We did not tell our father of our true ambitions. Let him think we wanted what he wanted for us: good grades at school, the admiration of the neighbors, marriage, children. Hattie would find a nice husband. I would find a nice wife. Eventually I would become Sharp, of Sharp and Son’s, and my own son would assume my old role, and so it would pass on for centuries.
By the time I was eleven I was sent to the front of the store after school one afternoon a week to apprentice with Ed Dubuque, my father’s right-hand man. Ed insisted that his name was real, that his father had been French-Canadian, but there was a rumor around town that he’d been brought up a ward of the state, in an orphanage that named its charges after the duller-sounding Iowa towns — Davenport, Bettendorf, Solon — names that made the orphans sound like solid citizens or gamblers. (Oh, to be named Oskaloosa, or What Cheer, or Cedar Falls!) Poor Ed Dubuque did seem orphanish, abandoned and busy, and he looked like a puppet: weak chinned, spindle nosed, with blond hair that stood upright. He even moved like a marionette, as though his center of gravity was somewhere around his shoulders: his hands floated down to pat children on the head, and when he was startled — several times a day — he jumped straight in the air, knees bent. At slow times he stood behind the counter, his head swaying. I loved him. “Master Sharp,” he always called me. I couldn’t tell whether he was kidding or not.
“Watch Ed,” my father directed, and I did. I could have watched Ed Dubuque for hours. He was a careful, sweet guy who knew all the customers by name, including, it seemed, those he’d never met before. Maybe he’d memorized the census. Sometimes, when he asked a man for his pant size, the customer would look suddenly abashed, as though Ed had asked his grandmother’s maiden name: he didn’t know, God help him; if only he’d paid better attention. And Ed would shake his head deferentially—No, of course, too much in this life to keep track of—and get his tape measure. He gently encircled a customer’s waist and then offered a pair of pants; he knelt at a customer’s feet to pin the cuffs, his face turned up. How’s this?
And so I let both Hattie and Pop plan my future: the wood floor of a stage, the wood floor of Sharp’s Gents’. Upon one set of boards or another, I was destined to tap out my days.
100 MPH
When I was twelve, I came down with a sore throat and slight fever, and Annie promptly sent me to my room, where she bundled me up in bed. She blamed the store, which, in catering to railroad men, invited sicknesses from as far away as Philadelphia. To Annie’s mind, a hangnail was as bad as malaria. The diseases that had killed our invisible and unspoken-of dead siblings, after all, had started as coughs so slight they could have been mistaken for sighs, and so she prescribed bed rest and quarantine for everything, believing that germs couldn’t possibly muscle their way through a bedroom door. On this day, she tucked the quilt beneath my mattress so tightly I might as well have been tied at the stake. Then she went to Sharp’s Gents’ for her bookkeeping duties.
I couldn’t pull my arms out from under the covers to read, which I wasn’t allowed to do anyhow: according to Annie, even the funny pages were too heavy for an invalid to lift. That left sleeping and thinking. I tried to combine the two by hypnotizing myself with strange vivid thoughts (here I am floating down the Raccoon River in a giant felt hat; here I am like my Biblical namesake, being lifted from the river by a princess) in the hopes that I could influence my dreams. That sometimes worked when I had a fever.
I dreamt I was in bed; I dreamt I couldn’t move; then all of a sudden I was in bed, I couldn’t move, and I looked at the window and saw a face. Slowly it resolved into Hattie, who pushed up the sash and stepped into the room.
“Shhh.” She was always shushing me.
I tried to sit up while Hattie closed the window. Finally I had to box my way out of my cocoon. “Were you outside?” I said stupidly. “Did you climb the tree to get up here?”
She was wearing a green and pink silk dress that looked like part of one of my fever dreams. The belt around her hips had come undone, and she tied it. “I went out my window. How do you feel?”
“Why did you go out the window?” I asked. The bedroom she shared with Rose was all the way over on the other side of the house.
She sat on the bed, near my feet. Annie would have been furious: Hattie might as well have guzzled a glass of my spit. I slept in an iron sleigh bed, a terrible piece of furniture that under normal circumstances discouraged loitering: you’d need dozens of pillows to make leaning on the curved headboard tolerable. The footboard was just as bad. Hattie lay the wrong way around and set her feet on my pillow. “I was up on the roof,” she said. “You can see everything from up there.”
A vague petty feeling sunk into my neck, and at the moment I believed it was jealousy: behind my back, while I was at the store, Hattie was working on some act I’d never be a part of. Rooftop walking. I was terrified of heights. I lay down so I couldn’t see her face. All these years later, I picture myself — yanking the pillow out from under her feet and throwing it into her face at the end of the bed — and I think maybe I had a premonition, though of what I’m not sure. Maybe that’s all jealousy is, the ability to look into someone’s future or past and see your own absence.
“You’ll get caught,” I told her.
She slipped the thrown pillow under her head. She didn’t have to warn me not to tell anyone; she knew I never would. “Next time you can come with me.”
That won me over, though we both knew I got nervous standing on a chair. “Aren’t you scared?” I asked. I stretched one leg out so I could stick my foot in her armpit.
“Stop that,” she said idly, but allowed it. “If I stood up, I might be scared. Mostly I just sit.”
“Why?” I shifted my foot to her neck. I was twelve, and as determined as a dentist to find the spot that would cause her to flinch. She just tucked her chin down on my toes, and considered the question.
“The first time,” she said, and already I was amazed: more than once, then? “I wondered how much I could see.”
I could feel her voice buzz on my hot toes. The sock seemed to conduct the sensation all the way to my ankle. “And?”
“A lot. Next time I’ll show you.”
I shrugged, though she couldn’t see that.
“I’ll show you how not to fall,” said Hattie, as though not-falling was a piece of information she’d picked up.
“Annie would faint,” I said.
“So we won’t invite her.”
Our town would look like a map from up there, Des Moines like Canada, except east. Maybe off in the corner there’d be a compass; I had an idea they were actual things, municipal constructions that told you where north was. Here’s city hall, here’s the high school, here’s the municipal compass, a contraption like a metal merry-go-round.
On the roof, said Hattie, the view was mostly trees. You could see a little bit of Fifth Street, three blocks away. Not Sharp and Son’s Gents’ Furnishings — well, maybe one brick or two, among the nearer leaves. She could see the river, though, and the railroad tracks which, I now decided, were made of the same stuff as my dreamt-up north-pointing dials, except they didn’t tell you where to go, they just went there.