A Box of Matches, Page 3

  My son, who is eight, had a plan for the leaves this year. He filled six large kraft-paper bags with them, and saved them in the barn, so that when my brother and sister-in-law came to visit with their children he could make an enormous pile. His plan worked, which is not true of all of his plans. The pile was big and the leaves were dry, not soggy, and my sister-in-law and I took lots of pictures of smiling children leaping around piles of leaves and flinging them in the air, and I had that moment of slight fear when I knew the future. I knew that we would remember this moment better than other perhaps worthier or more representative moments because we were taking pictures of it. The duck hovered near the rake, hoping that we would get down to a slimy underlayer where the worms lived. But there wasn’t one.

  I found out yesterday that one of the town elders has died. He sounded perfectly fine over the phone when I talked to him in November—gravelly-voiced but fine. When I was taking out the garbage yesterday, walking up the ramp that leads into the barn, I suddenly imagined this aged man turning from a living human being to skull and bones—and I was amazed in the same way that I’m amazed when the leaves fall and we’re left with skeletal trees every year. Really I’m glad my grandparents were cremated. I don’t like the idea that their skulls would be around somewhere. Better and more dignified for them to be completely parceled out.

  8

  Good morning, it’s 4:50 a.m.—I just took such a deep bite of red apple that it pushed my lower lip all the way down to where the lip joins up with the chin. There is a clonk point there, and a good apple can do that, push your lower lip down to its clonk point. Sometimes you think for a moment that you’re going to get stuck in the apple because you can’t bite down any farther. But all you have to do is push the apple a little to the left—or pull it to the right—and let the half-bitten chunk break off in your mouth. If you do it slowly, it sounds like a tree falling in the forest. Then start chewing.

  Phoebe said something yesterday on the way to school that I thought was very true. While I was finishing feeding the duck, she came out in her perfectly ironed blue jeans, carrying a piece of toast in her mittens and crouching like a Sherpa beneath the load of her backpack. She’s fourteen. We both got in the car, and I turned the heater on full. It roared and hurled out a blast of icy air. Phoebe held a mitten over her mouth and nose and said, “It’s cold, Dad, it’s cold.” I said, “You’re not kidding it’s cold—it’s really cold.”

  As I took hold of the steering wheel, I made an exaggeratedly convulsive noise of frozenness, and Phoebe looked over and saw that I was hatless. Then she noticed that my hat—a tweed hat with a silk inner band—was stuffed down near the hand brake. It had been in the car all night, cooling down. She reached for it, and in that abrupt way that people have when they’re trying to conserve warmth, she held it out to me. “Put this on,” she said.

  The thick tweed looked tempting, but I knew better and I said, “If I put this on I’m going to freeze.”

  She took the hat back from me and held it over the heater vents for a few seconds. “Try it now,” she said.

  The heater, as it turned out, had not warmed the hat to any perceptible degree: the silk inner band was a ring of ice and my head recoiled at the chill. I said: “Yow, yes, that’s going to be better.”

  “You’ve got to get cold to get warm,” Phoebe said.

  Now that is the truth. That is so true about so many things. You learn it first with sheets and blankets: that the initial touch of the smooth sheets will send you shivering, but their warming works fast, and you must experience the discomfort to find the later contentment. It’s true with money and love, too. You’ve got to save to have something to spend. Think of how hard it is to ask out a person you like. In my case, Claire asked me to go on a date to the cash machine, so I didn’t actually have to ask her. Still, her lips were cold, but her tongue was warm.

  By the time I dropped Phoebe off and gave her a dollar for a snack, my hat was as comfortably situated on my head as if it had hung on the coat tree all night.

  Henry was building a Mars city when I got home from work. He went upstairs and came out of his room with an enormous Rubbermaid storage container full of Lego. It seemed bigger than he could handle. Each Lego piece is as light as a raisin, but they become heavy in the aggregate.

  “Do you need some help with that?” I asked him.

  “No, thanks, I think I can do it,” said Henry.

  “That’s certainly a lot of Lego,” I said.

  “Dad, you should see how I get it up the stairs. It takes me about an hour.” He stepped down each step very slowly, his heels treading on the edges of his too long sweatpants. “Sometimes I get in hard situations where I’m balanced on one toe. It’s not very pleasant.”

  I’ve turned the top half-log over—it looks like a glowing side of beef now.

  9

  Good morning, it’s 4:23 a.m.—I have this ability to use bad dreams to wake myself up when I need to be up. I can just tell myself a time and a bad dream will come and get me just when I need it to. For instance, what woke me this morning at four o’clock was a dream about a low, bullish sort of pig that grunted around. When the pig lifted its head from the grass and saw me, it went very still and changed color from brown to a dark purple. I got up and peed and got back into bed, but I knew I was up for the morning then. I have a general theory about bad dreams which I think is revolutionary. My theory is that they are most often simply the result of the body’s need to wake up the mind using the only tools it has available, most often in order to pee. The mind is unconscious, in a near coma, but the body has received reports of a substantial accumulation of hot urine belowdecks. The body is getting insistent calls and memos describing the gravity of the hot urine situation, and passing it up to the low-brain, and the low-brain is putting in calls to the high-brain, but the high-brain’s phone is unplugged because it is asleep. What is the low-brain to do? It has three options: laughter, arousal, or fear. All three will elevate the heart rate, but laughter and arousal are, especially if the high-brain really wants to keep sleeping for a last ten or fifteen minutes, less dependable. Fear it must be, then. The low-brain looks on the monitor at the images that float by in an unstoppable stream of coolant. They are, as always, absurd and pointless. Any one of them will do. He seizes one at random—it happens to be of a small faun-colored pig in the yard—and he injects a special fear-chemical into it and lets it go, and suddenly it is a frightening dark-purple pig with murderous eyes. And if that doesn’t work, then there will be gray zombies hiding in tree stumps, glossy-green tidal waves, stairways that narrow down and drip mud, suffocating sweaters that you knit yourself and can’t escape from, tough Eskimos who want to kidnap your children, and so on, all coming at the end of sequences of mindless innocence—and the breathing elevates, the heart begins to pound, the eyes snap open. My contention is that the simple need to pee accounts for over half of the bad dreams that human beings experience, and it certainly accounts for my pig dream this morning.

  The fire had some trouble today. I balled up six sheets of the News Herald and laid over them two torn-off flaps from a cardboard box, with a crumpled Cheez-Its container laid over that, and at first the fire was healthy—so healthy was it in fact that I burned my sock when I looked away for a moment. Not my toe—just the white sock, which now has a rough black charred area at the tip. When the fire died down I stuffed a paper-towel tube deep into the orange otherworldly cavern between two lower logs: quantities of gray smoke issued from one end of the tube as the other end burned. But then it all died down again. This happens sometimes. When it does, you must take a moment to appreciate the unburning fire. It’s still hot—it still has the means of its own regeneration. Blow on it several times, long steady gulf-streams of oxygen, and a flame sprat will pop up again somewhere. Then adjust the logs slightly to give that flame some encouragement, and the fire is loping off on its own again.

  So now let me say a little about this room, our living room.
It looks like a real living room, I must say, and I like sitting in here because it is clean. My office is filled with my junk. I can’t think about anything but work in there, and I don’t want to think about work. Here there are five windows with thin white curtains, and each window has twelve panes of glass. The muntins—those little wooden pieces that hold the panes—look narrow and fragile, but they’ve been there for a long time. The room has looked more or less like this, with molding going around the wall three feet off the floor and warped pine planks, for over two hundred years, which is a long time. We have been here only three years, though. There is a couch in the room, and a triangular corner cupboard, and various chairs—nothing in the room is new, everything has been glued or repaired at some time in its life. Some of it is from Claire’s family, some from mine. The oriental rug came from my parents, who bought it for four hundred dollars around 1970. My parents were then big fans of oriental rugs—less so now because their interests have changed. Their most extravagant acquisition was a tiger rug—an oriental rug with a life-size hieratic tiger lifting its paw in the middle and incomprehensible designs running around the edge. They bought it for nine hundred dollars. It was too valuable to have on the floor: it hung on the wall in the front hall. One day when I was twelve or so, we were doing a family housecleaning, and I got interested in the idea of beating all the rugs. I took the little rugs out and hit them with a broom handle, and then I beat the tiger rug, imagining that the dust particles that poofed out had magical powers—and when I was done I hung it out over the railing on the front porch. I said to myself that I was hanging it there because I wanted it to “air out,” but really it was that I wanted people on our street to see that we had this very unusual and expensive rug. Towards dusk I heard an odd clink. I went out on the front porch. A car with a rusty trunk was driving off. The rug was gone, stolen. My mother wept. She would have it now if I hadn’t wanted to watch the dust puff out of it.

  10

  Good morning, it’s 3:37 a.m., and it’s just me here in the dark. I had a tussle with the coffeemaker just now. Claire warned me last night that she’d put its components in the dishwasher. “That won’t confuse you early in the morning?” she asked. I said nah, and it shouldn’t have. I unclamped the dishwasher door and allowed it to fall and bounce a little—the springs made their sproinging sound. I’m always happy to open a dishwasher, curious to see what Dead Sea Scrolls await within. I pulled on the top cage of dishes, feeling how smoothly its rollers rolled in the dark, making a sort of soft thunder as the extenders slid out and a little jingle when they reached their limit. And as soon as I began feeling up the dishes to try to find the filter basket, I encountered, faintly lingering there and radiating upward, the living traces of warmth from the long-completed dishwashing cycle—hints of heat persisting seven hours after I cranked the dial to Normal Wash. How could the machine have held the warmth this far into the early morning? Insulation, of course—that was the easy answer. But there was a further reason: in the upturned bottoms of all the mugs were shallow tidepools of warm water. These residual heat-sinks, along with all the molecules of agitated ceramic in the plates and mugs and all the forky forests of silverware, worked like radiators. And the pools of water are important in another way, too: if you open the dishwasher and you aren’t sure at a glance whether the dishes in it are clean or dirty, you can know their status for certain by checking to see whether the mugs hold these cupped pools, since when you upend a dirty mug and put it in the cage, it may be wet, but there won’t be water collected in its concavity because you will have carried it to the dishwasher right side up, only turning it upside down when you place it into the angled outside edge of the upper cage.

  I found the carafe easily, and the filter basket was behind the carafe. I pulled out one of the mugs. But where was the plastic snap-on lid that went on the top of the carafe? I groped my way around the whole dishwasher twice, methodically, before I finally found it leaning under a bowl. And then I had a terrible time snapping the top into place. I was pressing so hard that I worried that I might shear off the plastic pins on either side of the flange on the top flap, and that’s when I broke down and switched on the light switch—but it has a rheostat, thanks to our deaf electrician, and I was able to switch it on very low, just enough to be sure that I wasn’t shearing off the pins, and when the plastic top clinked into place I turned the light right off and finished up in the dark. The question is, Will that eruption of incandescence make a difference? Can I regain my early-morning consciousness? Everything is different because of everything else, and yet I feel, now safely installed in front of a healthy fire before four o’clock, that it didn’t make a bit of difference. My eye has reverted to its night mode without any trouble, and I have the same hollow, sleep-deprived feeling in my head that I always have—a feeling that is precious to me.

  I started today’s fire with a crumpled-up potato bag—one of those bags with the window made of a crisscross of open cords. It burned like a bastard and lit some dead apple branches, and with the further help of a Triscuit box and an empty cardboard spool of white ribbon, the flame-front moved up to take control of the upper-tier logs. Striking the match was, in fact, a more searing light experience than turning on the kitchen light. And think of that word, struck, which stores within it the old form of fire lighting: we now swipe a match as we swipe a charge card through a machine that will read its magnetic stripe, whereas once, before matches, we must truly have struck a flint. And maybe the early matches were things you did whack against something, as you would strike two flints together, rather than swiping them, though I doubt it. As I remember, the hardboiled detective novels have characters who “scratch” a match, which is a good way of saying it. Diamond “Strike on Box” matches these are, Made in the USA, according to an emblem on the front.

  Just now I stretched, looking over to my left at a table that is now in darkness but during the day holds a coffee-table book of Wayne Thiebaud paintings, including a very good painting of bowls of soup, some pumpkin, some pea. While I stretched, thinking of the soup bowls, my hand strayed under my pajama top and my middle finger found its way into my belly button where it discovered some lint. I rolled the lint into a tube, as one does, and having done so, I became curious about what such a tube would look like if it burned. I tossed it into one of the spaces between the coals. It went orange for a moment, fattened, and then darkened. It is still there now but it will be lost when I stir the coals.

  Claire told me last night that Lucy, the frail but funny woman who lives on our street, has had to go into the hospital. She’s going to be okay, but the woman who helps Lucy was trying to find a home for Lucy’s pets. Claire was wondering whether we should take one of the cats. I see that it would be a good thing to do but it seems to me that our current cat gets into terrible fights with neighbor cats already, and he’s had a major blow this year as a result of the arrival of the duck. Greta, although not very bright in some ways, is shrewd about cats. What you do is you walk up to the cat slowly, as if you want to say hello, and when the cat tentatively extends its nose in the willing-to-sniff-and-be-sniffed stance, you peck at him sharply. Then, when the shocked cat turns to walk away, his ears back, his feelings and nose hurt, lunge at him again and peck him directly on or near his anus. That makes him gallop off—for no animal likes to be pecked on the anus by a duck.

  Here is, since it has come up again, how we got the duck. Phoebe went to camp this summer—a camp that had llamas, goats, small noisy pigs, and ducks. The ducks had ducklings, and Phoebe called to tell us that there was going to be a lottery, the winner of which would take home a duck. Could she enter the lottery? There were six hundred children at the camp; although I hesitated, I thought it was all right to say yes to the lottery because the chance of our ending up with the duck was tiny. Only four families said yes to the lottery, however, and there were, it turned out, six ducklings. Having “won,” Phoebe picked the smallest one—small but, she thought, perky, and we put her i
n a cardboard box and drove it—her—home. And now we have this brown duck who has enriched our lives considerably. One cat and one duck is enough, however.

  The difficulty with the duck in the winter is that the hose is frozen. It is still out there somewhere under the snow-piles that the plow has made, and it will reappear in the spring—but it has disappeared for now. Up till the first blizzard we were filling a plastic wading pool for Greta to use. When the water was fresh she dove and flapped her wings underwater to rinse off her underwing area, lunging forward so hard that unless she turned her head she would bonk into the far side of the pool. We also walked with her down to the creek, where she was happy rooting in the mud. Even after it had snowed we walked with her down the hill once or twice so that she could splash in the very cold creek water. Her yellow feet are unsuited to snow; she has trouble climbing any hill, and yet she flies only to signal that she is hungry.

  But now that it is iron-cold, cold enough that we worry about how she manages at night, fluffed in with her cedar shavings, even with the blanket over the doghouse and the snow on the blanket, she has not been immersed in any sort of water for weeks. I hope her feathers don’t lose their insulative properties when she can’t bathe. Her feet, which you would think would be vulnerable to frostbite when she stands on the ice, seem unaffected. When one foot begins to feel intolerably cold, she just pulls it up into her feathers and stands balanced on the other. Then she switches.