A Box of Matches (7 page)

Paul sanded down the roughness of the scrape and dyed it a chocolate brown that wasn’t a perfect match but was still very close. I used the briefcase for almost fifteen years, until finally both handles tore. Now it’s in a box in the attic.

Good morning, it’s 4:55 a.m.—Last night I went to bed at eight-thirty, and this morning I woke up having found a position in the bed that was one of the best bed positions I’ve ever been in. I must be getting better at sleeping. No part of me hurt or had stiffness; I was floating on a perfect angle of pillow and shoulder. I lay for fifteen minutes, thinking about the time long ago when I had a pet ant named Fidel, and then I heard Henry get up and pee and come into our room. His blankets had fallen off and he had gotten chilled. I lifted our covers so that he could get in, a small shivering boy with a very cold hand that he put on my shoulder. Claire was asleep. We three lay there for a while, Henry’s nose against my back, until he warmed up and fell asleep; then I somehow managed to pour
myself out of the bottom of the bed without waking either him or Claire, so that I could come down here and fire up the morning. I’ve just crumpled a colorful advertising supplement from Sears. Their slogan is “The Good Life at a Great Price.” Every year on my birthday my mother would take me to buy a new pair of Sears work boots. They cost five dollars, and they would get very soft at the toe after a few months. Good boots they were, great boots, in fact. Boots wear out, but how many socket-wrench sets and circular saws can the world buy? I’ve lit the crumpled Sears circular. Blue ink sometimes burns bright green.

Home Depot is part of what is hurting Sears. Claire bought the unpainted doghouse that we use as a duck château at Home Depot. And this past weekend we went there to buy a mini-refrigerator, so that in the future, when houseguests come, they can have breakfast in their guest room, with their own butter and their own milk for their coffee and their own ultracool cantaloupe. While it’s true that you can have very good conversations with houseguests in the morning, when everyone’s hair is poking off in novel directions, it is also true that by the fourth day both guest and host, hoarse from forced cheer,
will find that they may prefer to read the paper in their pajamas in different parts of the house. So we selected a mini-fridge. We stood in an aisle for a long time, waiting for a person to show up with an electric lift that he could use to pull down one of the several boxed fridges that were on an upper shelf. Finally the fridge-retriever arrived. He was a diminutive man who has advised us in the past on faucets. This Home Depot employs several very small people, if I’m not mistaken, and they’re usually the most knowledgeable. Go right for the bearded dwarf with the tool belt if you want the best advice.

He rose up on the lift and, fifteen feet in the air, began wrestling with the mini-fridge. He whistled a Supertramp song loudly to convey that all was well. I didn’t want to make him nervous by staring up at his struggles, so I turned and looked down the aisle. There was a lot going on. A couple was choosing between two pieces of white pipe, and farther down I saw a big woman in a sweater and leggings pointing up at something. She had a lot of hair. She mounted a moving metal stairway, one that has rollers on one end and rubber nubbins on the other, so that when you put your weight on them the nubbins act as brakes, and she unhooked a toilet seat from a display. She
looked at it from several angles—a big angelic oval in the air above the heads of the ground level shoppers—and then she handed it down to her husband. He held it for a while, nodding, then handed it back up to her. She rehung it on its hooks. By then our mini-fridge had landed.

So now there is quite a nice fridge in the guest room. Henry and Phoebe unpacked it, pulling off all the pieces of blue tape. It was similar to the unpacking of a new printer, which always has pieces of sticky-but-not-too-sticky tape holding the various movable elements in place.

And now Henry has appeared in the dawn-lit living room. I just asked him if he’d had a good sleep in our bed.

“Yes, I was quite warm,” said Henry.

I asked him what made him wake up so early.

“Dad, you see, Mom said she was going to read me some more of the book we’re reading, and I wondered if she was awake yet. And when I felt how warm it was, I snuggled in. I joined the party.”

Henry puts the word Dad in practically every sentence he says to me. He seems to want to say the word Dad. Who is that Dad? I am.

“Dad, in only two years I’m going to be ten,” he just
told me. He has tossed an egg carton onto the fire. There was a fall of large shaggy flakes yesterday; the wild grape at the end of our lawn and the tall pines across the valley are squirrel-tailed with snow. And now I can hear the crows, the birds that announce the end of my secret morning.

Good morning, it’s 4:03 a.m., early, early, early. I did something new while the coffeemaker was snuffling and gasping: I washed a dish that I’d left last night in the sink to soak. Claire made a pathbreaking noodle casserole, which we ate three quarters of. One quarter is now socked away in the refrigerator. While I was filling up the carafe of the coffeemaker, it clinked against the glass casserole dish, and I thought what the hay. The dish was full of night-cooled water when I began. I put my hand in it. The suds were gone and the water was still—it was like taking an early-morning swim in the lake at camp, not that I ever did that. I could feel some hard places down on the bottom that would need scrubbing, and there were two dinner forks lurking below as well. I was
glad to know about the forks, because if I had poured the water out without removing the forks I would have made a jangling that might have woken Henry. I got the water from the tap to a hot but not unbearable temperature and, having successfully felt for the rough-sided scrubber sponge and the container of dishwashing liquid, I squirted a big blind
C
over the bottom, where the baked-on cheese was. It was a silent
C:
as one gets better at squirting out dishwashing liquid one learns how to ease off at the end of a squirt so that one doesn’t make an unpleasant floozling sound. And then I began to scrub, scooting over the smooth places and then ramming into the islands of resistance. Soon the baked-on atolls, softened overnight, began to give way: I pestered at the last one from the side for a while, smiling with the clenched-teeth smile of the joyful scrubber, and it was gone—no, there was still a tiny rough patch left behind to be dealt with, and then, oh sweet life, I could circle my sponge over the entire surface of the dish at the speed of the swirling water, frictionlessly, like a velodrome racer on a victory lap.

What a way to begin the day. You get to know a landscape by painting it; you get to know a dish by
washing it—washing and rinsing it both, and there is a way of rinsing that I have developed over the years that uses less water, a low-flow method. Let some water run into the bottom and then work the dish to create a rotating wave that sloshes centrifugally up to the upper edge of the dish. Then dump that water and fill it again, and spin again. The idea is to remove all traces of soap, because soap tastes bad. And then—and this is a part that some people forget—you should turn the dish over and rinse the underside: for when a dish sits in the sink it can stamp itself onto bits of food and you don’t want those bits going up on the shelf where they will harden. I got the dish settled in the drainer without making any loud clinks, and by that time my coffee was done.

What you do first thing can influence your whole day. If the first thing you do is stump to the computer in your pajamas to check your e-mail, blinking and plucking your proverbs, you’re going to be in a hungry electronic funk all morning. So don’t do it. If you read the paper first thing you’re going to be full of puns and grievances—put that off. For a while I thought that the key to life was to read something from a book first thing. The idea was to
reach down, even before I’d fully awakened, to the pile of books by the bed and haul one up and open it. This only works during the months of the year when you wake up in a world that is light enough to make out lines of print, but sometimes even when you open the book and can’t quite read it in the grayness, or greyness, when you see the word that you know is a word hovering there in a granular dance of eye particles, and then you find that if you really stare at it you can read it, and the word is
almost
, the reading of that single word can be as good as reading a whole chapter under normal lighting conditions. Your fingertips are still puffy from sleep, and the corner of the book is the first sharp thing you feel, and you lift it open at random, not knowing what book your hands found, and there is that
almost
slowly coming into semi-focus in the gnat-swarms of dawnlight. It changes your whole day.

But now, see, now, I’ve gone beyond
almost
. Now I read nothing when I wake up, I just put on my bathrobe and come down here. Nothing has happened to me when I sit down in this chair, except that I’ve made coffee and rinsed an apple and, at least on this unusual morning,
washed a casserole dish. I am the world, or perhaps the world is a black silk eye mask and I’m wearing it. This whole room warms up from the fire I’ve made: all the surfaces in the room, the picture frames, the Chinese teapot in the shape of a cauliflower, the glass coasters with Claire’s grandmother’s initials on them, the small wicker rocking chair that my father gave to Phoebe when she was four years old—all of it is warming up.

It occurs to me that I haven’t described the fireplace. It isn’t a Rumford fireplace. Rumford was a clever count who figured out, two hundred years ago, how to build fireplaces shallower, so that they would throw more heat into the room. This fireplace is almost a Rumford, but it is an earlier design. It is about a foot and a half deep, with diagonal brick sides. In the fireplace is a cast-iron grate; it is like a small porch or bandstand that holds the logs behind a low railing. There are decorative cast-iron urn shapes on each corner. What happens is that the iron gradually gets hotter, and the row of ornamental uprights in the balcony’s railing radiates the heat out onto my feet. Because the grate holds the logs so steadily, I can put my feet an inch or so away from the flame in perfect comfort;
only when the fire has really begun burning hard do I sometimes have to move my chair back.

The first year we lived here we were spooked by the chimney experts and didn’t have any fires. The man who sold us the house had stuffed quantities of pink insulation up all the openings. Once while I was unpacking things I heard an angry cheeping. I pulled on the insulation—a cloud of bird-dropping dust puffed out into the room. The cheeping got louder. I went to the bathroom, and when I returned I heard a nibbling sound along with an even louder cheeping, and I saw a bat crouched in a corner, wings half furled, furiously nibbling on a copy of
Harper’s Magazine
. The bat was angry, baring its teeth like a dog, and the teeth were surprisingly fangy. There had been an article in the paper about rabies and bats; I thought there might be some possibility that this one was rabid. When I imprisoned it under an upside-down plastic trash basket, it began chattering furiously and gnawing at the plastic. I called animal control, which turned out to be a cherubic town policeman of maybe twenty-two and his niece of ten who sat in the patrol car. He trapped the bat in a lunchbox container with a screw-on
lid. It was too expensive to test it for rabies, he said; he took a shovel out of his trunk and went off to a far corner of our yard, killed the bat and buried it there. We thanked him and he and his niece drove off. I felt that we’d done wrong. I certainly wouldn’t have wanted to have been bitten by the bat, but now I think it probably wasn’t rabid, just exhausted and mad after its tangle with the pink insulation.

Once we started using the fireplace, the bats moved to a comfortable spot in the eaves and had babies. Claire was looking out at the dusky sky one summer night from an upstairs window and saw many young ones, she said, black liquid drops, one after another, emerging from a shadowy hole.

Consider for a moment what the chimney sweeps had to do. I bet they ran into plenty of bats. I read about them one morning in a book of essays by Sydney Smith—I fished the book up first thing from the floor beside the bed and opened it to the table of contents, and there in the dimness was a title: “Chimney Sweepers.” Sydney Smith had written the essay for the
Edinburgh Review
in 1819. The sweeps were boys of seven or eight or nine,
who would show up at the appointed house at three in the morning and bang on the front door. The servants, still asleep, wouldn’t let them in, and so they would stand in the cold, no socks, chilblains throbbing, waiting. They had to be small in order to fit up the chimneys, of course, and they worked all day in those tiny spaces, carrying the sack of soot from one job to the next, and some got stuck and died in the dark high corners, and before they became hardened to the work their knees bled. One climbing boy—so they were called—told an investigator for the House of Lords that he climbed his first chimney because his master told him that there was a plum pudding at the top. A plum pudding is in effect a prune pudding, but that wouldn’t sound as good.

Now we think of Dick Van Dyke dancing his pipe-stemmed, long legged dance; real chimney sweeps today are chatty men of thirty-five whose trucks are expensively painted with Victorian lettering—they’re the sort of men who also like to dress up as clowns or magicians for children’s birthdays. But back in 1819, it wasn’t a good life, and I found when I read about the climbing boys that I wanted to right the wrong
immediately—I wanted to mail letters urging legislative reform, as if the long-ago suffering could be fixed retroactively and all those lost lives redirected.

When we first moved here, we called a local chimney sweep—a software engineer who swept on weekends—who peered up into the brickwork and said that it was all rotten. No way could he sweep it until the chimney was rebuilt. A mason we talked to said the same thing: no fires until you do something radical. So we gave up on fires, and our first winter was very cold.