hug him and kiss him on the top of the head, give him little tokens of affection—flowers or maybe a box of clementines. Of course, they all wanted him as a friend. Twice the universe had arranged itself into a great instrument of death and bore down on him, but how did he feel about it? Lucky. Not just for having survived his ordeals, but for the
ordeals themselves.
“They taught me who I am,” he said. “They gave me a calling that makes me happy every day. For that I feel like the most fortunate man alive.”
He made me think of fairy tales, of those creatures who swoop in and save you at the last minute, who become your closest, dearest friends, and then, once your problem is solved, vanish. Just like that. So Nancy got worse and worse; the picture darkened every day. One evening I revealed that she’d thrown a steaming iron at my head. The next I told Gay about how I’d woken up in the middle of the night not long ago to find her standing in the doorway of my bedroom, holding her cuticle scissors and just staring at me. Nancy became a bogeywoman hiding in my curtains, grinning at me from behind the clothes hanging in the closet.
“You have to end it once and for all, L.J.,” Gay would say. “You don’t need someone who doesn’t love you. Abuse isn’t love.” Or “L.J., I want you to call Nancy tonight—no, right now, and tell her it’s over. Tell her good-bye. Period.” And then Gay and I would head to my room and I’d take a deep breath and call my own extension and tell the busy signal that I had too much respect for myself to go on with it anymore.
Sure enough, though, that night or the next, Nancy would call and tell me that she loved me, that things would be different, and I would usher her right back into my life.
Out of every thousand children who came to the Home Wrecker, nine hundred and ninety-nine were simply out to have fun—to bounce and flip around inside—but there was always that one with a different motive: to try to pop the house. Like I said, this kind of child was rare; they appeared once a week at most. Some of them were what you’d expect: teenagers with shaved heads or colorful, weapon-like hair. They went at the house’s rubber walls with penknives or box cutters, nothing that could do much damage. The really dangerous customers were of a different sort altogether. These were children with fury in them, real fury. The first one I encountered was a young boy, ten or eleven, with neatly parted blond hair and skin red and scaly with sunburn. He wore slacks and a tie and carried his folded jacket under his arm like a book. As he handed me his ticket, I noticed something sad in his face, a sort of trembling despair around the mouth. Eventually I’d come to watch for exactly this kind of thing, but at the time I just waved him toward the entrance. He offered a quiet thank-you and then vanished inside. I paid little attention at first. I watched the go-carts race around the track. I heard a girl scream at someone for stealing her golf ball and decided that, later that day, I would tell Gay about the time Nancy had hit a golf ball at me inside our apartment and punched a hole in the kitchen wall.
Suddenly the front wall of the house dented out farther than I’d ever seen it stretched—the cables holding up the house vibrated—then it ricocheted back into place. A few moments passed, and then something barreled into the wall again, hitting the rubber so hard that it whitened up like fist knuckles at the point of impact, before springing backward. I walked over to the door and looked through.
The boy stood with his back pressed against the far wall, sweat running down his neck, his mouth hanging open. His tie lay on the floor. He stared at the front wall for a moment longer, braced himself, and then ran toward it, his head down, his piggish arms pumping. He hit the wall with everything he had, hurled himself so hard that when it rebounded he was thrown backward through the
ordeals themselves.
“They taught me who I am,” he said. “They gave me a calling that makes me happy every day. For that I feel like the most fortunate man alive.”
He made me think of fairy tales, of those creatures who swoop in and save you at the last minute, who become your closest, dearest friends, and then, once your problem is solved, vanish. Just like that. So Nancy got worse and worse; the picture darkened every day. One evening I revealed that she’d thrown a steaming iron at my head. The next I told Gay about how I’d woken up in the middle of the night not long ago to find her standing in the doorway of my bedroom, holding her cuticle scissors and just staring at me. Nancy became a bogeywoman hiding in my curtains, grinning at me from behind the clothes hanging in the closet.
“You have to end it once and for all, L.J.,” Gay would say. “You don’t need someone who doesn’t love you. Abuse isn’t love.” Or “L.J., I want you to call Nancy tonight—no, right now, and tell her it’s over. Tell her good-bye. Period.” And then Gay and I would head to my room and I’d take a deep breath and call my own extension and tell the busy signal that I had too much respect for myself to go on with it anymore.
Sure enough, though, that night or the next, Nancy would call and tell me that she loved me, that things would be different, and I would usher her right back into my life.
Out of every thousand children who came to the Home Wrecker, nine hundred and ninety-nine were simply out to have fun—to bounce and flip around inside—but there was always that one with a different motive: to try to pop the house. Like I said, this kind of child was rare; they appeared once a week at most. Some of them were what you’d expect: teenagers with shaved heads or colorful, weapon-like hair. They went at the house’s rubber walls with penknives or box cutters, nothing that could do much damage. The really dangerous customers were of a different sort altogether. These were children with fury in them, real fury. The first one I encountered was a young boy, ten or eleven, with neatly parted blond hair and skin red and scaly with sunburn. He wore slacks and a tie and carried his folded jacket under his arm like a book. As he handed me his ticket, I noticed something sad in his face, a sort of trembling despair around the mouth. Eventually I’d come to watch for exactly this kind of thing, but at the time I just waved him toward the entrance. He offered a quiet thank-you and then vanished inside. I paid little attention at first. I watched the go-carts race around the track. I heard a girl scream at someone for stealing her golf ball and decided that, later that day, I would tell Gay about the time Nancy had hit a golf ball at me inside our apartment and punched a hole in the kitchen wall.
Suddenly the front wall of the house dented out farther than I’d ever seen it stretched—the cables holding up the house vibrated—then it ricocheted back into place. A few moments passed, and then something barreled into the wall again, hitting the rubber so hard that it whitened up like fist knuckles at the point of impact, before springing backward. I walked over to the door and looked through.
The boy stood with his back pressed against the far wall, sweat running down his neck, his mouth hanging open. His tie lay on the floor. He stared at the front wall for a moment longer, braced himself, and then ran toward it, his head down, his piggish arms pumping. He hit the wall with everything he had, hurled himself so hard that when it rebounded he was thrown backward through the
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