Solos

by Kitty Burns Florey

  Of wet and wildness? Let them be left,

  O let them be left, wildness and wet;

  Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.

  Summer had stopped calling Marcus’s habit “running away,” and also stopped getting Big Rafe or the volunteer fire department to come and find him. She took it for granted that Marcus would come back.

  Phoebe didn’t like the woods. She liked the big, open field, and would run through the clover, away from Marcus and then back, leaping on him joyfully. But once they entered the woods, she would whine and look over her shoulder and want to go home, like a banished child in a fairy tale. Eventually, she’d start barking, and a barking dog meant his disappearing days were over. She’s only a puppy, he told himself, she’ll be braver when she gets older and bigger.

  Marcus wasn’t going to school that year, so come September, he was looking forward to spending time at home with his books and charts and puzzles and games. The Nelson School for Gifted Children, for which Grandma Mead paid the tuition, hadn’t worked out. After two months, the headmaster explained to Summer that Marcus was certainly gifted but not in ways the school was equipped to deal with, and suggested home-schooling. Summer, who spent almost three years at Oswego State Teachers’ College as an early education major before she dropped out, petitioned the Board of Education and got permission to teach Marcus at home, which meant he was left on his own to do whatever he liked while Summer baked pies and did her big, swooping dances on the lawn. An arithmetic tutor came on Saturday mornings, but after a while she stopped showing up. It didn’t seem to matter.

  When Hart came back, though, Marcus knew he’d be forced to get on a school bus every day and go to a real school again. He was cooperative about it, as part of his campaign to get along with his father, and he was enrolled in the fifth grade at the middle school in Honesdale. He approached it with optimism, hoping fifth grade wouldn’t seem like a waste of his time, as fourth grade had, and that he’d find a friend. But it did and he didn’t, and everything was over before Halloween.

  It was the same story: Marcus needs special attention, he shows no interest in regular schoolwork, his test scores are out of sight, but he’s not thriving in the atmosphere of school. Translated, this meant that the only arithmetic Marcus would participate in was the recitation of the multiplication tables, which he did with noisy enthusiasm. That he spent a good portion of his time working on Self-Descriptive Numbers, which he found out about in a library book. That he came up with a variant he called Meaningful Numbers, by which he figured out that his zip code corresponded to his house number, and that he announced his discovery joyfully to Miss Bright, disrupting a discussion of the principal products of Uruguay. That at recess he stayed alone with his pencil and notebook, refusing to play two-square or tag. And that in the lunchroom he wouldn’t sit at a table with other kids. He preferred to take his carefully packed lunch box and sit on the floor.

  Marcus couldn’t eat at a noisy, crowded table, and so the sitting-on-the-floor-in-the-lunch-room thing was something he devised out of desperation. This, of course, wasn’t allowed (“Why on earth not?” Summer asked, with her little laugh, which didn’t help), so Marcus was amazed when it actually turned things in his favor. His classmates ignored him when they saw he was impervious to anything they said, and the school was very nice about what the guidance counselor called Marcus’s highly individualized coping skills. Marcus is a sweet child, they said, polite and respectful, but desperately, irretrievably, bewilderingly different. If he kept on as he was going, he would end up repeating fifth grade. One stumped teacher ventured the words autistic and retarded, yet there was no denying Marcus tested far above his grade level in both arithmetic and reading. The Board of Education said there was no reason Summer couldn’t go back to teaching him at home, though she and his father might want to pay more attention to socialization skills.

  Hart, of course, did not go to this school conference, and when Summer broke the news, he took it rather well, only asking Marcus, rhetorically, why he had to be such a weird little twerp. He also said Marcus should join a Cub Scout troop, or take piano lessons, or go away to summer camp next year, or at least play more with the Estrada kids next door. But he and Marcus both knew that none of these things would come to pass.

  No matter what Summer might wish, they were an odd family.

  Hart did claim to be working. When he wasn’t watching football or working his way through the fifty-four novels of Anthony Trollope, he spent much of his time in closed-door phone conversations with people in New York or tapping the keys on his off-limits-to-Marcus laptop. Checks arrived in the mail from time to time, and once or twice he had to drive to Allentown. “To see my main man,” he said with a smirk, and when Marcus asked Summer who that was, she said, vaguely, “Maybe a car mechanic?” Hart was still, apparently, an art dealer, even though he now lived in a small Pennsylvania town, far from the galleries and the artists and the need to wear his Armani suit, “the whole sick fucking art market,” as he called it. When Marcus asked what an art dealer was, exactly, his father replied, “An idiot, son. A mad dreamer. I suggest you become a sanitation worker when you grow up.”

  While Hart holed up in the spare bedroom he’d commandeered as an office, Summer looked at cookbooks and puttered around the house, running the vacuum cleaner, scrubbing sinks, imposing her obsessive order on everything. Marcus’s socks (in the bureau drawer labeled SOCKS AND UNDERWEAR) were rolled into neat bundles and sorted by color. The pasta in the cupboard was alphabetized: angel-hair to ziti. At four every afternoon she would begin banging things around in the kitchen; they would finally eat at eight or nine. The smells would start wafting up to Marcus’s room by five, and he would sit with his stomach rumbling, losing himself in games and numbers, until finally, when he knew he would faint if he didn’t eat soon, Summer’s voice would float up the stairs on two notes: “Dinnnnnn-errrrrr!”

  Marcus was a small-boned, skinny boy with a limited appetite that could disappear entirely when he was upset or excited, and he was a continual disappointment to his mother when it came to food. It wasn’t that he didn’t appreciate her cooking, just that he could appreciate it only in small portions. Sometimes he would eat his first helping, then rest up, maybe take the dog out or go watch a little TV before he returned for more food, finding Summer still sitting at the table, calmly putting away another slice of roast pork and her third mound of mashed potatoes, reading an article in Gourmet about a restaurant in Zurich or the perfect cheese soufflé.

  Hart managed to eat everything Summer put on the table and not gain an ounce.

  On his nasty days, he also kept up a running commentary about her weight and her appetite, calling her “Some more” or “Chubber,” which got Marcus so angry he lost his appetite entirely.

  But sometimes Hart was nice, and then Marcus believed his resolution to like his father better was something that could actually work. Hart and Summer would be friendly and affectionate with each other: Marcus would come across them embracing, and once he looked out the window to see them kissing on the lawn—he clocked one kiss at ninety-six seconds, which astonished him. He knew what it meant, vaguely, when in the night he’d hear the rhythmic bed-banging noise from their room, and next morning Summer would look exhausted but cheerful, and even Hart would be in a better mood, slapping her on the bottom and calling her “Babe” or “Pumpkin.”

  Occasionally, Hart would put on one of his jazz CDs and sit Marcus down with him to listen. He could talk entertainingly about Trollope’s convoluted plots: blackmailing viscounts, crooked members of Parliament, lovesick maidens living on country estates, impoverished younger sons driven to reckless gambling. Once or twice Marcus and his father even drove to the mall in Scranton, where Hart would buy him a sweatshirt, a pair of sneakers, a new crossword puzzle book—it didn’t matter what, Marcus was always impressed when Hart, who was famously stingy, not only noticed his existence but shelled out money to confirm it. And that they h
ad done something together that was normal.

  Then Grandma Mead died suddenly, and Summer drove to Rochester alone for the funeral. There was no question of Hart (the Weasel) accompanying her, and Summer said Marcus, at ten, was too young. When she kissed him good-bye, he could feel her wet eyelashes on his cheek. Marcus had never been without his mother, and he had never been alone with his father for more than a few hours.

  Summer was gone for nearly a week.

  It wasn’t quite winter yet—the oak trees bordering the yard still held on to their stiff brown leaves but the days were grim, chilly, and sunless. Hart, as always, remained in his study all day, smoking and talking on the phone. Marcus stayed in his room with Phoebe, reading, doing puzzles, slipping down to the kitchen to make himself a piece of toast or a bowl of cereal. For dinner on their first night, Hart thawed some chicken parts and boiled them, and they ate them with gummy rice in front of the TV. On the second night, Marcus tried his hand at making spaghetti with tomato sauce but burned the sauce so badly they had to throw the pan away. On the third night—Home Improvement was on, one of Hart’s favorite shows to make fun of—they had fish sticks from the supermarket. On the next night, they ate leathery fried-egg sandwiches. Finally, on the last night, after Hart quit cursing and blaming Summer for not leaving them food, the two of them drove to Mario’s Olde Italian Inn in Honesdale. “What the hell,” Hart said recklessly, as if he were contemplating a dive off a cliff. “What the hell, let’s live it up, kid.” They would go to a restaurant and stuff their faces, to hell with the cost. It would be a chance to spend a little quality time together.

  All his life Marcus would remember this strange evening.

  He sat across the table from his father, with a Coke and a plate of lasagna. Hart drank one double Jack Daniels before dinner and two with. He began talking about his pet topics: the joys of Trollope, the tediousness of baseball, the tribulations of the New York Jets, and the moronic lyrics of pop music. Then he talked about his friend Joe Whack and the venality, stupidity, and shortsightedness of the art business and the mass of idiots known as “the public.” The only person who really appreciated Whack’s work, Hart said, was a Polish dentist in Brooklyn, who had actually bought one of his paintings. Marcus listened to this with interest—Joe Whack fascinated him because of his strange name and his strange paintings, and because he was an actual friend of his strange father. Then the conversation turned.

  “I want to tell you something,” Hart began. “Something you’re probably too young to have observed for yourself.” Hart was deep into his second Jack Daniels, and it was a moment before he went on. Marcus watched him expectantly. Finally, with the air of a sage uttering a profound truth, Hart pointed his index finger into the air and said, “There is something very wrong with almost everyone in the world.”

  Marcus didn’t think he was too young for such an observation. When he was at Honesdale Middle School, in fact, he would have agreed with this statement, but now that he was home again he was inclined to dispute it. He had an idea he didn’t quite know how to express, which was that, if you weren’t happy, you were more inclined to think there was something wrong with almost everyone in the world, but if you were happy, then you figured other people were probably okay. Also, he didn’t know if this sounded stupid or not.

  Hart didn’t expect a comment. He went on. “I’ve been observing for a long time the fact that, although people seem diverse—you know, their opinions and their interests and their values—basically they’re all very similar. They operate on mechanical reflexes and primitive thought patterns. All six billion of them, or whatever it is. Probably seven billion by now. Eight.”

  “I think it’s still just about six billion,” Marcus said helpfully.

  “Well, whatever. A hell of a lot of people.” Hart picked a large green olive out of a dish on their table and took a bite, shaking his head as he chewed, as if the taste of the olive illustrated what he was talking about. “And yet, it’s funny,” he said, with a half-snicker and a near-smile. “The ideas that populate those people’s minds, ideas about religion, morality, freedom, happiness—they’re like germs that infect and spread. They have no point or purpose. They exist without any logical foundation.” He set the olive down on the tablecloth and leaned toward Marcus.

  Marcus noticed that his father’s eyes were bloodshot, he needed a shave, and his longish hair was unwashed.

  “Do you understand what I mean?”

  Marcus nodded and said, “I guess so.”

  “Good. Keep listening.” Hart sat back in his chair with his drink. “These ideas are of course idiotic, and yet people are completely controlled by them and can’t see beyond them. But here’s my point, son. The important thing is not to let yourself give in to them. Don’t let them fuck you over.” He jabbed his finger in the air in Marcus’s direction. “And it takes more than just realizing they exist. You’ve got to resist them. You’ve got to question things that have no point. Illogical ideas. And never, Marcus—” Hart lurched forward suddenly and slammed his glass down on the table; it contained only ice, which rattled. “Never accept imperfection or compromise, and never—this is the important part—never forget that you are the emperor of your own life.”

  The emperor of your own life. Marcus liked the idea. “Cool,” he said. But then he wondered, what did it mean, anyway? Life wasn’t a kingdom. And if it was, how could there be six billion emperors?

  “Your life is yours, your decisions are yours, and what seems right to you, son—that’s what’s right. If you get your mind oriented the right way. If you get your head screwed on right, you can never be wrong. Do you understand?”

  Marcus squirmed. “Sure.”

  “I hope so,” Hart said. “Because if you don’t, and if you don’t stay eternally vigilant, you’ll always be nothing but a product of random evolution. You will not be an important person, Marcus. You’ll be nothing.”

  His father kept talking. Hart’s voice was harsh and gravelly, punctuated by smoker’s coughs. Marcus tuned out for a while. He looked around the room, cataloging things, while still trying to look like he was paying attention. In his line of vision, there were ten tables, six booths, a total of forty-two chairs not counting a high chair against the wall, six scenes of (he assumed) Italy framed in gold on the wall. He noticed there was a tank of fish behind his father’s chair, under the window. Why would a restaurant have a tank of fish? Was it an old Italian custom? Were they raising them to put on the menu when they got bigger? He counted five goldfish, including one with mottled black markings, like a calico cat, and four or five triangular gray fish and maybe a dozen little darting guys that seemed—could it be?—to be lit up by a long bluish neon streak. He would have liked to get up and look more closely, but he didn’t. He picked at his lasagna and looked at his father and nodded often enough to show he was listening, knowing that if he accompanied the nod with a frown now and then, or the rise of an eyebrow, it was more convincing: This was something he had learned in the guidance counselor’s office at Honesdale Middle School.

  But he tuned in again when Hart said, “I worry about you, Marcus. I worry that you and I haven’t been closer. I worry that your major influence has been your mother.” Marcus saw a look on Hart’s face he didn’t recall seeing before: a sort of sickly-sweet smile. “Not that Summer’s not a great girl.”

  Marcus nodded. “Summer is the best.”

  “Agreed. You’d have to go a long way to find a—” He paused. “A nicer person than your mother. Right?”

  “Right,” Marcus said warily. He had a feeling something terrible was coming, and braced himself.

  “But you have to admit she’s a little out of it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know. The Roman gods. The food. The crazy nature stuff. The labels. The—well, doesn’t it ever occur to you that your mother isn’t like other people?”

  This had occurred to Marcus many times, but he didn’t like it when his father s
aid it. “I thought that was good.”

  “What?”

  “I thought it was important to be different from other people. The six billion. Isn’t that what you said?”

  “Hey—Marcus? Let me put it this way: There’s different, and then there’s different. There’s different, and then there’s your mother!”

  Hart genuinely cracked up at this, and Marcus noticed how handsome his father was when the expression on his face was humorous and genuine. Anyone looking at them would think Hart was sharing a moment of winsome humor with his son, not making fun of his mother.

  “I like her the way she is,” Marcus said, refusing to smile. “I love her.”

  “Well, of course. Right. I hope so.”

  Marcus waited for his father to say, “So do I,” but Hart just sighed and signaled the waitress for another drink. They sat in silence for a moment. Marcus had made only a small dent in his lasagna. He looked down at his plate, thinking how the lasagna looked like a tiny version of one of those Indian villages in Colorado that was dug into a canyon wall, made of flat layers of stone. He wished they could leave. He knew Hart wasn’t through talking, and he knew he didn’t want to hear what else the gravelly voice would say. He thought about going home in the cold, then entering the warm house where a warm dog awaited him. He thought about being up in his cozy room under the roof with Phoebe under the covers beside him and yesterday’s crossword puzzle to be done. Wednesday, and pretty easy, but still.… Or maybe Summer would call from Rochester.

  “Of course you love your mother,” Hart said finally. “But you know, Marcus, she’s pretty much a slave to a set of wacky ideas and preferences that—well, if you were to be too influenced by them, they would not stand you in good stead out in the real world.”

  “Isn’t this the real world?” Marcus asked, knowing as soon as he uttered the question that his father would crack up again.

  “Honesdale?” Hart asked when his laughter subsided. “Honesdale, Pennsylvania? Crossword puzzles and phone books? Your mother’s pie? Big Rafe Estrada? Is that the real world? Give me a break, kid.”