roll down the hill. I wasn’t ready for that. I tried to stop the front tire from turning by jamming my feet on the pedals. And I did stop it. But the decline was so steep, I started to skid down the hill anyway. This, I couldn’t stop. I looked to the bottom of the hill and saw the cars going by on the avenue. Holy shit. I started to pedal in order to stop the skid, but soon I couldn’t keep up with the speed of the wheel. I took my feet off the pedals and that’s when I understood the power of gravity. The wind got loud in my ears. I looked down. The pavement was a gray and black blur and the pedals were rotating as fast as pistons in a car engine. My eyes were tearing. From the wind, I think. And when I crossed the last driveway before the intersection I pulled that brake harder than I’d pulled anything in the past four years and sent myself into a spin of more than two complete revolutions before I stopped.
In my dizziness, I could see my mother running at me. The traffic light behind her turned red, and made her hair look like it was in flames. I thought the ride I just took was scary, but I didn’t know the true meaning of fear until I looked into her face. The only questions she had for me pertained directly to my sanity. “Are you crazy? You almost got yourself killed!” With one hand she held the Big Wheel off the ground and with the other hand hit me on my ass. The slaps came in conjunction with the words she emphasized. “HOW could you DO such a STUPID THING?” She dragged me into the backyard. “That’s it! You’re not riding this friggin’ thing ever again! You hear me? EVER!”
I sat on the walkway crying, as my mother went into the house and then returned with a rope. In pure horror, I watched her tie my Big Wheel to the fence that separated the houses. “And you’re never goin’ in the street, either. OK? Now get off the floor, clean yourself up and get in here and eat dinner!” Then she slammed the door.
My sister, who had been watching this whole scene from the patio, decided it was better to say nothing and slowly went in the house and sat at the kitchen table. I couldn’t stop crying. I looked over to my favorite toy. Not only had she tied it up, but she left it lying on its side. It looked like an injured animal about to die in captivity.
That night, we sat through the quietest dinner in our family’s history. There was no yelling about how much room the neighbors’ cars were taking up on the street or about how we needed to finish chewing before we spoke. Or about clogged gutters. There was no talk about how good the food was or if we wanted more. And there was no back-scratching afterward. When we finished, Catherine and I watched TV on the patio until our mother came outside and said, “It’s time to go to sleep.”
I lay in my bed for a long time listening to the adults coursing through the end of their night. Catherine knew I was still awake.
“I’m sorry I have to go to kindergarten,” she said.
“It’s OK.”
“I don’t wanna go.”
“You’ll have fun.”
“I don’t know.”
A LITTLE WHILE later, I woke up and saw a king flipping a gold coin in the air. He caught it and slapped it on his wrist like he was calling heads or tails. He pointed to the window. I went to it and looked down. There was Ray standing on the back patio holding a puppy. I turned back and caught the last moment of the king’s robe as he left the room and started down the stairs. My mother was asleep in her bed. I grabbed my blanket and went down the staircase. At the bottom, I turned left toward my grandparents’ room. Through their doorframe, they looked like a Dr. Seuss illustration—stick legs and two bulging stomachs under a cover. In the hall was a pair of shoes with nothing in them. In the kitchen, dinner dishes were on a drying rack, looking like they were about to move by themselves. The only background noise was the hum of the refrigerator.
I walked out the back door, onto the patio. There was no Ray, no king, no puppy. Just my Big Wheel still on its side. I went over and stood it upright. I lay down next to it, put my head on the seat and pulled my blanket over me. I was tired. I wanted to sleep. But I wanted something more. What I really wanted was an all-inclusive sleepover party. And when I shut my eyes, I saw everyone I wanted to invite. A picture came to me of my dad singing to me. My mother was giving me a bath and my grandfather was carving a turkey. My grandmother was dumping pasta in a colander. I saw my Cousin Dina on a swing and Vicky was trying to tie her shoe. Aunt Marie and Uncle Ernie were at their dinner table and Ray was driving in his Cadillac. Catherine was sleeping right beside me. Also, there was a swimming pool.
I don’t know how long I had been asleep. My body jumped when I woke up. I didn’t open my eyes. I could tell it was still dark. An occasional car drove down Central Park Avenue. It was summertime and it was quiet. The patio smelled of dampness. The pictures of my family were still appearing in me. I felt the plastic seat of my Big Wheel under my head. I kept my eyes closed, but knew exactly where I was.
The theory is this: The way in which we tried to get the attention of the first person we ever had a crush on is the way we continue to do it for the rest of our lives. However creative, desperate, blunt or devious our young tactics were, we don’t give them up.
My tactic? Pretended I was a superhero. Pretended I had enough superpowers to rescue people from the ordinary world, that I came from a place better than earth, where superhuman things are a way of life. A faraway place, where magical powers are realized and saviors are born. Who wouldn’t fall in love with someone from that world?
So, that’s what I tried to convince the first girl I had a crush on—that I was different than the rest. That I had powers no one she knew would ever have.
When I was twenty-six I told my girlfriend about this theory—that as adults we still try to win lovers with our childhood tactics—and what my tactics were. “Yeah,” she said, “that is what you do, isn’t it?”
But I don’t want to talk about that. I want to talk about the year I was in the second grade. The year there were regular kickball games up the block and a crazy guy going around New York killing people. I want to talk about the first girl who let me be a superhero.
EVERY NIGHT IN front of the Gallaghers’ house, a kickball game would start up. A group of neighborhood kids gathered there after dinner and, in place of doing homework, played ball. The kickball season began in early spring and ended when we started having to run the bases with our hands in our pockets. My sister Catherine and I walked the five doors down to the Gallaghers’ and played until dusk, when our mother would call us home.
Mr. and Mrs. Gallagher didn’t run the kind of house in which the neighborhood kids were invited inside all the time. We didn’t even know what the inside of their house looked like—never got closer than the curb. Mr. Gallagher would only pop his head out the front door every so often to tell us to keep it down because his wife wasn’t feeling well and she was trying to sleep. I don’t ever remember actually seeing Mrs. Gallagher. But the manhole cover in front of their driveway was the best natural home plate on the block.
Rory Gallagher had long brown hair. Of the five Gallagher kids, she was second youngest. She stood with hands on her waist and her bony hip kicked out to one side. She also had a habit—which she didn’t pick up from her older brothers—of spitting. With a low growl she would collect the saliva in her throat, then hock it onto the street, two feet from where you were standing. It got so we didn’t mind. The only time Rory ever caught grief for this was when she spit on the street during the kickball games. If someone fielded a ball that had rolled over one of Rory’s saliva patches, they wouldn’t try to get the runner
