Solos (8 page)

The three of them sat amicably around the kitchen table eating roast pork and chutney and fig tart and apricot-almond ice cream and the chocolates, and Marcus decided to think more kindly of his father.

It wasn't easy.

Hart was more of a disciplinarian than Summer, who let Marcus do pretty much what he wanted. Hart made him take out the garbage, and go to his room when he talked back, and eat his goddamned beets or he couldn't have dessert. Marcus could live with that. He figured out early on that his father's disciplinary efforts had nothing to do with Marcus's behavior but were only about a need to dominate him, and so he knew that they would be erratic, contradictory, and not to be taken seriously. As for his father's remoteness and sloppiness and boozing, they didn't bother him either. He was almost glad Hart was such a slob, because cleaning up after him gave Summer something to do.

But what got to him was the way Hart hated everything. His commonest facial expression was a sneer—his lip curled up on one side to expose a yellow canine.

Hart approved of a few artists, and he liked pro football, old movies, and pre-1960 jazz. But he had only scorn for a long and eclectic list of items, including pop music, opera, junk food, what he called “yuppie food,” Indian food, Chinese food, baseball, lawyers, doctors, accountants, banks, the checkout clerks at the supermarket, supermarkets, the neighbors, and his own apparently immense and underachieving family back in Wisconsin, whom he brought into the conversation only to denounce as “bourgeois cretins.” He hated politicians, scientists, academics, and critics. He claimed that most writers were illiterate, journalists were corrupt toadies, and activists were phonies, no matter what cause they worked for. He seemed to get the most fun out of sneering at the TV shows Summer liked, providing a running commentary about people's clothes, hair, and weight problems. When he said, “They should shoot people who look like Roseanne and put them out of their misery,” his malevolent glee was like a bad smell, as though he had farted instead of sneering.

Not that Hart's objections to TV kept him from watching. He never missed a Jets game, and he was also partial to late-night talk shows and black-and-white movies. While Hart was in residence, Marcus didn't like watching TV, even the game shows. In the evenings, instead of curling up on the couch against Summer's friendly bulk, Marcus would leave the two of them in front of the set—Summer with popcorn, Hart with a tumbler of Jack Daniels—and go upstairs with his dog to do crossword puzzles or page through a phone book.

Regularity, number sequences, certain words and combinations of letters, puns, anagrams, lipograms, pangrams, palindromes, word games, crosswords, the rhythms of poetry—these things gave Marcus a deep sense of peace and contentment that he achieved otherwise only in the company of animals. With people, he tended to be friendly and curious, even nosy, but people often disappointed him, and he became glum and silent very quickly when they turned out to be boring or uncommunicative. With his dog, or at the dairy farm down the road where he went to watch the cows, or in the woods surrounded by invisible wildlife—
wildlife
, how he loved that word—then he was happy, and himself, and free. Once Hart arrived, all this became more important to him than ever.

The year he was ten, Marcus was preoccupied with three things in particular: crossword puzzles, phone books, and his puppy, Phoebe. Crossword puzzles were a fairly recent discovery. With a quarter in his pocket he walked down the road every morning to the Honesdale CVS to buy the
New York Times
. He noticed right away that the puzzles got harder as the week went on—they didn't get at all interesting until Thursday. He still did the Monday through Wednesday puzzles, but on those days speed was the important factor. His record was ten minutes for a Tuesday puzzle; it was so easy his pen could hardly keep up with his brain. He had a small stack of Friday and Saturday puzzles that were unfinished, and that he would go back to from time to time. If he plugged away long enough, he always finished them.

As for the Sunday puzzle, it was basically just a big Thursday one, and he could usually polish it off with his breakfast.

The phone books went way back to when, bored one rainy day while visiting his grandmother, he opened the Rochester directory and discovered there were fourteen Meads in it, and only one was his grandmother. Then he found eighty-seven Smiths and almost as many Diazes and Rodriguezes and Cohens and Chins. He was entranced. Now he had the Manhattan phone book. It was a revelation, a brave new world. Incredibly, it contained over a thousand pages of names. Five pages of Smiths! Four of Rodriguezes! People named Leszek Zymerloshaj and Ping Me Ming and Lillian Lux and Sable Brown! He liked chanting the names of all fifty-one Meads: “Amber, Beth, Bruce, Charles, Charles, Chatwin, Elaine, Eugene,” he would say to his dog. “Gerard, John, John, John, John B., John F., Jonathan, Karen, Kevin,” and Phoebe would look at him with bright eyes, wagging tail, and single-minded attention.

He acquired Phoebe when the Estradas' dog Connie had puppies the previous June. He had missed seeing them being born. When Jessica Estrada stood on her front porch that morning screeching to the world, “Hey everybody! Come on over! The puppies are coming,” Summer was in the shower, and Marcus was still in bed with the covers over his head, memorizing a poem by Robert Louis Stevenson as a present for her birthday. “Windy Nights,” it was called—inadequately, Marcus thought—and it contained the lines:

By, on the highway, low and loud
,

By at the gallop goes he
.

By at the gallop he goes, and then

By he comes back at the gallop again
.

Marcus mumbled the lines over and over to himself, enjoying the way they began to sound exactly like what they were describing. (He didn't yet know the word
onomatopoeia
, though when he learned there was an actual Greek word for what the poem did, he was thrilled.) After he recited the poem and Summer had applauded and hugged him, they went over to see the puppies, four of them: two mostly black, one mostly white, one spotted.

Summer was immediately entranced, and flopped down on the floor beside their basket, crooning to Connie at eye level about the beauty of her babies. Jessica Estrada told Marcus excitedly about the birth, how they came out slimy and had to be cleaned up by Connie, who not only licked off all the crud but ate a big pile of what looked like guts, something called the afterbirth, that also came out of her thing. Marcus was glad he'd been under the covers when it happened.

All the puppies but the white one, which the Estradas named Queso, were available for adoption, and when Summer decided she had to have one, Marcus was thunderstruck. He had always longed for a pet, but assumed they were too odd to have one. But Summer said a puppy born on her twenty-ninth birthday would be the most perfect present she could give herself, and before she could change her mind, Marcus made a case for the spotted black-and-white, floppy-eared female. Summer agreed immediately. She wanted to name the puppy Gemini, after her sign, but Marcus persuaded her in favor of Phoebe, the name of the imaginary sister he invented years ago. He loved it that
Phoebe
was pronounced nothing like the way it looked. So different from most names, which were perfectly straightforward. “It's like a magic word, it's as if Marcus was pronounced Magoo or something like that,” he explained to Summer, and she chuckled and ruffled his hair and gave in.

One thing he liked about Phoebe (one thing of many) was that if you ever did anything so crazy as to shave off her hair and sort it into two piles, one black and one white, the piles would be the same size. Not that she was symmetrical. Just that, if you studied her closely, her allotment of black and white fur, however randomly scattered across her compact puppy body, seemed equal. This he noticed as soon as he picked her out of Connie's litter. He also liked that Phoebe enjoyed hearing him recite names from the phone book or—even more—poetry.

By at the gallop he goes, and then

By he comes back at the gallop again
.

When Marcus recited, Phoebe would gaze at him raptly, and when he paused, she always gave the little bark that, otherwise, she used only when she was dancing around the kitchen waiting for him to shake kibble into her bowl. Marcus deduced that poetry pleased Phoebe the way food did, and that she understood it in her own way. He grew to love Phoebe more than he loved anyone else, maybe even his mother, a thought that caused him some guilt. And he bonded with Phoebe as he never had with a human being.

Not that he had bonded with anyone very often.

He did have one important friend for an entire summer when he was almost nine, a boy named Donnie Ryan. Donnie lived near the bakery, and they met when their mothers were in the same short-lived organic-gardening-and-nature-worship group. They liked to ride their bikes all over Honesdale, ending up at the little park between Ninth and Tenth to sit on the bench in front of the Civil War monument. There they'd make up limericks and knock-knock jokes, anagrams and palindromes. Once Donnie came up with “Dennis sinned,” which Marcus refined into “Dennis, I sinned.” Their favorite game they called simply the
word-wore-fore-fare-fame-game
, and they called each other
Mar-bar-bat-but-bus-cus
and
Don-doe-die-nie
.

They also liked to hang around Donnie's house playing a computer game called Numerabilis that involved arranging numbers in sequences in order to destroy the entire planet, country by country. Numerabilis was very difficult. Donnie was two years older than Marcus, and the sequences that led to world destruction came somewhat easier to him, so when one hot day in July Marcus destroyed, in rapid succession, Australia, New Zealand, and most of the islands in the Indonesian archipelago, he screamed so loudly Mrs. Ryan dashed upstairs in terror, ready to call 911.

At the end of that summer, Donnie's family moved to Jeffersonville. It was only twenty miles away, across the river in New York State, but the friendship was essentially over. Donnie and his mother did come to visit once, during Christmas vacation, but it was a wet, snowy day and, without bikes and Numerabilis, the boys couldn't find much to say or do. Marcus got upset when Donnie insisted he had made up a brilliant new palindrome (“Go hang a salami, I'm a lasagna hog”), even though Marcus had heard it on TV two days before. They ended up spending the afternoon combing halfheartedly through Marcus's collection of phone books looking for odd names, a pastime that fascinated Marcus but bored Donnie, who at his new school had become interested in MTV, the different makes of cars, and girls.

Marcus missed Donnie, but Phoebe soon became indispensable to him, a friend who never let him down and whose main interest was always the same: Marcus. Phoebe also kept him home. Since he was seven or eight, on warm summer days Marcus had taken to disappearing. There was a field behind the house that was pink and white with clover and daisies all summer, and behind it a woods that went on and on until it joined up with a state forest somewhere near Route 191. Marcus would pack a book and a notebook into his Nelson School backpack, along with a sweatshirt and heavy socks and a bottle of water and whatever he could find in the kitchen—crackers, a box of cereal, once a bag of frozen peas—and he would walk across the field, go deep into the woods, and sit quietly under a tree reading or figuring things out in a notebook. He'd watch as the little creatures who lived there gradually returned, realizing he was no threat to their turf. Once, a squirrel had actually run right over his leg. Another time a flicker perched in a tree a few feet above him and pecked out a rhythm. One evening at dusk, a solemn-eyed raccoon family stared at him through the brush for a long minute before they turned and vanished. His ambition was to see a fox.

When it got too dark to read he would put on his warm shirt and socks, pee into the bushes, and go to sleep, using the backpack for a pillow. He liked sleeping in the rustling silence of the woods, and waking up in the morning, not moving, opening his eyes slowly, bit by bit, in hopes of finding himself surrounded by animals. This never happened, though the birds were always noisy above him, and several times he saw deer, delicate and unexpectedly small, who would stand motionless until some subtle movement or shift in the wind would mobilize them and, white tails flashing, they would disappear into the trees. It was in the woods with a flashlight that, amazed at the beauty of the
w
's and
l
's, and the truth of what they said, he memorized the lines:

What would the world be, once bereft

Of wet and wildness? Let them be left
,

O let them be left, wildness and wet;

Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet
.

Summer had stopped calling Marcus's habit “running away,” and also stopped getting Big Rafe or the volunteer fire department to come and find him. She took it for granted that Marcus would come back.

Phoebe didn't like the woods. She liked the big, open field, and would run through the clover, away from Marcus and then back, leaping on him joyfully. But once they entered the woods, she would whine and look over her shoulder and want to go home, like a banished child in a fairy tale. Eventually, she'd start barking, and a barking dog meant his disappearing days were over.
She's only a puppy
, he told himself,
she'll be braver when she gets older and bigger
.

Marcus wasn't going to school that year, so come September, he was looking forward to spending time at home with his books and charts and puzzles and games. The Nelson School for Gifted Children, for which Grandma Mead paid the tuition, hadn't worked out. After two months, the headmaster explained to Summer that Marcus was certainly gifted but not in ways the school was equipped to deal with, and suggested home-schooling. Summer, who spent almost three years at Oswego State Teachers' College as an early education major before she dropped out, petitioned the Board of Education and got permission to teach Marcus at home, which meant he was left on his own to do whatever he liked while Summer baked pies and did her big, swooping dances on the lawn. An arithmetic tutor came on Saturday mornings, but after a while she stopped showing up. It didn't seem to matter.