with bloody noses, that no harm was done. But Eli had found his place beneath the rest of us, and he scurried around with his head bowed, staring at his black shoes.
I tried to catch sight of his mother driving him to and from school, but they left early for school and apparently left late for home. Spring was a blink, just a suggestion of time, all shadow and no cast; it was the first season that I remember going faster than I expected, and the first time I realized that time actually moved in a certain direction, toward something that wasn’t just the piling up of days and weeks and school years, but a point that had its own weight. It was like the first time you realize, as a kid, that all the escalator steps aren’t collected in the basement. That spring I saw myself in junior high and high school and beyond, and I saw the kids before me and after me as fellow travelers, and like any whiff of mortality it was powerful and frightening. I’d like to say that I found in this season of epiphany the time to offer a quiet apology to Eli, but to be honest the days were made up of Presidential Fitness Tests and Smear the Queer and the accidental grazing of Marcia Donnely’s left boob, one of only two actual boobs in our class (Marcia Donnely’s right being the other). And then, one day, it was the last week of school and we cut off the brown grocery sacks that had covered our textbooks, and we used knives from the cafeteria to clean the gum off the bottoms of our desks, and we prepared for the last days of fifth grade with the awareness that life was beginning.
Every summer I took over a newspaper route for an older guy in our neighborhood, and this time I promised to let my brother Ben help me out. We started the last week of school; I got up at four-thirty and pedaled around with him pointing out the houses that took the paper and then sliding it into the rusted metal tubes and snazzy-looking new plastic boxes. It was almost six when we came riding back down Empire Road toward our house. We pedaled through a couple of backyards and came out at the RiverVu TrailerPark—the only accurate word of that title being Trailer, since there was no Vu of the River and this was certainly no Park . I rode past the trailer of the great, prematurely bearded quarterback Kenny Dale, his cherry GTO in the driveway behind his parents’ Mercury Sable. I stood on my bicycle pedals and tried to look into his window, trying to imagine the things he must do to cheerleaders in that little trailer.
And then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw Eli emerge from the last trailer on the street and begin walking down the strip of houses. I circled around and watched from a block away as he shuffled in that familiar walk, the clattering of his leg braces the only noise competing with the birds in the neighborhood.
When I got home, my mom had made pancakes for my little sisters. I can still see Mom at the counter in the kitchen, short and slender in one of my dad’s big gray sweatshirts, which covered her like a bulky dress, and a pair of fuzzy slippers, smelling like a catalog of Avon products, the smoke from her cigarette curling around the long hair piled atop her head. “Clark? I’m making the girls some pancakes.”
“No time.”
I ran past her, got my book bag and my Nerf football, and ran back into the kitchen, grabbing my brown sack lunch off the counter.
“What do you mean no time? There’s always time for breakfast.”
“Not today. I’m riding my bike to school.”
Finally, she turned. It’s funny. The small things I took for granted then torture me now in their simple perfection: a plate of pancakes, a hand on my shoulder, a look of deep concern. You have no idea when you’re so eager to escape your own house, your own life, your own childhood, of the sad truth that no one will ever care for you like that again.
“You can’t ride your bike, Clark. It’s three miles.”
“I can ride three miles.”
My dad came out in
I tried to catch sight of his mother driving him to and from school, but they left early for school and apparently left late for home. Spring was a blink, just a suggestion of time, all shadow and no cast; it was the first season that I remember going faster than I expected, and the first time I realized that time actually moved in a certain direction, toward something that wasn’t just the piling up of days and weeks and school years, but a point that had its own weight. It was like the first time you realize, as a kid, that all the escalator steps aren’t collected in the basement. That spring I saw myself in junior high and high school and beyond, and I saw the kids before me and after me as fellow travelers, and like any whiff of mortality it was powerful and frightening. I’d like to say that I found in this season of epiphany the time to offer a quiet apology to Eli, but to be honest the days were made up of Presidential Fitness Tests and Smear the Queer and the accidental grazing of Marcia Donnely’s left boob, one of only two actual boobs in our class (Marcia Donnely’s right being the other). And then, one day, it was the last week of school and we cut off the brown grocery sacks that had covered our textbooks, and we used knives from the cafeteria to clean the gum off the bottoms of our desks, and we prepared for the last days of fifth grade with the awareness that life was beginning.
Every summer I took over a newspaper route for an older guy in our neighborhood, and this time I promised to let my brother Ben help me out. We started the last week of school; I got up at four-thirty and pedaled around with him pointing out the houses that took the paper and then sliding it into the rusted metal tubes and snazzy-looking new plastic boxes. It was almost six when we came riding back down Empire Road toward our house. We pedaled through a couple of backyards and came out at the RiverVu TrailerPark—the only accurate word of that title being Trailer, since there was no Vu of the River and this was certainly no Park . I rode past the trailer of the great, prematurely bearded quarterback Kenny Dale, his cherry GTO in the driveway behind his parents’ Mercury Sable. I stood on my bicycle pedals and tried to look into his window, trying to imagine the things he must do to cheerleaders in that little trailer.
And then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw Eli emerge from the last trailer on the street and begin walking down the strip of houses. I circled around and watched from a block away as he shuffled in that familiar walk, the clattering of his leg braces the only noise competing with the birds in the neighborhood.
When I got home, my mom had made pancakes for my little sisters. I can still see Mom at the counter in the kitchen, short and slender in one of my dad’s big gray sweatshirts, which covered her like a bulky dress, and a pair of fuzzy slippers, smelling like a catalog of Avon products, the smoke from her cigarette curling around the long hair piled atop her head. “Clark? I’m making the girls some pancakes.”
“No time.”
I ran past her, got my book bag and my Nerf football, and ran back into the kitchen, grabbing my brown sack lunch off the counter.
“What do you mean no time? There’s always time for breakfast.”
“Not today. I’m riding my bike to school.”
Finally, she turned. It’s funny. The small things I took for granted then torture me now in their simple perfection: a plate of pancakes, a hand on my shoulder, a look of deep concern. You have no idea when you’re so eager to escape your own house, your own life, your own childhood, of the sad truth that no one will ever care for you like that again.
“You can’t ride your bike, Clark. It’s three miles.”
“I can ride three miles.”
My dad came out in
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