The Way the World Works

String

I was two years old when we moved to Rochester, New York. We lived in an apartment on a street that was only a block long, called Strathallan Park.

The shortness of the street was perfect, I thought: it had two ends and not much middle, like a stick that you pick up unconsciously to tap against a fence, or like one of those pieces of string that the people in the food department at Sibley’s, the downtown department store, cut from wall-mounted spools to tie up a box holding a small cake. You could run from our end of the street, near University Avenue, all the way to East Avenue, the grander end, without having to stop to catch your breath, or almost, and when you reached the far corner and turned, panting, with your hands on your knees, you could look down the whole straight sidewalk, past the checkering of driveways and foreshortened snippets of lawn to where you had begun. Everything on my street was knowable by everyone at once.

A few of the lawns along Strathallan Park were, though small, fastidiously groomed — they were bright green and fluffy, and they were edged as well: using a blunt-bladed manual cutter at the end of a push pole, the lawn tenders had dug narrow, almost hidden troughs or gutters in the turf next to stretches of sidewalk and along walkways, outlining their territories as if they were drawing cartoons of them. The edge gutters looked neat, but they could wrench the ankle of a small-footed person who stepped wrong, and they held dangers for tricycle traffic as well: if you were going at top speed, trying to pass another tricyclist on the left, with your knees pumping like the finger-knuckles of a pianist during the final furious trill of his cadenza, you could catch your wheel in a gutter and flip or lose the race.

Some parts of the Strathallan sidewalk were made of pieces of slate that sloped up and down over the questing roots of elm trees (one elm had a mortal wound in its trunk out of which flowed, like blood, black sawdust and hundreds of curled-up larvae), and some parts of the sidewalk were made of aged concrete, with seams cut into them so that they would crack neatly whenever a growing tree required it of them. These seams made me think of the molded line running down the middle of a piece of Bazooka bubble gum, which you could buy in a tiny candy store in the basement of an apartment building near where we lived: the silent man there charged a penny for each piece of gum, machine-wrapped in waxed paper with triangular corner folds. It had a comic on an inner sheet that we read with great interest but never laughed at. Or, for the same penny, you could buy two unwrapped red candies shaped like Roman coins. These were chewy, and they let light through them when you held them up to the sun, but a red Roman coin couldn’t do what a hard pink block of Bazooka gum could as it began to deform itself under the tremendous stamping and squashing force of the first chew: it couldn’t make your eyes twirl juicily in their sockets; it couldn’t make all your saliva fountains gush at once.

When you pulled part of a piece of well-chewed gum out of your mouth, holding the remainder in place, it would lengthen into drooping filaments that were finer and paler than thread. And I was thinking a fair amount about thread and string and twine in those Strathallan years—twine is a beautiful word — about spools of thread, especially after I got the hang of the sewing machine, which I drove as you would a car, listening for and prolonging the electric moan of the foot pedal just before the machine’s silver-knobbed wheel began to turn, and steering the NASCAR scrap of fabric around a demanding closed course of loops and esses. When you floored the Singer’s pedal, the down-darting lever in the side of the machine rose and fell so fast that it became two ghost levers, one at the top of its transit and one at the bottom, and the yanked spool on top responded by hopping and twirling on its spindle, flinging its close-spiraled life away.

Sometimes my mother let me take the spool off the sewing machine and thread the whole living room with it, starting with a small anchor knot on a drawer handle and unreeling it around end tables and doorknobs and lamp bases and rocking-chair arms until everything was interconnected. The only way to get out of the room, after I’d finished its web, was to duck below the thread layer and crawl out.

I was wary of the needle of the sewing machine — my father told me that a sewing machine needle had once gone through my grandmother’s fingernail, next to the bone, and I didn’t like the long shiny hypodermic needles, called “boosters,” at Dr. Ratabaw’s office one block over on Goodman Street. One morning, just after I took a bath, wearing only a T-shirt and underpants, I climbed down into the lightwell of a basement window in the back of our house, and in so doing disturbed some yellow jackets that had built a set of condominiums there, and I got several dozen short-needled booster shots at once, and saw my mother’s arm set upon by outraged wasp abdomens that glinted in the sun as she brushed them off me. I tried to be braver at Dr. Ratabaw’s office after that.

So that was my first street, Strathallan Park. Everything was right nearby, but sometimes we traveled farther afield, to Midtown Plaza, for instance, where I saw a man open a door in the Clock of Nations and climb inside its blue central pillar. There were thick tresses of multicolored wire in the Clock of Nations, each wire controlling a different papier-mâché figure, all of whom danced back then, in the days before Midtown Plaza went into a decline and the clock froze. We bought a kite and some string at Parkleigh pharmacy and took them with us to the greensward behind the Memorial Art Gallery, where there were three or four enormous trees and many boomerang-shaped seedpods that rattled like maracas. There wasn’t enough wind there to hold the kite up, so we took it to a park, where it got caught in a tree and tore. My father repaired it on the spot, and even though it was now scarred, heavy with masking tape, we managed to get it aloft again briefly before it was caught by the same tree a second time. That was the beginning of my interest in kite flying.

Then, when I was six, we — that is, my sister, Rachel, my father and mother — moved to a house on Highland Avenue. It had a newel post on the front banister that was perfect for threading the front hall and living room, which I did several times, and it had a porte cochere and six bathrooms, a few of which worked, and it had an old wooden telephone in the hall closet that connected to another telephone in a room in the garage. The phone was dead, as my sister and I verified by shouting inaudible questions into either end, but there were interestingly herringboned threads woven as insulation around its cord, and because the phone had never been much used, the threads weren’t frayed.

Highland Avenue was, as it turned out, also a perfect length of street, just as Strathallan had been, but in the opposite way: it went on forever. In one direction it sloped past Cobbs Hill Drive, where I always turned left when I walked to school, and then past the lawn-and-garden store, where my father bought prehistoric sedums every Sunday; and then it just kept on going. In the other direction it ran past our neighbors’ houses, the Collinses, the Cooks, the Pelusios, and the Eberleins, and past a suburban-looking house on the left, and then it became quite a narrow street without sidewalks that just flowed on and on, who knew where. On Strathallan, our house number had been 30; now it was 1422, meaning that there must have been over a thousand houses on our street. In fact, it wasn’t even called a street; it was an avenue. Avenues were, I gathered, more heavily trafficked, and therefore more important, than streets — Monroe Avenue, East Avenue, Lyell Avenue, Highland Avenue — they reached into surrounding counties and countries, and because the world was round, their ends all joined up on the other side. I was quite pleased to be part of something so infinite.

Soon after we moved in, my grandparents gave us a hammock made of green and white string. We hung it from two hooks on the front porch, and I lay in it looking at the fragment of Highland Avenue that I saw through the stretched fretwork of its strings. I could hear a car coming long before I could see it, and as it passed, its sound swooshed up the driveway toward me like a wave on a beach. That’s when I counted it. One day I counted a thousand cars while lying on that hammock. It took about half an hour or so — a thousand wasn’t as close to infinity as I’d thought it was.

And Cobbs Hill Park, half a block from where we lived, was, I discovered, one of the best kite-flying places in the city. My father was able to put a box kite in the air, which I never could; once it was up it was like a rock, unmoving, nailed to the sky. The key to kite flying, I found, was that you needed to lick your finger a lot and hold it in the air, and you always had to buy more rolls of string than you thought you needed, because the string manufacturers cheated by winding their product in open crisscrossing patterns around an empty cardboard cylinder — it looked as if you were holding a ball of string that was miles long, but in fact it was only eight hundred feet, which was nothing. One way or another, we always ran out of string.

To put myself to sleep at night, I began thinking about kites that never had to come down. I would add more string, half a dozen rolls of it, and when I knew the kite was steady, I would tie my end to a heavy ring in the ground that couldn’t pull away and then I would shinny up the kite line with sticks in my pockets. I’d climb until I was a good ways up, and then I would make a loop around one foot to hold some of my weight, and begin knotting a sort of tree house out of the kite string to which I clung. The kite would be pulled down a little as I worked, but it was so far up in the sky that the loss of height didn’t matter much, and I would use the sticks that I’d brought along as braces or slats around which I would weave the string, emulating our hammock’s texture, until I had made a small, wind-shielding crow’s nest like the basket in a hot-air balloon. I would spend the night up there, and the next morning, as people arrived in the park with their kites, they would point up at me and be impressed.

But that was just how I got to sleep; my biggest real moment of Cobbs Hill kite flying came around 1966, when I was nine. I was given a bat-shaped kite that year. It came from England via Bermuda in a long cardboard box that said “Bat Kite.” The wings were made of black, slightly stretchy vinyl, with four wooden dowels as braces, a fiberglass crosspiece, and a triangle of vinyl with a metal grommet in it, where you tied the string. It was entirely black, a beautiful kite, but I wasn’t able to get it up in the air for more than a few minutes because it was so heavy.

Then one weekend my old tricycle rival, Fred Streuver, and I went up to Cobbs Hill on a day when there was a hard steady wind blowing in from Pittsford Plaza, and the bat kite went up and it stayed up. We were stunned. What had we done right? We began feeding out the string. The kite seemed to want to stay up in the sky. Nothing we could do would bother it. It was hungry for string and it kept pulling, wanting to go out farther, over the path near the tennis courts. I tied on another roll, checking to be sure that I’d made a square knot — the kind that gets stronger and tighter the harder you pull on it. Our black bat was now out past the lilac bushes near Culver Road, and it was high high in the air, visible all over Rochester — hundreds of people could see it — and then we tied on another roll, and it was out beyond Culver Road and still asking for more string.

I had an almost frightened feeling — I was holding directly on to something that was alive and flying and yet far away. Having thought my way out to the empty air where the kite was, I almost forgot how to balance as I stood on the grass of Cobbs Hill. Even the square knots that we had tied had risen out of sight — the string was getting more and more infinite every minute.

Then, as always, we ran out. But we wanted more. We wanted our bat to go a full mile out. Fred held the line as I gathered a length of scrap string that some departed fliers had left behind; I tied it on, even though it had a nested tangle in it that held a twig, and the kite kept pulling. I found another abandoned string, but here Fred and I were overhasty when we tied the knot, we were laughing crazily by now, we were tired, and neither of us was checking each other’s work. We sent up the new string, but when it had gone just out of reach, I saw a tiny unpleasant movement in the knot. It was a writhing sort of furtive wiggle. I said, “No, bring it down!” and I grabbed the line, but the kite’s pull was too strong, and the flawed knot shrugged off the rest of its loops — it had been, I now saw, a granny knot. The string that we held went limp, and the string on the other side of the failed knot went limp as well, and floated sideways.

Way off beyond Culver Road, the kite learned the truth all at once: it flung itself back some feet as if pushed or shot, and its bat wings flapped like loose sails, and then it slid down out of the sky into some trees that were beyond other trees, that were beyond houses, that were beyond trees.

We went looking for it, but it was gone. It had fallen somewhere in a neighborhood of short streets, in one of a hundred little back yards.

(2003)

Coins

In 1973, when I was sixteen, I got a job in building maintenance at Midtown Plaza, Rochester’s then flourishing downtown shopping mall. I spent a day pulling nails from two-by-fours — loudly whistling Ravel’s Boléro while I worked, so that the secretaries would know that I knew a few things about French music — and then Rocky, the boss, a dapper man with a mustache, apprenticed me to the mall’s odd-job man, Bradway. Bradway taught me the right way to move filing cabinets (you walk with them on alternating corners, as if you’re slow dancing with them, and when you have one of them roughly in position in its row, just put the ball of your foot low against a corner and step down, and the cabinet will slide into place as if pulled there by a magnet); and he taught me how to snap a chalk line, how to cut curves in Sheetrock, how to dig a hole for a “No Parking” sign, how to adjust the hydraulic tension on an automatic door, the right way to use a sledgehammer, and how to change the fluorescent bulbs in the ceiling of the elevator. He wore funny-looking glasses, and he sang “Pretty, Pretty Paper Doll” to the secretaries, embarrassing them and me, but he was a decent person and a good teacher. For reasons I still don’t understand he was disliked by one of the carpenters in the maintenance department, who referred to him as a “proctologist’s delight.”

One afternoon Bradway gave me a beeper and told me he was going to teach me how to sweep up the pennies in the fountain. Midtown Plaza’s fountain had a fifteen-foot-high inward-curving spray, and there were four or five low mushroom fountains to one side, lit from below; the water went around and under a set of stairs rising up to the mall’s second level. People threw pennies in from the landing on the stairs and while standing at the railing on the second level, but mostly they tossed them in as they walked past. I had thrown in pennies myself. The thing to do when you wished on a penny was to thumb-flip it very high — the more air time it had, the more opportunity it had to become an important penny, a singular good-luck penny — and then watch it plunge into the water and twirl down to the tiled bottom of the pool. You had to memorize where it landed. It was the penny with the two very tarnished pennies just to the left of it — or no, was it one of the ones in that very similar constellation a foot away? Every day you could check on your penny, or the penny you had decided must be your penny, to see how it was doing, whether it was accumulating wish-fulfilling powers.

So when Bradway said that I — a maintenance worker earning $2.50 an hour — was going to be sweeping up all the pennies, I experienced a magisterial shiver. We went down to the basement and got a pair of rubber fly-fishing boots, a black bucket with some holes in it, a dustpan, and a squeegee broom. Bradway showed me the switch that turned off the pump for the fountains. I pressed it. There was a clunk.

Back upstairs the water was almost still. I stepped over the marble ledge and, handed the long pole of the squeegee, I began pushing around other people’s good luck. The bottom of the pool was covered with small blue tiles, and it was somewhat slimy, so that the pennies, moved along by the squeegee, formed planar sheets of copper, arranging themselves to fit into one another’s adjoining curves, until finally a row of pennies would push up, make peaks, and flip back, forming a second layer, and then another layer would form, and eventually there was a sunken reef of loose change — including some nickels and dimes, but no quarters — in one corner of the pool. “That’s it, just keep sweeping them toward the pile,” Bradway said. He gave me the black bucket with the holes in it, and, rolling up my sleeves as high as I could, I used the dustpan to scoop up the change and pour it, entirely underwater, into the bucket. The sound was of anchor chains at the bottom of the sea. By doing as much of it as possible below the surface, we kept the penny removal somewhat discreet.

Bradway went away while I swept farther afield, and I looked out with a haughty but weary look at the people walking by: I was the maintenance man, standing in the water; they were just pedestrians in a mall. “Are you going to keep all that money?” a man said to me. I said no, it was going to charity. “I’m a good charity, man,” he said. The trickiest area to sweep was along the row of mushroom fountains (which were just stalks when the water was turned off), but even there it wasn’t too hard, and when I got the strays out into the open tilework and scooted the change along in a cloud of pale, sluggish dust, I felt like a seasoned cowboy, bringing the herd home.

Bradway came back and together we pulled the black bucket out, letting the water pour from the holes. It was extremely heavy. We set it on a two-wheeled dolly. “Feel that slime?” said Bradway. I nodded. “The bank won’t take the money this way.” We went down the freight elevator to the basement and he showed me a room with an old yellow washing machine in it. Together we dumped the money in and Bradway turned the dial to regular wash; the coins went through a slushy-sounding cycle. After lunch, I scooped out the clean money and wheeled it to the bank. As told, I asked to see Diane. Diane led me back to the vault, and I slid the black bucket off the dolly next to some dirty sacks of quarters.

Every week that summer I cleaned the fountain. Every week there was new money there to sweep up. I flipped more coins in myself; one nickel I deliberately left in place for a few weeks while I maneuvered away all the pennies around it, so that my wish-money would have more time to gather momentum. The next time, though, I swept it along with the rest, trying, however, to follow its progress as a crowd of coins lined up like piglets on the sow of the rubber blade. There were momentary collisions and overturnings, and the wavelets of the water added a confusion. My coin slid over another coin and fell to the right, and then, as I pushed them all into the corner pile, a mass of money avalanched over it and it was lost to view.

Once I came across a penny that had lain in the water under the stairs, unswept, for a very long time — perhaps years. Black it was and full of power. I pushed it into the heap with the others, dumped it into the washing machine, and delivered it to Diane at the bank.

(2001)

How I Met My Wife

She was walking up a flight of stairs in a college dorm; I was carrying my bicycle down the stairs. I could hear the ticking sound of the slowly revolving tire as I introduced myself.

I stood in her room with my hands in my pockets while she did her Italian homework. She sat on the floor, leaning against the bunk bed, wearing clean, wrinkly T-shirts of various colors. She was dissatisfied with her clothes, and she often changed several times a day. She moved her head almost imperceptibly when a song came on that she liked. She didn’t own a bra, though her mother pleaded with her. She liked someone else who lived on the hall; I liked watching her blush when he dropped by. On our first date she wore a wonderful cashmere coat that she had bought at a thrift store. It had a shawl collar made of lambswool that went with her soft, thoughtful lips. I tried to get her to shoe-ski on the thin layer of snow on the sidewalk in front of the administration building, but she didn’t want to. It was snowing big intermittent designer flakes that night. She told me about a kitten she had found in one of the forums in Rome, who grew up to be an enormous, arrogant, affable cat. Once, she said, it fell off the sixth-floor balcony of their apartment in the Piazza Paganica and broke its nose when it landed; its purr was especially loud and resonant after that fall.

(1993)

La Mer

After school, when I was thirteen, my bassoon teacher told me that the Rochester Philharmonic, where he played second bassoon, was rehearsing a piece of music called La Mer. Mer didn’t mean “mother,” he said — it meant “sea,” and the remarkable thing about La Mer was that it really and truly did sound like the sea. He played me some bits from the score while I put together my instrument. What he played didn’t sound like the sea to me, but that wasn’t surprising, because nothing sounds like the sea on the bassoon. A few months later, I bought a record of Pierre Boulez performing La Mer with the New York Philharmonic. I put on the heavy, padded headphones, that were like inflatable life rafts for each ear, and I heard Debussy’s side-slipping water-slopes, with cold spray blown off their crests, and I saw the sudden immensity of the marine horizon that followed the storm, and I was amazed by how true to liquid life it all was. It was just as good as Joseph Conrad’s “Typhoon,” then one of my favorite stories — maybe even better.

Later, after I’d applied to music school, I bought the pocket score of La Mer and tried to figure out how Debussy did it, but the score didn’t help much. What gave Debussy the confidence to pick up half a melody and then flip it away, like a torn piece of seaweed, after a moment’s study? How did he turn an orchestra, a prickly ball of horsehair and old machinery, into something that splashed and surged, lost its balance and regained it? There may be things about La Mer that are slightly dissatisfying — there may be too much of the whole-tone scale in a few places (a novelty then, worn out by cop-show soundtracks now), and Debussy made a mistake, I think, when he revised the brass fanfare out of the ending — but this piece has so many natural wonders that you drive past the drab moments as if they were convenience stores, without paying attention to them, looking out at the tidal prodigies.

Debussy finished La Mer—adjusting its orchestration and correcting proofs — during a month in England in the summer of 1905, in Eastbourne, a late-Victorian summer resort where he had gone with Emma Bardac. Emma was married to a well-to-do banker at the time, and was very pregnant with Debussy’s only child. A few years ago, paging through one of the biographies, I stopped at a picture of Debussy frowning down into the viewfinder of a camera, on the stone-parapeted balcony of the Grand Hotel Eastbourne. The camera was pointed out at the English Channel. I was living in Ely at the time, north of Cambridge, but it occurred to me, as I consulted a map and a schedule, that I could easily go to Eastbourne and return the same day.

I rode the screeching, battered local train out one March morning; I walked into town and stopped at a used book store, which had nothing about Debussy, and then at the tourist information center, where a kind woman pulled out a red notebook entitled “Famous People,” with entries for Wordsworth, Tennyson, Swinburne (who wrote “To a Seamew” nearby, at Beachy Head), King Arthur, and Debussy. The woman pointed me in the direction of the Grand Hotel, and when I finally found it, after turning the wrong way on the shore road, I was told that room 277 was the Debussy Suite, but that they couldn’t let me in to look out the windows of the suite because it was almost check-in time and that night’s guests might arrive at any moment.

So I sat in the garden on a white bench, with my back to the sea, looking up at the balcony where Debussy and Emma had, not so many years ago, looked out over the channel toward an invisible France. The balcony was right over the main entrance, under the letters that spelled “Grand Hotel.” In the pale sunlight, I sketched the facade of the hotel, with its eye-guiding beaux arts urns and scrolls (designed by R. K. Blessley in 1876); it seemed to me that Debussy, often penniless and foolish about money, had felt industriously rich here, perhaps for the last time, as he put the final touches on his ebullient sea poem. A few months later, back in Paris, his wife, abandoned and heartbroken, shot herself near the heart, and though she recovered, everyone’s life was different afterward.

I went back inside the hotel and up the fire stairs to the second floor. (The stairs had nicely carved banister knobs.) It was one of those buildings in which the flights of stairs and the placement of windows are out of synchrony: in the stairwell, the top of the window frame was low to the floor, so that I had to bend way down, my head pounding, to get a proper view. I had only a minute or two before I needed to leave to catch the train back. There was dried rain-dust on the outside of the glass, but I looked out over the water and saw, near to shore, an unexpected play of green and gold and turquoise waves — not waves, really, because they were so small, but little manifestations of fluid under-energy. The clouds had the look that a glass of rinse water gets when you’re doing a watercolor — slowly diluting black roilings which move under the white water that you made earlier when you rinsed the white paint from the brush. But the sea didn’t choose to reflect the clouds that day; it had its own private mallard-neck palette, the fine gradations of which varied with the slopes of the wind-textured swells. Through the dirty window, I thought I saw, for a moment, what Debussy had seen.

(2001)

Why I Like the Telephone

When I was little, I played with the phone a lot. I liked the physical sensation of dialing, of having my finger guided in its numerical hole (first it was black metal, then more comfortable clear plastic) along arcs of a perfect circle, as if it were a pen in a Spirograph. Sometimes I hurried it back around and felt the center gear strain slightly.

Also, for a period of several years while I was growing up, no member of my family wore a watch, and our house had no dependably working clock. (We had an antique clock on the mantel but we often let it wind down.) My job was to call, often several times a day, the time-and-temperature number, sponsored by Rochester Savings Bank, and find out what time it was. I was delighted to make these calls. The other phone numbers I had memorized merely reached people my own age (e.g., my friend Fred, GI2-1397, and my friend Maitland, CH4-4158), but the time-temperature number linked me to a realer, kitchenless world of atomic clocks and compound interest and absolute zero, to times and temperatures thrillingly beyond dispute, endorsed, it seemed, by the National Bureau of Standards and the FDIC. The day after daylight savings, the time-and-temperature number was always busy, a sign of simultaneous citywide activity as definite as the drop in water pressure during the ad breaks in the Super Bowl.

Later I learned the trick of calling myself up: you dialed some short number (was it 811?), and you made a carefully timed click of the cradle, and, miraculously, your own phone, the phone you were touching, would ring — a result that seemed, in those years before the discovery of other solitary auto-dialed pleasures, exotic and shocking and worthwhile.

It isn’t stretching things too much to say that in Vox, my phone-sex novel, I was performing the novelistic equivalent of these early telephonic diversions: I was calling up, or calling on, what I hoped were National-Bureau-of-Standards-level verities about the interests and flirtations of two representatively chatty single phoners, a pair who began as strangers to me and to each other and who thus had to move as mere voices from the absolute zero of their initial connection to the high-Fahrenheit range of their affectionate spoken orgasms. And at the same time, of course, I was making my own phone ring.

(1994)

What Happened on April 29, 1994

A Contribution to 240 Ecrivains Racontent Une Journée du Monde, the Nouvel Observateur’s anthology of events for April 29, 1994

I took my daughter to school, and then, at my office, I wrote an e-mail about library catalogs, although I was supposed to be reviewing a novel. A fact-checker from a newspaper called, wanting to know if I was thirty-seven, and whether it was correct to say that a book of mine had been published on a certain day in 1992. I had lunch at a Chinese restaurant with my wife and sleeping five-month-old son. We talked about an article on homelessness that she had read in the New York Review of Books. Then I wrote about library catalogs some more. When I got home, my daughter was wearing a new Girl Scout Brownie uniform. She was proud of her long, blue-tasseled socks, and her pride made my eyes fill with tears, partly because I was tired from writing about libraries all day.

Outside on the back deck, we used strips of masking tape to outline the dimensions of a possible second bathroom, to be installed in the laundry room. Chairs stood for the sink and the toilet; the space proved to be too small to accommodate a shower.

I bought hamburgers for dinner and rented Arsenic and Old Lace for us to watch as a family (never having seen it), but it frightened my daughter, so we stopped the tape. I made my son laugh by tickling the soles of his feet with my beard and making munching sounds at his ribs. When both children were asleep, my wife watched the rest of the movie while I, tipped sideways forty-five degrees, dozed on the couch. Then I went back to my office and sorted the mail I was supposed to answer into four piles. I didn’t actually answer any letters, but I felt that I had moved forward by sorting them. One of the pieces of mail I came across was a fax from Le Nouvel Observateur, and I realized that this was the very day I was supposed to write about and that I had thus far taken no notes. So I took some notes on the margin of the fax, which smudged on the shiny paper but remained legible.

The last thing I did before I got in bed was to put a computer disk between the two halves of my wallet so that I wouldn’t forget to take it with me to Phoenix, Arizona, where I was going the next morning to watch a friend get married to a tall woman who had appeared in a Jeep commercial. I went to sleep fondling my wife’s engagement ring.

Now, several months later, the bathroom is built. The strips of masking tape, which we didn’t bother to peel up when we finished our architectural planning that evening, have become ineffaceably baked onto the gray planks of the back deck. They are, in fact, the only tangible remains of that particular day.

(1994)

Sunday at the Dump

It’s a Sunday afternoon in South Berwick and I’m at the dump, sitting in a white plastic lawn chair. Dump days are Wednesday, Saturday, and Sunday; most people go on Sunday afternoons. The busiest time is just before six, when the dump closes: if you come too late, you’re stuck with your trash until Wednesday, and when Wednesday comes around you’re likely to forget. There are no garbage trucks in our town — everyone must make an appearance here. Just before election day, candidates for local office show up to shake hands and campaign — only here at the dump does a candidate have a chance of meeting a voter from every household. Many residents hardly set foot in the little stores on Main Street; they don’t use the post office much; they shop for groceries in supermarkets across the border in another state; their children are bused to school. But everybody comes to the dump. “We get more business here than town hall,” Jim told me. Jim is the dump’s manager — a stocky man in his twenties with a deep sunburn. When I had been sitting in my white plastic chair for about half an hour, in a shady place to one side of the parking lot, Jim came over to be sure I wasn’t trying to drop off some illegal toxic material in the bushes. I told him I was writing about the dump, because most people are happy when they come here. In fact, I’m smiling now, as I type this sentence, looking out at the sunlit cars and trucks, and the long rectilinear containers, each accepting a different kind of refuse. There is a beautiful red container, freshly painted, the size of a caboose, with a ladder up its side; in front of it there is a sign that says “Shingles Only.”

Though we call it a dump, technically it isn’t one: it used to be a landfill. Behind the main building there is a steep man-made hill, covered with yellow wildflowers, with two T-shaped structures poking up from it. These are vents; they release trapped gasses from the heap. Now all the trash that we bring goes in trucks to the nearby town of Biddeford, where they burn it. Biddeford residents complain of the smell; for unknown reasons, Biddefordians sited their incinerator in the center of town. I told Jim the Manager that our dump was looking very clean these days. When Jim took over a year ago, the place was a mess; now everything’s in order, and there’s no smell. “Every night we clean out all the recycling cans with a mixture of Simple Green, bleach, and water,” Jim said. “We don’t get any bees. When I got here, there were a lot of bees.”

Agamenticus Road is the way to the dump. Agamenticus is the name of a mountain nearby; there are rare plants that grow only on Mount Agamenticus, but I’ve never seen them. There is a pile of rocks on top of Mount Agamenticus, too. Indians supposedly had a tradition of commemorating a sacred burial site by arranging a large pile of rocks; now visitors to the mountain bring their rocks as well. I’ve been to the top of Mount Agamenticus once; I’ve been to the dump hundreds of times, often with my son. You take a right at the Civil War statue onto Agamenticus Road; you drive past some houses and a cemetery; and then, just after the ice cream stand and potted plant store, you take a left and you’re in a paved area in front of the dump’s main building, a brown shed. Next to it is a yawning opening — a sort of double-high garage door — into which people toss their clear bags of trash. One of the pleasures here is in throwing: today I flung each bag underhand, so that it had a final airborne moment of multicolored spin before it fell into the compaction pit. Sometimes I overturn the whole garbage can (which I’ve brought in the back of my van) and shake out its contents, holding it high over my shoulder: the bags emerge slowly, hissing slightly, held by the vacuum I created several days earlier when I stuffed the bags down into the can in order to close the lid. The bags holding regular trash must be transparent, so that the dump attendants can verify that you’re not throwing in something forbidden, like cat litter. Cat litter goes into another enormous container separate from the main one, a receptacle entirely devoted to mattresses, old couches, and cat litter.

There are three windows in the main building — one window is labeled “Brown,” one says “Green,” and one says “Clear.” Formerly the windows were fitted with swinging flaps of Plexiglas, but the flaps have been removed now — an improvement. Into these windows we throw bottles and jars. When the bottles fall into the bins on the other side of the swinging flaps (or where the swinging flaps were when there were flaps), the clinks they make are painfully loud. When the bottles break it’s a relief: shattering is noticeably less noisy than intact clinking. Why? Perhaps because some of the kinetic energy is used up in the breakage, and there are no broken inner bottle-hollows to muffle the radiating noise.

Down a slope and to the left of the main building are two dark-green containers, each the size of a mobile home. One holds newspapers and magazines, and one holds cardboard. You can flip pizza boxes like Frisbees into the container for cardboard, hoping to lodge them at the top of the pile, way back in the shadows. Often the boxes slide back out again. I took several bags of newspapers into the newspaper-and-magazine bin. There is a partition up half-way back, to hold the four-foot-high tide of paper from pouring forward. It’s hushed and warm deep in this news-vessel; the shiny advertising inserts make slushy whispering noises as you release them from the bag.

The most exciting place in the dump is the little shack with a cement floor and a sign over it saying “Swap Shop,” where people leave their serviceable junk. Today at the Swap Shop I noticed three toasters, two toaster ovens, a bike, a textbook of surgery, many pairs of shoes, two tape recorders, and an infant’s car seat. A man with a large, high stomach dropped off a green and white poolside chair that he had no use for; half an hour later I saw a grandmother walking off with it, while her grandson left with a toy parking garage.

My son and my wife once brought me home a bicycle from the Swap Shop: it has two flat tires, but it’s otherwise in good shape. Another time we found a pair of antique sleds there. Our friends the Remicks have gotten a treadmill, several extension cords, and an outdoor cooker, all from the Swap Shop. My prize was a complete set of the Golden Book Encyclopedia, with trompe l’oeil paintings on the covers — my beloved childhood encyclopedia. Since then, I’ve seen several more sets of this encyclopedia here — I suppose families must be getting rid of their copies all over the country at the moment. This afternoon, I selected a fifties paperback of Lao Tzu and a book about Czechoslovakia in 1968. (Lao Tzu says: “Rule a large country as small fish are cooked.”) The bookshelves are in the back of the shed — sometimes I take a strange pleasure in straightening up the rows of Reader’s Digest Condensed Books.

Now a woman of eighty or so, with a fresh white perm, is walking with stocky but sometimes unsteady steps toward the dump-mouth. She is wearing blue easy-care pants and carrying a small clear bag of tidy aged-person’s garbage. She tosses the bag in, watching it take its place in the pit among everyone else’s contributions. Maybe it’s the clearness of the bags that makes the dump seem like a place of confidences — everyone can see just what everyone doesn’t want.

A few times every Sunday, one of the crew drives the toothed bucket of a backhoe deep into the container full of cardboard to compress it: as the motor strains, the drooping arm of the machine disappears into the welter of boxes, which are forced up as well as back, and then it withdraws, like a hand reaching into a basketful of tickets at a raffle to pick the winner.

(2000)

Writing Wearing Earplugs

Some years ago I bought an industrial dispenser pack of two hundred pairs of Mack’s earplugs from earplugstore.com. Mostly, though, I buy them from the drugstore. Recently, Mack’s began offering them in orange, which is less disgusting than white.

I can sit anywhere, in any loud place, and work. Everything becomes twenty feet farther away than it really is. The chirping, barking, jingling cash drawer of a world is out of reach, and therefore more precious.

You must have a good seal. When you unstick your thumb from a jammed-in plug, your eardrum will make a tiny, silent cry of pain, like a word in Arabic. Then you know you have a good seal.

(2007)

One Summer

One summer I lived in a house that was being renovated, in a bright yellow room, with a mattress on the floor. I woke up late and tried to type in bed. I was working on a story about a man who by chance runs into his brain on the street. His brain is wearing a jaunty hat and is in a hurry. It has some kind of a sales job. At night I walked to a restaurant called Gitsis Texas Hots and ordered two hot dogs and a cup of coffee and reviewed the day’s work on “My Brain.” The story was never finished.

One summer my family went on a boat in Georgian Bay with another family. There was a girl who slept on the boat with her eyes open.

One summer a friend and I went on a bicycle trip. In a small town in New York State, somebody opened a car door and we both collided with it and fell down on the street. And we were fine. Later a flock of birds gathered in the tree above our sleeping bags in the early morning.

One summer in California I owned a hundred shares of stock in Koss Corporation, the headphone company. I bought a newspaper and discovered that the stock had doubled in value. I sold all my shares and bought a Honda Passport motor scooter. My girlfriend rode on the back, wearing a red helmet, and I had a blue helmet, and it was lots of fun except that she burned her leg on the muffler and had to go to the emergency room.

One summer my girlfriend and I got engaged and we went to Jordan Marsh and bought a mattress and a box spring from a salesman named Sam. Sam said his wife liked a softer mattress, but he liked a firmer mattress. He led us to a mattress that was both firm and soft. The thing about this mattress, he explained, was that on it the two of us could “sleep to the edge.” If you got a cheap queen-size mattress, he said, it was really like only getting a full-size mattress, because you couldn’t sleep to the edge. We bought the mattress Sam recommended and twenty years later we are still sleeping to the edge on it.

One summer I painted the floor and ceiling of a room in the same day. The paint didn’t stick very well to the floor, however.

One summer I tried to write about a man I’d interviewed named Pavel Moroz. Mr. Moroz had invented something he called a microcentrifuge. He took tiny spheres of liquid and spun them at the highest speed he could spin them at, using a dentist’s drill. Nothing spins faster than a dentist’s drill, apparently. Mr. Moroz believed that ultracentrifugation would transform matter into new states of purity and enlightenment. But nobody paid attention to him. When I talked to him he was taking classes to become a licensed masseur.

One summer I had a paddleboard and I went up the side of a big wave to the top. Then I was under the wave looking up at its sunlit crest. Then I was turned some more, and I saw sand and gravel doing a little polka on the bottom. I had no idea there was so much going on inside a wave.

One summer there were several cars with trick horns installed that played “La Cucaracha.”

One summer I heard someone next door typing on an electric typewriter while I sat outside in the sun. I listened to the swatting of the keys and thought how rare that sound was now. I tore an article out of the newspaper about the bankruptcy of Smith Corona.

One summer I sat at a table with Donald Barthelme, the short-story writer, while he drank a Bloody Mary. He said he was planning to buy a new stereo system. I recommended that he go with Infinity loudspeakers.

One summer I worked for a company that made modems. I began working twelve hours a day. In the morning, driving to work, I held the coffee cup in my teeth when I was unwrapping a doughnut. Once, passing a truck, I forgot that the coffee cup was there and I whipped my head around to be sure a car wasn’t in the next lane, sloshing coffee on my shirt and my seat belt. Another time a can of 7 UP exploded in the glove compartment. The car, a Dodge Colt, began to have a sweetish smell that I liked.

One summer my grandmother took us to visit a blind woman who lived by the sea. The woman told us that when she swam, she would listen for her dog, who barked whenever she drifted too far from shore. Once she went out to do errands and didn’t come home till very late. Her dog had had a bathroom emergency under a knicknack shelf, away from where she would step, which she thought was very considerate. We agreed.

One summer I went on a bike trip through Quebec and Maine, eating four peanut butter and jelly sandwiches a day. The roads in Quebec are very straight and flat.

One summer I worked at a place where they stored old copying machines. I learned to drive a forklift, and I drove it around the old copying machines, beeping the horn, which made a plummy “meep meep.” The second floor was filled with metal desks, and when it was break time, I would go up there to read spy novels. One of the people I worked with wandered around these desks drinking clear fluid from a bottle. That man sure drinks a lot of water, I thought. He opened and closed the drawers of the desks, checking to see if something of value had been left behind. I listened to the sound of drawers opening and closing, far away and nearer by, and fell asleep.

One summer a raisin stuck to a page I was writing on, so I drew an outline of it and wrote “A Raisin Stuck Here — Sunmaid.”

One summer I went to Italy with my girlfriend and her family. My girlfriend’s uncle brought a set of dissolvable capsules containing foam circus animals. Every night at cocktail hour we dropped one capsule into a glass of water. As each foam leg emerged, we would say, “There’s another leg!”

One summer two of my friends and I found a loose door. We hauled it up to the top of the garage roof and positioned it there with some struts so that we could sit on the door and look out at the world. There wasn’t much to do once we were up there except eat crackers, and the asphalt roof shingles were soft and easily torn, like pan pizza, we discovered. They overlapped unnecessarily, wastefully, so we tore off quite a number of them and flung them down. They glided like Frisbees. My parents were unhappy because they had to have the garage reroofed.

One summer my friend and I bought Corgi toys, about fifteen of them, and built a parking garage for them out of blocks. Then we had an argument, and my friend took the Corgis he owned back to his own house.

One summer I worked as a waiter in a fancy restaurant that had been owned by a reputed mobster. The mobster sold the restaurant to the head chef for a lot of money. But many of the people who’d gone to the restaurant had been friends and associates of the reputed mobster — when he stopped going, they stopped going. So business dropped, and I stood wearing a ruffle-fronted shirt with a black bow tie, looking out at the empty tables. Once a waitress told the chef that a patron wanted a simple chicken salad sandwich. The chef, whose speciality was veal dishes, was affronted. “Chicky salad?” he said. “Tell him to bring his dick in here, I’ll make him some nice chicky salad.”

One summer I converted all my old word processing files, written on a Kaypro computer, to DOS. And that was fun.

One summer a guy down the street got mad at the fact that people were allowing their dogs to poop every day in front of his yard. He took some white plastic forks and put them in the dog poops. They looked like little sailboats.

One summer we had four fans set up in the upstairs bedrooms. One fan started smoking and our alert dog barked to let us know. Then we had three fans.

One summer I read the Edmund Scientific catalog a lot of times and fantasized about owning a walkie-talkie and communicating with my friends with it. But they cost a hundred dollars.

One summer I was on the verge of making a baloney sandwich. I had the tomato in my hand and I’d opened the door of the refrigerator and I was looking down at the jar of mayonnaise on the bottom shelf, and then I thought, No, no baloney right now. And I closed the refrigerator door. I was able to resist that baloney and put it out of my mind.

One summer I read an old copy of Confessions of an English Opium-Eater with great fascination.

One summer my father put up a Tarzan swing in our back yard. My friend and I used an old refrigerator crate as the leaping-off point, with two smaller boxes on top of that for extra height. We swung so high that we could grab a branch in a spruce tree and hold on to it. Then one time the branch broke, and my friend fell. He lay on his back going “Orf orf.” I was worried and got my mother. She said he’d had the wind knocked out of him, but that he would be fine. And he was fine.

One summer I got a crush on a girl who was eleven. I was eleven at the time as well.

One summer my father planted an herbaceous border in our yard. I helped him plant the Santolina incana nana and mix in the peat moss. On weekdays he would go out after dinner and water in the dark, so that if I went out to get him I could only see the spray from the hose reflecting the porch light, and hear his whistling.

One summer I went to see a new movie called Annie Hall with two women who played the harp. One harp player didn’t like it, one harp player really didn’t like it, and I liked it a lot.

One summer I spent a lot of time in my room trying to learn how to handstand. But one of my wrists was not flexible enough.

One summer a photographer was doing an ad for a bank and needed a woman to make a funny face. He called up my mother, because he had heard that she could make funny faces. The two of them went out onto the front porch, and he said to her, “Okay, now make a funny face.” She grimaced, then laughed. He said, “Try not to laugh. Good. Now puff out your cheeks.” So she puffed out her cheeks. The ad, announcing a higher interest rate on savings accounts, came out in the newspaper. The picture looked nothing like my mother. I spent a good deal of time making funny faces in the mirror in case a photographer called me.

One summer I went to a science camp called Camp Summersci. We were driven in a used hearse to places of scientific interest. In Herkimer, New York, we chiseled quartz crystals called Herkimer diamonds out of a rocky hillside. One of the campers was a kid who knew more about The Lord of the Rings than I did. We talked about The Lord of the Rings for many hours in the back of the hearse.

One summer my father and I put up a basketball hoop above the garage door, and I played basketball with myself for a week and then stopped.

One summer a new friend said we should learn taxidermy at home. He sent off for lesson one. The course instructed us to look around for dead squirrels to stuff. I told him I didn’t know where any dead squirrels were. His voice was already changing and mine wasn’t. He laughed: “Heh heh.” I laughed nervously back. He shook his head and said, “See, I knew you’d laugh. All I have to do is pretend to laugh, and you laugh.”

One summer my girlfriend was unhappy with me when we went out for dinner because I pulled the onions out of my salad with my fingers and put them on the bread plate along with a glob of salad dressing. Later I leapt up from the table to watch a brief fistfight between a waiter and a patron. I said I was sorry and she forgave me.

One summer my daughter learned how to read the word misunderstanding.

One summer I rode to the top of a hill and then coasted, and the wind came under the back of my neck and down in my shirt and cooled me down. It felt very good. This was somewhere in West Virginia, on my bike.

One summer my friend Steve and I went out to a movie. He was getting his medical degree then. He suggested we go buy some cheese at the Super Duper. That sounded like a good idea to me. We bought two large pieces of mozzarella cheese and got into his car and ate them, talking about the current state of science fiction.

One summer I worked at a job where we had to wash hundreds of venetian blinds in a tall metal tank that stood in a loud room next to the air circulation fans. We dipped the blinds in soapy water in the tank, and then we moved them up and down. The dipping was supposed to remove the dust from the slats, but the dust had bonded with the paint and it stayed. So the man said we had to wash the slats by hand, with a rag. This made the white paint come off. We put all the blinds back in the windows, although they were bent and peeling and sorry-looking. Later I used a sledgehammer on a big piece of cement.

One summer I went to a Nautilus Fitness Center at the Americana Hotel in Rochester. I did various strenuous things on the machines, and then I crossed the street to McDonald’s and ordered two Big Macs. My hand trembled so much from the exercise that I could barely push the straw through the little cross in the plastic lid of my root beer.

One summer my son and I built a tree house near the compost pile. We painted it green. We ate dinner up there a few times.

One summer after my wife and I spent all day packing boxes I had a dream in which I’d grown a split personality that snarled and lunged at me like a police dog. I woke up and lay perfectly still, too afraid to close my eyes or click on the light. After several minutes of motionless nostalgia for the days when I had been a sane person, I finally touched my wife and said, “Dear one?” She made a questioning noise from deep in her sleep. I said, “I’m sorry to wake you but I’m having some kind of unusual panic attack.” She said, “I’m so sorry, baby.” I said, “It’s really bad, I’m scared about everything, I’m even scared to turn on the light.” She said, “I’ll hold you. Everything is good. Go back to sleep now.” She held me and I turned a different way in the bed and the fear dissolved and I went back to sleep. I woke up feeling fine.

One summer I dropped a bowl of hot fudge that I’d warmed up in a microwave onto the kitchen floor of a Howard Johnson’s and burned myself.

One summer my friend and I dug in his back yard using a hose to blast holes deep in the dirt. We made a series of small ponds and bogs. My friend’s mother was unhappy with us because the water bill was very high.

One summer my family and I ate dinner at a restaurant that had a machine that made saltwater taffy. The machine had two double-forked prongs that folded and stretched the taffy ball onto itself until there were unimaginable numbers of layers. When the taffy had been stretched and folded enough times a man rolled it into a loaf and mounted it in a machine that cut it and wrapped the cut pieces with waxed-paper wrappers. The device that twisted the wrapper ends moved too fast for the eye to see. The taffy man looked at us without acknowledging us or smiling. He had no privacy — he was like a zoo creature. He had a small mustache.

One summer we moved from Boston, Massachusetts, to New York State. I was driving the old brown car and my wife was driving the new red car down Routes 5 and 20. There was a big hot blue sky and enormous trees. I rolled my window all the way down. Immediately the wind sucked a map of New York State off my dashboard. In my rearview mirror I saw the pale creased shape float on air for a moment, as if deciding what to do. Then it plastered itself to my wife’s windshield, where she pulled it inside. She waved.

One summer when I was fourteen I took care of an orange cat at a house owned by two minimalist painters. All their walls were flat white, and they had many of their paintings up — long, narrow paintings, with silver metallic paint sprayed in from the ends, dripping subtly. The lonely cat roamed this minimalist house, meowing. I read issues of Artforum neatly stacked on their coffee table. There was an article about an artist who created an empty room with a sloping wooden floor. The artist, whose name was Vito Acconci, “pleasured himself” under the sloping floor, while visitors walked around the room overhead. I fed the cat, pleasured myself, and rode my bike home.

One summer I wrote “Truth wears sunglasses” in my notebook.

(2005)