morality? Huang and Baltimore looked at me. With real concern. Which made everything much worse. I’d never felt so morally deformed. Or humiliated. Despite my suit and my empty briefcase, despite the stolen tie, despite my clever, useless plan, I was just some idiot kid to them, whose griefs were to be dealt with through mildness and conciliation, whose lies were to be believed. The anger at being kept from dinner had left Huang’s eyes. Baltimore said, “Come on,” almost avuncular now. “Is there someone we can call?” Huang repeated. And—out of humiliated exhaustion, or out of my heated and burgeoning sense of guilt—I croaked the digits of my father’s phone number. Baltimore took, with a gentle hand, my elbow. The interview was over. I’d been dismissed. The worst part? Walking with shame-shadowed, childish eyes past Officer Pontecorvo, as Huang and Baltimore escorted me, like two court-appointed guardians, back into the precinct house’s front area to wait for my father. She got up and stretched, arms overhead, while I was crossing the echoing room. Even through her stiff-lined, graceless uniform, I could see the astounding contours of her tits and ass. A momentous, just-discovered landscape. A reminder from God about my lowly station.
VII .
I HAVE TO INTERRUPT to explain something. I told you my mother was dead. I don’t think about her a lot. I was young when she died, and the inexpressible pain that it caused went away over time. I know that sounds inhuman, but it’s true. She would have wanted it that way, I think: for me not to be unhappy. And even if I don’t think about her all the time, I do remember her. She was always happy, or I thought as a child she was always happy, because she was usually smiling. She was a book editor, when she died. At this small publishing house. Black Meadow Press. I never understood the name. It went out of business the year of her death, and when I was a kid I always thought the two things were related. I mean, of course she wasn’t always happy. No one is, and she and my father used to have terrible arguments, because he’s so helpless, I figured out much later.
She was a great cook and a great baker, so that even a kid with no other experience in eating would notice. She was competent too, with her hands. She once put in a new segment of pipe under our sink. Lying on her back, half-hidden in the space under the counter where the pipes are. She let me help her, or pretend to help her. I handed her a vise grip. My father told me that they met at a gallery opening for a friend of his who later went on to become semifamous, a sculptor in wire and untreated animal skins, that they met about a year before I was born. Her family had been in D.C. for generations. Five or six. Her maiden name was Hiller: before she married, she was Katharine Hiller. I’m named after her father, like I said. She had, instead of a diamond on her engagement ring, a cloudy, glimmering stone. An opal chip. I learned the name of the stone from my father.
You don’t give a fuck, of course. I’m only mentioning these particulars to help explain the following. When I turned seven, I had a miserable party at which the Eichman brothers, small-eyed, oval-headed twins, ganged up on me in my own backyard and battered my head with two identical white-pine dowels. That’s actually their name: Eichman . Who wouldn’t change their name, if it were Eichman? Someone who takes pride in it, right? Or someone who argues, Adolf Eichmann had TWO NS, you dirty fucking Jew , SO SHUT YOUR JEW MOUTH! The sticks they hit me with were meant for the piñata my parents had procured to liven up the party. Which failed, predictably, to open. Everyone blamed me for this, I could see by their eyes.
A chocolate cake with marshmallow frosting. That much I remember. My mother had baked it. She stands out, like I said, as an excellent baker in my lucid, fragmentary memories from childhood. The cake was really
VII .
I HAVE TO INTERRUPT to explain something. I told you my mother was dead. I don’t think about her a lot. I was young when she died, and the inexpressible pain that it caused went away over time. I know that sounds inhuman, but it’s true. She would have wanted it that way, I think: for me not to be unhappy. And even if I don’t think about her all the time, I do remember her. She was always happy, or I thought as a child she was always happy, because she was usually smiling. She was a book editor, when she died. At this small publishing house. Black Meadow Press. I never understood the name. It went out of business the year of her death, and when I was a kid I always thought the two things were related. I mean, of course she wasn’t always happy. No one is, and she and my father used to have terrible arguments, because he’s so helpless, I figured out much later.
She was a great cook and a great baker, so that even a kid with no other experience in eating would notice. She was competent too, with her hands. She once put in a new segment of pipe under our sink. Lying on her back, half-hidden in the space under the counter where the pipes are. She let me help her, or pretend to help her. I handed her a vise grip. My father told me that they met at a gallery opening for a friend of his who later went on to become semifamous, a sculptor in wire and untreated animal skins, that they met about a year before I was born. Her family had been in D.C. for generations. Five or six. Her maiden name was Hiller: before she married, she was Katharine Hiller. I’m named after her father, like I said. She had, instead of a diamond on her engagement ring, a cloudy, glimmering stone. An opal chip. I learned the name of the stone from my father.
You don’t give a fuck, of course. I’m only mentioning these particulars to help explain the following. When I turned seven, I had a miserable party at which the Eichman brothers, small-eyed, oval-headed twins, ganged up on me in my own backyard and battered my head with two identical white-pine dowels. That’s actually their name: Eichman . Who wouldn’t change their name, if it were Eichman? Someone who takes pride in it, right? Or someone who argues, Adolf Eichmann had TWO NS, you dirty fucking Jew , SO SHUT YOUR JEW MOUTH! The sticks they hit me with were meant for the piñata my parents had procured to liven up the party. Which failed, predictably, to open. Everyone blamed me for this, I could see by their eyes.
A chocolate cake with marshmallow frosting. That much I remember. My mother had baked it. She stands out, like I said, as an excellent baker in my lucid, fragmentary memories from childhood. The cake was really
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