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

did, and he took me out of the country, going first to England, to London, where we saw a very short, very pale doctor with bad teeth who was not English in the least (he was Russian, possibly; I have an impression of a Russian-sounding name, and I catch myself thinking it must have been “Chekhov,” because, I suppose, Chekhov was a Russian doctor also) and then on to Belgium, where we spent the summer in the countryside south of Namur, in a hotel made from an eighteenth-century palace. “We” at that point did not include Papa, who had left us on the dock in Dover to go look after his business, I think now, or to go look for Mama, as I imagined at the time. The woman who succeeded the woman who had followed Rasputin traveled with us on the boat going over and stayed with me when Papa left. I called her Nurse also, though she was not at all like the original, being American, diminutive, blonde, and not wearing an apron always, and she was more fun and less enveloping than the first Nurse, less comforting in an enveloping sense, as everyone from then on really had to be. She taught me how to play four kinds of solitaire, not including double, which is not solitaire at all and which we played endlessly in the hotel dining room while waiting for lunch. In the flagstone courtyard was a stone dolphin that spit water from its mouth, and they served fish every Friday. I don’t eat fish. The hotel was always crowded, thoroughly stuffed with a great many strange people, including a man who walked holding his shoes in his hands, even in the garden, a boy my own age who barked like a dog when spoken to, and a wispy middle-aged woman who on occasion went into the woods and sang “mon coeur est un violon.”
    I fell asleep on the sofa. I woke up and it was morning. I opened my eyes, then closed them. I dwelled within a while longer, rummaging there for the remnants of sleep. They eluded me. An awareness of things—hardness of sofa, stiffness of legs, emptiness of stomach—forced consciousness upon me, insidious, insistent, irresistible. One more time. Lying on my back, I stared wide-eyed at the ceiling and listened to the traffic building toward rush hour. Whenever I am home the noise of traffic is out there, more or less, sometimes drowned by the noise of the compressors, sometimes drowning the noise of the compressors, not always heard, seldom listened to except at moments like this, on waking, when the mind gropes for bearings, sometimes not telling for a glad moment if that sound is not truly the ocean. Only on Sundays and in the wee hours of the morning does the roar diminish to where I can pick out the voices of individual vehicles, separate the sad rumble of the old ones from the whistling smooth rush of the new ones or follow the heaviest trucks shifting down octaves on the curving ascent to the Connector. I have moved the fern. I got down almost on my knees, placed my hands on the rim of the pot, buried my face in the fronds (they smelled like a forest after rain), and pushed. Though my feet slipped from under me several times, knees banging the floor, I managed to shove the pot across the room. But unable to see where I was going, I continued pushing until it crashed to a stop against the wall next the bookcase, pitching me forward into the foliage and snapping several fronds. The pot had pushed up the rug as it slid, folding it into large accordion pleats that were now wedged between the pot and the wall and that took all my strength and several hard jerks to pull out. I was leaning over the bookcase, elbows resting on it, catching my breath, when I noticed the dust on top. I had not noticed it before, not recently in any case, because I don’t ordinarily hang my head a few inches above the furniture, as I was doing then. My eyesight is fairly good, considering, but not so keen that I can discern from far off something as retiring and minute as dust. It was, I saw, leaning over it, a rather thick coating, a depressing