The house in which the man lived and read was located on a street that went straight for three blocks and then curved to the right. From the head of the street, it was not entirely visible, especially if the weather was poor or if it was nighttime, because one of the streetlights down at the curve, known to locals as the hook, was out, and also because the man who lived nearest to the head had floodlights mounted outside his front door, and they washed out the vision of any observer unless he or she moved closer, up the straight part of the street and around the hook, at which point the house came into view. It looked larger up close, as many things do, as proximity is a factor in the apparent size of an object, but not in the actual size, which is to say that the house was not actually larger when it was closer, but that it seemed larger to observers. It was two stories, though there was a large finished attic that could be accounted a half story. The basement walls extended a few feet up from the ground level, which created the impression that the house sat in a box or tray. The house was of a type known commonly as the Foursquare, and it adhered to the floor plan common to houses of this type, with a first floor that included an entry foyer (which in turn included the stairs that led to the second floor), a living room, a dining room, and a kitchen. The kitchen included three chairs in motley mismatch, two made of a dark wood and the third lighter in both material (plastic) and hue (a sunny yellow). Though the wooden chairs possessed dignity and style, along with a certain solidity of purpose, the plastic chair was the man’s favorite, for it reminded him of a chair in another house, not a Foursquare, where he had grown up some three decades before, and where his earliest ideas about chairs and kitchens had been formed. It was in this third chair that he sat. There was a teakettle on the stovetop, no longer whistling, though it had been whistling a few moments earlier, signifying that the water within it had reached a temperature commensurate with the requirements of the duty it was about to perform, which involved transfer to a ceramic mug that also contained a small bag made of a blend of wood and vegetable fibers and filled with cured leaves of the plant Camellia sinensis. The water, freshly boiled, would pass through the semi-permeable membrane of the bag, reaching the leaves and creating a solution suitable, when cooled, for drinking. The tea was made at half-past nine and was, at thirty-five minutes past nine, judged sufficiently cool enough for sipping. In the fie minutes elapsed between those two events, the pouring of the just-boiled water over the cured leaves and the judgment that the water, now tea, was cool enough to drink, the man in the kitchen of the Foursquare house had made another judgment, which was to lift a book from the center of the table and turn it over in his hands to signify to himself that he was considering reading it. The man had turned over books in his hands before, and not just books: he had also turned over utensils, items of clothing, weapons, bottles containing medicine, erotic aids, and foods, but none of those things were books, and none of those books were the fourth volume of a biography about a man whose career in American politics had fundamentally reshaped the way in which the legislative branch of the Federal government exerted its influence, nor, for that matter, the way that the executive branch had done the same. The man in the kitchen lifted and lowered the mug filled with tea, transferring a small amount of liquid from vessel to mouth, and then sat in the chair of sunny yellow plastic, at which point he opened the book, the fourth volume of the biography of the man whose career in American politics had fundamentally reshaped the ways in which influence was exerted by the legislative and then executive branches of the Federal government, and he read the first word.
©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas
No comments:
Post a Comment