A Box of Matches (6 page)

I’m burning a bunch of little pinecones now that I gathered on the walk. One of the joys of life, I think, is trying to decipher the name on a gravestone as it is transmitted through the dense foliage of blue-green gravestone lichen. Some people clean off the grave-growths with chemicals and wire brushes, a mistake.

Where have I seen that interesting blue-green lichen color recently? Yesterday morning it was—no, day before yesterday—when I opened the hood of our Mazda minivan in order to replenish the tank of windshield-washer fluid. I’d turned on the car to warm it up, and I’d pressed the button that activates the rear-window heater—a stave of long wires elegantly arranged like the plectrum of a hardboiled-egg slicer, buried in the glass, which melts the ice with surprising efficiency—and then I pulled the hood release and heard the hood spring free. I propped it up on its cold rod. The windshield fluid is stored in an L-shaped tank that has a representation of a windshield wiper’s swath molded into it. It was down to the dregs, squirted dry. That’s not safe. When the trucks
salt the roads, the white smear of salt solution on the windshield sometimes catches the glare of the risen sun and obscures the road entirely, forcing me to poke my head out the window to see where we’re going. The plastic was cold and inflexible, its edges slightly painful to the fingers. I poured the pink liquid in. The engine, idling, trembled its hoses. When the tank was full, I snapped the lid back on and pulled the hood prop from its oval hole and, lowering it, pushed it into the metal prongs that wait in the gutterish area where the hood’s shape fits. And then, just before I let the hood drop shut, I noticed that the battery had grown some lovely turquoise exudate, electrical lichen, around one of its poles.

It isn’t clear to me why I grew up to be someone who can spell rhinoentomophthoromycosis, and yet whose knowledge of car repair extends only as far as replenishing the windshield-wiper fluid. When I was a teenager, I took off and put back on as much of my ten-speed bicycle as I could, soaking the wheel bearings in gasoline overnight and then packing them back in their tracks with fresh, pale grease. Ah, what a keen pleasure it is to glide ticking down a leafy street with fresh grease on
one’s wheel bearings. But I’ve never taken the next step and begun tinkering with cars.

Come to think of it, the bicycle was the beginning of my end-of-the-earth thoughts: I’d be on a trip down a long straight road, and the road would become steeper and steeper until finally it was plunging vertically down and the stars would come out around me, and I’d fall past the strata, and then somewhere along the way a road would form on the side of the cliff and I would land on it and begin bicycling as hard as I could up what became a very steep hill, and when I finally crested the top of the hill I would be in the underworld.

Good morning, it’s 5:25 a.m.—once I told a doctor from France that I was able to wake myself up at a preset time with the help of nightmares, and he said that his father had been a soldier who had taught him that if you want to wake up at, say, five in the morning, you simply bang your head five times on the pillow before you close your eyes, and you will wake up at five. “But how do you manage five-thirty?” I asked the doctor with a crafty look. He said that in order to wake at five-thirty you just had to do something else with your head, like jut your chin a little, to signify the added fraction, and your sleeping self would do the math for you. I’ve tried it and it works except that it’s much harder to go to sleep because your head has just been hit repeatedly against the pillow.

Incredible: I’m forty-four years old. What’s incredible about it is that my children are eight and fourteen years old, still here living with us. I’m driving Phoebe to her school every morning, after she irons her blue jeans. Only a few months ago I realized that when my father was the age I am now he had already lost me—that is, I’d already gone off to college and moved away. My parents were twenty-three when I was born, which would mean that my father drove down with me to college and bought me my first typewriter when he was only forty-one. What did it feel like to lose me? Maybe not so bad. Maybe by the time it happens you’re used to the idea.

The Olivetti electric typewriter that my father bought me was designed—this was in the seventies—in the high-Italian way, like a Bugatti from that era, very clean, no sharp corners but no unnecessary aerodynamicism either. It made a fine swatting sound when one of its keys hit the paper. A week after I got it, I masked over all the letters with black electrician’s tape, and that was how I learned to type. I took it with me to France and typed French papers there with it. Six years later it was stolen from Claire’s apartment, when thieves
came in through the fire escape. They stole her miniature TV and her roommate’s speakers, too. I find it remarkable that my father was buying me a farewell typewriter when he was younger than I am now.

Last night I washed my son’s hair, thinking what I always think: How many years will be left before I have no child young enough to wash his or her hair? Phoebe takes long showers now and of course washes her own hair. The loss is enough to make you lose composure—I’m not kidding. The dawn sky is now visible: the snow is a very light blue rather than grey. Yes, grey with an
e
—that’s one of those English spellings that I accept
(aeroplane
isn’t bad either), and not just because I learned to read it on the boxes of Earl Grey tea that my mother had. When spelled with an
e, grey
half hides the wide, crude sound of the
a
behind the obscuring mists of the
e
. It’s rare for a one-syllable word to have so much going on.

I once saw the earl of Grey on
The Merv Griffin Show
, an afternoon program hosted by the always cheerful and always tanned Merv Griffin. The earl of Grey had three things to say: one, that you can’t make good tea in a microwave; two, that the water shouldn’t be boiling but just on the verge; and three, that he wished that Twinings
had trademarked the phrase
Earl Grey
, which was used by everyone. The poor man had lost his name.

And it was on
The Merv Griffin Show
, as well, that I watched a father-and-son act in which the son, who was about seven or eight, climbed up a ladder and got into a small chair welded to the top of a long pole. The father balanced this pole on his hand, his foot, and then lifted it and placed it on his chin. But here something went wrong. The father had never been on TV before, one suspects, and he was nervous, and the lights onstage were brighter and hotter than the lights that he had rehearsed under, and he knew that he had a shorter time than usual, only two or three minutes, to do his act, before they cut away to the commercial. So his face was sweating more than it normally did—it was in fact dripping. He and his son were both wearing leopard-pattern caveman outfits—crazy looking getups with belts and shoulder straps as I remember. Perhaps the wife, who made the costumes, thought it was cute.

The man threw back his head and got his chin into position under the chin-cup at the end of the pole that held his son in the air and set it in place, and spread his arms. But then I saw two rapid jerky adjustments—maybe
the son was more nervous too and fidgeted for a moment—and one of the movements made the chin-cup slide off the man’s unusually slippery chin. It slipped down his neck, and his neck tendons became dozens of individual cords as he grimaced, and the pole continued to slip until it came to rest in the hollow just above his collarbone, where he held it by tightening his neck muscles so that the pole wouldn’t drive right into the soft tissue there. He held that, quivering, for a few seconds, until the orchestra made the sound of triumph, and the applause came, and then he lifted the pole off, brought it down, and the son jumped into his arms and the two of them took a bow in their matching leopard-skin caveman outfits.

Anyway, I gave Henry a bath, and saw all of his forehead, as you do when your child is in the bath—all that high, smooth forehead, as I rinsed out the shampoo, and I pointed towards the back of the tub, meaning “Look way back,” so that his head would tip back enough for me to rinse the shampoo from the hair just above his forehead, and I saw his young face, trusting me not to drip water in his eyes, his mouth chapped below one side of his lower lip because he sticks the tip of
his tongue out and to the side when he is concentrating, which is a genetic behavior that he inherited from my father-in-law (who puts his tongue at the corner of his mouth and bites it while performing some act of minor manual dexterity; their heads and ears are similarly shaped, too)—and I thought, I’ve got only a few years of Henry being a small boy. Even now when he stretches his legs out, his feet push against the tap-end of the tub. I remember how proud Phoebe was to be able to touch both ends of the tub, too—“Nice growing!” I said to her. And I even remember how proud I was myself to touch both ends of the tub. Generations of people grow to a point where they touch both ends of the tub. This is all too much for me.

Good morning, it’s 4:04 a.m. and I made the coffee very strong this morning. Two extra scoops in the dark. The cat wanted to be fed, but the cat rule is not before six-thirty, otherwise there will come days, I guarantee it, when I will want to sleep and the cat will want to eat at what will have become his accustomed time. When we’re still asleep and he thinks that it is breakfast time, he slides his claws into the fabric along the side of the mattress and then plucks the bed like a giant harp.

Passing through the dining room, after an eye-moistening crunch of apple, I saw a coppery flare of sloshing liquid where my coffee mug must be. Once again I thought it must be moonlight—moonlight in the morning coffee—but no, there is no moon available. And
then I recognized, by experimenting with where I held the coffee, that I was seeing a liquid reflection of the light from my new friend, the little green bulb in the smoke detector.

The mug of coffee rests on the top of the ashcan, and it gets hot on the side that is near the fire. But it stays cool on the side I sip from. This particular mug has a blue stripe around it and a small chip in the sipping area. Each time I take a sucking mouthful of tepid coffee I have the sharp-edged, chalky, chipped-ceramic experience as well, a good combination.

I’ve got my eyes closed now. The flames make semaphoring rhythms against my eyelids. An itch just made a guest appearance on my cheek, in the foothills of my beard—as the fire gets hotter it can make your face itch—and I noticed that I’ve gotten into the habit of using my tongue to prop my cheek from underneath, in order to stretch the skin a little and establish a solid base against which to scratch. I wonder now when I first began countering the force of my finger-scratch with tongue pressure through the cheek. Years ago, it must have been; I’ve kept no record. Once I had a briefcase that got a long scratch in it. I was looking for a job after college, and my
father, in whose house I was then living (my parents having separated a year or two earlier), bought me a hand-sewn briefcase made of dark leather—not the lawyerly kind with the expandable bellows but a simpler design with two leather handles that slid down into the recesses in the sides of the central compartment. The briefcase sat on a chair in the middle of my room—every day I woke up and saw it there and was made happy by it. In it was a file with all four of my unfinished poems and another with my résumé and several more empty folders ready for the time when I would have more things to file. My father was at work by nine, so I didn’t see him in the morning, but he would leave notes for me—
NEW BOX OF
CHEERIOS
, a note would say, in his fast but calligraphy-influenced printing, with a late-Victorian arrow pointing to the unopened Cheerios box, which was displayed at just the right angle to the paper. Next to the Cheerios was a bunch of bananas (often), and he would draw a hand with an extended index finger calling attention to that.
NOTE FRESH BANANAS!
the message would say, and the exclamation point would have its own drop shadow. I wish I had every morning note my father ever wrote me. I have some, I think, I hope.

So I would get up around ten-thirty and take a shower and talk to Claire on the phone, and then I would go out into the world with my new briefcase to seek my fortune, which involved walking around downtown for about an hour until I got hungry. One day I went to a cafeteria to have a hamburger. I was sitting down at the table with my briefcase in one hand and my tray holding a hamburger and a medium root beer, coleslaw, coffee, and a piece of pecan pie in the other, when the cup of root beer somehow tipped over and gushed into my new briefcase. I used some foul language and poured the root beer out of the briefcase into the tray. I took little pleasure in my lunch, although the mushrooms on the hamburger were quite good. When I was done, I called my father from a pay phone and told him what had happened. He said to go to Paul’s Shoe Repair and buy a can of Neat’s Foot Oil and rub it in. I did. I didn’t just rub it in, I poured it in, from the inside. This worked: the combination of root-beer sugar and shoe oil made the leather darker, and there was an odd smell for a while, but the briefcase was fine, better than ever.

Then at my grandfather’s funeral, one of my overly successful first cousins, all of whom went to Yale Medical
School and are full of shallow competencies—humph!—said, “Here, I can put this in the back,” and wrestled my briefcase out of my hand and flipped it up and let it land on the spare tire in the trunk of his rented car. He took hold of both sides of it and pushed it back deeper into the trunk, not noticing that there was a long bolt with a rough edge projecting up from the bottom of the trunk, onto which the spare tire was clamped, and that as he pushed my briefcase across this bolt, it would scratch the leather. This was no surface scratch—this was a deep, straight gouge, a wound three eighths of an inch wide that went all the way down one side, exposing the leather’s untanned layer. “Sorry,” my cousin said. I took my briefcase over to a stone parapet with a round decorative cement globe in an urn and I bounced my fist a few times against the urn’s rough surface. When you make a tight fist, your little-finger muscle, which runs along the side of your hand, can bunch up and become surprisingly springy, and if you time the the fist-clenching just right, you can use the sudden bunching of the muscle to help send your fist back up in the air for the next bounce. At the airport, my father looked at the briefcase scratch, and he said, “I’d take it to Paul’s Shoe Repair.”