made to resemble the face of the sun, with yellow plastic spikes representing rays around the circumference. The cord, half of it concealed by a straight-back chair, snakes down the wall to the outlet. The numbers and sturdy black hands of the clock are large and easily seen from every vantage within my apartment. At any time during the day I can lift my eyes to see how many minutes have passed since I last checked. I notice that Rachel has already reset the sun clock, which was disabled during the rewiring project.
I look over at the smaller windup clock beside the telephone by my bed. This is the clock I can see when I turn the lights out at bedtime. Its numbers and hands glow pale green in the dark, and I have grown accustomed to its loud tick-tock throughout the night. Sometimes when I wake from a troubling dream, I hear it and am calmed. I am still here, I tell myself. I recall a puppy we had in my childhood that howled and whimpered through the first two nights. Someone told us to put a clock in his doghouse to simulate the heartbeat of his mother. We did it, and on the third night the puppy was quiet. I think of how easily duped living things are.
I see my silver hairbrush on the dresser and a small photograph of my parents in a pewter frame. These things—the windup clock, the hairbrush, and the photograph—are my own, yet like the other things, they stir nothing within me. They are only things.
There is a blue clothes hamper beside the bathroom door, into which I deposit anything I want Rachel to wash for me. A white plastic wastebasket sits on the floor next to it. More than once I have had to pause and look at what is in my hand: Into which receptacle do I want to drop it? Once I accidentally threw two pieces of unopened junk mail into the clothes hamper. I left them there, and Rachel removed them later. Another trash can sits beside my recliner, and yet another sits beside the nightstand. A fourth is stationed under the sink in my bathroom. There is no need for so many trash cans. I don’t know what Patrick and Rachel were expecting from me. All four are checked and emptied regularly.
So I am in an apartment with four trash cans and four tables, I tell myself, not in Eliot’s study in Kentucky. I am at my nephew’s house on Edison Street in Greenville, Mississippi. Patrick will soon be home from the Main Office. He will have supper of some kind in a sack. Rachel is across the street. Perhaps she is helping Teri “in a pinch” again. She will be home soon, also, and will take my supper from the sack, arrange it on a plate, and bring it to me on a tray. Maybe she will bring me ice cream later for dessert.
The television is still on. Lou Grant is in the newsroom giving Ted Baxter a dressing down for some violation of good sense, and Georgette is in the background looking sympathetic. Murray and Mary are at their desks, heads lowered, trying to act busy. This was one of the few programs I used to watch regularly some thirty years ago. I liked the fact that Mary, Rhoda, Georgette, and Sue Ann, though they all seemed to have a high regard for marriage, nevertheless led happy, interesting lives in different ways as single women.
Since I was married by then, I could afford to admire their pluck in the adversities of singleness. Had I still been single, I might not have enjoyed the program so much, perhaps would have resented the attempts to depict the single life as a series of funny misadventures. For though I had not been struck with the blessedness of the married state in my sisters’ and parents’ lives, I had always harbored the dream that it could be so. I was not unhappy as a single woman, but feeling that I was missing out on something important, neither can I say I was especially happy. One’s marital status is not relative, though in many ways happiness is.
Too much knowledge is not a good thing. I have seen people ruined in various ways by knowing more than they need to. My five minutes of
I look over at the smaller windup clock beside the telephone by my bed. This is the clock I can see when I turn the lights out at bedtime. Its numbers and hands glow pale green in the dark, and I have grown accustomed to its loud tick-tock throughout the night. Sometimes when I wake from a troubling dream, I hear it and am calmed. I am still here, I tell myself. I recall a puppy we had in my childhood that howled and whimpered through the first two nights. Someone told us to put a clock in his doghouse to simulate the heartbeat of his mother. We did it, and on the third night the puppy was quiet. I think of how easily duped living things are.
I see my silver hairbrush on the dresser and a small photograph of my parents in a pewter frame. These things—the windup clock, the hairbrush, and the photograph—are my own, yet like the other things, they stir nothing within me. They are only things.
There is a blue clothes hamper beside the bathroom door, into which I deposit anything I want Rachel to wash for me. A white plastic wastebasket sits on the floor next to it. More than once I have had to pause and look at what is in my hand: Into which receptacle do I want to drop it? Once I accidentally threw two pieces of unopened junk mail into the clothes hamper. I left them there, and Rachel removed them later. Another trash can sits beside my recliner, and yet another sits beside the nightstand. A fourth is stationed under the sink in my bathroom. There is no need for so many trash cans. I don’t know what Patrick and Rachel were expecting from me. All four are checked and emptied regularly.
So I am in an apartment with four trash cans and four tables, I tell myself, not in Eliot’s study in Kentucky. I am at my nephew’s house on Edison Street in Greenville, Mississippi. Patrick will soon be home from the Main Office. He will have supper of some kind in a sack. Rachel is across the street. Perhaps she is helping Teri “in a pinch” again. She will be home soon, also, and will take my supper from the sack, arrange it on a plate, and bring it to me on a tray. Maybe she will bring me ice cream later for dessert.
The television is still on. Lou Grant is in the newsroom giving Ted Baxter a dressing down for some violation of good sense, and Georgette is in the background looking sympathetic. Murray and Mary are at their desks, heads lowered, trying to act busy. This was one of the few programs I used to watch regularly some thirty years ago. I liked the fact that Mary, Rhoda, Georgette, and Sue Ann, though they all seemed to have a high regard for marriage, nevertheless led happy, interesting lives in different ways as single women.
Since I was married by then, I could afford to admire their pluck in the adversities of singleness. Had I still been single, I might not have enjoyed the program so much, perhaps would have resented the attempts to depict the single life as a series of funny misadventures. For though I had not been struck with the blessedness of the married state in my sisters’ and parents’ lives, I had always harbored the dream that it could be so. I was not unhappy as a single woman, but feeling that I was missing out on something important, neither can I say I was especially happy. One’s marital status is not relative, though in many ways happiness is.
Too much knowledge is not a good thing. I have seen people ruined in various ways by knowing more than they need to. My five minutes of
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