A Box of Matches

by Nicholson Baker

  On New Year’s morning we packed two thermoses, one of hot chocolate and one of coffee, and we drove for half an hour, the four of us, to the little parking lot at the beach. There was a bitter wind that made our pants flap, but several people were there with their dogs, looking out at the places on the horizon where they expected the sun to rise. Some seemed to know where it would come up and some didn’t; one old couple, bundled and hooded in matching orange puffy coats, stood still, halfway down to the water, mitten in mitten. I figured that they would know where the sun would appear and, yes, they did. It underwent some waistline contortions, as rising suns so often do, narrowing first and then oozing out as if from a puncture in the seam of the horizon, and then the sky around the puncture point became inconceivably blue.

  That was this year. Last year for New Year’s I decided that I would shave off my beard because there was too much white in it. I bought an electric trimmer, and I began plowing off chunks of coarse fur. Henry watched with interest, but Phoebe became unexpectedly upset. She said that my personality had to have a beard. I must stop immediately, she said. I said I was tired of looking in the mirror at a prematurely white-bearded person—that I had no respect or affection for badger-people in their forties. If, after I finished buzzing it off, I didn’t like the results, then I would just regrow it. When I was halfway through, Henry said, “Dad, I think it looks interesting but you need to work some on the other side.” Claire said to Phoebe, “He’s just seeing how it looks.” But I could see that when she, Claire, saw me in the mirror she was a little startled.

  You see, Claire had never seen me beardless. I’ve had one since I was eighteen, and in years past I’ve been more than a little proud of its curly density and its russet highlights. By the way, you can trim a beard, I’ve found, using a double-bladed disposable razor: you “shave” over the beard’s shape as if it were your jaw and chin. I originally grew the beard because I thought I had a thin weak face, which I did, but over the years, without my knowledge or consent, it had changed into a plump weak face. The mouth was the main problem: I had always thought that I had a generous ho-ho-ho sort of mouth, the mouth of a backslapping mountain man, quick with a knock-knock joke or a kindly word, but it turned out, when put in the context of my upper lip, that my mouth was pursed and almost parsonly. That evening Claire kept getting caught by surprise by my face. “I can hear your voice in the room,” she said, “but when I look up, you’re not there,” she said. I buried my head in her bathrobe so that she wouldn’t see me; I was reminded of a time in seventh grade when someone kicked me during a soccer game and I spent the day with a puffed lip and thick twists of toilet paper projecting from both nostrils. Every time the teacher looked in my direction he laughed, and then he apologized for laughing, saying that he just couldn’t help it.

  It was a good experiment, Claire said, worth trying, but she liked my beard and wanted it back. I began regrowing it immediately.

  20

  Good morning, it’s 4:39 a.m. and I just watched a cocktail napkin burn. After its period of flaming was past, there was a long time during which tiny yellow taxicabs did hairpin turns around the mountain passes, tunneling deeper and deeper into the ashen blackness. I’ve torn off some pages of a course catalog for a local community college and I’ve rolled them up and pushed them into the hot places. Because I started late yesterday, I was in a rush to be sitting here in front of the fire by five a.m. sharp, and that is probably why I stepped on Henry’s airplane in the dining room. Out of a paper-towel tube, an electric motor, a battery holder, a light switch, and a great deal of masking tape, Henry made an airplane. He was sure that it would fly, even though Claire and I both gently, in different ways, observed that though it was beautiful it was heavy. Henry cut out larger and larger propellers from the lid of a shoebox, and he tried to tape on a second battery pack, and he and I went outside just before dinner and climbed the snowplow mound. He turned on the propeller and flung his machine out into the twilight. It landed heavily, but it seemed to be not too badly damaged. We came back inside. Phoebe and Claire were watching an episode of Gomer Pyle. I showed Henry how to make a paper airplane. I’d showed him once a few years ago, but he’d forgotten, and I’d almost forgotten myself. The moves came back to me, though, as I talked my way through them, and as the triangles narrowed into swept-back wings Henry began to make a purring, half-laughing sound of enlightenment that I thought he had stopped making forever.

  So swerving to avoid the dining-room chair this morning, I stepped on the battery-powered airplane. I felt it for breakage, but I think it’s all right—Henry had fortified it with more masking tape after its snow crash. Then, hurrying to be in here by five—not running but moving with a distinct sense of hurry—I felt a need to let out some private gas before I sat down, and because I didn’t want to make any noise I paused for a moment and pulled on one side of my bottom—backside perhaps is a more delicate term—to allow the release to proceed without fanfare. Then I came in here and set up.

  I wish I were a better photographer. Many family moments are going by and I’m missing most of them. At least I got a few shots last month when we had that very soft white snowfall that ticked against the window all night. It was an unusual snow, almost like Styrofoam in its consistency in some of the deep places, and when you dug in it, the light that it let through was an interesting sapphire blue—perhaps different prevailing temperatures during snowflake-growth result in a different shape of crystal, which absorbs and allows passage to different wavelengths of light. That Saturday Henry and I dug a tunnel through the snowplow pile. The duck became interested in our project—companionably she climbed to the top, beaking around in it for bits of frozen mud. When both of her feet got cold at the same time she sat down in the snow for a while to warm them. Once or twice she levitated, flapping hard. She didn’t much want to walk through the tunnel, and we didn’t make her.

  Towards the end of the tunneling I got the camera and took two pictures of Henry looking out, with his hood on and his nose red from cold. Then I was out of film. My pictures used to be better than they are now. About ten years ago I bought a Fuji camera that took fantastic pictures. It was a simple point-and-shoot machine, but the lens was good. Then a few years ago, I was packing our car for a trip. I was holding several things in my left hand—the Fuji by its strap, my battered briefcase, and a shopping bag full of presents—and I was concentrating on my right hand, in which I was holding a suitcase and a coat, but also reaching through the handle of the suitcase to open the back hatch of the car. As I put the things in the car, my overspecialized fingers, forgetting that some of them were doing double duty, relaxed their hold on the camera strap when they released the handle of the shopping bag, so that the camera fell, not in a broken, lurched-after tumble, but straight down, freely released, onto the street. It worked after that for a while, but it rattled in a very un-Japanese sort of way, and finally it stopped focusing. The camera store said they couldn’t repair it, so I bought a new camera, more expensive, waterproof, to replace it, but the pictures it takes are not as good, or else my skill has declined.

  These unintentional droppings of held objects have occurred to me at least twenty times in my life. Trouble ensues, for instance, when I have a heavy load from the dry cleaners hanging on coat hangers in a hand that is also holding something else. You can hook a lot of coat hangers onto two fingers, but they pull back the fingers and dig into the skin of the inside fingerjoints, and those heavy coat-hanger sensations are powerful enough to distract from the sensation of whatever other thing those fingers may be responsible for—the mail, say, which falls in the slush. I’m prone to other absentminded acts as well. I once pulled a bag of garbage from the kitchen can, tied it, and hung it on a hook in the hall closet. “Did you just hang up that bag of garbage in the closet?” Claire asked me. “I believe I did,” I said, thinking back. Another time I was standing in a kitchen talking to my mother-in law and drinking a cup of tea. Admiring the teacup, I asked her
whether it was Hollerbee china, knowing that she had gone to the Hollerbee outlet with Claire several times and bought things. My mother-in-law said she wasn’t sure where it came from. I turned it over to see if it had the Hollerbee logo on the underside, and it did. But I’d forgotten that there was tea in the cup.

  I suppose if I taught at a college I would gradually drift into the role of the absent-minded professor. One of Claire’s history teachers in college showed up late to class one morning with his wife’s bra clinging to the back of his sweater. Another morning, lighting a pipe near a longhaired student, he gestured with a match. A smell of hot hair filled the room; the professor, not noticing, continued his lecture.

  Once I lost a key. I spent a day looking for it before I gave up; a week later Claire found it frozen to the bottom of a piece of raw meat that she took out of the freezer. I don’t know how it got there.

  21

  Good morning, it’s 5:25 a.m., and last night was less good from the point of view of sleep. I had to pull out some of my old suicide fantasies—like the one where I’m the only passenger on a roller coaster that is fitted out with a horizontal blade at the top of one of its turns. I swoop up towards the high turn and the switchblade flips out into my path, chopping off my head. Released from my body, I tumble placidly through space, closing my eyes. Another one I tried was my self-filling grave idea, a mainstay in high school. If you kill yourself, you are being inconsiderate, because others must deal with the distasteful mess of your corpse. The self-filling grave solved that. You dig for a long time, mounding all the dirt on a sheet of plywood by the hole, and when you’ve gotten the grave just the way you want it, with the roots neatly trimmed off and a layer of soft, cool, fertile dirt in the bottom and no stones, you put a chair in the grave—not one of any value—and you clamp a revolver to the back of the chair pointing diagonally out and fitted with a remote-control trigger; and then you arrange a complicated system of pulleys and weights so that when you shoot yourself fatally and fall into the soft cool fertile earth, your fall will cross a tripwire that pulls away a prop and allows the load of dirt to slide in after you. The dumping of the dirt in turn triggers the flapping down of a large piece of biodegradable two-ply fabric, between the layers of which you have sprinkled grass seed, wildflower seed, and weed seed, in the proper proportions. After a few months, if all goes well, nobody will know where you are buried—except that the tilted sheet of plywood attached to the system of ropes and counterweights may occasion curiosity. I never end up actually dead in these fantasies. I can’t die: I have to be able to check whether, for example, the proportion of wildflowers to grass seed is too rich and must be adjusted down.

  From college I once sent my grandmother what I thought was a good letter. She sent a chatty letter back, but at the top there was an arrow pointing to the date, and she had written, in larger handwriting, “By the by, always date your letters.” Her flaw-finding note hurt my feelings, but she was right, and from that moment on I became extremely date conscious. I date every piece of children’s art that we keep (on the back, in tiny lettering), and I made sure that the Fuji camera had a “date-back” feature: it burned the date, year first, in orange fiery letters on the lower right-hand side of every picture.

  In the last letter my grandmother wrote us, when she asked for another picture of Phoebe to brighten the front of her refrigerator, she didn’t date the letter. No date anywhere. I had to note it on the letter myself, referring to the canceled stamp. I should have known then that she was letting go.

  I took the plane down the day after she’d broken her back. My grandfather was downstairs playing his Chopin prelude. I called an ambulance; she cried out with a terrible pain-cry when they moved her a certain way on the stretcher, which they had trouble maneuvering around the hallway to her room. But she got better. She didn’t believe in the dishwasher; she stored cans of soup in its top rack. While she was in the hospital, I taught my grandfather how to heat up a can of tomato soup, and how to put a load of laundry in the washing machine.

  For years she’d written (not just typed, but written) all of his scientific correspondence, and yet he insisted on moving to new universities and research centers, where he would attempt to carry on. When my grandmother was angriest at him—over the oblivious playing of the Chopin while her back was broken—she said to me in a whisper that the three fungal diseases he was known for were partly hand-me-downs from one of his teachers at Yale. What really bothered her was his autobiography. He had given it to her to edit. In the third chapter, he wrote that he proposed to her one afternoon, and then hurried back to his microscope to examine some interesting slides of coccidioidomycosis, prepared with a new kind of stain—and that was the last mention of her. “He is, I think, an affectionate person,” she said, “but he takes after his mother.” His mother was a self-absorbed and difficult birdwatcher who moved in soon after my grandparents were married and then grew vague and quarrelsome. My grandmother said, “There was one time, Emmett, when I was out for a drive, just on some errand, and there was a steep slope on one side of the road, and it was everything I could do to keep myself from driving right off the edge.” I said that I was very sorry it had been so difficult. “I’m really letting my hair down,” she said. I’d never heard that idiom before. Her hair was white with many gentle curls; it could not be let down.

  She loved her four children, though, and was good to them, and I do believe that it made her happy to be a grandmother. Also she liked that she knew where everything was in her house, and that she could list all the books of the Old Testament at high speed. She gave Claire a bag of rags, for polishing things, when we were engaged; one of her aunts had given her a bag of rags and she’d much appreciated it. Always date your letters, she taught me. Thank goodness for that Fuji camera.

  22

  Good morning, it’s 5:33 a.m. and I’m feeling better about my beard. Yesterday I was going through a box of clothes and I found a dark blue sweater that I’d forgotten about. It has a silvery white pattern of small shapes in it, and these bring out the silver in my beard or at least make it look less unintentional.

  We’ve run out of apples, so I’ve brought in a pear. I’ve held it up to the fire to read the label, which says “#4418 Forelle,” and then, around that, in capitals in a green border, RIPE WHEN YIELDS TO GENTLE PRESSURE. I woke up at 5:15, shivering. I could feel each shiver system with more detail, more precision, than normal. It began in my torso and then rose, vibrating, up my spine until I could feel the muscles in the back of my neck participating, and then it was gone. The duck sometimes shivers. I was glad to learn when I was a child that shivering serves a useful purpose, and is not simply a signal of cryothermic distress, although it clearly is a sign of that as well, since it feels bad. You know that if you’re shivering you must go inside or put on something warmer and you want to do that because the sensation of the shivering is unpleasant. But for some animals, who don’t have any warm places to go to, the shivering may be a neutral or even a pleasurable sensation, a way of passing the time.

  I’ve thrown my eaten pear into the fire. Phoebe cleaned her room yesterday and found two lost pairs of scissors there, one of which I am going to use to clip my mustache so that when I go out for lunch today I won’t get salad dressing on it and have to use my tongue to draw some of the mustache into my mouth and suck the lunch off. My beard has gotten long enough that it can become sleep-squashed on one side and flared-out on the other. Sometimes on the weekend I don’t take a shower until late in the afternoon, and then if I go to the store I have to fluff my beard into symmetry in the rearview mirror. People seldom give me strange looks, though, so I must not seem too eccentric.

  My pear had bird’s-egg specklings of a delicacy I’d never before seen on a pear, and seldom on a bird’s egg, either. It wasn’t quite ripe, though; it didn’t have that superb grittiness of skin, when the flesh dissolves and the disintegrating skin grinds against your molars. Apple skin must be chewed heavily and steadily,
and even so its slick, sharp-cornered surfaces survive a lot of molaring. But eating a ripe pear is similar to cutting a piece of paper with a pair of scissors: you feel the grit of the cut paper transmitted back through the blades to your fingers, you can sense that fulcrumed point of sharp intersection. Scissors are one of the many products that have gotten better in my lifetime. They used to become loose and wobbly at the hinge, and when they wobbled they would fold the paper between the blades instead of cutting it. But if you pushed the thumb-handle in the opposite direction to the larger loop of the finger-handle as you closed the two loops, even loose blades could be made to cut fairly well.

  When I was a kid nobody cut (as many do now) wrapping paper by steering the scissors through the paper without moving the blades—that was a later discovery, or else it depended on a certain kind of soft wrapping paper or a certain level of scissor sharpness. I bought the scissors in San Diego—they are made in China, and they have red plastic handles.

  I don’t feel so good.

  Another machine we had in San Diego was a hose organizer—a machine you cranked, winding the hose up like a piece of thread. There was a hose-guide that slid so that you could coil the hose evenly on its spool. When we moved away, we gave the hose organizer to our next-door neighbors; they seemed to want it. When you coil a hose manually after watering with it you have to slide the whole thing through your left hand, which guides it into a series of lassoing circles by the faucet. The hose is wet when you wind it, so that as you drag it back it collects bits of mulchy things, which then get on your hands, and snail slime, whereas if you have a hose organizer you feel like a crew member on a merchant vessel, hoisting the anchor or squaring the mainsail.