Dan (9 page)

“This can’t go on,” said Don Pond, shaking his fist, and for the first time Melba noticed that his inflexible features had a steely quality. “If it were just me who thought so, I’d never say,” continued Don Pond, “but there’s a quorum, and because I’m the first customer, the men wanted me to be the one to tell you. I told them I didn’t ask to be first customer, or even try in particular, and I never make much of it. How do you even know that I hold that distinction? I asked the men, and they gave no satisfactory answer. But I assure you they knew. Listen, Melba, no one would suggest you go to your bedroom and sleep, not now. But why don’t you come to my house, Melba?” Suddenly, Don Pond stiffened, and Melba leapt to her feet.

“What is it?” she asked.

“Dr. Buck is right outside,” whispered Don Pond hoarsely. “I saw him through the window.”

“Dr. Buck! But what’s he doing there?” Melba ducked down again, pretending to tie her shoe.

“He’s jumping up and down,” said Don Pond. “He’s rubbing his hands together.”

Melba rose but not to her full height. Bending sharply at the waist, she scurried around the counter, then flattened herself against the wall.

“He’s stamping his feet,” said Don Pond. “He’s swaying his hips. Have you ever seen anyone sit down on an invisible chair?”

Melba nodded. “Usually there’s a wall, though,” she said. “You pretend the wall is a chair and sit down. It engages the quadriceps.”

“He’s up again,” said Don Pond. “Shadow boxing.”

“I suppose the bakery hasn’t warmed the street any,” said Melba. “He must be freezing in just that light coat and fringe of hair. But why is he there?”

“He’s making sure I convince you to come with me,” said Don Pond.

“My leaving the bakery was Dr. Buck’s idea?” gasped Melba. “When you said the men in this town …”

“You didn’t know I meant Dr. Buck?” Don Pond’s voice was frankly incredulous. “You think the laypeople of Dan have gotten into the habit of diagnosing safe and unsafe without the help of a doctor? Melba, Dr. Buck is the only person in this town qualified to make decisions about your wellbeing. He told me you have a condition that makes you mistrustful of representatives of the medical profession and that you’d be more likely to heed my advice if I pretended it came from a group of anonymous men, men who’d reached their decision through a democratic process. I was under no circumstance to reveal Dr. Buck’s leading role in the matter. Now I’ve blown it,” Don Pond sighed. “But why can’t you obey Dr. Buck, like the rest of us? He’s not a small man, and his hands aren’t too cold or too hot. Before Dr. Buck, you wouldn’t remember, but Dr. Clamp doctored in Dan, and he had a mystifying head of hair. What’s more, he was never the right temperature! How can you give yourself freely to a doctor who isn’t the right temperature? What’s more elementary than temperature? Even the smallest doctor in the world knows how to regulate temperature. Dr. Buck got rid of Dr. Clamp easily enough …”

“Was there a funeral?” asked Melba. “I do seem to remember the town hall filled with casseroles, all different kinds, spaghetti, creamed corn, turkey divine, queasy tuna, mushroom potpourri, the one that’s made of five different congealed soups …”

“Five soup casserole,” murmured Don Pond.

“Five soup casserole, oyster cheese casserole … that was a funeral, wasn’t it?”

“Sure it was,” said Don Pond. Around his beard, the face had paled in patches and purpled in others. His words came slowly. Don Pond’s head was very small, and so usually words seemed to issue forth rapidly in a high thin stream. But these words were dark and thick, sluggishly emitted.

“But Melba,” said Don Pond, and the words and the movements of his mouth were misaligned, the words filling the air like sludge and the mouth stretching out and folding in again, so that Melba’s head jerked back and forth, following first the trajectory of the words then the ponderous motions of the mouth.

“It …” said Don Pond, “wasn’t …”

Melba’s hands clasped together.

“Dr. Clamp’s funeral …” said Don Pond.

“Then whose …” Melba began, but her world was going dark. She felt as she did when, like Ned Hat, she had been driven by circumstances to fill her mouth with hydrogen peroxide. She would drink the peroxide swishingly and grip the edge of the sink as her gums began to seethe. In those moments, her roaring mouth sounded like the inside of a conch shell, which sounded, in turn, like the outside of the ocean, and through these echoes—a form of geo-sonar—Melba felt that she could establish, briefly, a sense of her location on the earth. She could also establish other things. For example, her body had the consistency of a stone fruit, although with a different ratio of hard parts to soft parts, and those parts differently distributed. She had a keen sense of the human body—blemished and juicy, a lobe of oddly shaped flesh clinging to an oddly shaped pit—and of Dan, the endless thicket in which these bodies formed, growing in clusters but dropping one by one to rot in the understory, contributing nurturing ooze to the tangle of brambles and brackens ever-spreading their roots.

The word “bracken” shot through Melba’s mind. She swayed.

“Samovar …” She murmured the word just as “bracken” banged into it. She saw a spark that began to ripple and then she knew no more.

When Melba awoke she was no longer in the bakery. She was inside a small house, darkly paneled. She was stretched out on a long hard sofa with very wide armrests.

“I was having a dream!” she said, starting up. Everywhere, there had been buildings, but irregular buildings, with too few or too many walls. She had walked through the rooms and in room after room, curtains or vines or racks of meat hung down from the ceilings, but finally she had entered a room with a ceiling from which nothing hung down. The ceiling was made of clouds and through the breaks in the ceiling clouds she could see the clouds of the real sky above them.

“I think the moon had gone missing?” Melba said. “And I was looking for it?” Melba looked at the ceiling. It was white and bumpy, with a protuberant light fixture she did not care for.

“Drink this.” Someone was pushing a mug into her hand and Melba clutched it. The mug had no handle. The mug was so heavily made, however, that the outside was warmed only slightly by the steaming liquid in the central well. Melba held it gratefully with two hands.

“Coffee,” murmured Melba, lowering her face to the mug. She blinked away the steam, wiggling on the couch. The couch was nearly as deep as it was long. Unless Melba sat on the edge of a cushion her feet did not touch the ground. The black vinyl squeaked as she scooted forward and she heard a low indulgent chuckle.

“Do I hear Melba’s little otter?”

Melba blinked harder but sleep and steam clung to her eyeballs.

“Who’s there?” she asked.

“Don Pond, Melba,” came the answer, and as Melba blinked she focused at last on Don Pond’s small head. The size of the head and the uneven complexion reminded Melba of a gourd, and she smiled, reassured. Gourds, useless in themselves, are displayed to indicate hominess and abundance, and Melba was not impervious to the signification.

“Don Pond,” she sighed. “So this is your house!” In addition to the enormous couch, she now made out a few other features of Don Pond’s house: a low coffee table parallel to the couch and, on the other side, a loveseat on which Don Pond sat comfortably. Don Pond had removed his shoes and socks and his bare feet were nestled in the thick mustard-colored carpet. Melba wiggled her toes, realizing that her own shoes had been removed. In the paneled wall behind Don Pond, two windows filtered the daylight, but, as filters, the windows were not fine; the daylight that entered the room could not even be considered granular; it was chunky, practically obscured by impurities. Melba tried not to purse her lips or demonstrate her superiority in any way.

“I never realized how close your house really is to the bakery,” said Melba, to make conversation. “I only shut my eyes for a moment and here I am! I’m surprised I haven’t ended up here before, by accident. I rush about in the bakery, and I can imagine tripping over a broom and suddenly getting flung directly onto this couch. I suppose that’s near enough to what happened.”

She lowered her face again to the mug and sniffed.

“Why Don, this isn’t coffee …” she trailed off.

“Of course it’s not,” said Don Pond. “You’ve never known me to serve coffee, and I wouldn’t start now, when my main goal is to put you at your ease, to keep everything nice and normal. I find coffee off-putting and viscous.”

“Hmmm,” Melba swung her legs, snuffling at the mug, working the scent up her nostrils as she tried to identify the components. She couldn’t distract herself, though, from Don Pond’s ill-considered remark and, sighing, realized that she had to contradict him.

“I can’t agree with you, Don,” said Melba. “Not about coffee. I know I’m being quarrelsome. But wouldn’t you describe coffee differently if you considered longer? Imagine you’re taking a sip of coffee. Now hold the coffee in your mouth. Don’t you find it different than what you described? It’s not off-putting and viscous, is it? Why it’s soothing,” exclaimed Melba. “Soothing and jarring. That’s exactly what coffee is. Rather complex, but I’m sure you can tell if you concentrate.”

Melba wished she could brew Don Pond her special coffee, in case his imagination had flaws. Her coffee had been tested again and again, and she knew for certain that it always produced exactly those effects. To be soothed but also jarred—this was what Melba most needed, and that was what coffee, all coffee, but Melba’s coffee above all others, delivered. Randal Hans had said he needed this too. But perhaps Randal Hans had only said this to be confirming, because when he was Melba’s boyfriend, he exerted himself, verbally, to confirm many of her statements, which he later negated in writing.

The circumference of Don Pond’s beard contracted slightly. He was pursing his mouth, concentrating on the imaginary mouthful. Then he shook his head.

“No,” he said. “I’m really put off. There’s a gluey, bitter taint to my saliva now. No, I don’t like it.”

Melba averted her eyes. Apparently Don Pond was not her boyfriend, or at least not the confirming kind. Melba smiled a little to herself. She didn’t want Don Pond for a boyfriend anyway. She liked his head more and more, but other than his head he did not have a great deal to recommend him. He did not need to be soothed and jarred for one thing, or, at least, not by coffee. Perhaps he was soothed and jarred by something else? A pet?

Melba had noticed that people with pets sometimes put less emphasis on coffee than people without pets. Pets, she suspected, performed a service similar to coffee. Pets were always bounding onto their owners’ beds in the mornings, tonguing and clawing and defecating and yelping joyously.

Yes, it amounted to the same thing, thought Melba. Did Don Pond keep pets? She cocked her head, listening. She heard noises coming from the corners of the house, but the noises didn’t prove the presence of pets. Melba Zuzzo’s house was filled with noises, chirps, hisses, grunts, scratchings, and scrabblings, but she didn’t call the animals who made these noises
pets
. They didn’t bound for one thing, but scurried, and their behavior was sly and unredeemed. Those animals were not carefree like pets, and they displayed none of the pet’s easy sovereignty.

Don Pond gestured at the coffee table on which Melba noted a thick book, a wooden yo-yo, a teapot, an oilcan, and several garlic sticks laid in a row on top of the bakery bag. Melba felt herself flush as she caught sight of the garlic crumbs smattering the highly glossed surface of the table. So Don Pond hadn’t forgotten.

“I prefer tea to coffee,” said Don Pond. “This tea I’ve steeped for you is anti-viral, with tumor-inhibiting properties.”

Melba clapped a hand to her earlobe. The carbuncle had grown. It was a tumor? She searched Don Pond’s face. She read nothing there, but the insinuating thrust of his words could not be parried. She probed the ear, probed it again. A tumor. She should have known.

“Who told you about the tumor?” she demanded.

“No one had to tell me,” said Don Pond. “I’m not blind. But Dr. Buck isn’t calling it a death sentence. He says that you haven’t assumed leadership of your family, that you aren’t ready for a serious illness.”

“That’s true of Melba Zuzzo,” whispered Melba. “But if there’s any truth to the allegations … Don, Ned Hat has alleged …”

“Dammit, Melba, nobody believes the allegations.” Don Pond tossed his head, and stroked his beard up and down, fingers hooked into claws.

“Oh!” Breathing hard, Melba set her mug carefully beside her on the cushion and launched herself from the couch, hitting the carpet on all fours. She stood up shakily, bumping the coffee table with her shin.

“I need to pace, Don,” she said. Don Pond nodded. He had calmed considerably.

“That’s fine, Melba,” he said.

“I’ll be careful I don’t end up at the bakery!” She gave Don a watery smile and in response a smile opened in the beard, splitting the gourdlike head. Melba circled the coffee table warily. It was very close to both the couch and the loveseat and as she paced the length of the table on either side her legs brushed alternately the couch and the legs of Don Pond.

“Let me put on some music,” said Don Pond, tactfully. He stood and disappeared into the corner of the house. The house was not big, but Don Pond matched the house very closely, and he was difficult to see as he bent and fiddled.

“This music was recorded in a cave,” he called. “If you don’t like it, I can play something else.”

“I’m sure it’s fine,” said Melba.

“I bet it’d be something special to listen to it, also in a cave,” said Don Pond, returning to the loveseat.

“It sounds like fluttering,” said Melba.

“That’s right!” said Don Pond. “There’s fluttering, and it’s very dark, and you’re in the company of personified forces.”

Melba’s legs brushed Don Pond’s legs as she squeezed between the loveseat and the table. She tried to hurry her pacing, but her skirts and apron tangled her up and she fell, turning her body sideways so that she landed in the slot between the chair and the table, upsetting neither. It was skillfully done.