Peculiar how unconstrained he felt to understand the words that were spoken to him. Peculiar his sense of freedom from even that minimal burden of decoding spoken English.
She tormented him no further but went to the basement, where Alfred had shut himself inside his lab and Gary was amassing (“Thirty-seven, thirty–eight”) consecutive bounces on his paddle.
“Tock tock?” she said, wagging her head in invitation.
She was hampered by pregnancy or at least the idea of it, and Gary could have trounced her, but her pleasure at being played with was so extremely evident that he simply disengaged himself, mentally multiplying their scores or setting himself small challenges like returning the ball to alternating quadrants. Every night after dinner he honed this skill of enduring a dull thing that brought a parent pleasure. It seemed to him a lifesaving skill. He believed that terrible harm would come to him when he could no longer preserve his mother’s illusions.
And she looked so vulnerable tonight. The exertions of dinner and dishes had relaxed her hair’s rollered curls. Little blotches of sweat were blooming through the cotton bodice of her dress. Her hands had been in latex gloves and were as red as tongues.
He sliced a winner down the line and past her, the ball running all the way to the shut door of the metallurgy lab. It bounced up and knocked on this door before subsiding. Enid pursued it carefully. What silence, what darkness, there was behind that door. Al seemed not to have a light on.
There existed foods that even Gary hated—Brussels sprouts, boiled okra—and Chipper had watched his pragmatic sibling palm them and fling them into dense shrubbery from the back doorway, if it was summer, or secrete them on his person and dump them in the toilet, if it was winter. Now that Chipper was alone on the first floor he could easily have disappeared his liver and his beet greens. The difficulty: his father would think that he had eaten them, and eating them was exactly what he was refusing now to do. Food on the plate was necessary to prove refusal.
He minutely peeled and scraped the flour crust off the top of the liver and ate it. This took ten minutes. The denuded surface of the liver was a thing you didn’t want to see.
He unfolded the beet greens somewhat and rearranged them.
He examined the weave of the place mat.
He listened to the bouncing ball, his mother’s exaggerated groans and her nerve-grating cries of encouragement (“Ooo, good one, Gary!”). Worse than spanking or even liver was the sound of someone else’s Ping-Pong. Only silence was acceptable in its potential to be endless. The score in Ping-Pong bounced along toward twenty-one and then the game was over, and then two games were over, and then three were over, and to the people inside the game this was all right because fun had been had, but to the boy at the table upstairs it was not all right. He’d involved himself in the sounds of the game, investing them with hope to the extent of wishing they might never stop. But they did stop, and he was still at the table, only it was half an hour later. The evening devouring itself in futility. Even at the age of seven Chipper intuited that this feeling of futility would be a fixture of his life. A dull waiting and then a broken promise, a panicked realization of how late it was.
This futility had let’s call it a flavor.
After he scratched his head or rubbed his nose his fingers harbored something. The smell of self.
Or again, the taste of incipient tears.
Imagine the olfactory nerves sampling themselves, receptors registering their own configuration.
The taste of self-inflicted suffering, of an evening trashed in spite, brought curious satisfactions. Other people stopped being real enough to carry blame for how you felt. Only you and your refusal remained. And like self-pity, or like the blood that filled your mouth when a tooth was pulled—the salty ferric juices that you swallowed and allowed yourself to savor—refusal had a flavor for which a taste could be acquired.
In the lab below the dining room Alfred sat with his head bowed in the darkness and his eyes closed. Interesting how eager he’d been to be alone, how hatefully clear he’d made this to everyone around him; and now, having finally closeted himself, he sat hoping that someone would come and disturb him. He wanted this someone to see how much he hurt. Though he was cold to her it seemed unfair that she was cold in turn to him: unfair that she could happily play Ping-Pong, shuffle around outside his door, and never knock and ask how he was doing.
Three common measures of a material’s strength were its resistance to pressure, to tension, and to shearing.
Every time his wife’s footsteps approached the lab he braced himself to accept her comforts. Then he heard the game ending, and he thought surely she would take pity on him now. It was the one thing he asked of her, the one thing—
(Schopenhauer: Woman pays the debt of life not by what she does, but by what she suffers; by the pains of childbearing and care for the child, and by submission to her husband, to whom she should be a patient and cheering companion.)
But no rescue was forthcoming. Through the closed door he heard her retreat to the laundry room. He heard the mild buzz of a transformer, Gary playing with the O-gauge train beneath the Ping-Pong table.
A fourth measure of strength, important to manufacturers of rail stock and machine parts, was hardness.
With unspeakable expenditure of will Alfred turned on a light and opened his lab notebook.
Even the most extreme boredom had merciful limits. The dinner table, for example, possessed an underside that Chipper explored by resting his chin on the surface and stretching his arms out below. At his farthest reach were baffles pierced by taut wire leading to pullable rings. Complicated intersections of roughly finished blocks and angles were punctuated, here and there, by deeply countersunk screws, little cylindrical wells with scratchy turnings of wood fiber around their mouths, irresistible to the probing finger. Even more rewarding were the patches of booger he’d left behind during previous vigils. The dried patches had the texture of rice paper or fly wings. They were agreeably dislodgable and pulverizable.
The longer Chipper felt his little kingdom of the underside, the more reluctant he became to lay eyes on it. Instinctively he knew that the visible reality would be puny. He’d see crannies he hadn’t yet discovered with his fingers, and the mystery of the realms beyond his reach would be dispelled, the screw holes would lose their abstract sensuality and the boogers would shame him, and one evening, then, with nothing left to relish or discover, he just might die of boredom.
Elective ignorance was a great survival skill, perhaps the greatest.
Enid’s alchemical lab beneath the kitchen contained a Maytag with a wringer that swung over it, twinned rubber rollers like enormous black lips. Bleach, bluing, distilled water, starch. A bulky locomotive of an iron, its power cord clad in a patterned knit fabric. Mounds of white shirts in three sizes.
To prepare a shirt for pressing she sprinkled it with water and left it rolled up in a towel. When it was thoroughly redampened she ironed the collar first and then the shoulders, working down.
During and after the Depression she’d learned many survival skills. Her mother ran a boardinghouse in the basin between downtown St. Jude and the university. Enid had a gift for math, and so she not only washed sheets and cleaned toilets and served meals but also handled numbers for her mother. By the time she’d finished high school and the war had ended, she was keeping all the house’s books, billing the boarders, and figuring the taxes. With the quarters and dollars she picked up on the side—wages from baby-sitting, tips from college boys and other long-term boarders—she paid for classes at night school, inching toward a degree in accounting which she hoped she would never have to use. Already two men in uniform had proposed to her, each of them a rather good dancer, but neither was clearly an earner and both still risked getting shot at. Her mother had married a man who didn’t earn and died young. Avoiding such a husband was a priority with Enid. She intended to be comfortable in life as well as happy.
To the b
oardinghouse a few years after the war came a young steel engineer newly transferred to St. Jude to manage a foundry. He was a full-lipped thick-haired well-muscled boy in a man’s shape and a man’s suits. The suits were themselves luxuriantly pleated wool beauties. Once or twice every night, serving dinner at the big round table, Enid glanced over her shoulder and caught him looking, and made him blush. Al was Kansan. After two months he found courage to take her skating. They drank cocoa and he told her that human beings were born to suffer. He took her to a steel-company Christmas party and told her that the intelligent were doomed to be tormented by the stupid. He was a good dancer and a good earner, however, and she kissed him in the elevator. Soon they were engaged and they chastely rode a night train to McCook, Nebraska, to visit his aged parents. His father kept a slave whom he was married to.
Cleaning Al’s room in St. Jude she found a much-handled volume of Schopenhauer with certain passages underlined. For example: The pleasure in this world, it has been said, outweighs the pain; or, at any rate, there is an even balance between the two. If the reader wishes to see shortly whether this statement is true, let him compare the respective feelings of two animals, one of which is engaged in eating the other.
What to believe about Al Lambert? There were the old-man things he said about himself and the young-man way he looked. Enid had chosen to believe the promise of his looks. Life then became a matter of waiting for his personality to change.
While she waited, she ironed twenty shirts a week, plus her own skirts and blouses.
Nosed in around the buttons with the iron’s tip. Flattened the wrinkles, worked out the kinks.
Her life would have been easier if she hadn’t loved him so much, but she couldn’t help loving him. Just to look at him was to love him.
Every day she endeavored to cleanse the boys’ diction, smooth out their manners, whiten their morals, brighten their attitudes, and every day she faced another pile of dirty crumpled laundry.
Even Gary was anarchic sometimes. He liked best to send the electric engine barreling into curves and derail it, see the black chunk of metal skid awkwardly and roll and spark in frustration. Second best was to place plastic cows and cars on the rail and engineer little tragedies.
What gave him the real techno boner, however, was a radio-controlled toy automobile, much advertised on television lately, that went anywhere. To avoid ambiguity he planned to make it the only item on his Christmas list.
From the street, if you paid attention, you could see the light in the windows dimming as Gary’s train or Enid’s iron or Alfred’s experiments drained power off the grid. But how lifeless the house looked otherwise. In the lighted houses of the Meisners, of the Schumperts and the Persons and the Roots, people were clearly at home—whole families grouped around tables, young heads bent over homework, dens aflicker with TV, toddlers careening, a grandparent testing a tea bag’s virtue with a third soaking. These were spirited, unselfconscious houses.
Whether anybody was home meant everything to a house. It was more than a major fact: it was the only fact.
The family was the house’s soul.
The waking mind was like the light in a house.
The soul was like the gopher in his hole.
Consciousness was to brain as family was to house.
Aristotle: Suppose the eye were an animal—sight would be its soul.
To understand the mind you pictured domestic activity, the hum of related lives on varied tracks, the hearth’s fundamental glow. You spoke of “presence” and “clutter” and “occupation.” Or, conversely, of “vacancy” and “shutting down.” Of “disturbance.”
Maybe the futile light in a house with three people separately absorbed in the basement and only one upstairs, a little boy staring at a plate of cold food, was like the mind of a depressed person.
Gary was the first to tire of the basement. He surfaced and skirted the too-bright dining room, as if it held the victim of a sickening disfigurement, and went up to the second floor to brush his teeth.
Enid followed soon with seven warm white shirts. She, too, skirted the dining room. She reasoned that if the problem in the dining room was her responsibility then she was horrendously derelict in not resolving it, and a loving mother could never be so derelict, and she was a loving mother, so the responsibility must not have been hers. Eventually Alfred would surface and see what a beast he’d been and be very, very sorry. If he had the nerve to blame her for the problem, she could say: “You’re the one who said he had to sit there till he ate it.”
While she ran a bath she tucked Gary into bed. “Always be my little lion,” she said.
“OK.”
“Is he fewocious? Is he wicious? Is he my wicious wittle wion?”
Gary didn’t answer these questions. “Mom,” he said.
“Chipper is still at the table, and it’s almost nine.”
“That’s between Dad and Chipper.”
“Mom? He really doesn’t like those foods. He’s not just pretending.”
“I’m so glad you’re a good eater,” Enid said.
“Mom, it’s not really fair.”
“Sweetie, this is a phase your brother’s going through. It’s wonderful you’re so concerned, though. It’s wonderful to be so loving. Always be so loving.”
She hurried to stop the water and immerse herself.
In a dark bedroom next door Chuck Meisner imagined, going inside her, that Bea was Enid. As he chugged to ejaculation he was trading.
He wondered if any exchange had a market in Erie Belt options. Buy five thousand shares outright with thirty puts for a downside hedge. Or better, if someone offered him a rate, a hundred naked calls.
She was pregnant and trading up in cup size, A to Β and eventually even C, Chuck guessed, by the time the baby came. Like some municipality’s bond rating in a tailspin.
One by one the lights of St. Jude were going out.
And if you sat at the dinner table long enough, whether in punishment or in refusal or simply in boredom, you never stopped sitting there. Some part of you sat there all your life.
As if sustained and too-direct contact with time’s raw passage could scar the nerves permanently, like staring at the sun.
As if too-intimate knowledge of any interior were necessarily harmful knowledge. Were knowledge that could never be washed off.
(How weary, how worn, a house lived in to excess.)
Chipper heard things and saw things but they were all in his head. After three hours, the objects surrounding him were as drained of flavor as old bubble gum. His mental states were strong by comparison and overwhelmed them. It would have taken an effort of will, a reawakening, to summon the term “place mat” and apply it to the visual field that he had observed so intensely that its reality had dissolved in the observing, or to apply the word “furnace” to the rustle in the ducts which in its recurrence had assumed the character of an emotional state or an actor in his imagination, an embodiment of Evil Time. The faint fluctuations in the light as someone ironed and someone played and someone experimented and the refrigerator cycled on and off had been part of the dream. This changefulness, though barely noticeable, had been a torment. But it had stopped now.
Now only Alfred remained in the basement. He probed a gel of ferroacetates with the electrodes of an ammeter.
A late frontier in metallurgy: custom-formation of metals at room temperature. The Grail was a substance which could be poured or molded but which after treatment (perhaps with an electrical current) had steel’s superior strength and conductivity and resistance to fatigue. A substance easy like plastic and hard like metal.
The problem was urgent. A cultural war was being waged, and the forces of plastic were winning. Alfred had seen jam and jelly jars with plastic lids. Cars with plastic roofs.
Unfortunately, metal in its free state—a nice steel stake or a solid brass candlestick—represented a high level of order, and Nature was slatternly and preferred disorder. The crumble
of rust. The promiscuity of molecules in solution. The chaos of warm things. States of disorder were vastly more likely to arise spontaneously than were cubes of perfect iron. According to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, much work was required to resist this tyranny of the probable—to force the atoms of a metal to behave themselves.
Alfred was sure that electricity was equal to this work. The current that came through the grid amounted to a borrowing of order from a distance. At power plants an organized piece of coal became a flatulence of useless warm gases; an elevated and self-possessed reservoir of water became entropic runoff wandering toward a delta. Such sacrifices of order produced the useful segregation of electrical charges that he put to work at home.
He was seeking a material that could, in effect, electroplate itself. He was growing crystals in unusual materials in the presence of electric currents.
It wasn’t hard science but the brute probabilism of trial and error, a groping for accidents that he might profit from. One college classmate of his had already made his first million with the results of a chance discovery.
That he might someday not have to worry about money: it was a dream identical to the dream of being comforted by a woman, truly comforted, when the misery overcame him.
The dream of radical transformation: of one day waking up and finding himself a wholly different (more confident, more serene) kind of person, of escaping that prison of the given, of feeling divinely capable.
He had clays and gels of silicate. He had silicone putties. He had slushy ferric salts succumbing to their own deliquescence. Ambivalent acetylacetonates and tetracarbonyls with low melting points. A chunk of gallium the size of a damson plum.
The head chemist at the Midland Pacific, a Swiss Ph.D. bored into melancholy by a million measurements of engine-oil viscosity and Brinell hardness, kept Alfred in supplies. Their superiors were aware of the arrangement—Alfred would never have risked getting caught in something underhanded—and it was informally understood that if he ever came up with a patentable process, the Midpac would get a share of any proceeds.