Abbott Awaits (4 page)

Abbott is embarrassed about his broom. It is not, he knows, the right tool for the job. Abbott in his adult years has accumulated a fair number of tools, almost all of which happen not to be the right tool for the job. Abbott saw his neighbors—months ago, at the first buds of spring—sweep the snowplowed rocks from their front lawns to the street with large indoor/outdoor push brooms. These things had rubber grips, hardy bristles, lifetime warranties. Abbott's broom is a standard straw kitchen model, and it isn't doing much to chase the gravel from the crabgrass. He imagines an assembly of Pilgrims watching him from the street and shaking their heads. Abbott knows he should purchase the correct broom but in doing so he feels that he will commit himself entirely to this house, this lawn, this neighborhood, this family, this economic status, this climate, this region and its unfamiliar cycles—the winter plows, the spring sweeps, the seasonal relocation of gravel. If he owns the broom, then he will be sweeping this weedy yard each year until his death. The improper broom is embarrassing, but it keeps Abbott's options open. He can enjoy the freedom of the dabbler, though it is true that he is not enjoying his afternoon on the lawn. To brush the rocks from the grass and weeds, he
must use an incredibly forceful raking motion, and soon his wrists and forearms are sore, and he is, he notices, developing blisters on his hands. There are gloves in the garage, but they are the wrong kind. Abbott takes a break. He cannot lean on his broom, and he does not smoke cigarettes. The tall banks of clouds to the east look like a kingdom moving in. Or to the west. A Japanese neighbor hangs wet clothes on the line. What happened this morning is that Abbott spoke loudly at his daughter. This loud speaking might in fact have been yelling. The girl was imploring—Abbott does not remember about what—and he spoke loudly at her. He said, “Stop it.” He exclaimed. “You just push and push and
push
,” he said to her. “You will not let up.” Abbott knows that parents should not yell, that yelling just makes things worse and teaches children to yell. He knows he should maintain at all times a calm and controlled voice. He knows he should praise good behavior and simply ignore bad behavior until it disappears forever. Abbott can see that the broom is disintegrating. Pieces of straw are now mixed in with the gravel, and their extraction will require the use of some tool he does not own. It's bad enough that he yelled at the child. What's far worse is that his outburst to the two-year-old was nearly verbatim what Abbott had said several nights earlier, less loudly but more viciously, to his wife. He realized this as he said the words this morning, heard them, felt the familiar plosion of the
push and push and push
. There are different ways to articulate his misconduct, different angles of prosecution. It's demeaning, Abbott suspects, to speak to your wife in the same way that you speak to your young daughter, while it might be downright creepy to speak to your young daughter in the same way that you speak to your wife. In either case, it means that Abbott has acted as if he is married to a toddler. But Abbott takes comfort in the suspicion that the problem is actually much more dire and generalized, not particular to his wife and daughter. He might, he thinks, yell these words at anyone, anything, in his small beseeching world. There is nothing that won't not let up. Every day these cadgers and supplicants—the broken hinge, the moldy tub, the dog who has to pee. Down the street, coming closer, that sweaty college kid, collecting signatures for cleaner air.

It's already hot at 8:36 when Abbott and his daughter squat down beside the runoff grate at the edge of the road in front of their house. The girl says, “Rocks.” Abbott picks up three small rocks, puts them in his palm, and extends his palm toward his daughter. His daughter pinches a rock between her thumb and forefinger, then holds it over the grate a moment before dropping it in. Abbott and his daughter listen for the sound of the rock hitting water—a faint, high-pitched
bloop
that reverberates in the dark tunnel. The girl laughs when she hears it. Abbott extends his palm again, and his daughter pinches a rock and drops it into the grate, laughing when the rock hits water. Abbott offers the last rock, and the girl takes it and drops it into the grate, but the rock is too small and flat to produce a sound. The girl holds still for several seconds, waiting for the noise. Then she says, “More rocks?” Abbott is uncomfortable in his squat. He has begun having pain in his right hip. He of course considers arthritis. He picks up three more rocks, puts them in his palm, and extends his palm toward his daughter. A spry, gray-haired man, either a full professor or a retired full professor, walks up to the grate and stops.
“My kids used to love putting rocks in that damn grate thirty years ago,” he says to Abbott. “Every kid in this neighborhood has dropped rocks in that grate. Decades of rocks. It's a wonder the tunnel isn't all clogged up.” The man's tone, a complex blend of sympathy and severity, is a unique characteristic of the region and still perplexing to Abbott, who grew up with the comforts of superficial nicety. Abbott knows not whether to feel consoled that he is part of a lineage or irritated that his hardship is so prosaic. “Have a good day,” Abbott says to the man. Abbott's daughter says, “Man.” With her thumb and forefinger she pinches a rock out of Abbott's extended palm, holds the rock tantalizingly above the grate, then drops it. She smiles when she hears the reverberant
bloop
. She says, “Bloop.” She pinches another rock from Abbott's hand, holds it above the grate, drops it. The rock, when it hits the water, makes a faint, high-pitched sound that echoes softly in the dark tunnel. “More rocks?” the girl says. “Here's another one,” Abbott says, extending his palm. It's 8:39, hot. Somewhere a mower is already buzzing. Abbott comes out of his squat and sits on the road beside the grate. A neighbor drives by and waves. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of small rocks within Abbott's reach. The girl drops the rock in the grate, smiles when she hears the noise. “More rocks?” she says. A dog barks in some backyard. A cloud covers and then uncovers the sun. Campus is distant and theoretical, like a galaxy or heaven. There is something beyond tedium. You can pass all the way through tedium and come out the other side, and this is Abbott's gift today. He picks up a pinecone, puts it in his palm, and extends his palm toward his daughter. The girl's eyes grow wide and she laughs. She reaches for the pinecone, says, “Pinecone.”

Abbott would like to think he's a
good guy
, and yet his wife is up there sobbing, and he's down here with the superglue.

Abbott nearly swerves into a mailbox trying to read the church's hand-lettered advertisement for a forthcoming sermon entitled
TOLERANCE IS NOT THE SAME AS LOVE
. There is no need for comment or response. No need, even, for thought. Abbott knows that you are supposed to envision your mind, your consciousness, as a clean and empty room, open windows on opposite walls, the wind just passing through. The wind is the world, here and gone, or perhaps only here. Abbott likes to add white fluttering curtains to give the wind form, but he soon discovers that the room of his consciousness has a curtain rod, some hardware, a cordless drill with a battery that needs to be charged. He'll need an electrical outlet. Is the room wired? He can't remember what the things on the ends of curtain rods are called. They have a name. The wind swirls in his room, stirring up dust. Abbott has thoughts, he can't help it, about the hand-lettered advertisement for the sermon. One thought is that tolerance, while admittedly not identical to love, is, on an imaginary Continuum of Regard, a good deal closer to love than enriched uranium. Another thought, buried beneath the first like an earthquake survivor, is that there is in fact not one thing the same as love, including love.

Some stories, like this one, have more than one ending. Here is the beginning: When his family moved into the house in Western Massachusetts, Abbott found an old nine-by-twelve carpet rolled against a wall in the unfinished basement. Soon after settling in, Abbott unrolled the musty but serviceable carpet on the cement floor. He then placed the cat's litter box atop the carpet, both to create a comfortable excretory environment for the cat and to limit the dispersal of litter. During the winter, Abbott began to suspect the cat was spraying the carpet, but the carpet is dark and the basement lighting is poor, and he did not care to investigate the matter. When spring arrived with higher temperatures and higher humidity, however, the basement began to reek. And then tonight, Abbott, dizzy with the fumes, investigates the matter and realizes with a cold shudder that the carpet is soaked with cat piss that apparently never dries. Not dealing with it is no longer an option. He must put his hands on the carpet, and now. Abbott rolls the carpet (wincing at the wet cement beneath), opens the rusted metal doors of the bulkhead, and drags the sodden, cylindrical load up six wooden stairs to the backyard, then around
the house to the driveway. Now is the time for thinking. The carpet is far too big to leave by the curb for the weekly garbage pickup, and also too big to place in or on his car to take to the dump. Abbott knows what must be done, and he selects from his garage a standard carpentry saw, with which he attempts to cut a strip from the carpet along the twelve-foot side. The carpet, however, has a thick border, reinforced, Abbott will come to learn, by saw-resistant wire. Thus he returns to the garage and emerges with a large pair of hedge clippers, and with some effort he manages to slice the carpet's border. The word Abbott cannot quite remember until much later is
selvage
. The sun has dipped below the tops of the big trees, but the night is still quite hot, and Abbott is sweating. The windows of his house are open, and he can hear his wife tell his daughter, “No mouth.” Once he has sliced through the carpet's border with the hedge clippers, he is able, with considerable exertion, to cut a nine-foot strip with the saw, stopping at the bottom border to use the hedge clippers again. With this combination of tools, he makes seven long cuts, creating eight strips of filthy, urinous carpet, nine feet long and roughly eighteen inches wide. This takes quite a while. The wire inside the carpet borders cuts his fingers, which are wet with piss and slimy nuggets of cat litter. He hears his wife tell his daughter, “Time for your bath.” Neighbors walk by and watch him cut carpet with a saw. It is possible, he knows, that they can smell the ammonia from the street. He does not look up, does not indicate that he is available for chitchat. Even so, they call out, “Looks like you got your hands full there,” and, “What you need is a carpet cutter.” He grunts assent, wipes his brow with his sweaty shirt. Abbott rolls each of the eight nine-foot strips into a tight, damp bundle, and he stacks the bundles in the driveway like firewood.
Cord
, he thinks. He hears his wife tell his daughter, “Let's get you to bed.” He returns the hedge clippers and saw to the garage, and he sweeps up the litter and carpet fluff from the driveway. Then he takes from the garage an empty plastic garbage can and a box of heavy-duty lawn bags. He places the carpet rolls in two bags, four to a bag, and he heaves the bags into the garbage can. He tries to push the lid on, but it will not fit. That one vivid star must be Venus. Garbage pickup, Abbott remembers, is not tomorrow but the following day. He would rather the stuffed and lidless can not sit incriminatingly
at the street for thirty-six hours, so he decides to drag it back into the garage. This kind of dragging will eventually wear a hole in the bottom of the can, but Abbott does not know that yet, and he is untroubled. He presses an illuminated doorbell button mounted on a two-by-four, and the garage door drops slowly like a final curtain. And this is where the story furcates like lightning, strikes ground in four places. The first ending is about Ernest Hemingway and masculinity: catching speckled trout in a cold stream, knocking them dead on a flat rock, furling them in leaves, and placing them in a shady spot until dinner. The second ending is cold and familiar, another variation of the look-behind-the-refrigerator horror of domesticity and the soul-diminishing obligations of middle-class citizenship. The third ending is a virulent eco-sci-fi scenario, involving planetary visitors in the year 2820 who find massive underground deposits of nondegraded carpet. The fourth ending is the riskiest and the most interesting. This ending makes a sincere attempt at Franklinian homily, and it goes more or less like this: Almost any task, no matter how initially abhorrent, can, if conceived with Ingenuity and executed with Industry, create feelings of Satisfaction and Pleasure.

Amidst the toys in the family room is a battery-operated light-sensitive jungle-animal-sounds puzzle, given to Abbott's daughter either by a childless friend of Abbott or a friend of Abbott who hates Abbott. Tonight, like all the nights, Abbott and his wife clean the family room after putting their daughter to bed. Tonight, like all the nights, when they turn off the light after cleaning they activate a loud light-sensitive jungle-animal sound—an unspecifically savage squawk from the bottom of the puzzle crate. A monkey, perhaps, or parrot. Tonight, like all the nights, the jungle-animal sound is an agonizing surprise, an ambush. Abbott and his wife laugh and say curse words.
Shit
and
fuck
, for instance. The imprecations, because they are directed at a puzzle for children ages two to four, seem more vulgar and thus more satisfying. Tonight, like all the nights, Abbott says he will just take the batteries out of that motherfucker. Outside, the sun is setting, and the sky has turned that color that is both lovely and frightening. “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” says Abbott's wife, vanishing down the dark hallway. This day, like all the days, endless and gone.