Shirley

For all my moaning and groaning about bad lighting, this next thing might come as a shocker. High above our bathtub is a flood bulb pointing down. Nothing shading it! A person can read their book while their skin shrivels, sure, but that naked bulb up there? Why this heresy? I’ll tell you why. Before, we had a nice big hanging lamp wired into that ceiling hole. It dangled low enough for the person to avoid a sepulchral glare. But say they’d climbed into the tub to wash their feet. When they stood—unthinkingly—to climb back out, they maybe rammed their head into the heavy glass shade. (Who’s always thinking?) The lamp obstructing—that was enough of a fix. And then I started wondering whether something way worse than a goose egg could happen. What if, as the person mindlessly unbent from their crouched or sitting position, their head shot straight up inside the shade and connected with the fizzing bulb? Couldn’t they get electrocuted? Especially if they’d just taken an honest-to-God d...

We return yet again to the theme of sheets. In her 1996 memoir Are You Somebody? Irishwoman Nuala O’Faolain, telling of her “packed,” “clamorous” childhood home, explains that sometimes her cousins slept there, too. “There were so many of us that there were beds on the landing and in a windowless box-room. The bedclothes were supplemented by coats. There were only torn pieces of sheet—enough to put under your chin, to soften the rough coats. I do remember my mother pausing to fix a strip of cotton under some sleeping child’s cheek.” So see. Cold unforgiving slippy slidey polyester wouldn’t have been the same.

Are coffee drinkers more inclined than abstainers to get brown teeth? Seems likely, but I don’t let it worry me. There’s too much of an upside. Just, please God, don’t let my chompers get this bad anytime soon. We met up with these ladies in Indiana. (Again, some details here are changed.) The farmer, Sam and Sadie’s friend, has a whole herd. He ships their milk far and wide. It’s super healthy, expensive, dazzling bubbly white. I just think them brushing their teeth wouldn’t hurt anything.          

My three children, moral and upright as anybody else’s, called me an addict. The little darlings made their point one Christmas, secretly practicing the C-O-F-F-E-E song and, on Christmas morning, standing themselves in a line in front of me and reeling it out at breakneck speed. They’d bought me special coffees, too, in fancy packets. But it’s okay. They’re imbibers too, now. For their comeback performance at the big birthday party, more of the family pitched in. Judginess almost always backfires, I think. (Video credit: Akiko)  

At home where my heart is, coffee dribbling into my veins way early, there comes a surge of gumption. My skin hums with energy. Ingenious new ideas bubble up. The words I’m reading seem wildly significant. The world of possibilities bulges. This doesn’t last. And even for those few brief shining moments, not all is transformed. The nitpickiness doesn’t slink into the corner and cower. A merciful, forbearing, magnanimous me—now that would be a born-again conversion.  

A problem niggles at me and I’m compelled to make amends, repair it (though poorly). Or I’m in a fix of some sort, an unlucky situation, which only time might mend. In the story that follows I’ve changed the spots on the map and people’s identities and certain other details, for reason you’ll quite understand. The relatives in Indiana had a loveseat in the study with a puny pull-out mattress. If we stayed there, I got the mattress and Paulson a mat on the floor. He’d push it smack up against the pull-out frame’s metal leg. That way, we still got to sleep together. But this time other guests had been given the study. So that night Paulson and I drove down the road to Sam and Sadie’s to sleep. We knew these people only slightly. We parked near the barn, silent, the horses and cows in slumberland. The house was just as quiet until we stepped into the vast empty kitchen and Sadie’s dog set to yapping maniacally. Sadie couldn’t shut him up. She had a few friendly words with us and sent ...

Happiness is like a butterfly, hard to pin down, until it comes softly and sits on your sheet. My blue beauty, though, the zigzags maybe scrape the skin. It’s not a perfect fix. The scrap I pounced upon for patching the hole lacked a bit of the wing. Did Mae mind the slapdash effect? The quilts she stitches are impeccable, stunning. Did George? Nobody said. It didn’t seem like they’d had a rough night. After breakfast they continued merrily on their trip, leaving us behind in the dust of Virginia.    

Nothing shabby about the night sky in the afternoon, though. It wasn’t like this. Zachary’s photo is a frail imitation. Nobody could perfectly snap that lightning-white ring circling the absent sun. But science’s exactitude—thank you very much—correctly decreed the path of darkness. The data, calculated, got us to Ohio in time to watch the moon’s greed overtake, the bite growing bigger and bigger. At the precise, predicted instant we could throw off the glasses and scream. In that bright band of neon lay a flawless ruby jewel.

The bald bulb up on our porch ceiling is the worst. The dark is supposed to be a balm. It’s supposed to sneak in cattily like the fog, lullingly. Instead, a switch flick turns the night garish and inhumane. That high up, the blaze is an assault. I live in dread of ceiling lights, period. They’re harsh, supercilious. Something glaring down on a person—that’s mean. Lights suspended by their cords are somewhat of an improvement—those low enough. And we can partially dim the one hanging above our table when people are here. The small faces hardly higher than the dinner plates don’t get as bombarded and the rest of us can slightly unclutch our eyelids. We can let down our guard just a bit and lean into the (semi)gloom. But a feebly lit lamp by the armchair, at one’s elbow—now that’s a comfort. Or a floor lamp behind, where the gleam can’t pierce the periphery of one’s vision. Reading is supposed to be a joy, an indulgence, not a hateful strain. (I’d say if there aren’t lamps in heaven—th...

Perfectionist doesn’t mean perfect. Far from it. You always come up short, is all. You’re more or less miserable. You feel compelled to keep warding off, warding off the instinct to make things better. Besides driving yourself nuts, you drive everybody around you nuts. As the husband of a certain Anna Schlonneger told her, “You have to put a lid on the perfectionism. Not pay fanatical attention to every slight kink.” But it was Birdie, Anna’s friend, who actually set her straight. Anna had asked Birdie over for supper. Making her usual apologetic noises, Anna was pulling from the cupboard her huckleberry pie with jellied bruise-blue blobs hanging off the sides. Birdie broke in. “Homemade!” she cried, palms pressed to her bosom in rapture. “Now that is what I call a treat to the eyes. I declare, I cannot for the life of me see why anybody pays for those perfect cardboard store pies.” “Oh, but—” Right away, Anna recuperated. “Well!” Haughtily she scooted her dessert onto the table, th...