The Way the World Works: Essays (5 page)

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)

I
learned how to read, in the sense of knowing how to follow a story with pleasure as it accumulates over many chapters, by being read to. My mother read us (my sister and me) the things she had liked as a child, with several additions—she took us through
The Hobbit, Mistress Masham’s Repose,
Tove Jansson’s Moominland books, Lear’s “The Pelican Chorus,”
The Wind in the Willows, Winnie-the-Pooh,
the Dr. Dolittle series, some Kipling, several Tintin books, and Hawthorne’s
Wonder-Book.
She was an expert at the seamless substitution of a comprehensible phrase for the more involuted elegancies of Hawthornian diction, a fact I discovered only after I knew how to read by eye and could compare her version with the text. Her shoulder had a bone in it that was comfortable against my temple; I was under the impression that I was hearing some of each book through that shoulder-bone. And I was interested in how entertained she was by certain scenes: how much she liked, for example, the image of Toad sitting entranced by the side of the road near his overturned canary-yellow traveling wagon, murmuring “Poop-poop!” at the dwindling sight of the motorcar that had just zoomed past. It only became funny after she laughed.

But the most emotional early reading experience I had was the devastating death of Thorin Oakenshield in
The Hobbit.
I had no practice then with the conventions of character flaws and the plot signals that such flaws provide, and thus Thorin’s greed and his brusque treatment of Bilbo didn’t tip me off that he, Thorin son of Thráin, King under the Mountain, wasn’t going to recover from the wounds of battle, even though my mother had gently tried to prepare me. I wept hard until I fell asleep. My mother wanted to abandon the book because it upset me so much, but the next night I convinced her that I could cry quietly, and she kept going until the end. It became one of my favorite books.

Two Tintin books—
The Secret of the Unicorn
and
Red Rackham’s Treasure
—were the first things I truly liked reading by myself. Golden Books was the publisher of a few Tintin titles then, and they had Americanized the text slightly: Haddock’s ancestral home was called Hudson Manor rather than the Marlinspike Hall of the other Tintins that we ordered later on from England like jars of marmalade. I loved the shark-shaped one-man submarine, and Tintin’s shameless habit of talking to himself in his diving helmet while he was being stalked by the real shark, and the scene in which Thomson and Thompson, tired out, forget to keep cranking the air pump that leads below. Following a brief post-Tintin apprenticeship with some Freddy the Pig volumes, the first small-type reading I did was of
The Wonderful Adventures of Nils:
attractive because it was an ostentatiously thick edition and had a promising high-altitude goose-riding scene and concerned a person with a name similar to my own. After a chapter or two I could hardly follow what was going on, though, and I finished
Nils
joylessly, out of brute pride. The second thick book was
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea,
which
we owned in an old translation with fancy marbled boards. Since the only other use of
leagues
that I knew of was in the story of the cat with the seven-league boots, the notion of descending a full 20,000 leagues seemed eerily grownup. And the phosphorescent undersea glow of the
Nautilus
as it approached or fled from a ship at night was a glow that I have been on the lookout for in reading ever since.

(1996)

W
hen I come across something I really like in a book, I put a little dot in the margin. Not a check, not a double line—these would be pedantic—but a single nearly invisible tap or nudge of the pen tip, one that could almost be a dark fleck in the paper. In fact, sometimes as I’ve flipped through a book that I read closely years before, my eye has been caught by an actual paper-blemish that I have taken to be one of my own dots of approval, and I’ve stopped to read slowly through some undistinguished passage, prepared for beauty—and sometimes the beauty is discoverably there, and sometimes it isn’t, and then, suspicious, I bring the page close to my eye and inspect the dot and find that I was misled.

It’s best not to make too many dots—no more than, say, ten or fifteen for a single book. Compared with underlining, or highlighting in yellow or pink, the dot method is unobtrusive—that’s one of its great advantages. I can reread a book that I have dotted here and there, and yet not be too distracted by the record of my earlier discoveries. And I can feel secure in the knowledge that if others idly open my books, they won’t be able to see at a glance what interested
me—they won’t say to themselves, He thought
that
was good?

But my method is not only to mark the passages I like. I also write the number of the marked page in the back. Then—and this is the most important part—at some later date, sometimes years later, I refer to the page numbers, locate the dots, and copy out the passages that have awaited my return into a spiral-bound notebook. About fifteen years ago I fell behind—I have dozens, probably hundreds of books with a column of page numbers written in the endpapers whose appealing sentences or paragraphs I have not yet transcribed. Sometimes many months will go by without my adding anything to my copybook. But it is almost the only handwriting I do now, aside from writing checks, and whenever I take up the studious pen and begin, it makes me a happier person: my own bristling brain-urchins of worry melt in the strong solvent of other people’s grammar.

My first notebook dates from 1982, when I was twenty-five. On
page 2
is a sentence from Boswell’s
Life of Johnson:
“I passed many hours with him, of which I find all in my memorial is, ‘much laughing.’ ” Back then, I did a lot of the copying on lunch hours in Boston, and on weekends at a dark restaurant near Park Street Station called the Mug ’n Muffin, where I ordered a coffee and a blueberry muffin, which would arrive sizzling, after two full minutes in the industrial microwave, too hot to remove from its fluted wrapper, and which then, as I obliviously transcribed, would slowly turn to stone. At nearby tables, Bible students from Park Street Church would have long, hoarse conversations about God’s love, shaking their heads over His mercy as they stubbed out their cigarettes. Every few months at the Mug ’n Muffin there was a rich, almost chocolatey smell of
some comprehensive insecticide. It was the perfect place for longhand.