The Canals of Mars: A Memoir

Useful Things

M ymotherreusedmyfather’sbakerybags.Icarriedmy lunch in those bags, folded them, and brought them home for another use. Things were kept, according to my mother, because you could never tell when they might prove useful. All nails and screws. Every rubber band and paper clip. Adapters. Plugs. Buttons. String, wire, pins. And every appliance that might be fixed when she had time to figure out its workings. Radios and televisions. Mixmasters and blenders. “She gets it from The Prince,” my father said more than once, “being so handy,” but after a while it seemed like primitive cryonics for the inanimate. Some day in the future, when there was a cure for whatever had killed them, those useful things would be revived like the bodies of the long-frozen who were beginning to accumulateinexpensivefreezers,noneofthematalllikethewornout one that lay long and squat like a coffin in the corner of our basement next to the obsolete upright refrigerator, whose tiny freezer compartment, when it stood in the kitchen, used to turn, periodically, into a solid block of ice. That first refrigerator had cleared the kitchen windowsills of the perishables that were stored there from September to May. Its purchase meant we didn’t have to clean our plates because now leftovers could survive in weather warmer than near-freezing. My mother thought she could turn complaints into silence with wrenches and screwdrivers, that she possessed a toolbox for despair. When she opened her personal hymnal each Sunday, she believed the verses spoke to her. Hosannah, she might have sung to herself on her way to repair. Holy, she might have whispered to whatever she fixed. Sunday was a day we weren’t to be entertained by movies or amusement parks, but it wasn’t, as the Bible suggested, a day of rest. Needle and thread, my mother used on Sunday, darning small holes and patching the large ones, matching the colors of thread to the material in order to preserve the heels and toes of socks, the elbows of shirts, and the knees of pants. Useful Things 146 ■ w o r k “Good as new,” she’d say, meaning those words. She could cite every object I had ever lost; she’d made me retrace my steps for nickels and dimes and quarters, saying, “Look, then look again,” as if not finding lost coins would doom me to a life of hopeless debt. And always, late Sunday afternoon, the “redding up”—what Pittsburghers calledputtingthingsintheirplace.Sheunderstoodhowtogetthehouseshipshape. Afterwards, she said once, there were moments so quiet she’d dream everyone she loved had been saved. Standing in her kitchen, the drawers all closed, she imagined us sewn into a quilt, huge patches of purple, silver, and gold. All of our soft stories would cover her, and she would pull them up around her chin and listen to how those voices warmed her. My father did “outside work.” He cut the grass and tended the garden. He pulled weedsandplantedshrubberyandflowers,leaving“insidework”tomymother.It was an arrangement no one questioned. He frowned when I helped my mother with the dishes. He took me outside when it looked like I had nothing to do, removing me from the dusting my sister was doing, the laundry she was helping to fold. He named everything in the garden by its leaves—tomatoes, green beans, radishes, carrots, beets. And when he told me to pull weeds, he pointed out each kind, naming it, so there was no question what I was supposed to erase from among the rows. Inside the house, he was absence. Fix this, I said to my mother—toasters, tables, a mattress, shoes. Fix this. And she used needle and thread; employed screws, solder, and superglue; or managed the simplest repairs with tape. Such a perfect combination of adhesive and backing. So many ways to use it for repair. And yet that tape yellowed. And yet it curled and came off in time. Andgettingitofftherollwasajobthatbroughtmildexpletivesfrommymother. So she welcomed, when it came on the market, the tape dispenser. So she acquired the newest miracle of usefulness, Scotch Magic Transparent Tape, which unwound more easily and could be written on. But most of all, so she could repair with tape that didn’t yellow or ooze. Fix this. And she did until her heart broke down completely. Fix this. The projects she intended to do the day she died. Fix this. The refusals, finally, of the broken. The way we rearrange the rooms of our dead as if we will...