He shakes his head. “When did you get so mean?”
Her face crumples. “I’m not mean.”
“We have to be sticking together.”
She looks down, about to cry. He punches her lightly on the shoulder and tells her it’s okay. “But please don’t go through my room anymore.”
She nods her head, still looking down.
When he returns to his room, he takes the cash out of the Bermuda Triangle book, and tries to think of a new hiding spot. Nothing seems safe enough; he needs a new bank account, and will research this after lunch. He needs a nap. It’s exhausting, acting like an adult.
Bringing home the paperwork for his mother to sign, since he can’t have his own account until he’s eighteen, Lenny waits for her to return from work. This Children’s Savings Account at the local bank doesn’t need parental permission for deposits or withdrawals, so it’s ideal for his unmonitored saving and spending.
She comes home late, and studies the forms, amused. She asks how much money he has saved, and he tells her he plans to close his joint account with Dad, which has thirty dollars in it.
“Why do you want to close that one?”
“My friend Sal said not to trust joint accounts. Dad can steal it.”
She laughs. “He won’t steal thirty dollars from you.”
He tells her about the car dent repair bill, and how his father had lied, making Lenny work more than he should have. His mother sighs. “I didn’t know that.” She signs the paperwork, and fills out the rest of the information. She then reaches into her purse and pulls out a checkbook. “Let me help you with the account.”
“That’s okay.”
“No, just a little.” She writes a check for twenty dollars. As she tears it out, she says, “You should start saving for college. I don’t know how we will pay for all that.”
Lenny’s dreams have been getting more and more vivid, and he suspects it’s because he sleeps more deeply. With his father gone and their evenings quiet, he finds himself relaxing more quickly, and sinking into a sleep that often knocks him out until morning. It’s almost as if he’s catching up on years of deprivation. But his dreams are usually frightening, often puzzling, and when he wakes up he lies still for a while, remembering the fleeting details. His jaw aches. His head hurts. He replays the images in his head, disturbed by the repetition of the same kind of dream—being chased, hiding, running—and even though he knows that these are variations of the same memories, it doesn’t make his mornings any easier.
This pattern of deep but disquieting sleep will continue throughout his life, with his teeth-grinding worsening over the years to the point of cracking his molars and wearing his incisors down to stumps. He will add hair-pulling and unconscious thrashing soon, but at this moment the vivid nightmares and jaw-clenching battles prefigure a significant shift, when violent days and sleepless nights become peaceful days but violent nights.
35
When their father would sit at the dinner table with them, drunk and expansive, he would often tell them how he had always wanted to be a doctor. Even after coming to the United States to study finance, he dreamed of switching over to biology and then applying to medical school. And every time he told the story he would add that having a baby, Ed, made it impossible. Usually Ed was there, and Mira and Lenny knew better than to look at him, but Lenny sensed Ed’s exhaustion with the topic, with being blamed for thwarting their father’s dreams. Ed sat stone-faced and unmoving, folding his arms and ignoring his food.
Their father often lied about where he had gone to school, claiming he had his PhD from Columbia, though in reality he had been a teaching assistant there for a semester, and the PhD he did receive when he was in his forties was an honorary degree from a small religious college that awarded it to him in appreciation for a donation.
At the dinner table, while he listened to his father ramble drunkenly about how close he had come to being a doctor, Lenny became good at feigning attention, staring and nodding his head but having almost no idea what his father was saying. His father’s head would expand and contract in a psychedelic way, and Lenny would sometimes count rice grains on his plate to pass the time. Did you know a mound of white rice on a plate contains as many as a hundred mushy grains?
Lenny walks back to the house from somewhere—possibly Radio Shack or the library—and notices his father’s blue Cadillac parked on the street around the corner. He stops and stares, wondering if someone else had bought a similar car, but then he sees the smoke rising from the driver’s side, and when he moves closer he sees his father sitting there, flicking his ashes onto the street. What is he doing? Waiting? Spying? Meeting someone? Lenny stays hidden behind a tree. After ten minutes Lenny concludes that his father is spying.
His father blows his smoke straight ahead in the car, and it swirls around him and slowly rises up out of the window. Lenny knows that his father misses them, but he won’t come to the house because Lenny’s mother would probably call the police at this point. She grows stronger every day she spends without him. Lenny watches his father for another few minutes. He then backtracks and wanders the neighborhood.
Later that evening, when his mother finally returns home from work, Lenny tells her about the spying, and she says, “Yes, I’ve seen him. I think he also calls and hangs up. He misses his children.”
Lenny says, “We don’t miss him.”
His mother turns to him, surprised. She studies him for a moment, and says, “He’s still your father.”
“A bad one.”
She sighs. “Sometimes you can be as hard as him.”
This startles Lenny, who says, “That’s not true.”
She smiles, and shrugs it off.
Lenny finds Mira in the living room watching TV and drawing on looseleaf paper. Her art teacher told her at the end of the school year that she has a gift for drawing, and this is all the encouragement she needs to dive into it during the summer. He asks her if she wants to explore the church, but she doesn’t.
He says, “You can find stuff to draw in there.”
She looks outside and replies, “It’s too dark.”
They haven’t been spending any time together, and although he likes not having her tag along, he’s lonely. He asks, “You want to see what’s playing at Gables?” The movie theater recently began a 99-cent promotion.
“No, I just want to watch TV and draw.”
He’s about to tease her, grab her paper and taunt her with it, but he remembers his mother’s comment, that he can be as hard as his father. This rankles him, so he goes downstairs and watches his illegal cable TV and reads about strategies of guerrilla outdoor marijuana farming.
Many years later both his sister and brother will echo his mother’s sentiments, that Lenny, according to Ed, is “scarily like Dad.” Ed will point out Lenny’s military style—waking at dawn, maintaining a strict, rigorous schedule, even an instinctive, methodical, warrior-like way of getting what he wants—that can’t help but remind them of their father. This will hurt Lenny more than he will admit, since he will strive his entire life not to be like his father. He will argue that he is what his father could not become—disciplined and focused. But Mira will point out how Lenny can coldly, even cruelly, cut people out of his life, like he does with their father. Lenny doesn’t see this as cruel, but justified—that the people he cuts out of his life are dangerous to him, and need excising. In this way he is the opposite of his mother, who gave their father too many years of second chances.
36
But it’s true that Lenny does have a very disciplined approach to everything during this time; he trains almost every day, practicing both tae kwon do and kung fu, and teaches himself all kinds of useful and, for the most part, illegal skills, everything from building a microwave antenna from coffee cans that receives a new premium TV service, to finding hacked long-distance card numbers, to using a whistle from a Captain Crunch cereal box that coincidentally has the same tone to trick a payph
one into giving him free calls. All this information is readily available to anyone who digs, and Lenny likes to dig.
He buys an inexpensive Atari computer—the keyboard isn’t even real but has a flat membrane that’s so hard to press he can only use his index finger reinforced with his middle finger to type. He buys a cheap dial-up modem and joins bulletin boards—the earliest incarnation of forums—where he learns even more from the hacking community.
He worries about his father spying on them, so learns more about surveillance, but by the time he builds a telescoping periscope that allows him to see the street from his basement, his father stops showing up. His mother says the hang-ups also stopped. She guesses that he probably found another woman.
Lenny also continues his casual but persistent interest in marijuana cultivation. This is the most compelling of his investigations, his self-education, because he has already earned more money by helping Sal than he has in his entire young life. Without having any real concrete plans, he begins preparing the back yard for a possible crop, tilling the various plots near the foundation and in his mother’s old garden. He fertilizes the soil to prepare for the sowing after the first frost.
He has no seeds yet, but reads in a new magazine called High Times about a store in New York that buys seeds in Canada for “ornamental purposes” and resells them in the city. He looks up the store, which is listed as a natural food grocery, and he plots a future trip into Manhattan.
It surprises him how easy all of this is—he only needs time and money and energy, all three of which he has in plenty, given that it’s summer vacation and he has a wad of cash from Sal. He also spends more time reading novels at the air-conditioned library. He discovers the young adult science fiction section, and devours stories about spaceships, time travel and aliens, and is so moved by one time-travel novel in which the protagonist went to Ancient Egypt that he writes a letter to the author.
The librarian explains to him how to write authors in care of the publishers, and he likes the idea of being able to contact anyone through the mail. He writes Jimmy Carter, asking about space travel, and receives an embossed thank you card and a signed photo of the Carter family. He writes TV and movie stars, including Mark Hamill from Star Wars, the cast of Eight is Enough and Three’s Company, and authors like Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov. He even writes the cast of Brady Bunch, but the letters come back Return to Sender, because he didn’t realize he was watching all the shows in reruns.
The letters to celebrities and authors, many of whom either send back photos or short notes, make him feel connected to the world beyond his little neighborhood, and when he learns about a pen pal program run through the library, where he will be given an address of a student his age from somewhere in Asia, he signs up.
He’s lonely, isolated, and spends most of his time by himself, but begins using reading and writing as a way to keep connected. He misses the time with Sal and on a couple of occasions goes looking for him at his house, but his sister says he’s with his girlfriend.
Lenny wonders how he can get a girlfriend.
Ed calls home and speaks to their mother briefly, telling her how much he loves California. He weighs the notion of canceling his plans to go to SUNY Binghamton and reapplying to schools around Los Angeles, but because he’s a New York resident Binghamton would be cheaper. He’ll have to take a year off from school to establish California residency, which their mother doesn’t want him to do. He speaks briefly to Lenny, telling him that he’d love it out there, since the weather is great and the beaches are the best he has ever seen.
This is the seed that plants itself in Lenny’s mind, and California will be his destination years later, where he will live near the beach, and where he will find the memories of this time resurfacing during his fortieth year, and feel compelled to write this book.
One evening Lenny’s mother comes home and tells him about police cars and fire engines converging a couple blocks away, near the library. The streets have been cordoned off because of a big accident. Lenny wants to go out and check, but she brought home dinner, McDonald’s, and he’s torn between eating his Big Mac and seeing the police action. In the end the French fries win out.
The next morning he walks over to the scene, to Nar-wood Avenue, but sees no evidence of the activity. He goes into the library and asks the librarian about the police cars here yesterday. She says, “It was a motorcycle accident. Some poor guy crashed his motorcycle into a car.”
The mention of a motorcycle makes him straighten up. He asks if she knows the name of the motorcyclist.
“No. I heard he wasn’t wearing a helmet. I heard he died.”
“How would I find out who it was?”
“The local newspaper will have it in the next edition.”
“Can I find out sooner?”
“Why?”
“It might’ve been a friend of mine.”
The librarian pauses, and says, “I’m sorry. Yes, you can call the local police. But you can also call your friend’s parents to check.”
Lenny walks the few blocks to Sal’s house. As soon as he sees the flowers on the doorstep, he knows. He approaches the front door slowly, already dreading the news, and rings the bell. Sal’s sister appears, and she has a blank, muted expression on her face. Lenny asks her if Sal is home.
She shakes her head. “He was killed yesterday.”
“Oh.”
“He crashed his motorcycle.”
“Oh.”
They stand there for a minute, and then she closes the door.
37
Lenny walks around the neighborhood slowly, not quite believing any of this, and finds himself heading to the swamp. A few kids he hasn’t seen before play on the rope that extends over the creek, though none of them jump in. They swing over the water and back, and then stumble onto the bank. He watches them for a while, smiling when one of them accidentally falls into the water and leaps out, disgusted.
Lenny takes the convoluted paths to the grow site, where he finds the cut stalks depressing. A few leaves lie dried and withered in the scuffed dirt. The tripwires are still here, even though Sal had trampled them into the ground.
Then Lenny remembers the seeds in Sal’s crawlspace. It won’t take long for his parents to find those, and when that happens, they will be upset.
He hurries out of the woods and to Sal’s house again. The crawlspace door is on the side of the house, accessible simply by cutting through their side yard, and is covered with thick bushes and a row of young saplings. When he sneaks along the side of the house, he stays well below the windows. He can hear a TV blaring from one of the rooms. The crawlspace door is locked, but Lenny still has the extra on his keychain.
He unlocks the door and climbs in. He notices immediately that Sal had already cleared out most of his drug-related materials, including the shelf of books and pamphlets. He used to have a bong and a small box of rolling papers here, both of which are missing. Lenny smells air freshener—lavender—that mingles with the faint hints of pot. He crawls to the corner, where a large plastic storage bin sits among a few scattered mini-bike parts and a radio. When he pries open the top, he finds the jar of seeds—little brown pellets filled to the top with a few dried leaves and tiny stems mashed in. He doesn’t see any other evidence of drugs, and suspects this had been part of Sal’s new outlook.
He hears footsteps upstairs. He knows he can’t be caught here, so he quickly carries out the heavy jar, relocking the door quietly. Sal’s mother is directly upstairs, talking into a phone. Her voice sounds depleted and exhausted. Lenny waits until she drifts into a different part of the house and then he hurries out of the yard and down the street, cradling the jar in his arms.
He feels guilty for stealing something from a dead friend, but justifies it as keeping Sal’s parents from discovering anything.
When he returns home he hurries downstairs and searches for a hiding place. There are no locks to the basement and he worries about his sister snoop
ing again, so he decides the best thing to do is not to hide it. Marijuana seeds resemble some varieties of maple seeds, so he tapes on a label “maple seeds for replanting tree” and leaves this on his shelf.
But his next project is to build a safe.
Late that night he finds his mother at her home office, the desk lamp the only light on in the house, so the glow fills the hallway. She looks up, and asks why he’s awake. He tells her he’s having trouble sleeping, and she motions for him to sit in the chair across from her. When he does, he mentions that the motorcycle accident had been with Sal.
“That older boy?” she asks, alarmed.
“He died.”
“Oh, no.” She closes her eyes for a moment. “His mother… I met her a few times. She must be… Oh, this is terrible.”
“It was a new motorcycle. He wanted that for a long time.”
“Are you okay? Are you sad?”
“I don’t know. I guess not. I didn’t see him that much anymore.”
“But still. He was your friend.”
They sit quietly. She asks if he’s getting ready for school, which starts in a couple weeks.
“I guess so,” he says, then asks how he is supposed to do well.
She smiles. “Do everything your teacher tells you.”
“That’s all?”
“Study very hard for all the tests.”
This isn’t very satisfying advice, so he resolves to go to the library to learn more about how to do well in school.
“Do you miss your father?”
“No,” he replies, surprised by the question.
“Your father canceled our insurance without telling me. I found out by accident. We weren’t covered with health insurance and car insurance for a few weeks. It was really bad of him.”
“Do you have insurance now?”
“We all do. Yes. It’s not the canceling—there’s no reason why he should pay my car insurance. It’s not telling me that’s…. He can be so…” She stops herself. She takes a deep breath and asks if he wants something to eat or drink.
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