Baker Nicholson - A Box of Matches

I’ve got my eyes closed now. The flames make semaphoring rhythms against my eyelids. An itch just made a guest appearance on my cheek, in the foothills of my beard — as the fire gets hotter it can make your face itch — and I noticed that I’ve gotten into the habit of using my tongue to prop my cheek from underneath, in order to stretch the skin a little and establish a solid base against which to scratch. I wonder now when I first began countering the force of my finger-scratch with tongue pressure through the cheek. Years ago, it must have been; I’ve kept no record. Once I had a briefcase that got a long scratch in it. I was looking for a job after college, and my father, in whose house I was then living (my parents having separated a year or two earlier), bought me a hand-sewn briefcase made of dark leather — not the lawyerly kind with the expandable bellows but a simpler design with two leather handles that slid down into the recesses in the sides of the central compartment. The briefcase sat on a chair in the middle of my room — every day I woke up and saw it there and was made happy by it. In it was a file with all four of my unfinished poems and another with my résumé and several more empty folders ready for the time when I would have more things to file. My father was at work by nine, so I didn’t see him in the morning, but he would leave notes for me — NEW BOX OF CHEERIOS, a note would say, in his fast but calligraphy-influenced printing, with a late-Victorian arrow pointing to the unopened Cheerios box, which was displayed at just the right angle to the paper. Next to the Cheerios was a bunch of bananas (often), and he would draw a hand with an extended index finger calling attention to that. NOTE FRESH BANANAS! the message would say, and the exclamation point would have its own drop shadow. I wish I had every morning note my father ever wrote me. I have some, I think, I hope.

So I would get up around ten-thirty and take a shower and talk to Claire on the phone, and then I would go out into the world with my new briefcase to seek my fortune, which involved walking around downtown for about an hour until I got hungry. One day I went to a cafeteria to have a hamburger. I was sitting down at the table with my briefcase in one hand and my tray holding a hamburger and a medium root beer, coleslaw, coffee, and a piece of pecan pie in the other, when the cup of root beer somehow tipped over and gushed into my new briefcase. I used some foul language and poured the root beer out of the briefcase into the tray. I took little pleasure in my lunch, although the mushrooms on the hamburger were quite good. When I was done, I called my father from a pay phone and told him what had happened. He said to go to Paul’s Shoe Repair and buy a can of Neat’s Foot Oil and rub it in. I did. I didn’t just rub it in, I poured it in, from the inside. This worked: the combination of root-beer sugar and shoe oil made the leather darker, and there was an odd smell for a while, but the briefcase was fine, better than ever.

Then at my grandfather’s funeral, one of my overly successful first cousins, all of whom went to Yale Medical School and are full of shallow competencies — humph! — said, “Here, I can put this in the back,” and wrestled my briefcase out of my hand and flipped it up and let it land on the spare tire in the trunk of his rented car. He took hold of both sides of it and pushed it back deeper into the trunk, not noticing that there was a long bolt with a rough edge projecting up from the bottom of the trunk, onto which the spare tire was clamped, and that as he pushed my briefcase across this bolt, it would scratch the leather. This was no surface scratch — this was a deep, straight gouge, a wound three eighths of an inch wide that went all the way down one side, exposing the leather’s untanned layer. “Sorry,” my cousin said. I took my briefcase over to a stone parapet with a round decorative cement globe in an urn and I bounced my fist a few times against the urn’s rough surface. When you make a tight fist, your little-finger muscle, which runs along the side of your hand, can bunch up and become surprisingly springy, and if you time the the fist-clenching just right, you can use the sudden bunching of the muscle to help send your fist back up in the air for the next bounce. At the airport, my father looked at the briefcase scratch, and he said, “I’d take it to Paul’s Shoe Repair.”

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.