Chapter Eleven
Eleven
And so a dark time came and settled into the house on Farm Road.
In the morning, Miles drove Olive to school, and in the afternoon, he drove her home, and in between, he puttered about, beginning this and cleaning that and taking a long time to put on his boots and jacket and bring the dog into the yard, and a long time to remove his boots and jacket before he went inside.
Still the woods were beautiful, and still his children were happy, and still he had—if one ignored his knee—his health, and still—he tried to tell himself—things always worked out for the better; perhaps his injury had saved him from some grimmer fate.
And then the three members of the family with functioning knees would come home after skiing, their cheeks flushed, their moods high, talking about the snow, the woods, how magical it was, how magical! Until they saw him, and quieted at once.
There were chores to do, mounting numbers of chores, but they all felt futile; the exercises for his knee felt futile; the kids’ appetites for his meals were inversely related to the amount of time he spent preparing them; someone was bound to forget to remove a snowy jacket, or snowy boots, and issues of Kidz Newz!
seemed to reproduce when he wasn’t looking.
And then there was the dog. If the dog had been a lot of work before, the dog in winter was a different level of responsibility entirely.
Not that Miles didn’t enjoy their walks.
Before, he’d never understood Giuseppe’s chaotic paths, but now the snow had spelled it out for him.
Animal tracks everywhere. This was why he kept zigzagging across the trail, and this was why he was so transfixed by the stone wall, and that was why he stopped and plunged his head into the snow: all noted, all written down.
But whenever he took the dog outside, Giuseppe also came back plastered in snow.
The only variety was the type of snow: muddy slush, or icy chunks, or matted clumps that clung to his legs like hoary dreadlocks.
Moist, dog-shaped silhouettes appeared on the beds and couches, and dog-shaped smears along the wallpaper.
And there was the carpet, that obscure object of desire, that obsession.
The dog, it was clear, had no intention of abandoning the burrow he had started, and Miles only had to step away to hear his whirring paws against the subfloor.
But what was he to do? Liberate him in the forest?
Even this thought, which had emerged unbidden, secretly, shamefully, was neither emotionally nor practically possible: the dog would simply dig his way home, probably emerging proudly from the very spot he’d started excavating from above.
And, yes, they tried moving the furniture, and, yes, they tried a child-safety fence, but Giuseppe simply directed his attention elsewhere.
They’d decided to cut their losses, let him dig, and when the year was up, get it repaired.
As long as Rumphius sprung no surprise visits, he wouldn’t know what happened.
Like The Cat in the Hat! said Olive. For no mess was too big, or too deep or too tall, that they could not pick up, there was no mess at all.
When Giuseppe began to chew at the floor, as if to soften it for his paws, they decided to take him to the vet, who blamed it on the breed.
“You don’t think it’s the Super-Rat-Line?
” Miles asked, but she looked at him like he was a little crazy, and prescribed Giuseppe Clomicalm—clomipramine—which Miles, trying to seem less crazy, told her was in fact the same drug that he had been prescribed over twenty years before, in college, when, after a norovirus outbreak, he’d developed a germ fixation.
“That’s nice,” said the vet.
Actually, the story was a little more complicated, said Miles, feeling again like he was saying things he wouldn’t be saying if he weren’t so starved for human interaction.
He had been prescribed clomipramine, but the pharmacy filled clomiphene, for female infertility.
Sure, he’d been puzzled by the instructions to “time intercourse with the expected time of ovulation”—after all, wouldn’t doctors be recommending people with OCD not to time their intercourse?
Timing intercourse seemed a symptom of the condition.
It was only when his roommate’s deeply religious mother found it that the error was uncovered.
He could only imagine what the poor woman had thought the two young men were using it for!
But nothing bad had happened, save that for a couple of weeks, he’d felt a little more—for want of a better word—fertile, which was hardly the worst thing in the world.
“I hear you,” said the vet.
For a moment, he sensed her appraising him, maybe for a call to Animal Welfare, but then, from the examining room next door, came a growl, and then a human screaming, lots of screaming.
In an instant, the vet was on her feet and out the door.
For a long time, Miles waited with Giuseppe, who looked up at him, with some bewilderment, as through the wall came the sound of crashing, curses, and more screams. Should he call the police?
he wondered. But these were professionals.
So, after waiting awhile, he led Giuseppe out, through the lobby, where even the receptionist was missing.
The meds, the vet had said, would take eight weeks to work. In the meantime, Miles kept the dog close, which meant on him, or beneath his leg, which propped his knee up nicely.
Deeper and deeper he sank.
To make matters worse, the boiler, perhaps objecting to the disrespect inflicted on its friend the carpet, decided to take up the marimba.
It had never been a quiet boiler, but clearly it was angry, or maybe a bad batch of heating oil had given it some indigestion, for each night, just as Miles and Kate were getting into bed, it unleashed upon the baseboards like an infernal borborygmic glockenspiel.
Ping! it screamed, Ping! Ding! Ping! Ping Pong Pong Pong!
Ping! Pong Pong Pong Pong Pong Pong Pong Pong Pong.
Ping! Ping! Ping Ping!…Silence…Silence…Pong!
Pong! Pong! Pong! Pong! Fizz! All night long, as the great man once said: All night.
Was it going to blow up? Neither Kate, who could recite Milton’s description of Hell by memory, nor Miles, who had just recently researched and abandoned a chapter on Russian peasant stove construction, had ever seen a boiler, and so, standing one morning before the rebellious box of fire, they decided to call Paradise Boiler, named for Hank Paradise, the original owner, whose son Hank Paradise, Jr., said that it was working perfectly, a thing of beauty, yes…
Oh, but here’s the problem! Then he handed them two pairs of earplugs, and chuckled, as his father had once chuckled, and his sons would chuckle after him.
To add insult to injury, Miles found that three months of dry winter air had begun to split his thumbs.
Dr. Anita examined his fingers, reassured him by telling him the names of people with worse skin problems, and recommended little sheaths of latex called cots, which he rolled down over each affected digit.
The earplugs were bright green and flared outward at the end, and looked like little elf-ears worn inside his own ears, and the cots looked like little elf-condoms, or big elf-condoms, depending on the size of the elf.
Also, at night he wore two hats, because it was cold and he was starting to bald, and two pairs of socks, because he’d developed chilblains, a condition he thought people only got in medieval England.
Would you marry me now? he asked his wife, as she looked upon him, but he couldn’t hear her answer, because of the plugs.
He still took joy in hearing about Olive’s day at school, and seeing her most recent artwork, which Miss Kayleigh let her do in lieu of math and science.
Wesley was newly busy with the newspaper, which let the seventh-graders write articles that no one else wanted to write.
And Miles found Farm Candy videos helped pass the hours; he learned to milk a goat, remove a hairball from the sink with chopsticks, sharpen a chainsaw, make a bra (episodes 1, 2, and 3), bake muffins, cook samosas, and hang gutters while balanced on a very high ladder in shorts no bigger than a tool belt.
And every day he felt a little lightness in his heart when the Miscellaneous Minute theme song announced his quarter-hour drive to Greensbury Elementary.
He had even hunted down the podcast website, rich in episodes, only to discover that talk radio, much like a wild apple, was best when it was fresh and chanced upon serendipitously.
Now, downloaded in bulk, the callers just seemed sad and lonely, as Kate had said back when he’d played the program for her.
While he, who half-believed the addled tales and rambling questions, had felt that it offered a royal road into the unconscious of their new home.
Once he got lunch with Andrei, and several times he called up Snowflake Bentley, but just because you scythe well with a man does not mean that you will have much to talk about when the scything’s over. And Bentley didn’t have an answering machine.
And then, finally, he wondered if he might get back to his dissertation.
Lemonade from lemons, right? Peasants were injured all the time in folktales; this was easily worth a chapter.
But had he been chopped into pieces while he slept, and thrown into a barrel?
No, he had not. Had his arms been hacked off by an evil brother, preventing him from rescuing a child from a well?
No, this had not happened, either. What kind of claim did he have on their experiences?
What right? Colleagues were being pilloried for less.
And reading the depictions of winters made him miss the winter just outside his window. In the spring he’d write it, surely, but not now, not with the snow outside.