Glass (Small Press Distribution (All Titles)) (19 page)

I sprang up so precipitously I knocked my chair over on its back. Trying to kick it out of the way, I managed to tangle a foot in the rungs and nearly fell. I caught myself by grabbing hold of the typewriter and almost dragged it off the table. A chain reaction begun by the rat, who pushed first—pushed psychologically, of course, not with his paws: the relentless squeak of his little wheel was pushing. “A final squeak knocked Edna from her chair” was how it felt, I suppose. I snatched a pencil from the table and stamped across the room. Nigel’s eyes bulged when he saw me coming. I am sure he thought I was going to stab him with the pencil. I leaned over the tank, nose almost touching the wire screen. I shouted down into it as loud as I could and smacked the glass side with the flat of my hand, smacked it so hard that I am surprised I didn’t break it. Nigel flew straight into the air. I thought for a second he was going to topple over backwards, but he caught himself in time and shot into his tube. I waited to make sure he was not going to rocket back out before lifting the wire top. After a minute with neither hide nor hair of him, I reached inside and jammed the pencil down through the spokes of his wheel. I must have really frightened him—it was a long time before he came back out. He climbed in his wheel and tried to make it spin, then he sat in it, scratching. I don’t know why I said feelings of responsibility, when I meant feelings of failure.

A blank of days, days of blank. I did not type a word, I slept a great deal, I ate. I went down to Potts’s place. Despite my sporadic efforts several of the plants are intent on dying. I sat in Mr. Potts’s chair and watched the fish—subaqueous flowers afloat in a green fusion. From the window ledge a few feet from where I sat a plant had littered the carpet with yellow leaves. I dwelled, I thought, like Keats, among sere leaves and twigs. I fell asleep in the armchair and had a dream in which I was presenting a young Clarence to Papa, though in reality Papa died before I ever met Clarence. In the dream, instead of “Papa, this is Clarence,” I said, “Papa, may I present Sir Nigel Poole,” and Clarence bowed deeply, with a sweep of an ostrich-plumed hat. On other days I walked over to the park. Once I fell asleep on a bench there and dreamed of the gardener and the mole. After putting the mole in his pocket, he began jumping about, hopping from foot to foot, and then he stopped, unzipped his fly, and pulled out a rat. Nurse put her hands over my eyes and made me turn and run away. We paused in the driveway by the house, I looked up, and there was Papa seated on top of a hedge. Nigel has made bite marks up and down his pencil.

I did not hear the buzzer. I opened the door to take the trash out, and Brodt was standing on the landing—a different Brodt, I am tempted to say, owing to the elegant brown suit, collar noosed tight by a blue-and-yellow striped tie, and owing, I think, to the expression on his face. Well, he was smiling, and he was not wearing his uniform, and I did not for a brief moment know who he was, which is odd, as I had been expecting him since the day I glimpsed him staring up at my windows, if that was Brodt in fact and not, as I suggested then, someone who had come about the gutter. I was so agitated during his visit that I forgot to ask if it was him before. Perhaps not agitated, implying that I was thrashing about, however slightly—
disquieted
is how I was, the whole time he was here. I told him how surprised I was to see him, and he nodded slightly. I stood aside and he walked in. I left the bag of trash on the landing. He was wearing a brown hat with a narrow rim, not quite a bowler, that looked as if he had found it in a cinema—found it inside a movie, I mean, not on one of the seats; an older British movie that would have been. He carried a black satchel on a strap over his shoulder. He took the hat off—it must have been rather tight as it left a red line across his forehead—and smiled again, disclosing a gold tooth. I held out my hand, and he handed me the hat. I walked behind him, carrying the hat, while he circumambulated the room, stepping around my pages and pausing now and then to examine some object, because he was looking for something, as I thought at the time, or because he didn’t know what to do with himself, as I think now. He picked up a little soapstone Buddha from the windowsill and turned it over in his hand, looking, I assumed, for an identifying mark or label on the bottom, and placed it back. He paused by the sofa and stared down at the heap of books and photographs I had pushed off onto the floor, nudging some of it aside with the toe of his shoe, in a manner I thought inquisitive, though he might have been, in a very tentative way, clearing a space to sit down. If the latter was the case, he thought better of it, for he went over and stood at one of the windows plastered with notes, reading them perhaps (his back was to me), or else peering out between them at the ice cream factory, and I heard it roaring for the first time in a while, heard it, I want to say, with his ears. When he turned back to the room, he seemed to veer in the direction of the typewriter, which still held a page I had been typing, and he seemed to bend slightly, and I thought for a moment he was going to lean over the machine and read it. Pointing to the armchair, I suggested he take a seat, and he did, sliding the satchel from his shoulder and setting it on the floor in front of him. I sat on the edge of the sofa, facing him, the hat resting awkwardly on my knees. I considered placing it on the floor but did not want to appear to be discarding it. He looked down at the pages scattered on the floor next to chair. He glanced up at Nigel, who was peering at us through the glass. He made a series of little squeaking sounds in Nigel’s direction, lifting his upper lip and sucking through his teeth—the rat did not give any sign of hearing. “Would you like coffee?” I asked. He did not want coffee. He would enjoy a glass of water. I placed the hat on my seat and went to the kitchen. When I returned the hat was on the floor beside the chair. I handed him the glass and sat down again. He took a sip of water and placed the glass carefully on the floor next to the hat. I noticed he was looking at my pages again. He cleared his throat and leaned forward with a little smile that I did not know how to interpret, not being able to tell if it was sly or shy. I thought, Now he is going to talk about seeing me taking things. He bent down and snapped the satchel open. “I have something for you,” he said. He reached into the satchel. A moment’s pause, and he extracted my sheepskin earmuffs. “My favorite muffs,” I exclaimed in a whisper, snatching them from him. I put them on. The world went suddenly soft. I took them off (the world rushing back) and held them on my knees. I am sure I was beaming. He placed both hands on the chair arms, elbows crooked, as if about to stand up. He looked intently at me and said, “I had an uncle who heard voices, had heard them ever since he was a child. At some point, after he was already grown and had a wife and children, if you can believe it, he discovered that if he wore earmuffs he wouldn’t hear them anymore, hear the voices anymore.” I started to speak: “I don’t hear …” But he continued, “In the summer it was too hot for earmuffs, so he went around with big wads of cotton sticking out of his ears. A tall, really scrawny guy with a long nose, he looked just like a bird, some kind of crane, with downy tufts on the sides of his head. He looked really comical. Funny thing is, his name was Robin Bird.” He chuckled slightly. I think I did not smile, I was so taken aback. I was expecting him to talk about staplers. He must have noticed my puzzled look. He dropped his eyes, looking down at my pages again. “I feed birds in a park near here,” I said brightly, intervening, “sparrows and pigeons.” And he said, “In a tree outside my window I have seen blue jays, crows, orioles.” “I see only sparrows and pigeons,” I replied. He went on, “They trumpet outside my window in the morning. On Sunday morning they wake me up when I’m trying to sleep.” “Pigeons and sparrows wake me too, when they accumulate on the fire escape,” I said, helping, “though of course they can’t trumpet.” “Whistling and trumpeting. Mostly whistling,” he said. “That might be a cardinal,” I said, “Cardinals whistle.” He looked directly at me: “Yes, a cardinal. And something else too, in the top of a tree.” He was silent a moment. Then, pointing to the muffs in my hand, he said, “Nice color.” “Yes” I said, “I like blue,” and added, “I don’t have any trees, so I only get sidewalk birds like pigeons and sparrows.” “Orioles and cardinals are the only colorful ones I see,” he said. “Compared to sparrows,” I observed, “blue jays are colorful.” He laughed. “When I was a boy we hung aluminum pie pans on strings to keep birds out of the garden, but the blue jays weren’t frightened.” “I used to throw breadcrumbs out my window for the sparrows,” I said. “That’s nice,” he said. “We didn’t have a feeder, because we didn’t want to attract birds to the garden.” There was a long pause. He shifted in his seat, leaned an elbow on the chair arm and then seemed to think better of it and placed one hand in the other, resting both in his lap. I said, “Would you care to look at some of my pages?” He stared at the papers on the floor again. He seemed to be considering. “No, I don’t think that would help,” I think he said, finally. “I mean, I prefer not.” We seem to have said other things, which I have forgotten. We were standing in the doorway, he was turning to leave, when I said, “I was afraid you had come about the things I took.” I hesitated. “All the things I stole from work.” He made a sweeping gesture, as if casting something to the wind.
“Those
things?” For a moment I thought he was going to touch me on the shoulder, but he let his arm drop. “Don’t worry,” he said. “Everybody was taking things. Even the director was taking things.” I closed the door behind him. I leaned against it. I heard his footfalls descending the stairs, and then, faintly, the street door open and close. I went and sat in my typing chair. It is dark now, night fell while I was typing, and I can’t see the words. Oh, Brodt!

Nigel has eaten his pencil, all but the part inside the wheel and the metal bit that held the eraser, and he ate the eraser too, I noticed when I went over to give him a piece of my apple this morning—not eaten the pencil, actually, so much as shredded it; bits of blond wood and yellow paint are scattered about in the shavings.

After supper on the day following Brodt’s visit, it was still light out, and I was at the window looking down on the people clustered at the bus stop across the street, when suddenly a small child, a boy, I think, broke from the crowd and ran into the street, directly into the path of a car. There was a tremendous screeching of brakes that for a moment I thought was the child screaming, and the car stopped. The rear of the car rose into the air as it was stopping, and then, after it had stopped, seemed to remain that way, tilted forward, as if aghast. Then the rear of the car settled slowly back, descending with a sighing sound, I thought. The little boy stood just a foot or so in front of the car’s grill. From up here he seemed to be staring into the windshield. A woman in a blue dress rushed out of the crowd, wrapped the child in her arms and carried him back to the sidewalk. The two of them went a little ways off from the crowd. She knelt in front of the child, holding him at arms-length from her. I don’t know how much time had passed, a few seconds or several minutes, when the car that had nearly struck the child began slowly to roll forward again, and that must have been the cue: as soon as it was rolling forward everything else started to move, the voices of the people at the bus stop floated up, I heard someone shouting, the child wailed, and all was just as before. I did not give Nigel any pellets this morning, as he has not touched the ones he has, that I gave him three or four days ago, when I fed him a big handful, or the apple, so he can’t be hungry. I don’t know how much a rat is supposed to eat, but this one is eating very little.

They forgot me at Potopotawoc. I was supposed to be there for just three weeks in the fall, officially there, as opposed to still there but forgotten, and they lost sight of me, despite the fact that I was right there in front of them day after day for almost two years; lost sight of me, so to speak, among the falling leaves; a year and eleven months. I say they forgot me, but of course that is a psychological remark, and I obviously can’t know what was going on in their heads. Perhaps I was not forgotten at all, perhaps I was pointedly ignored. For two years I was ignored or forgotten. Given the silent treatment, sent to Coventry. Not entirely: sometimes I was paid too much attention, so they could not have forgotten that I was there, nor had Clarence, who sent postcards from all sorts of places, New Orleans, Key West, Tampa. They always ended, “and Lily sends her love.” When I say that it is a psychological remark, I am referring to my own psychology. “For two years Edna lived abandoned and forgotten” was how it felt. One night a large group of campers came and built a bonfire in front of my house. I was afraid it was a lynching party. They stood around the fire laughing and talking and sometimes singing. Then they gathered in front of my door, and I opened it and stood in the doorway while they sang “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary.” Some of them spent the night there, sleeping on the pine needles beneath the trees. When the sun rose they wandered off, wrapped in their sleeping bags and blankets; in the dawn mist they looked like wandering monks. Several of them were like that, wrapped in robes, moving about in the fog under the trees, when time stopped, just as it stopped for the car and the little boy, briefly, and they became a painting. A moment later they were walking away again, grumbling and cursing. They left behind a great deal of litter, and the next day I went out and cleaned everything up, beer cans and bottles and paper wrappers and sticks tipped with bits of marshmallow, and I put it all in a plastic bag and carried the bag up to the Shed. I want to say that I emptied the bag on the floor of the cafeteria, but in fact I just thought of doing that, because of the mess they had left in front of my cabin. I could not think of anything to type at Potopotawoc. Sometimes I copied things out of magazines, I typed an entire issue of the
New Yorker,
including the ads. I might have done that more than once. Everything I typed there was meaningless. It has been a long time since I have dwelled on Potopotawoc, dwelled in the sense of turning it over in my mind and trying to understand, which is quite different from obsessing. I told Clarence I was not obsessing, that I was merely thinking about it. Sometimes I cried about it, sitting on a rusted combine or threshing machine or whatever it was, at the edge of the pine woods. Nigel can scarcely haul himself forward. His breathing seems to be more rapid, and it makes a clicking sound. I had not noticed his sides heaving like that before. He was this way when I awoke yesterday morning. I have moved his water bottle, attaching it so the spout is closer to his head. I sat at the kitchen table and cleaned and oiled Poplavskaya’s typewriter. I tried to make it type and discovered the way in which it is broken: the carriage return mechanism doesn’t work, a pawl that is supposed to engage the gear has snapped, so even though the keys all function, the typewriter is practically useless except for typing things that are one line long. I typed a postcard to Potts: “Nigel is having the time of his life.” I have not thought of anything else short enough to type. Very little in life is that short. The postcard came out smudged with oil and rust. It looks like a postcard written fifty years ago, as in a sense it is. And the business with the exploding house: I look back and think, Who was that woman? As if I had temporarily lost my way, lost my bearings and wandered off the road, so to speak, into a thicket, or had gone temporarily out of my mind. That would explain a lot. Out of my mind for a couple of weeks in certain respects, not out of it entirely or always. “Edna had a bee in her bonnet” is how my mother might have put it. And when I would refuse to stop typing, after he had been calling me for a while, Clarence would come to the bottom of the stairs and shout, “Are you out of your mind, Edna?” It was not a question. He might be sick, I suppose. He drags himself along in what could be construed as a sickly fashion, though that might be the way a rat of his age is supposed to walk for all I know, or the way a rat is supposed to walk on shavings. I did not pay attention to how he was walking before; maybe they all walk like that. How would I walk in wood shavings up to my knees? If he is sick it is from eating paint, probably. It might not be a book, it might be an introduction, or maybe a long preface. I have posted a new note, taped it up next to the one that says: Feed the Rat. It makes sly reference to my interest in Henry Poole and his house, which seems strange to me now. I think I should call it my
erstwhile
interest, and that—my erstwhile interest—seems bizarre now, since I no longer know what there was about it that interested me. I am not making myself clear. It is like thinking that you have caught a fly, but then when you open your fist slowly, you discover there is nothing in it. You were holding your fist tightly shut, convinced you had a fly inside, and the whole time there was nothing in it, and it feels strange and bizarre and a little shocking when you open your fist and discover that. The new note says: “People in glass houses should not read newspapers.” As a thought, this strikes me as puzzling and profound. Clarence said once that I never considered anything profound unless it was puzzling. He made that remark after I had told him
The Misfits
was not profound.