by BRIAN HALL
* * *
• • •
“I loved summer camp,” Mom said, and showed him the brochure. Up until this moment, Mark had assumed he would also love summer camp, but when he looked at the pictures he saw gangs of smirking, confident boys holding balls of various kinds, and he got a dreadful sinking suspicion that camp would be like two straight weeks of gym class.
He was eight. Mom sewed his name tag into all his clothes. She gave him a white cotton laundry bag with a drawstring. She bought him a forest-green sleeping bag with ducks and hunters printed on the flannel inside.
He went.
He had never before experienced the fear and misery of the next two weeks. The kids were bullies. The counselors were inattentive and unjust. One of the latter, refusing to listen to an elementary fact regarding the cause of a disagreement, grabbed the back of Mark’s neck and pinched it so hard that Mark was sore for two days afterward. One of the meanest boys could hawk up and send flying gobs of spit so voluminous and solid they looked like milkweed pods. Mark dreamed long afterward of those floating, saggy, soggy hammocks of mean-spirited spit.
* * *
• • •
When Mark was ten, his father bought a TV that fit on the kitchen table. Now they had two black-and-whites. Dad scoffed at color TVs, with their red and green ghosts. “They haven’t figured out the technology yet,” he said, chuckling.
The new TV had a second dial that you turned to reach strange new channels called UHF, which stood for Ultra High Frequency. It turned out the old familiar channels had always been VHF, which meant Very High Frequency, though no one had had to call them that before UHF showed up. The existence of this second dial bothered Mark. It hinted at future additional complications. Also, the two UHF channels had weirdly high numbers: 38 and 56. Why were they so far apart? You could click the dial to dozens of other numbers and you got only static. It seemed like a wasteful system.
But Mark reconciled himself to it because Channel 56 was showing reruns of Lost in Space. They cut off the credits and music at the end, which was extremely annoying.
When he had watched the show at age six, in the living room, Susan would stand behind him sometimes and sneer. “That just wouldn’t happen.” Or, “For chrissake, they don’t even know the difference between a galaxy and a solar system.” Or a final verdict, when the pretty melody came on during the warm family moments: “Vomitous.” But now, passing through the kitchen, age fifteen, she was no longer mean. She’d say, “That’s Zachary Smith, right? He’s an amazing asshole, right?” Or, “Have you noticed the guy playing the dad has this one little spot of gray hair on one side? I wonder why they don’t dye that?”
When she lingered like this, Mark felt proud that the show was holding her attention. He hoped she would sit down after a minute and get absorbed, and then they could watch it together and he could fill her in. If a stupid bit happened to come along—he had begun to notice these—he mentally winced, even though she didn’t pounce. But she always walked out after a little while, and it pained him to think that the show had failed her, and at the same time he wanted to protect the show from her indifference. He wished there were a version of the show with all the great parts and none of the stupid bits.
Now it was his mother who sneered. “That family deserves everything they get,” she’d say, passing through the room. “Smith betrays them over and over, and they still save him.” The boy in the show, Will Robinson, was Mark’s favorite character. He had dreamed many times that Will and he were friends. He’d even had a couple of dreams about Will that were kind of weird and intimate. Will was Zachary Smith’s friend, and always championed the idea of forgiving him after one of his betrayals. “That kid is as soft as a peeled grape,” his mother said. Regarding Zachary Smith, she always proposed the same solution: “I’d kick him in the balls and shove him out the airlock.” Mark didn’t mind these comments, the way he would if Susan or Dad said them. Mom hated all TV.
Around this time, he got a Frisbee for his birthday. He loved it because it looked sort of like the Jupiter 2. Mark couldn’t think of a more evocative name for a spaceship than “Jupiter 2.” Sometimes he said the words under his breath and was filled with an unnameable emotion, like a key fitting a keyhole in his mind. He liked drawing the Jupiter 2. If you drew it right, it was wonderfully plump and yet pointy at the rim, sleekly curved yet also paneled in an indescribably pleasing way.
On the show, the ship always crash-landed at an angle behind a rocky ridge, so you never saw the impact itself. Mark practiced in the side yard and got pretty good at throwing the Frisbee in a tilted arc. If he got the range right, the Frisbee flew high, then hesitated, slid off the curve and came angling down behind the bushes near the house. When that happened, it looked almost exactly like the crashing ship in the show. Mark would investigate the site: suspended in twigs (the Robinsons clambering down, John helping Maureen, Don helping Judy), or cushioned in moss, or resting half on a little stone that looked exactly like the huge boulder it was supposed be. He would evaluate the site for its potential as a makeshift settlement. Then he’d throw the Frisbee again.
* * *
• • •
His father was a physicist. When Mark asked him what that meant, he said, “A physicist is someone who figures out why some things stand up and other things fall down.”
Mark was bothered by what he suspected was condescension in that answer.
* * *
• • •
For Christmas Mark got a book called The World of Tomorrow. He recognized the cover—it was a photograph of the City of Tomorrow that he’d seen at the World’s Fair five years ago. Most of the book was about other things; he never read those parts. Instead, he looked at the photos of the City, reading and rereading the accompanying text. “Vacations are very popular in our World of Tomorrow, for every worker has almost five months off each year. Some people do not work, but prefer to get along on the government’s guaranteed annual income of more than $10,000 a year.”
Scrutinized at length and up close, the City was as clean and inviting as he remembered. Little trees and clipped grass and little people and futuristic bubble cars sitting in circular white parking garages. Rosy evening light. People promenading on plazas. Circular buildings, circular fountains. Mark kept gazing at the skyscrapers with their sides that curved out toward the bottom, their random pattern of lit and unlit windows. He gazed at the windows, those translucent squares of uniform yellow light, and became filled with that same unnameable emotion.
* * *
• • •
That summer camp two years ago, his mother told him, had just been the wrong one. This new camp was recommended by the parents of one of Mark’s friends at school. Doug had gone there last year and loved it, and he would be going again. Mark was going for a month this time and it would be great. Mom’s favorite memories of childhood were all from her times at summer camp.
When he arrived, Mark learned that he and Doug were assigned to different cabins, but he was assured this would make little difference. He waved goodbye to his parents.
For the next four weeks, Mark hardly ever saw Doug. Doug was good at baseball and it turned out he had sports buddies from last year. Mark couldn’t throw, bat, or field. Doug distanced himself. Mark was also terrible at volleyball, basketball, soccer, tennis, and archery. He had the further disadvantage of crying when kids made fun of his tendency to cry whenever they made fun of him.
His cabin of ten was ruled by Kenny, a small boy with a pale face and dark curls who had dirty magazines in his footlocker, and who lay in bed wriggling under his blanket and cooing in a baby voice about the enormous boner he’d just gotten. Like bullies in books, he had two big cabinmates who served as his enforcers. Kenny was kind of a genius. He got all the kids in the cabin to do what he wanted by continually holding out the slight possibility of being accepted by him, and thus of his
calling off his two goons, who did whatever he wanted with an unquestioning devotion that puzzled Mark. Between them, they could have torn Kenny in half, so why didn’t they? There came the day when Steve, the only other kid who had consistently been at the bottom of the pecking order along with Mark, and who Mark had occasionally looked to for a spark of compassion, offering Steve the same—there came the day, about two weeks in, when Steve also begged excitedly to see Kenny’s latest boner, and Mark was alone.
One day, Mark came into the cabin to find it empty except for one of the goons. He hesitated at the door, but the goon waved him in. This one was Jeff. He was looking through the other goon’s footlocker. That one was Russell. “You’re not such a bad kid,” Jeff said. “Kenny’s a little prick, isn’t he?” Relief and hope warmed Mark. Might this be the wished-for rebellion of the goons? He didn’t say anything. He stood in the glow of Jeff’s humanity. Jeff was still rummaging in Russell’s locker. He pulled out some candy bars from Russell’s care package. He unwrapped one and took a bite. “You want one?”
“No thanks.”
“Come on. No one will know.”
“No, that’s OK.”
“Russell’s taken some from your care package, you know. And from mine, too, that asshole. That’s why I’m getting back at him. Don’t be a wuss. Take it.”
Mark didn’t want to jeopardize this fragile new bond. “OK.” He reached out his hand.
There was a hoot of glee from the platform above where the tents were stored, and down hopped Russell. “You fuckin’ stealing from me, fag?” He came scooting over the intervening cots and footlockers with simian agility, arms already pinwheeling for the pummeling. As Mark went down, terrified and despairing, a part of his mind considered the possibility that the goons were smarter than he’d given them credit for.
* * *
• • •
He collected Matchbox cars. His parents gave him two or three every birthday and Christmas, and he also bought them with his allowance at Woolworth’s. One car cost fifty cents. They were made in England, by the Lesney company. His mother always said (he was beginning to realize that whatever Mom said, she always said) that Matchbox cars were better than Hot Wheels. “Look at that detailing on the front grill. Whereas, look at this flakey chrome crap. Leave it to the Great American Businessman to make a shitty toy car.”
Mark’s favorites were a copper-colored 1950 Vauxhall Cresta, a gold Opel Diplomat, a cherry Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow, a green Ferrari Berlinetta, and a royal blue Iso Grifo. There was something about the vibrant color of the Iso Grifo that particularly entranced him. It glowed like a deep pond inviting him to jump in.
One of his blankets was made of a lightweight artificial material that, when you lifted it at its midpoint and let go, would settle into perfect mounds and curvy channels. Bowl-shaped depressions became home sites, whereas channels were roads working their way over the hills. He drove the cars along the channels, admiring the way they handled the curves, which demonstrated their precision engineering.
On his eleventh birthday he got an electric train, along with a signal tower his father had preliminarily made from a kit. The tower was beautiful, with a red brick storage room on the first floor and a green clapboard office above. There were window-shade decals in the upper windows and a tiny broom and lantern glued immaculately next to the door. Over the following months Mark used his allowance to buy other model buildings and tried to construct them as heartbreakingly neatly as his father had done, never quite succeeding. His father had chosen HO gauge, which fit the Matchbox cars pretty well, and now Mark had a train and buildings and cars and crossings and crossing gates, and he set them up in different configurations. The train circled, the cars waited at the crossings, then crossed. The Vauxhall Cresta turned right, accelerating. The Iso Grifo parked by the old mill. It all gave him that unnameable emotion. He could almost believe it was real, and the closer he got to that fugitive belief, the more he felt that feeling.
He added buildings and cars. Now he had a Mercedes-Benz ambulance and a Ford Galaxie police car. He had a cattle truck with a cow and three calves. One of the calves sometimes wandered onto the track and got hit by the train. Sometimes that made the train derail, which looked realistic. He was eleven, twelve. Susan sometimes joined him on the rare occasions when she was in the house, or not heavily asleep and more or less unwakeable in her bedroom. She asked him who lived where, where did they work, who was having affairs with whom, what was the name of the town. Mark was so thrilled at her interest that he would never have admitted that he had never thought about any of this, and so had to make up answers on the spot. “That’s the Feebersons’ house. He’s a dentist.”
“That’s a strange name.”
“Is it?”
“But that’s OK.”
Susan was the one who pointed out that his town had hardly any homes in it. He had two different log cabins and one modern house that Susan called a fifties tract house (that was where the dentist now lived), and the rest were train stations, lumber mills, granaries, warehouses, and factories. He had five train stations (he loved the long platforms with the variously distributed barrels and trolleys) and three big factories (he loved the complicated chutes and stacks and conveyor belts). “But that’s OK,” Susan said. “It’s kind of cool. It looks like a Siberian labor camp.” She sometimes even drove one of the cars from one place to another. She put two cars in front of a factory with a space between them, then took the Rolls-Royce (“The cigar-chomping factory owner,” she explained) and parallel parked it, with a confident flourish, ending with it beautifully snug against the imaginary curb. Mark worried a little at first, but he was never able to detect mockery in anything she said. After a few minutes she would disappear, and Mark would go back to executing left and right turns, speeding and getting stopped by the police car. Whatever cars Susan had touched, he always left where they were.
* * *
• • •
How had Dad painted so perfectly, so bubble- and streak-free, so gleaming and uniformly smoothly red the 1962 Ford Thunderbird that sat on the shelf above the desk in his basement study?
How did his mother cut Christmas wrapping paper with one steady thrust of the scissors, not even opening and closing them, simply parting the paper against the sharp inner edge, making a line as straight as a yardstick?
How did she wrap Christmas boxes so that, on the ends, when she folded the last perfect triangle against the other perfect triangles, she didn’t get that little wave of extra wrapping paper at the top that (after Mark applied the last piece of tape on his box) deflated and lifted the paper off the box a little, making the edges frustratingly uncrisp?
How could Dad tell that Mark had missed a patch in the lawn when the uncut grass was barely a quarter inch longer than the cut grass? “Stand in the sunlight. See? No, bend down. Come on, don’t be dumb, look along the row, surely you see the shadow.”
Why did they have to argue about how to hang the toilet paper? Mom: “It’s supposed to hang off the inside, so when you pull the paper toward you, you tear it off against the roll.”
Dad, pretending patience (but you could tell he was angry because the outside corners of his eyelids were turned down): “If you hang it that way, the flowers are upside down.”
“Why should I give a fuck which way the flowers go?”
“I’m only pointing out that the manufacturer, who might be expected to know, designs it to hang with the flap forward—”
“Why should I give a flying fuck what the fucking manufacturer thinks?”
* * *
• • •
Clementi was charming, Mom said, but Kuhlau was a no-talent bum. The last good composer was Brahms. Scarlatti’s music was fascinatingly different from Bach’s, you could hear it from the first measure. Schubert had beautiful melodies, but he worked them to death. Schumann was underrated.
The
Hardy Boys books were insipid pieces of shit, Mom said. Mark read Enid Blyton, whose books Mom brought home from the library. Blyton was famous in England, but none of Mark’s Hardy Boy–worshipping friends at school had ever heard of her.
Mark drank Ovaltine, while his friends drank Nestlé’s. Nestlé’s was sweeter, so of course they liked it.
Drake’s was first, with Yodels and Ring Dings. They were covered in dark chocolate and were good. Hostess shamelessly ripped Drake’s off with Ho Hos and Ding Dongs, which looked exactly like Yodels and Ring Dings except they were covered in pandering milk chocolate. When Mark’s friends brought out their Ho Hos at lunch (no one else seemed to eat Yodels anymore) he couldn’t resist telling them the disgraceful corporate history.
All Mark’s friends’ families had multicolored lights on their Christmas trees, which looked gaudy and cheap. The Fuller Christmas tree had only blue lights, and only blue and silver metallic balls, and the old heavy lead icicles that hung down properly but you couldn’t buy them anymore because of stupid safety concerns, and white paper snowflakes made beautifully and variously by Mark’s mother (how did she six-part fold the paper so exactly, how did she cut with the X-Acto knife so neatly?) and ironed by her to perfect planar flatness (which, when Mark said it once, Dad said was a redundancy). When you turned off the room lights and plugged in the tree, it glowed ghostly blue, like a tree from the fourth dimension, signaling to you with its finger-spread arms.
The best candy bar any company had ever made was Goldenberg’s Peanut Chews, but you could never find them in the Boston area, and as far as Mom knew, maybe they weren’t even made anymore, which would be typical.