Toad, page 18
“No, I’ve made it twice now. It’s really good. Mrs. Strong brought us some fresh butter. She’s the landlady. She lives in that big house in the drive. I pick dandelion greens and boil them and put butter and salt and pepper on them. I think it’s going to be a very easy birth. I haven’t had any pains or sickness or anything all the way through.”
“Have you got everything you’ll need for the baby?”
“My mother sent a little sweater. That’s all so far. What will I need?”
“Diapers. Dozens, I think. You’d better make a list.”
“I’ll remember. What else?”
“Shirts. Undershirts, like. There’s this funny kind that has two little strings to close it in front. Or maybe they’re on the side. And blankets. What did you ever do with that book I brought? Didn’t it have a list in it?”
“What, You and Your Baby? Listen, I threw that right out. It had all these stinking pictures of what the fetus looks like.”
“That’s lovely. That’s very clever of you.”
“Do you think the Indian women knew or cared what their babies looked like while they were growing inside them?”
“What are you two arguing about? Have we got a sharp knife?” Sam bounced in and I turned away from Carlotta’s fierce glare. He rummaged in the kitchen drawers.
“What are you doing out there?”
“Come and see.”
He bounced back out the door and I followed him, Carlotta’s eyes burning my back.
Sam wore a torn T-shirt and carried a paring knife in one hand. The rip of a saw drifted through the trees. “There’s this great guy helping me. He’s a welder. He lives over in Sherwood and works in Portland. He gave me a ride out from town one day and we got to talking. He built his own house.”
Sam pushed through the brush to a clearing and I followed. Rennel sat on a thin log to steady it while my brother sawed one end. They both looked up as we approached.
“Hello, brother,” I said.
“Sally, Christ, don’t you have any shoes?” Spike asked. “Every time I see you, you’re running around with your mud hooks flapping.”
We grinned at each other and Sam and Rennel stared, confused.
“You two know each other?” Sam asked.
“That’s my big brother.”
“But your names…”
“We had different fathers.”
Spike wiped his face with his forearm and went back to sawing. Sam placed the knife down near him and sat in the pine needles beside me. A pile of thin logs was stacked beside Spike. The branches had been stripped and sap oozed out where they’d been cut. The ground was littered with needles and yellow sawdust, and the warm air reeked of sweat and pine. Spike’s work shirt was dark in patches and he’d rolled his sleeves high over his strong freckled forearms. Rennel held the log they were sawing, flexed his arms, and watched Spike curiously.
Sam leaned in close to me and spoke softly. “He’s really a fantastic guy. He knows all about carpentry and machines. He’s got a lot of kids and they’re all pretty nice. He didn’t even graduate from high school, but he’s really sharp!”
I looked sideways at Sam, but he seemed only excited and interested. He was not making fun of me or my brother. “I know.”
“Oh, yeah. What a small place this is. Imagine running into your brother!”
Spike lined the log and measured it against the others. He took up a light ax and stripped off the bark quickly, using the knife around the knots where the branches had been.
Sam whispered, “It’s really exciting watching somebody who knows what they’re doing.”
I nodded gravely. “Yes.”
“It’s like Mr. Sing and his painting. He just goes right in and does it without any palaver.”
“Yeah.”
Spike stacked the stripped logs in a neat pile. They were each six feet long and four or five inches thick. He stood back and looked at the stack, then bent to pick up the saw and the ax.
“That’s got to dry awhile. I’ll come back in a few weeks and show you how to knock it together.”
Sam stood up and moved forward, smiling. “That’s great! Should I cover them in case it rains?”
Spike frowned a little. “It’s not that kind of dry.”
He looked at Sam to see if he understood. Sam smiled, eager.
“Rain won’t hurt it. You sure you don’t want that toilet fixed? I can’t do that, but I know a guy who can.”
Sam waved his arms. “Thanks very much, but we really like it the way it is. It’s nice shitting in the woods. Come back to the house and have a drink.”
Rennel went to one of the stacked logs and lifted it like a barbell, balanced it, and curled it up to his chin with his hands spaced carefully along its length. When he put it back he looked relieved.
It was strange to see Sam walking with Spike. My brother’s old dungarees and work boots and Sam’s old dungarees and heavy shoes. Spike said they could put the goat shed on a sledge so it could be dragged to wherever the goat was grazing. Sam thought that was wonderful.
Music came from the house. Sam went in to get Carlotta to make lemonade. Spike stopped at the door to leave his tools.
“You want to come over to the house with me, Sally? We haven’t seen you in a while.”
I could see my face mirrored in the freckles and creases of his. “I’m supposed to stay for dinner here.”
“Well, come over and see Jean when you can. We always figure you’re up to no good if we don’t see you for a couple of months.”
“I’m glad you’re helping Sam. He can use it.”
Spike looked through the door into the dark house. “Sam Aram? Is that his name? He’s a nice kid.”
“Yeah.”
Rennel walked up chewing a grass stem and trying to look competent. We went inside and I could hear dishes clinking in the kitchen. Spike took in the piles of cushions, the little inlaid boxes of dark wood, the strewn records and books, and the gaudy rugs. A poster of screaming women hung next to a Navajo blanket on the wall. There was an aftertaste of incense in the air, and all the ashtrays were full of butts. The music was not too loud today. Spike looked at me and I grinned. Sam entered carrying a tray of ceramic tea bowls and a coffee can full of lemonade. He slowly set it down on the floor. The ice in the lemonade chimed against the sides of the can.
“Sit down anywhere.”
Spike looked around, embarrassed. I flopped onto a pillow to show him. He eased down carefully and stretched out his stiff knee. Sam noticed.
“Is your leg sore?”
“No. There’s a metal plate in there instead of a kneecap. I wore the old one out kneeling on concrete while I weld.”
Sam stared in wonder and tipped lemonade into the tea bowls. “Is that a good job, welding?”
He passed us each a bowl, and one to Rennel, who hunched beside the record player. Spike explained that it makes a living, but he’d like to be a fireman.
Carlotta came and sat next to me.
“Is he really your brother?”
“Yeah. Listen. He’s got four healthy kids. Why don’t you ask his wife what you’ll need? She knows all about that stuff.”
“That’s a good idea. He’s nice.”
“Why don’t you let him get your toilet fixed?”
“It’s so nice shitting in the woods. Aram’s face gets this beautiful expression when he’s done it. Very still and strong and peaceful.”
“You go out together?”
“We hold hands. Sometimes it’s hard for me.” She leaned back against the pillows and closed her eyes.
Spike was explaining how he used to smoke grass with some Mexicans he knew when he was a kid in California.
“I don’t see anything wrong with it. But I don’t run across it anymore. I drink beer now in the summer and red wine in the winter.” He lifted the tiny tea bowl in one scarred brown hand and sipped politely at the lemonade. Sam was delighted.
“If you ever want to try some again just come on over.”
“I’d like to see Jean stoned once. She’s pretty funny when she’s had something to drink. That’s my wife.” He put down the tea bowl and got up gingerly, bending his good leg and keeping the other stretched out in front of him. “Well, I’m going to take my kids swimming. Why don’t you all come along?”
Sam jumped up. “Thanks, we’d like to, but we’ve got dinner all set up here. But we’ll come over. And you come here whenever you’re passing by, okay?”
My brother nodded. He looked down at me, crouched and barefoot. “You’d better come over sometime.”
The Volcano Bar diet
The great Volcano Bar diet is the only one that has ever worked for me, and I remember it with enormous affection. Still, it must be admitted that an intricate concatenation of factors are necessary for its success, and the exact circumstances would be difficult to reproduce for the benefit of the generally obese public.
I should explain that the Volcano Bar diet has always been an object of intense and luxurious adoration for me. Since the latter stages of infancy I have yearned for this particular sweet above all others. It is smallish, just one and three-quarters of an ounce, a hump in the rounded spreading form of an aging monadnock. The appearance is not inspiring and has, even by devotees, been described as reminiscent of varying forms and states of excrement. There is a lack of glint in the chocolate surface that, to the aficionado of chocolates, denotes an absence of paraffin and a corresponding increase of the crucial cocoa itself. The color of the chocolate is mellow, warm, and smooth. I have always imagined that by the syncretic quirk of some elderly Swiss gentleman (pink-cheeked he would be, and in the habit of walking everywhere clothed in long white tweeds), a fine standard of quality was pursued at the expense of profit: yellow cream must have been stirred into the milk chocolate rather than dried skim crystals, and perhaps the slightly granular filling suspended between the rich and mellifluous chocolate is a miracle of confection.
The nature of this crunch, as it were, has been the subject of close speculation to no definite conclusion. Once, I was convinced that it was crushed walnuts. A Philistine salad lover has proposed that it is merely sugar crystals, or toasted cereal crumbs. I reject both theories. The underlying tenor of flavor, that series of subtle, possibly wholly imaginary chemical effects which are sensed on the roof of the mouth and beneath the tongue, convinces me that there is some genuine source of strength in these particles. The problem in analyzing them is that they are so small, and so totally integrated with the chocolate, that it is very difficult to separate one so as to get a look at it. I have many times managed to extract one from some crevice in my teeth only to have it disappear in an involuntary convulsion of my tongue. The few instances in which I have removed it from my mouth, delicately licked the chocolate from it, and held it up on the tip of a finger for scrutiny have convinced me that it is indeed a form of nut. It does not dissolve, so it is not sugar. It does not grow soggy, so it is not cereal. It is a pale, indeterminate shade between white and yellow, which coincides with nut nature, but it does lack the acidity which points to the walnut. It is not coconut, for not even dried and desiccated coconut can be so totally stripped of its potent taste. My conclusion for today is that the crunch is pulverized filberts, which, I have discovered, are grown in the vicinity of the Volcano Bar factory. Though Brazil nuts cannot be eliminated as a possibility, I reject them on the principle that they would require expensive importation. I must emphasize at this point that what I have labeled “crunch” is not a strenuous exercise for the jaw. It is nowhere coarse enough to introduce a noise to the chewing process, and could never irritate even totally naked gums in mastication. This crunch is a subtle fibrillation to the tongue, a delicate contrast to the smooth chocolate, one of the revelations of genius displayed in the bar as a whole.
Now, this textured milk chocolate is not a fragile surface ornament, as is the case with so many of the crasser candies, but instead constitutes the greater portion of the bar. Begin where you will—the top, sides, or the base—and proceed, nibbling cautiously, through a full half-inch of this delectable concoction. Gentle inquiry with the tongue at this point is rewarded by the magnified sensitivity of anticipation. As you approach the center, the mysterious heart, the final, minute crust of the chocolate breaks away and is absorbed slowly in your saliva. Now is the time: lift the bar to eye level for examination. There, among the chiseled excavations, a tiny break has appeared, about half an incisor in width. There, instead of the predictable darkness of the ordinary crack or fault, is a tiny leak of white, gleaming coolly in the surrounding chocolate. In the next delicious moments, carefully remove still more of the dark wall encasing this bright secret, this snowy core, this glacial mystery. It is smooth, balanced in its nature on the brink of flowing, but never yielding. The first touch of the very tip of the tongue to this pale miracle induces a moment of surprise, a reorienting of the senses after the relative roughness of the surrounding case. The texture of the white center is silky, not as resilient as young flesh. If the first ice cream, sweetened with honey and loaded with eggs, were somehow transformed from its basic nature and could retain its prime firmness at room temperature, the effect would be not unlike this delectable magma at the core of the Volcano Bar. But the texture is augmented by a flavor of such sweetness, concentrating such intense sensation on those small areas of the tongue that respond to that stimulus alone, that it borders on pain. And inextricable from this sweetness is the redolence of pure vanilla. There is no confusion of tangs, no multiplicity of artificial fruits or distillations of bitter purple flowers to clutter the response and mangle the attentive nerve endings with irrelevant messages. This one clear note, sounded in the subtle passages of the sinus, reverberates a devastating joy.
There are, I know, cannibals still at large, and small children who eat the frosting and leave the cake. There are mammalian females of many species that, in pressured circumstances, will devour their own young. These and other violent extremes I can comprehend and can, in some deep crack of my inner self, find some sympathy for. But that class of insensate savages that take the center of their Volcano Bar in one bite, separate from the enveloping chocolate, sets the small hairs of my body stiff and vibrating, causes waves of shock to traverse my entire nervous system, and sends venomous serpentine convolutions into my very dreams. These grotesque and impious humans may include in their number some small portion of nearly suicidal aesthetes intent on blotting out every drab complexity of their prosaic existence by repeated, massive, petrifying jolts of ecstatic sensation, much as a violent psychopath is relieved of his symptoms by the passage of insupportable forces of electricity through his body. For these devotees, if indeed they exist, I can summon a horrified pity and a niggling drip of understanding. But there is that majority of the Big Bite perpetrators, many thousands strong, whose act is unconscious, unresponsive, motivated only by animal hunger or most ignorant habit. When that mellow nugget passes their lips nearly whole, its nature is relegated to the mechanical atrocities of the molars. No concept of the chemical processes of appreciation is present. The lump, smeared, chomped, and mixed only crudely with saliva, passes the uvula, is gripped by the uncaring esophagus, and is shuttled without thought into that senseless chamber of destruction—the stomach. The prospect of such waste is devastation.
My own way is slower. It is really useless to begin a Volcano Bar with less than an assured half hour of undisturbed leisure before me. Every glittering soupçon of the center must be nibbled off simultaneously with the exact balance of chocolate wall. Too little of one or the other, too large a bite, an interruption that forces me to swallow before the dark and light have completed their warm amalgamation in the hollow of my tongue and been circulated through the areas of my mouth like newlyweds at a reception—any of these accidents precludes the full enjoyment of the strange combination. They produce a certain willful bitterness, as in “Jeez!” (short, I have always supposed, for “Jesus!”), and they require a resettling, a beginning again, a moment of contemplation, a composed and reverent spirit, before resuming my affectionate consumption. It seems to me there is more pleasure inherent in a properly approached Volcano Bar than in the average five-course meal. And in those old days it still cost a dime.
The price was crucial. I had fifty dollars, with which I had planned to redecorate my boyfriend Joe’s little house. I had gone back to him despite him (evidently Leda Van Hoerderbroeck had found him unsatisfactory). But a few months later, Joe had to go east, to Florida, in fact, to visit his mother. His plans were always meticulous. He would drive, taking six days for the trip each way. He would be gone precisely forty days, spending Christmas in the bosom.
Meanwhile, the rent was paid and I was to mind the house. I had fifty dollars left of my life savings. I had dripped the rest away in the months since my attempted suicide. Finding a new job had seemed too much for each day as it dawned. But I wanted to commit some massive act of love, to create some ineradicable mark that would tie Joe to me in an external way, some clip and chain independent of my awkward body. I thought of the decorating because Joe admired the house of a local effete of our acquaintance, a man whose personal incapacities were in direct proportion to his undeservedly large income. Joe had never so much as tacked up a calendar, and a certain deference prevented me from attempting my usual weeds-in-jar approach to ornament. But now he would be gone, this was my chance. The noise, smells, and mess would not disturb his rituals. Besides, I knew I had to keep busy or I’d very soon be raving, caught once more in my old ailment. Not knowing what he was up to for such a long time would be a rich agar for my imagination.
I asked him if I could paint the bedroom while he was gone. He said it was very nice of me. His pleasure at the idea puffed me up, to the extent that I abandoned my original plan to spend twenty-five dollars on the house and to live on the rest. I could go around to the college cafeteria and wait for an acquaintance to walk through the line with me. I could go to dinner at my mother’s. I could steal.
