by Dave Eggers
me: Whew! That was close!
he: I’ll say!
ME: You hungry?
HE: Hey, you read my mind.
Toph is in Little League too, on a team coached by two black men, these two black men being Nos. One and Two among the black men that Toph has ever known. His team (and the coaches, too, as a matter of fact) wear red uniforms and practice on a field in a pine-surrounded park two blocks up the hill from our sublet, where the view is even more startling. I bring a book to the practices, guessing that watching eight-to-ten-year-olds run drills will be boring, but it is anything but. It’s enthralling. I watch every movement, watch them gather around the coach for instructions, watch them shag balls, watch them go to the drinking fountain. No, I don’t watch all of them, of course not, I watch Toph, follow his new, oversized red felt hat moving through the drills, watch him waiting his turn, watch him field a ground ball, turn and throw it to the coach at second, watch only him, even as he’s waiting in line, to see if he’s talking with the other kids, if he’s getting along, strain to see if he’s being accepted, if—though I occasionally catch one of the black kids doing something extraordinary—there are two stars, a boy and girl, both tall and fast and preternaturally gifted, miles ahead of all the rest, loose and lazy with their talent. During the drills, I wait for Toph’s turn, and when it comes time for him to field a grounder or cover second for a 4-3-2,1 almost die from the pressure.
Should have had that one.
Good, good, good.
Oh, God, c’mon!
I say nothing, but it’s all I can do to avoid making noises. He catches well, can catch anything really—we’ve been working on that since he was four—but the hitting... why can’t the kid hit? A lighter bat? Choke up! Quick bat! Quick bat! Jesus Christ, that was served up like a fat fucking steak. Hit the ball. Hit that coconut, boy!
I was never much of a baseball player, but did pretend to know enough to land a job as a T-ball coach and sports camp director during half of my high school and college summers. When Toph was old enough, he attended, came in with me every day, gloating shyly in the celebrity born of being the brother of the camp director, as dashing as he was.
I watch, and the mothers watch. I do not know how to interact with the mothers. Am I them? They occasionally try to include me in a conversation, but it’s clear they don’t know what to make of me. I look over and smile when one of them makes a joke that is laughed at by all. They laugh, I chuckle—not too much, I don’t want to seem overeager, but enough to say “I hear you. I laugh with you. I share in the moment.” But when the chuckling is over I am still apart, something else, and no one is sure what I am. They don’t want to invest their time in the brother sent to pick up Toph while his mother cooks dinner or is stuck at work or in traffic. To them I’m a temp. A cousin maybe. The young boyfriend of a divorcee? They don’t care.
Fuck it. I don’t want to be friends with these women, anyway. Why would I care? I am not them. They are the old model and we are the new.
I watch Toph interact with the other kids, scanning, guessing, suspecting.
Why are those kids laughing?
What are they laughing at? Is it Toph’s hat? It’s too big, right?
Who are those little pricks? Yll break those little fuckers.
Oh.
Oh, it was that. Just that. Heh heh. Heh.
After practice, we walk home, down the road, Marin Road, a pure forty-five-degree monster. It’s almost impossible to walk it without looking ridiculous, but Toph has invented a walk that surmounts the problem—it’s a kind of groovy walk, with his legs bent extravagantly, his arms sort of swimming in front of him, a grabbing of air and sending it behind him in a way that makes him look, in the end, much more normal than the arm-flailing, sole-slapping awkwardness the road normally necessitates. It’s an extremely happening walk.
As we hit our street, Spruce, and the ground flattens out, I inquire, as gently as I possibly can, about his hitting, or lack thereof.
“So why do you suck so much at hitting?”
“I don’t know.”
“Maybe you need a lighter bat.”
“You think?”
“Yeah, maybe we’ll get a new bat.”
“Can we?”
“Yeah, we’ll look for a new bat or something.”
Then I push him into a bush.
We are still driving. We are going to the beach. While we drive, when there is not watershed rock and roll on the radio, watershed rock and roll conceived and executed by masters of modern music-making, we play word games. There must be noise, there must be music and games. No silence. We are playing the game where you have to come up with the names of baseball players, using the first letter of the last name to start the next first name.
“Jackie Robinson,” I say.
“Randy Johnson,” he says.
“Johnny Bench,” I say.
“Who?”
“Johnny Bench. Reds catcher.”
“Are you sure?”
“What do you mean?”
“I’ve never heard of him.”
“Johnny Bench?”
“Yeah.”
“So?”
“So maybe you’re making him up.”
Toph collects baseball cards. He can name the going price for every card he owns—thousands, if you count the collection he inherited from Bill. Still, though, he doesn’t know anything about anything. I stay cool, though he deserves to have his head knocked against the window. You should hear the sound that makes. It’s amazing, even he says so.
Johnny Bench? Johnny fucking Bench?
“Trust me,” I say. “Johnny Bench.”
We stop at a beach on the way. I stop at this beach because I have heard about the existence of beaches like these, and then, on the fat side of a wide bend, a few miles from Montara, there is this certain beach, this beach with a sign that says “Nude Beach.” I am suddenly reeling with curiosity. I pull over, jump out of the car—
“Is this it?” he asks.
“Maybe,” I say, lost, dizzy—
and almost run across the highway, to the entrance before pausing for Toph, and my thoughts, to catch up. Is this okay? I think this is okay. This is not okay. I know what to do, I know what is right. Is this right? This is fine. This is fine. Nude beach? Fine. Nude beach. Nude beach. We walk to the entrance. A bearded man, sitting on a stool with a gray metal box on his lap, wants ten dollars, each, to enter.
“Is he ten dollars, too?” I ask, indicating the eight-year-old boy next to me, wearing a Cal sweatshirt and a Cal baseball hat, worn backward.
“Yes,” the bearded man says.
I glance beyond the bearded man, down the cliff, trying to catch a glimpse of the beach below, trying to see if it’s worth it. Twenty dollars! For ten dollars there had better be some very impressive nude women down there—and not just life-drawing-class nude women. This is okay. This is educational. It’s natural. We’re in California! All is new! No rules! The future!
I’m almost convinced. I step over to the bearded man, out of Toph’s earshot, and try to get the lowdown.
“So like, are kids allowed down there?”
“Of course.”
“But, is it like... weird?”
“Weird? What about it would be weird?”
“You know, for a little kid? Is it too much?”
“Too much of what? Of the human body?” He says it in a way that’s meant to make me seem like the freak, he Mr. Natural and me some kind of clothes fascist.
“Never mind,” I say. Stupid beach—probably just a bunch of naked guys with beards, bony and pale.
We run back across the highway, back into the red Civic and keep driving. Past the surfers, through the eucalyptus forest before Half Moon Bay, birds swooping up and over then back, circling around us—they too, for us!—then the cliffs before Seaside—then flat for a little while, then a few more bends and can you see this motherfucking sky? I mean, have you fucking been to California?<
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We left Chicago in a blur. We sold most of the stuff in the house, the stuff we didn’t want to move with, had this busy little woman come in and price everything, to tell the appropriate people about it—she apparently has a mailing list of devout shoppers, enthusiasts of possessions of the recently dead—about the estate sale for 924 Waveland, and then we got out of the way. When they were done just about everything was gone, and we picked through the remains—some of Toph’s old He-Man dolls, some coffee mugs, random pieces of silverware. We packed up the things we had saved—quite a lot, actually, sixty boxes maybe—and the things that hadn’t sold, put them all on a truck and now all of it sits in our Spruce Street sublets low-slung garage. Bill kept Mom’s car, sold it, Beth sold Dad’s car and bought a Jeep, and I made the rest of the payments on the Civic that Dad and I had bought together, just before, so I could get home on the weekends.
In Berkeley we’re living with Beth, and her best friend Katie—also an orphan, both gone by the time she was twelve— and my girlfriend Kirsten, who always wanted to live in California and so came out, too. Between the five of us there was only one parent still living—Kirsten’s mother—and so at first we were smug about our independence; we orphans would surely re-create domestic life, from scratch, without precedent. It seemed like a great idea, all of us in the house together—just like college! like a commune! sharing the babysitting, the cleaning, the cooking! Big meals together, parties, joy!—for at least three or four days, after which it became obvious, for all the obvious reasons, that it was not at all a good idea. We are all vibrating with the stress of the sundry adjustments, new schools and jobs, and we all quickly begin to snip and snap and complain about whose newspapers are whose, who should know not to buy granular dishwasher detergent, doesn’t everyone know such things my God. Kirsten, with student loans to pay and little savings, is trying frantically to get a job, but has no car. And she won’t let me pay her portion of the rent—
“I can pay it, don’t worry about it.”
“I’m not letting you pay it.”
“The martyr rides again!”
even though I can pay it, she won’t allow things to be easy, even for the summer. So I drive her to the BART in the morning, on the way to taking Toph to camp, and together Kirsten and I twitch and jiggle with tension, looking for reasons to attack, explode, let it go, not knowing if we’ll be living together in the fall, if we’ll have jobs by the fall, if we’ll even still be in love in the fall. The house amplifies our problems, its alliances—Toph and I, Katie and Beth, Beth and Kirsten and Katie—and resulting skirmishes making the place claustrophic, even with the view, and generally putting a damper on the fun Toph and I are trying desperately to create.
For example, we soon discover that, because the floors of the house are wood, and the house sparsely furnished, there are at least two ideal runways for sock sliding. The best is the back-deck-to-stairway run (fig. 1), which allows, with only a modest running start, one to glide easily thirty feet, all the way to the stairs leading to the lower floor, the first half of which can be jumped, provided one is prepared to drop and shoulder-roll upon hitting the landing, which, if “stuck,” should be punctuated with a Mary Lou Retton arm-raise and back-arch. Yes! America!
Our best trick, though, is to pretend, for the benefit of the neighbors and who-ever’s around, that I’m beating Toph with a belt. This is how: with the back deck door open, we stand in the living room and then, with the belt buckled into a circle, I yank it quickly on either end, snapping it taut and making a sound not unlike that produced if I were striking Toph’s bare legs at full force. When it cracks, Toph squeals like a pig.
BELT: Whack!
toph: (Squeal!)
ME: How does that feel, kid?
toph: I’m sorry, I’m sorry! Ill never do it again!
ME: Yeah? You’ll never walk again!
BELT: Whack!
(Squeal), etc.
It’s great fun. We are attacking California, Toph and I, devouring what we can before the fall comes and hems us in, and so while Beth and Katie do whatever they do, and Kirsten does job interviews, Toph and I drive down to Telegraph and look at the weirdos. We walk around the campus searching for the Naked Guy, or tie-dye people, or Hare Krishnas, Jews for Jesus, for the topless women who walk around, daring people to complain, who troll for TV cameras and cops issuing unfair citations. We see no breasts, and never find the Naked Guy, but one day we do see the Naked Older Man, gray-bearded, chatting casually on a pay phone, naked but for flip-flops. We eat at Fat Slice, maybe drive down to the Berkeley Marina, and, at the park at the end of the jetty, green and hilly and right there in the middle of the Bay practically, we take out the bats and mitts, a football and a frisbee, always in the car, all of it, and we throw things and roll around. There are errands, groceries and bad haircuts to get, and then the slow, quiet nights, no TV in the house, and then bed, where we read, talk on his little bed—“Its weird, already I can hardly remember them,” he says one night, the words burning and unstoppable, and then has to sit through an hour of pictures and Remember? Remember? See, you remember, of course you do—and then Kirsten and I sleep in a room overlooking everything, the same view as the living room and porch above, with Beth next door and Toph sleeping— he sleeps like a dream; two, three minutes and he’s out—in a makeshift home for him we’ve made, with a curtain and a futon, out of the area between our bedrooms.
We get to Montara, the beach, and park above it, next to a van, behind which a blond man is taking off a rubber suit. We get our stuff and walk down, from above the cliff to below, on a set of rickety steps, the Pacific cheering heartily for us.
Look at us, lying parallel, he with his shirt on, embarrassed to take it off. This is us talking:
“Are you bored?” “Yeah,” he says. “Why?”
“Because you’re just lying there.” “Well, I’m tired.” “Well, I’m bored.”
“Why don’t you go down and build a sand castle?” “Where?”
“Down there, by the water.” “Why?”
“Because it’s fun.” “How much do I get?”
“What do you mean, how much do you get?” “Mom used to pay me.” “To build a sand castle?” “Yeah.”
I pause to think. I am slow. “Why?” “Because.” “Because why?” “I don’t know.”
“How much did she give you?” “A dollar.” “That’s crazy.” “Why?”
“Pay you to play in the sand? Forget it. You won’t play in the sand unless I pay you?”
“I don’t know. I might.”
The ocean is too cold, and the drop-off too steep, and the undertow too strong to allow for swimming. We are sitting, watching the water and foam run madly through our moats and tunnels. He is not the best swimmer, and the waves hit the shore hard, and I get a flash— I’m watching another Toph drowning, twenty feet out. He got pulled out, into the maw, the wave came in and scooped him and—that fucking undertow. I run and jump and swim like a miracle to get him—I was on a swim team! I can swim and dive, fast and strong!—but am too late—I go under again and again but it’s all gray, the sand churning, swirling, the water hazy, and then it’s too late—he’s been pulled hundreds of feet out by now... when I come up for air I can see his little arm, tan and thin, one last wave and... Gone! We should not swim here, ever—
“Hey.”
We can swim in pools—
“Hey.”
“What, what?”
“What’s the deal with your nipples?” he asks.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, they sort of stick out.”
I look him in the eye.
“Toph, I want to tell you something. I want to tell you about my nipples. I want to tell you about my nipples, and generally about the nipples of the men in our family. Because someday, son [I do this thing, and he does this thing, where I call him son and he calls me dad, when we are having funny father-son-type chats, mocking them in a way while also being secretly
, deeply queasy about using these terms], someday my nipples will be your nipples. Someday you too will have nipples that protrude unnaturally far from your chest, and which will harden at the slightest provocation, preventing you from wearing anything but the heaviest cotton T-shirts.”
“No way.”
“Yes, Toph,” I say, looking out to the ocean thoughtfully, seeing the future. “You will inherit these nipples, and you will inherit a scrawny, rib-showing frame that will not at all fill out until your early twenties, and puberty will hit you impossibly late, and soon the beautiful blond straight hair that you like so much, that you wear long and which helps you look like the young River Phoenix, this hair will thicken, harden, darken, and curl so tightly and wildly that when you wake up you will appear to have permed your hair three times and then ridden for six hours in a convertible. You will slowly grow ugly, with skin riddled with acne so persistent that on top of the general zittiness that will roughen your cheeks and chin, you will get red skin-globules— your dermatologist will call them ‘cysts’—that will every other week set up shop in the crevice above your nostril, and will be so large and so red that strangers at twenty yards will gasp, small children will point and cry—“
“No.”
“Yes.”
“No way. I’ll be different I bet.”
“Pray for it.”
It’s windy but when you are lying down, listening to the sand, it’s warm, warm, warm. Toph is sitting up, burying my feet.
There is so much to do. I try not to think yet about everything coming soon, all the things we need to do when school starts and all this becomes real, but one thing—that Toph must see a doctor, must get a physical—breaks through and now my head floods, fuck— I have to get a resume together, and we have to find a new place to live when the sublet ends, and how will Toph get to school if I get an early job? Will Beth pull her weight, will she be too busy, will we kill each other? How often will Bill come up from L.A.? How much should I/can I/will I burden Kirsten? Will she even be around? Will she mellow when she finds a job and a car? Should I lighten my hair? Does that whitening toothpaste really work? Toph needs health insurance. I need health insurance.