The Best American Essays 2013 Read Online Free Page B

someone knocked it took me so long to get to the door that my caller would be gone by the time I arrived. My place was full of moths, whose origin I could not determine. They were the small, rolled-up type, like pencil shavings. I had liked them at first for their silence and the intricate designs on their delicate wings, but now, with their growing numbers and regular obtrusion into my books, blankets, and bathtub, I considered them a nuisance.
    My room was sparsely furnished with items left by the previous tenants, who had vacated abruptly. There was a vinyl-covered recliner and a dining room table, upon which sat my typewriter, and two chairs that went with the table. There was a television on a stand that I did not often use since it received only two channels, though occasionally I watched
I Love Lucy
—a program I had disliked as a child for all its yelling—and a PBS show hosted by theological psychologist John Bradshaw, who asserted that all my addiction problems could be traced back to my “wounded inner child.” (Maybe I was hurt by early exposure to episodes of
I Love Lucy
.)
    There were four boxes of
Paris Review
s that Jim had lent me, which I studied at night, especially the interviews with famous authors. Throughout the building the floors were covered with cheap carpet that with all its gold, green, and red filigree might’ve been called “gala,” but it was so thin that it wrinkled, and there was no padding underneath, so that if you didn’t have a mattress—I didn’t—you had to build up a nest of blankets on the floor. The heat was regulated by Mrs. Vollstanger, so it was always cold, and it was best not to sleep by the windows, which had bubbles trapped in their glass and made me feel as if I were a specimen in some intergalactic aquarium.
    I set my fish across the sink and promptly began to divide it into two-inch crosscut planks with a handsaw I used only for this purpose. While I worked, I thought about the coming of the next Great Depression and wondered how America would fall apart: Slowly or quickly? From the coasts inward or the middle out? With great fanfare or in a puff of smoke? And in which direction would everyone run this time? I also wondered if it had been wise to quit my job and sell my car.
    Sawing up a frozen albacore is not much different from sawing up a green tree trunk. I got about twelve steaks, which I wrapped and stacked in the freezer beside all the wild game that Mrs. Vollstanger had cleaned out of her recently deceased husband’s stand-up freezer and donated to me. A big-game hunter, he had labeled all his Cryovacked packages in permanent black marker: ELK, ELEPHANT, BLACK BEAR, ZEBRA, GAZELLE . So far I had been reluctant to try any of it for fear that Mrs. Vollstanger had actually killed, dressed, and Cryovacked her husband.
    I also had a twenty-five-pound bag of pink beans, a twenty-five-pound bag of black-eyed peas, a twenty-five-pound bag of brown rice, ten pounds of white flour, four pounds of oats, and two pounds of buckwheat—a proper head start, I thought, on the anarchy and economic despair to come.
     
    The door to Mrs. Vollstanger’s apartment was open, and before I could knock, she invited me in. Mrs. Vollstanger had a big, well-lit, orderly apartment on the southwest corner, with a panoramic view of the bay and the Samoa pulp mill. You could predict with fair accuracy what the weather would be like by which way the smoke blew from the mill. Usually it was blowing in from the ocean, which meant fog and rain, but today the smoke flowed north, indicating fair weather.
    “You’ve heard that the market slipped?” she said, handing me the envelope with the eviction notice for Annabelle Taft inside.
    “‘Slipped’?”
    “Everything will be fine. We have a good man in office,” she said, referring to then-president Ronald Reagan.
    Mrs. Vollstanger rarely left the premises. Her groceries were delivered. She did not own a car. The tenants who curried her