jetsam.
In the evenings, tired out from a day at the accounts office, she likes to read long romantic novels and listen to music on her CD player. One night—it was in the middle of January, in the middle of an ice storm—she sat reading a book called The Sands of Desire and listening to a concert of soft rock when she felt herself seized by an impulse to purify her life. The way her thighs broadened out as she sat in her chair, the printed words slipping out of focus, the notes of music—their excess and persistence crowded up against her, depriving her for a frightening moment of oxygen. She opened a window and let the icy air come into her apartment, but it was not enough. She grasped a small corduroy cushion and hurled it out the window, observing with satisfaction the way it spun around in the dark air as it descended, a soft little satellite of foam and fabric. Next she threw into the driving phosphorescence a compact disc she had bought on sale only one week earlier, a medley of country ballads, wailing, weak, and jerky with tears. In a kitchen cupboard she found a family-sized package of Cheese Twists, then a brown-edged head of lettuce in the refrigerator—out they went, one after the other, sailing off the tips of her fingers. And finally, in a gesture that was a kind of suicide or ritual cleansing, she didn’t know which, she emptied out the cracked china cup with its miserable, broken, mismatched contents, its unsorted detritus of economy and mystery. It seemed to her she could hear the separate items rattling down through the frozen tree branches and landing like a shower of meteorites on the rooftops of the cars parked below—the paper clips, the thumbtacks, the little bent key. Ping. Tut. Tsk, Tick. Gone.
This same Cheryl Spence has visited the Pioneer Museum at Steinbach and the Reptile Museum on Highway 70 and the Wax Museum in Minneapolis, but she has never even heard of the Museum of Keys in the city of Buffalo, that dark old American city of cracked alleys and beef-colored bricks. A rough place, a tough place—but underlying its rough toughness, buried there like a seam of limestone, is the hoarded and invested money of a dozen or so millionaires no one’s ever heard of, men made rich on meat, screws, plastics, textiles, optics, leather, and the like. One of them, a manufacturer of table silver, established the Museum of Keys some years ago as a showcase for his own extensive key collection.
His interest in keys began at the age of sixty, at a time when he was recovering from a serious heart attack. It was Christmas morning. He was seated in an armchair, a blanket over his knees, ashamed of that soft-fringed covering, ashamed of his cold feet in their slippers and the weak light that drifted in from the eastward-facing window. His wife presented him with an antique porcelain music box shaped like a shepherdess. Always before she had given him practical, manly objects such as fountain pens or fishing gear. What was he to make of a figurine with flounced china skirts, revolving slowly and playing the same merry waltz tune again and again and again? He sensed some covert meaning in his wife’s offering—for there she stood, inches away from him, so rounded, pale-fleshed, and mildly luminous, so timid in her posture and so fragile (with a head that tipped sideways and one hand clasping the pleats of her skirt), though her gaze at the moment of gift-giving was oddly sharpened and sly; she held her breath in her throat as if it were something breakable like ice or glass or part of the solitude she sometimes drew around herself. He loved her, and had never thought of her as a shrewd or demanding woman, yet here she was, waiting to be thanked, that much was clear, to be awarded an explosion of gratitude he had no way of formulating. He was not schooled in such expressions. Tact or shyness had kept him ignorant.
Her name was Anna. He knew, intimately, after thirty years of marriage, the floury cellular
In the evenings, tired out from a day at the accounts office, she likes to read long romantic novels and listen to music on her CD player. One night—it was in the middle of January, in the middle of an ice storm—she sat reading a book called The Sands of Desire and listening to a concert of soft rock when she felt herself seized by an impulse to purify her life. The way her thighs broadened out as she sat in her chair, the printed words slipping out of focus, the notes of music—their excess and persistence crowded up against her, depriving her for a frightening moment of oxygen. She opened a window and let the icy air come into her apartment, but it was not enough. She grasped a small corduroy cushion and hurled it out the window, observing with satisfaction the way it spun around in the dark air as it descended, a soft little satellite of foam and fabric. Next she threw into the driving phosphorescence a compact disc she had bought on sale only one week earlier, a medley of country ballads, wailing, weak, and jerky with tears. In a kitchen cupboard she found a family-sized package of Cheese Twists, then a brown-edged head of lettuce in the refrigerator—out they went, one after the other, sailing off the tips of her fingers. And finally, in a gesture that was a kind of suicide or ritual cleansing, she didn’t know which, she emptied out the cracked china cup with its miserable, broken, mismatched contents, its unsorted detritus of economy and mystery. It seemed to her she could hear the separate items rattling down through the frozen tree branches and landing like a shower of meteorites on the rooftops of the cars parked below—the paper clips, the thumbtacks, the little bent key. Ping. Tut. Tsk, Tick. Gone.
This same Cheryl Spence has visited the Pioneer Museum at Steinbach and the Reptile Museum on Highway 70 and the Wax Museum in Minneapolis, but she has never even heard of the Museum of Keys in the city of Buffalo, that dark old American city of cracked alleys and beef-colored bricks. A rough place, a tough place—but underlying its rough toughness, buried there like a seam of limestone, is the hoarded and invested money of a dozen or so millionaires no one’s ever heard of, men made rich on meat, screws, plastics, textiles, optics, leather, and the like. One of them, a manufacturer of table silver, established the Museum of Keys some years ago as a showcase for his own extensive key collection.
His interest in keys began at the age of sixty, at a time when he was recovering from a serious heart attack. It was Christmas morning. He was seated in an armchair, a blanket over his knees, ashamed of that soft-fringed covering, ashamed of his cold feet in their slippers and the weak light that drifted in from the eastward-facing window. His wife presented him with an antique porcelain music box shaped like a shepherdess. Always before she had given him practical, manly objects such as fountain pens or fishing gear. What was he to make of a figurine with flounced china skirts, revolving slowly and playing the same merry waltz tune again and again and again? He sensed some covert meaning in his wife’s offering—for there she stood, inches away from him, so rounded, pale-fleshed, and mildly luminous, so timid in her posture and so fragile (with a head that tipped sideways and one hand clasping the pleats of her skirt), though her gaze at the moment of gift-giving was oddly sharpened and sly; she held her breath in her throat as if it were something breakable like ice or glass or part of the solitude she sometimes drew around herself. He loved her, and had never thought of her as a shrewd or demanding woman, yet here she was, waiting to be thanked, that much was clear, to be awarded an explosion of gratitude he had no way of formulating. He was not schooled in such expressions. Tact or shyness had kept him ignorant.
Her name was Anna. He knew, intimately, after thirty years of marriage, the floury cellular
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