Page 55 - WTP Vol. XI #6

Do you know anything about a box? she said to Joe over the phone.
He said it was all a mystery to him.
I’m not going to open it.
No, no, don’t, it’s some mistake of course.
She said to herself hanging up, I do not have Babies 0-3 months so the box cannot be for me or for us, or for our neighbors. Such things she said to herself; there were no infants on the street at all though the box seemed to think there ought to be.
Because of the question of how they lived, although the box was light, it seemed to be very heavy.
If she were determined to know there were only Baby Things in the box, she should take it to the police. They would open it, and then there they would be, the Baby Things, weighing very little, little more than no baby at all.
The books were not straight in the shelves, and that was how they lived, and one day they would have the ceiling in her sewing alcove properly replastered.
People came to dinner sometimes, and ate and talked and one had put her feet under the dog and his blanket lying before the fire; the dog seemed not to notice. Another had come, too, a few nights before the box, and this one had an infant, and probably boxes marked Baby Things, and being a parent, may have ordered
a Grolier’s Encyclopedia. But what would she have
to leave for the two of them? And wouldn’t she have written a name on a box on which she had written three times Baby Things, were she to leave it somewhere for someone, purposefully? Wouldn’t she have written To Caroline and Joe?
There was the reason Caroline no longer ate oranges. On a day, one day, she had sliced an orange in two, then again,
making four, and had thought how slicing an orange was like cells dividing, like the zygote, like cleavage, holding together, splitting apart. She had sliced the orange again, noticing the grind of the serrated knife on the wood, the perfume of the orange, its juices pooling. There were eight, there was splitting apart, and when there were sixteen, it was clear that there was no holding together in cleaving an orange. She had put a sliver of orange in the parakeet’s fruit cup and eaten all the other pieces quickly, even furtively—as if slicing had been indecent in some way, or foolish or obsessive somehow, her slicing an orange like a failed act of gestation.
The box was still on the stoop. There had to be more, something she’d missed. She opened the door a crack to keep the dog inside and looked at the box, then stepped out on the stoop and picked it up and, turning it all around and upside down, found, then, at last, the address, almost invisible in thin blue ink against the cardboard, almost illegible in her mother’s spidery writing. There were the stamps to tell the mail carrier on which side to find the address. Pale Ramón Fernandez, said the box. It was addressed to the dog. The box was for the dog? That was the dog’s name, a name beyond the genius of the poet and his rage for order.
When she ripped the tape off the top seam of the box on the kitchen table, her mind saw a pool on the floor as if some woman’s waters had broken. When she pulled out the thing, she saw forceps. When she saw the stuffed dog was packaged in an armchair, stirrups came to mind, and when she clipped the plastic strips holding the stuffed animal in its armchair-painted packaging—umbilical cord. But there was no infant crying, no noise at all
as she put the stuffed animal on the floor for Ramón
after telling him it was from her mom and had arrived stillborn. He vocalized a bit in response to her and she decided he was asking a question: she said It’s for you, Ramón, since you got hurt, and since you’re an only dog. And it came in a box marked Baby Things.
She remembered then that her mother had wanted to get Ramón a present, since he had been injured again, and
sliced his pad, but was getting better. She remembered that her mother got presents for all three of her granddaughters, Caroline’s nieces, and wasn’t Ramón the grandpuppy? The box would have come from her sister Paulie’s house, with its children and encyclopedia. She remembered then an annoying thing about visiting Paulie: lights burning in empty rooms, all over the house nobody was turning out the lights when they left the room and the ceiling fixtures would burn all through the day until her intervention for the sake of conserving energy.
(continued on next page)
48