228: I grew depressed.
Little Follies, “The Young Tars,” Chapter 14
14
I GREW DEPRESSED. I lost the will to work. I wanted to grab that moving finger and say, “Hold it a minute. Don’t be in such a hurry. There are some messes to be cleaned up before you go rushing on,” but it seemed to be impossible. What was the sense of working on the manual if it would never be what I wanted it to be, would never be perfect, would never reach a point where I could say, “Okay, that’s it! That’s just the way it should be. Now let’s not change anything.” We perfectionists are reluctant to let go of our projects while we see in them the slightest flaw, but if we do pronounce a thing finished at last, we expect it to endure forever, immutably perfect. When the garden is at last laid out and planted just right, we never want to see any weeds. When the fence is completed, we never want to see any rot. When we get the Tars Manual just right, we never want to see another revised edition.
I couldn’t eat. I lost weight at an alarming rate. My parents tried to get me to eat by making meals that appealed to me (scalloped potatoes with ham were a favorite then, but they tasted like paste), or by pushing snacks on me (especially sandwiches made with cream cheese and grape jelly). They also tried to “get my mind off my work.”
Getting one’s mind off one’s work was, in my family, regarded as absolutely essential to mental—and even physical—health. (In later life, I’ve more often felt just the opposite, and have used work as a way of getting my mind off, say, plumbing problems, or taxes, or the barking of the poor dog that, when Albertine and I lived elsewhere, before we moved to the splendid quiet of Small’s Island, some neighbors of ours bought for their children, in an apparent effort to demonstrate how long a dog could be made to bark by leaving it tied on a short tether without food, water, or affection.) In my family, the most desirable way of getting one’s mind off one’s work was to take a vacation, but the most convenient one was to watch television.
“Peter,” said my mother, and I started as if someone had thrown a rock through my window. I hadn’t heard her come up the stairs or come into my room. There she was, beside me, with her hand on my shoulder. “My goodness, Peter,” she said. “You’re a nervous wreck. Didn’t you even hear me come in?”
“No,” I said. “I—I—was trying to work on the—well—on the manual—or—I don’t know—anything.”
“Oh, Peter,” said my mother. “This is terrible. You’re worrying too much about this work. You’ll give yourself the collywobbles.”
“I will?” I asked.
“Of course you will. Now you just set that aside for the rest of the night and come on downstairs and watch television with us. You can make some popcorn, and we’ll watch a show, and you’ll get your mind off your work. ‘All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy,’ remember.”
I followed my mother downstairs. My father was sitting in his favorite chair, drinking a beer and watching a comedian, a rubber-faced guy with a crewcut and heavy, black-rimmed glasses, teeter atop a wobbly ladder, holding a bucket of sloshing paint and a dripping brush. I smiled. It was good to be reminded that things could be worse.
I went into the kitchen. From a cupboard I took a package of the popcorn favored in my family at that time, a kind that came in a plastic pouch that was divided vertically into two rectangular pockets. The smaller of these pockets, the one on the right side of the package, held a rectangle of solidified vegetable fat that resembled an elongated bar of soap. The other pocket held just the right amount of popcorn for a family a little larger than ours. I tore open the section that held the fat, and, squeezing from the bottom, ejected the bar from the package into the largest pot from my mother’s set of waterless cookware. I cut off a quarter of a stick of butter, peeled the wax paper from it, and put the butter into a saucepan over a low flame to melt. When the fat began to smoke, I tore open the section that held the popcorn and poured the kernels in. I covered the pot and shook it vigorously until the kernels had nearly stopped popping. I removed the lid then, so that I could watch while the popping of the last tardy kernels made the mass of popcorn rise and fall as if it were breathing, heaving a sigh. I poured the popcorn into a gray earthenware bowl with a pale blue line around the lip. I drizzled the butter over the top in figure eights. I shook salt onto the popcorn from the kitchen salt shaker, part of a ceramic salt-and-pepper set shaped like ears of corn. I had won them at a carnival. I carried the bowl into the living room and put it on the coffee table, a pine table supposed to imitate a cobbler’s bench of colonial times. I sat on the floor beside it and watched, without real interest, while the guy with the crewcut and a woman with a wide mouth and a loud voice tried, with clownish ineptitude, to put floral wallpaper onto the walls of a set that represented a living room similar to ours.
My mother put her hand on my head and stroked my hair. “You mustn’t let little things bother you so much,” she said. “Why, when you’re grown up you probably won’t even remember any of this.”
[to be continued on Friday, March 31, 2022]
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