Baker Nicholson - A Box of Matches

I spent almost all yesterday morning in bed dozing, and finally got into work around one. Now my coccyx hurts — the chest infection has descended to my tailbone, or has awakened an old wound. Last year I fell on my tailbone while getting into the car. Tears sprung, pain speared. And that event was an awakening of a very old injury, when once in fifth grade I went sledding down a steep hill. I had a long ride, without incident, and then came to what looked like an insignificant little drop-off from a snow-pile into a snow-covered school parking lot. That little drop landed me right on my tailbone. I hurt there for months afterward. I think I may have broken something, but tailbones are like toes, vestiges of tree-dwelling primates. You don’t really need to worry too much about whether they’re broken or just bruised.

To cool down just now I walked to the dining room, and I almost sat down on the two stairs between the dining room and the kitchen and rested, but instead I walked into the kitchen and had a glass of water. The moon is everywhere — it’s impossible to say what color it is — I thought there was new snow but it was just moon.

Several years ago I decided that I would make a collection of paper-towel designs. Hundreds of patterns were coming and going, offered by the paper-towel makers, and unlike wallpaper patterns nobody was interested in studying them as indicia of American taste. Do you remember when suddenly one of the manufacturers began printing in four colors? I think it was 1996. I had in mind a big folio, with a pane of a towel on each page, and a label of what it was, who had made it, the date, notes, etc. I saved maybe eight paper-towel samples and then abandoned the project: I lack the acquisitive methodicalness that you need to create a really great paper-towel collection. And the main point is that the designs that I would want to have collected, the ones at the top of my want list, are the ones from my own childhood and my early marriage. The designs now are perfectly fine, but the designs then — the sampler-inspired patterns and the alternating pepper grinders and carrots — held an allegorical fascination. Of course there was more excitement over paper towels then — the vast advertising budget for Bounty, the Quicker Picker-Upper, made it so. A big change in paper towels since the advent of bulk-purchase stores has been the variation in frame size. The old rolls had a perfectly consistent size across all brands, which was very helpful because then you got so that you could tear off a frame without thinking. Then one manufacturer made much longer towel frames, for unknown reasons — perhaps to get us to use them up faster — and I was forever yanking the roll off of its holder, pulling in the wrong place. The roll that I used today has excessively short frames — good, though, because you use less per yank. But consistency has gone all to hell.

If you put your face very close to the window, you sense through the glass the coldness outside. I went upstairs to go the bathroom and was amazed by how magnificently cool our bedroom was. Claire got up to pee and she said, sleepily, “I set up the coffee for you.”

“I know, I’m terribly sorry.”

“You threw it out.”

“I did, I’m sorry.”

“We’ll just have to order Chinese,” she murmured, falling asleep.

I asked her if she had a need for anything I might have stowed away in my pajamas.

“All set for the moment, thanks,” she said.

I keep thinking of a knee operation I had years ago, when I watched the arthroscopic probe on a small screen and saw my kneecap from underneath, like an ice floe from the perspective of a deep-diving seal, with a few bubbles that looked like air but were, said the surgeon, bubbles of fat. He sewed up my torn meniscus and I was better, having read eight murder mysteries, none of which I can remember. No, I can remember one. There was a Perry Mason novel, by Erle Stanley Gardner, in which a character in a ship goes up on deck because he wants “a lungful of storm.” That’s what I want — a lungful of storm.

Good morning, it’s 4:21 a.m. and the birch bark is burning well. I can pick up a pair of underwear with my toes. There are two ways to do this. Most people would grab a bunch of fabric by using all of their short, stubby, “normal” toes to clamp it against the ball of their foot and lift it, but because of my unusual middle toes, which are long and aquiline — distinguished — I can lift up the underwear by scissoring my middle toe and my big toe together onto the waistband: then I lift the underpants and hand them off to my hand and flip them towards the dirty-clothes bin. By then I’m ready to fall over, but I catch myself by planting my underpant-grasping foot back down on the floor. If you throw underpants in a particular way, the waistband assumes its full circular shape in the air, slowly rotating, on its way towards the dirty clothes.

Yesterday, having thus dealt with my underclothing, I had my shower, which was uneventful but for a moment near the middle. I was replacing the soap in the rubber-covered wire soap holder that hangs over the showerhead. It’s a helpful holder because the soap dries out between mornings, whereas soap that sits in the corner of the shower or in a ridged cubby or a built-in ledge does not. I use Basis soap because it has no brain-shriveling perfumes. It is filled with very dense heavy soap material: it’s harder and heavier than, say, Ivory soap. And it is a beautiful smooth oval shape, an egglike shape almost. But it’s as heavy as a paperweight, as hard as travertine when dry or newly wetted, and extremely slippery. More than once I have lost control of a bar of this soap. And yesterday when I dropped it I noticed that as soon as the soap squirted out of my fingers, my toes lifted, arching up from the tub as high as they could go, while the rest of my feet stayed where they were. Both sets of toes did this immediately, as soon as the soap left my grip. My toes had evidently learned something in life, ever since the chilblains that I got one winter. What they have learned is that if they are touching the floor of the tub and a bar of soap drops on them, it is going to hurt a lot; however if the toes are lifted up half an inch in the air, much of the energy of the collision will be absorbed as the egg of soap forces the tightly stretched toe-tendons to elongate, and the impact on chilblains or healing toe-bones won’t be nearly as painful. They learned this by trial and error, over many years, all by themselves, and now each time I fumble a bar of soap they arch up, on alert, braced for possible impact. My eyes are closed during all this, so I have no idea where the soap is falling; after it hits the tub, making a bowling-alley sound, they relax.

One of my middle toes has, as my coccyx does, an Old Injury. At seventeen, in the summer, I was the night cook at a busy place called Benny’s: I cleaned the kitchen after closing, wiping down all the surfaces, pouring bleach on the cutting boards and draining the fryers and, last of all, mopping the floor. At first the cleaning took me until four in the morning, and my ankles swelled from standing for twelve hours; later I got faster, and I began cleaning our own home kitchen for pleasure, shaking out the toaster and going in under the burners on the stove. I was promoted to night cook when the head cook walked out on beer-batter-fish Friday, our biggest night. The manager and the assistant manager took up stations at the fryers — I specialized in onion rings. Too forcefully I pulled out a metal drawer filled with half-gallon cartons of semi-frozen clams; the drawer came out and fell on my toe. The pain was tremendous. I hum-whispered a long quavery moan to myself, but the show had to go on — I began making the icy clams dance around in the breadcrumbs.