Mezzanine

by Nicholson Baker

  Yet, though it is true that my thoughts about escalators now are composed of up to seventy or eighty percent of this kind of kid-memory, I have lately become increasingly uncomfortable about including it in descriptions of the things I love—and it was only a few weeks ago, several years after the escalator ride that is the vehicle of this memoir, that I reached a somewhat firmer position on the whole issue. I was driving south, in the middle lane of a wide highway, at about 7:45 in the morning, on a very blue, bright, snowless day in winter, on my way to the job that I had taken after leaving my job with the department on the mezzanine.1 I had the sun-visor flap swung over to shield me from direct sunlight, which was hot on the left—in fact, I had extended the shade-range of the sun-visor (that beautiful aileron, notched in one corner to clear the rearview mirror) by slipping a manila folder over it—so the sky in front of me was filled with an excellent, pure blue, while no sun fell directly on me to make me squint. Cars and trucks around mine were all nicely spaced: close enough to create a sense of fellowship and shared purpose, but not close enough to make you think that you couldn’t swerve exuberantly into another lane at any time if you wanted. I had the vertebrae of the steering wheel in my left hand and a Styrofoam cup of coffee with a special sipmaster top in my right.

  I drew close behind a green truck going about five miles an hour slower than I was. It was technically a “garbage truck,” but not the kind of city machine that comes to mind when you hear that phrase (the drooping rear section like the hairnet of a food-service worker). It was, instead, the larger kind of truck that hauls the compressed garbage from some central processing site to a landfill: a big rectangular container drawn by a semi-detached cab. I know that the garbage was somehow compressed because I could see little pieces of it pressing fiercely out the slight gap under the rear panel—it was not refuse of a normal, fluffy, just-gathered density. Thick green canvas covers, very dirty, were drawn across the top of the container, secured with bungee lines that stretched in angles down its sides.

  The angles of the bungee lines and the transition between those straight lines and the taut scalloped curves they pulled from the cloth covers were what pleased me first. Then I looked between the bungee lines at the surface of the metal container: organic shapes of rust had been painted over with more green, and the rust, still active, had continued to grow under its new coat, so that there was a combination of the freshness of recent paint and the hidden weatheredness of rust. The whole thing looked crisply beautiful as I changed lanes to pass it. Right when I suddenly had more blue sky in front of me than green truck, I remembered that when I was little I used to be very interested in the fact that anything, no matter how rough, rusted, dirty, or otherwise discredited it was, looked good if you set it down on a stretch of white cloth, or any kind of clean background. The thought came to me with just that prefix: “when I was little,” along with the sight of a certain rusted railroad spike I had found and placed on an expanse of garage concrete that I had carefully swept smooth. (Garage dust fills in concrete’s imperfections when you sweep with it, making a very smooth surface.) This clean-background trick, which I had come upon when I was eight or so, applied not only to things I owned, such as a group of fossil brachiopods I set against a white shirt cardboard, but also to things in museums: curators arranged geodes, early American eyeglasses, and boot scrapers against black or gray velvet backgrounds because anytime you set some detail of the world off that way, it was able to take on its true stature as an object of attention.

  But it was the garbage truck I saw at age thirty on display against the blue sky that had reminded me of my old backdrop discovery. Though simple, the trick was something that struck me as interesting and useful right now. Thus, the “when I was little” nostalgia was misleading: it turned something that I was taking seriously as an adult into something soupier, less precise, more falsely exotic, than it really was. Why should we need lots of nostalgia to license any pleasure taken in the discoveries that we carry over from childhood, when it is now so clearly an adult pleasure? I decided that from now on I wouldn’t get that faraway look when describing things that excited me now, regardless of whether they had first been childhood enthusiasms or not.

  As if in reward for this resolution, later that same day I was looking in a cooler in a convenience store and saw a plastic-packaged sandwich labeled “Cream Cheese and Sliced Olive.” The idea of a cross-section of olive-encircled pimiento set like a cockatoo’s eye in the white stretch of cream cheese hit me very hard as an illustration of the same principle I had rediscovered that morning: on their own, olives are old, pickled, briny, rusty—but set them off against a background of cream cheese and you have jewelry.1

  So I want now to do two things: to set the escalator to the mezzanine against a clean mental background as something fine and worth my adult time to think about, and to state that while I did draw some large percentage of joy from the continuities that the adult escalator ride established with childhood escalators, I will try not to glide on the reminiscential tone, as if only children had the capacity for wonderment at this great contrivance.

  Chapter Six

  WHILE STILL temporarily intoxicated by this sensation of candor, I have to say that no matter how hard I try to keep sentimental distortions from creeping in, they creep in anyway. In the case of the escalator, I can probably keep the warpage down, because escalators have been around, unchanging (except for that exciting season when glass-sided escalators appeared), for my whole life—nothing has been lost. But other things, like gas pumps, ice cube trays, transit buses, or milk containers, have undergone disorienting changes, and the only way that we can understand the proportion and range and effect of those changes, which constitute the often undocumented daily texture of our lives (a rough, gravelly texture, like the shoulder of a road, which normally passes too fast for microscopy), is to sample early images of the objects in whatever form they take in kid-memory—and once you invoke those kid-memories, you have to live with their constant tendency to screw up your fragmentary historiography with violas of lost emotion. I drink milk very rarely now; in fact, the half-pint carton I bought at Papa Gino’s to go with the cookie was one of the very last times: it was a sort of test to see whether I still could drink it with the old pleasure. (You have to spot-check your likes and dislikes every so often in this way to see whether your reactions have altered, I think.) But I continue to admire the milk carton, and I believe that the change from milk delivered to the door in bottles to milk bought at the supermarket in cardboard containers with peaked roofs was a significant change for people roughly my age—younger and you would have allied yourself completely with the novelty as your starting point and felt no loss;1 older and you would have already exhausted your faculties of regret on earlier minor transitions and shrugged at this change. Because I grew up as the tradition evolved, I have an awe, still, of the milk carton, which brought milk into supermarkets where all the rest of the food was, in boxes of wax-treated cardboard that said “Sealtest,” a nice laboratorial word. I first saw the invention in the refrigerator at my best friend Fred’s house (I don’t know how old I was, possibly five or six): the radiant idea that you tore apart one of the triangular eaves of the carton, pushing its wing flaps back, using the stiffness of its own glued seam against itself, forcing the seal inside out, without ever having to touch it, into a diamond-shaped opening which became an ideal pourer, a better pourer than a circular bottle opening or a pitcher’s mouth because you could create a very fine stream of milk very simply, letting it bend over that leading corner, something I appreciated as I was perfecting my ability to pour my own glass of milk or make my own bowl of cereal—the radiant idea filled me with jealousy and satisfaction. I have a single memory of a rival cardboard method, in which a paper stopper was built into one corner of a flat-topped carton; but the triumphant superiority of the peaked-roof idea, which so gracefully uses the means of closure as the means of dispensation (unlike, say, the little metal pourers built
into the sides of Domino sugar or Cascade dishwashing detergent boxes, which while intrinsically interesting are unrelated to the glued flaps of cardboard at their tops and bottoms), swept every alternative aside.

  But I also had a strong counter-fascination for the system of home delivery, which managed to hold on for years into the age of the paper carton. It was my first glimpse of the social contract. A man opened our front door and left bottles of milk in the foyer, on credit, removing the previous empties—mutual trust! In second grade we were bussed to a dairy, and saw quart glass bottles in rows rising up out of bins of steaming spray on a machine like a showboat paddle as they were washed. Despite my intense admiration for the carton, I felt superior to those who reached into the supermarket’s dairy case and withdrew Sealtest products, admitting to the world in doing so that they did not have home delivery and hence were not really members of society but loners and drifters. Yet soon I began to sense that everything was not right in the realm of home delivery. We had begun with Onondaga Dairy, their quart glass bottles topped with a paper cap that held the glass with folded pleats, their trademark an American Indian child wearing the kind of Western-movie feather headband that I doubt was ever worn among the tribes of upstate New York. Then the dairy mergers began. Milk continued to appear without interruption, but the name on the step-van, and the step-van itself, kept changing. Deliveries went from three times to twice a week. Strange, foreign half-gallon bottles—Keen Way Dairy is the only one I remember—began cropping up: one dairy was using the bought-out bottles of other defunct dairies, meaning that the name molded in the glass no longer matched the name printed on the cap, a disturbing discordance. Then glass was abandoned altogether, replaced first by white plastic containers with red handles, and then by the very same Sealtest cartons you could buy in the supermarket. Out of habit or a reverence for tradition, we continued to take home delivery, even though the delivered milk often went bad more quickly, after a day in the foyer, unrefrigerated, while my parents worked and my sister and I were at school. Though I resisted it at first, my mother began buying supplemental cartons of Sealtest from the A&P, or sending me out to buy them from the mom-and-pop stores; but in order to keep (we thought) the home-delivering dairy afloat in these twilight years, we responded to the sad promotional leaflets they left between the cartons, diversifying into orange juice, chocolate milk, cottage cheese, buttermilk. By this time the step-van had no name painted on it at all; we were the last house on the street and perhaps in the whole neighborhood still taking deliveries, doubtless more of a nuisance than a mainstay: the delivery man, a different person every other week, would accelerate roughly as soon as he had swung back into the seat and put the van in gear—he had a whole city of isolated sentimentalists to cover. Finally the last merged dairy left a leaflet saying that they were discontinuing home service, and the transition was complete. I’ll guess and say that it was 1971. Did I mourn? Any sadness I felt was overpowered by an embarrassment that we had associated ourselves with the losers, services that could be grouped with horse-drawn ice and coal trucks, Fuller brush men, and person-to-person telephone calls, in an age of Brasilia, of Water Piks, of wheeled and segmented arms that telescoped out from airport gates to press their vinyl, curve-accommodating terminus against the riveted door-regions of unloading passenger planes, and of escalators.

  But because the whole gradual change was complete before I became an adult, whenever I think over it I am tempted away from history into all kinds of untrustworthy emotional details. It took my mother a few years before she stopped absentmindedly trying to tear open the wrong side of the Sealtest carton, despite my having lectured her on the fact that one triangle was much more heavily glued than the other, their difference indicated by the words “Open Here,” enclosed in the outline of an arrow—to disregard it was to fail to take the invention seriously. My father made iced coffee after a morning of lawn-mowing or shrub transplantation, and often he left the carton sitting out on the counter afterward, with the spout open. And here I am pulled, willingly by this time, to consider my father’s great iced coffee: several spoonfuls of instant coffee and sugar, liquefied into a venomous syrup by a bare quarter-inch of hot tap water to remove any granulation, then four or even five ice cubes, water to halfway up the glass, and milk to the top: so many ice cubes that until they melted a little, hissing and popping, with the milk falling in diffusional swirls around them, he could barely get a spoon to the bottom of the glass to stir the drink.1 His plan was to market a bottled mocha version of it called Café Olé, a mock-up of which, with a dramatic Zorro-like logo scripted diagonally across the label, sat on our mantel for a while after the plan was set aside. I have to include, too, the subsidized half-pints of milk we bought in school for four cents and raced each other to drink in one skull-chilling continuous inhalation on the paper straw—this mystical four cents linked both with the picture of the tall glass of milk in the poster of the four food groups, and with the rule that you should have four glasses of milk every day, a rule I faithfully followed, drinking four at one sitting just before bed if I had to.

  All of these nostalgia-driven memories pour out of that Sealtest carton, pulling me off course, distorting what I want to be a simple statement of gratitude for a great packaging design that happened to come into widespread use when I was little. I look forward to the time when I will have thought about milk and cheese products enough as an adult that the unpasteurized taint of sentimentality will lift from the subject; but so far, aside from the recent cream-cheese-and-sliced-olive thing, only one additional unit of dairy thinking has occurred to me: I have lately turned against milk as a beverage. In my first year of college it became widely believed that “milk makes more mucus” and hence should be avoided when you have a cold—that was the beginning of my disenchantment. I noticed soon afterward that it seemed to coat my tongue and give me bad breath, something I was, as I have said, very anxious to avoid, and then a few years later it developed that L. was allergic to milk: it gave her blood-flecked diarrhea, and the sight of someone swallowing a full cold glass on TV made her moan with distaste. Before she understood that she was physically allergic, she ascribed her dislike to her father’s influence: he, she told me, associated dairy products with a certain kind of cheerful brutishness—blond mezzosoprano camp counselors in Wagnerian horn-hats sitting among the lupins drinking bowl after bowl, their knees and cheekbones visibly growing. She remembered his quoting Tacitus’s Germania darkly, something about “barbarians who buttered their hair.” (Or was it not Tacitus but Ammianus Marcellinus?) And I, influenced by her dislike, began to feel uncomfortable when I saw the semi-opaque coating left on the side of a glass of half-drunk milk narrowing up to where someone’s lips had slurped at the rim; my pity for all those bouts of diarrhea that she had gone through before she understood her allergy and my own deep desire not to be thought of as a hair-butterer combining. When she had to use milk in a recipe, she would sniff at the open carton suspiciously, uncertain of its freshness, but uncertain too whether her uncertainty was not actually an aversion to its normal smell; and she would finally say, “This seem all right to you?” handing me the carton with a pragmatic, pursed-lip, frowning expression I liked a lot—the “Would you kindly corroborate this bad odor?” expression—studying my face carefully as I put my nose to the carton. And here was another wayside greatness of the milk carton: the small diamond shape of the spout is a perfect fit for the nose, concentrating any scent of sourness: no wide, circular milk-bottle opening could have been nearly as helpful for diagnosis.

  I have, then, only one unit of adult thought about milk to weigh against dozens of childhood units. And this is true of many, perhaps most, subjects that are important to me. Will the time ever come when I am not so completely dependent on thoughts I first had in childhood to furnish the feedstock for my comparisons and analogies and sense of the parallel rhythms of microhistory? Will I reach a point where there will be a good chance, I mean a more than fifty-fifty chance, th
at any random idea popping back into the foreground of my consciousness will be an idea that first came to me when I was an adult, rather than one I had repeatedly as a child? Will the universe of all possible things I could be reminded of ever be mostly an adult universe? I hope so—indeed, if I could locate the precise moment in my past when I conclusively became an adult, a few simple calculations would determine how many years it will be before I reach this new stage of life: the end of the rule of nostalgia, the beginning of my true Majority. And, luckily, I can remember the very day that my life as an adult began.

  Chapter Seven

  IT HAPPENED when I was twenty-three, four months into my job on the mezzanine, at a time when I owned only five shirts. Each of them could be worn, at the most, three times, except for the blue, which continued to look sharp well into the fourth wearing, as long as none of the previous wearings had been on unusually hot days. The cleaner’s would accept no fewer than three shirts at a time, and they took four days, so frequently there would be a single shirt hanging in my large, resonant closet when I came home from work.

  On that morning of my adulthood, I had on my bureau an unopened brown paper parcel containing three clean shirts. I pried off the string (for it never paid to try to snap the string that early in the morning, or to fiddle with the rapid but excellent dry cleaner’s knot), and let string and paper fall at my feet. My mother had sometimes brought home paper parcels of thinly sliced Westphalian ham and allowed me to open them, and this first moment of shirt disclosure had something of the earlier Westphalian unveiling, yet it was perhaps even more pleasing, because in this case I was rediscovering my old buddies, articles of clothing I had worn many times before, now made almost unrecognizably new, no longer wrinkled inside the elbows or around the waist where I had tucked and retucked them, but wrinkled with positive kinds of semi-intentional knife-edge creases and perpendicular fold-lines that only heightened the impression of ironedness, having come about either as a result of the occasionally indiscriminate force of the pressing and starching machines (such as the crow’s-feet on the sleeve near the cuffs) or as a result of the final careful foldup. And the shirts weren’t merely folded: strips of light blue paper held them tightly and individually to their stored state, their arms impossibly bent behind them as if each were concealing a present.