Dan

by Joanna Ruocco

  Don Pond, a stickler? She wouldn’t believe it. Swiftly, Melba changed the subject.

  “I had an idea for a new kind of pastry,” she said, brightly. “Instead of using ingredients, I would use quintessence. I would combine the quintessence of multiple things, quail, I think, for one, and custard, and I’d make a glaze of course and sprinkle nonpareils on top, either whole nonpareils or their quintessence, I’m not sure.”

  Don Pond’s expression did not change, but Melba reassured herself that his face was still quite cold; she couldn’t expect it to flex readily just because she’d said something fascinating. She gathered garlic sticks and brownies and presented Don Pond with a large bag.

  “Thank you, Melba,” said Don Pond. He took the bag and held it awkwardly, and Melba watched him closely, moistening her finger with her tongue. She waited impatiently for him to open the bag and begin to speak, rapidly, self-loathingly, waving a garlic stick from which salt and garlic chips would shower down. She held her moistened finger at the ready. But Don Pond did not open the bag. Don Pond looked around the bakery as though he had no status there at all, as though he were not the first customer, as though he were not even finite, and therefore had no ascertainable value whatsoever.

  “I’ve been talking with some of the other men,” said Don Pond. “Melba, you’re not safe here in the bakery. What’s that on the floor? Never mind. Don’t look. It’s better not to look. Listen, Melba, I’m not blaming you. Some employees try to get themselves killed at work. They say they’re fetching the stepladder to change a light bulb and the next thing you know, they’ve let the ceiling fan take their heads off. That’s not you! What’s happening here is beyond your control. Melba, you need to leave the bakery at once.”

  “I wouldn’t want to say that you and the other men are wrong, Don,” said Melba. “But I know that I’m safe in the bakery. Once I cracked an egg on the side of the mixing bowl and a chick fell out. That was startling and I felt shaky for some time afterwards, but I finally came to terms with it and accepted that there’s an explanation. I mean, eggs are supposed to be eggs and not chickens, but there is a point in the genesis of eggs and chickens when they’re the same thing. In the bakery, I have things I do when I feel afraid and they really help. I’ll show you.”

  Melba ran through the swinging door. In the depths of the bakery, the air had turned hot and acrid. Melba squinted in the dull orange light and sniffed. Something inside the ovens was definitely burning. The top shelf of the oven billowed smoke. Melba finished squinting and didn’t pause a second longer. She considered herself a veteran of such situations, situations in which nothing can be saved. She had no qualms about allowing whatever it was inside the oven to burn itself off. She rushed past the oven with her hands over her nose and mouth. No, she would not open the oven door. Why create a mess out of false sentimentality? She pulled a heavy bucket from beneath the long table and struggled back toward the front of the bakery through the smoke. A moment later, she was heaving the bucket around the counter, dropping it by Don Pond’s feet. She yanked off the lid.

  “Salt,” panted Melba. She ducked behind the counter, rummaging, and returned holding a wooden dowel. Crouching beside the bucket, she thrust the dowel into the salt. For several quick, shallow breaths, she stirred the salt in the bucket with a wooden dowel, then she stirred for several slow, deep breaths, and, finally, she released the dowel and sat motionless on the bakery floor, her elbow in the bucket, the top four inches of the dowel pressing against her inner arm. She looked up at Don Pond. He was looking at the ceiling.

  “You don’t even have a ceiling fan,” he said.

  “Don,” said Melba. “Maybe I can’t trust this sensation, but I feel wonderful right now, warm and confident. My palms are even tingling. I couldn’t feel half so good if I were somewhere else, if I weren’t in the bakery, if I were in my bedroom, for example, thrashing on the floor between rolled-up balls of tights. Even if I kept buckets of salt in my bedroom, and installed a tower of ovens, I’d always feel more imperiled in my bedroom than in the bakery.”

  The essential nature of Melba’s bedroom differed from the essential nature of the bakery in ways she couldn’t quite pinpoint, but that brought her vivid apprehensions of impending doom.

  “If I had to describe my bedroom to someone, not to a future tenant, to a disinterested party, to you Don, I would say that my bedroom has a demented, disconsolate nature. Have you ever discovered voles in your pillowcasings?”

  “Of course, Melba,” said Don Pond, but he was still looking at the ceiling, shifting from foot to foot.

  “I’ve made you uncomfortable!” cried Melba. “I shouldn’t be talking about my bedroom, but Don, it’s so frightening. Maybe you and the men are right about the bakery. Maybe I don’t notice how unsafe it is because I’m always comparing it to my bedroom, and the bakery is a kind of Elysian Field compared to my bedroom, not to sound snobbish,” added Melba, who could be shy about her admiration for the classical world.

  Don Pond was no longer looking up. His head was sinking between his shoulders and he looked stricken. Melba knew she had to stop speaking. She pressed her lips together and clutched the dowel with both hands, stirring as she mastered herself.

  There was something essentially upsetting about her bedroom, she thought, assured by the pressure of the dowel on her palms. It was as though her bedroom had been built on the site of an ancient burial ground. The walls were a sickening, fertilized color, lush and waxy. The carpet fibers broke easily between her fingers, just as hairs would break after centuries of neglected grooming.

  Melba disliked the way bakery customers white-gloved the bakery, fingering the refrigerator, the counter, the walls, the window, and even the linoleum, zinging her with their haughty observations about dusts, greases, and molds, but at least the bakery customers usually had the good manners to hurry, shouting orders as they charged the counter and rebukes as they barreled out the door. There was something affirming about their outrage. The bakery’s customers seemed to harbor a belief in standards. They seemed to believe that excellence existed, that it was attainable, by Melba herself, if she just applied herself more vigorously and with greater attention to sanitary procedure. The visitants to her bedroom, on the other hand, were silent and unhurried and their abuses could not be attributed to ideals. These visitants circled her bed in rotting smocks, displaying flesh of disturbing translucency, brindled here and there with rope burns. They often huddled on Melba’s stomach, compressing her diaphragm with heels and clammy buttocks. That would never happen in the bakery! Her bedroom was a different order of place, a place that emanated malignancy, and Melba had wondered on occasion if this emanation fell under the purview of her landlord, Mark Rand, or if the emanation was beyond his jurisdiction.

  Melba’s pulse hammered so hard in her temples that she jerked up, gripping the dowel as hard as she could manage, swirling the salt until her palms chafed and she turned away from the bucket, scooting to lean her back firmly against the counter.

  “This can’t go on,” said Don Pond, shaking his fist, and for the first time Melba noticed that his inflexible features had a steely quality. “If it were just me who thought so, I’d never say,” continued Don Pond, “but there’s a quorum, and because I’m the first customer, the men wanted me to be the one to tell you. I told them I didn’t ask to be first customer, or even try in particular, and I never make much of it. How do you even know that I hold that distinction? I asked the men, and they gave no satisfactory answer. But I assure you they knew. Listen, Melba, no one would suggest you go to your bedroom and sleep, not now. But why don’t you come to my house, Melba?” Suddenly, Don Pond stiffened, and Melba leapt to her feet.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “Dr. Buck is right outside,” whispered Don Pond hoarsely. “I saw him through the window.”

  “Dr. Buck! But what’s he doing there?” Melba ducked down again, pretending to tie her shoe.

  “He’s jumping up and d
own,” said Don Pond. “He’s rubbing his hands together.”

  Melba rose but not to her full height. Bending sharply at the waist, she scurried around the counter, then flattened herself against the wall.

  “He’s stamping his feet,” said Don Pond. “He’s swaying his hips. Have you ever seen anyone sit down on an invisible chair?”

  Melba nodded. “Usually there’s a wall, though,” she said. “You pretend the wall is a chair and sit down. It engages the quadriceps.”

  “He’s up again,” said Don Pond. “Shadow boxing.”

  “I suppose the bakery hasn’t warmed the street any,” said Melba. “He must be freezing in just that light coat and fringe of hair. But why is he there?”

  “He’s making sure I convince you to come with me,” said Don Pond.

  “My leaving the bakery was Dr. Buck’s idea?” gasped Melba. “When you said the men in this town …”

  “You didn’t know I meant Dr. Buck?” Don Pond’s voice was frankly incredulous. “You think the laypeople of Dan have gotten into the habit of diagnosing safe and unsafe without the help of a doctor? Melba, Dr. Buck is the only person in this town qualified to make decisions about your wellbeing. He told me you have a condition that makes you mistrustful of representatives of the medical profession and that you’d be more likely to heed my advice if I pretended it came from a group of anonymous men, men who’d reached their decision through a democratic process. I was under no circumstance to reveal Dr. Buck’s leading role in the matter. Now I’ve blown it,” Don Pond sighed. “But why can’t you obey Dr. Buck, like the rest of us? He’s not a small man, and his hands aren’t too cold or too hot. Before Dr. Buck, you wouldn’t remember, but Dr. Clamp doctored in Dan, and he had a mystifying head of hair. What’s more, he was never the right temperature! How can you give yourself freely to a doctor who isn’t the right temperature? What’s more elementary than temperature? Even the smallest doctor in the world knows how to regulate temperature. Dr. Buck got rid of Dr. Clamp easily enough …”

  “Was there a funeral?” asked Melba. “I do seem to remember the town hall filled with casseroles, all different kinds, spaghetti, creamed corn, turkey divine, queasy tuna, mushroom potpourri, the one that’s made of five different congealed soups …”

  “Five soup casserole,” murmured Don Pond.

  “Five soup casserole, oyster cheese casserole … that was a funeral, wasn’t it?”

  “Sure it was,” said Don Pond. Around his beard, the face had paled in patches and purpled in others. His words came slowly. Don Pond’s head was very small, and so usually words seemed to issue forth rapidly in a high thin stream. But these words were dark and thick, sluggishly emitted.

  “But Melba,” said Don Pond, and the words and the movements of his mouth were misaligned, the words filling the air like sludge and the mouth stretching out and folding in again, so that Melba’s head jerked back and forth, following first the trajectory of the words then the ponderous motions of the mouth.

  “It …” said Don Pond, “wasn’t …”

  Melba’s hands clasped together.

  “Dr. Clamp’s funeral …” said Don Pond.

  “Then whose …” Melba began, but her world was going dark. She felt as she did when, like Ned Hat, she had been driven by circumstances to fill her mouth with hydrogen peroxide. She would drink the peroxide swishingly and grip the edge of the sink as her gums began to seethe. In those moments, her roaring mouth sounded like the inside of a conch shell, which sounded, in turn, like the outside of the ocean, and through these echoes—a form of geo-sonar—Melba felt that she could establish, briefly, a sense of her location on the earth. She could also establish other things. For example, her body had the consistency of a stone fruit, although with a different ratio of hard parts to soft parts, and those parts differently distributed. She had a keen sense of the human body—blemished and juicy, a lobe of oddly shaped flesh clinging to an oddly shaped pit—and of Dan, the endless thicket in which these bodies formed, growing in clusters but dropping one by one to rot in the understory, contributing nurturing ooze to the tangle of brambles and brackens ever-spreading their roots.

  The word “bracken” shot through Melba’s mind. She swayed.

  “Samovar …” She murmured the word just as “bracken” banged into it. She saw a spark that began to ripple and then she knew no more.

  When Melba awoke she was no longer in the bakery. She was inside a small house, darkly paneled. She was stretched out on a long hard sofa with very wide armrests.

  “I was having a dream!” she said, starting up. Everywhere, there had been buildings, but irregular buildings, with too few or too many walls. She had walked through the rooms and in room after room, curtains or vines or racks of meat hung down from the ceilings, but finally she had entered a room with a ceiling from which nothing hung down. The ceiling was made of clouds and through the breaks in the ceiling clouds she could see the clouds of the real sky above them.

  “I think the moon had gone missing?” Melba said. “And I was looking for it?” Melba looked at the ceiling. It was white and bumpy, with a protuberant light fixture she did not care for.

  “Drink this.” Someone was pushing a mug into her hand and Melba clutched it. The mug had no handle. The mug was so heavily made, however, that the outside was warmed only slightly by the steaming liquid in the central well. Melba held it gratefully with two hands.

  “Coffee,” murmured Melba, lowering her face to the mug. She blinked away the steam, wiggling on the couch. The couch was nearly as deep as it was long. Unless Melba sat on the edge of a cushion her feet did not touch the ground. The black vinyl squeaked as she scooted forward and she heard a low indulgent chuckle.

  “Do I hear Melba’s little otter?”

  Melba blinked harder but sleep and steam clung to her eyeballs.

  “Who’s there?” she asked.

  “Don Pond, Melba,” came the answer, and as Melba blinked she focused at last on Don Pond’s small head. The size of the head and the uneven complexion reminded Melba of a gourd, and she smiled, reassured. Gourds, useless in themselves, are displayed to indicate hominess and abundance, and Melba was not impervious to the signification.

  “Don Pond,” she sighed. “So this is your house!” In addition to the enormous couch, she now made out a few other features of Don Pond’s house: a low coffee table parallel to the couch and, on the other side, a loveseat on which Don Pond sat comfortably. Don Pond had removed his shoes and socks and his bare feet were nestled in the thick mustard-colored carpet. Melba wiggled her toes, realizing that her own shoes had been removed. In the paneled wall behind Don Pond, two windows filtered the daylight, but, as filters, the windows were not fine; the daylight that entered the room could not even be considered granular; it was chunky, practically obscured by impurities. Melba tried not to purse her lips or demonstrate her superiority in any way.

  “I never realized how close your house really is to the bakery,” said Melba, to make conversation. “I only shut my eyes for a moment and here I am! I’m surprised I haven’t ended up here before, by accident. I rush about in the bakery, and I can imagine tripping over a broom and suddenly getting flung directly onto this couch. I suppose that’s near enough to what happened.”

  She lowered her face again to the mug and sniffed.

  “Why Don, this isn’t coffee …” she trailed off.

  “Of course it’s not,” said Don Pond. “You’ve never known me to serve coffee, and I wouldn’t start now, when my main goal is to put you at your ease, to keep everything nice and normal. I find coffee off-putting and viscous.”

  “Hmmm,” Melba swung her legs, snuffling at the mug, working the scent up her nostrils as she tried to identify the components. She couldn’t distract herself, though, from Don Pond’s ill-considered remark and, sighing, realized that she had to contradict him.

  “I can’t agree with you, Don,” said Melba. “Not about coffee. I know I’m being quarrelsome. But wouldn
’t you describe coffee differently if you considered longer? Imagine you’re taking a sip of coffee. Now hold the coffee in your mouth. Don’t you find it different than what you described? It’s not off-putting and viscous, is it? Why it’s soothing,” exclaimed Melba. “Soothing and jarring. That’s exactly what coffee is. Rather complex, but I’m sure you can tell if you concentrate.”

  Melba wished she could brew Don Pond her special coffee, in case his imagination had flaws. Her coffee had been tested again and again, and she knew for certain that it always produced exactly those effects. To be soothed but also jarred—this was what Melba most needed, and that was what coffee, all coffee, but Melba’s coffee above all others, delivered. Randal Hans had said he needed this too. But perhaps Randal Hans had only said this to be confirming, because when he was Melba’s boyfriend, he exerted himself, verbally, to confirm many of her statements, which he later negated in writing.

  The circumference of Don Pond’s beard contracted slightly. He was pursing his mouth, concentrating on the imaginary mouthful. Then he shook his head.

  “No,” he said. “I’m really put off. There’s a gluey, bitter taint to my saliva now. No, I don’t like it.”

  Melba averted her eyes. Apparently Don Pond was not her boyfriend, or at least not the confirming kind. Melba smiled a little to herself. She didn’t want Don Pond for a boyfriend anyway. She liked his head more and more, but other than his head he did not have a great deal to recommend him. He did not need to be soothed and jarred for one thing, or, at least, not by coffee. Perhaps he was soothed and jarred by something else? A pet?

  Melba had noticed that people with pets sometimes put less emphasis on coffee than people without pets. Pets, she suspected, performed a service similar to coffee. Pets were always bounding onto their owners’ beds in the mornings, tonguing and clawing and defecating and yelping joyously.

  Yes, it amounted to the same thing, thought Melba. Did Don Pond keep pets? She cocked her head, listening. She heard noises coming from the corners of the house, but the noises didn’t prove the presence of pets. Melba Zuzzo’s house was filled with noises, chirps, hisses, grunts, scratchings, and scrabblings, but she didn’t call the animals who made these noises pets. They didn’t bound for one thing, but scurried, and their behavior was sly and unredeemed. Those animals were not carefree like pets, and they displayed none of the pet’s easy sovereignty.