Nicholson Baker: Traveling Sprinkler

We led Smacko down to the shore and smelled the seaweed and looked out at the boats for a while. There were some drops of rain. We were a bit awkward with each other, I have to say, or maybe it was that the stones were unusually slippery — we’d lost some of our wonted familiarity. She told me she was working on a show about synthetic thyroid pills. Then we went back and I invited her out of the rain into my superclean car. She got the sandwiches and I opened the picnic basket. She’d brought a demi bottle of champagne to celebrate, which was awfully nice of her. The cork blew out the open window and we took bites of her egg salad. It was the best egg salad sandwich ever, and I said so. She’d also made a lemony beets-and-greens creation. I offered her some carrots and she crunched one, making an enormous sound.

“So what are you up to?” she asked.

I told her I’d bought a guitar and was learning some chords. “I think I’m done with poems for the moment. I’m writing songs now.”

“Can I hear one?”

“Not yet. But I vacuumed the car in your honor.”

She looked around. “Very nice. I have to say—” She hesitated. “It smells a tiny bit like smoke. Are you smoking cigarettes?”

“No no no. Cigars.”

“Oh, baby. Why?”

“I tried a corncob pipe and it was no good for me. Before that, I tried a can of Skoal, and it made me ill. I’ve stopped drinking. No beer, no Yukon Jack, no Tyrconnell. I need some new tongue-loosening addiction.”

“I can’t imagine you as a cigar smoker — I don’t want to imagine you as a cigar smoker.”

“It’s just a phase. It’s my brown period.” I stuffed the plastic bag that my sandwich came in into the picnic basket. “Are you still on friendly terms with that doctor dude?”

“Harris.” She nodded.

“Isn’t ‘Harris’ kind of a needless encumbrance? Does he really know you and understand you?”

Roz gave me a look. “Progress is being made,” she said. “There are complications.”

“Because I know you and I love you,” I said. “It’s my birthday and I can say that.”

“Then what about that woman in Pennsylvania?”

“You’d moved out, you were gone!” I said. “It was brief and fleeting and completely wrong in every way.” Several years ago I had an untidy interlude with a poet from Lehigh University, and I’d made the mistake of telling Roz, hoping it might make her jealous and bring her back.

“I moved out because you were being impossible,” Roz said. “We had no money and you were singing in the barn all day long.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

She looked at her hands. I made a big sigh. Smack whimpered from the back and Roz gave him some of her sandwich.

“Cigars,” she said. “Not good.”

“I’ll stop smoking them if you move back in with me.”

“Please, I’m serious. The show is so much work, and — I wasn’t going to tell you this — but I’m anemic. I’m very anemic. I have pica.”

“Oh baby, how absolutely awful.” I moved the picnic basket clumsily so I could hold her hand. “What’s pica?”

“Do you remember how I used to have those terrible periods that just went on and on?”

I said I certainly did.

“Well, they’re worse now,” Roz said. “They last more than a week and I go through boxes of ultra tampons. It’s a festival of gore every month. I haven’t been sleeping, because when you’re anemic you don’t sleep. You just sit up eating poppy seeds and anything crunchy. Sesame seeds — I eat tubs of sesame seeds. And dry oatmeal. Sometimes I want to eat the whole sidewalk. That’s what pica is. For instance.” She pointed. “See that big rock? To me it looks chewable. I want to eat that rock. That’s how messed up I am.”

“Oh my goodness,” I said. “Are you taking iron pills?”

“Yes, yes, but they don’t agree with me. I’ve been eating masses of collard greens, though.”

“What does the gynecologist say?”

“She says—” Roz started to cry.

“Sweetie!” I said.

“Don’t worry, it’s not cancer. But it sure is a pain.” She wiped her eyes with her napkin and took a breath. “I’ll be fine. I have to go now. I have to read a stack of research papers. We have a show coming up on colonoscopies. Harris thinks they’re a false religion, that most of them are unnecessary, and he’s pretty convincing.”

“Good, because nobody’s going to be poking around in my bottom. A doctor snuck a thermometer in there when I was five years old and it was horrible. Humiliating.”

Roz smiled. “I’m sorry to hear that,” she said.

“Ah, don’t be, water under the bridge.”

“Well, happy birthday, honey.” She kissed me on the cheek and drove off in her sporty battered car.

ROZ LOOKED PALE, now that I think of it. She’s working too hard. I sent her an email thanking her for the egg salad sandwich. “I’m worried about you,” I said. “Call me if I can do anything. Thank you for the picnic. Love — P. PS Forgot to say — great show on spinal fusion surgery! PPS I’m having problems writing lyrics. Only if you have time — can you think of some random three-word phrases, each using only one-syllable words?”

When Roz first moved in with me, I dusted off the traveling sprinkler and showed her what it looked like. I showed her how it worked, how you hooked up the hose to its fundament and the water surged in and up through its bowels and out the two twirly wands and how you could adjust the angle of the spray that came from the rusted ends of the wands. She lifted it and remarked at how heavy it was. She was delighted by it in her good-natured way. “It’s so simple,” she said.

I don’t want to say that a traveling sprinkler is the best way to water a lawn, because it isn’t. The best way to water a lawn is to live in a place where there’s enough rain, and when there are hot, dry months the lawn just stops growing and gets dusty. That’s how you should water a lawn. But if you want to have a big garden party and you want really green grass for it — say you want to have a wedding or a game of badminton and you want the grass to be very healthy and strong to hold up under all those happy, playful feet — then you lay out the hose course. You make the track. It’s better than the Disney Monorail. It’s better than the water slide made of plastic.

You lay that hose out like you’re squirting icing on a coffee cake, in a big set of repeating S’s. You can’t make the turns too sharp — nothing can be abrupt or “discontinuous,” as they say in Algebra II. The brilliance of the whole thing comes in its ability to ride its source of power. It’s a serious cast-iron machine.

When we first got together, Roz had wanted to have a baby, and like the selfish dumbass I was I’d said, “Not now”—which meant not ever.

• • •

I’M LISTENING to a song called “Jacuzzi Games,” by Loco Dice. There are no words. A woman makes soft but unfeigned-sounding murmurs and purrs of sexual pleasure over a good beat, with some added echo. The bassline doesn’t change. I’ve been working on my traveling sprinkler poem. When I’m fiddling with a poem it’s better not to have any words coming in the headphones. But then I sometimes reach a point when I’m totally absorbed. Then I can play any song at all, words or not. I don’t hear the words as words. Those are the best times. I can be listening to Springsteen singing “Pink Cadillac” in a shady spot on Inigo Road and be writing about sitting in a treehouse reading William Cullen Bryant’s poem “A Hymn of the Sea” while smoking a huge, nasty cigar from Federal Cigar, as I did yesterday. “A Hymn of the Sea” is in an ornate edition with a hundred engravings and my grandfather’s name written in pencil in the front. He wanted to be a poet and didn’t quite make it. My great-grandfather wrote light verse. I come from a long line of extremely minor poets.