When I was twelve years old and a good deal more certain about the world than I am now, my father bought me a used three-speed Raleigh bicycle; I took it down to the basement we shared with the Schades and painted it peacock blue.
Schade and his wife were very old now but they had managed to have two children late in life, in a final spurt of fertility before the good times passed forever. Georgia Schade, who later became my wife, was eleven; her brother Joseph, the last of the last, was nine. There had been another child, the product of the Schades’ first flowering, but he had died tragically and discouraged them from trying again for a long time. Georgia told me that he’d drowned while sailing a model boat in a public fountain. The then-young Schades had turned to each other on their stone bench and lost themselves in a long kiss; by the time they came back to the world and remembered their child, little Jubal Schade had slipped, hit his head on the stone coping, and was floating irretrievably face down in the doubtful water.
Peacock blue is a color darker than sky, brighter than navy, somewhere this side of electric. I had wrapped the wheels of my bicycle in newspapers to keep paint off the spokes and tires; a picture of Toledo’s mayor stared at me through the front fork, transfigured by drops of celestial blue. Summer had been a long time coming, but now, as I laid the paint over the bike’s original shabby black, I could feel it at my fingers’ ends; I almost had hold of it.
“I think that’s going to look dumb,” Georgia Schade said. She had come quietly down the basement stairs to stand behind me.
“What’s dumb about it?” But I knew what she meant; I was laying on the paint like an amateur and I could tell it would never come smooth. It clung to the tube frame and to the arched fenders, clumsy, brilliant. I didn’t care.
“Dumb,” she repeated. She was an odd girl; she did things that made me uneasy. The top floor we rented from the Schades had no private entrance; the flight of stairs we took to get to our place passed through the center of the house and we walked by the Schades’ closed doors to go home. From time to time, by what I believed then to be coincidence, Georgia would come out of the bathroom without any clothes on just as I was passing by. She squealed and wrapped her arms around herself, but I remember now that it took her a perceptible moment to step back inside the steamy bathroom every time.
“Yeah? Well I don’t care—I like it,” I said.
Banners of dusty sunlight fell from the high basement windows, cutting the gloom into uneven rectangles and making it darker. In front of us the coal furnace squatted cold and silent, holding up the house in its thick tube arms. My happiness that afternoon was just this side of being unendurable.
“I’m not allowed to wrestle with you any more,” Georgia said.
I moved my brush slowly down the front fender; a small drop of blue fell in the mayor’s right eye and gave him a shifty look. “All right,” I said.
“You know why?”
“Because.”
I stopped painting. “Because what?”
“I can’t tell you.”
“All right,” I said.
“You’d have to promise never to tell anyone I told you.”
“I promise,” I said.
“It was my dad. He said it wasn’t right for us to wrestle because I’m not a girl any more.”
“What are you then?” I was puzzled.
“A woman,” she said. Her voice took on mysterious harmonies when she said it, and her eyes glazed over as if she was looking at a religious object. The object turned out to be Georgia; a broken storm window leaning against the furnace reflected her image and she stared at herself with awe.
“First of all, that isn’t true,” I said. “You’re only eleven years old. You’re not even as old as I am.”
“In India some eleven-year-old girls have babies,” she said.
I pretended to dip my brush and wipe off the excess paint on the rim of the can, but I studied Georgia out of the corner of my eye. She was wearing a T-shirt, and indisputable breasts no larger than lemons lurked under the fabric, giving strength to her claim.
“Yeah, but this is Ohio; we’re not in India,” I said.
She turned away from me and favored the old furnace with a superior smile; she threw her shoulders back and stepped slowly through one of the bright banners of sun toward the basement stairs, as if to leave. But she stopped at the bottom and leaned on the banister; one breast just touched the painted wood of the railing.
I knew that at the age of twelve I wasn’t nearly ready to be a father—if she could have babies, even if it was in India, it gave her an edge I would never overcome.
“Why are you walking funny?” I said.
“My father said you probably wouldn’t understand if I told you,” she said. She tossed her hair, glancing at the storm window. “You’re not to touch me in certain places any more, either.”
“What?”
“When we play. If we play. I’m a woman now, and you have to treat me with respect.”
That was the end of my perfect summer before it started, though it took me a while to notice the flaw. When the paint on my bicycle was dry I rode it around and around the little streets that wound back on themselves in self-conscious curves. I loved the machine already: the way a flick of my thumb could shift from one gear to the next, the long easy roll of the front wheel over the minor irregularities of the asphalt, most of all the glory of the peacock-blue paint on frame and fenders. But while I made my swoops and aimless circles all through our neighborhood, a piece of me was back in the basement; I kept seeing in my mind’s eye Georgia Schade having babies in India, and her peculiar sashaying walk through the dusty slices of sun that fell through the windows crept into the rhythm of my pedaling.
My parents were serious people, a lot younger than the Schades but no less firm about what they expected from the world and what the world could expect from them—not in return but in the course of the natural sweetness and decorum of existence. My father taught tenth-through-twelfth-grade English and coached the football team at Perrysburg Country Day School; my mother was a secretary at the YMCA. At night she worked off part of our rent by typing for Schade, who relaxed from his university teaching by doing translations of Jules Verne. Among the sounds that mark that summer for me are the clatter of her old Royal, the chime at the end of each line, and the rustle of another clean page being fed into the roller.
Someday my parents planned to buy a house of their own, and probably they would rent the top floor to another young couple next in line for the serious life. I looked at them with mixed feelings: my dad in his chair underlining Beowulf, my mother leaning over to read Schade’s difficult handwriting, and I saw that for them life was a progress, skirting pitfalls and avoiding temptations. My pilgrim parents.
Of the two it was my father who talked to me more, but we never stayed with it for more than half a dozen sentences at a time. Not that he was humorless, or lacked a feel for that deep absurdity at the bottom of it all, but he couldn’t share it with me easily. One night I walked beside him to the corner drugstore to get cigarettes; on the way back he stopped under a streetlight.
“Women don’t always understand,” he said. He stood with the pack of Chesterfields in one hand, holding the red strip of cellophane between two fingers.
“Understand what?”
“What I mean is, they don’t worry about the same things that men do.” He tapped a cigarette out of the pack and lit it. “I’m going to quit,” he said. “It’s a bad habit. Suicide, if you keep at it.” We walked along quietly for a while. It was a warm night and behind open windows people watched their televisions; we could see blue gleams in the dark houses, and hear bits and snatches of programs washed into the street.
“Hemingway had a lot of crazy ideas about the world,” my father said. “And naturally there’s the fact that he blew off the back of his own head with a shotgun—there isn’t any way around that.” He threw away the butt of his cigarette; it made a little twisting spark that arched into the gutter and died there. “Women don’t like him much,” he said. “But he wrote two or three books that you can still count on.”
Just before we got to the house he stopped again. “Your mother doesn’t like him at all,” he said. I wanted to ask why that was important, but he had already told me as much as he could and he ran up the front steps to escape.
Which brings me to where I sit now, twenty-three years later, facing a window which faces a California freeway. I feel as hollow as a blown egg. In another house a thousand miles up the coast in Seattle my son is twelve years old and waits for me to say the words that might have made a difference that long-ago summer in Toledo if my father had found them to say to me. And following the family tradition I don’t have anything better than faith in Hemingway to offer him. Two or three books he can count on. And admiration for a man who blew off the back of his own head with a shotgun, an act I have learned to think of as neither brave nor cowardly.
“Dear Thomas,” I want to write. But I don’t know what comes after that; my memory of my father jinxes me and I want to trot away from my son even in this letter. “How are you?” I end up saying. “What are you doing in school? Do you have any friends?”
I am seventy miles south of Los Angeles, stranded on this cheaply magical coast, and the cars race by on the freeway in front of my window, toward San Diego and Tijuana, the beaches and the pretty restaurants of La Jolla. I have many friends but I can’t stand to talk to the closest of them for more than twenty minutes before a deafening boredom sets in. Like my father I also have students, though mine are a little older, a little less well treated by the world. They come to Carlsbad Community College and I give them, for a gift, grammar and a belief in Standard English to help them along their pilgrim’s way through the serious life.
My father packed his clothes one hot night in August twenty-two years ago and took a room over a drugstore in Perrysburg. My mother and I stayed at the Schades’ house and every other weekend I visited my dad in his badly aired room with the brown floors. We sat at the kitchen table and played cribbage, he cooked hamburgers on a two-burner gas range, and we hardly ever talked at all. When I got home early Sunday nights my mother would look up from De la Terre a la Lune, Englished in violet ink in Schade’s tiny handwriting, and ask me how he was. Our talk about my parents’ separation didn’t go beyond that.
I have faith in the vigorous life and I run my three miles on the beach every day unless the weather is bad; it hardly ever is. Jets and helicopters from the El Toro Naval Air Station swoop low over me while I jog, and back in the yellow hills the boys from Camp Pendleton practice with their howitzers and mortars. The distant explosions sound like the paper bags I blew into and broke when I was a kid. Their noise makes me feel better. The tourists make me feel better, and so does the far-off rumble of freight trains at night. Even the smog that comes down on us when the Santa Ana winds blow in Los Angeles is a sign that people up there still have an interest in making things that smoke and smell bad.
After my run I go to school and dance through the halls with my students, my colleagues, an occasional dean caught in the rush between classes.
“Dear Thomas,” I repeat in my mind while my students bend their heads over examples of clumsy sentences and try to figure out where they went wrong. “Dear Thomas, I would like to explain to you about life, but I don’t know very much about it and probably never will. Find your own way without advice from Your Loving Father.”
My second run of the day. The flap-flap of my bare feet on the damp sand awakens some of the near-dead dozing on the slight slope to the sea, and they raise their heads to see a youngish man trotting steadily south along the edge of the tide, where the water has retreated, leaving a fringe of sea-sputum, foam, and broken shells.
That September after a flawed summer spent thinking about Georgia Schade, I went back to Perrysburg Country Day School, where my father’s position on the faculty entitled me to a place among the sons of Jeep executives, real-estate men, and tool-and-die tycoons. In the long fragrant fall afternoons I worked out with the junior high team and listened to my dad, on the next field, putting the older boys through their paces. He didn’t have much to work with; there were twenty-six boys in the senior high, of whom two were cripples and one a resolute intellectual, leaving my old man with twenty-three bodies. But he faced each new season with confidence; he was a believer in strategies, and devised fantastic formations and trick plays to make up for the lack of manpower. During football season his table talk was full of two-eight-one defenses and unbalanced lines. His tackles were often eligible and his guards dreamed of taking the snap from center and running to glory while the quarterback zigzagged in the backfield to lull the defense.
In October Perrysburg won its second football game in three years and my father blew himself up with his two-burner gas range, possibly on purpose. It happened early in the morning. I rode my blue bicycle to school; before I could get it parked I noticed my friends gathering around to stare at me with serious, peculiar faces. The assistant principal, Mr. Rodeheaver, cut through the circle and put his arm around my shoulder. I helped him load the bike into the trunk of his car, where the paint left long blue streaks on the carpeting, and he drove me home. Old Mrs. Schade was hugging my mother; Mr. Schade, Georgia, and Joseph stood in the dark hall wearing expressions of fascinated gloom, like spectators at a car accident.
Later that afternoon, having learned from my mother how he died, I took a bus to where my dad had lived. The city hadn’t had time to clean up very much; his room fronted the street and the power of the explosion had knocked the wall straight outward. Bricks lay in a heap across the sidewalk, full of shiny fragments of window glass; long strips of wallpaper blew from the opening on the second floor like party decorations; a piece of brown linoleum hung down over the drugstore’s miraculously undamaged plate-glass window like a dirty dead tongue.
A pretty girl in a red swimsuit comes out of the waves and stops, up to her knees in the rolling water, to stare at me. I smile back and without my willing it at all my stride lengthens, my shoulders square themselves, and something in my head goes to work calculating chances I don’t want to take.
Georgia, my wife, writes that Thomas is doing as well as can be expected from a kid with no father. She signed up a University of Washington fraternity man to be his Big Brother, and she tells me in every letter where they went camping together, how this rich man’s kid from Delta Kappa Upsilon took my son to the zoo, to the circus, to the rodeo, where a fallen rider was nearly kicked to death by a bull. How did the fraternity man cope with that? I wonder. How did he explain to a twelve-year-old that we all have to bleed?
She is only a year younger than I am, but I think sometimes she has not learned a damn thing since that June afternoon in the Schades’ basement when she decided, with her father’s word for it, that she was a woman. I have news for her this evening from California: she wasn’t a woman then and she isn’t now, though we had our child without going to India and her breasts got to be big and she let me hold them when we made love.
A year after my father died my mother and I moved to New York and I lost track of Georgia. We met again by chance at a miserably dull party in Manhattan; we went for a walk, thought we fell in love, got married in good faith, and learned to dislike each other.
I jog down the long stretch of sand, thinking what lucky fools marathon runners are. They run for joy. I run to ease myself out of life and some days I do my three miles before school, again after dinner, and if I can’t sleep I get out of bed to come here and run a third time, under the yellow moon. De la Terre a la Lune: my mother finished the typing that winter by way of something to do and because she wasn’t certain that the insurance company would call my dad’s death an accident and pay off his policy. I proofread for her and I remember Jules Verne’s characters sailing in their aluminum bullet around this moon, high on pure oxygen, anticipating the twentieth century.
I get to running faster and faster until I’m charging down the silent beach, arms pumping, legs flailing. I’m going as fast as a bicycle, faster. A cloud crosses the sun and shadows the water and I feel myself beginning to cry, though I’m not particularly sad. The sea under the cloud is a peculiar lucid blue, deeper than sky, somewhere this side of electric.