The Entire Predicament Page 8

  After the girls found the baby, they knelt with it on the noisy girl’s threshold with the door open, to let out the light, and looked at its nose and mouth. One time, a policeman asked one girl in one room, and then the other girl in another room, why they didn’t bring the baby inside immediately.The noisy girl said, “You don’t know.You weren’t there.”The quiet girl said, “We were afraid to bring it into the house.”What she meant was they brought the baby out of the rain and into the light, and there was enough light on the porch so they could see, and it didn’t matter whether they were inside or outside the house, that the boundaries he was asking about were arbitrary and you don’t think about, for God’s sake, architecture at a time like that. But the policeman thought maybe something was scary about the noisy girl’s parents, so he investigated them to find out about possible abuse.

  I went to Aunt Stacy’s house with the map she’d sent me. I sat on the sofa next to the blue wingback chair. I held the map in my hand, and Stacy held my hand with the map in it and pointed to the map with her other hand. She said, Please go there, then there, then there. Call me from there, if they have a phone. She’s unhooking the swing. She’s nursing her ankle. When she looks at me, I’m burying the baby. When she looks at me, I’m the baby, buried.

  I went back to my house, which was a good long drive.You never know how it feels until it happens to you, and then if it happens to you, you still have no idea if you know how it felt to anyone else. At that point, you’re pretty busy anyway. And later, you don’t remember so well.You feel what you are feeling now. I don’t know what it is.

  When I got home, I opened the back door, which divides my kitchen from the path that leads to the woods. I set about washing some dishes. I got partway through, and then I took a bath. I’ve got a lousy, shallow tub, and while I was soaking, I thought about how a bathtub ought to be designed. It ought to be adjustable like a lawn chair, or big enough to have a lawn chair in it. It ought to have a faucet you can operate easily with your foot. It ought not to be shaped like a trough. I’d stopped washing my dishes because a moth flew out of my cupboard and it turns out moths were making babies in my beans. I dumped the beans in the trash can outside, and then I got into the tub.When I got out of the tub, I stood in my kitchen in my bathrobe and watched a bird that had flown in. Usually, earlier in the season perhaps, when a bird comes in it flaps around in a panic, and usually ends up really hurting itself. But with this bird, I had the sense it was attempting to migrate, that my house was simply, for the moment, in the way of the South, because it flew in, perched on a shelf, a plant, the dish rack, and then flew out, decent and calm as a bird can be. There was no drama, no righteous desperation.

  I’m stuck at thirteen only when I think of the baby, and when I think of the baby, I’m stuck at thirteen. It’s not right, because there’s a lot more to me, I’m sure. In any case, the suspense is killing me.

  Go to the mountain.There’s a sagging cabin with its mortar falling out in chunks. In it live some people.They’re up on the mountain, making a living. Ask at the door, Did you make a call from a pay phone on this date? Do you remember a man wearing yellow boots? Were you eating coleslaw at the diner? Did you tell this woman you were in a hurry? Do you or did you ever own a parakeet? Did this tumble from your pocket? Did you break this omelet pan? Have you traveled to Ecuador? And what about your family? And what about your friends? Have you buried a baby?

  Did you bury this baby?

  I dried my hair and then I crawled under my fluffy covers. Under the covers there is heat and air. As I was falling asleep, one of my friends called, and it could have been any one of them, they are all so fine and lovely. I spoke with her on the phone, bringing the phone with me under the covers. I told her about the bird in my kitchen, and then about this one time in junior high when we did a Christmas show at a nursing home. We made reindeer horns out of coat hangers and our fathers’ socks. We sang and gave out peppermints. We used the peppermints as the reason to go up to the old people and say, “Merry Christmas, how’d you like the show?”

  I thought, Who told us to do that? Who said give peppermints to people with dentures? Who said do role reversal on the candy dish on gramma’s coffee table? Who said bad singing is good singing if it’s volunteer? I gave a peppermint to a woman who held an aluminum mixing bowl in her lap and spat great translucent globes of mucus that fell, like action heroes, in slow motion. I said, “Merry Christmas, how’d you like the show?” and she said, “It was stupid,” and I regret with might the indignation I felt, and how such simplicity stumped me.

  Under the covers, we talked for hours, and I didn’t have to tell her how the thing I meant about the peppermints was I think you lose more if you lose so much you start living for convention. Instead, I told her all sorts of things, dumb little things that happened one time, and dumb little things I was thinking about now and then. We swapped off. I told her something and then she told me something back. We were on the phone for enough time that I got unsleepy and then sleepy again several times. She said, “I’m so sleepy,” and I said, “But now I’m awake,” and I said, “I’m so sleepy,” and she said, “But now I’m awake.” Finally, we were both sleepy at the same moment, and I hardly remember most of what we talked about, which is much of why it felt so lovely. There was some justice, I thought, later. A sweet, naked little bully, with scarves around her feet.

  Some Machines

  CLOCK

  Started off I felt afraid of any electric cord. Could get disrupted, go back to twelve, never wake me. I could sleep and sleep, miss work, seem dead. So it was batteries, little fold-out clocks I liked. I got one and it took the place of a watch. I carried it around and it felt at once antiquated and unpretentious, a pocketwatch but practical, digital, black and plastic. Not masculine (chunky, leather) or feminine (slender, jeweled) and somehow, in my pocket, anti-time.

  Countless people have solved their problems with clocks.

  But I crushed mine, sitting on it too much. The numbers flickered and faded, washed into the pale khaki of dead electronic screen space. Meant I had to go shopping, a terrible, terrible thing. I rejected a flip-bottom silver-colored plastic one because its imitation alloy finish was so deadly cheap and lightweight, and then I rejected a simple black version with hands because the numbers glowed green and I couldn’t bear the resemblance to the Halloween masks on sale next to it, and now, after several stores and two returned purchases I have this round one, actual metal, with hands and a tiny white bulb that lights the face when I press a button in the back, and it slides in and out of a clever case.

  It’s the ticks, though. I stay awake. I write this in my notebook leaning over my night table in the tiny bulb glow, angry at the weakness of the entire situation.

  Here, in this imaginary epistolary, I’m ticking, too.

  PHONE

  At night, one night, I couldn’t reach you. You were visiting your parents.Their phone rang and rang but no one answered and no machine. I didn’t know the arrangement your family has with the computer. I hung up and I lay there, butt to butt with my dog, imagining the terrible things you could be going through, ranging from they took you to dinner and a movie to they bound you in a chair and asked you who the hell I was and why I kept calling.

  HEATING PAD

  It’s blue, with small blue roses on one side and words on the other.

  I’m holding it.

  It says: “This product has been engineered to put out the maximum temperature allowed by industry standards. Heating pad.Wetproof E12107. Danger.” It doesn’t have periods, commas, or semicolons, but I add them as I read and so I add them here, desperate for punctuation. “Burns will result from improper use,” it says. “To reduce the risk of burns, electric shock, and fire, this product must be used with the following instructions: do not use while sleeping; burns can occur before timer turns off; burns may occur regardless of timer or control setting; check skin under pad frequently to avoid burning and blistering; do not use on infa
nt; this pad is not to be used by or on an invalid, a sleeping or unconscious person, a person with poor blood circulation, a paralyzed person or a person with diabetes; do not use if signs of appendicitis are present; do not use a heating pad on areas of sensitive skin; never use pad without removable cover in place; do not use in an oxygen enriched environment or near equipment that stores or emits oxygen; place pad on top of and not under the part of the body needing heat; do not sit on, or against, or crush pad; avoid sharp folds; never pull this pad by the supply cord and do not use the cord as a handle; unplug when not in use; never use pins or other metallic means to fasten this pad in place; carefully examine inner cover before each use; discard the pad if inner covering shows any signs of deterioration such as blistering or cracking; read and follow all instructions on box or packed with pad before using. Fabric content 100% polyester.”

  I miss you.

  SUPERMARKET CHECKOUT MACHINE

  I have made eight mistakes checking myself out. (Not like that. This is not me trying to be sexy. I swear, desire is so embarrassing). I’m all revved up over it. It’s as if I feel I am demonstrating, by stamping my feet and talking back to the instruction screen, the need for qualified checkout machine operators, but I also know no one watching my animated frustration will be anything except annoyed. Can’t we all just cooperate and get through this? Jesus, no one likes this shit, who do you think you are?

  Here are the mistakes I made: I did not get my discount card out of my wallet fast enough. I tried to replace the plastic bag on the rack with a bag from home. I took too long putting the bags back the way they were supposed to be and had to rescan my items. I put too many items in the plastic bag. I pushed star instead of pound. I decided not to buy a piece of cheese I thought I was going to buy. I wanted six eggs and not twelve. But that last one always happens.

  I miss the rubber conveyor belt, even though it has so often mangled my parsley. No one wants this, I think, looking around for help. Everyone is immersed in the checkout process. People study the screens and handle their items like science projects, sudden experts. I miss the tellers at the banks, I miss the gas station attendants, and when I collect my receipt from the girl whose job it is to oversee all eight automated checkout stations I say,“Does it bother you that these machines are replacing you?” and she says, “No, I have this job,” and I say, “Yeah but I mean—” and she says,“We’ll just have different jobs,” and I say, “Yeah but I mean—” and she says, “We can get jobs at another store,” and I say,“Yeah but I mean—” and she cuts me off and says, “Yeah they suck, I know, everyone hates them,” but this time she’s whispering.

  It’s exactly what I wanted her to say, and I go to my car and raise the hatchback, load the slippery bags, and they promptly slump and release their contents. I miss stiff brown bags with toothy edges. I miss those boys who used to load my bags. I feel old, and rich, and stupid.

  REFRIGERATOR

  The year I spent in the studio apartment, I let the bulbs burn out one by one until I was living by refrigerator light. In the dark, I’d want something, a pen, a cigarette, a sentence from a book, and I’d open the door. Light came to mean cold, and wanting something meant cold, too.

  I could hear the man next door, everything he watched on television, and when he turned his television off I could suddenly hear him breathing and I knew we were sleeping side by side or head to head (I couldn’t decide which was worse), the one faint wall between us. I felt pinned between him and the refrigerator, which turned on and off so loudly—refrigerators are so loud, and hulking, you just never notice unless you’re trying to sleep in a kitchen.

  Soon the refrigerator seemed as human as the man next door. I pictured the light still on inside it, pressing and humming, the rumbling life that we know is encased in a body’s skin.

  Do you see what I mean?

  MOTORCYCLE

  The Judge asked, “Why are you on disability?” and the plaintiff said her arm had been reattached after fifteen hours of microsurgery.

  The Judge asked, “Then why do you want the Harley-Davidson back from your brother, who has been keeping it as collateral and over this year rebuilt it from salvaged original parts along with ordering some new ones?”

  The plaintiff said, “This is all I have left of my husband.”

  He’d given her the motorcycle, and they’d been riding double. In the accident, her arm was severed, and he’d been killed.This is what I pieced together. What a gory moment in history. The motorcycle was scattered, and her husband’s body was scattered. She’d wandered around the dark road with her arm dangling by the inside flap of her skin and muscle, stumbling and unable to tell what was him and what was machine. Somebody sorted it out later, while she was in the ambulance and in the hospital. They divvied up the parts into two piles: people parts for burial in one box on the side of the road, and motorcycle parts in another box on the side of the road, for trash, they assumed, until her brother claimed the parts, knowing her.

  “Knowing he could use me,” she said.

  She couldn’t spell. The notes of agreement submitted to the Judge as evidence proved it. When the Judge said, “Give your brother the five hundred dollars, and you, sir, give her the motorcycle,” and then cracked the gavel, the plaintiff said, “Yes!”—a whispered hurrah—and made the kind of gesture you make to celebrate when you score in pinball.

  Now comes what I have to confess.

  Some things she didn’t say in court that I was hoping she’d say were:

  “Brother, how could you have put that bike together when you knew I’d want to do it when my arm worked better? I wanted to line the parts in rows in my driveway. I wanted to lift them and fit them into one another. Not because I never learn and I’ll just get out on the road, reckless again, hair in the wind. And not because I don’t hate the machine for what it contributed to his death and my own wrecked body. But because I know that machine is my man’s body, and in my memory of wandering the glossy night road under the stars, I wanted to reconstruct the motorcycle because I could not reconstruct my husband. Because for all my recklessness, drug and alcohol abuse, and disregard for the well-being of my children, I have a soul that loves and knows beauty.”

  I was by myself, watching the television in a waiting room, waiting for the guy to change my inspection sticker (yes, I still have that fucking car), and as soon as I knew that’s what I hoped, those words, those ideas, I felt embarrassed of the things I imagined wanting from her.

  This is the problem with thinking and with wanting anything.

  The couch felt funny against my skin. Inside my skin, my insides felt funny. It’s just not a nice way of speaking.

  GYM

  Remember what you said when we were walking down the street and we passed that window with all the treadmills, these guys running and running, trying and trying to get through the window, all these guys in the background, so earnest and voluntarily tangled in these contraptions like medieval torture machines, and remember how I said we should hook them up to a loom and you said no, a generator, and we debated the merits and you totally won, but I think now what I liked about my idea so much was that what a loom makes is warm and colorful, and power, well, power is awful and invisible.

  RUBE GOLDBERG

  As you walk past cobbler shop, hook (A) strikes suspended boot (B) causing it to kick football (C) through goalposts (D). Football drops into basket (E) and string (F) tilts sprinkling can (G), causing water to soak coattails (H). As coat shrinks, cord (I) opens door (J) of cage, allowing bird (K) to walk out on perch (L) and grab worm (M), which is attached to string (N). This pulls down window shade (O), on which is written,“YOU SAP. MAIL THAT LETTER.” A simple way to avoid all this trouble is to marry a wife who can’t write. (http://www.rube-goldberg.com/html/mail%20a%20letter.htm)

  PROJECTOR

  At the movies it was about a scary video and you had to watch the video really carefully, looking for anything, and I saw the circular blip in the corner of
the film, the one that tells the operator to switch reels, and I thought it meant something, I thought it was like when Bergman burned the film but then in this movie nothing came of it. Then I kept thinking: it had to be something because are there even projector operators anymore?

  Here are some of the machines in a different movie from this week: CD players with headphones and just all kinds of music-recording equipment, microphones, whole panels with knobs for adjusting levels, a bus, lots of cars in the traffic scenes and cityscapes as well as two or three car-fixing scenes, a factory machine that the guys count to two and push these giant buttons in unison and the machine presses car doors into shape, some guns (Is a gun a machine? You bet it’s a machine. I just never thought of it before), the whole regular cast of kitchen appliances in the kitchen (There was only one kitchen in this movie and it was in a trailer!) although I don’t think the stove made it into any shots.There weren’t any computers in this movie.

  Some machines, I notice, are better than others for bouncing ideas off of, and for containing undesirable emotions.

  AIR CONDITIONER

  It goes like this: The house contains people and machines. The landlord owns the house. The landlord gets mad at the tenants when the machines break. The tenants get mad at the machines when he’s an asshole.

  I hated him, all the tenants hated him, we all hated the landlord. He kept thinking of dumb upgrades so he could raise rent, thirty dollars and then thirty more for this other thing, and fixed everything with duct tape and got mad at you if anything broke. Haven’t I told you this before? He got mad at me when I got robbed, when that guy came in and stood over my bed, holding my TV. He was an overinvolved landlord, meddling, emotional. He’d come over in his tennis outfit and want everyone’s rent, stick his head in your kitchen. He’d come over and start talking with us as if we didn’t hate him.