are stories of madness and stories of humor. There are philosophical musings and cruel twists of fate. There are man-eating plants, and even a little sympathy for the devil.
Come, then, and look at things from a new perspective. See the world through inhuman eyes.
Join me in
THE AWKWARD AGE
by David Liss
PETE ALWAYS BELIEVED that he and Roberta had done everything they could do, but they’d been doing everything they could for so long that the urgency had long since slipped away, leaving nothing behind but familiarity. It was one of those situations that looked pretty much awful from the outside but was just everyday life to those inside.
So it was a surprise more confusing than pleasant when the phone rang one weekday night and Pete found himself talking to a woman with one of those congenial San Antonio accents that bespoke social fluidity and comfortable wealth. “Is this Neil’s dad? Hi. This is Mason’s mom.” Which is to say,
Back to their phone conversation. Pete knew of no child named Mason, so the call caught him off guard. Mason’s mother, Cindy, whom Pete immediately recognized from her voice as a particular kind of San Antonio woman — a blond, ponytailed, lacquered — wanted to invite Neil to sleep over with Mason on Friday night. There were some calls across the house, some quick checking of schedules, and the thing was arranged. Just like that. Not until it was all over did Pete cajole Neil away from his computer long enough to answer some rudimentary questions about Mason, who was, by definition, remarkable simply for being Neil’s friend.
It was not Pete’s fault that he had no idea how to communicate with his son. Not really. On his best day, Neil was impossible to talk to, and this conversation turned out to be even more difficult than most. Neil had been a withdrawn kid when they’d lived in San Diego, and Pete had hoped their move to San Antonio two years ago would give him a chance to open up, to reinvent his life, but it hadn’t. He remained the same. Quiet without being moody. Withdrawn without being sullen. Alone without being lonely.
What little attention Neil had for his father evaporated the minute my name was mentioned, and he instantly retreated to the far reaches of his bed, tucked his receding chin into his too-large T-shirt, and mostly nodded yes or shook his head no or shrugged that he didn’t know. Pete — who was tall, broad in the shoulders, fit from a regular and moderately punishing gym routine — felt like a menacing ogre, and he couldn’t find it within himself to press on with the interrogation. He finally opted for a strategic retreat rather than continue to embarrass his son or do anything that might somehow endanger the sleepover.
Roberta, the lady of the house, made her own foray into Neil Land, but emerged with no more success. “I didn’t want him to feel so uncomfortable that he’d cancel,” she said later that night as they lay in bed. She was reading a mystery that she’d read a jillion times before. Roberta loved to reread books. Some of her favorites she’d read twenty times or more, which Pete would have considered less absurd if she were reading Proust or Joyce, but these were books by Janet Evanovich or John Grisham, books that hardly warranted a single skim, let alone dozens of attentive reads. Some years ago Pete had found this habit endearing, but now he thought it silly, even embarrassing.
“It’s weird,” Pete said. He was leafing through the
“You think this is a pre-gay sleepover?” asked Roberta.
Pete set down his magazine. “I’m saying it’s odd. I mean, I don’t care if he’s gay. I’d celebrate him being gay.”
“Like with a coming-out party?” Roberta asked. “Our neighbors would love that.”
“At least he would be enthusiastic about something. I just want him to be who he is instead of …” But Pete did not finish the sentence, because the only possible way to finish it was
Neil always been that way; even as a baby he’d been detached, uninterested, unnaturally calm. Pete and Roberta had done all the right things, gone to all the right doctors, had all the right tests. The results were always the same. There was nothing wrong with Neil. He had no developmental issues; he was nowhere on the autism scale. He was intelligent and responsive, but he didn’t care for people. That was who he had always been.
“You should simply enjoy the fact that he has a friend,” Roberta told him.
A few minutes later, when she turned out her light, Pete vaguely considered rolling over toward Roberta, who remained very attractive for a woman of forty-seven — pretty, slim, the gray in her hair sexy in a Disney villainess kind of way — but he didn’t know if he exactly wanted to have sex. The last three or four — yes, it was exactly four — times he’d made advances, Roberta had rejected him, and he didn’t know if he was up for the emotional trauma of five in a row. He might be awake half the night, pondering this rejection, wondering what it meant for their eighteen-year-old marriage. Alternatively, she might be interested, and he wasn’t entirely sure that would be a good thing either. In theory sex seemed like an excellent idea, but even at its most rushed it was a time-consuming business, and it was already after midnight. He had work to finish in the morning. Did he want to have sex, or did he want to have
It turned out that Roberta could not take Neil over to my house on Friday night. She was the program director of an oldies radio station, and a crisis had exploded across station management with shocking urgency. The station’s popular morning DJ announced he’d received a lucrative offer from a station in Baltimore, and Roberta had to attend an emergency meeting about how to confront this offer. Pete, who telecom-muted as a software engineer for the database company he’d been with in San Diego, had the flexible schedule, and he was the one who picked up all the parenting slack. On the way to my house, Neil slouched in the front seat, playing with the satellite radio, settling on some kind of shrill dirge-like music that left Pete feeling both anxious and depressed.
“What’s this Mason like?” Pete attempted.
Neil shrugged and then attempted to retract his mass of curly brown hair into his chest cavity. “Okay, I guess.”
“Yeah? What do you two like to do together?”
“I don’t know. Nothing.”
At a stop sign, Pete took a moment to look at his slight, pale, gaunt specter of a son. “Is he also into computer games?”
“Who?” asked Neil with complete sincerity.
“Who do you think?” Pete sighed with frustration. “Mason.”
Neil didn’t respond, but his silence was not of the furtive or guilty kind, and Neil was already drifting off into the blank space he so much preferred to conversation. Pete decided to let the matter go.
Mason’s family, which is to say my family, lived in one of those massive old Alamo Heights houses on one of those winding old streets near the dam. It was the kind of house, inhabited by the kind of people, that made Pete feel small and insignificant and destined to be an outsider in San Antonio. Here was land money, oil money, cattle money. Here were people who surrounded themselves with uniformed Mexicans and felt no discomfort in wielding their complete authority over them, comfortable giving out orders in their competent Spanish. They were the sort of people who, when they heard Pete was a software engineer, would say, “I think that’s great!” as if to announce that they were okay with Pete’s curious little career. They were accepting of his meaningless toil. They were willing to put a happy face on his inexplicable lack of riches. Mason’s family’s immodest weal made any interest in Neil even more inexplicable. Pete steadied his nerve as he pulled into our circular driveway, and Neil grabbed his bag
