A Contribution to 240 Ecrivains Racontent Une Journée du Monde, the Nouvel Observateur’s anthology of events for April 29, 1994
I took my daughter to school, and then, at my office, I wrote an e-mail about library catalogs, although I was supposed to be reviewing a novel. A fact-checker from a newspaper called, wanting to know if I was thirty-seven, and whether it was correct to say that a book of mine had been published on a certain day in 1992. I had lunch at a Chinese restaurant with my wife and sleeping five-month-old son. We talked about an article on homelessness that she had read in the New York Review of Books. Then I wrote about library catalogs some more. When I got home, my daughter was wearing a new Girl Scout Brownie uniform. She was proud of her long, blue-tasseled socks, and her pride made my eyes fill with tears, partly because I was tired from writing about libraries all day.
Outside on the back deck, we used strips of masking tape to outline the dimensions of a possible second bathroom, to be installed in the laundry room. Chairs stood for the sink and the toilet; the space proved to be too small to accommodate a shower.
I bought hamburgers for dinner and rented Arsenic and Old Lace for us to watch as a family (never having seen it), but it frightened my daughter, so we stopped the tape. I made my son laugh by tickling the soles of his feet with my beard and making munching sounds at his ribs. When both children were asleep, my wife watched the rest of the movie while I, tipped sideways forty-five degrees, dozed on the couch. Then I went back to my office and sorted the mail I was supposed to answer into four piles. I didn’t actually answer any letters, but I felt that I had moved forward by sorting them. One of the pieces of mail I came across was a fax from Le Nouvel Observateur, and I realized that this was the very day I was supposed to write about and that I had thus far taken no notes. So I took some notes on the margin of the fax, which smudged on the shiny paper but remained legible.
The last thing I did before I got in bed was to put a computer disk between the two halves of my wallet so that I wouldn’t forget to take it with me to Phoenix, Arizona, where I was going the next morning to watch a friend get married to a tall woman who had appeared in a Jeep commercial. I went to sleep fondling my wife’s engagement ring.
Now, several months later, the bathroom is built. The strips of masking tape, which we didn’t bother to peel up when we finished our architectural planning that evening, have become ineffaceably baked onto the gray planks of the back deck. They are, in fact, the only tangible remains of that particular day.
(1994)
Sunday at the Dump
It’s a Sunday afternoon in South Berwick and I’m at the dump, sitting in a white plastic lawn chair. Dump days are Wednesday, Saturday, and Sunday; most people go on Sunday afternoons. The busiest time is just before six, when the dump closes: if you come too late, you’re stuck with your trash until Wednesday, and when Wednesday comes around you’re likely to forget. There are no garbage trucks in our town — everyone must make an appearance here. Just before election day, candidates for local office show up to shake hands and campaign — only here at the dump does a candidate have a chance of meeting a voter from every household. Many residents hardly set foot in the little stores on Main Street; they don’t use the post office much; they shop for groceries in supermarkets across the border in another state; their children are bused to school. But everybody comes to the dump. “We get more business here than town hall,” Jim told me. Jim is the dump’s manager — a stocky man in his twenties with a deep sunburn. When I had been sitting in my white plastic chair for about half an hour, in a shady place to one side of the parking lot, Jim came over to be sure I wasn’t trying to drop off some illegal toxic material in the bushes. I told him I was writing about the dump, because most people are happy when they come here. In fact, I’m smiling now, as I type this sentence, looking out at the sunlit cars and trucks, and the long rectilinear containers, each accepting a different kind of refuse. There is a beautiful red container, freshly painted, the size of a caboose, with a ladder up its side; in front of it there is a sign that says “Shingles Only.”
Though we call it a dump, technically it isn’t one: it used to be a landfill. Behind the main building there is a steep man-made hill, covered with yellow wildflowers, with two T-shaped structures poking up from it. These are vents; they release trapped gasses from the heap. Now all the trash that we bring goes in trucks to the nearby town of Biddeford, where they burn it. Biddeford residents complain of the smell; for unknown reasons, Biddefordians sited their incinerator in the center of town. I told Jim the Manager that our dump was looking very clean these days. When Jim took over a year ago, the place was a mess; now everything’s in order, and there’s no smell. “Every night we clean out all the recycling cans with a mixture of Simple Green, bleach, and water,” Jim said. “We don’t get any bees. When I got here, there were a lot of bees.”
Agamenticus Road is the way to the dump. Agamenticus is the name of a mountain nearby; there are rare plants that grow only on Mount Agamenticus, but I’ve never seen them. There is a pile of rocks on top of Mount Agamenticus, too. Indians supposedly had a tradition of commemorating a sacred burial site by arranging a large pile of rocks; now visitors to the mountain bring their rocks as well. I’ve been to the top of Mount Agamenticus once; I’ve been to the dump hundreds of times, often with my son. You take a right at the Civil War statue onto Agamenticus Road; you drive past some houses and a cemetery; and then, just after the ice cream stand and potted plant store, you take a left and you’re in a paved area in front of the dump’s main building, a brown shed. Next to it is a yawning opening — a sort of double-high garage door — into which people toss their clear bags of trash. One of the pleasures here is in throwing: today I flung each bag underhand, so that it had a final airborne moment of multicolored spin before it fell into the compaction pit. Sometimes I overturn the whole garbage can (which I’ve brought in the back of my van) and shake out its contents, holding it high over my shoulder: the bags emerge slowly, hissing slightly, held by the vacuum I created several days earlier when I stuffed the bags down into the can in order to close the lid. The bags holding regular trash must be transparent, so that the dump attendants can verify that you’re not throwing in something forbidden, like cat litter. Cat litter goes into another enormous container separate from the main one, a receptacle entirely devoted to mattresses, old couches, and cat litter.
There are three windows in the main building — one window is labeled “Brown,” one says “Green,” and one says “Clear.” Formerly the windows were fitted with swinging flaps of Plexiglas, but the flaps have been removed now — an improvement. Into these windows we throw bottles and jars. When the bottles fall into the bins on the other side of the swinging flaps (or where the swinging flaps were when there were flaps), the clinks they make are painfully loud. When the bottles break it’s a relief: shattering is noticeably less noisy than intact clinking. Why? Perhaps because some of the kinetic energy is used up in the breakage, and there are no broken inner bottle-hollows to muffle the radiating noise.
Down a slope and to the left of the main building are two dark-green containers, each the size of a mobile home. One holds newspapers and magazines, and one holds cardboard. You can flip pizza boxes like Frisbees into the container for cardboard, hoping to lodge them at the top of the pile, way back in the shadows. Often the boxes slide back out again. I took several bags of newspapers into the newspaper-and-magazine bin. There is a partition up half-way back, to hold the four-foot-high tide of paper from pouring forward. It’s hushed and warm deep in this news-vessel; the shiny advertising inserts make slushy whispering noises as you release them from the bag.