Casebook by Mona Simpson Page A

fleece. They looked good. They should, I thought, for that price. Crossing the wide lawn, Eli and my mom started singing. Horribly.
    Eli was still the dork guy. He was turning her dorky, too.
I’m a-gonna wrap myself in paper .
I’m gonna daub my head with glue .
    “I’ve never been to the Gamble House,” she said.
    In an old-fashioned kitchen, Kat was supervising kids in aprons who were packing up plates. Both boys and girls had ponytails. About fifty glass cups of what looked like chocolate pudding waited next to a metal bowl of whipped cream.
    We found Hector and Jules sitting on a huge staircase. Eli started explaining Japanese influences on the wood joining. My mom smiled a way I didn’t like. Hector and I lagged behind on the tour. In the big rooms the furniture looked spindly and uncomfortable. We ended up in the kitchen; Kat gave us each a chocolate pudding, with a cap of whipped cream.
    My mother never seemed happier than on that day, eating chocolate pudding in the cold. She shivered and smiled. A mother’s happiness: something you recognize and then forget; it didn’t seem to matter much at the time, though it spread through our bodies.How did I know a moment like that was something I’d collect and later touch for consolation?
    We waited while Kat checked doors and lights and turned down thermostats. We heard a train moan. When it had passed, Eli squinted and recited:
When we pulled out into the winter night and the real snow, our snow, began to stretch out beside us and twinkle against the windows, and the dim lights of small Wisconsin stations moved by, a sharp wild brace came suddenly into the air. We drew in deep breaths of it as we walked back from dinner through the cold vestibules, unutterably aware of our identity with this country for one strange hour, before we melted indistinguishably into it again.
That’s my Middle West—not the wheat or the prairies or the lost Swede towns, but the thrilling returning trains of my youth, and the street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark and the shadows of holly wreaths thrown by lighted windows on the snow.
    “That’s a lot to know by heart,” I mumbled. So Eli was a memorizer. Now I knew why I’d scored thirty dollars from poetry. My mother beamed again like a moron. He’s not your kid , I felt like saying.
    “Are you from the Midwest?” Hector asked him.
    “Yes, the flyover,” he said. “I lived in Ohio until I was nine.”
    “Where in Ohio?”
    “Where am I from in Ohio, Reen?” Eli asked. The Mims looked down and swung her foot. Oh no! She didn’t know the answer! My heart dropped, but I was also happy. “And when is my birthday?” He elbowed her side. He was smiling, but there was pain in it. Poor guy.
    “I have it in my book,” she said, halting.
    “Mom!” She knew our birthdays! What was the deal?
    “I grew up in a suburb of Cleveland called Lakewood,” Eli said, looking at Hector, specifically avoiding her. “And my birthday is November tenth.”
    I pushed Hector out the back door so we were alone and said, “I’m beginning to think she’s the bad guy. He remembers every thing about us. What’s up with her?”
    “Maybe she’s got the ’tism,” Hector said. That was our new thing. The ’tism.
    “See those sweatshirts?” I pointed to my sisters, one of whom was cartwheeling on the grass. “Eighty dollars each. I’m broke. Eli got the Mims a dress. We’re sleeping in a cabin, and yesterday we went skiing on Pine Mountain.”
    “You went to Mount Pinos?” For years, in elementary school, his dad drove him to Mount Pinos to look at stars. It never occurred to me it was the same mountain.
    “What have you guys been doing?”
    “Just helping here. We’re going home tonight.”
    “Us tomorrow.” It was almost time to leave for Boston with our dad. In the car, driving back to our cabin, we heard a train again.
    “I love that,” my mom said.
    Eli had those sticks you break to make light. We drew on the dark