Page 56 - WTP Vol. XI #6

The Package (continued from preceding page)
She went upstairs, intending to make the bed. When she got upstairs, she stood by the ironing board. Why’d I come
up here? Something. The toilet wasn’t running, the iron remained unplugged. The broken bit on the iron’s heat gauge did not heal itself, for all her noticing it was broken.
She refrained again from checking whether those were Hustler’s under Joe’s side of the bed. Straightening up from tucking the bedspread over the pillows, she knocked her head against the low-slung slope of the ceiling. Inside her skull, the delicate work of new capillaries shivered with the jolt, quivered and broke like a spider web, if you’d walked through it, say, spanning a path between birches. She had stood up too quickly, knocked her head, then paused, leaning over the bed, hands on her knees, and she felt odd but didn’t identify it as vertigo. Then one hand went to the back of
her head and rubbed down along the nape of her neck and across her shoulder and she whispered Ouch, and vaguely remembered another feeling like this one, when she’d had
a fender bender that had sent Ramón flying forward so fast over the seats of the car into a collision with her head, bone on bone. She said to herself, he had a nosebleed. She listed a bit to the right as she smoothed the bedspread, and then used a lint-brush to clean it of dog hair.
This is how we live, she thought. There’s a dog in an armchair who watches out both west and south windows. It’s his chair and we don’t sit in it. Joe is the Master and I am the Lady. There is a Daddy in the house but he has grown children. There are four pairs of my shoes on the porch that I haven’t put away; in the drawer in a plastic bag are pieces of a plate waiting to be glued together; a woman from Chile cleans the house who likely thinks I am not a good housekeeper since this is not such a big house. Did I ever aspire to being a good housekeeper, or what Mom would say, Homemaker? There is no Mommy in this house. One reason the woman from Chile keeps coming to clean is Spanish, so Joe can speak it, his getting to speak it when she’s here. The logic that drew these details of their life into focus had to do with what she had failed or was failing to do, like making babies.
Did she even have a job? Caroline heard the question as if it came from Kevin Costner in Bull Durham. Who are you? Do you have a job? She heard her answer, almost the same as Susan Sarandon’s, I teach part-time at the community college, freshman composition, English 101, except Caroline taught at a university, and the courses were for English Majors.
Ramón barked as if someone was at the door.
She went downstairs and found no one at the door. In the kitchen Ramón bristled and threatened in the direction of the stuffed terrier she’d put on the floor. She realized
they had to be introduced. She realized she had to introduce Ramón to this thing as if it were a visitor.
It weighed very little; she tossed it in the air to show Ramón it was for playing. He sniffed at it the way he might sniff at someone who’d never been to the house before, who had been there half an hour or so; then he’d get brave enough to sniff a new person. Some people who came to the house were afraid of him, for his size, for his shining incisors, but he was the one afraid, and barked always like one afraid and people knew that in a dog, fear could be dangerous.
Caroline tossed the stuffed terrier again; it weighed very little, little more than no baby at all. When she’d heard
that her Mom was going to get Ramón a present, she had thought it was going to be funny. This was supposed to be funny, she said to Ramón; she went on, Mom thinks you’re a surrogate child, Ramón. She gave him a rawhide bone. You chew on that idea for me, okay?
The box was still on the kitchen table and the display package for the stuffed terrier told her that Ramón now had a companion with a BIG Imagination, that its name was Wishbone and that it had a TV show that aired daily. On the back of the packaging were pictures of Wishbone dressed as Robin Hood, Sherlock Holmes, Ali Baba. He was not dressed as Jane Eyre, Pocahontas, Nancy Drew. She tried to personify Wishbone, the dog who read. The package was shaped like an armchair. How appropriate.
She was reminded then of a book-searching trip, of arriving at the used-book store down the street, just as it opened. There were dog toys on the floor, and a shredded paperback. The owner explained that the night before, they had gone out to dinner, leaving two dogs in the store, one older, one still young. A storm had come up, thunder, lightning. The pup got nervous and had chewed on a book. There it lay, in shredded bits, the paperback. The pup had chosen for his chewing D. Terman, By Balloon to the Sahara. Up until now, it had been very funny to think about the dog chewing the book as if reading and taking a balloon to the Sahara.
Since it wasn’t so funny anymore, she went upstairs to
her desk. Christopher Smart sits on my desk, she said.
She picked up a book, one of five volumes of Christopher Smart’s collected works. Saying Christopher Smart sits on my desk is not literal since he’s dead. What figure is that? She went through her mental inventory of figures and made a check mark at Metonymy. She looked about her desk, and over it. See the fountain pen whose nib spreads ink only after you dip it in water—it needs cleaning. See the photo of her family of origin, the five of them before the divorce. There’s the Dad who mugged Stern Papa for the camera although he was anything but, and he was handsome in
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