sat at his desk and folded his hands. A neat pile of books lay on the corner of the desk: Geometry and Physical Science and Animal Farm. They had the overused look of books given to students in the lower depths of the high school, which was where George had always resided. The design of the room seemed a deliberate attempt to wipe clean the slate of George’s previous life, to make of him a more ambitious boy, a scholar. George drew one hand up, to pat his pomaded hair, and a shadow of trouble crossed his features.
George’s room was on the corner of the house, so he had two windows. He got up and went to the one that faced the side yard, the woods. His hands were in his pockets, and because of the light over his desk and the fact that there were no curtains yet, I could see the reflection of his face in the window, and the way he was looking at me.
He was short, shorter than Bobby, and less good-looking. Bobby was the handsome one, with a face like Fabian’s and a tall body in which he moved like a swimmer.
“So, welcome to our new lives, Luca,” he said.
He turned to me, and his face made a beckoning motion before he lowered his brow. He was thinking something over, whether or not to make some request. I said nothing, offered nothing. It was all too new, this sort of power shift between us.
“How old are you, Luca?”
I said eleven, soon twelve.
He sat down on the edge of the bed and touched his hair again. He looked at his school books, sullen and mistrusting, then reached under his bed. He pulled out a fat paperback and flipped through it. He chuckled. “This is good,” he said. “This is very good.”
He tossed it toward me. The throw didn’t quite make it. I picked it up. It was a purple book with a picture of a Victorian gentleman on the cover, a man with a long mustache.
“You go back downstairs, and the next time Lucy tries to treat you like a baby, you read her some of that, okay? Read it out loud.”
I knew that was not a good idea, but I nodded, because his face on the bed now wore a cruel little smile.
“You take it, and read it anyway. If you have any questions, you ask me.”
That was all. He dismissed me. And the next thing was, I was sitting alone in John’s living room.
I hadn’t known that was what I wanted to do, but I was drawn back there, rather than to the party itself. I sat and absorbed it all. The room was dark. The only sound was the bubbles sent up by the filter of the fish tank. I’d come to sit here for a reason, but I didn’t know exactly what that was. Our world was changing. I understood now why my parents had looked as they’d looked at home, preparing for this, charged and expectant. I sat there, and I tried to grasp it.
For the first time, I was able to see beyond my father’s vision of this room, to what John was trying to do here. We were princes now, Bobby and George and me, but how did you go about being a prince? What did it mean for your daily life? I knew this: the book in my lap was something to be ashamed of. I knew vaguely but, still, enough what would be inside it: sex and more sex. George had given it to me because, for him, sex was easier than other things—easier for George than the books on his desk, or John’s new insistence that he be a “college man,” which we’d begun to hear for the first time.
A sound came from outside, but my reverie was deep enough that I did not get up to look until the sound had been going on a long time. At the base of John’s driveway, my father was lighting a cigarette and with his free hand throwing rocks. That is, he stopped to light the cigarette and then he threw the rocks. He looked calm and unperturbed, just as if he had stepped out to have a smoke, and it was only in the motion of his arm as he threw that I knew something was wrong. He was throwing the rocks very hard, very far, and with great concentration. He was trying to hit our house, across the way.
After a while, he stopped. He disappeared, walked into the dark. I could see the lit ash end of his cigarette and then nothing of him, but I suspected he had gone over to our house and was inspecting it, testing the floorboards and the beams the way he did, humming, all the while, one of the songs with which he consoled himself. “Teach Me Tonight.” “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore.” I watched, and I held the book George had given me, and at that moment, though I didn’t know why, I wanted to fling the book across the room, to mimic my father’s gesture with the rocks.
After another little while, John came out in search of him. I saw John stop at the end of his driveway. He looked to both sides, exaggeratedly, like a man in a cartoon, and like the man in the cartoon, I suspected he would choose the wrong direction. I almost shouted, from the window, to set him straight. But he chose right. When he brought my father back, ten or so minutes later, it may have been me, reading into the scene, but John had his arm around my father’s shoulders, and I saw in those shoulders an immense resistance, as though John were leading him back toward a place he had decided, in the last ten minutes, he really didn’t want to go.
Like everything else, that image disappeared, covered over by another, and another. I was in the seventh grade, and I made my good marks. Luca Carcera, beloved of the teachers. In the winter there were lakes, frozen over for skating, and I had friends. Sometimes we stayed late, skating; the sky took on, around the departed sun, a shade of deep yellow that exists in the world only when you are twelve, and disappears after. My father arrived to pick us up and stood outside the car, bundled up. “Nobody drowned, huh?” he shouted. “Nobody fell in?”
Sometimes he brought his hockey stick and came down to the ice to show us how it was done. He’d played left wing at BC and he had wonderful speed and when he turned on the ice he managed a terrific little jumping movement. I would never be as good as he was, none of us would. “Your father,” they said, the boys who were my friends, breathless and in awe.
Afterward, he patted himself and found the pack of Pall Malls in his coat pocket and smoked one. Smoke came out of his mouth, and the smoke our breath made in the cold seemed a pure imitation. The car smelled of cigarettes and, once or twice, of the presence of someone else, a body that had recently been there. It was a poor-smelling, weathery body, whosever it had been, someone who did not dress well or have the personal habits of my father, and we covered it, my friends and I, packed in with our skates. It went away. I looked out the window and saw the crust of the snow and something that flashed across my mind went away. To entertain us, my father was singing.
In the evenings, we drove to Natick, to Framingham, to visit furniture showrooms, to move among the great empty sofas and easy chairs. Or else my parents huddled in the kitchen, planning the house. “Do you want this, Dorothy, or do you want that?” my father would ask, as they studied furniture catalogs. He was only slightly impatient, even indulgent at times. Sometimes they would retreat into Italian, tender when they did that, or else angry. In the adjacent dining room, I sat writing a play about Cortés, “The Conquest of Mexico,” my assignment for school. In the scene where Cortés faces Montezuma, I had him shout, “Do you want this, or do you want that?” Meanwhile, my parents, in English, moved toward agreements: a sectional in off-white, a beige easy chair, a round kitchen table with teak chairs.
In April, we moved into the new house. The day had a ceremonial quality, measured and carefully paced, like a presentation scene in the movies, the birth of Ramses. My father held my mother’s elbow at the threshold, as if they were about to step into a lake and he was attentive to the chill she might feel. With his hands in his pockets, in his best camel’s hair coat, he inspected the rooms and nodded. The rooms were large and full of light; on the walls, the textured grass cloth shone. Before us lay a new life, shimmering and empty as the model kitchens and dining rooms in the furniture showrooms. Moving trucks had preceded us, and the movers had made mistakes. A couple of chairs, placed in the wrong room, had to
