So they both died. But only one of them deserved it.
When Mark took the book out, he usually turned to this page. He stared. He read the text again and looked again at the picture. The rain clouds were dark and mottled. The weeds were bright green. The Allosaurus had evil yellow eyes. You couldn’t see her eyes. Sometimes it made Mark cry. “But soon the water rolls peacefully over the hidden forms. Slowly a layer of shifting sand blankets killer and victim alike . . . And so the years roll on.” This made Mark sadder. Did her pain matter? She was there, and then not there. The years rolled on. Her suffering, like 1965, would never come back.
That winter his parents gave him and Susan a talk about fire safety. If they smelled smoke or saw a fire, they shouldn’t stop to put on clothes or get anything, anything, they should run straight out of the house.
Mark nodded. He had earned their trust. They grilled Susan, whom they suspected of inattention and disobedience. Susan gave Dad the runaround about what if she was in the bathtub, she wasn’t going outside bare naked. Susan was close to getting popped. Mark, meanwhile, was surprised to find himself making a mental reservation. He even seemed to be feeling a sly pleasure from the thought that he knew something his parents didn’t know, and that the reward of earning their trust was that they would never suspect he would harbor such a thought. Yes, of course he would run straight out of the house—except for a lightning-fast secret diversion to the toy closet, where (he knew exactly where it was, he always put it in the same place) he would grab the Golden Book of Dinosaurs and carry her out of the fire.
• • •
Was the luxury convertible that he’d driven on the Magic Skyway a Chevy or a Ford? Dad said Fords had better bodies, but Chevys had better engines, and that was why he always bought a Chevy.
“It was neither, dumbass,” Susan said. “It was a Lincoln.”
• • •
In second grade, the superintendent’s son came in talking about a Vulcan nerve pinch and started tossing other kids around. He spent the day trying to draw what he said was the coolest spaceship ever, but couldn’t get it right, so he got frustrated and scary.
Later, Mark learned that Star Trek came on at 8:30 on Thursdays, which was past his bedtime. One night he woke up with a stomachache and came downstairs and found his father watching the show. He was allowed to lie on the couch for a few minutes. A man wearing those futuristic clothes like pajamas was running through the woods and then a piece of metal like a TV antenna popped up from behind a rock. Mark thought, “This is the kind of show grown-ups watch,” thus absolving himself from having to spend any time worrying about it, and fell asleep.
• • •
Mom brought Mark to an optometrist. He picked nice frames with dark plastic on the top and clear gray plastic on the bottom, because they looked like what scientists on TV wore. The optometrist called them “classic.”
He thought glasses would bring everything closer, but instead they made things slightly smaller and clearer. It was astonishing. He wondered how it worked.
He started taking piano lessons. He practiced on his mother’s Cable & Sons upright.
There were eighty-eight keys on the piano, and there were also eighty-eight constellations, which was pretty interesting. Mom had wanted to be an astronomer, but she also wanted children. “I made the right choice,” she said. He practiced in the dining room while Mom cooked in the kitchen. “That’s a wrong note!” she called out, whenever necessary.
• • •
“I loved summer camp,” Mom said, and showed him the brochure. Up until this moment, Mark had assumed he would also love summer camp, but when he looked at the pictures he saw gangs of smirking, confident boys holding balls of various kinds, and he got a dreadful sinking suspicion that camp would be like two straight weeks of gym class.
He was eight. Mom sewed his name tag into all his clothes. She gave him a white cotton laundry bag with a drawstring. She bought him a forest-green sleeping bag with ducks and hunters printed on the flannel inside.
He went.
He had never before experienced the fear and misery of the next two weeks. The kids were bullies. The counselors were inattentive and unjust. One of the latter, refusing to listen to an elementary fact regarding the cause of a disagreement, grabbed the back of Mark’s neck and pinched it so hard that Mark was sore for two days afterward. One of the meanest boys could hawk up and send flying gobs of spit so voluminous and solid they looked like milkweed pods. Mark dreamed long afterward of those floating, saggy, soggy hammocks of mean-spirited spit.
• • •
When Mark was ten, his father bought a TV that fit on the kitchen table. Now they had two black-and-whites. Dad scoffed at color TVs, with their red and green ghosts. “They haven’t figured out the technology yet,” he said, chuckling.
The new TV had a second dial that you turned to reach strange new channels called UHF, which stood for Ultra High Frequency. It turned out
