help from unknown accomplices inside the museum, they had concealed the explosives within the hollow, carpenter-built display platforms in the museum shops where the postcards and art books were stacked. Some of the perpetrators were dead; some of them were in custody, others were at large. They were going into the particulars in some detail, but it was all too much for me to take in.
I was now working with the sticky drawer in the kitchen, which had been jammed shut since long before my father left; nothing was in it but cookie cutters and some old fondue skewers and lemon zesters we never used. She’d been trying for well over a year to get someone from the building in to fix it (along with a broken doorknob and a leaky faucet and half a dozen other annoying little things). I got a butter knife, pried at the edges of the drawer, careful not to chip the paint any more than it was chipped already. The force of the explosion still rang deep in my bones, an inner echo of the ringing in my ears; but worse than this, I could still smell blood, taste the salt and tin of it in my mouth. (I would be smelling it for days, though I didn’t know that then.)
While I worked and worried at the drawer, I wondered if I should call somebody, and, if so, who. My mother was an only child. And though,technically I had a set of living grandparents—my father’s dad and stepmother, in Maryland—I didn’t know how to get in touch with them. Relations were barely civil between my dad and his stepmother, Dorothy, an immigrant from East Germany who had cleaned office buildings for a living before marrying my grandfather. (Always a clever mimic, my dad did a cruelly funny imitation of Dorothy: a sort of battery-operated hausfrau, all compressed lips and jerky movements, and an accent like Curt Jurgens in Battle of Britain. ) But though my dad disliked Dorothy enough, his chief enmity was for Grandpa Decker: a tall, fat, frightening-looking man with ruddy cheeks and black hair (dyed, I think) who wore lots of waistcoats and loud plaids, and believed in belt beatings for children. No picnic was the primary phrase I associated with Grandpa Decker—as in my dad saying “Living with that bastard was no picnic” and “Believe me, dinnertime was never any picnic at our house.” I had met Grandpa Decker and Dorothy only twice in my life, tense charged occasions where my mother leaned forward on the sofa with her coat on and her purse in her lap and her valiant efforts to make conversation all stumbled and sank into quicksand. The main thing I remembered were the forced smiles, the heavy smell of cherry pipe tobacco and Grandpa Decker’s not-very-friendly warning to keep my sticky little mitts off his model train set (an Alpine village which took up an entire room of their house and according to him was worth tens of thousands of dollars).
I’d managed to bend the blade of the butter knife by stabbing it too hard into the side of the stuck drawer—one of my mother’s few good knives, a silver knife that had belonged to her mother. Gamely, I tried to bend it back, biting my lip and concentrating all my will on the task, as all the time ugly flashes of the day kept flying up and hitting me in the face. Trying to stop thinking about it was like trying to stop thinking of a purple cow. The purple cow was all you could think of.
Unexpectedly the drawer popped open. I stared down at the mess: rusty batteries, a broken cheese grater, the snowflake cookie cutters my mother hadn’t used since I was in first grade, jammed in with ragged old carry-out menus from Viand and Shun Lee Palace and Delmonico’s. I left the drawer wide open—so it would be the first thing she saw when she walked in—and wandered over to the couch and wrapped myself up in a blanket, propped up so I could keep a good eye on the front door.
My mind was churning in circles. For a long time I sat shivering andred-eyed in the glow of the television, as the blue shadows flickered
I was now working with the sticky drawer in the kitchen, which had been jammed shut since long before my father left; nothing was in it but cookie cutters and some old fondue skewers and lemon zesters we never used. She’d been trying for well over a year to get someone from the building in to fix it (along with a broken doorknob and a leaky faucet and half a dozen other annoying little things). I got a butter knife, pried at the edges of the drawer, careful not to chip the paint any more than it was chipped already. The force of the explosion still rang deep in my bones, an inner echo of the ringing in my ears; but worse than this, I could still smell blood, taste the salt and tin of it in my mouth. (I would be smelling it for days, though I didn’t know that then.)
While I worked and worried at the drawer, I wondered if I should call somebody, and, if so, who. My mother was an only child. And though,technically I had a set of living grandparents—my father’s dad and stepmother, in Maryland—I didn’t know how to get in touch with them. Relations were barely civil between my dad and his stepmother, Dorothy, an immigrant from East Germany who had cleaned office buildings for a living before marrying my grandfather. (Always a clever mimic, my dad did a cruelly funny imitation of Dorothy: a sort of battery-operated hausfrau, all compressed lips and jerky movements, and an accent like Curt Jurgens in Battle of Britain. ) But though my dad disliked Dorothy enough, his chief enmity was for Grandpa Decker: a tall, fat, frightening-looking man with ruddy cheeks and black hair (dyed, I think) who wore lots of waistcoats and loud plaids, and believed in belt beatings for children. No picnic was the primary phrase I associated with Grandpa Decker—as in my dad saying “Living with that bastard was no picnic” and “Believe me, dinnertime was never any picnic at our house.” I had met Grandpa Decker and Dorothy only twice in my life, tense charged occasions where my mother leaned forward on the sofa with her coat on and her purse in her lap and her valiant efforts to make conversation all stumbled and sank into quicksand. The main thing I remembered were the forced smiles, the heavy smell of cherry pipe tobacco and Grandpa Decker’s not-very-friendly warning to keep my sticky little mitts off his model train set (an Alpine village which took up an entire room of their house and according to him was worth tens of thousands of dollars).
I’d managed to bend the blade of the butter knife by stabbing it too hard into the side of the stuck drawer—one of my mother’s few good knives, a silver knife that had belonged to her mother. Gamely, I tried to bend it back, biting my lip and concentrating all my will on the task, as all the time ugly flashes of the day kept flying up and hitting me in the face. Trying to stop thinking about it was like trying to stop thinking of a purple cow. The purple cow was all you could think of.
Unexpectedly the drawer popped open. I stared down at the mess: rusty batteries, a broken cheese grater, the snowflake cookie cutters my mother hadn’t used since I was in first grade, jammed in with ragged old carry-out menus from Viand and Shun Lee Palace and Delmonico’s. I left the drawer wide open—so it would be the first thing she saw when she walked in—and wandered over to the couch and wrapped myself up in a blanket, propped up so I could keep a good eye on the front door.
My mind was churning in circles. For a long time I sat shivering andred-eyed in the glow of the television, as the blue shadows flickered
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