Revenge of the Paste Eaters (24 page)
Beardwork.
Furthermore, they were vindictive. It would appear they
object
to being torn out by force. They grow back immediately—often the same day—but they reverse themselves when they come to the flesh line, and start growing back inward toward the brain.
I am convinced that it is the wayward, retro-growing chin hair that leads to memory loss. They seem to happen about the same time. Memory cells are very close to the surface of the brain. Certainly if a gentle tap on the skull with a ball bat can cause memory loss, the steady, stubborn excavation of ingrown chin hairs could have the same effect.
If only I had not stopped to pluck the forest along my jawline, I might know where my car keys are right now.
i am in shape.
My shape is round.
When I was younger I imagined with every new day that I was on the cusp of developing a lifelong habit of physical fitness. The developmental stage of this habit has turned out to be uncommonly long, but at the time I believed it, body and soul. I was suffering a minor lapse of self-indulgence, and any minute now a burst of resolve would drive me to the gym or an exercise machine and—within a matter of weeks, perhaps, or at the very most, months—I would reclaim that fit and youthful figure that was mine.
The fact that my fit and youthful figure was borrowed from five years of actual physical labor in a factory, or that the pounds began adding back on almost from the day I left that job neither dampened my enthusiasm nor daunted my faith. For about three years of my life I was thin(ner), strong, and able to walk long miles without a single huff, and nothing but basic intrinsic laziness was keeping me from being thin and strong again. It was a matter of will.
As it happens, the fitness challenge in my life dovetailed very nicely with my passion for buying things. I bought fitness machines. I bought rowers and bicycles and weights and stationary bikes, I bought jogging shoes and exercise outfits and sweatpants and little stretchy wrist- and headbands. I bought gym memberships. I bought exercise classes. It is truly a shame the body does not tally up and award points for the effort it takes just to gather the things that will help us get into shape.
Back when I was so persistently chasing the ideal, however, my shape was just more or less “bulgy.” Exercise outfits made me look fat. Attempting to exercise made me look awkward and stiff and red in the face. All of it—breathing itself—made me sweat.
It was about this time that I would come home from work, wriggle my jellyrolls into yet another stretchy exercise outfit, and slog off to class. Usually the entire incentive to go was the dinner I planned to eat on the way home. Still, I knew, as soon as the exercise gene kicked in and I really got
into
the program, I too would learn to look at food as mere fuel, and not as the reward. I would come home from my exercise program feeling fit and strong and morally virtuous and stiff as a board, and my back porch light would be on.
I never turned on the back porch light.
When I bought the house, I saw that porch and I thought to myself,
A weaker person would allow this room to fill up with all of the things they don’t use.
I resolved never to do that.
Five years later the back porch held the litterbox and six pieces of exercise equipment.
I hardly ever went out there.
I had no reason to turn on the back porch light.
And yet, there the light would be, beaming for all to see . . .
I would stand there, fondling the string, and wonder to myself,
Exactly how did this light get on?
I even asked the cat, but he had no apparent opinion.
The cat—Babycakes—was at the time about six months old. He was a gorgeous kitten, a red tabby—an unusually fluffy red tabby, for a short-haired cat—but he had never possessed quite the cuddly, sweet disposition I had tried to impose on him with his name. Someone less bent on filling her own needs with catflesh would have named him “Digger,” or perhaps “Hellspawn”: I wanted a lap cat, a pick-up-and-cuddle cat, so I named him Babycakes. And I can pick him up and cuddle him. I routinely warn others not to even try it, and I keep bandages on hand for the hard-of-believing, but he
looks
for all the world like a big old long-haired pick-him-up-and-cuddle cat.
During the random dawnings of the light Babycakes was still small and oddly haired, and every now and then his back end overran his front end and dumped him in clumsy heaps on the linoleum. He was barely as tall as my ankle. At odd moments of the day or night he might turn into a faint pink streak that galloped from one end of the house to the other, making more noise in transit than the average dump truck.
I was standing in the kitchen one night after exercise class. Perhaps I was trying to bring normal color back to my face. A faint pink streak roared through the kitchen, out onto the porch, vaulted onto the exercise bike, crawled like an inchworm up onto the bike seat, s-t-re-t-c-h-e-d his fine gold self between the seat and the handlebars, and began batting savagely at the light string. By the third swat, the light came on. The cat fell off the bike, shook himself off, and sauntered out of the kitchen as if to say, “So
there.
”
Occasionally guests would come to my house, admire my decor, and laugh when they saw my exercise bike on the back porch. “So this is where you work out?” they might tease.
“Actually,” I would answer, “we use it to turn on the light.”
And they would stand there, looking at my bike. Occasionally the more curious might reach out and just experimentally touch the light string, as if expecting some sort of invisible challenge.
The cat would walk over to his dish and sniff.
my grandmother molby was
probably in her sixties when she began her life as a nomad. I believe she was driven off her farm (belatedly) by the Great Depression, or the fear of the next coming depression, or the election of a Democratic president—whatever compelled her, sometime in the mid-1950s my grandmother packed up my grandfather and all of their worldly goods, left the farm where they had lived for thirty or forty years, and went house-shopping.
When my grandmother moved (and I presume it was my grandmother who moved—once she made up her mind something was going to happen she had a gift for “fussing” about it until all opposition got out of her way) she moved everything they owned. She moved the Victrola, which she stored in the new barn across the road. She moved the solid brass bed that she later sold to an antique dealer for five dollars, she moved the marble-top tables that she sold to the same man, she moved the artwork she had done as a child . . . she moved everything. My grandmother survived the Great Depression: she was not a woman to throw anything away.
They could not have moved because the house was too big or the farm too hard to manage, because they moved to a bigger house on a bigger farm out on M-86, west of town. While I remember their house on Michigan Avenue (and there are photographs of me as a child taken all around it), it is the house on M-86 that I associate with my grandmother. It was a big old two-story house with weathered shake siding, a big, long stone porch, and some of the most beautiful woodwork I have ever seen. It had pillared, built-in bookshelves between the living room and the dining room. It had a glorious staircase. It had bay windows in the dining room. It had a see-through wooden china cabinet with cut-glass windows as the wall between the kitchen and the dining room. It had forced steam-heat baseboard heating that always sounded, when I slept upstairs alone, like Jack the Ripper was coming for me up the stairs. It had four bedrooms upstairs, but my grandparents immediately built a bedroom and bath for themselves on the main floor. In the upstairs bathroom there was a claw-foot tub I could climb into for my bath and I could barely see over the sides. I loved the house on M-86.
Between two big cement gateposts there was the lane that went back to the back fields of the farm. This was a two-lane dirt road, perfect for exercising my imaginary horses. I fought many fierce battles of the Wild West on that road. When I went to my grandmother’s house I spent hours under the pignut tree probably half a mile from the house. I battled evil or was evil, depending on my mood at the time. I robbed banks and trains, held up saloons, fought with noble Indians, and hanged myself without mercy. I was a self-entertaining child: it was not the absence of other children my age that ever caused me problems when I was a kid.
When I wasn’t racing up and down the lane, I was sequestered upstairs in the privacy of an old saloon hotel. The upstairs was uncommonly suited to that fantasy because the stairway came up the back wall and then circled around, and the hallway was open, the railing looking back down the stairway—just like an old Western hotel on television. My grandmother must have gone up there, because there was never so much as a dust mote anywhere, but she left me to my own amusements when I was staying with her.
Very little of the time I spent with my grandparents was spent with either one of them. My grandmother routed my grandfather out of bed at 7:30 every morning (it was time to make the bed) and he would dress, shave, have breakfast, and then go take a nap in his rocker in the living room. If I happened to wander through before he had dozed off he would have me sit down and then he would regale me with tales of the railroad. He worked for the railroad all through the Depression. He was a professional train rider. He had started out in a different position, but as the Depression dragged on and more and more people were laid off he was bumped from one job to another until finally his job consisted of getting on the trains and riding from here to there to somewhere else (he knew all of these places by name) and then in a week or two coming home. This was apparently a nuisance, and he was glad when the Depression was over. He used words like “the Chesapeake and Ohio” or “the Nickelplate,” Baltimore, Washington, D.C., Gary, and Chicago. His voice reminded me of Clark Gable, so almost anything he said
sounded
significant, but his ramblings about the trains and working for the railroad were the most boring lectures I had heard in my short life. I would be a near adult before I would reason that if people paid to ride the trains, it was unlikely the railroad had hired my grandfather to do it.
The house on M-86 was a beautiful house, but it was hard on my grandmother’s nerves. They lived there for twelve years, and survived eleven traffic accidents in their front yard. Headed west on M-86, approaching my grandmother’s house there was a sharp curve that was improperly graded and required a certain attention to detail to navigate. Late at night, coming home from the bars, drunks in particular piled into the cement post at the end of the lane, or climbed one of the two trees in the front yard with their car, or missed her yard but wound up across the street (also her property) in front of the barn. One missed all of the other obstacles and ran across her lawn and into her stone porch. Adventures like these were simply another attraction for us kids, but our grandmother became convinced that sooner or later someone was going to get killed, and she couldn’t bear it. (We all wanted to be there.) She was also acutely aware of how long it took the ambulance to reach her house, and she worried about my grandfather’s heart. I don’t know that there was anything wrong with my grandfather’s heart, but she was never one to stanch a worry when she could just as easily fuss. Eventually she decided to move him into town, where he would be closer to the hospital.
To achieve this end, she began “sorting.” Out went the brass bedstead. Out went the marble-top tables. My grandmother owned a lot of beautiful old antique furniture, but she was not a strong admirer of antiques, and since they meant little to her, they were not, in her estimation, worth very much. I, on the other hand, was raised by people who fondled the grain of their wood, who looked for those little wooden blocks in the corners of drawers (they mean something), who admired dovetailing and quartersawn oak and bird’s-eye maple—I have never liked modern furniture.
And I have always loved music. Hidden safely in the corner of an unused haymow was my Grandmother Molby’s old Victrola. It worked. It had 78s, it had extra needles. The sound was a little scratchy, but there must have been easily twenty records. To run it, I had to wind it up by hand, and when it began to wear down, it played slower. It was roughly four feet tall and perhaps two feet square. It was made out of polished walnut—the cabinet alone was beautiful.
My grandmother decided it was “worthless” and needed to go to the dump.
I begged. I cried. I pleaded. I wanted it, and I wanted it badly.
My mother noted that I didn’t have anywhere to put it. I noted that I lived in a room that was 14-by-14 and hardly cramped.
My grandmother said, “You don’t want that dirty old thing.”
I established I did want it. I offered to clean it up, although I couldn’t see what was “dirty” about it. I gave it my best shot. And I was not a stupid child: I knew it was a collector’s item, I knew it stood a good chance of being worth good money someday.
But my grandmother had decreed it “dirty” and dirt is the kiss of death.
“You don’t
need
it,” my mother said, knowing full well who could fuss the hardest the longest and the most.
And off the Victrola went to the dump.
The house on M-86 is still there. The orchard is gone. Someone enclosed the stone porch with aluminum and sided the house with pale green aluminum siding. Every now and then my Beloved and I drive by it on our way to family reunions and she sticks her fingers in her ears as we go around the last curve.
I don’t think it’s “godawful green,”
she’s been known to say.
Perhaps they own it and they can paint it any color they want.
Browsing through old photographs recently I found a picture of the house on M-86 in all of its old glory, which I showed to her triumphantly. “This is what it
used
to look like,” I crowed.