A Box of Matches (10 page)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
