He gazed wistfully into the middle distance, and it was clear that this was what he’d been looking for his entire life: the main chance, the shortcut no one else had seen.
“So you’re going to start a soda company?” I asked him.
“We’re going to launch it locally first,” he said. “Use Denver as a trial market. Once it catches on here, we can attract some investors, maybe go public. And then we take it national.”
I imagined America putting down its Coke and drinking instead from a can with my dad’s face on it. Barry-Cola, it said on the can. I laughed.
Dad looked hurt. “This is going to be paying your college tuition,” he said, and I felt bad.
“I don’t think I get it,” I said, although this was not true. “How do you lower the costs?” And so he told me again.
When she picked me up on Sunday night, my mom was in one of her wanting-to-talk-about-Dad moods. “So what did you guys do?” she asked me. I never told her the truth: that I had played Arkanoid and Super Mario Brothers and Castlevania III and maybe Excitebike, although Excitebike was kind of juvenile, while my dad watched golf on TV, each of us with the shades drawn to keep the glare of the afternoon sun off our respective screens. There was something about the way men behaved without women around that I already knew to be ashamed of.
“The usual,” I said.
She pulled onto the freeway. My mom gets anxious when she has to merge into traffic; her impulse is to slow down, which is not a helpful impulse in a merging situation. When she was securely in the middle lane, she looked at me out of the corner of her eye. “So,” she said, “are there any girlfriends around?” She was trying to sound casual. At first I thought she was talking about me, partly because the pursuit of a girlfriend was a problem I thought of as specific to me, and partly because the idea of my dad with a girlfriend was almost inconceivable.
“I don’t think he has time for a girlfriend,” I said.
“Oh yeah?” she said. “What’s keeping him so busy?”
I didn’t want to tell her about the soda thing. I didn’t feel like hearing my mom laugh at my dad when I was the one who had to go spend every other weekend with him. “I think he mostly works on articles,” I said. Dad had once had an article in a journal of management theory.
That seemed to work. We were going home, and I started to feel better. I would still have to do my homework, which I always brought to my dad’s in a backpack and then neglected until I got home Sunday night. But at least I’d be in my own room, with my mom lying in bed on the other side of the wall reading one of her thick paperbacks, listening to a tape of the music she liked, the Carpenters or America or Bread.
In an attempt to provide a family atmosphere, my mom had arranged for us to go out to dinner with the Oberfells once a month. At the restaurant I always chose the seat farthest from Bronwen, to disguise my interest. This typically put me next to her brother Pete, a pale, fearful nine-year-old.
Bronwen’s father Gary was talking about the challenges his dental practice faced. “There’s just too many dentists in the area,” he said. “I don’t know how we’re all supposed to make a living.” Gary had massive hands, and watching him bring his cheeseburger to his mouth was disturbing.
“Well, we’re not going to any of these other dentists, that’s for sure,” my mom said. “Two sets of teeth you can count on.”
“Most of them are Chinese,” Gary said. “Or, you know, Oriental somehow.”
“Did you see about the babies in Kuwait?” my mom said, following an associative trail that I chose not to pursue. “Where they took them out of the incubators and left them to die on the floor? I think that’s so terrible.”
We ate in silence for a moment: one table at a Denver-area Denny’s paying its own small tribute to the memory of the dead Kuwaiti babies.
Eventually Stacey decided to move things along. “So what’s your favorite class in school, Eric?” she asked me.
“Math,” I said.
“Eric spends a lot of time playing with his computer,” Mom said.
“Wow!” said Stacey. “A computer?” She gestured to her offspring. “These guys don’t even know the first thing about computers,” she said. “Apparently we’re all going to have to know about them soon, though, right?”
I was familiar with the computers-are-the-unstoppable-wave-of-the-future rhetoric she was referring to, and I hoped it was true, but I suspected it wasn’t, because besides me and Nicky and Nicky’s dad, nobody seemed to like computers very much.
“Computers never fixed anybody’s teeth, that’s for sure,” Gary said.
“Tell them what you’re making,” said Mom.
This was difficult. If I were to reveal even a bare outline of the game now, when it was only half completed, my plan to seduce Bronwen would lose the element of surprise. But after all those hours imagining her reaction, polishing the gemstone of my fantasy, the possibility of arousing her interest was irresistible.
“We’re making an adventure game,” I said, my voice rising nervously. “Me and my friend Nicky. It’s called Tomb of Morbius.” I risked a glance at Bronwen, who was pouring ketchup on her hash browns.
“Wow!” Stacey said again. “A computer game! Doesn’t that sound cool, Pete?”
“I guess,” Pete said. Bronwen put the ketchup down and addressed herself to the eggs.
“Pete really likes computer games,” Stacey said. “Pac-Man he likes, and that other one… what’s that one you like called, hon?”
“Street Fighter,” said Pete.
“Street Fighter,” Stacey said. “We went to the bowling alley for his birthday and he didn’t even want to bowl, he just wanted to play Street Fighter the whole time.”
“I got the sixth-highest score,” Pete said.
This was all going wrong. “Our game’s not like an arcade game,” I said, trying not to sound indignant. “It’s an adventure game. It tells you where you are and what you can see, and you type in what you want your character to do.”
“Oh, it sounds great!” said Stacey. She was a nice person, but she was maybe more appropriate for younger children. “I’m sure he’d love it! Wouldn’t you like to see Eric’s computer game?” she asked Pete.
“I guess,” he said.
“Great!” said Stacey. “Maybe he could come over this Saturday and see it! What do you guys think?”
Pete and I both looked down at our plates. No food cools more quickly than French fries, or suffers more from the cooling. Bronwen asked the waiter to refill her Coke.
Afterward we went out to the Oberfells’ station wagon, Pete climbing into what we all called, by long-standing custom, the very-back. I was in the middle of the back seat, with my mom on one side and Bronwen on the other; when we turned right I was rocked toward her, and when we turned left she was rocked toward me, and I could feel her arm touching mine through our jackets. I kept returning to my Bronwen-plays-Tomb-of-Morbius fantasy, but now I had to route around her little brother. What if Pete returned home raving about the game? It was so fun! There were all these awesome dragons and monsters… Unlikely: Pete’s usual demeanor was near-catatonic, and even if the game roused him to uncharacteristic heights of enthusiasm it was hard to imagine this having much effect on Bronwen. And what would Nicky say when he learned I’d agreed to show our secret project to a nine-year-old?