("How far is the horizon?"
"Eighteen miles at sea level," I answer rapidly. "Or only fourteen. I forget which."
"Why sea level?"
"I don't know. Maybe if you're up higher you can see farther.")
He puzzles over things like that well in advance (although not in these words, which are mine. He is only nine and lacks my vocabulary. Where was I when I was nine? Isolated among friends in elementary school too, where it was mandatory that I see a dentist twice a year to have my teeth fixed and have my head examined once or twice a year by a nurse right in the classroom, along with all the other kids, whites, Blacks, Jews, Italians, for nits, without any of us ever being told what nits were, although intonations signaled they were bad. That was a test I always passed. I don't know how I would have survived if I had ever failed. Once a girl peed in her seat in the classroom during a geography test and everyone knew it. I don't know how she survived. I don't think I could have ever survived if I had ever peed in my seat in the classroom during a geography test).
When my boy puzzles over things in advance, he tends to puzzle over things that perplex or torment him. (He almost never sees anything good in store for him. He has wishes; he never sees them coming true, even though he knows I promise and give him just about everything he asks for and everything else I think he wants and should have. When he does chance to think about something pleasant that is likely to happen to him, his reveries turn negative: he begins grieving it won't. He loses it before he even has it. He is like our salesmen, and me, wired by experience to expect, and long for, the worst — just to have it over with.) They pollute his summers for him. (The early part of each summer is marred for him by the need to acclimate himself to the surroundings of whatever beach or country house we have decided to rent that year. He won't go away to camp, and neither will my daughter ever go again, although they don't enjoy being with us. We never know what to do with Derek. It is always so embarrassing to hide him; and equally embarrassing to disclose him. The latter part of the summer is ruined for him by the approaching fall. Sometimes, to my chagrin as well as his, the cares of early summer and late summer overlap, so that if one set subsides for a while, the other is present already, gnawing at his peace of mind. Sometimes he pisses me off, and I begin to worry about everything too, including the feelings of enmity toward him that start fermenting inside me. I'm afraid I am beginning to dislike him.)
I know (and am annoyed) that weeks before the end of summer he begins fretting despondently about all the trials he knows are lying in wait for him: the schoolwork, the accomplishments expected of him in gym (he welcomes running and dodging games, at which he is swift, nimble, and foxy), the new teachers, the old teachers, the principal, the assistant principal, the shop teacher, and the science teacher (he has always been leery of shop teachers and science teachers. Perhaps because they are men), the music teacher (will this one also require him to stand up in turn and sing solo a few notes in order to determine into which section of the chorus to classify him for those times when they have to perform at the weekly school assemblies?), the student monitors from grades higher than his own (boys bigger and stronger than himself with license to order him about, and older, taller girls with badges and arm bands of authority and with embryonic breasts starting to swell forward toward him mysteriously and threateningly. I remember how it was when I was small), and the boys and girls familiar to him from the preceding school year who will not be in his class again. He laments the loss of children he knows, boys and girls, even those he does not like, who move away into different communities or are transferred by their parents into private schools (more and more of us seem to be transferring our children into private schools, which are expensive and not much good, and then transferring them out again into other private schools that are not much better. We don't like the heads of these private schools. More and more things seem to be slipping into a state of dissolution, and soon there will be nothing left. No more newspapers, magazines, or department stores. No more movie houses. Just discount stores and drugs. More and more of us, I think — not just me — really don't care what happens to our children, as long as it doesn't happen to them too soon) or the one or two who drowned or got hit by cars during the summer (the incidence of accidents suffered each year by children we know corresponds with portentous accuracy to the incidence of accidents suffered by adults I know in the company. Martha in our department is going crazy), and those others who, as a consequence of inexorable and unfathomable processes in operation in offices downstairs (adults toiling assiduously with records of living children that are dead already on sheets and cards in folders and cabinets) have been separated from him (like our tonsils and our baby teeth) and scattered about into different classrooms. He hates changing from teachers who have been kind to him.
("What are you worrying about?" I will ask him when I can no longer endure in silence the thought that he might be worrying alone.
"I'm not worrying," he will reply.
I wish I could be more of a help to him. I wish he would let me try.)
"What are you worrying about?" I will ask again.
"I'm not worrying," he answers, looking up at me an instant with a glimmer of surprise.
"What makes you look so glum?"
"I was thinking."
"What were you thinking about," I persist with a smile, "that makes you look so worried?"
"I don't know. I forgot already."
"You looked so glum."
"I don't know what that means."
"Sad."
"I'm not sad."
"Tired?"
"Maybe I'm sleepy."
"Do you stay up late?"
"Sometimes I don't fall asleep right away."
I sometimes wonder if he really worries as much as I think he does. I sometimes think he worries more. He is a cautious little thing (or seems to be. I know I worry for him and expect the worst to happen to him also. So does my wife. I used to worry about my daughter too when she was little, but now she is past fifteen, and the worst hasn't happened. What is the worst? I'm not sure). Maybe the worst has happened and went unrecognized, because my boy, now that I look back, has never had an easy time of things (and my daughter is having a lousy time of it now, unless she is acting too. Wouldn't it be funny if both were acting more unhappy than they are merely to spite and upset us? Ha, ha. I wouldn't find it funny at all. Even as an infant in a playpen he always seemed to be siphoning everything around him in through large, mysterious, intelligent eyes and judging everything he absorbed tentatively before making up his mind and allowing himself to react — even when he reacted spontaneously, as when grinning or giggling suddenly, there always seemed to be a premeditated delay, an infinitesimal lag, but a lag nonetheless, during which a decision had been arrived at. Even an offer of money, or an ice cream pop, would bring a moment's weighty consideration before acceptance. I lose patience with him often. I shout and shame him sometimes — then deny I shouted and try to persuade him I was only being emphatic. It's no way to build confidence. I try to be generous and companionable to make up for it.
"Say yes or no," I demand of him in explanation. "What difference would it make if you are wrong? What would you lose by making a mistake?"
He is confused.
He is afraid of making mistakes.
So he makes them with me by vacillating).
I know he must wonder now why his life has been arranged to be so unceasingly difficult (why I shout at him so frequently, or seem to, why I undoubtedly do raise my voice) or if there ever will come a time of tranquillity and bliss for him in which no new implacable demons are waiting in ambush for him, stirring in time as the moment of contact draws near, making ready for him, practically in view. (I know I wonder all of that for him. When will he be able to relax and take things easy, so I can relax and take things easy too?)
"Tell me, what do you want to do?" I ask him so many times out of disconsolate, moody concern. "What do you want to be?"
"I would like to learn how to drive a car someday."