Baker Nicholson: A Box of Matches

I found the carafe easily, and the filter basket was behind the carafe. I pulled out one of the mugs. But where was the plastic snap-on lid that went on the top of the carafe? I groped my way around the whole dishwasher twice, methodically, before I finally found it leaning under a bowl. And then I had a terrible time snapping the top into place. I was pressing so hard that I worried that I might shear off the plastic pins on either side of the flange on the top flap, and that’s when I broke down and switched on the light switch — but it has a rheostat, thanks to our deaf electrician, and I was able to switch it on very low, just enough to be sure that I wasn’t shearing off the pins, and when the plastic top clinked into place I turned the light right off and finished up in the dark. The question is, Will that eruption of incandescence make a difference? Can I regain my early-morning consciousness? Everything is different because of everything else, and yet I feel, now safely installed in front of a healthy fire before four o’clock, that it didn’t make a bit of difference. My eye has reverted to its night mode without any trouble, and I have the same hollow, sleep-deprived feeling in my head that I always have — a feeling that is precious to me.

I started today’s fire with a crumpled-up potato bag — one of those bags with the window made of a crisscross of open cords. It burned like a bastard and lit some dead apple branches, and with the further help of a Triscuit box and an empty cardboard spool of white ribbon, the flame-front moved up to take control of the upper-tier logs. Striking the match was, in fact, a more searing light experience than turning on the kitchen light. And think of that word, struck , which stores within it the old form of fire lighting: we now swipe a match as we swipe a charge card through a machine that will read its magnetic stripe, whereas once, before matches, we must truly have struck a flint. And maybe the early matches were things you did whack against something, as you would strike two flints together, rather than swiping them, though I doubt it. As I remember, the hardboiled detective novels have characters who “scratch” a match, which is a good way of saying it. Diamond “Strike on Box” matches these are, Made in the USA, according to an emblem on the front.

Just now I stretched, looking over to my left at a table that is now in darkness but during the day holds a coffee-table book of Wayne Thiebaud paintings, including a very good painting of bowls of soup, some pumpkin, some pea. While I stretched, thinking of the soup bowls, my hand strayed under my pajama top and my middle finger found its way into my belly button where it discovered some lint. I rolled the lint into a tube, as one does, and having done so, I became curious about what such a tube would look like if it burned. I tossed it into one of the spaces between the coals. It went orange for a moment, fattened, and then darkened. It is still there now but it will be lost when I stir the coals.

Claire told me last night that Lucy, the frail but funny woman who lives on our street, has had to go into the hospital. She’s going to be okay, but the woman who helps Lucy was trying to find a home for Lucy’s pets. Claire was wondering whether we should take one of the cats. I see that it would be a good thing to do but it seems to me that our current cat gets into terrible fights with neighbor cats already, and he’s had a major blow this year as a result of the arrival of the duck. Greta, although not very bright in some ways, is shrewd about cats. What you do is you walk up to the cat slowly, as if you want to say hello, and when the cat tentatively extends its nose in the willing-to-sniff-and-be-sniffed stance, you peck at him sharply. Then, when the shocked cat turns to walk away, his ears back, his feelings and nose hurt, lunge at him again and peck him directly on or near his anus. That makes him gallop off — for no animal likes to be pecked on the anus by a duck.

Here is, since it has come up again, how we got the duck. Phoebe went to camp this summer — a camp that had llamas, goats, small noisy pigs, and ducks. The ducks had ducklings, and Phoebe called to tell us that there was going to be a lottery, the winner of which would take home a duck. Could she enter the lottery? There were six hundred children at the camp; although I hesitated, I thought it was all right to say yes to the lottery because the chance of our ending up with the duck was tiny. Only four families said yes to the lottery, however, and there were, it turned out, six ducklings. Having “won,” Phoebe picked the smallest one — small but, she thought, perky, and we put her in a cardboard box and drove it — her — home. And now we have this brown duck who has enriched our lives considerably. One cat and one duck is enough, however.

The difficulty with the duck in the winter is that the hose is frozen. It is still out there somewhere under the snow-piles that the plow has made, and it will reappear in the spring — but it has disappeared for now. Up till the first blizzard we were filling a plastic wading pool for Greta to use. When the water was fresh she dove and flapped her wings underwater to rinse off her underwing area, lunging forward so hard that unless she turned her head she would bonk into the far side of the pool. We also walked with her down to the creek, where she was happy rooting in the mud. Even after it had snowed we walked with her down the hill once or twice so that she could splash in the very cold creek water. Her yellow feet are unsuited to snow; she has trouble climbing any hill, and yet she flies only to signal that she is hungry.

But now that it is iron-cold, cold enough that we worry about how she manages at night, fluffed in with her cedar shavings, even with the blanket over the doghouse and the snow on the blanket, she has not been immersed in any sort of water for weeks. I hope her feathers don’t lose their insulative properties when she can’t bathe. Her feet, which you would think would be vulnerable to frostbite when she stands on the ice, seem unaffected. When one foot begins to feel intolerably cold, she just pulls it up into her feathers and stands balanced on the other. Then she switches.

Good morning, it’s 4:45 a.m. Yesterday my son and I got haircuts from Sheila in town. I like her because she’s fast and she doesn’t care that I have what Claire calls a “roundabout,” meaning that I’m well on my way to being bald. Nor does she want to give my son a shelf haircut. She’s a person who just likes cutting people’s hair. There you have it — just snipping locks all day long and sweeping the piles into garbage bags. My son gets a solemn expression when he’s having a haircut. I looked at him in the mirror, sitting with his wet hair in the big salon chair with the white clerical collar on him — eight years old, noticeably taller than last time, with good straight shoulders and a straight back — and I wanted to make low animal noises, growlings, of love for him. I can’t call him pet names like “Dr. Van Deusen” anymore in public, he has forbidden me. I now must call him simply Henry. Henry it is. I asked Sheila what she thought of the siding that was going up on the old Congregational church in town. She nodded approvingly and said, “Low maintenance.”

Sometimes if Sheila’s closed or booked up, Henry and I go to Ronnie’s barbershop. The first year we lived here, we went to Ronnie’s father, also named Ronnie, a man who nodded and pursed his lips as he snipped. The father retired and the son took over. The son scowls all the time; he’s one of those people whose mouth falls into a scowl, although in fact he’s fairly upbeat. He uses his father’s old-fashioned cash register, which makes a ringing sound when you push down the keys. But it’s a very long wait in Ronnie’s shop, because his prices are low and he gets a lot of business from the military bases nearby. I don’t like watching these army people get their hair cut. They want it “skinned” and flat-topped. Their heads rise up off of thick necks and they narrow at the top like medium-range missiles, and as Ronnie uses the shaver on them, folds of back-of-head skin begin to reveal themselves. The back of a man’s head is not meant to be seen: there is something repulsive, almost evil, about the place where the skull meets the top of the spine. Old scars, too — Ronnie’s shaver’s dispassionate teeth move back and forth over a white, C-shaped scar, grinding away the hair.