“That’s a strange name.”
“Is it?”
“But that’s OK.”
Susan was the one who pointed out that his town had hardly any homes in it. He had two different log cabins and one modern house that Susan called a fifties tract house (that was where the dentist now lived), and the rest were train stations, lumber mills, granaries, warehouses, and factories. He had five train stations (he loved the long platforms with the variously distributed barrels and trolleys) and three big factories (he loved the complicated chutes and stacks and conveyor belts). “But that’s OK,” Susan said. “It’s kind of cool. It looks like a Siberian labor camp.” She sometimes even drove one of the cars from one place to another. She put two cars in front of a factory with a space between them, then took the Rolls-Royce (“The cigar-chomping factory owner,” she explained) and parallel parked it, with a confident flourish, ending with it beautifully snug against the imaginary curb. Mark worried a little at first, but he was never able to detect mockery in anything she said. After a few minutes she would disappear, and Mark would go back to executing left and right turns, speeding and getting stopped by the police car. Whatever cars Susan had touched, he always left where they were.
• • •
How had Dad painted so perfectly, so bubble- and streak-free, so gleaming and uniformly smoothly red the 1962 Ford Thunderbird that sat on the shelf above the desk in his basement study?
How did his mother cut Christmas wrapping paper with one steady thrust of the scissors, not even opening and closing them, simply parting the paper against the sharp inner edge, making a line as straight as a yardstick?
How did she wrap Christmas boxes so that, on the ends, when she folded the last perfect triangle against the other perfect triangles, she didn’t get that little wave of extra wrapping paper at the top that (after Mark applied the last piece of tape on his box) deflated and lifted the paper off the box a little, making the edges frustratingly uncrisp?
How could Dad tell that Mark had missed a patch in the lawn when the uncut grass was barely a quarter inch longer than the cut grass? “Stand in the sunlight. See? No, bend down. Come on, don’t be dumb, look along the row, surely you see the shadow.”
Why did they have to argue about how to hang the toilet paper? Mom: “It’s supposed to hang off the inside, so when you pull the paper toward you, you tear it off against the roll.”
Dad, pretending patience (but you could tell he was angry because the outside corners of his eyelids were turned down): “If you hang it that way, the flowers are upside down.”
“Why should I give a fuck which way the flowers go?”
“I’m only pointing out that the manufacturer, who might be expected to know, designs it to hang with the flap forward—”
“Why should I give a flying fuck what the fucking manufacturer thinks?”
• • •
Clementi was charming, Mom said, but Kuhlau was a no-talent bum. The last good composer was Brahms. Scarlatti’s music was fascinatingly different from Bach’s, you could hear it from the first measure. Schubert had beautiful melodies, but he worked them to death. Schumann was underrated.
The Hardy Boys books were insipid pieces of shit, Mom said. Mark read Enid Blyton, whose books Mom brought home from the library. Blyton was famous in England, but none of Mark’s Hardy Boy–worshipping friends at school had ever heard of her.
Mark drank Ovaltine, while his friends drank Nestlé’s. Nestlé’s was sweeter, so of course they liked it.
Drake’s was first, with Yodels and Ring Dings. They were covered in dark chocolate and were good. Hostess shamelessly ripped Drake’s off with Ho Hos and Ding Dongs, which looked exactly like Yodels and Ring Dings except they were covered in pandering milk chocolate. When Mark’s friends brought out their Ho Hos at lunch (no one else seemed to eat Yodels anymore) he couldn’t resist telling them the disgraceful corporate history.
All Mark’s friends’ families had multicolored lights on their Christmas trees, which looked gaudy and cheap. The Fuller Christmas tree had only blue lights, and only blue and silver metallic balls, and the old heavy lead icicles that hung down properly but you couldn’t buy them anymore because of stupid safety concerns, and white paper snowflakes made beautifully and variously by Mark’s mother (how did she six-part fold the paper so exactly, how did she cut with the X-Acto knife so neatly?) and ironed by her to perfect planar flatness (which, when Mark said it once, Dad said was a redundancy). When you turned off the room lights and plugged in the tree, it glowed ghostly blue, like a tree from the fourth dimension, signaling to you with its finger-spread arms.
The best candy bar any company had ever made was Goldenberg’s Peanut Chews, but you could never find them in the Boston area, and as far as Mom knew, maybe they weren’t even made anymore, which would be typical.
• • •
For fun, Mark assigned a constellation to each key on the piano, going up alphabetically, so that Andromeda was the lowest note, and Vulpecula the highest. “Golden” notes—a term he made up—were the ones where the note name corresponded to the first letter of the constellation name. Only the white keys counted for this test, because if you allowed, say, G sharp, then why couldn’t you also call it A flat, and once you opened that can of worms then why couldn’t F be E sharp any time it suited your purposes, and for that matter why couldn’t G be A double flat, and so on?
There were only three golden notes on the piano: the lowest A, Andromeda; the C two octaves below middle C, Capricorn; and the C above
