need, on the other, to be squeaky clean—came into dramatic and rather ludicrous conflict one evening when I was taking a bath and a beetle crawled onto the hot water valve. I lived in the basement, beetles were always barging in, but I’d never before answered the question: was it more important to be virtuous (let the bug live) or keep the bathroom clean (squash the silly insect)? Suddenly it seemed like the only serious problem I’d ever contemplated. I got out of the bathtub and paced up and back on the blue tile, cleaning up after myself as I dripped, wondering whether I should kill the beetle or let it live. For half an hour that dichotomy was the one idea in my head. I sat down on the stool to get a different perspective on the situation. Then the beetle fell off the faucet and drowned.
It’s difficult to be impeccable in the damaged universe. As hard as I tried to be moral and immaculate, I would have certain lapses and my environment would have others. Mother simply refused to listen to any more
mea culpas
—she said if I pestered her any more she was going to refer me to a child psychiatrist, who was paid to listen to such lunacy—so every night I sat up and wrote a list of all the infinitely important, infinitely unimportant things I’d done wrong during the day. The last item on the list would always be that I’d wasted electricity by staying up late to write the list, which sounds like one of Father’s jokes left behind on the Borscht belt but was, nevertheless, the degree to which my mind had wrapped in on itself. In the morning I’d leave the list in Mother’s purse or on the front seat of her Fiat before she left. After a while she wouldn’t even glance at it before throwing it out and we got so we didn’t have to talk about it. She knew I’d leave her a list, I knew she’d throw it away, and we both were happy. This went on for years and now it seems too close to psychosis to endure for more than a few minutes, but at the time Mother seemed to have arrived at a puzzled acceptance of it and I did, too. I thought I’d be observing beetles from the bathtub and writing notes at midnight forever. I forget how or when all this madness ended; God knows I can still get trapped in the interstices of the OED or the marginalia of some torn, blackened page I’ve rescued from the refuse. But before the initial disorder ceased, the lists—in the way that everything language touches it focuses and refines—made things worse.
I became imbued with the notion that to carry dirt from one spot to another was to spread germs and endanger people’s lives. In the house, this was easy enough to avoid. If I removed my shoes on the back porch, then showered six or seven times and washed my hands every time I came in contact with something, I was in no danger of distributing any mud. Outdoors, especially on the playground at Currier, the mania got magnified. I’d be running merrily across the yard, step in a puddle, realize what I’d done, then run back and soak my feet until I felt the dirt had returned to its point of origin. I used to spend entire recesses digging my heel into a grease spot I suspected of being the repository of the black spot on my shoe.
The climax of this campaign came when Charles flew up from Los Angeles for my ninth birthday, and Father took us to see
Citizen Kane,
which I didn’t understand, but Charles explained, “It’s about money. All great art is about money.” Charles is now employed by an association in Sacramento that has no address or phone because, as Charles explains, the government monitors all union organization of service workers. Although this was the sixth time he’d seen the movie, Father said some of the visual effects were stunning. I couldn’t distinguish a visual effect from a subplot, but I thoroughly enjoyed the buttered popcorn, the icy Coke, the pink box of Bon Bons. As we left the theater and walked toward the car, everyone was content until I intuited a
It’s difficult to be impeccable in the damaged universe. As hard as I tried to be moral and immaculate, I would have certain lapses and my environment would have others. Mother simply refused to listen to any more
mea culpas
—she said if I pestered her any more she was going to refer me to a child psychiatrist, who was paid to listen to such lunacy—so every night I sat up and wrote a list of all the infinitely important, infinitely unimportant things I’d done wrong during the day. The last item on the list would always be that I’d wasted electricity by staying up late to write the list, which sounds like one of Father’s jokes left behind on the Borscht belt but was, nevertheless, the degree to which my mind had wrapped in on itself. In the morning I’d leave the list in Mother’s purse or on the front seat of her Fiat before she left. After a while she wouldn’t even glance at it before throwing it out and we got so we didn’t have to talk about it. She knew I’d leave her a list, I knew she’d throw it away, and we both were happy. This went on for years and now it seems too close to psychosis to endure for more than a few minutes, but at the time Mother seemed to have arrived at a puzzled acceptance of it and I did, too. I thought I’d be observing beetles from the bathtub and writing notes at midnight forever. I forget how or when all this madness ended; God knows I can still get trapped in the interstices of the OED or the marginalia of some torn, blackened page I’ve rescued from the refuse. But before the initial disorder ceased, the lists—in the way that everything language touches it focuses and refines—made things worse.
I became imbued with the notion that to carry dirt from one spot to another was to spread germs and endanger people’s lives. In the house, this was easy enough to avoid. If I removed my shoes on the back porch, then showered six or seven times and washed my hands every time I came in contact with something, I was in no danger of distributing any mud. Outdoors, especially on the playground at Currier, the mania got magnified. I’d be running merrily across the yard, step in a puddle, realize what I’d done, then run back and soak my feet until I felt the dirt had returned to its point of origin. I used to spend entire recesses digging my heel into a grease spot I suspected of being the repository of the black spot on my shoe.
The climax of this campaign came when Charles flew up from Los Angeles for my ninth birthday, and Father took us to see
Citizen Kane,
which I didn’t understand, but Charles explained, “It’s about money. All great art is about money.” Charles is now employed by an association in Sacramento that has no address or phone because, as Charles explains, the government monitors all union organization of service workers. Although this was the sixth time he’d seen the movie, Father said some of the visual effects were stunning. I couldn’t distinguish a visual effect from a subplot, but I thoroughly enjoyed the buttered popcorn, the icy Coke, the pink box of Bon Bons. As we left the theater and walked toward the car, everyone was content until I intuited a
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