GLASS
GLASS
A NOVEL
SAM SAVAGE
COPYRIGHT © 2011 by Sam Savage
COVER AND BOOK DESIGN by Linda Koutsky
AUTHOR PHOTOGRAPH © Nancy Marshall
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CIP INFORMATION
Savage, Sam, 1940—
Glass : a novel / by Sam Savage.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-1-56689-273-5 (alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-56689-291-9 (ebook)
1. Widows—Fiction. 2. Authorship—Fiction.
3. Self-realization in women—Fiction. 4. Marriage—Fiction.
5 Psychological fiction. I. Title.
PS3619.A84G57 2011
813´.6—DC23
2011024104
GLASS
It would be wonderful to leap over certain obstacles and be in a superior position to the one one is in. One sees that one is, in a sense, helplessly concerned with one’s concerns. One has to have the thoughts one has, one can’t just have the thoughts one would like to have.
—JASPER JOHNS
(in conversation with Deborah Solomon, the New York Times Magazine, June 19, 1988)
I was much too far out all my life
And not waving but drowning.
—STEVIE SMITH
I THINK A LOT. I think too much Clarence liked to say, when I objected to some of the piffle he would come out with, especially when he had knocked back a few. I am not going to go into that now, into his drinking or his piffle, as I am not at the moment thinking about Clarence, except insofar as I have to in order to mention him at all—you cannot talk about someone without thinking about them in that sense. What I was actually thinking about was traveling, though not about that either in the sense of considering it as potential action—rushing to the bus station and so forth, or even looking at colorful brochures—as if I could take a trip if I wanted, though I really do want to in some sense of wanting, in some sense of trip. To want in that way is to have a desire without attaching it to any foreseeable action—desire without hope, I guess it is. I believe the word for that sort of desire is velleity. I am finding that I have more and more velleities these days, and one of them is the velleity to travel, a hopeless longing to just peregrinate off somewhere. But thinking about it some more it strikes me that even velleity might be too strong, suggesting as it does a feeble impulse, so terribly feeble these days. I don’t as a matter of strictest fact have a desire to travel even as something hopeless and impossible, not at the present time, not when I have only just started typing again. It is more that I sometimes like to imagine the places I might go if I were to take a trip, and that is what I was doing a few moments ago, before being distracted by the thought of Clarence, which intruded without being summoned. I was sitting at the little table by the window, where I take breakfast and where the typewriter is at the moment. I am still sitting there, obviously. My posture is erect, elbows open, forearms sloping slightly downward; I am wearing a blue dress. I intend to type up all sorts of items in addition to Clarence, and among them I expect will be some that have yet to pop into my head. I say that, and it occurs to me that in the huge heap of things stacked in my head Clarence has become just an item. Before saying it—inadvertently as I have just explained—I had not thought of him in quite that way. The table is small, round, with tapered wooden legs and a Formica top. I take breakfast here because the windows face east and I can be sitting in front of them with my cup of coffee when the sun comes up. It comes shining up over the ice cream factory, the light streams in through the big windows, and I take a first small sip. Sometimes with that first sip the words “sip and shine” come into my head and shine there. Moments like these, I suppose, are what people mean when they talk of life’s little pleasures. The sun comes up, the ice cream factory roars, and sometimes I imagine the roar is the sound of the rising sun, as in the Kipling poem I loved as a child, where the dawn comes up like thunder out of China across the bay. All the windows in this room face east, but the sunlight streams through only one of them, the center one of three, the clear one between the two obscure, as those two are mostly covered with notes and bits of tape and through them the sunlight merely seeps, apart from a few slanting shafts that penetrate the interstices, shedding bright jagged patterns on the floor. If Rudyard Kipling could see the sun come up out of the ice cream factory across the street, he would be disappointed, I am sure. There are other days when the clouds are so thick I am not certain where the sun is exactly, and on those days I have a feeling of such oppression I find it hard to see the point of going on, and when the cloudy days come one after another without a break between them, as has been happening more frequently in recent years, things reach such a pass I find myself crying over trifles. By “things” I mean mostly my thoughts. Opening the refrigerator one morning and finding there is not any milk is such a trifle, where in fact I did sit down and cry. I woke up and it was raining again. I lay in bed listening to it fall and comforted myself by thinking about how in a few minutes I was going to be curled up with my coffee in the big armchair by the window, pictured myself looking out at the rain and feeling thankful to be dry and warm. And after that to get up in the semi-dark and walk to the kitchen and discover the milk has turned and to know that I will have to drink the coffee black or go out to the store in the rain … naturally I sat down and just wept. In addition to the table I have an armchair and a footstool that sits in front of the armchair, and those, along with a small sofa, a bookcase, a little corner stand that holds the telephone, and two straight-back chairs that go with the table, are all the furniture in the living room, unless one counts the radio—a yellow Sony radio on the windowsill nearest the armchair. When I sit in the armchair I rest my feet on the stool, as I have been told to do because of the swelling in my ankles, though that is not why I do it—I do it because I am more comfortable that way. I sit and look across the humps of my knees at my feet, an increasingly doleful sight in recent years, with their river deltas of blue veins. I have managed to identify the Zambezi and, I think, the Magdalena, though I need to verify the latter with a better atlas. The armchair is upholstered in a brown velvety material, the footstool is brown as well but a different brown from the chair, my feet are upholstered in flesh that beneath the scaly epiderm has grown spongy lately, retaining dimples if I poke it. When I was a child I once heard my father say of my mother that she was in a brown study, and I thought, What an odd thing to say, since we could all see that she was sitting in her car in the driveway. I have liked the expression ever since, because of the funny pictures that come with it, though I never say it out loud anymore as none of the people I talk to now would know what it means, but sitting in my brown chair I sometimes think of it. “Edna is in a brown study” is how I think of it then. By “people I talk to now” I mean the people I have been talking to lately, which would be various young people behind the counter at Starbucks, the waitress at the diner, Potts, the girls at the agency, the man in the typewriter store, and a bus driver, to the best of my recollection. I have other acquaintances who would surely know what a brown study is, but I have not been talking to any of them lately, where by “not talking to th
em” I don’t mean that we are not on speaking terms, suggesting a mutual not-talking due to animus; it is just that lately I haven’t said anything in their vicinity—last summer was when I stopped saying things in their vicinity. Another expression I like is “on the point of departure,” as if there were a pinnacle or peak of some sort with departure a slope on one side and staying a slope on the other. Seen in that way staying is really a kind of backsliding: sliding back into my big brown chair. There are other phrases like that, which remind me of that one—“on the verge of despair,” for example. In fact there are quite a lot of those—“on the brink of madness,” “at the edge of bankruptcy,” “on the fringe of respectable society,” and so forth. You can see just from these phrases that every walk of life has its pitfalls. I don’t say that as an excuse. I have not gone to work since the second week of January. Early one morning at an hour when on any other weekday I would have been charging down the stairs to the street, afraid of missing my bus, I did not charge down the stairs. I stood on the landing for a while, and then I went back inside. I did not deliberate; there was nothing to deliberate about. “Edna was stopped cold in her tracks by a sudden blankness” was how it felt. Of course I mean mentally charging, impelled by a fear of being late, not physically running down the steps, which would be practically suicidal at my age. I did not, on the last day I was at work, intend never to return. I had not properly packed up, and I left my sheepskin earmuffs hanging on the back of a chair. I called in sick every day at first, then every few days. After a while I stopped calling, preferring to wait until they telephoned me. Now no one telephones. I did not go to work because it was too much bother. It is something of a mystery that the typewriter is once again perched on the table. I put it here quite a few weeks ago. I dragged it from the back of the closet, having removed a great many other items—clothing, books, blankets, parts of a broken chair—piling them on the bed, in order to reach it. I intended to start typing the moment I set it down, and I actually did whack the keys a few times, to check that they were working, and I saw right away that the ribbon had dried out. That was to be expected, of course, the machine having sat in my closet for years, though I was not personally expecting it, not having thought about the ribbon at all and expecting really to be able to sit down and type. I am not sure how many years, certainly ten or eleven, since I have lived in this apartment fourteen years and after the first two or three I have not typed at all. The mystery is why I all of a sudden decided to take it up again, take up typing again after so much time without it. One day I am staring out the window or quietly eating oatmeal at my table or, as I mentioned, weeping, and the next day I am typing. I will not say merrily typing or even typing away, but typing nonetheless, accurately and at a good pace, considering. When I first moved into this apartment I was still writing letters to a few people, though I was finding it increasingly difficult to think of anything to say to them beyond the usual stuff of how are you all and I am well considering, unless I happened to be recovering from flu or some such thing, and then of course I could always mention that. It became obvious after a while that I was not saying anything more than would fit on a postcard, and I started sending postcards instead, and that was when I stopped typing, postcards being the sort of thing one writes by hand, and it must have been soon after this that I put the typewriter in the closet, it having become just one more thing to trip over. Of course one could write postcards on a typewriter. A drawback would be that they would come out curved and have to be placed under a book until flat again, and also, because a typewriter’s letters are so much smaller than handwriting, one would be able to fit more words on the card, defeating the whole purpose of writing cards in place of letters. One would end up once again inserting all sorts of irrelevant drivel just to fill up the white space, and that seems to me the actual reason people do not usually type postcards. After all, there is nothing really wrong with mailing curved postcards; certainly there is no postal rule against it, since in any case it would be flattened in the cancellation machine or whatever they call the device that prints the wavy lines across the stamps. When I said that I am now once again typing at a good pace considering, I was referring to my age: I am typing at a good pace for someone my age, with hands like mine. I am inclined to say that my fingers look like claws. My fingers do not look like claws, though they are thinner than they ever were and the knuckles are swollen. I think they are the hands of an average female person of my age. My dress is fastened at the wrist by four white buttons. I collected stamps when I was a child, without enthusiasm, because the grown-ups thought I should. My father’s companies received correspondence from all over the world, and he made them save all the interesting stamps for me, ones they might otherwise have taken home to their own children. I did not enjoy collecting stamps and never bothered pasting them into the big blue albums Papa bought me, but I kept the prettiest ones near my bed in a mahogany box with an old-fashioned square-rigged sailing ship carved in bas-relief on the lid, and I looked at them now and then. The ones I liked best were from countries I had never heard of, faraway parts of the British Empire, and French Equatorial Africa, a place that because of its name impressed me as infinitely desirable. I was required to take a nap every afternoon until I was ridiculously old, and instead of sleeping I sometimes took the stamps from the box and looked at them and imagined that I was traveling to the places the stamps came from and riding elephants, encountering crocodiles, and things of that nature. I actually don’t remember my daydreams from that period, just that I spent a lot of time having them, so I am only guessing when I say they included crocodiles and elephants. I mean, why wouldn’t they? As time passed, and my situation became increasingly intolerable, I daydreamed more often, not just at nap time, and stayed away longer. I stayed away in the dreams—I was dreaming that I was away. By “situation” I mean ordinary life, which at that time included Mama and Papa. I must have been four or five when I finally recognized that ordinary life with them had become intolerable for me. They had brought me to my first day at kindergarten, “they” in this instance being Mama and Nurse, the large German woman who took care of me while Mama was socially whirling. She had a real name, I suppose, but if I once knew it I have forgotten it now. The words “Gertrude Klemmer” hover next to a number of my earliest recollections, though perhaps that was someone in a book. Whatever her name, she was Nurse to me, and I saw a great deal more of her than of Mama or Papa. She left when I was five or six, replaced by a series of other women, none of whom stayed for very long. I am not sure she was German; she might have been Dutch. I finally did travel to Europe several times after I was grown, to Mexico, Venezuela, and to East Africa once, for a short while, but I never went to any of the countries of my favorite stamps. Traveling as a grown-up, with all the burdens and unhappiness of being grown, turned out to be not nearly as nice as I had thought it would be when I imagined it as a child.
The blank space means I stopped typing at that point—to go look for a picture of Nurse. I had been wondering if she was German or Dutch, and I thought I would have another look at her picture. That was ridiculous, of course, to think I could find out by looking at a picture whether someone is German or Dutch, but I went and looked for it anyway. I have noticed that I am having a great many thoughts lately that don’t quite make sense. As happened earlier, when I complained about being distracted by the thought of Clarence, which I accused of intruding without being summoned. In fact, after reflecting on it some more, it is not clear to me how a thought could ever be summoned, as I seem to have suggested then. After all, I would scarcely be in a position to summon a thought, pluck it from the enormous heap of all possible thoughts, were I not already thinking it, in some sense of thinking, in some sense of already, and of course it is less a heap than a tangle, an enormous tangle of possible thoughts, like a jungle. Summoning a thought would be like summoning a stranger from a crowd in order to find out his name. Well, I suppose you could do that with gestures or by shouting or by going ove
r to him and plucking his sleeve, as you might do if one day you were to see someone in a railroad station whose name you would like to know, perhaps because he looks like the kind of person you would want to be friends with. To make the analogy work you have to imagine that you are not able to go over next to that person, perhaps because you are crippled or horribly tired or under arrest and are handcuffed to a policeman. You see this person you want to know, perhaps someone famous who would be able to help you out of your difficulty, but you are not allowed by some mysterious force which we won’t go into now to shout or wave or even move your eyes in a significant manner. The only way you are permitted to get his attention is by calling his name, and that is just the thing you don’t know and were hoping to find out. Of course we have to assume also that the people you are with, the policeman or doctor or whatever, don’t know his name either, or if they do they are refusing to tell you, because they think it would be harmful for you to contact that person or perhaps harmful to them, to their position in society, especially if you are being wrongly detained, or perhaps they just do it out of spite. I feel that I am not making myself clear. I am trying to make the really simple point that summoning thoughts is out of the question: they just come, and the matter seems complicated only because it is really so simple. That is often the case, I suppose, simple things being slippery because they don’t possess any angles by which one can get a firm grip on them. I find it helpful to think of the mind as like a street: cars and people and whatever, dogs, leaves, just keep coming into it, turning into it or walking or blowing into it, scraps of paper and dust, for example, in addition to leaves, and there is no telling what will turn into it next, nor is there any way to peer around the corner and see what is coming and maybe divert some of it one way or the other, perhaps by standing at the intersection and waving one’s arms the way a traffic policeman does; send this car that way and that one this way, where by “cars” of course I mean thoughts, and by this way and that way I mean into the mind or not. When you think about it like that, using only concrete images, it is easy to see how absurd it is to think that one can summon thoughts. They just come. There is another matter that is related to this one in a way that is not clear to me at the moment. Possibly I could make it clear were I to think about it some more, but I am really quite tired of the whole subject. I feel that I am dithering, even though when I set out I was determined to be decisive. When I set out typing, I mean. I set out to be concise and decisive, and in the next moment a hundred things broke in, intruded of their own volition, invaded really, and as I have just finished pointing out not summoned in any way. That needs to be qualified—qualifications being another thing, in addition to intrusions, that tend to get in the way: even though one cannot summon thoughts willy-nilly out of nowhere, once they have shown themselves even partially, poked up the tips of their noses, as it were, one is able to line them up to be thought about, like distributing numbers to people at a deli counter. For example, when I typed that bit about velleities I was also on the verge of saying several other things, but I made those wait in line until I could talk about velleities, and then of course the things that crowded in with that, the furniture, the spoiled milk, the stamp collection, and so forth, right up to the man in the railroad station. In my experience it is not possible to give out more than a few numbers at a time, at least not possible to give them out in one’s head. When a great many things crowd in at once, I write them down on a piece of paper, or else I forget to think about them. Sometimes I tape the paper up on a window where I can see it. The photograph I was looking for is of Nurse and me in the yard at home. I thought I had put it back in the letter box, that being what I call the cardboard box where I keep all the letters I care to preserve, as well as most of my photographs. I don’t call it that exactly, in that I don’t believe I have said those words out loud together even once, unless we count the times I almost certainly did say them when we lived in England, where that is how they like to say mailbox. We were there for only three weeks, so I couldn’t have said it very often even then, but just a moment ago, when I was wondering where the photograph of Nurse had got to, I am sure I was thinking something like, “it must be in the letter box.” Otherwise how could I have known where it was I was about to look? Unless, of course, I had a picture of the box in my head at the time. I am certain I did not have a picture like that in my head at the time. I often have words in my head, sometimes my own words, sometimes other people’s, fragments of conversations, bits and pieces of songs and poems, pointless chatter, and little announcements like “I am going to open the window” just before I open the window, but I seldom have pictures. The photo was not in the letter box. I had used it as a bookmark, I finally remembered, in The Lord of the Rings, which I was trying to read a few years ago—trying once again, that is, there was such talk about it after they made it into a movie, though I was just as bored as the first time, ever so many years ago—and when I put it back on the shelf I must have forgotten to retrieve the bookmark. I had obviously forgotten, since there it was sticking out of the book. I normally use string for bookmarks, not pictures. It used to irritate Clarence when I would go back and forth in this manner, saying one thing and then another, with the second thing canceling out the first in a way that might seem fickle, and drifting sideways instead of shooting relentlessly forward, though I would not call it dithering, which sounds lax and weak-kneed. He called it vacillating, but to me it is just thinking. Clarence’s mind always dove straight for what he wanted, and he said that my back-and-forthing drove him nuts. But frankly there was something almost brutal about his own thinking, if one can even call it thinking. He had no inkling of the difficulty some of us have in going forward. It is fair to say that Clarence was not a thinking person. In fact he was able to do what he did and, incidentally, write the way he wrote, only because he was simply blind to alternatives, his sentences stamping across the page like little soldiers, each armed with a dangerously active little verb. And some people loved it, because the sentences carried them right along, and like the little soldiering sentences themselves his readers were not obliged ever to think about where they were going. I have always thought this about his writing; if anyone had asked me I would have said so, even though the sentences in The Forest at Night are not nearly as awful as they became later. I mean awful in that particular respect; in other respects they are wonderful, of course. I expect that in the future I will want to stop typing for a variety of other reasons, other than looking for a photo, and I anticipate leaving a blank spot in those places as well. I have stopped several times already, pausing surreptitiously, so to speak, but did not think of putting in blanks then, and I don’t recall where those places were, in order to go back and put them in now. Needing a minute or two to think something over might be a reason, in which case I will want to keep my hands poised above the keyboard in anticipation of going on, unless of course the thinking turns into dwelling on the past or even mulling, as it so easily can, in which case I will want to rest them in my lap. I will probably stare out the window if it comes down to mulling. Leaving off typing altogether would be another reason I might want to put in a blank space—leaving it off altogether temporarily, I mean, in order to busy myself elsewhere, not giving up for good, though there are quite a few things I might want to do right here at the table: draw pictures, for example, or lay my head down for a rest, or eat something, an apple, for instance, that I have found there. I might after typing a while decide to stand up due to cramps, stretching my arms above my head, stamping my feet to get the tingles out. Perhaps, if it is not cold or rainy out, after a few stretches and stamps I will open a window and look down at the street while resting my elbows on the sill, or even lie down on the rug for a few hours, like a dog. I might also stop for a lot of other reasons—because I am having lunch or have gone out to the movies; or I might be sleeping or have gone off on a trip somewhere, though that last seems unlikely, as I mentioned at the outset. I considered varying the size of the blank
space according to the length of time I am away—the wider the blank the longer the time—but after thinking about it some more I decided that would not be practical: I would need just reams of blank pages if I actually were to go off on a trip, even a short one around the block, being such a slow walker. And I doubt that I am going to want to mention everything I do when I am not typing. I am not going to say, I just got up to urinate, I just got up to see if the mail has come, and so forth. I suppose that merely seeing the photograph of Nurse, when I was using it as a bookmark, having not seen it for a great many years, might be what prompted me to drag the typewriter out of the closet, though that by itself does not abolish the mystery; it only pushes it back a step, to the question of why after all that time I decided to go rummaging in the letter box in the first place. Rummaging in my mind is what I am doing. I say that, and I get a picture of someone up to the neck in balled-up newspaper; a female someone, as I can tell from the hairdo. It is dark outside my windows now. Not dark entirely, since I live on a city street where there are always lights, but fairly dark, considering. I have turned on the lights in the room, the ceiling light and the standing lamp next to the armchair. The last time I mentioned something like that the sun was shining; mentioned, that is, whether it is day or night, both of which are merely symptoms of what is really going on out there, which is planetary motion, the rotation of the earth on its axis and (for us) night following day, day following night, regardless. I say that, and I see the planet Earth, the way it looks from the moon in the photographs they brought back from that dreadful place, like a spinning blue-and-white glass marble out in the middle of nowhere. At this moment it has completed approximately three and one half spins since I took up typing again. When I was in the ninth grade our science teacher told us about the Renaissance public’s reaction to the idea that the earth is round and not flat, an idea that must have been quite startling at the time. It cannot be round, people said then, or the persons living on the bottom half would have fallen off. The teacher laughed when she told us about that, because those people were so silly, and we all laughed too, and I am sure we all thought, “What silly people.” I joined in, of course, even though I really had no idea why the persons on the bottom had not fallen off. It still strikes me as odd that they don’t. I think something is wrong with one of the streetlights, is the reason it is so dark outside.