesting, destroying angel, or Amanita phalloides—from the Latin phallus; the immature mushroom is shaped like an erect penis.” (Sudden interest in shoe tips. Relief when he went on.)

  “Very dangerous,” he said, pulling a pair of leather gloves from his jacket, stretching them over his hands, waving his circle of fourteen-year-olds back, back, back, before he knelt. Next to the leaves, he laid a finger on each section of the mushroom, beginning with the pileus—”like an umbrella,” he explained, “designed to protect the scissor-blade gills, which in turn protect the spores, microscopic ‘seeds,’ rather like our sperm”—(sideways glances)—”which you’ll never see with the naked eye unless you make a spore print, but that’s another lesson. Here then is the stipe and, ringing it, a partial veil or annulus. Most significant of all, the volva—consider the female anatomy—a semidetached cup at the base of the stem. By this you’ll know amanita. But be aware, the cup is often buried beneath soil or a rock.”

  Sometime later, he brushed a lash from the crook of his left eye. A wayward spore burned halfway through his cornea before he arrived at the hospital.

  From that point on, Little John was a changed man. His students forever associated mushrooms with cantankerous pirates, thanks to the eye patch he wore.

  Amanita phalloides is an easily bruised, pale beauty, the color of milk glass in its momentary prime, mature carriage like a tiny Greek temple. One bite, and you have boarded a subway to the grave. Amatoxins are the lethal component of amanita. They resist changes in temperature and are quickly absorbed by the intestines. The estimated lethal dose is 0.1 mg/kg, or 7 mg of toxin in adults. Six to thirty-six uneventful hours may pass after ingestion. Then nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, and abdominal pain begin in earnest. After a while, there’s momentary relief as symptoms subside. If you were planning to drive to the hospital, you might change your mind, assume the worst is over. This latent period is why amanita is often fatal. Quietly, with little show, amatoxins invade the liver and kidneys. Without treatment, the result is coma or death.

  Seeing one, you might think pedestal, or plinth, not toad-stool—the nickname, ever since the fourteenth century, for all poisonous mushrooms. The word comes from the Middle English tadde and stole and stemmed from a fear that toads themselves were deadly poison. Variations include tadstoles, frogge stoles, tadstooles, tode stoles, frogstooles, paddockstool, puddockstool, paddocstol, toadstoole, paddockstooles, and toodys hatte.

  Innocent as sugar

  but full of paralysis:

  to eat

  is to stagger down.

  —MARY OLIVER

  We keep our distance from catastrophe—invisible, silent, or otherwise. Our brains are hard at work on self-preservation. But powerful as our instinct is to stay alive, we also crave knowledge, excitement, and pleasure. The germ of touching begins in the brain—first as a mild curiosity, then as a spur to action.

  By sight, the most omnipresent amanita is muscaria. Wherever the image of a mushroom is called for—in children’s literature, greeting cards, kitschy seventies needlepoint—its features appear: white stem and a bright-red, umbrella-shaped cap with marked white flecks or “warts.” The common name is fly agaric. In the Middle Ages crushed muscaria in a dish of milk attracted flies, which then grew drowsy and drowned. Even today the mushroom is used as an insecticide. It’s also possible the nickname derives from the medieval belief that insanity was caused by flies invading the brain.

  The agaric is considered poisonous. But in small doses it’s a well-known hallucinogen. The psychoactive ingredient is muscimol, most potent in the layer of skin just below the cap. Like tryptamine (found in another hallucinogenic mushroom, Psilocybin), muscimol mimics the effects of serotonin on the brain. Symptoms occur thirty minutes to two hours after ingestion and include dilation of pupils, confusion, repetitive actions, euphoria, a feeling of unusual strength, distortions of body and time, and visual hallucinations.

  Four-thousand-six-hundred-year-old hieroglyphs from Egypt suggest that the agaric was considered a gate to immortal life, but only royalty could indulge. Certain Vikings in Scandinavia ate the mushrooms and, in war, rampaged unmanageably; they came to be known as Berserkers, hence one likely origin of the word berserk. In eastern Siberia, A. muscaria was used recreationally as well as religiously. The Koryak tell the story of the god Vahiyinin, who spat upon the earth, and his spittle became the warty mushroom. Big Raven consumed the mushroom, which enabled him to carry a whale to its home. He was so elated with his new powers, he begged the god to scatter the agaric far and wide so that his people could experience it too. Western Siberians were less fortunate. There, only the shaman could eat the mushroom to induce a trance state; the rest of the tribe drank his urine, where the active ingredient persisted, sans toxicity.

  In his book The Greek Myths, Robert Graves hypothesizes that the Dionysian rites were conducted under the influence of Amanita muscaria. Other researchers have conjectured that agaric was used by Moses, Elijah and Elisha, Isaiah, Ezekiel, Jonah, even Jesus and his disciples. A 1291 fresco in Plaincourault, France, shows the agaric righ
t alongside Adam, Eve, the Serpent, and the Tree of Knowledge. Eve bends forward, her hand resting on her distended abdomen, perhaps in warning to potential users.

  To “mushroom” is to expand rapidly. To “pop up like mushrooms” is to appear suddenly, as if overnight. In fact, all species of mushrooms take several days to form, beginning with the pin stage, followed by a button stage. Finally, the mushroom draws in water quickly and can swell to full size in a few hours. As Emily Dickinson observed, “Doth like a bubble antedate, / And like a bubble hie.”

  Lewis Carroll, Victorian storyteller with a questionable attraction to little girls, was a known experimenter with fly agaric. Alice in Wonderland’s body warps and quick travels through time were probably inspired by agaric-induced hallucinations. In one scene, Alice is instructed by a hookah-smoking caterpillar to nibble from the mushroom he sits on. She grows immense with a bite from one side, miniscule when she eats from the other. Her neck stretches grotesquely, her arms poke out of the chimney and two upstairs windows. She’s able to hear animals talk, bicker, sing. A croquet ball morphs into a hedgehog, a baby into a pig.

  The story of a little girl’s daring and its unusual consequences impacted culture for decades to come. In the sixties, Grace Slick’s song “White Rabbit” included the infamous lyric:

  One pill makes you larger

  And one pill makes you small

  And the ones that mother gives you

  Don’t do anything at all

  Go ask Alice

  When she’s ten feet tall

  The era brought a desire for transformation through sexual freedom, a mind-bending rock ’n’ roll soundtrack, and renewed interest in magic mushrooms—chiefly Psilocybin, but also Russula, Panaeolus, Stropharia, Boletus, and Amanita muscaria. (Most hallucinogenic mushrooms are now illegal in the United States. But it’s still possible to purchase the agaric on the web at just twenty-nine dollars an ounce—no stems, just caps!)