David Wallace - Girl With Curious Hair

"Those aren't persons."

'No one has ever argued pursuasively that that has anything to do with it. My professors stopped trying.'

"Could we possibly agree on whom you might ask now?"

'He said real poetry won't be in words after a while. He said the icy beauty of the perfect signification of fabricated nonverbal symbols and their relation through agreed-on rules will come slowly to replace first the form and then the stuff of poetry. He says an epoch is dying and he can hear the rattle. I have all this in letters he sent me. I keep all my letters in a box. He said poetic units that allude and evoke and summon and are variably limited by the particular experience and sensitivity of individual poets and readers will give way to symbols that both are and stand for what they're about, that both the limit and the infinity of what is real can be expressed best by axiom, sign, and function. I love Emily Dickinson. I said I wasn't going to pretend like I understood and disagreed but it seemed like what he thought about poetry was going to make poetry seem cold and sad. I said a big part of the realness that poems were about for me, when I read them, was feelings. I wasn't going to pretend to be sure, but I didn't think numbers and systems and functions could make people feel any way at all. Sometimes, when I said it, he felt sorry for me, and said I wasn't conceiving the project right, and he'd play with my earlobes. But sometimes at night he'd get mad and say that I was just one of those people that are afraid of everything new and unavoidable and think they're going to be bad for people. He came so close to calling me stupid that I almost got really mad. I'm not stupid. I graduated college in three years. And I don't think all new things and things changing are bad for people.'

"How could you think this was what the girl was afraid of?"

'Today, a little over three weeks in Prosopopeia, I am sitting in my relatives' living room, with the cotton back in my ear, watching the lunchtime news on a Canadian station. I suspect it's nice outside. There is trouble in Quebec. I can hear my aunt saying something, in the kitchen. In a moment she comes in, wiping her hands on a small towel, and says that the stove is acting up. Apparently she can't get the top of the stove to heat, that sometimes it acts up. She wants to heat some chili for my uncle and me to eat when he conies home for lunch. He'll be home in the early afternoon. There's not much else for a good lunch in the house, and she's not fussy for going to the IGA because she has to prepare for a French quiz, and I'm certainly not going to go out in the wind with that ear acting up like it's been, and she can't get the stove to work. She asks me if I could maybe have a quick look at the stove.'

'I'm not afraid of new things. I'm just afraid of feeling alone even when there's somebody else there. I'm afraid of feeling bad. Maybe that's selfish, but it's the way I feel.'

'The stove is indeed officially acting up. The stovetop burners do not respond. My aunt says it's an electrical thingummy in the back of the stove, that comes loose, that my uncle can always get it working again but he won't be home until she's already in class, and the chili won't be able to simmer, reblend, get tasty. She says if it wouldn't make my ear hurt could I try to get the stove going? It's an electrical thingummy, after all. I say no problem. She goes for my uncle's toolbox in the closet by the cellar door. I reach back and unplug this huge, ugly old white stove, pull it away from the wall and the new dishwasher. I get a Phillips out of my uncle's box and remove the stove's back panel. The stove is so old I can't even make out the manufacturer's name. It is possibly the crudest piece of equipment ever conceived. Its unit cord is insulated in some sort of ancient fabric wrap with tiny red barber-spirals on it. The cord simply conducts a normal 220 house AC into a five-way distributor circuit at the base of the stove's guts. Bundles of thick, inefficient wires in harness lead from each of the four burner controls and from the main oven's temperature setting into outflow jacks on the circuit. The burner controls determine temperature level at the selected point through straightforward contact and conduction of AC to the relevant burner's heating unit, each of which units is simply a crudely grounded high-resistance transformer circuit that conducts heat, again through simple contact, into the black iron spiral of its burner. Energy-to-work ratios here probably sit at no better than 3/2. There aren't even any reflecting pans under the burners. I tell my aunt that this is an old and poor and energy-inefficient stove. She says she knows and is sorry but they've had it since before Kennedy and it's got sentimental value, and that this year it came down to either a new stove or a new dishwasher. She is sitting at the sunlit kitchen table, reviewing verb tenses, apologizing about her stove. She says the chili needs to go on soon to simmer and reblend if it's going to go on at all; do I think I can fix the thingummy or should she run to the store for something cold?'

'I've only gotten one letter since he left, and all it says is how much he's taking care of a picture of me, and would I believe he kisses it? He didn't really like to kiss me. I could feel it.'

'The harnessed bundles of insulated wires all seem well connected to their burners' transformers, so I have to disconnect each bundle from its outflow jack on the distributor circuit and look at the circuit itself. The circuit is just too old and grimy and crude and pathetic to be certain about, but its AC-input and hot-current-outputs seem free of impediment or shear or obvious misconnec-tion. My aunt is conjugating French ir-verbs in the imperfect. She has a soft voice. It's quite pretty. She says: "Je venais, tu venais, il venait, elle venait, nous venions, vous veniez, Us venaient, elles venaient." I am deep in the bowels of the stove when she says my uncle once mentioned that it was just a matter of a screw to be tightened or something that had to be given a good knock. This is not especially helpful. I tighten the rusted screws on the case of the distributor circuit, reattach the unit cord to the input jack, and am about to reattach the bundles of wire from the burners when I see that the harnesses, bundle casings, and the outflow jacks on the circuit are so old and worn and be-gooed that I can't possibly tell which bundle of wires corresponds to which outflow jack on the circuit. I am afraid of a fire hazard if the current is made to cross improperly in the circuit, and the odds are (½) 4! that anyone could guess the proper jack for each bundle correctly. "Je tenais," my aunt says to herself. "Tu tenais, il tenait." She asks me if everything is going all right. I tell her I've probably almost got it. She says that if it's something serious it would really be no trouble to wait until my uncle gets home, that he's an old hand with that devil of a stove and could have a look; and if neither he nor I could get the thing going we two could just go out and get a bite. I feel my frightening haircut and tell her I've probably almost got it. I decide to strip some of the bundles of their old pink plastic casings for a few inches to see whether the wires themselves might be color-coded. I detach the bundles from their harnesses and strip down the first two, but all the wires reveal themselves to be the same dull, silverfish-gray, their conduction elements so old and frayed that the wires begin to unravel and stick out in different directions, and become disordered, and now I couldn't get them back in the distributor circuit even if I could tell where they went, not to mention the increased hazard inherent in crossing current in bare wires. I begin to sweat. I notice that the stove's unit cord's cloth insulation is itself so badly worn that one or two filaments of copper 220-wire are protruding. The cord could have been the trouble all along. I realize that I should have tried to activate the main oven unit first to see whether the power problem was even more fundamental than the burner bundles or the circuit. My aunt shifts in her chair. I begin to have trouble breathing. Stripped, frayed burner wires are spread out over the distributor like gray hair. The wires will have to be rebound into bundles in order to be reinserted and render the burners even potentially workable, but my uncle has no tool for binding. Nor have I ever personally bound a system of wire. The work that interests me is done with a pencil and a sheet of paper. Rarely even a calculator. At the cutting edge of electrical engineering, almost everything interesting is resolvable via the manipulation of variables. I've never once been stumped on an exam. Ever. And I appear to have broken this miserable piece-of-shit stove. I am unsure what to do. I could attach the main oven's own conduction bundle to a burner's outflow jack on the distributor circuit, but I have no idea how hot the resultant surge would render the burner. There is no way to know without data on the resistance ratios in the metal composition of the burners. The current used to heat a large oven even to WARM could melt a burner down. It's not impossible. I begin almost to cry. My aunt is moving on to ir/iss verbs. "Je par-tissais, tu partissais, il partissait, elk partissait." '