After they left his grandmother’s apartment, they drove through the neighborhood, up Smith, along the Gowanus Expressway, and looped around to come down Court. When they hit Lorraine, they turned right and crept along.
He knew all the street names by now. This was the third weekend in a row his father had taken him to his old neighborhood to show him around. His father was trying to squeeze it in before he forgot what everything was.
They reached the Red Hook Pool. “This is where we swam when I was a boy,” his father said. “It’s hard to believe it’s been so long. Everybody was naked and nobody realized it. It was great. We spent the whole day here and at the end we were like prunes. It’s still being used today, you know.”
Connell nodded politely; he was missing a Halloween party for this.
“Not today,” his father said. “I know that. It’s too cold today. Today in general.”
His father stopped the car. There was an honest, open look on his face. Ugly thoughts flashed through Connell’s mind.
Do you know, really? What do you know anymore? You never really were like a normal father in the first place, were you? You were always more of a dork than the others. You and your obsessively catalogued cassette and VCR tapes, your long-sleeved shirts in the summer, your never wearing shorts, your old movies, your corny jokes. You and your lab coats and sharpened pencils. You and your insistence on perfect grammar and enunciation. You and your spazzy sneakers, your sweat-stained baseball caps, your ear hairs. You and your never exceeding the speed limit by more than a couple of miles an hour. You and your beakers, your clipboards, your briefcase. You and your boring stories of the old neighborhood. I could break your heart right now if I wanted to, you big dork, you nerd, you spaz, you geek, you herb, you Poindexter.
Then his father faced the road again and they turned onto Columbia. They came to a derelict building with a long, faded sign that spelled KOHNSTAMM in capital letters. “This is what’s left of the factory I worked at,” his father said. Graffiti dotted its surface, and weather had worn off much of the paint, so that the ghostly outline of the words MANUFACTURING CHEMISTS could just barely be distinguished below the name. “There used to be so much manufacturing in this city. Now those jobs are gone. Factory work was a—how do I say it? It was an incubator for the middle class.”
His father was having one of those extended moments of lucidity in which he could hold forth about some topic and it wouldn’t seem like anything had happened to his mind. Connell always got a little charge of hope from them, a sense that some part of his father might be able to make it back from the other side of the creaky rope bridge.
“I wouldn’t have gotten where I did if it weren’t for a manufacturing job. We don’t make anything in this country anymore.”
“We make missiles,” Connell said. “Movies. Hamburgers.”
His father seemed not to have heard him. “I worked here at your age,” he said. Then he looked at him searchingly. “No, a little older than you. In my early twenties. I keep thinking you’re older than you are. You look so much like my brother Phil.”
Connell turned the radio on, found WDRE. The beginning notes of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” were playing and he turned it up. He didn’t even care if his father told him to turn it down, because in his mind he wasn’t really there. Maybe he wasn’t really there in his father’s mind either.