by Sigrid Nunez
Cole knew the school he went to was expensive, as the schools his parents had gone to were expensive, so expensive that they’d had to keep paying the bills for years after they weren’t in school anymore. He knew they were worried about paying for his own education for years to come, and he wished he could bring them around to his own view, which was that school was not worth it.
As Cole understands it, if things had been different—if his parents had not had to work so hard all the time, and if they had not had to worry so much about money—he would have been born sooner. But he has always wondered about this. If he had been born sooner, on a different day in a different year, would he be exactly the same? Would he still be himself?
And if they had never moved, if they had stayed in Chicago, would his parents still be alive? Cole thinks the answer is yes, even though he knows that many people got sick and died in Chicago, too. In the big cities, so many people died so fast that bodies kept piling up and there were corpses everywhere, even outdoors. It is another one of Cole’s guilty secrets that he wishes he could have seen this with his own eyes. That, and the riots.
Cole has heard people call Tracy pretty, but again he has no opinion about this. Or rather his opinion is that although grown-ups can sometimes look good in photos or in movies or from far away, up close there is always something blotchy or hairy or saggy, and most grown-ups, even the ones who don’t smoke, smell.
The big exception was his great-grandmother, Ginia, whom he’d met only once, when he was six. Ginia was old but her face was freakily beautiful, like something carved out of soap, with eyes like Blue Jay marbles. She was teensy. A grown-up no bigger than himself! He could not see how anyone could stand, let alone walk, on such matchstick legs. When he thinks of her now, he thinks of an egret.
But she, too, had a smell. And in general old people are the ugliest and smelliest people of all.
He has always been sensitive to smells, but since his illness he is more so. His memory may be worse, but his senses seem to have got better. He is sure he hears better than he used to. PW says it’s because Cole has never lived so far out in the country, where it’s so quiet, especially at night. But being in the country is not a whole new experience for Cole. He has been to the country on vacations, and he has been to summer camp.
From school he knows that Native Americans had much sharper vision and hearing than the white settlers had, and he likes to pretend he is one of them, a brave (how he loves that word), able to hear a fly land on the windowsill.
Riding a horse, he has also imagined himself a brave, nothing between him and the horse’s warm, broad back. He has never understood why white people invented the saddle.
Tracy and PW say the Indians were not the first people in America, there were white people here before them. Cole is surprised to hear this. He is sure that’s not what he learned in school—unless it’s one of the things he no longer remembers.
It was his mother who’d pointed out that it was only human smells that bothered him, which is true. But then it is also true that he likes animals more than he likes people. He does not mind the smell of horses or dogs; in fact, he thinks horses and dogs smell good. He has never been bothered by the smells in a zoo. He could stay in the monkey house all day long. But once when he was sitting on a park bench and a homeless man sat down beside him, he had jumped up and fled without even caring that the man’s feelings might be hurt. He does not feel so guilty about this because he knows he’s not the only one who’d find the man’s smell worse than a monkey’s. But he has always wondered: why was that?
Besides keeping house, Tracy does church work, of which there seems to be no end. She is good with her hands, and in every room of the house there are things—quilts, pillows, ceramics—that she has made. Though constantly busy, she is always looking for more to do. (“Devil ain’t gonna catch this lady with idle hands.”) Yet the word Cole is unable to separate from Tracy is lazy.
They don’t read, and they can’t write to save their lives. They’ve never heard of most of the presidents of the United States, they think America won the war in Vietnam, they think Prohibition was a law that made it illegal to own slaves.
That was Cole’s father, fuming about his students. Cole suspects at least some of this could also be said about Tracy.
And it’s not just what they don’t know, it’s what they don’t want to know.
Tracy is what his father would call intellectually lazy.
Every time this thought occurs to Cole, he feels guilty.
Not that he would even care, if Tracy wasn’t his teacher.
The hours he spends on lessons with her are torture. He cannot hide his feelings completely, but fortunately everyone thinks he’s just a normal red-blooded boy who’d rather be off riding his bike, say.
Though he has shared some of his secrets with PW, about Tracy he knows he will never be honest.
HE REMEMBERS HIS LAST DAY OF SCHOOL as if it were yesterday, and at the same time as if it were very long ago. He was still the new boy then. He and his parents had moved from Chicago during Christmas vacation.
His father said, “I know how hard it is for you to leave all your friends and jump in with a whole bunch of new kids in the middle of the year. But try to think of it as an adventure.”
His new homeroom teacher, who reminded him of his father but whose name Cole can no longer recall, made Cole stand in the front of the room and introduce himself. Cole had never felt so exposed. (That night he dreamed he was standing in front of a roomful of strangers again, this time naked.)
Hating the teacher, avoiding eye contact with the two kids he instantly picked out as bullies, he prayed his voice would not crack. One bully glared at him the whole time; the other kept his eyes mostly shut. A boy in the front row with a face practically buried under freckles listened to every word with his mouth open, as if Cole were explaining sex. Two girls farther back put their blond heads together and whispered about him (what else?). Everyone else looked as if they weren’t listening, Mr. What’s-his-name (staring out the window) included.
Cole kept it short. He was from Chicago, he didn’t have any brothers or sisters, his father was a history professor, his mother was a lawyer. Or rather she used to be a lawyer, but not anymore.
A hand shot up. (The teacher had encouraged questions.) How come his mother stopped being a lawyer?
Cole shrugged. She didn’t like it, he said. He did not say because it was a dull, heartless profession full of people who cared only about money, as his mother always said when people asked her.
His father used to say, “Serena, you should’ve been born rich. You’re just not cut out to work.” But in fact, except for right after Cole was born, his mother had always worked at one job or another. It was true she had hated most of those jobs. But about a year before they moved she’d started working as the manager of a small theater company, a job she had loved. “If only it paid more!” (Always, the problem was money.)
Cole didn’t tell any of this to the class. He didn’t say anything about the fights his parents had had about moving. His mother said it wasn’t fair. Just when she’d finally found a job that was right for her! She blew up when his father said she could always find something similar where they were going.
“Don’t patronize me, Miles.”
Then it was his father’s turn to blow up.
“Let me get this straight. I’m supposed to pass up a great opportunity just so you can keep working for a nonprofit company that pays shit, and that you’ll probably end up leaving anyway as soon as the novelty wears off?”
“But you don’t even like teaching. All you ever do is complain.”
“It’s a great fucking job!”
“It’s in fucking Indiana!”
In the middle of fucking nowhere, was how she usually described it. Not even a major city. “Like there are really major cities in Indiana anyway,” she told her sister as she wiped her eyes—tears not from crying but from laughing at the name
of the town: Little Leap.
No major cities. And no such place as Big Leap, either.
Aunt Addy lived in Germany but had come to Chicago for Christmas.
“I mean, the people are all right-wing, the climate sucks, there’s no music or theater. There are no museums, no decent restaurants.” The pills his mother was taking to make her less negative were not working at all. “All anyone cares about is fucking basketball. At least, I think it’s basketball.” Cole rolled his eyes.
Aunt Addy was more than his mother’s sister: she was her twin. He never saw much of her because she lived overseas. She was good at languages and worked as a translator and an interpreter for an international bank. She hated America, even to visit, and came back as seldom as possible.
“There are some twins who always dress alike and do everything together,” his mother told him. “But Addy and I were never like that. Even as kids we rebelled against matching outfits, and as soon as we were old enough we got different hairstyles.” Nowadays their hair was pretty much the same, short and fluffy, partly dark and partly light. But of course they were rarely seen together.
Aunt Addy had Total Freedom, his mother always said. Meaning she wasn’t married and she didn’t have kids.
Cole’s father was a runner, a racer, a winner of marathons. In college his nickname had been Miles-and-miles. Though he didn’t compete anymore, he still ran every morning to stay in shape.
When she was in a good mood, Cole’s mother called his father Miles-and-miles. Her own nickname was Serena-anything-but. But people only used it to tease her.
“You know it’s not my fault I didn’t get tenure,” his father said.
Cole’s mother’s silence seemed to say that it was.
But it wasn’t just herself she was thinking about. Did he really want their son to grow up in a cultural backwater? She had grown up in a cultural backwater and had escaped to the nearest big city the first chance she got.
Maybe because of the word backwater Cole has always had an image of his mother swimming to Los Angeles. (The truth is just as hard to picture: his mother—a girl—hitchhiking to Los Angeles.)
Cole’s father was from Seattle and always said Chicago was a town he could take or leave. Chicago wasn’t his mother’s favorite town, either; she would much rather have lived in New York. They’d ended up in Chicago only because of his father’s job. The one he lost when he didn’t get tenure.
Cole thinks of Chicago as his hometown, but he’d lived a third of his life in Amherst, Massachusetts. Amherst was where he’d been born and where his father had been teaching at the time. But it was in New York that his parents had first met. His father was in graduate school then, and Cole’s mother happened to be in town visiting her best friend from college.
“Your mom was the best-looking girl at this party, see, but I married her because she was the only one who laughed at my jokes” was one of his jokes.
Cole wonders if he will end up living in as many different places as his parents had lived. Pastor Wyatt has told him about visiting African villages on missions for the church, and Cole wishes he could visit them, too. He likes looking at photos from PW’s African days. PW had a good friend in Kenya whose name was Mwendwa, and there are photos of the two men together. Mwendwa has a very long, narrow, dark face and the only smile Cole has ever seen that really does stretch from ear to ear, reminding Cole of a banana. Though Cole knows the people in the photos are very poor and don’t have enough food or clean water or medicine, everyone—from tiny bare-assed toddlers to an old man missing both legs—looks happy, as if it was as good as getting toys or money just having your picture taken. There are some photos of men sitting on mats in a hut and carving wood, and in PW’s house there are some wood statues—a bird, a turtle, a woman carrying a child on her back—that the men gave him when he had to go back to America.
Cole hopes to go around the world one day. One of his favorite words is explorer. During the pandemic people weren’t allowed to travel anywhere unless they absolutely had to, and even now it’s not the way it was before. There aren’t as many airplanes. There aren’t as many buses or trains, and there aren’t as many cars on the highways.
Cole remembers his father saying that when he was a kid every boy wanted to be a sports hero or a rock star but that he wanted to be an astronaut. To Cole this never sounded terribly exciting, sitting strapped in for all those miles just to arrive at a place like the moon, where everywhere you looked was exactly the same and nothing was happening, no people or animals. But Africa . . .
PW says he would love to take Cole to Kenya one day, but it would be a lie if he said it was likely to happen. They were living in a whole different world these days.
“Let’s just say if I go, I’ll do everything to make sure you get to go, too. Fair enough?”
It was fair, but it was disappointing. And so PW made a promise he knew he could keep. For Cole’s next birthday he would bless him with a camping trip to the Kentucky mountains. Cole’s heart was full, and when PW said there would be just the two of them (“no girls allowed”), he thought it would burst from joy.
Cole doesn’t know what he’ll be when he grows up. Certainly not a lawyer. Not a teacher. Not a preacher, either. He can’t imagine getting up in front of people and talking to them the way Pastor Wyatt and the other preachers do. When he and Tracy listen to Pastor Wyatt on the radio, Tracy says, “Isn’t it something, how he doesn’t sound a bit nervous? I could never do that, knowing all those people out there were listening to my every word.”
“Me, neither,” says Cole. And he remembers that first day of school, standing up in front of his new classmates.
No, his mother was not working right now. Yes, he liked their new house. The house belonged to the college where his father was teaching, and it was much bigger than the apartment they’d had in Chicago, and now they could have a dog. A sheepdog was what he wanted.
The bully with closed eyes popped them open at this and exchanged a sneer with the other bully, and Cole figured a sheepdog must be a girly breed.
He has no idea why he lied. In fact, they’d had a dog in Chicago, an old basset hound named Sadie (full name: Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands), who’d died in her sleep a few months before they moved. And though it was true Cole wanted a new dog, he hadn’t decided on any particular breed. So what made him say sheepdog?
Cole didn’t tell the class his parents were getting divorced. Though she’d quit her beloved job at the theater and put all her energy into moving and getting them settled in their new home, his mother was planning to leave.
It was her secret, but Cole had found out about it.
If he had shared this with the class the other kids probably wouldn’t have cared, but the teacher might have been pissed. It would have been one of those times—and Cole has learned such times are not rare—when you got in trouble not for lying but for blurting out the whole truth.
It never even occurred to him to tell his father what he’d heard his mother tell Addy on the phone.
He didn’t know if he’d be leaving Little Leap, too. If it was just divorce his mother was looking for or Total Freedom.
What if she was planning to go all the way to New York? Or Berlin, which Addy always made sound like the coolest place on the planet. (According to Addy, New York City was finished.)
He couldn’t ask his mother about any of this. Not because he was afraid she’d be angry at him for eavesdropping but because he figured knowing he knew the truth would only make her more upset than she already was.
In any case, as far as he knew, the plan was for him to finish middle school and then go away to some boarding school, location not yet decided.
Sometimes he thought he could not wait for that day; other times he prayed it would never come.
When it was over, the teacher made him stand and squirm for a few seconds, just so he’d know his performance had been unsatisfactory. Finally allowed to return to his seat, which had to be directly i
n front of one of the bullies, Cole realized he had sweat through his shirt.
The teacher asked the class to tell Cole something about his new state. They shouted out things like Hoosiers and Indy 500, as if he’d come from some foreign country instead of right next door.
The crossroads of America.
He knew about Michael Jackson and Larry Bird and Indiana Jones (and that he had nothing to do with Indiana the state). His father had made him read Kurt Vonnegut. He had never heard of James Dean.
Try to think of it as an adventure.
The same desks and chairs. The same scuffed linoleum floors. The same smells (BO, new sneakers, mac and cheese).
The same bullies. The same whispering girls.
The new school was not really much of an adventure.
Until everyone started getting sick.
THE SCHOOL STANK OF LYSOL, and several times a day they all had to line up and wash their hands. Clean hands save lives was the message being hammered into them. When it came to spreading infection, they were informed, they themselves—school kids—were the biggest culprits. Even if you weren’t sick yourself, you could shed germs and make other people sick. Cole was struck by the word shed. The idea that he could shed invisible germs the way Sadie shed dog hairs was awesome to him. He pictured the germs as strands of hair with legs like centipedes, invisible but crawling everywhere.
Minibottles of sanitizer were distributed for use when soap and water weren’t available. Everyone was supposed to receive a new bottle each day, but the supply ran out quickly—not just at school but all over. Among teachers this actually brought relief, because the white, slightly sticky lotion was so like something else that some kids couldn’t resist. Gobs started appearing on chairs, on the backs of girls’ jeans, or even in their hair, and one boy caused an uproar by squirting it all over his face.