that interested in me. We barely knew each other. We didn’t have any overwhelming rapport. We talked like strangers in Winnipeg. What kind of need, I wondered, would make a person hold a phone to her head for two hours? Whatever it was I wanted no part of it.
A few nights after that we went to my friend Bob’s apartment for a soiree featuring five or six other young minds and a few cases of Old Milwaukee. Bob made Karen laugh, and even though she and I disappeared in the middle of the party to use his bedroom for sex, at the end of the night I told him he should ask her out. He told me I was crazy. I called her the next night and she said she couldn’t talk because she had Bob on the other line. My response was to feel mortally wounded.
But something had changed. I had evidence of a girl liking me. For those few weeks of talking to Karen on the phone Ihadn’t felt so bad. And I had this taste of drama from it ending badly. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was learning to use girls for the same sort of distraction from misery I used songs for. I started to get the idea that whatever was wrong with me, whatever it was that school hadn’t solved, maybe girls would solve.
----
Pop Meredith’s porch, like all the others on his block of row homes, was recessed about twenty feet from the curb, allowing room at the top of the first of two sets of steps for a landing that on most of the houses of the block was a concrete slab, but which my grandparents had converted to brick pavers with room enough for beds for tulips and marigolds, and for a rosebush that gave months of pink blooms. Pop watched cars go by, said hello to passing neighbors, tossed birdseed on the bricks. He cooed to the sparrows and chickadees that came to the porch’s hanging feeder, and went still when one landed on the black wrought-iron railing in front of him, the creature eyeing him with seconds-hand ticks of its head. When it left, Pop ashed his Camel into the stand-up ashtray kept, indoors and out, always at his left hand, even though he was right-handed and needed to cross himself to ash. The ashtray stand was black plastic molded in the shape of a horse’s head, an amber-colored glass dish resting on the crown of the skull. Granny sat next to him, working a needlepoint, and then talking with a neighbor who’d stopped by. A transistor radio was tuned to Harry Kalas and Whitey Ashburn calling the Phillies game. For all their charms, for the way their mutual affection came across in their chat, Harry and Whitey’s pairing was made exquisite by its portions of silence. They felt no need to speak when the game didn’t require it, and so they endowed the night with aching slips of quiet—five- and ten- and sometimes fifteen-second gaps—while the pitcher took his signs or called the catcher out for counsel. Many nights you could dial in the game not because you heard a play being reported but because you’d found the one spot on the dial where static gave way to a singular near absence of sound, no hiss, only the low, steady murmur of the crowd like a box fan running two rooms away.
Baseball on the radio, birds feeding, the porch’s yellow smell of birdseed and tobacco, this is the scene my parents, my sister, and I would be received into on summer nights when we drove the five minutes from our house, down Oakland Street, crossing Arrott, Herbert, Foulkrod, Fillmore, Harrison, passing Frankford High School, where for one week in April the forsythia hedges would bloom yellow, crossing Allengrove, Wakeling, Oxford, Pratt, Bridge, making the left on Cheltenham up the hill to 1531. We were all couples then, single words: Grannyandpop, Marianandwill, Andrewandtheresa, Harryandwhitey. “Where are we going?” “To Grannyandpop’s.”
Dolph sits facing us with perfect posture, his back straight, feet on the floor, forearms on the arms of the chair, like a king receiving subjects. And here’s why it’s so tight: every inch of the palace is
A few nights after that we went to my friend Bob’s apartment for a soiree featuring five or six other young minds and a few cases of Old Milwaukee. Bob made Karen laugh, and even though she and I disappeared in the middle of the party to use his bedroom for sex, at the end of the night I told him he should ask her out. He told me I was crazy. I called her the next night and she said she couldn’t talk because she had Bob on the other line. My response was to feel mortally wounded.
But something had changed. I had evidence of a girl liking me. For those few weeks of talking to Karen on the phone Ihadn’t felt so bad. And I had this taste of drama from it ending badly. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was learning to use girls for the same sort of distraction from misery I used songs for. I started to get the idea that whatever was wrong with me, whatever it was that school hadn’t solved, maybe girls would solve.
----
Pop Meredith’s porch, like all the others on his block of row homes, was recessed about twenty feet from the curb, allowing room at the top of the first of two sets of steps for a landing that on most of the houses of the block was a concrete slab, but which my grandparents had converted to brick pavers with room enough for beds for tulips and marigolds, and for a rosebush that gave months of pink blooms. Pop watched cars go by, said hello to passing neighbors, tossed birdseed on the bricks. He cooed to the sparrows and chickadees that came to the porch’s hanging feeder, and went still when one landed on the black wrought-iron railing in front of him, the creature eyeing him with seconds-hand ticks of its head. When it left, Pop ashed his Camel into the stand-up ashtray kept, indoors and out, always at his left hand, even though he was right-handed and needed to cross himself to ash. The ashtray stand was black plastic molded in the shape of a horse’s head, an amber-colored glass dish resting on the crown of the skull. Granny sat next to him, working a needlepoint, and then talking with a neighbor who’d stopped by. A transistor radio was tuned to Harry Kalas and Whitey Ashburn calling the Phillies game. For all their charms, for the way their mutual affection came across in their chat, Harry and Whitey’s pairing was made exquisite by its portions of silence. They felt no need to speak when the game didn’t require it, and so they endowed the night with aching slips of quiet—five- and ten- and sometimes fifteen-second gaps—while the pitcher took his signs or called the catcher out for counsel. Many nights you could dial in the game not because you heard a play being reported but because you’d found the one spot on the dial where static gave way to a singular near absence of sound, no hiss, only the low, steady murmur of the crowd like a box fan running two rooms away.
Baseball on the radio, birds feeding, the porch’s yellow smell of birdseed and tobacco, this is the scene my parents, my sister, and I would be received into on summer nights when we drove the five minutes from our house, down Oakland Street, crossing Arrott, Herbert, Foulkrod, Fillmore, Harrison, passing Frankford High School, where for one week in April the forsythia hedges would bloom yellow, crossing Allengrove, Wakeling, Oxford, Pratt, Bridge, making the left on Cheltenham up the hill to 1531. We were all couples then, single words: Grannyandpop, Marianandwill, Andrewandtheresa, Harryandwhitey. “Where are we going?” “To Grannyandpop’s.”
Dolph sits facing us with perfect posture, his back straight, feet on the floor, forearms on the arms of the chair, like a king receiving subjects. And here’s why it’s so tight: every inch of the palace is
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