Free Glass (Small Press Distribution (All Titles)) by Sam Savage Page A

always loudly balling up pages, it seems to me. We once had a debate about whether crumpling paper was a useful release of tension, which was his position, or ostentatious self-indulgence, as I maintained. In the end, when he could not think up any more good arguments, he balled up a page and threw it at me. “Up to snuff” was one of my father’s favorite expressions. When he let a servant go, it was because that person was not up to snuff, unless of course the servant had been caught stealing and then he would mention that instead; and not only servants—President Roosevelt (that would be Franklin D. Roosevelt) was not up to snuff, because Papa had not approved of his economic schemes. He said the schemes were a load of hooey. And one day Nurse was no longer up to snuff; I don’t know why. I was constantly fearful that I would turn out not to be up to snuff, and I am certain Mama was not up to snuff. On the opening day of shooting season when I was ten, it was discovered that she had gone off in the night with a man named Roger Pip, who had used to play golf with Papa. When Papa found the note, which Mama had attached to the collar of his favorite gun dog, he was on the front steps dressed in a brown tweed shooting jacket, which he ruined by tearing off a lapel. After that he must have been truly demoralized, and he took to drinking huge quantities of Scotch instead of brandy. Unfortunately he could not hold his liquor anymore, and after the third drink he would sometimes shout at me, and after the fifth he could not tell which way was up. Six months after Mama fled I was sent away to school, boarding first in a large house with two elderly women and then later in a dormitory with other girls my age. It is not plausible that I actually remember Papa finding the note and tearing his jacket, since when he went shooting he never set out directly from the house in town but always from a lodge somewhere, so in fact I don’t know how he found out that Mama was gone—perhaps he came to realize it only gradually, as I did after a while, after she had been gone a long time. The social whirl, as I saw it, had just swallowed her up. It swallowed her up, and after a few years it spit her out again, in San Diego, where she lived with a man named Hanford Wilt until she died. I was nineteen when she died. Every Christmas and every birthday she sent me presents, always jewelry of some sort, and with the presents came a letter, which she would sign “Mama” and in parentheses write “Margaret Wilt,” in case I had forgotten who “Mama” was. The letters were typed on blue paper. There was a girl from California at school who told me San Diego had a perfect climate, with only three rainy days a year. It struck me as odd that a person named Margaret Wilt would choose to live in a place with so little rain. Mama was not a good typist, her letters were full of x-ed out words, sometimes whole lines of x ’s. Not a good mother either, I imagine you are thinking.
    The tank is still there, on the floor next to the fern, where Potts and I set it down. If I lean back in my chair, I can peer around the fronds and see the rat moving restlessly about down there. It scurries this way and that, climbs up on its little metal wheel and climbs down again, digs in the shavings with its forepaws like a dog, sniffing. Now and then it pauses and peers out through the glass wall of its enclosure. Its pink nose twitches. Its actions have a purposeful air, but at the same time they seem completely pointless. Not utterly different from mine, I suppose, if someone were to watch me going here and there in this apartment; a question of scale. “Edna scurries pointlessly this way and that in her enclosure,” the person watching me might write. Brodt, when he used to watch me roaming about, might have written something of that sort. At some point, after Mama left, they told Papa I was suffering from nervous agitation. I don’t know who told him, somebody