Glass (Small Press Distribution (All Titles)) (3 page)

Leaning into the fern, dipping our arms up to the shoulder in foliage, we grasped the curved lip of the pot, one on each side, and hoisted. It was extremely heavy, the ceramic was slippery, and we had to set it down every three or four steps on our way up the stairs and hold it in place with our knees to prevent it tumbling back down the stairway, while we panted above it. Potts is shorter than me by a head, and each time we lifted the pot the fronds rushed into her face and knocked her glasses crooked. With both hands clinging to the pot she had no choice but to leave them that way, dangling from the tip of her nose, until it was time to pause again, and twice they fell off into the thicket of fronds, forcing us to stop while she searched for them, parting the fronds and peering and squinting as if hunting insects. At the top of the stairs we turned and maneuvered the plant through the doorway, with me backing in first. I could not right off the bat think where to put it, and I did not want Potts hanging around while we talked it over, so I suggested we just plunk it on the floor by the table, tilting my head to indicate the table with the typewriter, and I said
plunk
in order to convey the impression that I did not care in the least where it went. It is still there, on the floor next to the table. My elbow brushes against it when I operate the carriage return lever, tickling, and I have to pause and rub. Several of the fronds seem to have become broken on the way up the stairs—they are hanging sharply down like the wings of a crippled bird—or else I broke them pushing past to get to my chair. I am going to have to move it someplace else. It is one thirty in the morning. It has taken me two hours to type Potts up. In the silent interstices that open periodically in the midst of the clatter of the keys (I am tempted to write “thunder of the keys”), when I pause to think before going on (or before going back in order to bury something beneath a chain of
x
’s), I notice how quiet everything has become, where “everything” I mean the city, or at least the portion of it beneath my window, though earlier someone in the street was shouting “Martha” again and again. I want to explain about the silence: it is the silence of a roaring, a roaring that goes on all day long and for some parts of it all night as well—roaring of compressors on the roof of the ice cream factory, ocean-like roaring of traffic on the Connector, amalgamated cacophonous roaring of people and cars mingled in the street below. I am so accustomed to it that I don’t even hear it most of the time, especially in the colder seasons, when I have the windows closed, as they are now. I hear it when it stops. This is not at all what I meant to do. I intended just to mention Potts, notice her parenthetically, so to speak. “Edna, in passing, dropped a few words about Potts, a neighbor” is how it was supposed to be. I thought I would use the encounter with my neighbor as an example of the sort of thing that can happen in the blank spaces. It was not a good choice; I can see that now. It thoroughly fails to convey the depth of the tedium that defines those places, that, in fact, constitutes their blankness. I made it happen too fast, for one; and for two, even though lugging the fern up the stairs was quite taxing in a physical way, it was not boring in the least. Thanks to Potts’s glasses it was even comical in a feeble way. In fact and for the most part nothing happens in the blank spaces, and when a blank space goes on and on for years, so long it would take thousands of blank pages even to hint at how long and tedious it is, an hour with Potts cannot even begin to convey it, and I don’t know why I keep saying
tedium,
when it is actually much worse than that.

I am at my station early this morning. The sun is not yet above the roof of the factory, but the buses are running and the street is already choked with cars, as I can tell by the noise, and the compressors are hard at work. If I were to open the windows now, I would have to wear muffs. By “station” I mean my table, of course; I could also call it my post or even my outpost. I am on guard here, finger on the trigger, meaning the keys, in a final stand against melancholy. I am tempted to say final
desperate
stand, as in Custer’s Last. I have propped the photograph against my coffee mug, where I can look at it while typing—the one of Nurse and me that I was about to discuss when I became distracted by Potts, among other items. Seven spins ago that would be. I did not type anything yesterday or the day before that, those being the blank space above. Nurse is wearing a long plain dress with big puffy pockets in front (the pockets are a different color from the dress), while I am in a short dress with ruffles and no pockets that I can see. The photo is in black and white, so my dress looks white, though I remember it as pale yellow. I have a large bow in my hair, which looks black, but it might have been dark blue or maroon—the ribbon looks black, that is, my hair was auburn, and I don’t recall a bow. Neither of us is smiling. We stand next to one of the tall hedges that bordered our driveway at home, some of them carved in European fashion into the shapes of animals. My father designed them, but the actual bending and clipping was done by a gardener on a tall wooden ladder, my father shouting instructions from below. The animal in the hedge beside us seems to be a bear. In fact the bear is pretty much at the center of the photo, with Nurse and me standing off to the side, so perhaps I should not have said that the photograph is of us—it is of the bear, and we are just in it. Behind the bear is the house we lived in, a big brick house on a hill—you cannot see the hill in the picture—with several very large chimneys, which you can see, that come up along the outside walls, and a cupola on the roof, which you can only see the top of. The cupola had windows on all sides. With its six or eight sides (I have forgotten how many exactly) it resembled the top portion of a lighthouse, but it was only up there for show and did not connect to any stairway or door. I recall standing on the lawn with Papa and asking him to take me up to the cupola, and I remember him saying there was no way into it. The bay windows of this apartment remind me of the cupola, of how it might have looked from inside had I ever gone there. An expensive garden with statues, several fountains, and, as I mentioned, hedges shaped like animals surrounded the house. I was very small, when one day walking in the garden with Nurse we found a dead mole. We showed it to the gardener, Nurse pointing to it with the toe of her shoe (she wore black shoes with laces, as did the maid and cook, because they were servants, I thought, since Mama never wore shoes with laces), and he picked it up and stuffed it in his pocket. For some reason that is the clearest of all my childhood memories: whenever I think of those times for very long the mole is there. An iron fence made of tall black spears guarded the perimeter of the whole of it—house, garden, coach house, and so forth. Later, when I would show people pictures, I would tell them the fence was there to keep the animals from running off. Except for kindergarten and measles I don’t remember much that happened in my life until I was five, when I was attacked on the sidewalk near our house by a large brown-and-white dog. Luckily I was rescued by the postman, though my dress was nearly torn off me. And once during a storm I tried to walk from my room to my parents’ room on a narrow ledge that ran around the outside of the house beneath the windows, and I slipped and fell into a box hedge, from which Mother’s driver rescued me, carrying me into the house in his arms, and to this day the odor of wet foliage brings with it a pleasurable feeling, an ever-so-slight giddiness and excitement, which I think might be due to the connection with being rescued in that way, though I don’t recall why I wanted to go to my parents’ room or why I didn’t use the door.

Papa was a handsome man. He possessed a large blond mustache and an imposing chin, and he jutted as he walked—if you were in his way you would probably want to get out of it. It was, I imagine, this imposing and jutting way of his that had put him where he was, which was on top of the heap. Mama was a lovely woman. She possessed wide-set gray eyes, an upturned nose, a sumptuous bosom, and a difficult personality. She was given to nervous spells and vapors, read
Vogue
in French, and did not much enjoy me when I was little. Papa was given to accumulation and when not supervising rolling mills and smelters enjoyed golf, shooting pheasant, the
New York Herald Tribune,
and gadgets. He occasionally, as I recall, enjoyed me on his knee, where we played horsey, starting sedately and finishing in a gallop that threw me onto the floor once, causing my head to bleed. That is, I believe, my earliest memory of Papa. He was a genuine type of sportsman, by which I mean he did not pursue his sports merely as an aspect of something else the way Clarence did, when he, Clarence, would pursue certain sports in order to be able to write about them later, going down ferocious rivers in a rubber boat, shooting large animals, and jumping out of an airplane once, for example. Being handsome, lovely, and rich they ought to have been happy, I suppose, but they were not. That is the mystery of Mama and Papa. When I look at photographs of the two of them together in the beginning, when Mama, especially, was quite young, and think of how it all turned out, it seems almost impossible. Our house had a splendid dining room with a mahogany table at which twenty guests could eat with their elbows out, though guests were very rare, due, Nurse said, to Mama’s nerves. At meals Mama and Papa would observe each other from opposite ends of the long table, and Mama’s gray eyes would fly angry silences at Papa, who would catch them in his enormous mustache. Their marriage was a tall column of pain, like a fluted vase. Balanced precariously on the fricative point at which Mama’s personality met Papa’s chin, it was always about to fall over and smash. I was not encouraged to speak at the table, or maybe I chose not to speak for fear of being the one to knock the vase over. Whatever the reason, when I think of those meals I am struck by the silence: I sit in a carved and gilded chair, in the gulf between my parents and at a great distance from each, arranging my food into islands and oceans and stirring the oceans into whirlpools, while the back of the chair stabs me painfully in the shoulder blades. When I told Clarence about this he said that it sounded like something out of a movie, by which I think he meant sumptuous and posh, but also, perhaps, not quite real. Despite her nerves Mama enjoyed going to parties much more than Papa ever could. Thinking about it now I imagine that her nerves might actually have prompted her to go to parties, in order to relax, if Papa had been getting on them for a while, as despite his best efforts he could not stop himself from doing, in the same way, I imagine, that I could not for the life of me stop myself from getting on Clarence’s nerves, and vice versa, that being, I suppose, in a general way the mystery of people being together, being close together in the same house for a long time, though “the same house” in the case of Clarence and me was a series of different houses, one after another over the years, growing bigger and bigger and then smaller and smaller, but always together in them anyway. When we were first together we typed in the same room, at the same table in the place we lived in at the outset, which was my apartment in New York City, but later we typed in different rooms whenever we could, if we had other rooms, and if they weren’t too cold, as they were in France. We had a lot of writer and painter friends in those early days. We were convinced that every one of us was going to become famous, though no one ever did except Clarence in a way. The way he became famous was among people who read hunting and adventure stories in magazines and noticed the name of the person who had written them, the same people who later bought his novel. I had written most of one book before I met him but had not shown it to anyone, and then I tried to write another, which was not as complete, though the writing was better, and when I showed parts of that one to people they failed to understand it at all; they wanted to know what I was getting at. When we lived in Philadelphia we typed on different floors, meeting for meals and having friends over or going out every night, and we read to each other what we wrote. I tried to write novels but I could not make them go, though Clarence still read me his, and I made suggestions and typed up what he wrote, and that was the period when I began to rewrite constantly. We told each other that we were in it for the long haul. More and more we talked only about people who were in it for the long haul.

When they brought me to kindergarten that first day—“they” as I said being Nurse and Mama—I took one look at the children, while the numerous heads, which I recollect as being absolutely enormous, swiveled in my direction; swiveled, I want to say, like cannons, though of course people’s heads, especially children’s heads, don’t look anything like cannons. I took one look and threw myself down flat on my back on the floor and screamed, and I did that every day until they gave up. They had formed the idea that I ought to associate with children my own age, supposing this to be good for me in some obscure way; they thought of it as socialization, I imagine, though of course they would not have used that word. They probably hoped kindergarten would improve my character, which was execrable. When I was at home I would lie on my stomach to scream, as I would still, I suppose, were I to lie down and scream today, unless I had been hit by a car, as I nearly was again this morning due to wearing earmuffs in the street, and knocked on my back, in which case I probably would not bother rolling onto my stomach—assuming I still
could
roll onto my stomach after being struck by a car—before starting to scream. I suspect that if I lay flat on my back to scream on the first day of kindergarten it was in order to see the effect I was having on the other children, though now I cannot recall what that was. At the time I had had so little experience with other children that I might have been incapable of even discerning what the effect was exactly, there being, after all, scarcely a whisker’s difference, as bare expressions go, between a laughing child and one that is jeering. The only children I saw in those days, before I went away to school in Connecticut, except for an occasional cousin and the ones I glimpsed fleetingly from the car window when Nurse took me out driving, were the small Irish and Italian boys who ventured up the hill to gawk at our house. Those children all had buzz cuts—because of lice, I was told—and their ears stuck out from their heads in a strikingly perpendicular manner. The iron spears of our fence were spaced in such a way that sometimes they got their heads stuck between them, due to the ears, and would stay that way, at times wailing loudly, at others just whimpering, until the gardener could dislodge them by pressing firmly on the top of their heads with a boot, after which they invariably ran off with their hands to their ears. I used to tell people that Papa had designed the fence in that way in order to trap children, but I don’t think that was strictly true. It is true, I think, that neither of my parents were fond of children. Send us a chapter, Grossman wrote back, and we’ll see. When I read that, I thought, What kind of life has chapters? Clarence sometimes spoke of opening a new chapter. Or maybe it was turning a new leaf.