In place of the Richard Brinsley train station there is now a parking garage where criminals go to hold people up at gunpoint; Amtrak, at great expense, has built a new and pitiful little station nearby that has some blue fiberglass chairs and vending machines in it. The sculpture of the noble-breasted bronze woman and her eagle has never turned up. All that’s left of the original station are the tiles in my parents’ fireplace — and of course that fireplace isn’t my parents’ anymore because when they got their divorce, they sold the house. But that’s all right — the tiles are permanently fixed in my head; when I look up at night I see them in the constellations, surrounded by black grout.
29
Good morning, it’s 6:03 a.m., late. Yesterday I used the toilet plunger on the bathtub drain with great success. The cat was so indignantly hungry this morning that I grabbed a handful of catfood and jingled it into his bowl, and then I brought that hand to my face and smelled it. It smelled quite good — some catfood does. Perhaps my nose is celebrating that it has gotten its land legs back. Cats need to keep the bits of food forever tumbling, half airborne, in their mouths, like clothes in a dryer, or like tiny Hacky Sack balls, and so they’re forced to do more head bobbing than seems necessary.
I’m afraid the cat is a compulsive eater. I watched him through the window the other day, after he’d bolted down a full bowl of dry catfood in the shape of little fishes. He was especially displeased with the quality of the snow that cold day — a grimy sort of snow that stuck to his paws, making him shake his hind legs with every step, while he held his head up and looked out for crows and coon cats. Then he stopped and started to retch, his head low, his stomach clenching. Nothing came out, but he had eaten too much too fast. He took a moment to compose himself, and then he went on walking, fluttering his rear paws each time.
This morning I woke up writing an impassioned petition in my head, but impassioned petitions do nothing, and now I’m downstairs. What you don’t realize normally, but do just as it begins filling the room through the windows, is how bright but unblinding daylight is. No man-made source can arrive at the particular effortless blueness of this crevice-cleaning light. It is a simple light that goes everywhere but with no heat, aware that it is taken for granted and content to be so.
Very soon, I’ve got to take a shower and drive Phoebe to school and go to work. It used to be, several long weeks ago, that the shower was the beginning of my day and the place where I did my eyes-closed morning thinking, and I do love the hum of the ceiling fan and the clinking slide of the plastic rings on the shower rod as I pull the curtain closed. I often sing “Eight Days a Week” to the drone of the ceiling fan. And when I reach in (before I get in, so that I won’t be blasted with cold or hot) and turn on the control by feel, I can sometimes hear the ringing sound of the water racing up the pipe and smacking against the showerhead, where it is immediately split into two dozen streamlets of fine snickering spray. While it is warming up, I drape my watch over one edge of the sink, and then I wander back into the bedroom to take off my pajamas. I can do this, by the way, without having to bend to the floor to pick them up. Here’s how: pin the end of your left pajama leg under your right foot and then lift your left leg, stepping out of the pinned flannel on that side. At this point you’ve got one pajamaed leg and one naked leg. Then pin the bottom edge of the right pajama leg under your left foot, and bend that knee, drawing off the pajamas entirely — but hold on to the waistband so that instead of their falling to the floor you can ball up the loose and still warm garment and shove it under the pillow for the next night’s sleeping.
The showerhead is lower than my head, so I must duck a little, but it’s well worth it — those skull-warming drops force out a blubbering sigh of relief. I’m just my shower self — hideous, naked, defenseless. I shave in the shower, eyes closed, mirrorless, checking with my fingertips for places I missed. Of course because I have a beard I have less to shave, but I still have neck and cheeks to do — I balloon out each cheek in turn to make the follicles pop up. Sometimes I fall into the habit of shaving too high on the underside and have to remember to stop earlier on the upstrokes. I don’t like beards that fail to cover the corner of the jawbone: that is, beards that are a form of makeup, with sharp cuts and topiary corners. I move the soap, that heavy oval bar, into all the places it needs to go, being sure to rinse it off for the next person — i.e., my wife — after it goes in some of the places. You can make the soap revolve in your hand, like a police car’s dome light, just by working your thumb and palm muscles a little: it looks as if the soap is turning of its own accord, and not as if you are turning the soap. Revolving the soap this way several times under the spray is a good way to clean it off. The soap must be left clean.
My towel hangs on a rack across the bathroom, too far to reach while standing in the tub after the shower. I don’t like leaving puddles on the floor, and I’ve had little success when I’ve tried to shake my legs to get some of the free water off them before I stepped out. So now I use my hands as squeegees: starting at midthighs I squeegee my hands down my legs to my ankles. You would be surprised at how much water sheets off. In this way I leave a fairly dry bathroom, even though the drain to the bathtub is slow enough to count as clogged and, until I took action yesterday, filled after every shower. The small fluffy rug next to the shower absorbs the lesser wetness from my feet.
The reason why the tub was draining so slowly is that the plumbers installed a kind of drain mechanism whose metal stopper is unremovable. It can be pulled up about half an inch and no farther. Once I called the plumber to see what he could do with this diabolical machine: he used a bent paper clip to poke in around the drain cap and withdraw some of the hair-muck, which is just what I would have done. Paper clips can only do so much, and yesterday, as I stood in the shower squeegeeing off the water from my legs, I looked down at my feet, which were submerged in water that was not trickling out of the bathtub. There was no sound of draining. The tub drain was clearly clogged. What could I use to get that clog moving? Well, why not the toilet plunger? There are two kinds of toilet plunger: the brick-red classic plunger that is able to stand up by itself, and the somewhat newer black rubber plunger, the design of which is more like that of an undersea creature, with a narrowing part meant to go a little ways into the toilet canal, and a higher bell, to thrust out more water and suck in more water with each plunge. These are the double-flush plungers — the kind that we have.
The classic toilet plunger would have been useless on the bathtub, because you couldn’t have pushed the bell down, but the black double-flush worked extremely well. I got on my underwear and my shirt and then I pulled back the shower curtain and I put that, of course, none-too-hygienic plunger into the standing water and gave it a lunge, and then another lunge. It made the most wonderful deep squirting noises — huge sucking, bubbling gulps and gasps and noggin-snorts as several pounds of water were thrust down into the drain and forced up in a foul fountain out the overflow valve higher up on the top. I began working with the water, as if I were rocking a car when it’s stuck in the driveway, sucking, pushing, sucking, pushing. At one point the drain seemed even worse, and I found that all the turbulence had caused the drain lid to turn and fall shut. When I opened it again and was more careful to center the plunger over the mouth of the drain, I got real results: after one blast, to which I gave the full might of my arms, a supernova of black fragments came up, God, and then more with a second plunge, and I knew that without chemicals, without rooting snakes, with only strength and cunning, I had made that water move. I held still for a second to listen: yes, the purling of the water curving away into the pipes. Later there was even a brief vortex, like a rainbow after a storm.