A Box of Matches
Page 8
23
Good morning, it’s 5:20 a.m.—I thought the shivering was just from cold, but yesterday at work I began to have feverish feelings, and now I’m weak and the smell of the flaring match makes me feel very ill. I’ve tasted an apple from a brand-new bag of apples, but what I want to do is lie down on the floor. The blizzard yesterday was lost on me, and I spent all night with little delusional half-thoughts.
I’m going to lie down on the floor now, where it’s cool.
24
Good morning, it’s 6:30 a.m.—All yesterday I could feel the veins in my temples feeding the headache. In the morning, I was talking to Claire when I coughed abruptly and got up to go to the bathroom and then, thinking that this couldn’t possibly be happening, I vomited a huge splash of water, Tylenol, and apple bits onto the bathroom floor before I made it to the toilet. I felt like a wind sock on a windless day. After the violence of the throwing up was over, and I had gotten my nosebleed under control, I asked Claire to bring a mop and I asked Henry to bring a roll of paper towels, and in the surge of good feeling that follows hours of nausea, I cleaned everything up. I threw out my socks; they had holes in the heels anyway. Then I went back to bed and slept, and when I woke I had a killer headache which lasted all day. But Claire brought me up tonic water and saltine crackers at one point, and though I threw up one more time I think that phase is over. I have something going on deep in my chest. Juliet, the woman next door who runs the day-care center, has been sick with pneumonia; she quite cheerfully told Claire her medieval symptoms at the bus stop and then Claire told them to me.
By feeding it some of an old telephone book, and a whole six-pack soft-drink holder, and an empty baking-soda box, I’ve finally gotten the fire to start. I don’t know how long I’ll be able to sit here, but I do feel fortunate to be able to do it at all. I have a glass of tonic water and five saltines on the ashcan next to my leg. Oh, the little sparkles of salt on the crackers, and the clear sweetness of the tonic water. We didn’t have any ginger ale, but tonic water will do.
I knew I had a fever yesterday, but at first I had no desire to use a thermometer. You just know—with your children, too. Just touch them on their backs, below their necks, and if it’s very warm there, then, yes, they have a fever. The moon is out on the prowl this morning. I slept for fifteen minutes at a time all day, dream-chewing on gristly ground-up pieces of thought, turning on one side and then the other, lifting the covers with my hand so that my knees could pass without sending the covers off the bed. Maybe I should go back to bed now. My head swivels listlessly, like a brussels sprout in boiling water, and yet all I’ve got is the flu. I think I’ll have another cracker.
Yesterday towards evening I started to feel better and I decided that I would in fact like to know my temperature. If I didn’t know, I wouldn’t be giving my sickness its fair due, since the only real achievement of a sickness is the creation of a fever. The rest is dross. I found the thermometer and got back in bed, leaning against the pillows, and slid the glass swizzle-stick down into the fleshly church basement below my tongue, on the right side of that fin of stretchable tissue that goes down the middle. The cool glass almost had a flavor, but didn’t; maybe it was the flavor of sitting at a lunch counter in the afternoon, looking out the window. My bottom jaw came forward a bit so that I could gently cradle the instrument with my teeth, and I held my lips pursed, waiting for the mercury to warm itself in my deepest salival catch basins; and as I waited I looked around the room, grazing my fingernails on what proved to be an unusually interesting stretch of wall. Every once in a while the thermometer would slip out a little ways and I would frown and clamp it firmly with my teeth and then chimp it back into place with my lips. Finally it was time to see what my temperature was. I held the glass very close to my eyes and turned it. At first I saw liquidly swollen numbers dancing and drinking sherry on the far side of the triangle, and then, turning more, these hove around and became precise and fringed with well-tended gradation lines, and behind them flashed the infinitely thin silver band, the soul of the body’s temperature, stopped at a little under 101 degrees. I sank back with some relief: I did in fact have a fever. “My fever is a hundred and one!” I called out to whoever could hear.
“Very sorry to hear that, Dad!” Phoebe called from her room. She was writing a one-page paper on Voltaire.
I thought of those five-hundred-pound people in the tabloids who can’t leave their beds. Then I remembered a picture of a woman with a growth-hormone disease. She is growing and growing without stop. Some years ago, she pleaded for Michael Jackson to send her money, and he had, but now who knows? He has his own deformities to contend with.
25
Good morning, 3:49 a.m. and I’m behaving as if everything’s normal. When my apple fell off the ashcan, again, it made a low ominous sound as it rolled across the floor, and I remembered a review I read as a child of a Roman Polanski movie in which someone’s head is chopped off and bounces down the steps. This room is not level or plumb. There is a large hump in the floor in one corner: over the years the floorboards have simply twisted and bent to fit whatever stresses were being imposed on them. I’ve been awake for an hour and a half, flipping through worry’s Rolodex. I’m drinking coffee, oddly enough, and there lies a tale. Claire, knowing that I was determined to get up as usual this morning, very kindly set up the coffeemaker before she went to bed. I, sleepily, swiveled open the filter basket and saw in the dimness that it wasn’t empty and dumped it out; but the filter seemed to fall into the garbage too easily. Only when I poured water into the tank of the coffeemaker and there was an answering sound of water already there did I realize that I’d just thrown out fresh coffee.
I spent almost all yesterday morning in bed dozing, and finally got into work around one. Now my coccyx hurts—the chest infection has descended to my tailbone, or has awakened an old wound. Last year I fell on my tailbone while getting into the car. Tears sprung, pain speared. And that event was an awakening of a very old injury, when once in fifth grade I went sledding down a steep hill. I had a long ride, without incident, and then came to what looked like an insignificant little drop-off from a snow-pile into a snow-covered school parking lot. That little drop landed me right on my tailbone. I hurt there for months afterward. I think I may have broken something, but tailbones are like toes, vestiges of tree-dwelling primates. You don’t really need to worry too much about whether they’re broken or just bruised.
To cool down just now I walked to the dining room, and I almost sat down on the two stairs between the dining room and the kitchen and rested, but instead I walked into the kitchen and had a glass of water. The moon is everywhere—it’s impossible to say what color it is—I thought there was new snow but it was just moon.
Several years ago I decided that I would make a collection of paper-towel designs. Hundreds of patterns were coming and going, offered by the paper-towel makers, and unlike wallpaper patterns nobody was interested in studying them as indicia of American taste. Do you remember when suddenly one of the manufacturers began printing in four colors? I think it was 1996. I had in mind a big folio, with a pane of a towel on each page, and a label of what it was, who had made it, the date, notes, etc. I saved maybe eight paper-towel samples and then abandoned the project: I lack the acquisitive methodicalness that you need to create a really great paper-towel collection. And the main point is that the designs that I would want to have collected, the ones at the top of my want list, are the ones from my own childhood and my early marriage. The designs now are perfectly fine, but the designs then—the sampler-inspired patterns and the alternating pepper grinders and carrots—held an allegorical fascination. Of course there was more excitement over paper towels then—the vast advertising budget for Bounty, the Quicker Picker-Upper, made it so. A big change in paper towels since the advent of bulk-purchase stores has been the variation in frame size. The old rolls had a perfectly consistent size across all brands, which was very helpful because then you got so
that you could tear off a frame without thinking. Then one manufacturer made much longer towel frames, for unknown reasons—perhaps to get us to use them up faster—and I was forever yanking the roll off of its holder, pulling in the wrong place. The roll that I used today has excessively short frames—good, though, because you use less per yank. But consistency has gone all to hell.
If you put your face very close to the window, you sense through the glass the coldness outside. I went upstairs to go the bathroom and was amazed by how magnificently cool our bedroom was. Claire got up to pee and she said, sleepily, “I set up the coffee for you.”
“I know, I’m terribly sorry.”
“You threw it out.”
“I did, I’m sorry.”
“We’ll just have to order Chinese,” she murmured, falling asleep.
I asked her if she had a need for anything I might have stowed away in my pajamas.
“All set for the moment, thanks,” she said.
I keep thinking of a knee operation I had years ago, when I watched the arthroscopic probe on a small screen and saw my kneecap from underneath, like an ice floe from the perspective of a deep-diving seal, with a few bubbles that looked like air but were, said the surgeon, bubbles of fat. He sewed up my torn meniscus and I was better, having read eight murder mysteries, none of which I can remember. No, I can remember one. There was a Perry Mason novel, by Erle Stanley Gardner, in which a character in a ship goes up on deck because he wants “a lungful of storm.” That’s what I want—a lungful of storm.
26
Good morning, it’s 4:21 a.m. and the birch bark is burning well. I can pick up a pair of underwear with my toes. There are two ways to do this. Most people would grab a bunch of fabric by using all of their short, stubby, “normal” toes to clamp it against the ball of their foot and lift it, but because of my unusual middle toes, which are long and aquiline—distinguished—I can lift up the underwear by scissoring my middle toe and my big toe together onto the waistband: then I lift the underpants and hand them off to my hand and flip them towards the dirty-clothes bin. By then I’m ready to fall over, but I catch myself by planting my underpant-grasping foot back down on the floor. If you throw underpants in a particular way, the waistband assumes its full circular shape in the air, slowly rotating, on its way towards the dirty clothes.
Yesterday, having thus dealt with my underclothing, I had my shower, which was uneventful but for a moment near the middle. I was replacing the soap in the rubber-covered wire soap holder that hangs over the showerhead. It’s a helpful holder because the soap dries out between mornings, whereas soap that sits in the corner of the shower or in a ridged cubby or a built-in ledge does not. I use Basis soap because it has no brain-shriveling perfumes. It is filled with very dense heavy soap material: it’s harder and heavier than, say, Ivory soap. And it is a beautiful smooth oval shape, an egglike shape almost. But it’s as heavy as a paperweight, as hard as travertine when dry or newly wetted, and extremely slippery. More than once I have lost control of a bar of this soap. And yesterday when I dropped it I noticed that as soon as the soap squirted out of my fingers, my toes lifted, arching up from the tub as high as they could go, while the rest of my feet stayed where they were. Both sets of toes did this immediately, as soon as the soap left my grip. My toes had evidently learned something in life, ever since the chilblains that I got one winter. What they have learned is that if they are touching the floor of the tub and a bar of soap drops on them, it is going to hurt a lot; however if the toes are lifted up half an inch in the air, much of the energy of the collision will be absorbed as the egg of soap forces the tightly stretched toe-tendons to elongate, and the impact on chilblains or healing toe-bones won’t be nearly as painful. They learned this by trial and error, over many years, all by themselves, and now each time I fumble a bar of soap they arch up, on alert, braced for possible impact. My eyes are closed during all this, so I have no idea where the soap is falling; after it hits the tub, making a bowling-alley sound, they relax.
One of my middle toes has, as my coccyx does, an Old Injury. At seventeen, in the summer, I was the night cook at a busy place called Benny’s: I cleaned the kitchen after closing, wiping down all the surfaces, pouring bleach on the cutting boards and draining the fryers and, last of all, mopping the floor. At first the cleaning took me until four in the morning, and my ankles swelled from standing for twelve hours; later I got faster, and I began cleaning our own home kitchen for pleasure, shaking out the toaster and going in under the burners on the stove. I was promoted to night cook when the head cook walked out on beer-batter-fish Friday, our biggest night. The manager and the assistant manager took up stations at the fryers—I specialized in onion rings. Too forcefully I pulled out a metal drawer filled with half-gallon cartons of semi-frozen clams; the drawer came out and fell on my toe. The pain was tremendous. I hum-whispered a long quavery moan to myself, but the show had to go on—I began making the icy clams dance around in the breadcrumbs.
Before he quit, the head cook passed on two pieces of information that I haven’t forgotten. The first was in response to my insistence that the kitchen had to be clean. “It’s all food anyway,” he said. The second came when I forgot that an order was for a cheeseburger and not a hamburger. “Watch,” the cook said. He took a square of American cheese and dipped it for a moment in the hot water in the steam table. The cheese melted a little and, when flopped down on the burger, looked deliciously semi-molten. The steam-table water was not clean, however; I almost dipped a piece of cheese into it myself but didn’t.
I liked a waitress with a wide pretty face and a mouth whose many teeth forced her to smile generously. We took a break together once; she said that she wanted to be a poet. Her favorite poet was Rod McKuen, she said.
Benny’s Restaurant is gone now: now there is a drugstore on that corner with fake dormer windows in its roof that are lit from inside by recessed fluorescence to create the impression that there are cozy upstairs bedrooms behind them. Few now can testify, as I can, to the wondrously bad smell that came from the Benny’s Dumpster out back. What a marvelous, piercingly awful smell it had. People sometimes wanted breakfast very late at night, and I could never master over-easy eggs; they often broke when I flipped them, and I tried to hide the broken one with a piece of careless toast. I got compliments on my onion rings, though.
27
Good morning, it’s 5:42 a.m.—I thought I was being clever last night by setting the fire up with paper, cardboard, and logs, so that I could just strike a match and begin this morning. Deep in the coals, however, the heat had persisted, and it lit my preset fire prematurely, sometime in the middle of the night, so that by the time I arrived fifteen minutes ago, the logs had coaled down to an orange skeleton crew. Start building. On Jeopardy, when someone turns out not to be as smart as he thought, and he bets everything and loses, and goes down to nothing while the others are in the thousands, Alex Trebek, the master of ceremonies, will say to him, “Start building.”
I have a very stuffed nose now, and when I sleep my teeth dry out because I breathe through my mouth, and then my lips stick to them as if to pieces of sunbaked slate, and that fixed grimace wakes me up, and then comes that good moment when you push your lips out and down so that the teeth remoisten again. First they resist, and then the sliding resumes all at once, and you baste your teeth and get your tongue, which has also suffered an hour of desiccating privations, moving again. Oh, I am happy being up like this. Who would have known that I am and maybe always have secretly been an early-morning man? I would not have known it. Claire took us to see the sunrise on New Year’s morning, and that has changed me. I used to be amused by those men who get to work at six-thirty, “bright and early”—but they’re right: you want to be doing things when the world is still quiet; the quietness and uncrowdedness is your fuel. Except for me the phrase would be “dark and early.”
While on the subject of fuel—I think I know why I’m feeling especially lucky this mornin
g. It’s because yesterday I hit sixteen dollars exactly when I filled the car with gas. I unscrewed the cap and put it on the roof of the car, and I selected the fuel grade, regular, and I started pumping. The metal of the pump was very cold on the finger-bones; the hose jumped a little when the gas started flowing through. I looked up from my gassing crouch and stared at the electronic numbers on the pump, trying to take in the movements of the rushing cents’ column, which go by so fast that you end up only being able to make sense of the pieces of the LED numbers that each numeral has in common: the 4, the 5, and the 6, for instance, all have a middle horizontal stick, but the stick winks off for the 7, and then it comes back on for the 8 and 9, then off for the 0 and the 1; and there are other rhythms as well, so that each ten-cent cycle has a good deal of blinking syncopational activity. But don’t let yourself get hooked on studying that. After five dollars’ worth goes by you have to steel yourself to ignore the winks in the cents column and concentrate on the basic thumping beat of the dimes column. Get that rhythm in your head and then start tapping your foot steadily to that beat so that you become an automaton of steady flow—30, 40, 50, 60, 70. Keep counting up past ten dollars, and eleven, and twelve, watch those mystic dollars change, and don’t release the handle, don’t slow the flow, run the gas full throttle, counting and chanting and tapping the numbers like the monster of exactitude you are, and then get ready to release all at once, coonk. Yesterday I originally shot for fourteen dollars, and then when I got close to fourteen, I felt as if I was good for fifteen, and then when I came up on fifteen I said to myself, “Go for sixteen, you sick bastard,” and I clenched my teeth and stared and counted six, seven, eight, nine, and off. Often I’m disappointed: the number will stop at $16.01 or even $16.02—seldom below. But no, yesterday the numbers stopped dead on $16.00 and I said, “Bingo, baby.” When you hit it on the money, a good thing will happen to you that day. In my case the good thing was that when I went in to pay for the gas I noticed a box of donuts on a convenient donut display right by the register. Three kinds of donut—cinnamon, plain, and white powder that makes you cough—were all in the same box, all showing through the plastic window like the mailing address to a world in which everyone spoke with his mouth full. I bought them, even though it meant I couldn’t just hand over a twenty-dollar bill, and when I showed up at home holding the box over my head as I crunched through the snow to the porch, my son opened the door and said, “Donuts! Bingo, baby.” I used to go for the cinnamon-powdered ones, but now I find that old-fashioned donuts have a slightly bitter astringency that leaves your teeth feeling cleaner after you’ve eaten one, as I just have.