A Box of Matches (12 page)

The showerhead is lower than my head, so I must duck a little, but it’s well worth it—those skull-warming
drops force out a blubbering sigh of relief. I’m just my shower self—hideous, naked, defenseless. I shave in the shower, eyes closed, mirrorless, checking with my fingertips for places I missed. Of course because I have a beard I have less to shave, but I still have neck and cheeks to do—I balloon out each cheek in turn to make the follicles pop up. Sometimes I fall into the habit of shaving too high on the underside and have to remember to stop earlier on the upstrokes. I don’t like beards that fail to cover the corner of the jawbone: that is, beards that are a form of makeup, with sharp cuts and topiary corners. I move the soap, that heavy oval bar, into all the places it needs to go, being sure to rinse it off for the next person—i.e., my wife—after it goes in some of the places. You can make the soap revolve in your hand, like a police car’s dome light, just by working your thumb and palm muscles a little: it looks as if the soap is turning of its own accord, and not as if you are turning the soap. Revolving the soap this way several times under the spray is a good way to clean it off. The soap
must
be left clean.

My towel hangs on a rack across the bathroom, too far to reach while standing in the tub after the shower. I don’t like leaving puddles on the floor, and I’ve had little
success when I’ve tried to shake my legs to get some of the free water off them before I stepped out. So now I use my hands as squeegees: starting at midthighs I squeegee my hands down my legs to my ankles. You would be surprised at how much water sheets off. In this way I leave a fairly dry bathroom, even though the drain to the bathtub is slow enough to count as clogged and, until I took action yesterday, filled after every shower. The small fluffy rug next to the shower absorbs the lesser wetness from my feet.

The reason why the tub was draining so slowly is that the plumbers installed a kind of drain mechanism whose metal stopper is unremovable. It can be pulled up about half an inch and no farther. Once I called the plumber to see what he could do with this diabolical machine: he used a bent paper clip to poke in around the drain cap and withdraw some of the hair-muck, which is just what I would have done. Paper clips can only do so much, and yesterday, as I stood in the shower squeegeeing off the water from my legs, I looked down at my feet, which were submerged in water that was not trickling out of the bathtub. There was no sound of draining. The tub drain was clearly clogged. What could I use to get that clog
moving? Well, why not the toilet plunger? There are two kinds of toilet plunger: the brick-red classic plunger that is able to stand up by itself, and the somewhat newer black rubber plunger, the design of which is more like that of an undersea creature, with a narrowing part meant to go a little ways into the toilet canal, and a higher bell, to thrust out more water and suck in more water with each plunge. These are the double-flush plungers—the kind that we have.

The classic toilet plunger would have been useless on the bathtub, because you couldn’t have pushed the bell down, but the black double-flush worked extremely well. I got on my underwear and my shirt and then I pulled back the shower curtain and I put that, of course, none-too-hygienic plunger into the standing water and gave it a lunge, and then another lunge. It made the most wonderful deep squirting noises—huge sucking, bubbling gulps and gasps and noggin-snorts as several pounds of water were thrust down into the drain and forced up in a foul fountain out the overflow valve higher up on the top. I began working with the water, as if I were rocking a car when it’s stuck in the driveway, sucking, pushing, sucking, pushing. At one point the drain seemed even
worse, and I found that all the turbulence had caused the drain lid to turn and fall shut. When I opened it again and was more careful to center the plunger over the mouth of the drain, I got real results: after one blast, to which I gave the full might of my arms, a supernova of black fragments came up,
God
, and then more with a second plunge, and I knew that without chemicals, without rooting snakes, with only strength and cunning, I had made that water move. I held still for a second to listen: yes, the purling of the water curving away into the pipes. Later there was even a brief vortex, like a rainbow after a storm.

Good morning, it’s 4:53 a.m.—I brought some wood in from the porch and put it on the fire, and I thought I could make out, in the dimness, a spider or one of those big hopping ants dashing around on the upper surface, trying to escape the heat. But it wasn’t a spider or an ant, it was just a bit of black ash being scooted this way and that by the updrafts. Where do the spiders go? One afternoon back in the fall when it was cold but not so cold as it is now, I put a birch log at the top of a fire. The flames lit the white bark, which crackled and curled, and then suddenly a largeish spider climbed into view, making little nervous sprints in one direction and then another. I went into the kitchen and got a small glass. The spider was keeping still by this point—not terribly big, with a
dark motif on his yellow abdomen that looked like something you would see on a biker’s T-shirt. I put the rim of the glass near him and he sensed the nearby coolness and walked onto it; when I righted the glass he slipped to the bottom. Any time he tried to climb up the edge, as I carried him out the back door, I shook the glass slightly so that he fell back. I poured him out onto the woodpile. He crawled over to the edge of some bark, trying to fit under it, but his abdomen was too big to allow him to pass into the shadows. There was a yellowness to the upper segments of his legs, too. “You have fun,” I said to him. It isn’t that I think it’s horrible to kill a spider, just that there are certain things I would rather not do, and one is to watch a spider catch fire.

It’s completely still here. I don’t hear a single car. I can see a little indirect glow of the moon on one of the curtains, and when I type my fingers make patterings, like a squirrel spiraling up a tree. The fire today began with the help of a Vermont Trading Company catalog, and I have at the ready the remains of a thick prospectus for a mutual fund, part of which I burned the other day. The prospectus was made of a kind of onionskin—very strong and thin and noisy when turned. You would think it
would burn quickly but it is a sluggish starter. Then it flames up just fine.

The spider makes me think of Fidel, my long-ago ant. We got him because my grandmother wanted to get Phoebe a plastic cooking set for her third birthday. At the store, my grandmother brought the cooking set up to the gift-wrap counter, and while it was being wrapped, she went to shop for something else. When she returned, she was given the wrong box, which she mailed to us. And thus Phoebe opened a birthday present that was an ant farm.

But we were all perfectly happy to have an ant farm, and in time we sent away for the ants and poured in the granules and watched them dig their tunnels. They were doing fine in their farm, and then Claire and Phoebe went away for two weeks to visit Claire’s parents—this was before Henry was born—and I was left in charge. And it got a lot colder. Some of the ants didn’t like the cold and died—when they died they curled up, very conveniently, so that the other ants could carry them to one of two crypts or burial grounds. I kept the ant farm on the mantel, and there wasn’t an awful lot I could do about the cold—that house just got cold. After one very cold night
there was a widespread curling up and dying of ants. No droplets of springwater or crumbs of saltine would help. But the ants that remained were hardier. They kept digging. There were better tunnels to be made—or not better, just different. One by one they died, until there were two ants left. And then one evening I came home from work and saw that only one ant was now alive. He had buried his friend.

This final ant, however, was a super-ant. He looked the same as the others, but he kept on going. I named him Fidel. I told Claire about Fidel when we talked on the phone—we had no cat or duck back then, so he was my only companion. Fidel kept alive by working, and he was a good example to me. He would hold still for several hours, napping, and then he would begin digging a new tunnel. His tunnel crossed through what had been a grave site, and as he worked his way through, he carried each curled-up ant to a new, better crypt, at a higher elevation, that he made on the right side of the farm, over the plastic barn and silo. After intense struggle, he succeeded in transferring all his fallen comrades from the left-hand crypt to the new right-hand crypt, and he piled the granules of rock or sand over them.

Fidel old boy, Fidel my pal! I kept hearing cavernous choral music when I looked at his purposeful life between those two close-set panes of plastic. I tried to take pictures of him, but the plastic reflected the flash and I got nothing, just a flare of white and an orange date. I would give him a crumb of saltine, and he would spend half an hour burying it. Some of the ants dissolved and became no more than black stains in the sand, and yet Fidel lived on, slower but still active. He wasn’t sentimental: I watched him uncover a bit of one of his associates—a leg—which he unceremoniously kicked behind him.

My family returned, and I was no longer alone. But lonely Fidel lived on for two more weeks, then three, a month,
more than a month
—he lived longer alone than he had lived with company. I ran out of springwater and used tap water, and he seemed not to mind. He thrived on tap water, in fact—maybe it was the secret elixir of longevity for him. He knew that nobody was alive to carry his curled-up body to a resting place, so he didn’t die. To him devolved the full responsibility of the farm. He moved his feelers in little circles—he felt everything before he lifted it. Sometimes he worried me because he rested by tucking his abdomen up under himself, and I
thought maybe he was winding down, but no—I dripped in a little water, and his feelers began going, and he went into a rain-avoidance routine, hurrying down to a dry tunnel. Or I would breathe on the plastic where he was, and he would sense the warmth and move an antenna, then turn and cling to the fogged-over part of the plastic.

“Is the ant still alive?” Phoebe asked one day. She was wearing two aprons over her dress and a pink blanket over her head, surmounted by a fez hat. I said yes, he was still alive. She said she was sorry that the other ants had died. “When we first got them, they were nice little ants.”

For two days I forgot about Fidel, and then, in the middle of the night, I remembered him. I shined a flashlight on him, sure that I would find that he was no more. He looked dusty. I dripped in some water and a cracker crumb—an earlier crumb had a fine haze of mold on it—and spoke encouragingly to him. And he moved. I was interested by the ends of his legs, which I thought must be wearing away with all that scrambling over sand boulders. He had learned to brace himself against the plastic as he maneuvered an ant body up an incline. Moving ant bodies had become his whole life.

And finally he did die, as every ant will. I kept his
farm, however, the legacy of tunnels and graveyards that he had completely rebuilt after he had become the sole representative of his civilization. For two years it stood on a table in my office. When we moved, I packed it in a box, wrapped carefully in white packers’ paper. But I wasn’t too surprised when I unpacked it and saw that all the tunnels were gone—the ant farm was now just loose sand with some dirt specks in it.

Good morning, it’s 5:25 a.m., boys and girls. I seem to be down to a few matches skidding around in the little red box. I struck one of the remaining ones and it broke. As a result of the breakage, the match head must have been nearer to my nose than it normally is, so that when the first flare flowed out, going sideways as it does before the teardrop shape can form, I received a sudden sharp smell in my nostril that sent my head back, the smell of a new flame. It was as sharp as when some carbon dioxide from a gulp of root beer accidentally backs up into your sinus and your head rocks. I lit the under-fire and then laid the spent and broken match on top of two quarter logs—sometimes a little piece of something on top of the fire seems to work like a fishing lure, drawing the goldfish
flame upward through the cracks and around the corners, where the splinters turn black and crumple, glowing.

At twilight yesterday Henry and I went on a walk in the woods, where there were tracks of rabbit and deer, and the feetmarks of some small birds. When it got too dark, we came back to the barn and dug another tunnel in the plow pile. Because there have been so many thaws and refreezings, the snow in the pile has a granular consistency for several feet, and then finally you find the virginal substance underneath: bluish white and freshly fluffy even after all these weeks. Then a heat-seeking wind came up, and it filched all the heat from under my arms and around my ribs. But when we went in, the duck stood by the back door quacking actively for warm water with food pellets sprinkled in it. I carried her to her duckhouse and got her settled, and draped the blanket over the roof, stuffing a fold of it into the crack between the roof and the sides so that her night would be a little warmer.

I want to take care of the world. Sometimes I think of a helmet with a set of plastic earflaps that I swivel down over my ears. There are holes on the outside of the earflaps that pick up sounds of distress from far away. It is like listening to the whales groan and squeal—there is
usually one cry that is prominent, and, by turning my head from side to side, I use the signals reaching each ear to guide me to where the crime or misery is. I can fly, of course.

Meanwhile, Jumbo California Navel Oranges are selling two for seventy-nine cents, according to the supermarket circular I just crumpled and stuffed into a fire hole—which doesn’t seem all that cheap. Last night, Claire and I watched a cable-TV biography of James Taylor—what a voice that man has—and we paid the bills, and now there’s the slush pile of torn envelopes and little cross-advertisements that come in with them; the watches and the luggage sets and the insurance plans that add a few dollars a month. I’m burning some of the envelopes that Christmas cards came in—not the cards. Envelopes burn well, because the torn places catch quickly. Claire started paying most of the bills two years ago, after we got one too many of those polite reminders—“All of Us Forget on Occasion”—which would shade into “Your Account Is Seriously Past Due.” Bills are just little wrapped enclosures. If you don’t open them you don’t know whether they’re angry or not. The credit-card companies love me, in truth, because I’m
always good for a late fee and a superhigh interest rate, and yet I’m not going to default on them. And yet once I do open the envelopes and I start paying, I enjoy it, and I still pay some of the charge accounts that have work expenses on them. Also I put on the stamps. I suppose common practices will change soon and become electronic, just as now we’re no longer sent our canceled checks but rather little scanned pictures of our checks. But what a pleasure it is to have winnowed out all the glossy enclosures and have gotten things down to the essentials: the payment stub, torn off, and the handwritten check, and the return envelope, and the stamp. Then you straighten up that little stack of paid bills, all in envelopes that are slightly dissimilar sizes, and see the addresses peeping through the windows, and you feel good. Some billers, like the bank that holds the mortgage, don’t believe in sending return envelopes, and we have to supply a new one of our own.