A Box of Matches (8 page)

Then we invited Lucy, our neighbor, over for dinner. She scoffed at the mason and the chimney sweep. She said she used her chimneys every winter, even though they told her she mustn’t. Our house had been here, she pointed out, for more than two hundred years, without once having burned, and the fireplaces had all been in use until very recently, and the two brothers who had owned the place hadn’t installed woodstoves, which deposit creosote. It was unlikely that our chimneys would suddenly become terrible fire hazards; more likely that the experts were judging the old brick too harshly. Light a little fire and see if it draws, she said. Keep a blanket
nearby—if you have a chimney fire, which probably won’t happen, stuff the blanket up the chimney and it will cut off the air supply to the fire and put it out.

So we made a small test blaze, clutching an old blanket, and the fireplace worked perfectly. We tried all the fireplaces—they all worked. There was no problem. And the brickwork is in better shape than before because the fires have dried it out.

Some crows are outside; I can hear them. I’m going to take a shower and then feed the duck. She hears me coming and makes her small querying noises, but these days when I flip back the blanket and take away the screen, she drops to the ice and is still. I think it’s because she has to wait until her eyes are adjusted to the daylight, and she wants to be motionless while the adjustment proceeds so as not to draw the attention of a predator. Yesterday, she riveted away at the food I sprinkled into the warm water, blowing snortingly through her beak-nostrils once or twice, and when I walked back to the porch she hurled herself into the air, honking loudly, and landed in a snow-pile, perfectly placed to hop into the porch. It was cold, so I let her come into the porch, and then into the house, where she followed me around,
shaking her wings and tail. “Who do we have here?” said Claire at the top of the stairs. After the duck had a chance to get warm I carried her gently to the door and urged her out, feeling her small bones. She didn’t want to go. She can’t be an indoor duck because she leaves green duck artifacts everywhere in her excitement.

Good morning, it’s 5:14 a.m., and it’s cold, and the only creature stirring is the cat: he’s just had an extended session in his litter box, scraping and scraping. He’s got one of those litter boxes with the roof and the side hole: he climbs in and is able to turn smoothly around, and then he holds still with his head out the hole, slitting his eyes, until he is finished, and then the compulsive digging begins, the scrape of claws on grey plastic.

I woke up this morning and went into the bathroom and pulled down my pajama bottoms and silently peed, shivering, for a long time. I can accumulate a remarkable amount of urine. It’s been almost fifteen years since I took to sitting down on the toilet to pee at night. Someone I worked with was complaining about her husband’s bad
aim in the bathroom, and someone else said her husband sat down and always had, and I was struck by this. Just because during the day you stand, does that mean that you must stand during the night as well? Of course not. There’s no shame in sitting down, and here’s what happens if you don’t. In the middle of the night you don’t want to turn on the light, because it hurts your eyes and makes it harder to go back to sleep, so you decide to go in the dark. You think you have a pretty good idea where the toilet bowl is. So you stand there in the dark, straining for cues and luminosities, saying to yourself that it’s a very large bowl anyway and the chances are good that you’ll hit the mark. And yet of course you’re sleepy and you may have a slight nonsexual stiffening and you’re clumsy. So you let some pee down into the darkness. You listen for the sound. Is it the sound of a fluid stream hitting water? That’s good. Then you’re fine. Is it, on the other hand, the sound of a coherent fluid stream hitting porcelain? That may be good or it may not be good, depending on whether you’re hitting the porcelain of the actual inside of the bowl, around the water, or the porcelain on the edge. A doubt arises. Very probably it’s the porcelain near the water. You’ll know that it is near if
you make a tiny left or right adjustment and hear the confirming sound of water. And you wonder, Which way do I adjust the aim? It seems like I might be aiming a little too much to the left. So you correct by directing the stream a little to the right, and the sound changes, and now you’re in trouble, because it’s the sound, you’re pretty sure, of pee hitting rim and maybe even floor, so you quick jerk back to what you think is your original position. But it isn’t the original position. You’ve lost your bearings now, you’re wandering in an unknown forest, and you have a suspicion that maybe the stream has split into a V; when that happens, no amount of course correction will help. You clamp off the outflow and turn on the light to take stock. If you can’t see anything on the floor, you’re okay, but if there’s an obvious small pool, then you have to get the undersink sponge going or use bunched-up toilet paper to dab it up, and the bending with the bunched toilet paper sends blood to the head, further waking you up. Now you’re much more awake than you would have been had you turned on the light in the first place. Not all of the pee will be cleaned, either, because it is the middle of the night, and nobody cleans things up that well in the middle of the night. Eventually
over some weeks a faint smell will arise. That’s why I recommend sitting.

Also, if you sit your activity is silent; whereas if you stand and you are lucky enough to hit water, the cat wakes up at the noise and may pluck the bed.

Passing me by, passing me by. Life is. Five years ago I planned to write a book for my son called
The Young Sponge
. I was going to give it to him as a birthday present. It was going to be the adventures of a cellulose kitchen sponge that somehow in the manufacturing is made with a bit of real sea sponge in it, giving it sentient powers. It lives by the sink but it has yearnings for the deep sea; it thirsts for the rocky crannies and the briny tang. Then Nickelodeon came up with a show, and a pretty good one, about a sponge. My idea was instantly dead: my son would think I was merely copying a TV show. Nickelodeon had acted, I had only planned to act.

Speaking of creative torpor, when my half-eaten apple fell off the ashcan just now, it occurred to me that I don’t really know what the Ashcan school of art is. Yesterday evening I felt the fireplace ash. It was cool, finally: deep-red bits can stay alive for many hours. I shoveled some of it into the tin container with a lid that was here when we
moved in—it must be the ashcan. The ash was a very light grey, almost white, and very fine—composed mostly, I imagine, of clay, which doesn’t burn when paper burns. Henry, who was watching me, said: “Dad, think of all the stuff we’ve burned, and it all goes down to this much.” It was only the third time I’ve shoveled out the fireplace. The ungraspableness of history, which can seem thrilling or frightening depending on your mood, can assert itself at any moment. I just found another small bedroll of lint in my automatic lint-accumulator and I tossed it into the fire: there was an almost imperceptible flare of differently colored fire—ah!
lint fire
—and it was gone. That is part of why I like looking at these burning logs: they seem like years of life to me. All the particulars are consumed and left as ash, but warm and life-giving as they burn. Meanwhile the duck is outside in the cold. She piles her excretions high in one corner, according to Claire, and she has a little declivity in the wood chips, where she fluffs up her feathers, but she’s got to be cold out there. She will be so happy when things thaw and she has the mud along the creek to root around in. Yesterday I touched the feathers on the back of her neck: they don’t
look as if they would repel water quite as well as they did in the high summer, because she hasn’t been able to swim in water. Yesterday, also, I heard her take off behind me and I turned to see an egg-shaped, cross-eyed form with windmilling arms flying towards me at head height. Often she changes course right at the very end of her flight, and this time she landed on an icy patch; her feet went back like a penguin’s and she scooted a little. But she was unhurt.

I’m still fascinated by the ability of her feet to withstand cold. The cold must go right through that thick layer of skin into her leg bones. What she wants is more blueberries. Claire bought frozen blueberries for her and defrosted a cup of them in the microwave. You can feel strange worries about the nature of consciousness when you try to imagine what a duck is thinking about all night closed up in a doghouse with a bowl of slowly freezing water and some food pellets, with a screen door over the opening to keep out coyotes and a blanket over the screen door. Every so often, she roots a little in the shavings—looking for what? She wants grubs and worms, but there aren’t any now, too cold. Why does she exist? We as a
family exist to be nice to the duck, and the duck exists to puzzle us. Who would have known that ducks make desperate sounds, trembly murmuring squeals, when you hold out a handful of pellets for them? Who would have known that she prefers to be fed by hand than to have the food in her bowl? What she likes best is to have you hold out to her a handful of pellets over the warm water. That way when she jabs at them with her beak, some fall into the water, and she can rap away at them under the water, snuffling through her beak-nostrils, and then come back up and get some dry pellets again, up and down.

She seems less interested in the cat’s anus: he keeps a distance and has returned to his primary mission, asserting the rights of private property against neighborhood coon cats.

I just laid a Quaker Oats container on the fire, which had burned down to a dim red glow. The cylinder flamed, blindingly, and the Quaker in the black hat, smiling, was engulfed. What is left now looks like some war-blackened martello tower on a distant coast. I looked over to the window to see if there was any light yet outside, but the curtains were drawn: Claire sometimes closes them at
night because they are, she’s right, a kind of insulation. But I think I’ll pull one of them open now so that I can see the hints of light outside as I work.

“It’s completely dark,” I whispered when I pulled back the curtains. The glass, though, had a good smell of summer-afternoon dust in it.

Good morning, it’s 5:44 a.m., and I’m up late again, but I’ve got four big old logs on the fire, each with a layer of burn-scabs from yesterday evening that break off when I rearrange them. The coffee is extra strong this morning; I poured in some from the less good bag so that we wouldn’t run out of our reserves in the good bag. Phoebe is disappointed in herself because she didn’t say interesting things when a restaurateur came to dinner last night. She appeared, dressed with great care in a T-shirt with tiny sleeves, her bangs perfect in a fourteen-year-old way, in the living room, and listened while the restaurateur told Claire about his drive through Nova Scotia, and I carved off bits of nutty cheese log and scraped them onto crackers. Finally, the
restaurateur asked Phoebe how her school was. Phoebe described her science project, in which she baked three small cakes, each made with a different brand of baking soda, to see which one would rise more. “Hm,” said the restaurateur. Phoebe went quiet again. Afterward she said, “I wanted to ask him how you get to be a chef and instead I just sat there.”

“You told him about your baking-soda project.”

“I’m a boring person,” she said.

I told her that she wasn’t a boring person, and she insisted that she was, and I countered that she wasn’t, and then we got onto the subject of the unnecessary repaving of Calkins Road, which took us to the subject of war crimes, and that we discussed till ten-fifteen, which is why I got up late.

I’m glad there are fifty-two weeks in the year—it seems like the right number, and there is the interesting congruity with a deck of cards. But there really should be more than twelve months. January is one of my favorites, and we’re getting towards the end of it. My children are practically grown, and my beard—I’m not at all content with my beard. Fortunately February is a pretty good month, too, so I’ll still be okay. They’re all pretty good
months, actually, it’s just that there aren’t enough of them. On New Year’s morning this year Claire got us to drive to the ocean to watch the sun rise. That outing was what made me suddenly understand that I needed to start reading Robert Service again and getting up early—that New Year’s outing combined with the time a few months ago when I took the night sleeper car from Washington to Boston and woke up in my bunk and pulled the curtain to look out the window and saw that we were in the station in New York City, and I realized that I was passing through a very important center of commerce without seeing a single street and that something similar was happening in my life.

On New Year’s morning we packed two thermoses, one of hot chocolate and one of coffee, and we drove for half an hour, the four of us, to the little parking lot at the beach. There was a bitter wind that made our pants flap, but several people were there with their dogs, looking out at the places on the horizon where they expected the sun to rise. Some seemed to know where it would come up and some didn’t; one old couple, bundled and hooded in matching orange puffy coats, stood still, halfway down
to the water, mitten in mitten. I figured that they would know where the sun would appear and, yes, they did. It underwent some waistline contortions, as rising suns so often do, narrowing first and then oozing out as if from a puncture in the seam of the horizon, and then the sky around the puncture point became inconceivably blue.

That was this year. Last year for New Year’s I decided that I would shave off my beard because there was too much white in it. I bought an electric trimmer, and I began plowing off chunks of coarse fur. Henry watched with interest, but Phoebe became unexpectedly upset. She said that my personality had to have a beard. I must stop immediately, she said. I said I was tired of looking in the mirror at a prematurely white-bearded person—that I had no respect or affection for badger-people in their forties. If, after I finished buzzing it off, I didn’t like the results, then I would just regrow it. When I was halfway through, Henry said, “Dad, I think it looks interesting but you need to work some on the other side.” Claire said to Phoebe, “He’s just seeing how it looks.” But I could see that when she, Claire, saw me in the mirror she was a little startled.