In the summer of 1969, while playing a game of basketball, my brother Harold blew out his knee. For some time afterward he walked with crutches, then with our newly dead grandfather’s cane, and finally with a pronounced limp that faded until, to everyone in our family but me, he appeared to have made a complete recovery.
In July of that year—the summer of the moonwalk; the summer when I fantasized about playing for the Lakers and being Jerry West or Elgin Baylor—our family sojourned from Seaside, Oregon, where my parents were managers of a small, sand-wracked motel, to a north Seattle neighborhood of new-built homes, many of them in varying stages of incompleteness, some mere foundations or yawning craters in the earth, some framed up but still skeletal, without roofs, others half-plumbed but not wired, or vice versa—the line of houses on our side of the block was a stark and vivid frieze about the growth of cities, and wandering through them at the age of thirteen I felt the disquieting security of having so many unpossessed places to hide, as if the furtive corners of these half-built, lifeless homes could be counted on in times of darkest trouble, if they came somehow; for times of trouble—poisoned water in the tap, unformulated enemies, hydrogen bombs dropping from the Seattle skies—seemed always just ahead to me for some reason.
Coming up from Seaside in the back of our Bel Air, I listened to Harold recite the names of all the presidents in order, ending with Richard Milhous Nixon. His ability to perform this feat was vaguely irritating to me; when we’d cleaned motel rooms on summer afternoons he’d often muttered the names of presidents under his breath while exhorting me to work with greater energy so that the two of us could be done with it sooner. Today Harold is a pediatrician, a soft-spoken man of thirty-five with the emaciated limbs and astonishingly thin face of an Auschwitz survivor—one of those stick figures that stares at you from black-and-white photographs of the Holocaust as if to say: I am alive, but just barely. I sometimes ponder how it must be for children to have Harold tapping at their bony chests, if he is an adult who engenders in them fear or trust, if his hands inspire confidence or not. He never married. At fifteen, that summer his knee went, he was aggressively and obnoxiously competitive, an adrenalated whirlwind when it came to games of any sort; he was, in his own stringy, blue-eyed, determined way, unbeatable at just about everything.
While Harold named presidents beside me in the backseat I watched intently the passing landscape, nervous that our father might be too inept as a driver to get us all safely to Seattle. I’d seen him, only hours before, fumble with backing up the U-Haul trailer that now flew along behind us like a ponderous shadow, carrying everything our family possessed in its gloomy, malodorous insides. My mother, her bare feet propped just over the glove compartment, read Woman’s Day magazine from behind her sunglasses, a straw hat pulled down over her head, her thick hair braided down her spine. My father listened to a Pacific Coast League ball game—Portland vs. Spokane? Portland vs. Tacoma?—on the Bel Air’s fading radio, one index finger wrapped around the bottom of the steering wheel, the back of his shaved neck—from where I sat—sunburned and latticed with pale crevices. He wore his hair cropped short and gelled rigorously with Brylcreem, a Hawaiian print shirt, zoris, and his bathing suit, below which his slack thighs lay pale against the car upholstery. He was much given to rooting in his nose as he drove and, at crucial moments in the baseball game, turning up the radio volume to deafening levels. At these times Harold fell silent.
“Twenty questions,” our father said, just before Astoria, because he felt we were bored and that he owed us something. “Let’s see which one of you can get it, all right?”
“Male?” said Harold.
“Yes.”
“Before nineteen hundred?”
“Yep.”
“American?”
“Right.”
“A president?”
“Right.”
“Abraham Lincoln?”
“No.”
“George Washington?”
“You got it.”
Harold clapped his hands emphatically. “I did it in six,” he pointed out. “Did you hear that, mom? I did it in six.”
“Very good,” said our mother.
In such a manner we flew north together, in our box on wheels, dragging our possessions behind us. We all knew how momentous this journey was: when my grandfather died in heart surgery that spring my mother came into a modest inheritance, and with this my parents made the down payment on the Seattle house, for they desired, the two of them, a new life in the city, the life they had talked about for many years. In Seaside they’d grown weary of vacuuming sand from ravaged motel rooms while the wind from the Pacific blew seams into their faces and made them both old before their time. They’d wanted to be free of this wind and sand and of empty wine bottles on bedside tables and of living like visitors in the motel’s office-apartment while strangers came and went ceaselessly, leaving behind an eternal mess to be cleaned up so that others could come along and, finding it clean, wreak havoc on everything because they deigned to. They were tired and wanted to be where cleaner jobs were and where my mother’s family was; they took it for granted that moving to this new place meant all things unwanted could be left behind, and they persisted, for years to come, in believing that they could always move again should their lives begin to turn sour on them. We have all thought this, people have always thought it; but this fact did not prevent the idea from taking root in my parents’ hearts and nurturing them through all the harsh times.
We crossed, in our Bel Air, the gray-green breadth of the Columbia. We passed through Megler, Naselle, Raymond, Artic, Melbourne, Montesano, Elma. And as the journey thickened and the towns became more foreign to us we all became less talkative—each with our private universe of sentiment to contemplate en route to a new home to live in. We watched the world rush past outside our windows and felt that it was increasingly alien, increasingly strange but beckoning.
Now, if a move to a new place is an opportunity for change in whom we have thus far played at being, then all of us, traveling north together, must have noticed the expectant quiet that seemed to me to settle over the land as the Bel Air rolled up Highway 12, drawing us with it toward a new life in which—because we were only human, a human family—the passions that had thus far held us together might be forever rearranged under the sky of a distant city.
It was the day before Neil Armstrong walked on the moon—presumably with the good of all mankind as his purpose—that my family arrived in Seattle. My father, his elbow slung out the Bel Air’s windowframe, gave the rest of us a running commentary. “Space Needle,” he said perfunctorily. “Site of the ’62 World’s Fair … Husky Stadium over there … Green Lake off to the left somewhere.” He fumbled his way off the interstate, our trailer pitching along behind. For a while we rambled along a wide boulevard, then over narrower, newer streets through rows of placid ranch houses, finally past a claustrophobic, overpaved city park. “See that basketball court?” said our father, proudly. “The lights come on at night out there. The net’s made out of chain links. And it’s just three blocks from your new house.”
Harold and I both looked at it; or rather, I spied on Harold while he looked through the window at the basketball court our father had pointed out.
“Looks pretty good,” he observed.
The winter before, in Seaside, we’d stood on the concrete at the elementary school and took turns shooting thousands of free throws together, steam spewing from our mouths. My brother began his shot from the center of his belly, his mouth hung open, his elbows tucked in, utterly dependent on some physical inner rhythm that would allow him, at the right moment, to release the ball. It was a thing of beauty, I see now. With the snow shoveled aside so that a lane to the basket was cleared, and icicles plunging from the school-house eaves, he made ninety-six in a row one afternoon, his eyes glassy and still in his face, his fingers numb, saying nothing. His rhythm was exacting, impeccable, but anxious. These minutes of shooting a basketball in the cold were fraught with a deep dread of missing. On that afternoon I stopped shooting my own shots and became his personal rebounder. I felt his rhythm right from the beginning and fed it with a precision no one else could quite get. There was an unspoken agreement between us on this: I would sense how he needed the ball in his hands, and when it should arrive, and how gently it must assert itself; he, for his part, would put the ball in the basket.
In this manner—together—we progressed to the 1969 Oregon Free Throw Tournament. My brother’s name appeared in the Portland papers: twenty-five out of twenty-five in the semifinal round: steely perfection at fifteen, wrote a reporter for The Oregonian. In the finals, at halftime of a U. of Portland game, he missed one only because I threw it to him wrong: it was his final attempt after twenty-four in a row had slipped through the cords impeccably. The ball caromed off the back of the rim, bounced straight up and disappeared behind the backboard—crazily, embarrassingly, extracting a groan from the gathered crowd. He won anyway, and his trophy stood on a bookcase in our family’s house for many years to come.
Watching him scrutinize the court near our new home I wondered if he would shoot free throws there in the same manner; if everything, in short, would be the same here. Perhaps Oregon had not been enough for him; perhaps he would need Washington State, too.
When we turned onto our new block finally two boys were in the street, tossing a baseball back and forth. The neighborhood, with all its half-built homes, had the chaotic aspect of a war zone. Shirtless men shingled the roof of one house while a cement truck churned, pouring concrete across the way. The dirt had a scabbed and ravaged appearance—you had the feeling that the earth was being remade on an impossibly titanic scale. Bulldozers had gouged our street out of blackberry riots to make room for exactly eighteen homes. In the end all would come to look egregiously similar; fronted by squares of immaculate lawn, guarded by yard lamps that blinked on at twilight, the split-level facades of our neighborhood were like sad, gaping and embarrassed faces set in the sill of the earth. In silhouette, on summer evenings, men mowed the grass or washed automobiles—but no one knew anyone. The place suggested somehow a necessity for distance, and thus on that first day—before the neighborhood existed, really—there was no one to greet us first of all, and no will to greet us even if there had been, as we did not greet those who followed us there out of the unformulated conviction everyone shared that one’s neighbors would inevitably move on.
My father pulled cautiously into the drive of our new home: “This is it, guys,” he said. We spilled out onto the sidewalk together; my mother, producing a key from a chain around her neck, ceremoniously unlocked the front door. Then all of us wandered through the vacant rooms together, the freshness of things inspiring in us a brand of reverence—“Don’t touch the walls,” said my mother. Our voices echoed in the empty, painted chambers, alien, unsettling sounds. In astonishment we stood at the threshold of our dining room. An imitation chandelier, festooned with vaguely absurd cut-glass diamonds, hung by a chain from the ceiling. In the bathroom two sinks had been set in the tile; the wings of the mirrors swiveled on chrome hinges and the cabinets were stained with linseed oil. We inspected the kitchen together. My mother operated the garbage disposal; my father slipped the brass bolt in the Dutch door. We admired the counters and the window sills and closets. It seemed that some diminutive empire had been created for us, bordered by fences and careful rockeries, to close out that other world of wind and sand from which we had recently emerged together.
“We have to celebrate,” announced my father. “We’ll bring everything in first, then eat, have a party.” He backed my mother against the kitchen sink, hoisted her up and turned her in a circle; her heels flew out behind her. “I should have carried you across the threshold,” he said, snapping his fingers. “What was I thinking of?”
“It’s not too late,” my mother told him.
He carried her across, of course. It must have seemed to him then that the life he had dreamed of was within reach. How was he to know then what he would have to bear? That my mother would die of lymphoma twelve years later? That they would sell this new house within five years? That he would sit by her in the hospital and wish for an end to it all?
That night, since we had no beds yet, Harold and I slept on the living-room floor—or rather didn’t sleep because the place was too strange, the house too noxious with fumes of paint, the night too sultry, too windless. I’d always slept in the same room with Harold and had carried this tradition with me to the new place. But it occurred to me now that I didn’t have to. In the new place there was a bedroom for everyone.
“You think things are going to be different here?” I said.
“Some things,” said Harold. “Sure they are.”
“Like what?” I asked. “Name something.”
Harold turned onto his back beside me. We’d stripped to our underwear, and lay facing the ceiling with our hands behind our heads, our elbows pointing out like wings. The light from a streetlamp gathered in the window and swarmed across Harold’s tightened rib cage and over the as yet untainted plasterboard. “Like a lot of things,” he answered. “I don’t know.”
“I’m glad I’m going to have my own room,” I told him. “I can do whatever I want now.”
We were silent for some time. It was the kind of silence that often follows insult, when no one is quite certain of the meaning of silence—a nervous interim, even between brothers.
“That’s fine,” said Harold, after a while. “Fine.”
“It has to be,” I told him. “So there.”
He slept after a while. I didn’t. I never slept as well as Harold did, and still today I seem always to be restless when others have slipped into the world of dreams.
It was the day of the moonwalk, a thing that seemed to us more distant than the moon; while planets disintegrate and stars are born we migrate, love, make plans, pare our fingernails, hate one another ceaselessly.
Before ten o’clock that morning Harold and I were at the basketball court our father had pointed out to us.
“Shoot for outs,” he said.
“You shoot.”
“First one to make it.”
“You go first.”
Harold shot. It went in, naturally, a swish.
“By ones to fifteen,” said Harold, after I missed. “Win by two, make it–keep it.”
“Take it out,” I said.
I gave him the ball. He tucked it under his wiry forearm and smiled at me with what I took to be an underhanded beneficence.
“Good luck, brother,” he said to me.
He drove to his right, turned his back to the hoop, and committed himself to that subtle chess match all basketball players know about: maneuvering toward a half-inch of shooting space or, if the defense can be duped, toward a spin-and-drive to the basket. I was mesmerized by little things—a dip of the head, a twitch in the shoulder, a convincing set to the mouth—then a fall-away jumper, his slim body going up strong against the backdrop of the city streets. An incandescent moment with the sun around his head like a halo; then the ball rattling through the chains.
“One-o,” said Harold. “I’m up.”
He went left now, as if heading for the corner, then ignited in a curl toward the baseline. At eight feet he swiveled in a running hook that swirled twice around the iron before dropping.
“Two-o,” he announced.
He banked in a jumper two steps left of the foul line. Then, going to his left again, a running floater. A reverse lay-up flipped back over his right shoulder. A hook shot from the right baseline.
“Six-o,” he said. “Mine.”
“Take it out,” I answered.
In Seaside we’d played one-on-one a thousand times in the yard at the elementary school. There was sand on the court, and no net, and a sea wind to grow accustomed to. We’d sat against the wall of the school chewing gum and drinking soda pop when we were done. Harold was going to play for the Celtics one day; I was going to play for the Lakers.
A slashing lay-up from the left, protected. He missed, and I scored twice from the top. Seven to two, Harold.
In Seattle we found the sun fell pale and motionless and the chain net gave a satisfying swush when the ball passed through it. In Seattle we found an audience in passing cars and young couples decked out in tennis whites. In Seaside the throes of Pacific waves had forever been there, lulling me—the sound of my life passing. Now, in the city, there was no such sound, no vista from home of an endless ocean beyond which any possibility lay; in the city, I realized, there were millions of people, all like me: dreamers falling short of their absurd dreams.
Harold banked one in from thirty. He drove right, coiled through a three-sixty and released the basketball from the graceful fingertips of his left hand. Swish.
“Nine to two,” he said. “My outs.”
A jumper off the dribble drive, left. Down the middle, straight at my fear, the right knee in my chest, an exaggerated arc and off the board.
“Eleven-two,” said Harold.
He missed from the top of the key. I struggled in low. A turnaround from five feet—in.
“Eleven-three,” I said.
Once, in Seaside, we picked clean a cherry tree together. Harold, stains on his face, sat against its base spitting pits for distance while I watched him from a branch high above.
Two fall-aways. A scooping lay-up. Harold’s breath, stinking of peanut butter. His elbows and most of all his tenacious rear end, bumping me out of position.
“Game point,” announced Harold.
We’d gone smelt fishing together. Millions of them, spawning in the breakers, Harold and I yarding on our net in tandem while the Pacific smashed the sand around us.
He went right. I leaned into him; Harold leaned back, of course. And for a moment we were frozen that way, two islands of tension, the both of us seized up, intractable. He held the ball cradled between his hip and forearm, he ducked low, laying his shoulder against my chest. I could feel the spring coiling in him, and when he dipped away from me I followed forward brutally, going with his weight. Harold kept falling back, the ball looping over us and against the sky, far short of its mark, an airball, happily, and then that ligament in his knee buckled and snapped and his face darkened, a shadow formed in the pupil of his eye. I was standing over him and Harold was on the concrete, his knee braced in both hands, his face contorted in soundless pain. He seemed naked, exposed and utterly helpless while I stood over him, observing.
The evening astronauts first walked on the moon Harold was at the Children’s Orthopedic Hospital. I went there too, and sat beside him with a transistor radio, and we heard Neil Armstrong tell the world that his was one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind. For some time we pondered the meaning of this; it seemed to Harold that Armstrong had left a word out. Didn’t he mean a man had taken one small step toward peace for all of mankind? Yet my father, from the foot of the bed, insisted that either way Neil Armstrong was a phony—that the experience should have been beautiful, but that Armstrong was there so that one day, if necessary, we could knock the stuffing out of the Russians from the surface of the age-old moon.
We sat there in that hospital room and listened to men speak to us from the Sea of Tranquillity; Armstrong called it a “magnificent desolation”; then a broadcaster reported that a Russian probe, “bent on reconnaissance during the mission,” was preparing, soon, to land in lunar soil. My father laughed at this, at which point my brother asked grimly for a dose of painkiller and I bolted through the door to find his nurse, thankful to have this convenient task to do for Harold just then.
* * *
My father never found a job in Seattle. For two weeks in August he labored at a flour mill on Harbor Island, a paid trainee who in the end would not be hired permanently. Each evening he came home with a film of flour dust against his skin and clothes, dressed in work whites and Converse tennis shoes, the smell of beer on his breath. Then it was over. My mother, using a yellow highlighting pen, marked those classified advertisements she felt in her heart he ought to give his attention to. She packed him a sack lunch and sent him off in the Bel Air to spend his days filling out forms. But to no avail, really. Whether it was self-willed, or the times, or both together, my father found no work in the city. Sometimes on fall evenings he would sit on the patio and smoke cigarette after cigarette in a shroud of silence, his head hung between his knees. This went on throughout that autumn until my mother’s inheritance was depleted. Then my father took out a small business loan and bought up a parking lot in downtown Seattle, where he spent his days drinking coffee and reading magazines in a drafty and cold plywood hut.
My mother cleaned houses and the offices of dentists for many years in Seattle. It was what she knew how to do, and she was much in demand among the ladies of the North End, who found in her a methodical, reliable worker. With her hair tucked up under a scarf and not a speck of makeup to conceal her real face she looked downtrodden, weary. She died when she was forty-eight; the day before I had tried feeding her applesauce through a straw but my mother could not keep it down.
My brother stopped playing basketball. After his knee went he was through with sports, not because he had to be but because he wanted it that way. When I came home from practice he’d be wearing a sweater and looking at bugs through his microscope. On certain occasions he would look up at me as if mystified by what he beheld in my face; then his eye would travel to the lens again, leaving me out of its field of vision and focusing on something very small he never offered to share. It would stay there peering steadily down, insistently, patient, until I left in the direction of my own room—a solitary place.