Street View
The original word, I might point out, was Googol. I remember that distinctly from my favorite childhood book. The Answer Book. By Mary Elting, and if not that, surely its sequel, Answers and More Answers. I Googled the book a while back to see which; sadly, both books seem lost to prehistory, defined here as prior to 1990. But the lack of the internet in my youth covers my tracks, even as it now works to haunt me.
The Answer Book was like a paper version of Google, if Google were limited to three hundred questions you didn’t get to choose but were assured that “children asked most.” How is glass made? What happened to the dinosaurs? What makes a rocket go?
When you finished that book there was a sense of completeness, but also the sense of all that was out there beyond one’s view. What would the 301st question have been? In my rural childhood, when I closed that book, all that was left was the long expanses of sorghum that stretched out to the hot sky’s edges.
“Googol” was the largest named numeral. A numeral one, followed by one hundred zeroes. Numbers like that seemed stupendous back then, but now barely make a dent. I feel a life in which, as I age, I have multiples of personas. The flow of information is overwhelming, and I found that the night I began to Google my possibly sad journey here. But circa 1970, The Answer Book was all I had, a meager meal in the end, staving off a ravenous appetite. The irony I find now is that for my own students, for whom facts and information lie boundlessly before them, they seem not to want to open the covers.
I grew up in Arkansas. The other night, I sat in my study in Cambridge and typed in the address of that first house, a faded bungalow shouldered onto Highway 65; on the screen of my laptop, rising like a fever dream from Google Street View, there it was. That shoebox of my misery. I could see them all, instantly: my mother, dropped ankles and rubbery skin, fretting on that low porch; my grandmother, wheezing in her housecoat; my father, shirtless, the billow of stink off his breath.
I worry that Street View might defeat my memory; I click the digital chevrons at the bottom of the screen, and the picture slides, and I am again gliding by that squat house, collapsing of its own humid cladding. I’m gliding as I did on that secondhand bike, spray-painted red, the underinflated tires thumping on the hot ribbon of Route 65—what my father called “The Road to Damascus,” although the flow of northbound traffic indicated it was mostly “from.” I don’t remember sweating, but I must have, all the time, in that heat. I was ten.
Sometimes, then, I don’t know how I got here. I rarely speak of who I once was, here in the rarified life. I am married to a woman who sits me down for a “serious talk” and says such things as, “I feel I need to be living a more textured existence.” She cannot imagine the serious talks at that kitchen table in the house on Route 65, as poverty and alcoholism and despair closed in on my people. Then she looks at me looking at her, and accuses me of not understanding.
I wear all the right clothes now. The Oxford shirts and buttery loafers, the pressed chinos. After dinner I drink The Famous Grouse, on the rocks, from a crystal tumbler. I live in just the right place: I sit in my house on a leafy street, brick-sidewalked street (walking distance from the Yard), a street on which birds seemed to have been shipped in to sing their morning tunes.
So different than the machine-thrumming summer buzz of Arkansan grasshoppers. I had a drawl then; I speak now in the canned-soup vernacular of all the places I’ve been—not enough spice to make it interesting, not so little as to not be adequate to most.
My father would be ashamed of me.
But he died too early. Dropped dead in the rows in ’72. On Google Street View, I find the next sad place, the apartment house in Little Rock where my mother and grandmother and I then lived on food stamps and church doles. Out there on Geyer Street, I discover, that house still stands, but barely: What was likely built to shelter a single family had then become diced into tiny compartments for unfortunates such as ourselves. Now, in my computer’s image, that house stands beaten and boarded, the low chain-link fence collapsed and the scraggly trees in front as untrimmed as a drunk’s beard.
But there, in the city, our fourth-hand television could get a signal, and the transformation began in small increments. In that small airless living room, I began to mimic those television voices, whispering those accentless sentences as holy mantras. I wanted to talk just like the Brady Bunch did. I wanted to talk like the Partridge Family. My mother would sit in her chair looking at me, saying nothing at all.
School was where I spoke that language loudly. My classmates would ask me where I was from. My teachers saw my hunger, and fed me; when, on my computer, I look at that boarded window to the right of the front door, I see beyond it my younger self, sprawled on the floor with pages, my limited facts and allotment of equations.
Could I have been my happiest then? Now, looking at my iPad in my dawn kitchen, with its Italian marble tiles and its massive culinary island, I look again at that boarded window on my MacBook and wonder. It was just myself, my mother and my grandmother. We endured those hot summers with only the rattling fan. My sweat coursed onto the books in that midday heat. My mother did find a way to get me the books, and I realize I never thanked her. At sunset, she went walking, alone, to get her air. She did so every night, night after night, coming home long after dark. One night she walked home early, with a man.
“This is Herbert,” she said.
“No,” is what I said.
Herb was a widower who had a house up on East Sixth Street. He was older, with two grown daughters; I think his only sin was loneliness, although I punished him for far worse, with my silence and derision. He spoke in that slow ramble, and when I had to speak to him, I responded in kind with my clipped new voices, my Transatlantic lilt. He was kind, although I’d have never admitted it then; it’s harder for me to look at that house (which I never once referred to as “my house,” always “Herb’s house”) on Street View, although even now it looks very well kept. The two cars parked on the lawn seem functional, the yard itself is green and trimmed and only burnt toward the curb. I suspect that some Herb progeny yet occupy that little place, which stands painted and clean among less-reputable neighbors. It could have been a haven. But I was already plotting my escape.
I didn’t know what I wanted to do; I didn’t know exactly who I wanted to be, but I sure knew who I didn’t want to be. I explained as much in my college applications. It is the true remaining flaw on my permanent record of life (easily Googled now, to be sure, with various wiki entries, faculty profiles, and speaker bios) that I spring not from the Ivy League but from a less portentous place. But I recall the campus with happy memories. The day I got the letter and the pledge of scholarship at Bethany College, I knew this was the essential pivot of the plan. I can MapQuest the exact distance, door-to-door from Herb’s to Bethany: 519 miles. A substantial journey, by any measure.
At Bethany, they were stout Lutherans (How many Saturdays I spent cheering on our football team, “The Terrible Swedes”? I recall exactly our cheers from the grandstands: “Kor Igonem! Kor Igonem! Tjo! Tjo! Tjo!”).
Regrettably, Google Street View has not much come to Lindsborg, Kansas. I refresh periodically in hopes of a more ground-level view, hope that camera-crowned Google car has finally breached its borders. But the blue line vaults straight up Kansas 4, through town, headed toward
