10
Good morning, it’s 3:37 a.m., and it’s just me here in the dark. I had a tussle with the coffeemaker just now. Claire warned me last night that she’d put its components in the dishwasher. “That won’t confuse you early in the morning?” she asked. I said nah, and it shouldn’t have. I unclamped the dishwasher door and allowed it to fall and bounce a little — the springs made their sproinging sound. I’m always happy to open a dishwasher, curious to see what Dead Sea Scrolls await within. I pulled on the top cage of dishes, feeling how smoothly its rollers rolled in the dark, making a sort of soft thunder as the extenders slid out and a little jingle when they reached their limit. And as soon as I began feeling up the dishes to try to find the filter basket, I encountered, faintly lingering there and radiating upward, the living traces of warmth from the long-completed dishwashing cycle — hints of heat persisting seven hours after I cranked the dial to Normal Wash. How could the machine have held the warmth this far into the early morning? Insulation, of course — that was the easy answer. But there was a further reason: in the upturned bottoms of all the mugs were shallow tidepools of warm water. These residual heat-sinks, along with all the molecules of agitated ceramic in the plates and mugs and all the forky forests of silverware, worked like radiators. And the pools of water are important in another way, too: if you open the dishwasher and you aren’t sure at a glance whether the dishes in it are clean or dirty, you can know their status for certain by checking to see whether the mugs hold these cupped pools, since when you upend a dirty mug and put it in the cage, it may be wet, but there won’t be water collected in its concavity because you will have carried it to the dishwasher right side up, only turning it upside down when you place it into the angled outside edge of the upper cage.
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.