Glass (Small Press Distribution (All Titles)) (6 page)

I had a birthday party, and Mama failed to show up. We all stood around a long time, just waiting, and then Papa whispered something angry, making the parlor maid’s face redden, and they brought the cake in anyway, and it was an angel food cake. The party was just me and the servants, plus Papa for a few minutes. I refused to blow out the candles, so Nurse blew them out for me, kneeling behind me with her head next to mine as if we were blowing them out together, though I knew that I was not blowing out anything. She explained that Mama was not there because she was caught up in the social whirl. It was, Nurse said, impossible for Mama to get away, no matter how much she wanted to. I must have been quite upset, because I remember that later in my room when Nurse brought me another piece of cake, I just ate the icing off and crumbled the rest and pushed the pieces down into the heat vent. Days later I saw ants going in and out of the vent, and the gardener came up and sprayed something down inside it. When I thought of the social whirl in those days, I pictured an enormous vortex. It looked a lot like the Maelstrom whirlpool in one of my picture books, but instead of swirling water it was made out of swirling people, men and women in evening clothes whirling round and round, arms and legs flailing wildly as they struggled to escape by scrambling up the nearly vertical walls of the vortex in order not to be sucked down into the bottomless hole at the center. Later when I was grown I several times had the same image in nightmares, except then I was the only person in the whirlpool. I think Papa, being a genuine sportsman, was sorry I was not a boy, and Mama also was sorry, and for many years they tried to engender one, but they never engendered anything. I imagine the effort made Papa feel better, but Mama told Nurse that it made her feel pummeled, told her while I was sitting there. Not just Nurse and Mama but other people also were in the habit of talking as if I were not there, because I was a girl, I suppose, or because they thought I was lost in my own world and not taking in what they said. After a few years Mama had had enough, apparently, and began locking the door to her bedroom. Papa, however, being a man and, I imagine, quite virile, had not had enough. After a long while, after many meals with Mama off in the far distance making silence and throwing it at him, while I sat in the middle distance with my head down stirring mashed potatoes into muddy pools, and after he had tried the door many times, whispering hoarsely and rattling the knob, he finally understood that this was a habit she had fallen into, and then he also had had enough; and at those times, having had enough of the one and not of the other, he would retire to the study after supper and drink brandy until his face was red. The study was a comfortable room, a person could sit in it and not have her shoulder blades jabbed, so anyone who wanted to sit anywhere in our house for very long always sat there, except Mama. When Papa drank he sat there a long time, as I recall. It had leather chairs, a leather-topped table, leather-covered books, and a leathery old butler named Peter who stood behind Papa’s armchair and poured. Those were all comfortable things, and I suppose they made Papa feel comfortable sitting there, even when he was unhappy, which would be the reason he could sit there for a long time, because he was unhappy but comfortable. We also had a large comfortable dog named Rupert who enjoyed listening to Papa talk even when he, Papa, was tight and no one else could understand him. But after a while Papa would have enough of the study also, and then, having had enough of one and not of the other, he would stumble back upstairs and beat on Mama’s door with his fist. This happened, it seems to me, a great many times, and then one night when it was about to happen again Mama had had enough of that too, and she threatened to shoot him through the door. I don’t suppose it really happened as many times as it seems, and it is possible she only threatened to shoot him once, threatened once to shoot him—fill him full of bullets, is what she said—and it only appeared to be happening all the time because it was so frightening. I don’t know if this is useful. My bedroom was across the hall from Mama’s, and when Papa began hammering on her door, I would think of places to travel, and after he had gone downstairs I would turn on the light and open the little box with the stamps and lay the stamps out on the bed and pretend that they were island countries scattered across the ocean of the bedspread. I would lay them out in different patterns, in a clump like Fiji or strung out in a line like the Marianas, and spend a long time considering the order in which I would visit them. I would imagine the king or president or whoever was pictured on the stamp coming down to the beach with his entourage to welcome me when I landed, and the entourage would include elephants and horses, usually, and I would fall asleep imagining this, and next morning the maid would have to help me retrieve my stamps from the tousled bedcovers.

Sleepless nights filled with wild thoughts, distracted days, typing fitfully, with many long blank spaces. Sometimes I type and think; more often I think without typing, in the armchair or in bed or sitting on a bench in the park. I was not able to fall asleep last night. I lay in bed for hours, staring up at the dark where the ceiling was, eyes locked open, and I thought, This is how I will look when I am dead. I got out of bed, nearly fell out, sitting on the floor for a few minutes first before getting up and going into the living room. Dawn was hours away, and I could hear the rat moving about. When I switched on the light, it lifted its head and looked at me. I tried to imagine that it looked surprised at seeing me in the living room at that hour, but that was difficult: rats don’t seem to have much in the way of expressions, except, of course, agony and the like, which all animals can express—even insects can express that. I slid several pages across the floor with my foot, to a spot near the armchair. I sat in the chair and picked them up and read them over to see if they were up to snuff. Finishing a page, I dropped it next to the chair, the way I always used to in the evening, when I would read over the pages I had typed that day. In those days, after reading a page I would let my arm hang out over the side of the chair, dangle out over the floor, still absently clutching the page, while I read through the next, and then just before reaching the bottom of that one I would let the suspended sheet slip from my fingers and whisper slantwise to the floor, lackadaisically, in a gesture of casual disdain, I thought at the time, as opposed to Clarence’s frantic way of balling pages up and throwing them at the trash can or making neat self-congratulatory stacks. Sometimes he would yank a page out of the typewriter with such violence he would make the roller shriek and cause me to jump out of my skin. Clarence was always loudly balling up pages, it seems to me. We once had a debate about whether crumpling paper was a useful release of tension, which was his position, or ostentatious self-indulgence, as I maintained. In the end, when he could not think up any more good arguments, he balled up a page and threw it at me. “Up to snuff” was one of my father’s favorite expressions. When he let a servant go, it was because that person was not up to snuff, unless of course the servant had been caught stealing and then he would mention that instead; and not only servants—President Roosevelt (that would be Franklin D. Roosevelt) was not up to snuff, because Papa had not approved of his economic schemes. He said the schemes were a load of hooey. And one day Nurse was no longer up to snuff; I don’t know why. I was constantly fearful that I would turn out not to be up to snuff, and I am certain Mama was not up to snuff. On the opening day of shooting season when I was ten, it was discovered that she had gone off in the night with a man named Roger Pip, who had used to play golf with Papa. When Papa found the note, which Mama had attached to the collar of his favorite gun dog, he was on the front steps dressed in a brown tweed shooting jacket, which he ruined by tearing off a lapel. After that he must have been truly demoralized, and he took to drinking huge quantities of Scotch instead of brandy. Unfortunately he could not hold his liquor anymore, and after the third drink he would sometimes shout at me, and after the fifth he could not tell which way was up. Six months after Mama fled I was sent away to school, boarding first in a large house with two elderly women and then later in a dormitory with other girls my age. It is not plausible that I actually remember Papa finding the note and tearing his jacket, since when he went shooting he never set out directly from the house in town but always from a lodge somewhere, so in fact I don’t know how he found out that Mama was gone—perhaps he came to realize it only gradually, as I did after a while, after she had been gone a long time. The social whirl, as I saw it, had just swallowed her up. It swallowed her up, and after a few years it spit her out again, in San Diego, where she lived with a man named Hanford Wilt until she died. I was nineteen when she died. Every Christmas and every birthday she sent me presents, always jewelry of some sort, and with the presents came a letter, which she would sign “Mama” and in parentheses write “Margaret Wilt,” in case I had forgotten who “Mama” was. The letters were typed on blue paper. There was a girl from California at school who told me San Diego had a perfect climate, with only three rainy days a year. It struck me as odd that a person named Margaret Wilt would choose to live in a place with so little rain. Mama was not a good typist, her letters were full of x-ed out words, sometimes whole lines of
x
’s. Not a good mother either, I imagine you are thinking.

The tank is still there, on the floor next to the fern, where Potts and I set it down. If I lean back in my chair, I can peer around the fronds and see the rat moving restlessly about down there. It scurries this way and that, climbs up on its little metal wheel and climbs down again, digs in the shavings with its forepaws like a dog, sniffing. Now and then it pauses and peers out through the glass wall of its enclosure. Its pink nose twitches. Its actions have a purposeful air, but at the same time they seem completely pointless. Not utterly different from mine, I suppose, if someone were to watch me going here and there in this apartment; a question of scale. “Edna scurries pointlessly this way and that in her enclosure,” the person watching me might write. Brodt, when he used to watch me roaming about, might have written something of that sort. At some point, after Mama left, they told Papa I was suffering from nervous agitation. I don’t know who told him, somebody did, and he took me out of the country, going first to England, to London, where we saw a very short, very pale doctor with bad teeth who was not English in the least (he was Russian, possibly; I have an impression of a Russian-sounding name, and I catch myself thinking it must have been “Chekhov,” because, I suppose, Chekhov was a Russian doctor also) and then on to Belgium, where we spent the summer in the countryside south of Namur, in a hotel made from an eighteenth-century palace. “We” at that point did not include Papa, who had left us on the dock in Dover to go look after his business, I think now, or to go look for Mama, as I imagined at the time. The woman who succeeded the woman who had followed Rasputin traveled with us on the boat going over and stayed with me when Papa left. I called her Nurse also, though she was not at all like the original, being American, diminutive, blonde, and not wearing an apron always, and she was more fun and less enveloping than the first Nurse, less comforting in an enveloping sense, as everyone from then on really had to be. She taught me how to play four kinds of solitaire, not including double, which is not solitaire at all and which we played endlessly in the hotel dining room while waiting for lunch. In the flagstone courtyard was a stone dolphin that spit water from its mouth, and they served fish every Friday. I don’t eat fish. The hotel was always crowded, thoroughly stuffed with a great many strange people, including a man who walked holding his shoes in his hands, even in the garden, a boy my own age who barked like a dog when spoken to, and a wispy middle-aged woman who on occasion went into the woods and sang “mon coeur est un violon.”

I fell asleep on the sofa. I woke up and it was morning. I opened my eyes, then closed them. I dwelled within a while longer, rummaging there for the remnants of sleep. They eluded me. An awareness of things—hardness of sofa, stiffness of legs, emptiness of stomach—forced consciousness upon me, insidious, insistent, irresistible. One more time. Lying on my back, I stared wide-eyed at the ceiling and listened to the traffic building toward rush hour. Whenever I am home the noise of traffic is out there, more or less, sometimes drowned by the noise of the compressors, sometimes drowning the noise of the compressors, not always heard, seldom listened to except at moments like this, on waking, when the mind gropes for bearings, sometimes not telling for a glad moment if that sound is not truly the ocean. Only on Sundays and in the wee hours of the morning does the roar diminish to where I can pick out the voices of individual vehicles, separate the sad rumble of the old ones from the whistling smooth rush of the new ones or follow the heaviest trucks shifting down octaves on the curving ascent to the Connector. I have moved the fern. I got down almost on my knees, placed my hands on the rim of the pot, buried my face in the fronds (they smelled like a forest after rain), and pushed. Though my feet slipped from under me several times, knees banging the floor, I managed to shove the pot across the room. But unable to see where I was going, I continued pushing until it crashed to a stop against the wall next the bookcase, pitching me forward into the foliage and snapping several fronds. The pot had pushed up the rug as it slid, folding it into large accordion pleats that were now wedged between the pot and the wall and that took all my strength and several hard jerks to pull out. I was leaning over the bookcase, elbows resting on it, catching my breath, when I noticed the dust on top. I had not noticed it before, not recently in any case, because I don’t ordinarily hang my head a few inches above the furniture, as I was doing then. My eyesight is fairly good, considering, but not so keen that I can discern from far off something as retiring and minute as dust. It was, I saw, leaning over it, a rather thick coating, a depressing example of how small things accumulate, so I really might have seen it from a distance had I bothered looking in that direction, looking intently, that is, with the goal of seeing, not just gazing aimlessly about as I am bound to do when navigating this way and that in the apartment so as not to crash into things. Desiccated insects caught between windows and storm panes are a second type of depressing small thing that I have noticed accumulating lately. The fact is, I have not been even mildly interested in the bookcase for quite some time now, ever since I stopped reading, and I doubt that I have glanced in its direction,
seeingly
in that direction, even once, except for the time weeks ago when I plunked the stack of new ribbons on top of it, when I was too excited, enchanted by the prospect of typing again at last—
unexpectedly
typing again at last—to notice anything at all. Now that I have noticed the dust I am going to fetch a cloth from the kitchen and wipe it off. Yellow and brown paint flakes accumulating at the foot of the wall on the landing and stairs would be a third. The bookcase is a quite ordinary piece of furniture, not large, made of plywood and veneer. In it I keep the books I expect to read someday along with the ones I have finished reading but have not bothered to put away. Some have been there a long time waiting for me to get around to them. And I keep a few photographs on top, in ornate pewter frames that we bought in Mexico. All the photographs that are not in frames I keep in the letter box, as I think I mentioned. Also on top, between two photographs, is a stack of small flat boxes; those are my typewriter ribbons. I like being able to look up from the armchair or the typewriter and see the stack of ribbons; it gives me confidence that I will be able to keep on typing. I was on the verge of writing, “keep on typing until I finish,” when it occurred to me that I am not exactly sure what finishing means or how I will know when it is finished; I don’t even know what
it
is. When I wrote those words I was just thinking in a vague way of getting to the end of whatever this is, even if in the end it is still not complete, “end” in that case meaning just the place where it stops. With the fern out of the way, I can look down at the rat’s tank on the floor while I am typing. I begin to type, and the renewed clatter of the keys seems to startle it, and it looks up at me. At other times it clings upside down to the lid of the tank and peers up at me through the wire while making an odd rattling noise with its teeth. Potts says in her note to vary the diet with leftover fruit—not oranges—and grain. I wonder what she imagines I would have in the way of leftover grain. When I leaned over the tank a few moments ago to drop a piece of apple in, forcing it through the wire, the smell nearly knocked me down. I am supposed to change the wood chips regularly. I haven’t done that. I am not sure of the procedure, and I don’t know what regular is.