“Is it my imagination, or did this story just get really weird all of a sudden?”
“Well, the context is supposed to explain and so minimize the weirdness. The tree toad in the pit in her neck is the thing that has kept the Thermos woman from connecting emotionally with the world outside her: it has been what has kept her in sadness and confusion, see also darkness and shadow, what has bound and constrained her, see also being wrapped in a scarf, what has kept her from facing the external world, see also staying in profile all the time. The tree toad is the mechanism of nonconnection and alienation, the symbol and cause of the Thermos woman’s isolation; yet it also becomes clear after a while that she is emotionally attached to the tree toad in a very big way, and cares more for it and gives it more attention than she gives herself, there in the privacy of her apartment. And the man also discovers that all the scarves the woman wears to cover up and hide the tree toad are full of tiny holes, air holes for the toad, holes that are practically invisible and that the woman herself makes via millions of tiny punctures of the cloth with a pin, late at night.”
“My ear even hurts a little. We must be really high.”
“So that the very thing that has made the woman unconnected when she wants to be connected and so has made her extremely unhappy is also the center of her life, a thing she cares a lot about, and is even, in certain ways the man can’t quite comprehend, proud of, and proud of the fact that she can feed the pale-green tree toad bits of food off her finger, and that it will let her scratch its white throat with a letter opener. So now things are understandably ambiguous, and it’s not clear whether deep down at the core of her being the Thermos woman really wants to connect, after all, at all. Except as time goes by and the man continues to hang around, exercising his non-love love-mechanism, being gentle and caring, the woman falls more and more for him, and clearly wants to connect, and her relation with the tree toad in the pit in her neck gets ambiguous, and at times she’s hostile toward it and flicks at it cruelly with her fingernail, except at other times she falls back into not wanting to connect, and so dotes on the tree toad, and scratches it with the letter opener, and is aloof toward the man. And this goes on and on, and she falls for the man on the whole more and more. And the man begins to be unsure about his formerly definitely non-love feelings for this strange and not too pretty but still quite complex and in many ways brave and in all ways certainly very interesting Thermos woman, and so his whole love-situation gets vastly more complicated than it’s ever been before.”
“Listen, would you like a Canadian Club? I can get Jennifer to bring you a Canadian Club.”
“Not too tasty with gum, I’m afraid, of which I would however like another piece.”
“Coming right up.”
“And so things are complicated, and the man earns the Thermos woman’s trust more and more, and finally one night she brings him to her family’s home in Yonkers, for a family get-together and dinner, and the man meets her whole family, and he knows right away something’s up, because they all have scarves around their necks, and they’re clearly extremely on edge about there being an outsider in their midst, but anyway they all sit around the living room for a while, in uncomfortable silence, with cocktails, and Cokes for the little kids, and then they sit down to dinner, and right before they all sit down, the Thermos woman looks significantly at the man, and then at her father, and then in a gesture of letting the family know she’s clued the man into her secret condition and initiated some kind of nascent emotional connection, she undoes her scarf and throws it aside, and her tree toad gives a little chirrup, and there’s a moment of incredibly tense silence, and then the father slowly undoes and discards his scarf, too, and in the pit in the left side of his neck there’s a mottle-throated fan-wing moth, and then the whole rest of the family undo their scarves, too, and they all have little animals living in pits in their necks: the mother has a narrow-tailed salamander, one brother has a driver ant, one sister has a wolf spider, another brother has an axolotl, one of the little children has a sod webworm. Et cetera et cetera.”
“I think I feel the need for context again.”
“Well, the father explains to the man, as the family is sitting around the table, eating, and also feeding their respective neck-tenants little morsels off the tips of their fingers, that their family is from an ancient and narratively unspecified area in Eastern Europe, in which area the people have always stood in really ambiguous relations to the world outside them, and that the area’s families were internally fiercely loyal, and their members were intimately and thoroughly connected with one another, but that the family units themselves were fiercely independent, and tended to view just about all non-family-members as outsiders, and didn’t connect with them, and that the tiny animals in their necks, which specific animal-types used to be unique to each family and the same for each member of a particular family, in the old days, were symbols of this difference from and non-connection with the rest of the outside world. But then the father goes on to say that these days inbreeding and the passage of time were making the animal-types in the necks of the family-members different, and that also, regrettably, some younger members of the fiercely loyal families were now inclined to resent the secrecy and non-connection with the world that having animals in their necks required and entitled them to, and that some members of his own family had unfortunately given him to understand that they weren’t entirely happy about the situation. And here he and all the other members of the family stop eating and glare at the Thermos woman, there in her glasses, who is silently trying to feed her tree toad a bit of pot roast off the tip of her finger. And the man’s heart just about breaks with pity for the Thermos woman, who so clearly now stands in such an ambiguous relation to everything and everyone around her, and his heart almost breaks, and he also realizes in an epiphany-ish flash that he has sort of fallen in love with the Thermos woman, in a way, though not in the way he’d fallen for any of the uncountable number of women he’d fallen in love with before.”
“Look down a second, if it doesn’t hurt your ear. I think we’re over Pennsylvania. I thought I saw a hex sign on a barn roof. We’re past Lake Erie, at least.”
“Thank God. Drowning in sludge is one of my special horrors.”
“.…”
“And so things are complicated, enormously complicated, and the man feels he’s now experiencing the kind of strong discriminating love the love therapist had been recommending, so he’s pleased, and also maybe I neglected to mention he’s long since toned down his head-over-heels-in-love-in-public inclinations, things are now much more under control, and with all his professional weight-measure experience, plus his new-found amorous restraint, he manages to land a fairly good job with a company that makes scales, and he’s doing pretty well, although he does miss that exciting head-busting rush of hot feeling he used to get from being madly, passionately, non-discriminatingly in love. But the Thermos woman is clearly undergoing even more complicated changes and feelings than the man; she’s obviously fallen in love with him, and her nascent connection with him is obviously arousing in her a desire to begin to connect emotionally with the entire outside world, and she gets more concerned with and attentive to her own appearance; she loses more weight, and buys contact lenses to replace the Coke-bottle glasses, and gets a perm, and there’s still of course the problem of chinlessness and leg-length, but still. But most of all she now noticeably begins to perceive the green tree toad in the pit in her neck as a definite problem, and ceases to identify herelf with it and non-connection, and begins instead to identify herself with herself and connection. But now her perception of the tiny toad as a definite problem, which is, remember, a function of her new world view and desire to connect, now paradoxically causes her enormous grief and distress, because, now that she feels a bit connected to the world, she no longer feels that she wants to stay in shadow and present only profiles—so far so good—but that now even though she doesn’t want to hide away she feels mor
e than ever as though she ought to, because she’s got a reptile living in a pit in her neck, after all, and is to that extent alienated and different and comparatively disgusting, with respect to the world she now wants to connect with.”
“Aren’t tree toads amphibians, really?”
“Wise-ass. Amphibian in a pit in her neck. But she suddenly and ominously gets even more fanatical about being in shadow and wearing the scarves, even though these are obviously alienating things: the more she wants to be accepted by the world, the more she’s beaten back by her heightened perception of her own difference, amphibian-tenant-wise. She becomes absolutely obsessed with the green tree toad, and gives it a really hard time with her fingernail, and cries, and tells the man she hates the toad, and the man tries to cheer her up by taking her out dancing at a nightclub that has lots of shadows. Gum, please.”
“.…”
“And things get worse, and the Thermos woman is now drinking a lot, sitting in her apartment, and as she’s drinking, the man will look at her sadly, as he sits nearby working on the design for a scale; and the tree toad, when it’s not busy getting flicked by a fingernail, will look at the man and blink sadly, from the lower lid up, there in the pit in the Thermos woman’s neck.”
“.…”
“And now, disastrously, it’s late April. It’s the height of spring, almost. Have you ever been around someplace that has tree toads, in the spring, Lenore?”
“Oh, no.”
“They sing. It’s involuntary. It’s instinctive. They sing and chirrup like mad. And this, I rather like to think, is why the tree toad looked sadly at the man as the man was looking sadly at the drinking Thermos woman: the tree toad has its own nature to be true to, too. The toad’s maybe aware that its singing will have a disastrous effect on the Thermos woman, right now, because whereas in the past she always just used to keep herself hidden away, in the spring, in the singing season, now she’s clearly torn by strong desires to connect, to be a part of the world. And so maybe the tree toad knows it’s hurting the Thermos woman, maybe irreparably, by chirruping like mad, but what can it do? And the singing clearly drives the Thermos woman absolutely insane with frustration and horror, and her urges both to connect and to hide away in shadow are tearing at her like hell, and it’s all pathetic, and also, as should by now be apparent, more than a little ominous.”
“Oh, God.”
“And one day, not long after the toad began singing in the apartment, as the air is described as getting soft and sweet and tinged with gentle promises of warmth, with a flowery smell all around, even in New York City, the man gets a call at work from the Thermos woman’s father, in Yonkers: it seems that the Thermos woman had thrown herself in front of the subway and killed herself that morning in a truly horrible way.”
“Sweet Jesus.”
“And the man is obviously incredibly upset, and doesn’t even thank the father for calling him, even though it was quite a thing for the Eastern European father to do, what with the man being an outsider, et cetera, and so but the man is incredibly upset, and doesn’t even go to the funeral, he’s so frantic, and he discovers now—the hard way—that he really was connected to the Thermos woman, really and truly, deeply and significantly, and that the severing of an established connection is exponentially more painful than the rejection of an attempted connection, and he wallows in grief, and also disastrously his old love problem immediately comes roaring back stronger than ever, and the man is falling passionately in love with anything with a pulse, practically, and now, disastrously, men as well as women, and he’s perceived as a homosexual, and starts getting regularly beaten up at work, and then he loses his job when he tells his supervisor he’s in love with him, and he’s back out wandering the streets, and now he starts falling in love with children, too, which is obviously frowned upon by society, and he commits some gross though of course involuntary indiscretions, and gets arrested, and thrown in jail overnight, and he’s in a truly horrible way, and he curses the love therapist for even suggesting that he try to love with his discriminating-love-faculty.”
“May I please ask a question?”
“Yes.”
“Why didn’t the Thermos woman just take the tree toad out of her neck and put it in a coffee can or something?”
“A, the implication is that the only way the animal-in-neck people can rid themselves of the animals in their necks is to die, see for instance the subway, and b, you’re totally, completely missing what I at any rate perceive to be the point of the story.”
“.…”
“And the man is in a horrible way, and his old love problem is raging, together with and compounded by his continued grief at the severed Thermos-woman-connection, and his desire never ever to connect again, which desire itself stands in a troublingly ambiguous and bad-way-producing relation to the original love problem. And so things are just horrible. And they go on this way for about a week, and then one night in May the man is lying totally overcome by grief and by his roughly twenty-five fallings in love and run-ins with the police that day, and he’s almost out of his mind, lying in a very bad way there on the rug of his apartment, and suddenly there’s an impossibly tiny knock at the apartment door.”
“Oh, no.”
“What do you mean, ‘Oh, no’?”
“.…”
“Well he opens the door, and there on the floor of the hall outside his apartment is the Thermos woman’s tiny delicate pale-green tree toad, blinking up at him, from the lower eyelid up, with its left rear foot flattened and trailing way behind it and obviously hurt, no doubt we’re to assume from the subway episode, which episode however the toad at least seemed to have survived.”
“Wow.”
“And the story ends with the man, bleary-eyed and punchy from grief and love and connection-ambiguity, at the door, staring down at the tiny pale-green tree toad, which is still simply looking up at him, blinking sadly in reverse, and giving a few tentative little chirrups. And they’re just there in the hall looking at each other as the story ends.”
“Wow.”
“I think I’d like to try two pieces of gum at once, please.”
“.…”
“It’s clearly not right for the Frequent Review, but I’m going to write a personal rejection note in which I say that I personally liked it, and thought it had possibilities, though it was not as yet a finished piece.”
“Another troubled-collegiate-mind submission?”
“That’s the very strong sense I get, although the kid tried to pass himself off as much older in his cover letter, and included what I have now determined to be a phony bibliography of published material.”
“Lordy.”
“I’m suddenly monstrously hungry, Lenore.”
“I know for a fact there are sandwiches. Let me buzz Jennifer.”
“.…”
Afterword
That was fun, wasn’t it?
I had the pleasure of acquiring and editing—or trying to edit—David Foster Wallace’s brilliant first novel, The Broom of the System. This basically fulfilled every idealistic and naive dream I ever had of being the editor who discovered the best writer of his generation, and I was only thirty-six at the time. Imagine the thrill of turning the pages of a manuscript from a completely unknown young author and encountering such instances of bravura storytelling as you have just read. John Keats wrote one of his greatest poems about that feeling, “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer.” Like him, “Then felt I like some watcher of the skies / When a new planet swims into his ken.” Planet DFW had swum into view.
The Broom of the System is a novel of ideas, most of them deriving from the gnomic philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. I was a little thin, to put it mildly, on my Wittgenstein, so before setting down to edit—or try to edit—the novel, I read a compact Modern Masters volume to bone up on his work. That didn’t help much, frankly, as David overwhelmed most of my queries and reservations with an unstoppable volley of high-IQ verbiage. Sti
ll, to this day I can quote Wittgenstein’s solemn admonition “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent,” which is a guaranteed conversation stopper.
So I left the brainy big-picture stuff to David’s big brain and concentrated on the intense local pleasures to be experienced in his virtuoso deployment of linguistic facility and narrative velocity, of which this tree toad episode is such an outstanding example. The parallel John Irving send-up in the novel involving a headlong attempt to save a dying baby may be even better; certainly David wiped the floor with the competition when he read that section at his first-ever public reading, in 1987 at New York’s McBurney Y. I was there, and that evening a star was born.
One final note. In reading this piece, I connected two dots I never had before. David once told me that one of his favorite movies was the 1989 cult film How to Get Ahead in Advertising, starring Richard Grant as an advertising copywriter blocked on an ad for pimple cream. He discovers that a boil on his neck is actually growing into a replica of his head, one that gives voice to all his darkest impulses about hucksterism and success, and eventually replaces him. A similar literalization of a psychic state of alienation of course informs the passage you’ve just read, and it was a technique David would continue to use and refine.
—Gerald Howard
GIRL WITH CURIOUS HAIR
Little Expressionless Animals
IT’S 1976. The sky is low and full of clouds. The gray clouds are bulbous and wrinkled and shiny. The sky looks cerebral. Under the sky is a field, in the wind. A pale highway runs beside the field. Lots of cars go by. One of the cars stops by the side of the highway. Two small children are brought out of the car by a young woman with a loose face. A man at the wheel of the car stares straight ahead. The children are silent and have very white skin. The woman carries a grocery bag full of something heavy. Her face hangs loose over the bag. She brings the bag and the white children to a wooden fencepost, by the field, by the highway. The children’s hands, which are small, are placed on the wooden post. The woman tells the children to touch the post until the car returns. She gets in the car and the car leaves. There is a cow in the field near the fence. The children touch the post. The wind blows. Lots of cars go by. They stay that way all day.