The Bigness of the World (28 page)

Harold didn’t know how to respond, for he thought of his name as who he was, a feature that could not be changed without altering
everything else. Still, he liked the earnest, conspiratorial way in which his aunt addressed him.

“What do your friends call you?” she asked. “Harry?”

He did not tell her that he had no friends. “No, I don’t really care for diminutives,” he said instead.

She laughed. “Well. Now I can certainly see why they chose Harold.”

He smiled shyly then and offered to make her iced tea.

“Groovy,” she said. “I like a man who can cook,” and when he explained that iced tea did not actually involve cooking, she laughed her throaty, pleasant laugh yet again.

Eventually, Harold understood that his mother called his aunt more frequently because she and his father argued more frequently, their arguments sometimes taking root right in front of him but over things so small that he did not understand how they had been able to make arguments out of them. Thanksgiving was a perfect example. As the turkey cooked, his parents sat together in the kitchen drinking wine and chatting, their faces growing flushed from the heat and the alcohol, and when everything was ready, his father seated his mother and then placed the turkey in front of her with a flourish.

“Le turkey, Madame,” he declared, pronouncing
turkey
as though it were French.

His mother giggled and picked up the carving knife. “Harold, what part would you like?” she asked.

“White meat, please.”

“I’ll give you breast meat,” his mother said, adding with a small chuckle, “God knows your father has no interest in breast.”

For the rest of the meal, Harold’s father spoke only to Harold, asking
him
for the gravy when it actually sat in front of his mother. His mother was also silent, and when the meal was nearly over, she dumped the last of the cranberries onto Harold’s plate even though all three of them knew that cranberries were his father’s favorite part
of Thanksgiving. Later, as Harold sat reading in his room, he heard his parents yelling, and he crept down the hallway and perched at the top of the stairs, letting their voices funnel up to him.

“You know
exactly
what I’m talking about,” his father shouted.

“Come on, Charles. Lighten up.” Harold heard a small catch in his mother’s voice, which meant she wanted to laugh. “He thought I was talking about the turkey breast.” She paused. “Which, of course, I was.”

There were five words that were forbidden in their household, words that, according to his father, were not only profane but aesthetically unappealing. Harold heard his father say one of these words to his mother, his voice becoming low and precise as it did when he was very angry. His mother did not reply, and a moment later, Harold heard his father open the front door and leave.

When his mother came to tuck him in, her eyes red from crying, he asked where his father had gone. “To the pool hall,” she said, which made her start crying again because this was an old joke between them. When his father occasionally disappeared after dinner, slipping out unannounced, Harold’s mother always said, “I guess he’s gone to the pool hall.” She had explained to Harold what a pool hall was, and they both laughed at the notion of his neat, serious father in such a place, there among men who smoked cigars and sweated and made bets with their hard-earned money.

“You have a lot of books,” Simon said after he had proclaimed Harold’s mother lustful and they had finished their sandwiches, and there seemed nothing left to do.

“Yes,” said Harold. He almost added that he was a “voracious reader,” but remembering what his father always said, that words were meant to be tools of communication but just as often drove wedges between people, he opted for triteness instead. “I love reading,” he mumbled.

“Have you read all of these books?” asked Simon with a shrug.

“Yes. Now, I mainly check them out of the library. The limit is three at a time, but Mr. Tesky lets me take five.” Mr. Tesky was his favorite librarian because, in making recommendations, he never relied on expressions like
the other boys
or
kids your age
.

“Yes,” replied Simon. “That’s because he’s a fag.”

Harold had no idea what
fag
meant, but he regretted terribly not using
voracious
. “Figure it out from context,” his mother always told him after he had bothered her one too many times to explain words. He considered the context and decided that
fag
had to do with being helpful.

“Yes,” he agreed. “He is.”

Simon laughed and threw a pillow at him. “You’re a fag also,” Simon said.

It turned out that
fag
meant to work really hard: “
TOIL
,” said his dictionary. Which made sense, for Mr. Tesky did work very hard. Of course, Harold normally would have noticed that this
fag
was a verb while Simon had used it as a noun, but Simon’s visit had left him feeling tired and unmoored, and so he overlooked this obvious distinction. He set the dictionary back on the shelf in the spot that it always occupied and surveyed his room, looking for something out of place, something to explain his uneasiness. Finally, he decided to calm himself by slipping into his kimono.

Harold had purchased the kimono that summer at a yard sale at which his mother had been convinced to stop only because there were books for sale. Overall, his parents did not approve of yard sales, for they felt that there was something
unsavory
about putting one’s personal belongings outside for strangers to see, and not just to see but to handle and even buy. Harold, however, liked wandering amidst carpets with dark, mysterious stains and mismatched cutlery and stacks of clothing that had presumably once fit the people selling them, people who seemed in no way embarrassed to be associated with these dingy socks and stretched-out waistbands.

The kimono, by contrast, was the most beautiful piece of clothing
he had ever seen, black with a white crane painted across the back, and his mother, who lent him the two dollars to purchase it, told him that it was from Japan and that in Japan everyone wore such things, and though he found this hard to believe, Mr. Tesky later showed him a book from his personal collection with pictures of Japanese people wearing kimonos as they walked in the streets and sat around drinking tea. Harold wore his kimono only at home, but he felt different when he slipped it on, more graceful and at ease, though whether this meant that he felt more himself or less, he could not say.

He stopped wearing the kimono quite abruptly when he overheard his father referring to it as his “dress,” though there had been issues before that: as he ate, the sleeves dragged across his food and became sullied with red spaghetti sauce and pork chop grease, and as he descended the stairs one night, he tripped on the hem, toppling down the last three steps and wrenching his ankle. For days afterwards, he worried that he had inherited his mother’s clumsiness, though she tended to fall only in public, usually on special occasions. On his first day of school this year, for example, she turned to wave at him and caught her foot where the tile became carpeting. She flew forward, upsetting an easel at which one of his classmates stood painting, and landed face down on the floor, her skirt hiked up along her thigh. Miss Jamison rushed to help, and his classmates gathered around her in awe, shocked and excited to see an adult splayed out on the floor. His mother always attended carefully to his cuts and fevers and upset stomachs, and he knew that he should go to her, but he did not because he could not bear being regarded as the boy whose mother fell. Instead, he stayed at his desk with the top up against the sight of her, arranging his books. When he got home that afternoon, his mother teased him about it so relentlessly that he knew he had hurt her deeply.

His mother knocked at his door and came in. If she was surprised
to see him wearing his kimono again, she did not say so. Instead, she got right to her point, which was that she felt he should invite Simon for a sleepover.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” said Harold.

“Why not?” asked his mother, ready, he knew, to tell him yet again that he would have more friends (using “more” as though he actually had some) once he learned not to be so hard on people. “He seemed like an affable fellow.”

“Yes,” agreed Harold, trying to think of a way to turn his mother against Simon without having to use the word “lustful.” “He is affable, but he’s also a Democrat.”

His mother sighed loudly and stood up. “I thought you’d had enough of that thing,” she said, meaning his kimono, and she went downstairs to make dinner.

Harold’s parents were Republicans. For Halloween, they had insisted that he go as the Gallup Poll, a costume requiring two people, one to be Jimmy Carter and the other, Gerald Ford. He wanted to be Carter because he liked the slow, buttery way that Carter spoke, but his parents had forbidden it, instead phoning the parents of a girl in his class whose father was his father’s subordinate at the bank. The girl, whose name was Molly, had been dropped off the afternoon before Halloween, and the two of them sat in his living room, where, with the help of his mother and several newspaper photos, they sketched the two candidates. He was surprised at how well the masks captured the two men — Carter’s sheepish smile and Ford’s large, bland forehead — and after cutting small slits for the eyes and stapling elastic bands to the sides, he and Molly slipped them on and practiced trotting around the living room side by side, pretending to jockey for position and calling out, “We’re the Gallup Poll.”

Later, after Molly had gone home, his mother told him that he needed to be sure to finish first, and so, as they paraded in front of the judges the next afternoon, he made a halfhearted surge at the
very end, nosing ahead of Jimmy Carter. After the prizes had been given, predictably, to a witch, a robot, and a farmer, Mr. Tesky came up to Harold and complimented him on his costume. “Do you follow politics?” Mr. Tesky asked, his Adam’s apple bobbling playfully. As usual, he wore corduroy pants with a belt so long that it actually made another half turn around his body. Harold wondered whether Mr. Tesky had once been fat, a man better suited for this belt, but he did not ask because he knew that it was impolite to ask questions about health. Actually, his parents included money, religion, and politics on this list as well, so Harold did not know how to respond to Mr. Tesky’s question.

“No,” he said finally. “I’m too young to follow politics.”

Mr. Tesky laughed and reached out as though to ruffle his hair, then seemed to think better of it and retracted his hand, thrusting it into his back pocket as though putting the gesture literally behind him.

At dinner, Harold’s father asked nothing about Simon’s visit, which Harold took as an indication that his mother had been sufficiently convinced of Simon’s unsuitability. Instead, the conversation centered on back-to-school night, which they would all three be attending the next evening. Harold did not understand why his parents required him to participate, but the one time that he had protested, explaining that none of his classmates would be going, his father berated him for his apathy. As his parents chewed their roast beef, Harold went through the list of his teachers again, making sure that they understood that Mrs. Olson taught science and Miss Olson, social studies, because his parents tended to mix up the two women, expecting Miss Olson to be young when, in fact, she was just a few years from retirement.

“You should also meet Mr. Tesky,” he said, and then because it was his habit to utilize new words immediately, he added, “He’s a fag.”

“Harold,” said his mother in her severe voice. “I don’t want to hear
you ever talking that way about people. That’s a terrible accusation.” His father said nothing.

Harold did not reply because he had found that when his mother became angry like this, it was best to remain silent and let the moment pass, even when he did not understand what had caused her outburst, for his confusion often provoked her more.

The next night, as his mother stood in his homeroom talking to a group of other mothers, his father announced, “I think I will have a talk with your Mr. Tesky. Perhaps you can escort me to the library, Harold.”

Mr. Tesky was on a ladder when they arrived, wearing his belt and a half, the tip of it sticking out at them from behind like a tongue. He did not seem to realize at first that they had come to talk to him, and so while they stood looking up at him, he continued to shelve books, sliding himself nervously along on his rolling ladder. When he finally came down and shook hands with Harold’s father, Harold saw that his collar was twisted inward on one side; it occurred to him that Mr. Tesky’s collars were always askew but that he had never thought to note it until now, now that he was viewing Mr. Tesky through his father’s eyes.

For nearly ten minutes, the two men discussed Harold and his reading habits, his father comporting himself as though he were gathering information on a new hire at the bank, revealing nothing about himself while asking questions that sought to lay bare gaps in Harold’s knowledge or abilities, weaknesses in his approach to reading. Then, shifting the conversation suddenly away from Harold, his father asked, “Say, what do you make of these speed-reading courses?”

“Speed-reading?” repeated Mr. Tesky.

“I’ve been doing some research,” said his father. “Apparently the Carters are big fans and so was Kennedy,” adding with a snort, “For what that’s worth,” as though speed-reading, like opinions on communism
or the economy, must be discussed along party lines. “I’m thinking about holding a seminar at the bank, maybe bringing in a specialist.”

Mr. Tesky sawed his index finger vigorously back and forth beneath his nose.

“Did you know that the average person reads just two words a second?” his father continued. “But with training, that can be increased to five, even seven. I’ve just been reading about the Wood Method. Ever heard of it? You move your hand across the page as you read, and apparently the motion catches the eye’s attention and stimulates it to work faster.” He opened a book and demonstrated, sweeping his hand across the page as though blessing it or driving out demons.