Picturing Will (12 page)

A Day Visit to Mrs. X

Getting up early, on an overcast day. Raincoats put in the car trunk. Finding Ozzie, the rubber turtle, when the trunk lid pops up. Ozzie, saved from oblivion! (Though the child has never been
informed of it, Ozzie has been named by the parent after Ozzie Nelson, whose short neck made him look like a turtle.) Then the road: pine trees, with all the green growth high up, which must mean they’re dying. An unfamiliar smell blowing through the windows. The ride is much too long—how can adults just look straight ahead and drive? The parent’s jack-o’-lantern eyes shine brightly in the rearview mirror. The child counts all the cars that are red. Probably the color of the car Santa would drive, if he drove a car instead of a sled. Checking the sky, just to see … but it’s the wrong month. Santa never makes mistakes. He only comes out one night a year
.

Arrival at Our Destination

The child is suddenly shy when he meets X, a tall, matronly woman in a gauzy dress. When it blows in the wind, it looks like the ruffling feathers of the lavender-blue bird he saw at the zoo. They let you walk right into the cage with the birds. There are strips of plastic instead of doors. Does X know about the birdcage at the zoo?

The child tells X about the zoo
.

X sits on her heels to make eye contact. She says she knew him when he was a little baby
.

People say this all the time
.

X says she has spent all day cleaning her house; it won’t be much like a zoo. (She says this to the child, but is actually speaking to the parent.)

X rises. The parent and X embrace
.

Time stretches endlessly. X brings out cookies. Raisin, not chocolate chip. The child has been told that raisins are monsters’ nose goop
.

Slightly embarrassed, the parent says that children are unpredictable. Who knows why they sometimes refuse to eat?

Returning Home from X’s

It might not be a road but the sea. They might be in a boat, not a car. That might not be the setting sun but the North Star by which
the parent navigates. Soon all the other cars will have to give sea room. Sea room means that other boats are supposed to come only so close. What if there was sidewalk room, and people were supposed to stay a certain distance away? Or bedroom room, and your stuffed animals needed to be one foot away from you? The child decides that before he goes to bed, he will see that Dobbin, Chubby, and Sheila Skunk are all one foot from his side, instead of nestled close. That is, if the hill they are about to ascend doesn’t turn into a wave that crashes, sending their car far off its path. With relief, he sees that they have caught the wave perfectly. Then there is more black sea in front of them. Distances across water are farther than they seem
.

Think about the odd situations and difficulties the child faces every day. With not enough information, he has to go on intuition; because of an as-yet-uninhibited imagination, the ordinary devolves into the extraordinary with phantasmagoric swiftness. And, as if the world weren’t mysterious enough with its cacophony of voices and unanticipated interruptions, at day’s end the child is read a fanciful tale
.

There can hardly be a more serious test of a person’s sanity than surviving childhood. Romanticized by adults as a time of freedom, childhood is actually the time when the child is increasingly told to repress his desires. Singled out by poets as persons who possess great wisdom, children are in actuality often silenced
.

Adults keep their sanity by ruling out excessive speculation. They strive to see continuity when little is discernible. But these things do not come naturally to a child. The child is either totally involved or looking ahead to the next thing. The child always wonders, What if? The child can see continuity in a doll, a train, and a yo-yo. Though the child’s room can seem a chaotic battlefield, it may have a very distinct order. How distressing that at the parent’s whim villages are torn down, and all the animals in the zoo are piled in the toy box, with no regard to natural enemies
.

While children spontaneously imagine, parents compulsively seek order. The lines are drawn, though fatigue can erode the strongest parent’s resolve. Down on all fours, the parent may agree to help
reconstruct the village. To stop the child’s tears, the parent will willingly take the yellow hatbox down from the top shelf of the closet, in spite of previous explicit instructions to the child to stay away from it, and place the box at the far end of the rug, so it can shine again as a three-dimensional sun, illuminating a happy kingdom
.

PART II
FATHER

TEN

H
aveabud invited himself along on the trip to Florida. Mel was going to deliver Will to his father’s house, then drop off the rental car and fly back to New York. At the last minute, Haveabud decided to take Spencer on the trip. As far as his mother was concerned, if Spencer wanted to miss a few days of school, so be it. She would write a note explaining his absence, using heavyweight cream-colored paper embossed with her initials and a fountain pen she would guide faultlessly through the slanting loops of the Palmer method. According to the test they had given him at school, the boy was a genius. Why did a genius need to be in school?

Going to Florida had become a common enough routine for Will. He did not dislike his father—he hardly knew him—but the reason he was excited to make the trip was to see Wag, his blood brother, who now lived there. They had pricked their thumbs and held their fingers together for the blood exchange and had peed into the toilet so that their urine made one stream.

Wag knows that Will thinks New York City is a noisy marching-ground of people who pay no attention to children. Will knows Wag’s mother is seeing a psychiatrist because of something to do with having killed a deer in Virginia. Wag wants to go back to Virginia. Will would like to be wherever Wag lived.

In the motel parking lot, Haveabud rose up on tiptoes, curling his fingers in horror-movie fashion, baring his teeth. This was part of his stretching routine,
après
drive, as he said, when he climbed out from behind the wheel. As a passenger, he drummed the dashboard, leaned far to the left and tilted the rearview mirror toward him so he could examine his eye and remove a speck, changed the station on the radio constantly, rocked back and forth in the seat, poking the insides of his cheeks with his tongue. Nevertheless, in spite of having communicated to Mel that he was doing him a favor, Haveabud was having a good time. It was a pleasure to be riding in a comfortable rental car instead of being bounced through potholes in a New York cab whose suspension system must previously have hit landmines. Boys in the backseat talking about dinosaurs were preferable to cabbies raving about the mayor or about their daughters being taught communist propaganda in kindergarten. No bottle of Poppy was attached to the dashboard. No crucifix dangled from the rearview mirror. And best of all, their destination was a place filled with palms, not the World Trade Center. Florida, where the bourgeoisie sat in bamboo bars and sipped drinks swirled into a mush of coconut and rum (in a true heaven, such bars might exist to dispense mother’s milk). Florida, where the planes spewing their skywriting above the beach moved faster than Walt Disney’s pen. And all around you, turquoise—the color that was once the hope of the future.

“Did you know,” Haveabud said to Mel, “that the signature you see when you go to a Walt Disney movie is a fabrication? Disney never wrote that way. He’d try to sign an autograph, and faces would fall. But it had been perfectly conceived: a signature to establish a persona. A wonderful idea that came to haunt the real Walt Disney.”

“I only knew he was frozen,” Mel said.

Spencer came up beside Haveabud and asked who was frozen.

Mel said they should register; he had a headache and wanted to stretch out for a few minutes.

“Uncle Haverford,” Spencer said, “the Tyrannosaurus had a head that was over four feet long.”

Haveabud rubbed his fingers across his eyelids.

“And it had serrated teeth, and some of them were half a foot,” Spencer said, spreading his arms wide.

Haveabud looked at Mel, who was lifting suitcases out of the trunk. “I don’t know,” Haveabud said. “He wants a computer to keep track of all this information. Maybe I should buy him one.”

“Please buy me a Mac II,” Spencer said. “It could be my birthday present and my Christmas present.”

“But I’d still have to get you a confirmation present,” Haveabud said. His eyes felt gritty—strange, because the car was air-conditioned. But who knew what cars were composed of? There would probably be an announcement, years down the line, that the air grates had been made out of a substance more dangerous than asbestos.

In the hot parking lot, Will was fanning himself with one of Spencer’s books about the terrain of the prehistoric world. Mel turned to hand him his duffel bag but saw that Will looked tired and hefted it himself. He started toward the entrance to register, and Will ran to his side and walked with him.

“What’s a confirmation?” Spencer said.

Haveabud snorted. “I was kidding,” he said. “Your mother has no religious beliefs that I have been able to ascertain. The day religion goes public and is listed on the American Stock Exchange, you may have to dress up and go to church.”

“We don’t go to church,” Spencer said.

“My point entirely,” Haveabud said. “Don’t listen to me. I’ve told you before, I just need to talk.”

As Mel was registering, Will asked whether they could call Wag’s mother.

“She knows we’re on the way,” Mel said. “We’re not going to get to your father’s until late tomorrow. You’ve got to at least say hello before they make arrangements for you to see Wag.”

Will looked skeptical.

“Look,” Mel said, kneeling. “It’s going to work out. If Mary can’t drive Wag to see you, Corky said she was willing to drive you there on the weekend. One way or another, you’re going to see him.”

Will looked only slightly less skeptical.

“Look,” Mel said again, continuing to talk even though his head was pounding and the clerk had finally materialized, snapping chewing gum and brushing her bangs out of her eyes. “The thing you have to do is hang out with your father and Corky for just a little while. They’re anxious to see you. They know you miss your friend, but you don’t want to run in and start talking about that immediately, because they’re both looking forward to seeing you.”

Mel finished and smiled hopefully. As he registered, Mel gave silent thanks that his own parents had not divorced. There were certain things that seemed to be generational: In his grandparents’ generation, tyrants kept their wives. Anyone who lived through the Depression, as his parents had, was always wary about calling long distance. The telephone could have been a one-armed bandit; even gambling frightened them less than long distance.

“Would you like to call Wag when we get to the room to tell him about your trip?” Mel said.

Will lit up.

Mel got two sets of keys and put his hand on Will’s shoulder as they walked through the lobby.

Outside, Spencer was showing Haveabud a picture in one of his books, telling him that it was drawn to scale and illustrating his point by holding up his thumb, like a painter testing perspective. In front of Spencer’s thumb was a carwash with a shopping center behind it. Mel gave Haveabud’s key to Will, who ran to give it to him. Haveabud called to Mel, asking if he wanted to go across the highway for ice cream.

“Aspirin,” Mel said, shaking his head no. He was relieved that the room was so close. He opened his suitcase before he even looked around, shook three aspirin out of the bottle, pulled the glass out of its plastic wrapper in the bathroom, filled it with tepid water, and drank.

“Aspirin,” Mel said again, aloud, hoping his body would realize that help was on the way and that the pounding would subside. He lay on the bed, flat out, and waited for Will. When Will did not appear after a few minutes, he struggled up, thinking he might not know which room was theirs, even though he had left the door ajar. He saw Haveabud, arms spread hawklike over Spencer’s and Will’s shoulders, steering them toward the highway.

When Will opened the door to the room he would share with Mel, he saw both of Mel’s shoes kicked off and felt the air conditioner’s strong, cold blast. Realizing he should not awaken Mel, he went next door to Haveabud’s, knocked, and was let in. He told Haveabud Mel was sleeping. He said nothing to Haveabud about the phone call, because when he mentioned Wag earlier, Haveabud had asked if Wag was his girlfriend. Will had frowned, thinking he was being teased. Wag was his best friend, and he was not a girl. His mother had said that Wag’s mother might get tired of Florida and come back to Virginia, but he wasn’t sure if his mother was just guessing about that, or if Mrs. Vickers had said something to her. Wag would know—if he ever got to see Wag.