28
Good morning, it’s 4:32 a.m. and there’s that train whistle, a-tootin’ in the night. They are masters of pathos, those professional train-whistle tuners. They know just what’s going to arrow straight through to our hearts. I recall a cowboy movie in which a man was shot near the heart with an arrow that had a detachable head. If he pulled the arrow out, the head would stay in there, and he would surely die. So he had to push the arrow all the way through his chest and out his back, remove the arrowhead, and then draw the unarmed shank back out from the front. He grimaced and trembled, but he lived.
Nothing like that has happened to me. I’ve just ridden my tricycle, gone to school, greased my bicycle bearings, gotten a job, gotten married, had children, and here I am. There are lots of stars out tonight—I looked through the glass at one, which broke into two because of a distortion in the glass. Or maybe it was my tears. Nah, just kidding. I’m a child of urban renewal. As I grew up, the elms and the buildings came down. Once my father and I went to the top of Reservoir Hill to walk around the reservoir, which we did every so often. I was six years old. We could see out over the city. He pointed towards downtown. “You see that thing with the three arches?” he said. I said I did. “That’s the train station. They’re going to tear it down.”
I asked him if we could stop them. People were trying, he said, and there was a petition, which was a list of names of people who didn’t want it to happen, but it didn’t look as if it could be stopped. He and I drove to the train station on a Sunday, a few days after they’d started the demolition. The inside had been covered with tiles. It was now open to the sky; but the fountain was still there by the grand stairway, with a bronze figure of a woman sending forth an eagle. The fountain later disappeared; nobody knows where it is. The building had been built by a local architect named Richard Brinsley, an Arts and Crafts enthusiast, in 1904. There were holes in the side walls where the black ball had smashed, and broken tiles everywhere, but there were many tiles still in good shape, and my father and I filled a wooden crate with them and brought them home. Brinsley had designed the tiles himself—there were four different designs. They were called encaustic tiles. Brinsley also happened to be the architect who had designed our house, which is why my father knew about him—in our attic he found Brinsley’s private recipe for stucco: it included horsehair.
Some of the tiles my father gave away to employees, and five he used right away to repair our fireplace, which had been damaged when the couple who owned it before us had ripped out the mantelpiece and installed a narrow strip of moderno-slate, surmounted by an enormous pink mirror. My father took down the mirror and gave it to a man who grew tree peonies, and he chipped out the broken places in the tilework and mixed up some fresh grout and squished the tiles from the train station into place. They fit perfectly—perfectly—as if they were meant to be there. He let me squish one of them in. They had a sort of Celtic design, in green and brown, but with a very soft porous glaze. When it dried, the grout we had used was whiter than the grout that was around the other tiles. It didn’t look right, so we touched it up with black Magic Marker. The black, however, was too dark, and then it became my job to Magic Marker all the grout between all the tiles in the fireplace. When I was finished, the fireplace looked deep and rich, with no broken places, and the tiles from the railroad station were like random stars in the sky of the plain brown tiles that had been there. There was no way you could tell that I had used black Magic Marker. My father put a new mantelpiece over the fireplace, an ornate one with two out-scrolling mustaches of dark-stained oak that had been torn out of a church on Main Street and left on the curb, and when it was done, the thing looked as if it had always been there, a fireplace any boy would be proud of.
In place of the Richard Brinsley train station there is now a parking garage where criminals go to hold people up at gunpoint; Amtrak, at great expense, has built a new and pitiful little station nearby that has some blue fiberglass chairs and vending machines in it. The sculpture of the noble-breasted bronze woman and her eagle has never turned up. All that’s left of the original station are the tiles in my parents’ fireplace—and of course that fireplace isn’t my parents’ anymore because when they got their divorce, they sold the house. But that’s all right—the tiles are permanently fixed in my head; when I look up at night I see them in the constellations, surrounded by black grout.
29
Good morning, it’s 6:03 a.m., late. Yesterday I used the toilet plunger on the bathtub drain with great success. The cat was so indignantly hungry this morning that I grabbed a handful of catfood and jingled it into his bowl, and then I brought that hand to my face and smelled it. It smelled quite good—some catfood does. Perhaps my nose is celebrating that it has gotten its land legs back. Cats need to keep the bits of food forever tumbling, half airborne, in their mouths, like clothes in a dryer, or like tiny Hacky Sack balls, and so they’re forced to do more head bobbing than seems necessary.
I’m afraid the cat is a compulsive eater. I watched him through the window the other day, after he’d bolted down a full bowl of dry catfood in the shape of little fishes. He was especially displeased with the quality of the snow that cold day—a grimy sort of snow that stuck to his paws, making him shake his hind legs with every step, while he held his head up and looked out for crows and coon cats. Then he stopped and started to retch, his head low, his stomach clenching. Nothing came out, but he had eaten too much too fast. He took a moment to compose himself, and then he went on walking, fluttering his rear paws each time.
This morning I woke up writing an impassioned petition in my head, but impassioned petitions do nothing, and now I’m downstairs. What you don’t realize normally, but do just as it begins filling the room through the windows, is how bright but unblinding daylight is. No man-made source can arrive at the particular effortless blueness of this crevice-cleaning light. It is a simple light that goes everywhere but with no heat, aware that it is taken for granted and content to be so.
Very soon, I’ve got to take a shower and drive Phoebe to school and go to work. It used to be, several long weeks ago, that the shower was the beginning of my day and the place where I did my eyes-closed morning thinking, and I do love the hum of the ceiling fan and the clinking slide of the plastic rings on the shower rod as I pull the curtain closed. I often sing “Eight Days a Week” to the drone of the ceiling fan. And when I reach in (before I get in, so that I won’t be blasted with cold or hot) and turn on the control by feel, I can sometimes hear the ringing sound of the water racing up the pipe and smacking against the showerhead, where it is immediately split into two dozen streamlets of fine snickering spray. While it is warming up, I drape my watch over one edge of the sink, and then I wander back into the bedroom to take off my pajamas. I can do this, by the way, without having to bend to the floor to pick them up. Here’s how: pin the end of your left pajama leg under your right foot and then lift your left leg, stepping out of the pinned flannel on that side. At this point you’ve got one pajamaed leg and one naked leg. Then pin the bottom edge of the right pajama leg under your left foot, and bend that knee, drawing off the pajamas entirely—but hold on to the waistband so that instead of their falling to the floor you can ball up the loose and still warm garment and shove it under the pillow for the next night’s sleeping.
The showerhead is lower than my head, so I must duck a little, but it’s well worth it—those skull-warming drops force out a blubbering sigh of relief. I’m just my shower self—hideous, naked, defenseless. I shave in the shower, eyes closed, mirrorless, checking with my fingertips for places I missed. Of course because I have a beard I have less to shave, but I still have neck and cheeks to do—I balloon out each cheek in turn to make the follicles pop up. Sometimes I fall into the habit of shaving too high on the underside and have to remember to stop earlier on the upstrokes. I don’t like beards that fail to cover the corner of the jawbone: that is, beards that are a form of makeup, with sharp cuts and topiar
y corners. I move the soap, that heavy oval bar, into all the places it needs to go, being sure to rinse it off for the next person—i.e., my wife—after it goes in some of the places. You can make the soap revolve in your hand, like a police car’s dome light, just by working your thumb and palm muscles a little: it looks as if the soap is turning of its own accord, and not as if you are turning the soap. Revolving the soap this way several times under the spray is a good way to clean it off. The soap must be left clean.
My towel hangs on a rack across the bathroom, too far to reach while standing in the tub after the shower. I don’t like leaving puddles on the floor, and I’ve had little success when I’ve tried to shake my legs to get some of the free water off them before I stepped out. So now I use my hands as squeegees: starting at midthighs I squeegee my hands down my legs to my ankles. You would be surprised at how much water sheets off. In this way I leave a fairly dry bathroom, even though the drain to the bathtub is slow enough to count as clogged and, until I took action yesterday, filled after every shower. The small fluffy rug next to the shower absorbs the lesser wetness from my feet.
The reason why the tub was draining so slowly is that the plumbers installed a kind of drain mechanism whose metal stopper is unremovable. It can be pulled up about half an inch and no farther. Once I called the plumber to see what he could do with this diabolical machine: he used a bent paper clip to poke in around the drain cap and withdraw some of the hair-muck, which is just what I would have done. Paper clips can only do so much, and yesterday, as I stood in the shower squeegeeing off the water from my legs, I looked down at my feet, which were submerged in water that was not trickling out of the bathtub. There was no sound of draining. The tub drain was clearly clogged. What could I use to get that clog moving? Well, why not the toilet plunger? There are two kinds of toilet plunger: the brick-red classic plunger that is able to stand up by itself, and the somewhat newer black rubber plunger, the design of which is more like that of an undersea creature, with a narrowing part meant to go a little ways into the toilet canal, and a higher bell, to thrust out more water and suck in more water with each plunge. These are the double-flush plungers—the kind that we have.
The classic toilet plunger would have been useless on the bathtub, because you couldn’t have pushed the bell down, but the black double-flush worked extremely well. I got on my underwear and my shirt and then I pulled back the shower curtain and I put that, of course, none-too-hygienic plunger into the standing water and gave it a lunge, and then another lunge. It made the most wonderful deep squirting noises—huge sucking, bubbling gulps and gasps and noggin-snorts as several pounds of water were thrust down into the drain and forced up in a foul fountain out the overflow valve higher up on the top. I began working with the water, as if I were rocking a car when it’s stuck in the driveway, sucking, pushing, sucking, pushing. At one point the drain seemed even worse, and I found that all the turbulence had caused the drain lid to turn and fall shut. When I opened it again and was more careful to center the plunger over the mouth of the drain, I got real results: after one blast, to which I gave the full might of my arms, a supernova of black fragments came up, God, and then more with a second plunge, and I knew that without chemicals, without rooting snakes, with only strength and cunning, I had made that water move. I held still for a second to listen: yes, the purling of the water curving away into the pipes. Later there was even a brief vortex, like a rainbow after a storm.
30
Good morning, it’s 4:53 a.m.—I brought some wood in from the porch and put it on the fire, and I thought I could make out, in the dimness, a spider or one of those big hopping ants dashing around on the upper surface, trying to escape the heat. But it wasn’t a spider or an ant, it was just a bit of black ash being scooted this way and that by the updrafts. Where do the spiders go? One afternoon back in the fall when it was cold but not so cold as it is now, I put a birch log at the top of a fire. The flames lit the white bark, which crackled and curled, and then suddenly a largeish spider climbed into view, making little nervous sprints in one direction and then another. I went into the kitchen and got a small glass. The spider was keeping still by this point—not terribly big, with a dark motif on his yellow abdomen that looked like something you would see on a biker’s T-shirt. I put the rim of the glass near him and he sensed the nearby coolness and walked onto it; when I righted the glass he slipped to the bottom. Any time he tried to climb up the edge, as I carried him out the back door, I shook the glass slightly so that he fell back. I poured him out onto the woodpile. He crawled over to the edge of some bark, trying to fit under it, but his abdomen was too big to allow him to pass into the shadows. There was a yellowness to the upper segments of his legs, too. “You have fun,” I said to him. It isn’t that I think it’s horrible to kill a spider, just that there are certain things I would rather not do, and one is to watch a spider catch fire.
It’s completely still here. I don’t hear a single car. I can see a little indirect glow of the moon on one of the curtains, and when I type my fingers make patterings, like a squirrel spiraling up a tree. The fire today began with the help of a Vermont Trading Company catalog, and I have at the ready the remains of a thick prospectus for a mutual fund, part of which I burned the other day. The prospectus was made of a kind of onionskin—very strong and thin and noisy when turned. You would think it would burn quickly but it is a sluggish starter. Then it flames up just fine.
The spider makes me think of Fidel, my long-ago ant. We got him because my grandmother wanted to get Phoebe a plastic cooking set for her third birthday. At the store, my grandmother brought the cooking set up to the gift-wrap counter, and while it was being wrapped, she went to shop for something else. When she returned, she was given the wrong box, which she mailed to us. And thus Phoebe opened a birthday present that was an ant farm.
But we were all perfectly happy to have an ant farm, and in time we sent away for the ants and poured in the granules and watched them dig their tunnels. They were doing fine in their farm, and then Claire and Phoebe went away for two weeks to visit Claire’s parents—this was before Henry was born—and I was left in charge. And it got a lot colder. Some of the ants didn’t like the cold and died—when they died they curled up, very conveniently, so that the other ants could carry them to one of two crypts or burial grounds. I kept the ant farm on the mantel, and there wasn’t an awful lot I could do about the cold—that house just got cold. After one very cold night there was a widespread curling up and dying of ants. No droplets of springwater or crumbs of saltine would help. But the ants that remained were hardier. They kept digging. There were better tunnels to be made—or not better, just different. One by one they died, until there were two ants left. And then one evening I came home from work and saw that only one ant was now alive. He had buried his friend.
This final ant, however, was a super-ant. He looked the same as the others, but he kept on going. I named him Fidel. I told Claire about Fidel when we talked on the phone—we had no cat or duck back then, so he was my only companion. Fidel kept alive by working, and he was a good example to me. He would hold still for several hours, napping, and then he would begin digging a new tunnel. His tunnel crossed through what had been a grave site, and as he worked his way through, he carried each curled-up ant to a new, better crypt, at a higher elevation, that he made on the right side of the farm, over the plastic barn and silo. After intense struggle, he succeeded in transferring all his fallen comrades from the left-hand crypt to the new right-hand crypt, and he piled the granules of rock or sand over them.
Fidel old boy, Fidel my pal! I kept hearing cavernous choral music when I looked at his purposeful life between those two close-set panes of plastic. I tried to take pictures of him, but the plastic reflected the flash and I got nothing, just a flare of white and an orange date. I would give him a crumb of saltine, and he would spend half an hour burying it. Some of the ants dissolved and became no more than black stains in the sand, and yet Fidel lived o
n, slower but still active. He wasn’t sentimental: I watched him uncover a bit of one of his associates—a leg—which he unceremoniously kicked behind him.
My family returned, and I was no longer alone. But lonely Fidel lived on for two more weeks, then three, a month, more than a month—he lived longer alone than he had lived with company. I ran out of springwater and used tap water, and he seemed not to mind. He thrived on tap water, in fact—maybe it was the secret elixir of longevity for him. He knew that nobody was alive to carry his curled-up body to a resting place, so he didn’t die. To him devolved the full responsibility of the farm. He moved his feelers in little circles—he felt everything before he lifted it. Sometimes he worried me because he rested by tucking his abdomen up under himself, and I thought maybe he was winding down, but no—I dripped in a little water, and his feelers began going, and he went into a rain-avoidance routine, hurrying down to a dry tunnel. Or I would breathe on the plastic where he was, and he would sense the warmth and move an antenna, then turn and cling to the fogged-over part of the plastic.
A Box of Matches Page 9