The difficulty with the duck in the winter is that the hose is frozen. It is still out there somewhere under the snow-piles that the plow has made, and it will reappear in the spring — but it has disappeared for now. Up till the first blizzard we were filling a plastic wading pool for Greta to use. When the water was fresh she dove and flapped her wings underwater to rinse off her underwing area, lunging forward so hard that unless she turned her head she would bonk into the far side of the pool. We also walked with her down to the creek, where she was happy rooting in the mud. Even after it had snowed we walked with her down the hill once or twice so that she could splash in the very cold creek water. Her yellow feet are unsuited to snow; she has trouble climbing any hill, and yet she flies only to signal that she is hungry.
But now that it is iron-cold, cold enough that we worry about how she manages at night, fluffed in with her cedar shavings, even with the blanket over the doghouse and the snow on the blanket, she has not been immersed in any sort of water for weeks. I hope her feathers don’t lose their insulative properties when she can’t bathe. Her feet, which you would think would be vulnerable to frostbite when she stands on the ice, seem unaffected. When one foot begins to feel intolerably cold, she just pulls it up into her feathers and stands balanced on the other. Then she switches.
11
Good morning, it’s 4:45 a.m. Yesterday my son and I got haircuts from Sheila in town. I like her because she’s fast and she doesn’t care that I have what Claire calls a “roundabout,” meaning that I’m well on my way to being bald. Nor does she want to give my son a shelf haircut. She’s a person who just likes cutting people’s hair. There you have it — just snipping locks all day long and sweeping the piles into garbage bags. My son gets a solemn expression when he’s having a haircut. I looked at him in the mirror, sitting with his wet hair in the big salon chair with the white clerical collar on him — eight years old, noticeably taller than last time, with good straight shoulders and a straight back — and I wanted to make low animal noises, growlings, of love for him. I can’t call him pet names like “Dr. Van Deusen” anymore in public, he has forbidden me. I now must call him simply Henry. Henry it is. I asked Sheila what she thought of the siding that was going up on the old Congregational church in town. She nodded approvingly and said, “Low maintenance.”
Sometimes if Sheila’s closed or booked up, Henry and I go to Ronnie’s barbershop. The first year we lived here, we went to Ronnie’s father, also named Ronnie, a man who nodded and pursed his lips as he snipped. The father retired and the son took over. The son scowls all the time; he’s one of those people whose mouth falls into a scowl, although in fact he’s fairly upbeat. He uses his father’s old-fashioned cash register, which makes a ringing sound when you push down the keys. But it’s a very long wait in Ronnie’s shop, because his prices are low and he gets a lot of business from the military bases nearby. I don’t like watching these army people get their hair cut. They want it “skinned” and flat-topped. Their heads rise up off of thick necks and they narrow at the top like medium-range missiles, and as Ronnie uses the shaver on them, folds of back-of-head skin begin to reveal themselves. The back of a man’s head is not meant to be seen: there is something repulsive, almost evil, about the place where the skull meets the top of the spine. Old scars, too — Ronnie’s shaver’s dispassionate teeth move back and forth over a white, C-shaped scar, grinding away the hair.
I asked Ronnie why people want their hair so short, and he said it was convenience. “People don’t want to spend time with their hair.” Ronnie is mistaken, I think. These men are self-primpers. Every two weeks they are willing to drive all the way to Oldfield and wait for an hour in a chair, staring at their enormous square knees, insisting that their hair be as short as it can possibly be; whereas I get mine cut, and then I forget about it for five months. They seem to enjoy the prickliness — you see them fondling their skulls when they walk out the door. Marines, so Ronnie told me, generally want their hair mown shorter than any other group of military men. They want to look like penile tubes of warmongeringness. I basically want nothing to do with all men except my son, my father, and a few others. Robert Service, the poet, I like. Anyway, that’s why Henry and I usually go to have our haircuts at Sheila’s.
12
Good morning, it’s 5:07 a.m. I’m snoring a lot, and it’s keeping Claire awake. She used to say that it was her bedside light that bothered me, but it’s gone beyond that now. Probably I snore because I have more fat on the end of my epiglottis, making it floppier.
My grandfather was a great snorer. In his youth, he had ambitions to find a cure for some major disease, which brought him to medical school, and he ended up a research pathologist specializing in fungal diseases of the nose and brain. When I was fifteen, he began paying me to help him proofread his gigantic and wondrously expensive book, Fungal Disease in Humans. My grandmother had finally said, after twenty years of doing proofreading and correspondence for him, that she’d had enough. I became one of the few teenagers who could spell rhinoentomophthoromycosis—“rhino” because the malady begins in the nose. A number of the diseases that my grandfather studied had first appeared in the early nineteen-fifties after overeager pharmacologists, wanting to believe that steroids were the new miracle drugs, administered them in huge doses, sometimes in African and South American countries. Dosed with a sufficiently heavy course of some corticosteroids, one’s immune system stops functioning, and then the hyphae, or creepers, of normally innocent organisms like bread mold take root and grow through the veins and arteries and into the brain, causing blockages and dead places. The pictures of the doomed sufferers are horrible.
My grandfather’s other textbook was a compendium of tips and tricks for doing better postmortem examinations, copiously illustrated by a nice man who loved houseplants, and printed on special paper that could be rinsed if you got blood and gook on it. The way to make steady money in the textbook business is to bring out a new edition of your book every two years, whether it needs it or not. Otherwise your book competes with all the used copies of your book that are available for resale. I helped my grandfather with these successive editions, and then, after my job-hunting leads didn’t pan out, he got me a position at the publishing company that had brought out his books. And now twenty years later what am I? I’m an editor of medical textbooks. The job pays seventy thousand dollars a year and it isn’t terribly difficult. Of course doctors are smart in many ways, but a lot of them are also, in my experience, silly credulous people who need to be told what to think by a textbook, until a different textbook tells them to think differently.
Once when I was just married, I read an Agatha Christie and two Dick Francises, and I thought I should get up early and write a murder mystery about fungal diseases. I imagined a plot like an elaborate machine — like one of those works of mechanical art in airports, in which billiard balls move around on wire tracks, turning windmills and setting off chimes. I filled a silver glass — one of a pair that had been a wedding present — with cold water, and I took a piece of soft wheat bread from out of the bag, and I went to a chair by a window, where I sat looking at the streetlit sunrise, and tried to write about fungus-related death. The condensation on the silver water glass made patterns that I studied closely: it grew a fuzz of tiny droplets, like a reindeer’s antler, and then one droplet would break ranks and join with another, and suddenly a bigger dome of a drop, which had sucked in some of its surrounding fuzz and become too heavy to hold its place on the silver surface, slid down an inch, then gathered more strength and, changing direction to avoid an invisible point of resistance, slid another inch. Eventually there were five or six of these trails, and as I sipped the water the lowering of the level of the liquid would influence the texture of the droplets and the trails on the outer surface.