Okay, she said, what what what.
Okay, you want my reasons for suggesting a little refresher course.
Yes. Yes, that is, sir.
Don’t be afraid. No, it’s just that you don’t eat. You won’t talk to the others, staff or patient. You’ve stopped participating in group. You have stopped functioning.
I don’t eat?
Only the morsels you smuggle back to your room in a napkin, like a chipmunk.
Morsel. She liked the word. It was folded on itself and had a taste. It was dark and nourishing, better than a snack. She also liked his rubbish. It was cleaner and firmer than our trash.
How about group?
Group? she said, meaning: I still go to group.
He understood.
Yes, you go to group, but you sit under the table.
Knees are easy. Faces are defacing.
Ha. I like that. I quite know what you mean. I’d prefer to look at knees rather than some of the defaced faces in staff conference and seminars. All the same, we’re stuck with these faces and we have to make the best of it.
I’ll take the knees.
There you go.
Now he was trying to sound like Dennis Weaver and didn’t. She was embarrassed for him. How could he stand to speak himself? You’d have to be crazy to make such a fool of yourself. How could he stand to be so out-of-focus? a bogus Englishman doing knock-knocks. I’d rather be crazy. Or maybe the question was, why did she have to know everything before she could say anything?
I — she began and stopped.
Yes?
(Here came her statement because this was the one thing she knew.)
I have to go down first. You’re trying to keep me up.
Down?
I have to go down down down before I go up. Down down in me to it. You shouldn’t try to keep me up by buzzing me up.
Down and down I go, round and round I go. He twirled around, keeping hands in pockets. God, she thought, if I were him I’d be crazier than me.
Tacky-tacky, she said. I need to go down to my white dwarf.
White dwarf?
You know stars? He did know stars, often spoke of the constellations. To stay sane, learn about wrens, mums, Orion.
What about stars?
A red giant collapses into a white dwarf. Hard and bright as a diamond. That’s what I was trying to do when my mother found me in the closet going down to my white dwarf.
Ah. Quite a speech, although I suspect you meant going down to become my white dwarf, I think.
I have to get down to it, to me. And you won’t let me. You want me up before going down.
Ah, but what if the star collapses all the way into a black hole? (This pleased him.) How will we find you in a black hole? (The more he thought about it, the more pleased he was.) I’m not up to a time warp.
No buzzin cousin.
Your parents are coming this afternoon.
A bang by the gang.
There you go.
When’s the buzzing?
Oh, tomorrow. Ninish.
Now she wanted him to leave. One advantage to being crazy is that one is given leave to be rude. Had she gone crazy so people’s feelings wouldn’t be hurt? She turned her face into the wing of the chair until he left.
When she heard the door close, she put the binoculars in her lap and watched the highway where it came over the hill beyond the cedars. She was waiting for the bread truck.
When the bread truck came, she looked at her watch, opened her notebook, and began to write.
2
When she woke in the morning it was cool enough in the greenhouse to make her think about keeping warm when winter came.
The stove was her best hope. The only alternative was to buy a kerosene heater in town, if such a thing was available. That cost money and meant buying and lugging fuel and stinking up the greenhouse, which still had its faint reek of root rot and tropic orchid damp.
But how to move the stove from the cellar of the ruin to the potting shed? It was too heavy to move more than an inch or so along the cellar floor, let alone haul up the steps.
But she thought it would do. Big and black and iron, it was a Ben Franklin maybe or a potbellied. No, it didn’t have a belly but an oven and firebox as big as a dollhouse and capped by iron lids the size of dinner plates and a balcony of warming compartments (she guessed). It even had a water tank. And its name was not Ben Franklin but Grand Crown. Mica windows, crazed and brown and glittering with crystals, let into the dark room of the oven. There were pipes of light fluted blued metal, one an elbow — fluted flues? It was a cook stove! But didn’t cook stoves warm rooms? Was it also a water heater?
Then why hadn’t she asked the man with the golf stick to help her? He was strong enough. They could have got it out with ramps and ropes like the Egyptians building the pyramids. Had she been put off because he was angry and out of it, sunk into himself, beheading skunk cabbages and aiming the golf stick like a gun? No, for that very reason he’d have done it — for the reason that he was, she saw at once, out of it, out of his life, he’d have been glad to do anything at all except whatever it was he was doing or not doing. So that she had only to say to him in the glade do this, do that, and he’d have done it, not for her, not even seeing her, but for the pleasure, the faint ironic pleasure of the irrelevance of it, of helping a stranger move a stove in the woods.
Though she could not have said so, she could tell that he had reached such a degree of irony in his life that he would as soon do one thing as another. He’d have been glad to help her move the stove just for the oddness of it. “Where have you been?” his golfer friends would ask him. “I sliced out-of-bounds on eighteen and met a girl who asked me to help her move a stove into her house.” “Right,” they would say. “What else?”
No, she hadn’t asked him because she didn’t want to ask anybody. Asking is losing, she might have said. Or getting helped is behelt. It is not that a debt is incurred to a person for a thing as that the thing itself loses value. It was her stove and her life and she would move the stove and live her life. Sitting on the step beside the dog, she felt the porcelain shield and the blue enameled trademark Grand Crown and tapped the mica window. It was as solid as quartz. The stove was heavy. She could barely pick up one corner.
There was time to get it out. The October sun was warm. Get it out how? With ramps? pulleys? slaves? She didn’t know. All she knew for sure was that she could do it and do it alone. Anything is possible if you have time and take thought over it. She had found a treasure. You don’t ask a stranger to help you move a treasure. You don’t ask friends either. And you certainly don’t ask family.
She had at least a month. If she had to she could take it apart piece by piece and move it like the Statue of Liberty.
Wasn’t there a picture in a dictionary showing a child picking up a horse, using a system of pulleys and ropes? She could go to the hardware store but she needed a word. What was the word for such a thing? If she didn’t have the word, they wouldn’t give it to her. Never mind. She’d look until she found it, then point. I hate to go into hardware stores and not know the name of a thing.
Go to library, get book on greenhouses, look up pulley in dictionary. There might be a picture of different kinds of pulleys with names.
Move stove, she wrote. She wrote:
Consider water problem, i.e., taking a bath. It appears stove has small pipes for heating water. Water supply?
Two more problems:
One: How to live. How do you live? My life expectancy is approximately another fifty or sixty years. What to do? One good sign: I can already feel myself coming down to myself. From giant red star Betelgeuse, Dr. Duk’s favorite, trying to expand and fan out and take in and please the whole universe (that was me!), a great gaseous fake of a star, collapsing down to white dwarf Sirius, my favorite, diamond bright and diamond hard, indestructible by comets, meteors, people. Sirius is more serious than beetle gauze.