Abbott empties the dirty water from his daughter’s inflatable pool by stepping on the edge. When all the water has drained into the yard, he uses his hose and hose attachment to spray out the dead bugs and blades of grass from the bottom and sides. Today it is above ninety degrees. He drags the pool ten feet away so he won’t kill the grass beneath it. It might be too late for that, he speculates. After he locates the two valves and blows in more air, he removes the hose attachment and places the running hose in the pool. The water from the hose is too cold for his daughter, though, so Abbott boils water in a teakettle on the stove, then takes the kettle outside with an oven mitt and pours it into the pool. He pours in four kettles of boiling water. Abbott’s daughter will be excited. Abbott moves a deck chair to the edge of the pool, where he might sit this afternoon with his feet in the water. When the girl awakes from her nap, she does not want to play in the pool. She wants to walk. She and Abbott walk through the neighborhood to a busy street called Pleasant. Abbott picks her up, and they watch the traffic pass. The girl is quiet, lethargic. Abbott puts his palm on her forehead — of course she feels hot. He puts his palm on his own hot forehead and determines nothing. They see delivery trucks, a motorcycle, a town bus. Then Abbott points and says, “Look at that. Right there, coming this way.” The girl turns her head toward the flatbed tractor-trailer carrying a small white house. In front of the truck there’s an escort car with a yellow flashing light on its roof. The house on the truck passes slowly by. “Pretty amazing,” Abbott says to her, before noticing that she’s crying. She’s not making a sound. Tears are filling her eyes and running down her cheeks and neck. “It’s OK,” Abbott tells her. “Let’s go get a snack.” He carries her back down the street toward their house. She smells like sunblock. “Listen,” he says, “it’s just fine.” Tonight he’ll tell his wife about it. One of them will say it’s troubling. The other will say it’s nothing to worry about. Abbott doesn’t know yet which one he’ll be.
27 In Which Abbott Sits in a Parked Car for Quite a While
Were he to marry, twenty-eight-year-old Charles Darwin scribbled in pencil on the backs of envelopes, he would never see America; he would never learn French; he would never go up in a hot air balloon; he would never take a solitary trip in Wales; he would be obliged to go walking every day with his wife; he would be forced to visit and receive relatives; he would be forced to bend in every trifle; he could not read in the evenings; he would be fat and idle, anxious and responsible; he would never have enough money for books; he would be banished from London; he would be trapped in London; he would have the expense and worry of children; he would feel a duty to work for money, especially if he had many children; he would be forced to host visitors and be a part of Society; he would listen to female chit-chat; he would have no time in the country, no tours; he would have no large zoological collection; he would not have enough books; he would have no freedom to go where he liked; he would not have the conversation of clever men at clubs; he would suffer, above all else, a terrible loss of time. Darwin was married within the year. He and his wife, Emma Wedgwood Darwin, produced ten children, three of whom died young. Late in life, he wrote of Emma: “She has been my greatest blessing, and I can declare that in my whole life I have never heard her utter one word which I had rather have been unsaid. … I marvel at my good fortune that she, so infinitely my superior in every single moral quality, consented to be my wife. She has been my wise adviser and cheerful comforter throughout life.” And to his children Darwin wrote: “I have indeed been most happy in my family, and I must say to you children that not one of you has ever given me one minute’s anxiety, except on the score of health. … When you were very young it was my delight to play with you all, and I think with a sigh that such days can never return.”
28 Abbott and the Vexing Claims of Purity
Furthermore, Abbott’s daughter will not drink her organic cow’s milk. Just will not, no matter how many times her father takes a sip of it and then licks his lips and rubs his belly. Then this morning Abbott’s wife has what she considers a breakthrough when she adds maple syrup to the milk and the child drinks it eagerly. “Maple milk!” his wife says, making lip-smacking noises at the child. Abbott is not impressed. He feels his belly-rubbing program has not been given enough time to succeed. “And all those additives and chemicals,” he says to his wife. “No,” she says, “it’s pure maple syrup.” “Right, pure,” Abbott says, troubled by the stupidity of his sarcasm. He gets up from his chair and walks to the kitchen to scrutinize the syrup bottle, which does indeed disingenuously announce its 100 percent purity. What he will do, he decides, is read the ingredients out loud like the Declaration of Independence, but he finds upon inspection that the ingredients are not listed on the bottle, so his scheme collapses. “I thought they were required to put the ingredients on here,” he says. “What?” his wife says. “It’s pure maple syrup. Sap, that’s the ingredient. Look at her go.” There’s no denying it, the child is crazy about maple milk. Abbott is still perplexed by the absent list of ingredients. “Syrup is not sap,” he says with a derisiveness born of uncertainty. “It can’t just be sap.” His voice nearly cracks, and his wife turns in her chair to face him. “Well, what do you think it is?” she says, laughing now. “Processed sugar,” he says. “And aspartame. Lead paint. Fluorocarbons. Agent Orange. Parablendeum. How does it get so delicious?” “More?” Abbott’s daughter says, holding up her empty cup. “They do something to it,” his wife says, “but they don’t add anything. I’m not saying it’s health food, but I know it’s natural. Pure Vermont maple syrup — what did you think that meant?” Abbott disappears into his office, where, after establishing a particularly strong dial-up Internet connection, he learns, at age thirty-seven, that real maple syrup is, after all, just maple sap — from a tree — boiled down. (Native Americans taught the early settlers how to make it. For a sugar maple tree, you’ll need about thirty-two gallons of sap to make a gallon of syrup. It’s a good idea to strain the finished syrup through cheesecloth to remove any debris or crystallized minerals.) Here he is, suspicious of trees. He hunches over the laptop in his darkened office, chastened and contrite. Outside, someone is mowing in the rain. Abbott knows you can’t just believe. He knows you can’t just not believe.
29 Abbott and the Infestation
Every Sunday morning Abbott retrieves from the end of the driveway a newspaper in a blue plastic bag. Every Sunday morning he pulls the plastic bag off the newspaper and drops it into a low kitchen drawer containing nothing but blue plastic bags. This morning he opens the drawer with his foot and tosses the balled-up bag into the drawer, which is, Abbott now sees, filled completely with blue plastic bags. This morning’s blue bag falls slowly onto the pile, then slides and tumbles out of the drawer and onto the kitchen floor. It stretches out nearly to full length. A draft of air nudges it across the tile. Abbott’s dog jumps back and yelps, in all likelihood waking the child. Abbott looks down into the heaping drawer of weeks. This is how you know that you have Time in your house; you discover its shed skins. He places the thick newspaper on the counter, where it will remain until it is recycled. He gets down on his knees by the drawer. Who else is going to do it? He opens a blue plastic bag and begins to shove the other blue bags into it. The opening is small, so the work is painstaking. When he’s finished, he ties the top of the bulging bag in a knot and tosses the whole year into the garage. Today he’ll deal with shit, snot, piss, blood, vomit, rust, and rot, but they won’t be bad in quite the same way that this is bad.