A Box of Matches (11 page)

One of my middle toes has, as my coccyx does, an Old Injury. At seventeen, in the summer, I was the night cook at a busy place called Benny’s: I cleaned the kitchen after closing, wiping down all the surfaces, pouring bleach on the cutting boards and draining the fryers and, last of all, mopping the floor. At first the cleaning took me until four in the morning, and my ankles swelled from standing for twelve hours; later I got faster, and I began cleaning our own home kitchen for pleasure, shaking out the toaster and going in under the burners on the stove. I was promoted to night cook when the head cook walked
out on beer-batter-fish Friday, our biggest night. The manager and the assistant manager took up stations at the fryers—I specialized in onion rings. Too forcefully I pulled out a metal drawer filled with half-gallon cartons of semi-frozen clams; the drawer came out and fell on my toe. The pain was tremendous. I hum-whispered a long quavery moan to myself, but the show had to go on—I began making the icy clams dance around in the breadcrumbs.

Before he quit, the head cook passed on two pieces of information that I haven’t forgotten. The first was in response to my insistence that the kitchen had to be clean. “It’s all food anyway,” he said. The second came when I forgot that an order was for a cheeseburger and not a hamburger. “Watch,” the cook said. He took a square of American cheese and dipped it for a moment in the hot water in the steam table. The cheese melted a little and, when flopped down on the burger, looked deliciously semi-molten. The steam-table water was not clean, however; I almost dipped a piece of cheese into it myself but didn’t.

I liked a waitress with a wide pretty face and a mouth whose many teeth forced her to smile generously. We
took a break together once; she said that she wanted to be a poet. Her favorite poet was Rod McKuen, she said.

Benny’s Restaurant is gone now: now there is a drugstore on that corner with fake dormer windows in its roof that are lit from inside by recessed fluorescence to create the impression that there are cozy upstairs bedrooms behind them. Few now can testify, as I can, to the wondrously bad smell that came from the Benny’s Dumpster out back. What a marvelous, piercingly awful smell it had. People sometimes wanted breakfast very late at night, and I could never master over-easy eggs; they often broke when I flipped them, and I tried to hide the broken one with a piece of careless toast. I got compliments on my onion rings, though.

Good morning, it’s 5:42 a.m.—I thought I was being clever last night by setting the fire up with paper, cardboard, and logs, so that I could just strike a match and begin this morning. Deep in the coals, however, the heat had persisted, and it lit my preset fire prematurely, sometime in the middle of the night, so that by the time I arrived fifteen minutes ago, the logs had coaled down to an orange skeleton crew.
Start building
. On
Jeopardy
, when someone turns out not to be as smart as he thought, and he bets everything and loses, and goes down to nothing while the others are in the thousands, Alex Trebek, the master of ceremonies, will say to him, “Start building.”

I have a very stuffed nose now, and when I sleep my teeth dry out because I breathe through my mouth, and then my lips stick to them as if to pieces of sunbaked slate, and that fixed grimace wakes me up, and then comes that good moment when you push your lips out and down so that the teeth remoisten again. First they resist, and then the sliding resumes all at once, and you baste your teeth and get your tongue, which has also suffered an hour of desiccating privations, moving again. Oh, I am happy being up like this. Who would have known that I am and maybe always have secretly been an early-morning man? I would not have known it. Claire took us to see the sunrise on New Year’s morning, and that has changed me. I used to be amused by those men who get to work at six-thirty, “bright and early”—but they’re right: you want to be doing things when the world is still quiet; the quietness and uncrowdedness is your fuel. Except for me the phrase would be “dark and early.”

While on the subject of fuel—I think I know why I’m feeling especially lucky this morning. It’s because yesterday I hit sixteen dollars exactly when I filled the car with gas. I unscrewed the cap and put it on the roof of the
car, and I selected the fuel grade, regular, and I started pumping. The metal of the pump was very cold on the finger-bones; the hose jumped a little when the gas started flowing through. I looked up from my gassing crouch and stared at the electronic numbers on the pump, trying to take in the movements of the rushing cents’ column, which go by so fast that you end up only being able to make sense of the pieces of the LED numbers that each numeral has in common: the 4, the 5, and the 6, for instance, all have a middle horizontal stick, but the stick winks off for the 7, and then it comes back on for the 8 and 9, then off for the 0 and the 1; and there are other rhythms as well, so that each ten-cent cycle has a good deal of blinking syncopational activity. But don’t let yourself get hooked on studying that. After five dollars’ worth goes by you have to steel yourself to ignore the winks in the cents column and concentrate on the basic thumping beat of the dimes column. Get that rhythm in your head and then start tapping your foot steadily to that beat so that you become an automaton of steady flow—30, 40, 50, 60, 70. Keep counting up past ten dollars, and eleven, and twelve, watch those mystic
dollars change, and don’t release the handle, don’t slow the flow, run the gas full throttle, counting and chanting and tapping the numbers like the monster of exactitude you are, and then get ready to release all at once, coonk. Yesterday I originally shot for fourteen dollars, and then when I got close to fourteen, I felt as if I was good for fifteen, and then when I came up on fifteen I said to myself, “Go for sixteen, you sick bastard,” and I clenched my teeth and stared and counted six, seven, eight, nine, and
off
. Often I’m disappointed: the number will stop at $16.01 or even $16.02—seldom below. But no, yesterday the numbers stopped dead on $16.00 and I said, “Bingo, baby.” When you hit it on the money, a good thing will happen to you that day. In my case the good thing was that when I went in to pay for the gas I noticed a box of donuts on a convenient donut display right by the register. Three kinds of donut—cinnamon, plain, and white powder that makes you cough—were all in the same box, all showing through the plastic window like the mailing address to a world in which everyone spoke with his mouth full. I bought them, even though it meant I couldn’t just hand over a twenty-dollar bill, and when
I showed up at home holding the box over my head as I crunched through the snow to the porch, my son opened the door and said, “Donuts! Bingo, baby.” I used to go for the cinnamon-powdered ones, but now I find that old-fashioned donuts have a slightly bitter astringency that leaves your teeth feeling cleaner after you’ve eaten one, as I just have.

Good morning, it’s 4:32 a.m. and there’s that train whistle, a-tootin’ in the night. They are masters of pathos, those professional train-whistle tuners. They know just what’s going to arrow straight through to our hearts. I recall a cowboy movie in which a man was shot near the heart with an arrow that had a detachable head. If he pulled the arrow out, the head would stay in there, and he would surely die. So he had to push the arrow all the way through his chest and out his back, remove the arrowhead, and then draw the unarmed shank back out from the front. He grimaced and trembled, but he lived.

Nothing like that has happened to me. I’ve just ridden my tricycle, gone to school, greased my bicycle bearings, gotten a job, gotten married, had children, and here I am.
There are lots of stars out tonight—I looked through the glass at one, which broke into two because of a distortion in the glass. Or maybe it was my tears. Nah, just kidding. I’m a child of urban renewal. As I grew up, the elms and the buildings came down. Once my father and I went to the top of Reservoir Hill to walk around the reservoir, which we did every so often. I was six years old. We could see out over the city. He pointed towards downtown. “You see that thing with the three arches?” he said. I said I did. “That’s the train station. They’re going to tear it down.”

I asked him if we could stop them. People were trying, he said, and there was a petition, which was a list of names of people who didn’t want it to happen, but it didn’t look as if it could be stopped. He and I drove to the train station on a Sunday, a few days after they’d started the demolition. The inside had been covered with tiles. It was now open to the sky; but the fountain was still there by the grand stairway, with a bronze figure of a woman sending forth an eagle. The fountain later disappeared; nobody knows where it is. The building had been built by a local architect named Richard Brinsley, an Arts and Crafts enthusiast, in 1904. There were holes in the side
walls where the black ball had smashed, and broken tiles everywhere, but there were many tiles still in good shape, and my father and I filled a wooden crate with them and brought them home. Brinsley had designed the tiles himself—there were four different designs. They were called encaustic tiles. Brinsley also happened to be the architect who had designed our house, which is why my father knew about him—in our attic he found Brinsley’s private recipe for stucco: it included horsehair.

Some of the tiles my father gave away to employees, and five he used right away to repair our fireplace, which had been damaged when the couple who owned it before us had ripped out the mantelpiece and installed a narrow strip of moderno-slate, surmounted by an enormous pink mirror. My father took down the mirror and gave it to a man who grew tree peonies, and he chipped out the broken places in the tilework and mixed up some fresh grout and squished the tiles from the train station into place. They fit perfectly—perfectly—as if they were meant to be there. He let me squish one of them in. They had a sort of Celtic design, in green and brown, but with a very soft porous glaze. When it dried, the grout we had used was whiter than the grout that was around the other
tiles. It didn’t look right, so we touched it up with black Magic Marker. The black, however, was too dark, and then it became my job to Magic Marker all the grout between all the tiles in the fireplace. When I was finished, the fireplace looked deep and rich, with no broken places, and the tiles from the railroad station were like random stars in the sky of the plain brown tiles that had been there. There was no way you could tell that I had used black Magic Marker. My father put a new mantelpiece over the fireplace, an ornate one with two out-scrolling mustaches of dark-stained oak that had been torn out of a church on Main Street and left on the curb, and when it was done, the thing looked as if it had always been there, a fireplace any boy would be proud of.

In place of the Richard Brinsley train station there is now a parking garage where criminals go to hold people up at gunpoint; Amtrak, at great expense, has built a new and pitiful little station nearby that has some blue fiberglass chairs and vending machines in it. The sculpture of the noble-breasted bronze woman and her eagle has never turned up. All that’s left of the original station are the tiles in my parents’ fireplace—and of
course that fireplace isn’t my parents’ anymore because when they got their divorce, they sold the house. But that’s all right—the tiles are permanently fixed in my head; when I look up at night I see them in the constellations, surrounded by black grout.

Good morning, it’s 6:03 a.m., late. Yesterday I used the toilet plunger on the bathtub drain with great success. The cat was so indignantly hungry this morning that I grabbed a handful of catfood and jingled it into his bowl, and then I brought that hand to my face and smelled it. It smelled quite good—some catfood does. Perhaps my nose is celebrating that it has gotten its land legs back. Cats need to keep the bits of food forever tumbling, half airborne, in their mouths, like clothes in a dryer, or like tiny Hacky Sack balls, and so they’re forced to do more head bobbing than seems necessary.

I’m afraid the cat is a compulsive eater. I watched him through the window the other day, after he’d bolted down a full bowl of dry catfood in the shape of little fishes. He
was especially displeased with the quality of the snow that cold day—a grimy sort of snow that stuck to his paws, making him shake his hind legs with every step, while he held his head up and looked out for crows and coon cats. Then he stopped and started to retch, his head low, his stomach clenching. Nothing came out, but he had eaten too much too fast. He took a moment to compose himself, and then he went on walking, fluttering his rear paws each time.

This morning I woke up writing an impassioned petition in my head, but impassioned petitions do nothing, and now I’m downstairs. What you don’t realize normally, but do just as it begins filling the room through the windows, is how bright but unblinding daylight is. No man-made source can arrive at the particular effortless blueness of this crevice-cleaning light. It is a simple light that goes everywhere but with no heat, aware that it is taken for granted and content to be so.

Very soon, I’ve got to take a shower and drive Phoebe to school and go to work. It used to be, several long weeks ago, that the shower was the beginning of my day and the place where I did my eyes-closed morning thinking, and I do love the hum of the ceiling fan and the
clinking slide of the plastic rings on the shower rod as I pull the curtain closed. I often sing “Eight Days a Week” to the drone of the ceiling fan. And when I reach in (before I get in, so that I won’t be blasted with cold or hot) and turn on the control by feel, I can sometimes hear the ringing sound of the water racing up the pipe and smacking against the showerhead, where it is immediately split into two dozen streamlets of fine snickering spray. While it is warming up, I drape my watch over one edge of the sink, and then I wander back into the bedroom to take off my pajamas. I can do this, by the way, without having to bend to the floor to pick them up. Here’s how: pin the end of your left pajama leg under your right foot and then lift your left leg, stepping out of the pinned flannel on that side. At this point you’ve got one pajamaed leg and one naked leg. Then pin the bottom edge of the right pajama leg under your left foot, and bend that knee, drawing off the pajamas entirely—but hold on to the waistband so that instead of their falling to the floor you can ball up the loose and still warm garment and shove it under the pillow for the next night’s sleeping.