When the Marbles Go

My husband tells me somebody just died. He saw it in the newspaper. No, I say, that man died way back. I know this—we skipped the funeral. Whoever was supposed to send in the obituary just procrastinated.

Another day, home from town, my husband tells me he locked himself out of the car. He had to borrow a screwdriver from someone to get into the spare key’s secret compartment he installed a long time ago, at some vague spot on the car’s undercarriage.

“Uh-huh,” I say. I never liked that hiding place. I can never remember where it is. “It’s time you found somewhere better, not so complicated,” I say.

He says, “Oh, I can just keep a screwdriver in the car.”

I say, “No, then you’ll lock the screwdriver in, too.”

Ho-ney.

And then out in the garden, when he’s pointing out all the wonderful new life—the strung-out, brave lettuces, the ridges for the sweet potatoes he’ll plant, the raspberry canes’ new-fledged leaves—I see a strange, small plot by the garden’s edge, the dirt mounded into three short little rows.

“What’s that?” I ask. “What’re those hills?”

“Aw,” he says, “I was experimenting.”

He thought the regular white potatoes might do better at that location, not where he usually plants them. They tend to come up scabby, probably from a virus in the soil. “But I did it wrong,” he says. “So disgusting.”

“How’d you mess up?” I ask. This is always entertaining.

He meant to do like he did with the potatoes last summer—his new method. After hoeing his ditches, he’d layered in plant debris along with the seed potatoes and just a sprinkling of soil to get them started. The plant matter was supposed to enrich the dirt and make it looser, more sifty. Once the shoots peeked through, pointing their green at the sky, he’d hilled them like always, raking lots of between-the-rows soil up around them.

But here he made the hills right off. He didn’t stop with the debris layer—or add the seed potatoes. Only after he finished his hilling did this hit. He had to push each seed potato down through, like a well digger or somebody, and then pat the dirt back into place. “I don’t know if they’re growing, even,” he says. “I might have to start over. It’s totally backwards—what I did. I don’t know why. I can’t explain it.”

So I worry.

But maybe I’m worse off.

I run into Food Lion for peas. That’s all I want—peas. It’s only when I’m standing in front of the store’s frozen-vegetables cases do I remember that I’ve stopped buying their peas. They switched suppliers. Some my daughter came home with—from the Netherlands, as indicated on the Food Lion bag—were horrible, she said. The Netherlands! I wondered, How would something even be edible? And now all these facts have flown out of my head?

Watching a play, I don’t understand. This awful accident on her bike the actor is telling us about, slammed by a car? Is she dead now? Is she speaking from the grave? She freezes, flat on her back on the stage. She writhes. She panics, wildly, because the rescue people don’t know her ID is in her sock and won’t know who to call.

“Was she speaking from the grave?” I ask someone behind me, afterwards. “Are you confused?”

“No,” says the person. “She didn’t die.” My husband, too, seems not at all stumped. What’s wrong with me, then?

(I learn later, though, that somebody I know who’s very smart, who attended on a different night, was just as mixed up. That helps, a little.)

In an article I’m looking at in my husband’s Science News magazine, microbiologists at the University of Maryland, in a study on flatulence, sat a senior in an oxygen-free chamber to try to measure the hydrogen output. Wait, I tell myself, no, that’s sensor, not senior, as in senior citizen. Then because the chamber experiment failed to produce results, one of the scientists slid the hydrogen sensor into his pants. A hydrogen sensor? I think. What? What would that ever be? How would a thing be made out of hydrogen instead of aluminum, say, like with aluminum cans? Oh. Oh. It sensed hydrogen.

The woman in the illustration, too. She’s bending over to smell—no, puff at—a dandelion. The whole big field, they’ve turned diaphanous white, gone to seed. Inexplicably, though, the dandelion she’s picked, the fluff is streaming out behind her, blowing backwards. Backwards!

Only after an uncomfortable amount of time do I comprehend my mistake. She’s not sniffing at the dandelion. That’s not seed fluff escaping.

I see that what I’ve pulled from my kitchen drawer is the garlic press, not the can opener. I bring to my lips my Mason jar of water—I keep it on the sink for quick swigs, topped with a glass lid—and realize that the lid is still on. Other grandchildren’s names, not that of the one I’m talking to, come stammering out of my mouth. Informing people of my age, I have to stop and calculate. Long after I pull our supper from the oven it’s still cranked to 425 degrees, heating up the planet.

Why, I wonder, am I paused here by the bathtub? What am I needing? Oh, my towel.

This thing of stepping into another room and then standing there baffled—everybody does this, right? But all the time? Just the other day I found myself saying to myself, What is it I was going to do next? I don’t remember. Then, in resignation, Of course I don’t.

I think the mind goes in increments. Or maybe, by this age, there’s just too much in there. The marbles are jostling for space. All we can do is watch them roll.