During this same March night, while I was sleeping, a warm rain turned to freezing rain and then snow, depositing a candied crust on the reviving greenery, a white carameliza-don that sparkled on the skin of the driveway and in the buckgrass and wild blueberry that grow along the edge. The winter still had a kick of cold in it. Halfway down, I regretted not bothering to put on gloves and my little rubber hunting shoes, with their soles patterned in chains, for my morning walk to retrieve the newspaper. I slipped and slid. In the headlines, President Smith, that anonymous, derided man, was offering free farmland to citizens willing to go and work an assigned acreage of the depopulated Midwest. The Homestead Act anew. Little fragmentary sheaths of ice showered upon me as a chill breeze stirred the beech twigs overhead. This should be the terminal mood of my life, I thought: everything mundane candy-coated.
Deirdre got me to go to the Peabody mall yesterday; she had a whole list of depleted household necessities, including bathroom washcloths. With her cervine sense of smell she claimed that all of our washcloths inexpungeably stank. “What have you been wiping with them?” she asked me.
I blushed, answering, “Only myself. That’s the smell of old age.”
She alertly saw, out of those globular shining eyes of hers, that she had hurt my feelings, to a degree that might cause a rift. Hastily she told me, “You don’t smell like that. You smell sweet, like a freshly powdered baby. The back of your neck, especially.”
I wondered what she knew of babies. She was not as young, perhaps, as she seemed to me-old enough, certainly, to be a mother, of some child crawling or toddling down there in the murky valleys beneath my little hill.
The mysterious people who dwell in these valleys were out in force at the mall, in their windbreakers and blue jeans, their high-domed, billed bubba hats and their barbarically ornate running shoes. Retirees-who all seemed ancient to me, but some were perhaps younger than I-lounged in a daze of early Alzheimer’s on the benches the mall provides, waiting for their shapeless wives to come claim them and lead them to the car. If they had a thought as we passed, it must have been that Deirdre was my daughter, or a hard-faced young escort from the nursing home. We entered the mall through Filene’s; to swim in such an abundance of scarves and underwear and pointed vinyl shoes, in so pungent and deep a lake of artificial perfumes, dizzied and dazed me. Spring, though not quite yet in the air, was in the fashions, and in the stir of consumers, propelled by the lengthening light out of their warrens into the wide clearing of consumerism. Young couples, tattooed and punctured visibly and invisibly, with studiously brutal haircuts, strolled hand in hand as if in a garish park of the purely unnatural, so deeply at home here it would not have surprised me if, with a clash of nostril studs and a spattering of hair dye, boy and girl had turned and begun to copulate. Malls have become a public habitat soaked in slovenly intimacy; its customers step naturally from huddling around television in their living rooms to cruising these boulevards of superfluity, where fluorescent-lit shops press forward temptations ranging from yogurt-coated peanuts to electric-powered treadmills. Elderly women had dressed themselves like kewpie dolls, in pastel running suits that suggested an infant’s pajamas. I was the only person in sight wearing leather shoes and a necktie. Deirdre parked me outside Banana Republic and at the end of my ordeal took me into Brooks Brothers and bought me a striped shirt that answered some gangsterish beau ideal of her own. She has, it almost made me weep to think, a splinter of feeling for me somewhere in her polished brown machine of a body. Easy weeping is another sign of dotage, along with stinking washcloths.
My grandchildren, spread along Route 128 in the residential gristle between its ossified centers of commerce, tend to have-Etienne and Olympe aside-tony, English-tinted names: Kevin, Rodney, Torrance, Tyler, Duncan, Quentin, and Keith. The girl, perhaps inevitably, is called Jennifer. Where do my kids and their spouses get these monickers? Off of birthday-card racks, it must be, or the Winnie-the-Pooh page on the Internet. They all have their problems. Torrance was born a month premature and is delicate, querulous, and elfin; Tyler, his younger brother, was born two weeks late and has club feet and a prematurely sealed fontanel. Quentin suffers from chronic constipation, and Duncan is hyperactive: he will grab and shake a ficus tree or a floor lamp until the leaves drop or the bulb shatters. Rodney has reading problems, Kevin broke his wrist on the school jungle gym, and Keith is having a hard time adjusting to the arrival of his little sister, about whom so much sexist fuss is being made. And yet they all are dear, and half have learned to spell GRANDPA and send me, at their parents’ prompting, birthday and Christmas cards. It quickens my senile tears to think of them all marching-toddling, creeping-into the future, lugging my genes into the maelstrom of a future world I will never know. Such brave soldiers, in what kind of battle, for what noble cause? The doughboys who swarmed out of the trenches into clouds of mustard gas had geniuses for generals by comparison.
If love between my children and me has achieved, thanks to African wisdom, a certain settled, ironical, negotiable shape, that between my grandchildren and the apparitior that I form at the back of their tadpole eyeballs is pun chaos. I often try to imagine what they will feel when I die A faint apprehensive pang, tinged with the comic, as with those boys who sneak off to the baseball game on the excuse of a grandparent’s funeral. In their up-to-date eyes, I have lived in hopelessly old-fashioned, deprived times, so what can it matter, even to me, that I die?
Building the dollhouse for my daughter in the cellar-at the memory, my pen becomes impossibly heavy in my hand.
Walking back up the driveway with the newspaper this morning, I was suddenly conscious of the noise, through the sparse intervening woods, of the sea; it had a new, louder voice. There was a warm, snow-eating drizzle in the air, and a wet wind during the night had activated our outdoor burglar lights, I noticed when I awoke to urinate. The air carried the thrashing of the waves on the beach with the urgency of fresh news, the yowl of a creature new-born. The infant spring has its own acoustics, I noticed. Walking a bit around the property a few days ago, I had taken note of the heavy-headed little snowdrops, and the first pale edges of daylily leaves in the drab soil, but these signs bore no glad message for me. This breezy moist sea-roaring possibly did. Such marine thunder, slowly grinding up the continents, must have sounded thus in our planet’s earliest days, when the lifeless seas beat upon rocky shores now lost beyond all geological conjecture. This prezoic sea’s invasion of my ear somehow cheered me. I liked the fuss, the stirring up. I walk carefully these days, trying to avoid any thought that will tip me into depression.
Deirdre in her renovations, as she bravely tries to oust Gloria’s décor from a few corners of the house, sends me down to the barn with rugs and items of furniture she wants out of sight. Already, in this barn originally built to accommodate carriages and their horses, with troughs and stalls and a drain in the middle of a sloped floor for an Augean hosing, there is an accumulation of old bicycles and skis and collegiate lamps and chairs and hide-a-beds and cardboard boxes of textbooks that will never be consulted again. It is easier to keep these condemned objects here in a kind of life imprisonment than to steel oneself for execution out on the curb on trash-collection day. Such repositories, in garages and basements and closets and attics, pledge our faith in eternal return, in a future that holds infinite temporal opportunities for eventual reuse and rereading. Alas, time’s arrow points one way, toward an entropy when all seas will have broken down all rocks and there is not a whisper, a subatomic stir, of surge. So to fumble and stumble around looking for a cranny of space in which to lay an old Oriental four-by-six whose American domestic career began in Gloria’s father’s grandmother’s Danbury, Connecticut, foyer is a wallow in one’s own death, in funerary spaces as futile as Egypt’s treasure-crammed tombs.