SIX

I see a framed photo on the wall: two rows of high school boys in mud-soaked football jerseys and pants. Dean Langley, his hair parted down the middle in two slick wings, is the only one in a clean jersey.

His room is immaculate. A dictionary is lined up with the edge of a sturdy desk. A college banner and a picture of a grim white-bearded Andrew Carnegie cover the worst cracks in the walls. The striped bedspread and curtains match; he has ordered them from the Sears Roebuck catalogue with money from an after-school job at the livery stable.

Sitting at his desk in creased slacks, white shirt, sleeveless sweater, he hands me a book. It’s my novel by Emile Zola about a French courtesan. “If the preacher had seen you with this,” he says, “I would’ve been in dutch.” Dean teaches Sunday school at the church which may sponsor him for a college scholarship. He confiscated the book from me when he caught me reading it in his class.

“What did you think of it?” I ask.

I’ve got him. He can’t hide his grin—a look I’ve never seen on his face before. “I liked the descriptions of those fancy balls,” he says, his voice hushed.

We hear voices from outside the window. The town’s one street is rutted with wagon tracks; the weather-stained storefronts lean over the sidewalk as if about to collapse into kindling under the weight of the rain clouds overhead. Dean’s father, in a rumpled double-breasted suit, stands in the street at an angle, as if leaning on air. It’s a familiar pose—he’s often seen stopping women to chat. Everyone feels sorry for his wife. Now he’s talking to the red-haired woman I saw before in his old store. She twirls a parasol as she laughs.

Dean glowers at him. If he were a porcupine, he’d have shot a hundred quills into that rumpled suit of his father’s, drawing blood.

As the woman walks off down the sidewalk, Mr. Langley bows and tips his hat. The men spectators grin, the women turn their faces away. Dean watches his father pick up his wicker sample case. We hear him walk into the house, his footsteps stumbling along the hall toward Dean’s room. I can smell his cigar smoke.

“You in there, boy? I could use a hand.”

With a whip-like movement of his arm, Dean slams the door. The crash reverberates through the house. Dictionary pages flutter with the sound of a crowd whispering. The bedspread hysterically wraps itself around a bedpost. The picture of the bearded industrialist slides down the wall and explodes into laughter on the floor.

I stare at Dean. He is a graying sixty-year-old man. Purple-faced with rage, he raises his arms and presses his palms against the wall as if holding back a swelling dike.

Gradually the room settles. The spread sighs back onto the bed. Andrew Carnegie rises up the wall and resumes his grim expression. The curtains hang stiffly on either side of the window.

Dean is a teen-aged boy again. His forehead is flushed but his face is determinedly composed and absolutely blank.

“Keep the book under your jacket,” he says, showing me out.

I walk slowly along the sepia-tinted street, looking back. The crash of the door echoes in my chest.

“When I was your age,” my mother told me, “I dreamed of having a room as big as this.”

“It’s very nice,” I said. She’d had the walls painted Easter chick yellow; the new curtains had a cheerful Scotch plaid design. On shelves at the far end were scale model cars, Tinkertoys and Lincoln logs, an elaborate electric train set still in its box. Somehow, though, I couldn’t appreciate them as much as I should have. Something was the matter with me; I didn’t really belong in this nice room—this house, this town, this childhood.

During the day the attic was quiet, but at night, when I read inside the bell-jar of light from my bedside lamp, I had to try hard not to hear the shouting downstairs. Then I felt as if I were living inside a little dome vibrating on top of a pressure cooker. My father’s voice was a low rumble, my mother’s a shrill whine. My father always seemed on the verge of striding across the landing to smack my mother in the mouth; my mother often sounded as if he’d already done it. I lay on my back with my sheet clamped between my teeth, whispering, “Shut up! Shut up!”

“I think you’re afraid of yourself—” That was my mother’s voice. I sat up. “—of what you might do to Jerrett if you let him get close—”

“Marian, if that psychiatric mumbo jumbo helps you, fine. But don’t try to inflict it on me—”

“Can’t you forgive yourself for Robert? It was years ago. I’ve forgiven you, why can’t you—”

“Thanks. But sometimes your mercy can be worse than—”

Needing to go to the bathroom, I stomped down the stairs and rushed along the landing with my hands over my ears. As I went by, my mother hid her glass in the folds of her bathrobe. She’d started drinking again, as Miss Gilly had said she would, but now, having “things under control,” she waited until five o’clock to mix her first cocktail. She smiled at me as I returned to the attic. Even with makeup, her nose was covered with faint red veins, and dark pillows of skin puffed out beneath her eyes.

Maybe they were bruises, I thought, as I lay in bed later. The voices finally ceased; silence hovered around me like a giant black moth’s wings about to swing shut. I could picture my father standing over my mother, his fists clenched; she lay on the floor with blood dribbling from her mouth. My own fists clenched beneath the sheet.

I stopped going downstairs at night, preferring to pee into my waste basket and empty it secretly in the mornings.

Miss Gilly gave me her old wooden radio to drown out the voices. I found a country music station from West Virginia with a disk jockey named Wayne the Night Owl who kept me company plunking his guitar and telling stories about his hoboing days. He played songs on his harmonica that ended in lonesome train-whistle wails. I supplied the boogie woogie beat of the night train’s wheels rolling along the track; the locomotive’s light shone through my window and tinted the darkness blue around my bed.

Sometimes I dreamed of trains. But sometimes I dreamed I was a bombardier—not the man who went down with my father in his burning plane, but a boy drifting in the basket of an untethered balloon dropping bombs all over town.

Ridge Haven was at the end of a suburban commuter line—“The Last Station Before Heaven,” as the town newspaper proclaimed on its masthead. It was a beautifully preserved New England village, with narrow country roads, fields, ponds, and deep fragrant woods. Old stone farmhouses, redecorated by junior executives, stood in apple orchards and fields.

Protected from view by high hedges were the estates of corporation presidents: sprawling Victorian mansions with rolling lawns, out-buildings, four-car garages which had once been stables. Senior executives like my father lived in places nearly as big, white colonial-style houses surrounded by lawns and woods.

A few miles from our property the country club’s golf course began, a winding carpet of green with soft beige sand traps scooped out of grassy knolls. The clubhouse, an old gabled mansion, was surrounded by terraces and gaily striped awnings. When we ate lunch there on weekends, I had to dress up in my slacks, blazer, and tight necktie. Every Saturday and Sunday during the summer, I had a tennis lesson with the pro. Afterwards, I watched my father finish matches with his friends, and then the two of us would play. He shouted at me across the net:

“Pay attention! Keep your eye on the ball!” The harder I tried to concentrate, the more awkward my strokes were. The net gave twinges of hopelessness as my ball hit it and dropped back onto my side of the court with little apologetic bounces. My father seemed as frustrated about this as I was.

He signed me up on the Junior Tennis Ladder, a chart posted outside the pro shop. Names were printed in black ink on stiff strips of paper that could be moved from slot to slot up and down a long column. I was supposed to challenge boys two or three rungs above me on the ladder. If I beat someone, I would move up to his rung and he would drop to mine. But if I didn’t challenge anyone, other boys who were winning matches climbed up the ladder over me, and I dropped each time to make room for them.

“The tennis ladder’s like life,” my father told me. “There’s no standing still. If you mope around in one place with your head in the clouds—like your brother—other people get ahead of you, and you get pushed backwards.” I nodded, my tennis racquet dangling from my hand. The diabolical logic of the system lodged in my head like a migraine. Still, I rarely challenged anyone. All summer long I tumbled in slow motion down the ladder of life.

Boom!—one of my bombs obliterated the club’s pro shop, turning racquets to kindling. Boom!—tennis players in white shorts exploded all over the brushed clay courts, their limbs littering the smoking craters. Ka-Boom!—fire storms swept across the terraces; ladies in straw hats sipping ice tea burst into flames, bald men clutching golf clubs flew through the ruptured awnings. KA-BOOM! The club was parched earth, nothing standing but the caddy shack where the kids from PS 8 staggered out to wave up at me and cheer as my balloon drifted away overhead.

The boys on the tennis ladder went to the Country Day School. I was on its waiting list, but I had it on good authority that the place was full of snobs and sissies, and was able to resist my parents’ efforts to take me out of the public school.

The kids who went to PS 8 all lived in what my parents called “the village,” where the houses were closer together and the yards smaller than in the outlying areas. Many of the people were first-and second-generation immigrant families, mostly Italians. Some fathers worked in factories in Bridgeport, some were members of the town police and fire departments, some ran small grocery stores. Mothers took in laundry to help out. In front yards, grandfathers in felt hats constructed rock gardens reminiscent of the mountains of Sicily. Here and there were elegant older houses where New England spinsters rocked in antique drawing rooms behind lace curtains. Somewhere a dozen or so black families lived—the men were mail carriers, the women caterers and maids—but I never knew where their houses were. I thought they must have had a special, secret place of their own somewhere.

The commercial district looked as uncommercial as possible. No vulgar storefront displays were permitted. The zoning board—advised by the Historical Society and controlled by the Protestant families who owned most of the land—had determined the maximum size allowable for signs. Colonial white clapboard shops lined either side of the main street. Even the gas station looked as if it had been erected before the American Revolution. Many shops resembled private residences, with tiny green lawns and flagstone walks. Entering one, you felt you were in the tidy home of some elderly lady who happened to have some cakes or cashmere sweaters she might sell you if you asked her nicely.

There were no bars and only one diner, which had individual tables, not booths, and was called a tea room. Matrons ate long lunches there: sliced chicken sandwiches on white bread, no crusts. High school students could buy milk shakes and hamburgers but were not allowed to smoke or sit more than four to a table. There was of course no jukebox.

Only one store appealed to kids—the Corner News Shop. On its main floor was a large selection of candy bars, comic books, and magazines which included, in the very back of the bottom row, True Detective and Police Story, with dagger-wielding women in black slips on the covers. Upstairs were the kinds of toys—squirt guns, balsa gliders—that kids could buy with their allowances, not the toys my parents got me for Christmas, which came from FAO Schwartz in New York.

I got to explore the store on Sundays after church while my father picked up the paper and chatted with other men in tweed topcoats and Tyrolean hats. Because it had the thickest business section, he usually bought the New York Times, though it made him rant about its Truman-Democrat bias. He hated Truman almost as much as he had Roosevelt, who had handed over the country to the labor unions. I suspected that he also preferred the Times, because it had no color comics section. The few times my mother got him to buy the Herald Tribune, which she said had a better gardening section, he threw out the funnies. That comics rotted kids’ minds (I assumed no grownups ever read them) was one of the few things my parents agreed on. I didn’t protest; Miss Gilly got her friends to save the Sunday funnies and brought them to me after her days off.

I could tell that the Tribune was a Republican paper from all the pictures of Thomas Dewey it ran. In a classroom secret ballot, I voted for Dewey along with everyone else—except one person. All the kids gazed around at each other wondering who could have voted for Truman. None of us had suspected that there were any Democrats in our town, much less lurking somewhere right here in our school.

At last the teacher herself, a woman named Miss McQuater, confessed. A clamor went up, but she didn’t look the least bit ashamed. Folding her arms across her chest, she said she thought that Truman would be the best president for the country’s working people, of which she was one, she was proud to say. In the confused silence that followed, she called on me to say why I had voted for Dewey. I gave it some thought. Because he had color comics in his Sunday paper, I said. Everyone laughed, and Miss McQuater smiled, too. “I suppose that’s as good a reason as any for voting Republican,” she said. I was grateful to her for backing me up.

Miss McQuater was amazingly young for a teacher: perhaps thirty-five. She had curly black hair and big dark eyes. She wore purple blouses, plaid skirts, wide belts made of colored leather. Her wrist clinked with a bracelet of gold charms which she actually let us touch.

Everyone, girls included, fell in love with her. She could often be talked into telling us funny stories about her mischievous nieces and nephews, who were our age. It astounded us that a teacher could have a personal life. We more or less assumed that when we left school after the last bell, the teachers curled up under their desks and waited for us to arrive again the next morning.

Miss McQuater was occasionally grouchy, but she gave us warning when she came in, explaining that she’d been up all the night before on a train from Dover, Delaware—a city which began to take on an aura of mystery for us. When her face burst into a smile, we felt that we’d done something good to deserve it. She even thanked us for cheering her up.

She read us stories about knights and ladies, tales of true love which the girls liked more than the boys. When the boys in the back rows—the older ones who were repeating the grade—began whispering and hitting each other, she didn’t silence them with icy looks, the way the other teachers did. She walked up the center aisle, her bracelet clinking, to argue with the “tough guys,” as she called them. She pursed her lips hard and brushed the curls off her forehead, but eventually we heard a hoarse, musical laugh bubble up out of her. It was obvious that the boys were making noise just so that she’d go to the back of the class and talk to them. No other teachers would do that.

Then one day, she didn’t come to school. We had an elderly substitute who organized us into study groups and quizzed us on state capitals. I signed a get-well hurry-back card to Miss McQuater, and waited for word of how she was. No word came. Approaching the classroom every morning, we listened for her in the halls; they seemed bleak without her. After several weeks, though, we got used to the substitute and even treated her with a grim civility.

Suddenly Miss McQuater was back. Just before the first bell rang, she jingled into class in a loose skirt and purple blouse and shiny high heels. Wild cheers and applause greeted her.

This made her break out crying. Everyone stared. Leaning back against the teacher’s desk, she wiped her face with a lacy handkerchief. Her eyelashes looked like dark wounded butterflies; her cheeks went a spectacular shade of pink. She couldn’t speak for long moments, but she beamed a smile up and down the rows that took our breath away.

Finally she told us how much she’d missed us. We all tried to talk to her at once. Everyone assumed she’d been sick—that was the only reason teachers ever missed school. One of the boys in the back row called out, “What was wrong with you?”

Slowly she raised her face. Her damp eyes shone. “Nothing,” she said. “I’m pregnant.”

Recovering from shock, one of the girls offered congratulations. She smiled and swallowed hard. “I’m very happy about it,” she said. Then her face fell; lines appeared in her forehead that we hadn’t seen before. “But the school board’s not happy. They wouldn’t even give me permission to come say good-bye to you.”

Good-bye? A hush fell over the class.

“They don’t think I’m fit to teach you anymore.”

“Why not?” I asked, and several others joined in.

“Because the people who run your town hate people like me—” She pressed her knuckles against her lips. “You see, I don’t have a husband. The man I loved decided he didn’t want to marry me. So I’m just going to go ahead and have my baby anyway.” She narrowed her eyes at the flag hanging on its pole in the back corner of the room. “Do you think this makes me a bad teacher?”

I’d never heard of an unmarried woman having a child before. I think I’d vaguely assumed that it was against the law. One girl said that she had a cousin who’d had a baby without a husband, and then another girl said that she did, too. We all agreed that this didn’t make anyone an unfit teacher.

Miss McQuater thanked us over and over, and hugged as many kids as she could get her arms around. My face was pressed into her soft blouse; I inhaled a dizzy mixture of strong perfume and sweat. And then she was gone.

The principal, a scowling bald man in a suit, stood in the doorway to keep kids from running after her down the hallway. When he left, the class was pandemonium. Every girl was crying, even two girls who could fight as well as any boy. One kid wrote, “Fuck the Prinsaple” on the blackboard.

At dinner, I told my parents about what had happened, wondering if they would be outraged, too. They were, but not in the way I’d hoped. My mother thought it was dreadful that the woman had been allowed to upset a classroom full of children with a story like that. My father was furious—this was what public education was coming to! I kept asking them why Miss McQuater’s being pregnant meant she couldn’t be a good teacher, but the matter was much too complicated to discuss.

I was kept home the next day while my mother tried to enroll me in the Country Day School, but there wasn’t an opening. For the time being, I went back to PS 8.

The new teacher was a gray-haired woman who wore bulky cardigans and shoes that squeegeed as she walked briskly up and down the aisles. The kids in the back row never disturbed the class by fooling around; her sharp glances kept them in a state of sullen defeat. I got used to stuffing my brain full of facts.

But every now and then as I sat at my desk I would hear the clink of what sounded like a charm bracelet rising from the sidewalk beneath the window, and I would look out, hoping to catch a glimpse of a purple blouse and bouncy black curls—Miss McQuater on her way back to us from Dover, Delaware, with a baby in her arms.

The school resembled a brick armory surrounded by a fenced dirt playground. All morning it gave off a murmur of high voices and an aroma of mashed potatoes. At 3:20, the last deafening bell of the day released swarms of kids onto the playground.

I moved out the door with cautious strides, hoping I could get to the bus without being teased about the way I talked: I had a slight British accent concealed behind an acquired West Virginia drawl. A boy named Vince Marino never teased me, for some reason. He had a way of flicking his black hair off his forehead that I used to practice in the mirror at home, though my own blond hair was short and bristly. Never allowed onto the bus without creased slacks and an ironed shirt, I envied Vince who, like the other village boys, showed up at school in jeans and T-shirt and scuffed sneakers. I admired the freedom with which he careened around the school drumming on fire extinguishers, yelling to his friends in the halls, punching bigger kids in the cafeteria food line. He’d always been one of Miss McQuater’s favorites.

When Vince asked me one day if I wanted to come over to his house after school, I immediately said yes, though I hadn’t the faintest idea how I’d get home afterwards. I’d never done anything so impulsive.

I phoned home from Vince’s house. Miss Gilly had almost called the police when I hadn’t gotten off the school bus. Finally she asked me for Vince’s address, and said somebody would come fetch me later.

“Your mom don’t want you here, huh?” Vince asked.

“It wasn’t my mother,” I said, then wished I hadn’t. I didn’t want him to know I had a nanny. “It was my aunt.” I was about to make up a story about an aunt who was visiting from Nebraska, but Vince wasn’t surprised to hear that I had an aunt at home. One lived with his family, along with her daughter, Vince’s cousin, a pretty dark-haired girl named Tina who played the piano at assemblies with me and was trying to get a scholarship to the Country Day School to study music. Also in the house were Vince’s mother and stepfather, a grandmother, and four little sisters. They all lived in small rooms on the second floor. I loved the way the house smelled of spaghetti sauce that bubbled in a huge pot on the stove. Kids ran through the kitchen continually; adults yelled at them and the kids yelled back. This made me nervous until I noticed that nobody ever seemed mad at anyone.

Vince’s stepfather, a contractor, sat on the living room couch in green work pants and a T-shirt; his feet in white socks rested on a coffee table. He wiggled his toes at the little girls as they ran past, making them giggle. In my house, nobody was allowed to put their feet up on a table or take their shoes off in the living room. I liked it here.

I liked Vince’s mother, too, a plump young woman who gave off a smell of laundry soap. She wore no makeup at all; her face was shiny with sweat as she came out of the room behind the kitchen. For some reason she seemed to know who I was when Vince said my name.

“Why didn’t you tell me you were going to have a guest after school, Vincent?” she scolded as we sat down at the kitchen table. “I could have straightened things up a little.”

Vince flicked the hair off his forehead. “He’s not a guest, Mom. He’s just a friend of mine.”

I grinned and tugged down the bill of my baseball cap.

She poured us glasses of chocolate milk, then sat down with us. The cookies she gave us tasted of licorice, though they weren’t black. “Italian cookies,” Vince said. “My grandmother makes them.”

“They’re great,” I said, taking another.

The grandmother was standing by the stove watching us, a tiny old lady with a caved-in smile. Vince got up and helped her sit down in a chair next to me.

“How do you do?” I said, as I had to the other adults.

She stared at me and gave off a cackley laugh.

“She’s a little feeble.” Vince tapped the side of his head.

“Vincent!” His mother scowled at him.

The grandmother reached out toward me. I thought she wanted to shake hands. She put her bony hand in mine and hung on to my fingers.

“Mama—” Vince’s mother started toward her.

The old woman said something in Italian, and gripped me tighter.

“That’s just one of her tricks.” Vince grinned. “She likes you.”

“It’s embarrassing your friend,” his mother said.

“I don’t mind,” I said. “I like it.”

This seemed to be the right thing to say. Vince’s mother stopped looking worried, and refilled my glass. The old lady’s hand didn’t feel so bony anymore, just small and warm. This was one of the strangest things I’d ever done—sit at a kitchen table holding an old woman’s hand. After a while, though, nobody seemed to take any notice, so I relaxed. I was even disappointed when the grandmother shyly slipped her hand away to reach out for a cookie.

As Vince left the house, his mother wrapped her arm around his neck, her hair brushing his face as she kissed his cheek. This, too, seemed remarkable. Watching, I nearly stumbled down the front steps.

Vince borrowed a bicycle for me from a neighbor and we took off for the town park. I liked the old bandstand partially covered with vines, the gnarled trees, and the lake that gave off a glow of bug-buzzing heat. A couple lay near the shore with their arms around each other. High school girls in swinging pleated skirts walked beside a field, pink bubblegum bubbles expanding in front of their faces. An old man raked leaves into a fire; the smoke plumed up, turning the air hazy, smelling good.

Some of the kids from PS 8 were playing touch football by the lake. They were boys the teachers never spoke to in class except to tell them to keep quiet and stop acting like dummies. But here they seemed older and more important. Vince ran over to join them, beckoning me to follow. I knew a lot about baseball, but I wasn’t sure about the rules of football. The boys eyed me warily.

Vince and I were put on different teams. The captain of my team, a stocky kid called Angelo who wore his cap backwards, told me to block for a pass. When the ball was hiked, I moved in front of a kid who was running toward Angelo. He threw me to the ground as he rushed past.

“Hey—” I yelled, but he just rushed forward to slap Angelo. I stood up, brushing my slacks off, and shuffled into the huddle again.

“He ain’t going to stop if you just stand there smiling at him,” Angelo said to me.

“I’m sorry. I’ll kill him this time,” I said.

“Just take him out of the play, okay?” Angelo ran into position. The boys standing on the line with me made growling sounds.

I understood something now: the only way to be good at this game was to care a lot about it. My father had told me this about tennis, but I’d never been able to work up much interest in the importance of winning. Now, though, I frowned fiercely as I got down into position. As soon as the ball was hiked, I lunged forward and tackled the kid trying to rush past me. To my joy and amazement, he tumbled to the ground.

“Will you fuckin let go!” he said, squirming loose.

I stood up, grinning. I didn’t brush myself off, since I noticed nobody else did.

“What are you—from Mars?” The kid glared at me.

“You’re just mad because I blocked you,” I said.

A crowd gathered. “Leave him alone,” Vince said, and took me aside. He explained that I couldn’t tackle anyone in this game, and showed me how to block with my arms folded across my chest. I walked into the huddle with my arms already crossed tightly. Several kids were arguing about which planet was farthest from the earth—Mars, Pluto or Uranus. On the next few plays, the kids called me “Uranus,” or sometimes just “Anus,” for short.

Then Vince kicked the ball into the lake. We stared at it floating far out in the greenish algae like a peanut set in lime jello.

“Nice kick, dummy,” Angelo said to Vince.

I knew what I had to do for Vince. Pulling off my loafers, I dove in. Weeds clung to my ankles like slimy rags, but I was a good swimmer—I’d had lessons at the country club. I pushed the ball ahead of me to the shore. I couldn’t tell if the kids were grateful or not as I climbed out, dripping and trailing weeds. They had looks on their faces as if they were trying to keep from coughing. I handed the ball to Vince.

“Good going,” he mumbled, and rubbed it on the grass.

“I’ll just get dry,” I told him. “You go ahead and play.”

The boys looked at one another and then back at me. “Don’t catch cold,” Angelo said, and they all ran off.

After I’d wrung out my sleeves and pants cuffs as best I could, I decided to ride the bicycle around for a while. It was a battered, comfortable old bike; its fat tires cushioned the ride over bumps. I pedaled beside the lake, caught up in the sensation of coasting along without destination or purpose. The shadows of kids’ sailboats rippled on the water. The smell of burning leaves drifted past me.

Under a big tree, I saw a man rolling a blue beach ball across a patch of luminous green grass toward a little boy, who flailed at it with his hands; the father clapped and retrieved the ball each time. The peaceful aimless rhythm to their movements fascinated me. Watching the two of them made me feel lonely, but also lucky, in a way, for noticing things that other people didn’t appear to think were remarkable. The park seemed more open, more interesting than any place I’d ever been.

I heard a train whistle from beyond a clump of trees, a long faint cry that seemed to echo the way I was feeling. As I looked in its direction, I was sure I could sense a warm blue haze filtering through the branches and spreading around me. The sound faded. I stopped my bike and listened hard. But now the air was clear again, and I had the feeling that the sound wasn’t one you could listen for. You had to be in the right coasting mood and just let it come to you, by surprise, of its own accord. I hoped I’d hear it again one day.

The game was breaking up as I arrived at the football field. I rode beside Vince and waved good-bye to his friends at the park gate. His home was across the street from the park, one of a row of frame houses with wide front porches, walks cluttered with toys, old trees spreading branches over the sloping roofs. But something about the place was different.

I felt its presence in the pit of my stomach before I actually spotted it—my father’s big gray Dodge parked at the curb.

Vince did a kind of baseball slide off his bike, letting it fall sideways as he jumped off. I wanted to try the maneuver, too, but feeling the car’s headlights watching me, I lost my nerve.

The scene in the living room had changed. Vince’s father was no longer resting his feet on the coffee table. He sat in an armchair with his shoes on, his big hands resting on his knees. Two little girls stood stiffly on either side of their mother in the doorway. I could see the grandmother sitting at the kitchen table, glaring past them.

My father had the whole couch to himself. His dark suit and gray silk tie made the slipcover’s flower pattern look shabby. An empty wine glass rested on the low table in front of him. And on the rug lay a rectangular wicker laundry basket full of ironed white shirts and towels.

“Hello, Jerrett.” He gave me a long look, his frown moving down my shirt and pants to my feet. Then he stood up quickly and smiled at Vince’s mother. “This has worked out very nicely—I can collect my son and the laundry at the same time.”

I stared at the basket on the floor. “Laundry?”

He reached into his inside jacket pocket and pulled out a thin black wallet. Its leather was as shiny as his shoes. The little girls craned their necks to look at it. My father started to hand Vince’s mother a bill, but she gestured toward her husband. He took the money and stuffed it into his pocket.

My mind was working slowly. Suddenly I realized: Vince’s mother was what my parents always called “the laundress.” I pressed myself back against the door frame.

“I appreciate your hospitality,” my father said to the stepfather, and then turned to Vince’s mother. “That was excellent wine, madam.”

Vince’s mother nodded. I tugged down the bill of my cap, aware of my reflection in the mirror beside the door—a skinny kid with smudged face and shirt, rumpled soggy slacks, and muddy loafers. I caught a whiff of myself: pond scum.

“Have you thanked Mrs. Marino?” My father smiled at me. The smile said, “Hurry up!” Everyone in the room saw it.

“Thank you,” I said. “I had a very good time.”

Mrs. Marino’s expression was new; it reminded me of the way the boys had watched me on their football field. “Vincent!” She shouted suddenly, though he was right next to her. “What’re you standing there for? Put that laundry in Mr. Langley’s car!”

“Yeah, yeah.” Vince grunted as he leaned over the basket. It was almost too long for him to pick up, but he got his arms around it somehow. I wanted to help him carry it, but he pushed ahead of me and avoided looking at me all the way to my father’s car. After he slid the basket onto the back seat, he ran his finger along the hood.

“Some paint job. This car new?”

“I guess so.”

“You got a radio in it?”

I shook my head.

Vince pointed to a dented sedan in the driveway. “We got a radio in ours,” he said. Then he ran back inside the house, leaving me on the sidewalk to wait for my father.

Riding home through the town, I imagined myself drifting high above the street in my balloon. Its basket jerked as I released bombs—KA-BOOM!—and far below, smoke clouds billowed up with a delicious black stench, obliterating my father’s new car.

The smoky air around me was only exhaust fumes, though: a line of commuters’ cars waited at a stop light. The street filled with traffic sounds. They were louder than usual—horns honked impatiently, the noise battering the windows. My father hadn’t moved forward when the light had turned green. He was too busy yelling at me.

“Look at yourself!” He knocked the rear-view mirror sideways so that I had to see my hair spiking out from beneath my cap. “How could you go to someone’s house like that? You represent the family! You can’t go around looking like the son of—of some tramp!”

I squeezed against the door. The cars behind us honked and honked.

“ANSWER ME!” He began to pound on the steering wheel with both fists. His face went dark red, his lips bloodless. I’d never seen his eyes like this: the pupils seemed to quiver at me.

Suddenly I stopped cringing. “I was playing football!” I screamed. I felt the seat reverberate beneath me the way the ground had as I’d tackled the boy on the field and lay there, bruised and proud. I’d never talked back to my father before. My voice just shot out of me. “Everybody got dirty!”

His foot squashed the accelerator. The car shot through a red light and pulled over, screeching to a halt with two wheels up on the curb. He sat forward, his shock of silver hair hanging over his eyes. I loosened my grip on the armrest. I could see that he was making sense of what I’d said. His mouth opened and closed several times before he spoke.

“Did you score a touchdown?” he asked in a strange hoarse voice.

“No.”

“Never mind.”

I cocked my head. “What?”

He sat back in his seat. “I wasn’t very good at football, either.” He spoke so softly I had to lean sideways to listen. “But I knocked myself out to make it into the team photo. I needed it to send with my scholarship application. My father had no money to send me to college.”

“Why not?” I asked.

He shook his head. “The old man rode the trains from town to town selling kitchen gadgets nobody wanted and sleeping in cheap boarding houses. He’d come staggering back home through town, everybody smelling the whiskey on his breath, seeing the gravy stains on his necktie. He stank up our house with his cigar smoke …”

“I remember when he came to visit,” I said. “He smoked outside.”

“I wouldn’t let him smoke cigars in my house. One day I came home and he was standing out in the rain in his old suit, puffing away.” My father shut his eyes, going silent for a moment. “Christ, I never meant for him to stand out in the rain, though!”

“It was summer, wasn’t it? I mean, he wasn’t cold or anything.”

My father nodded, opening his eyes. “That’s true.”

“He made flutes for me and Robert.”

“I remember those flutes. I used to have a drawer full of them.” My father sighed. “He could be good with small children sometimes. Children and women and stray dogs.” He started the car’s engine.

Suddenly it backfired, a booming sound that echoed in the quiet street and filled the clear air with fumes. He glanced sideways, and I caught the flicker of a smile on his face before he accelerated off the curb.

That night, lying in bed with the radio on, I again imagined the balloon drifting above the town. But what I breathed now, as I descended for a closer look, was a smell more startling than the odor of bomb smoke or a backfiring car’s exhaust fumes. It was the sweet scent of towels and ironed white shirts, of soap-flakes and starch—the smell of that wicker laundry basket in the car’s back seat. I could imagine lying in the basket swaddled in fresh soft towels up to my chin—this was the exact same basket in which I’d been driven home from the hospital after I was born.

I was furious with my father because I thought that he’d spoiled my friendship with Vince. And he had, in a way. But I couldn’t picture Vince’s face as clearly now as I could that of my father, sitting beside me, with his shock of silver hair fallen over his clenched forehead, and the brief smile on his face as he drove off into traffic.

I see the car turning up the driveway. My father was not there on the day when I first arrived at the house in the laundry basket, but today we are linked together by it, literally: the basket is too long for him to carry inside by himself.

“Can you give me a hand with this?”

“Okay.”

I take hold of one end, and he the other, and, with me shuffling backwards across the garage floor and him stooping awkwardly, we carry that basket—again and again and again—into the house where I live.