the register, gleaming and stuffed with cash, decided it was a sacred place, that I wouldn’t take anything, because I wanted to be able to return, and after the supermarket I knew how hard it was to go back once you crossed a line.
Within a few months I moved on to mysteries. I preferred Sherlock Holmes to Agatha Christie, because in his world even the tiniest bit of dust was a clue. I convinced a friend that the best way to spend our summer afternoons was to write our own. We collaborated on a story about a murder set in Scotland and Egypt, the two most exotic locales we could imagine. In a couple years I moved on to Vonnegut, and I convinced another friend, Warren, to collaborate on a science fiction novel, to which we added pages daily. By the time I was sixteen and my father wrote me for the first time and I learned that he called himself a writer, I was already on my way, though perhaps part of me latched on to the chance to outdo him.
The summer I bought Jekyll and Hyde a distant cousin I’d never seen before or since appeared at my grandmother’s with some other vague relatives one Sunday. Corey was a little older and had no fingers on his right hand, just little knobs where they should be. Not even a thumb. I knew not to stare, offered to take this cousin for a walk. I was a good kid. We circled the house, I glanced at his hand when he wasn’t looking, thought how hard it must be—how did he work a button, hold a spoon? Why didn’t he wear a glove? I didn’t mind walking with him, we wouldn’t run into anyone I knew, not on my grandmother’s lawn. Already I knew where to position myself in relation to those less fortunate—not to stare, not to treat them any differently, not to even mention what’s right there in front of us. I’m compassionate, kind, considerate, brave, somewhat clean—a walking, talking Boy Scout oath, whatever, fine by me, just as long as I’m not confused with the freak. Each year they lined us up in the elementary school cafeteria, to be measured and weighed, and though I’m chronically skinny at least I’m always average height, thank God for that. Between my mother’s rotating cast of boyfriends, and being nominally Protestant in an Irish Catholic stronghold, and the food stamps, and the frayed clothes, I’m already teetering painfully close to not fitting in, anywhere.
As we wandered my grandmother’s yard I showed him the hose, how you could hit the upper windows with its spray, I showed him the path into the woods, and how I shimmied up the gutter pipe to stake out the roof. This might have been a mistake, because I realized too late that he’d never be able to follow me. I led him to my grandmother’s pear tree, which she bought and planted herself just a few years earlier. I had helped dig the hole, held it upright while she tamped the dirt back down. A spindly thing, slow-growing, with just one small hard pear, the first, dangling from a branch. We were told to let this pear grow, my grandmother checked it every day. I told Corey how proud she was of her lone pear, and he stared at me straight and defiant, like he was angry with me for some ungodly inscrutable reason, he stared and reached his hand out to this pear, forcing me to look right at it, my mouth dropping open a little. Then he smiled and gripped it with his palm, pulled it free. He threw it into the street, then turned and walked back into the house.
turner’s special blend
Twice in the 1970s Scituate will be written up in Time magazine as the second most alcohol-consuming town, city or r.f.d. zone in the United States. A sidebar, no explanation, folded into a larger article on the scourge of sniffing glue or drunk driving. The first is some seaside Steinbeck hole in California no one’s ever heard of. In Scituate every other business in the small string of stores we call the Harbor is either a bar or a package store, “package” being puritan code for “liquor.” From an early age you cannot
Within a few months I moved on to mysteries. I preferred Sherlock Holmes to Agatha Christie, because in his world even the tiniest bit of dust was a clue. I convinced a friend that the best way to spend our summer afternoons was to write our own. We collaborated on a story about a murder set in Scotland and Egypt, the two most exotic locales we could imagine. In a couple years I moved on to Vonnegut, and I convinced another friend, Warren, to collaborate on a science fiction novel, to which we added pages daily. By the time I was sixteen and my father wrote me for the first time and I learned that he called himself a writer, I was already on my way, though perhaps part of me latched on to the chance to outdo him.
The summer I bought Jekyll and Hyde a distant cousin I’d never seen before or since appeared at my grandmother’s with some other vague relatives one Sunday. Corey was a little older and had no fingers on his right hand, just little knobs where they should be. Not even a thumb. I knew not to stare, offered to take this cousin for a walk. I was a good kid. We circled the house, I glanced at his hand when he wasn’t looking, thought how hard it must be—how did he work a button, hold a spoon? Why didn’t he wear a glove? I didn’t mind walking with him, we wouldn’t run into anyone I knew, not on my grandmother’s lawn. Already I knew where to position myself in relation to those less fortunate—not to stare, not to treat them any differently, not to even mention what’s right there in front of us. I’m compassionate, kind, considerate, brave, somewhat clean—a walking, talking Boy Scout oath, whatever, fine by me, just as long as I’m not confused with the freak. Each year they lined us up in the elementary school cafeteria, to be measured and weighed, and though I’m chronically skinny at least I’m always average height, thank God for that. Between my mother’s rotating cast of boyfriends, and being nominally Protestant in an Irish Catholic stronghold, and the food stamps, and the frayed clothes, I’m already teetering painfully close to not fitting in, anywhere.
As we wandered my grandmother’s yard I showed him the hose, how you could hit the upper windows with its spray, I showed him the path into the woods, and how I shimmied up the gutter pipe to stake out the roof. This might have been a mistake, because I realized too late that he’d never be able to follow me. I led him to my grandmother’s pear tree, which she bought and planted herself just a few years earlier. I had helped dig the hole, held it upright while she tamped the dirt back down. A spindly thing, slow-growing, with just one small hard pear, the first, dangling from a branch. We were told to let this pear grow, my grandmother checked it every day. I told Corey how proud she was of her lone pear, and he stared at me straight and defiant, like he was angry with me for some ungodly inscrutable reason, he stared and reached his hand out to this pear, forcing me to look right at it, my mouth dropping open a little. Then he smiled and gripped it with his palm, pulled it free. He threw it into the street, then turned and walked back into the house.
turner’s special blend
Twice in the 1970s Scituate will be written up in Time magazine as the second most alcohol-consuming town, city or r.f.d. zone in the United States. A sidebar, no explanation, folded into a larger article on the scourge of sniffing glue or drunk driving. The first is some seaside Steinbeck hole in California no one’s ever heard of. In Scituate every other business in the small string of stores we call the Harbor is either a bar or a package store, “package” being puritan code for “liquor.” From an early age you cannot
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