stayed in bed forever. In junior high, his best friend, Seth McCandless, had died of leukemia. It was a long, slow slippage, with hair loss and transfusions and a seventh-grade benefit performance of The King and I, and in the end the McCandlesses had emptied their son’s locker, weeping as they knelt in front of the gun metal gray compartment, retrieving the stuff of youth: gym shoes, a Spanish textbook called Usted Y Yo, and the smelly remains of what had once been a turkey roll sandwich. The McCandlesses had, by all accounts, turned weird after Seth died, keeping their house shuttered and the yard unshorn. Seth’s roomhad remained a shrine to the dead boy; on the windowsill, his once-busy ant farm had been left untouched, the ants eventually transmogrifying into a snaking, fossilized traffic jam. Mrs. McCandless had “let herself go,” according to Adam’s mother, which really only meant that she stopped dyeing her hair and sometimes spent whole days in her nightgown, so that on Halloween the neighborhood children called the McCandless home “the witch’s house,” and egged the porch with a vengeance. Eventually the house was sold and the couple disappeared from the neighborhood, perhaps from the edge of the world.
Anything was possible when a child died. Poor Seth had a head of chick-fuzz in his final days, and he had joked with the nurses and orderlies that he should only be charged half of the daily rate for the TV rental, because he was now blind in one eye. All the kids from the drama club came to visit, gathering in a sober circle around his bed and trying to cheer him up with stories of what plays the club might be performing in the fall.
“Well,” said Beth Gershon, serious and homely, “we’re trying to get Mr. Lavery to agree to The Bald Soprano, but you know how conventional he is. We’ll probably end up doing The Crucible for the umpteenth time. And I’ll have to be Goody Proctor again.” Seth had listened attentively, hanging on to these last details of what had once been his world, his life, until it had been so unceremoniously snapped away.
After Seth’s funeral, Adam became quiet and stayed in his room reading a mortality doubleheader of Death Be Not Proud and A Separate Peace. He also, at that time, began writing, scrawling agonized adolescent free-associations in a spiral notebook. Later, these became fragments of dialogue and, later still, plays. So maybe poor Seth McCandless, now long dead, had turned Adam into a writer.
But Sara’s death wouldn’t make him turn into anything; he was almost thirty years old, and had already turned. Her mother was another story; a mother could change, could transform intothe witch in the witch’s house, or go wild with grief and lose her job, her property, her hold on the world. Adam was frightened for Natalie, and he thought that if he let her go back to her house and her dead dog’s pinworm medicine, he would never see her again.
“Listen, I can’t stay with you and your friends,” said Natalie vaguely. “You young people. I’m sure you all want to be alone.”
“No, we don’t,” he said quickly. “Everything changed when Sara was killed. We don’t really know what to do with ourselves. We’re completely fucked up.”
Sara’s mother studied him, and he let himself be watched. In the distance he saw the small fires of people with less on their minds, and he wished he could join them, unpeel the silver foil from a roasted potato and eat it among friends, laughing. A Frisbee would be flung, the kind that glowed in the dark, and it would sail freely across the sky. Wine would be drunk, nostalgic, stirring folk songs sung. Instead, he was sitting on a dune with the mother of his dead best friend, inviting her to move in. And somehow, she was saying yes.
6
Smiling Buddha
For days and days Natalie slept like a baby, while the real baby in the house almost never slept at all. Real babies wanted to take it all in, they didn’t want to
Anything was possible when a child died. Poor Seth had a head of chick-fuzz in his final days, and he had joked with the nurses and orderlies that he should only be charged half of the daily rate for the TV rental, because he was now blind in one eye. All the kids from the drama club came to visit, gathering in a sober circle around his bed and trying to cheer him up with stories of what plays the club might be performing in the fall.
“Well,” said Beth Gershon, serious and homely, “we’re trying to get Mr. Lavery to agree to The Bald Soprano, but you know how conventional he is. We’ll probably end up doing The Crucible for the umpteenth time. And I’ll have to be Goody Proctor again.” Seth had listened attentively, hanging on to these last details of what had once been his world, his life, until it had been so unceremoniously snapped away.
After Seth’s funeral, Adam became quiet and stayed in his room reading a mortality doubleheader of Death Be Not Proud and A Separate Peace. He also, at that time, began writing, scrawling agonized adolescent free-associations in a spiral notebook. Later, these became fragments of dialogue and, later still, plays. So maybe poor Seth McCandless, now long dead, had turned Adam into a writer.
But Sara’s death wouldn’t make him turn into anything; he was almost thirty years old, and had already turned. Her mother was another story; a mother could change, could transform intothe witch in the witch’s house, or go wild with grief and lose her job, her property, her hold on the world. Adam was frightened for Natalie, and he thought that if he let her go back to her house and her dead dog’s pinworm medicine, he would never see her again.
“Listen, I can’t stay with you and your friends,” said Natalie vaguely. “You young people. I’m sure you all want to be alone.”
“No, we don’t,” he said quickly. “Everything changed when Sara was killed. We don’t really know what to do with ourselves. We’re completely fucked up.”
Sara’s mother studied him, and he let himself be watched. In the distance he saw the small fires of people with less on their minds, and he wished he could join them, unpeel the silver foil from a roasted potato and eat it among friends, laughing. A Frisbee would be flung, the kind that glowed in the dark, and it would sail freely across the sky. Wine would be drunk, nostalgic, stirring folk songs sung. Instead, he was sitting on a dune with the mother of his dead best friend, inviting her to move in. And somehow, she was saying yes.
6
Smiling Buddha
For days and days Natalie slept like a baby, while the real baby in the house almost never slept at all. Real babies wanted to take it all in, they didn’t want to
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