"Seasons Clear, and Awe" - Chapter 5
by Matthew Gasda
We continue this week in serializing our inaugural contest winner’s novel, Seasons Clear, and Awe, by Matthew Gasda. New subscribers can catch up with the previous chapters below:
Submissions are open for our next quarterly contest, whose deadline is January 2st, 2026. Finalists are awarded $500, and the Winner $1,000. Spread the word (and maybe throw your hat in the ring!).
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“Seasons Clear, and Awe” chronicles three decades in the life of the Gazda family, whose children inherit not wealth but something more dangerous: their parents’ unlived ambitions and their mother’s gift for psychological dissection. As Stephen and Elizabeth grow from precocious children into neurotic artists in their thirties, Matthew Gasda reveals how post-industrial, late 20th century America created a generation too intelligent for ordinary happiness, too self-aware for decisive action: suspended between the working-class pragmatism of their fathers and the creative and spiritual aspirations of their mothers, capable of everything except building lives.
Matthew Gasda is the founder of the Brooklyn Center for Theater Research and the author of many books, including the recent novel The Sleepers and Writer’s Diary.
⚬─────────✧─────────⚬
Bind us in time, O Seasons clear, and awe.
O minstrel galleons of Carib fire,
Bequeath us to no earthly shore until
Is answered in the vortex of our grave
The seal’s wide spindrift gaze toward paradise.
— Hart Crane
These beauteous forms,
Through a long absence, have not been to me
As is a landscape to a blind man’s eye
— Wordsworth
⚬─────────✧─────────⚬
The next day, Stephen went to the Northwest Swim Club with his friends Ryan and Adam, driven by Ryan’s mother, Mrs. Connell, who tirelessly hosted their sons’ friends and took them to the pool or whatever else, occasional paintball games or trips to the mall. Really, whatever Ryan wanted. The Connells had a little more money. So did the Vorns.
Adam’s family was from Holland. The name Vorn was Dutch. Adam’s dad was born in Holland, and people in Holland were very pale. Adam said that Stephen wasn’t entirely with it. Both Adam and Ryan were bigger than Stephen. Ryan was skinny but taller. Adam was taller and bigger; the best athlete, best at basketball, best at baseball. Adam and Ryan went to a different middle school after they met, and they would go to a different high school because they lived in Bethlehem suburbs, Bethlehem Township. And so the sense of competition between the boys was decreased. It was much friendlier. And even though the boys were assholes to each other and hazed each other and beat each other up and competed tirelessly in every domain (Madden, ping pong, GoldenEye, Super Smash Brothers) they cared about each other and identified as a group.
And Stephen was grateful for their friendship because he didn’t have many friends at Northeast. And if he hadn’t been grandfathered into a friend group at East Tills, the Bethlehem Township middle school, he would have felt really bad about himself. He didn’t know what he would have done.
In the backseat, Stephen and Ryan were taping up wiffle ball bats, which they’d filled with soggy newspaper, for stickball at the pool, which had a macadam baseball court. Adam had buzzed black hair in a basket; he was quieter for the most part, except on the basketball court.
—I think these are good, Stephen said. —The fat one’s the bomber, this one’s the lightning rod.
—These are garbage, Ryan said, laughing. —So bad.
—Watch, Stephen said.
— You both can’t.
—These bats are not going to save you from being 5’3” and bad at baseball, Adam mumbled.
—Shut the fuck up. Stephen said.
—I’m 5’5”, Ryan said.
It was really a taboo to admit that Adam was by far the best athlete among them.
Every boy secretly believed that he was meant to be the best, that his talent would be revealed and it was only a matter of time, a matter of growth spurts.
Ryan’s work on the bat was becoming obsessive. Stephen was more of an experimental bat maker, sticking different types of paper overnight and experimenting with different tapes. Whereas Ryan was much more technical: loading the wiffle bat to precise points with electrical tape. Ryan had brought scissors in the car, whereas Stephen just ripped tape off with his bare hands.
—How hot is it supposed to be today? Ryan asked his mom.
—82, 83.
—It’s still going to be too cold to swim, Stephen said.
Adam burped. Ryan farted in their laps. Mrs. Connell turned on the radio.
—B-104, Ryan requested.
This was a Top 40 hits station, which Stephen hated; instinctively he didn’t like pop music, but he had no vocabulary really for what he should like instead. He liked the Beatles. Adam liked the Rolling Stones because his dad loved the Rolling Stones. Ryan agreed that classic rock was good, but he loved rap. He loved Eminem. Stephen felt in a way that he never really became a proper kid. Like all these other kids knew how to be kids, and all these other boys knew how to be boys, and he was forced to pretend or fake it. Other parents imposed a clear sense of order and rules and prerogatives. What to like, what not to like… his parents had not exactly those. No one to say, This is a cool radio station, This is what to wear, This is what slang to use.
Stephen’s parents were a little older and out of touch. His mom always said she didn’t want to worry about keeping up with the Joneses or moving to a bigger suburban house or driving an SUV, like a lot of his friends’ parents did.
—We’re not Bush voters. Your father and I would spend Sunday mornings cutting coupons. I could only afford to take you kids to McDonald’s.
Stephen’s mom had recently gone back to work as a paralegal at Talmann, Hutters, and Sorrentino in Allentown. Stephen understood that his mother had once been a very successful paralegal in Philadelphia. She always talked about it, her Philadelphia days, her days living on the Main Line.
—I was dating Rick, but he was rich. Or his father was rich. But he was too insecure.
Insecurity was Adele’s skeleton key for explaining human behavior. In fourth grade, when Stephen had been somewhat ostracized by the cool kids in his class, his mom would explain it that way.
—Jay Gambaccini is just jealous of you. The girls think you’re cute. You’re so smart.
Stephen had internalized this. He was so gifted, so smart. He hadn’t gone through a growth spurt, but he had a nice face.
But he didn’t have a girlfriend. Ryan sort of had a girlfriend. Adam sort of had a girlfriend. And they got to hold girls’ hands. And Adam had hinted that he had gotten to touch boobs.
Stephen felt incredibly far from this. This was impossible.
This would not happen for him; this would never happen. It was a curse.
Girls were not like his mother; they did not see how special he was.
Would he rather be Jose Silva, and have a girlfriend, and live in public housing, and be poor and cool, or would he rather be himself, anonymous, unknown, but full of hidden potential, a middle-class hero?
Stephen imagined what would happen if he grew six inches, or seven inches, and was suddenly over six foot and over a hundred and seventy pounds. He would throw 90 miles an hour, 95 miles an hour, throw a football 60 yards, he would be getting scholarship offers, he would be famous, he would play in the NFL and the MLB, and at the same time he would write books; a kind of athlete-scholar-artist, and he would be loved by beautiful women, but there would be one beautiful, special woman who would be his wife.
He hoped that would be Bethany Herzog, who was new to Bethlehem in the fifth grade and had gone to Northeast with him and was currently dating an older boy, Jose Silva, who was in seventh grade, who was tall and loud and didn’t do his homework, and lived in public housing, which Stephen would ride past on his bike from baseball, but had been warned not to ride through by his parents.
Would he rather be Jose Silva, and have a girlfriend, and live in public housing, and be poor and cool, or would he rather be himself, anonymous, unknown, but full of hidden potential, a middle-class hero?
—Is Adam Fenstermaker gonna be there today? Stephen asked Adam about the other Adam, whom Stephen had known since kindergarten and who had burns on the palms of his hands from touching a hot grill as a toddler, somehow.
Adam Fenstermaker liked basketball a lot more than stickball and was generally pretty bad at baseball. Adam Fenstermaker preferred Pokémon, and Pokémon cards, playing NBA Street, but when he did occasionally play real sports, he competed very hard, throwing his body around, getting hurt.
—Okay, Gazda, do you wanna listen to classical music? Ryan asked, laughing.
—Derp, Adam said.
—I don’t want to listen to N’SYNC, Stephen said.
—You love N’SYNC, just admit it. Ryan said.
—Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No.
—Admit it, Adam said.
—Ok, Stephen said in a Valley Girl voice, —I love N’SYNC, so good, best band ever, I love N’SYNC, oh my god. I’m like, oh my god.
Mrs. Connell, or Lauren, who was friends with Stephen’s mom and Adam’s mom, placed few limits on Ryan. She would maybe tease Ryan about his selfish demands to go to the mall, to go to the movies, to go to the ice-skating rink, to go to the pool, to have sleepovers, to get a new video game console, but she never really said no. The result was always the same; Ryan got what he wanted.
And this made Ryan a unique figure in the friend group, because it meant that Ryan’s house was always available to hang out at, because it meant that they could always have sleepovers, because there would always be new DVDs and new games, and because they had ping-pong and floor hockey and Risk, and Adam’s mother was Christian, or had been raised Evangelical, and was a little more conservative in her parenting style. Stephen’s mother, he knew, was also a pushover, but the menu of options was smaller for Stephen.
In 2001, Stephen was always itching to get out of the car. Always feeling a compulsive need to run, to swim, to get sun on his limbs, to feel, to go through a series of Contra Thompson follies, and to lie in the homely dry grass of the Northwest Swim Club, or to skin his knees on the macadam of the stickball court, or to jump in the pool that at this point in May was still cold, or too cold for Stephen, who didn’t really like cold water.
The night before, he’d masturbated to Bethany Herzog, rubbing himself on his bed, humping it essentially, then rolling over to the other side of the bed to avoid the sticky stain. His mother never said anything. He never knew if she noticed. He allowed himself to believe that such indiscretions would never be noticed by anyone. His fantasies were vague, innocent, tender, very romantic.
He only knew enough about sex to know that it was unbearably exciting, a dramatic turning of the tide of life, a way of becoming radically different, achieving victory in the battle of life, in the battle of growing up. Sex was far away, but it was so important.
The previous summer in Ryan’s basement, Adam, Ryan, Stephen, with their other friends, Tommy and Drew, had figured out a way through some arbitrary bending of the cable wire to access a black and white version of Cinemax (Channel 14), where they were presented immediately with an eccentrically large pair of breasts. And then, Stephen experienced what he understood was an erection. He didn’t masturbate that night because the other boys were there. And he wasn’t sure if they in their sleeping bags had jerked off (at the image of those breasts and the unknown woman in black and white getting fucked by a man, and then lying on top of another woman, also with big breasts, and kissing her on the neck and the collarbone and breasts, and pushing her fingers into the other woman, before the magic gift of the cable box turned off as arbitrarily as it turned on).
Now, Stephen was plotting a way to get access to porn on the family desktop, but he was afraid of getting caught. Other boys like Ryan claimed to know how to download and hide porn from their parents, but the thought of the shame was too unbearable for Stephen to attempt it.
But he would get over it. He had to get over it. He had to know more. He had to have porn. He had to have more images, more inspiration. He couldn’t masturbate to Bethany Herzog in the same way that he could masturbate to the mysterious woman from Channel 14.
Lauren Connell’s minivan pulled off the road into the parking lot of the Northwest Club. The boys started gathering their things, their bats, their towels. Adam was applying suntan lotion; his Dutch skin was paler than the others. Stephen refused to wear suntan lotion. Ryan was somewhere in the middle (could be convinced by his mother).
There were two pools, the smaller kids’ pool, which was for nine and unders, and then the regular pool, three or four times the size of the kids’ pool, with a seven-foot deep end and a ten-foot diving area.
Behind the swim club, behind the chain link fence, was a freight rail line through which trains came several times a day, and for Stephen these trains had a mythical quality. They somehow tied into Bethlehem’s deeper past, the past of his grandfathers, who were steel workers, and they were the last real suggestion of Bethlehem’s strategic importance located between Philadelphia and New York, along the Lehigh River, which linked up to the Delaware and, by extension, the entire Eastern Seaboard.
All of this history had disappeared by the time he was born. The last coke works had shut down in 1992: that’s what his father said, but most of the steel was completely dead by the 80s. Efficient and cheaper Japanese steel had killed Bethlehem Steel, as his father explained it.
It was the only explanation Stephen ever really received. But Bethlehem’s new middle classes, of which his family was a part, didn’t mourn the loss of industry, because it was dirty, dangerous—a kind of blight or monstrosity that had marred Bethlehem for a hundred years. Now the town had returned to a state of colonial tranquility.
Stephen understood it (Stephen, who loved to read history books, who loved everything related to the past, and the brownfield sites, the miles of old factory that ran along the Lehigh River and had gone to seed like a vegetable garden in the autumn—brown and yellow). All this was implicitly appropriate to Stephen: this mythical background, this screen that formed the background to his own life. It wouldn’t have been appropriate for him to have been born in a much more anonymous town like Nazareth or Easton, even Allentown. Only Bethlehem had a tragic grandeur.
The boys got up and raced out of the car to the entrance where they had to show their membership cards, laminated squares, which showed that their parents paid $300 a summer. Stephen hurried through the changing room: gross and dank and squalid.
He didn’t like the sight of teenage boys, mostly high school swimmers, getting naked and slapping each other with towels. The idea of being naked in front of anyone terrified him. There seemed to be a generational disconnect.
The older boys knew how to behave in the locker rooms. The younger boys had absolutely no idea. At some point their fathers had stopped explaining such things.
There was a line. Past the changing rooms the air smelled like chlorine and sticky sugary candy and the dry cut grass. The grass around the pools was drier than any—more prickly than any–grass Stephen had ever touched. That had to do with the chlorine in the pools, though he didn’t know exactly why. Just as they hoped, the stickball game had commenced already on the blacktop northwest of the pools. A few hung a left from the diving area.
Stephen said, —I’m going to play.
—I kind of want to swim first, Adam said.
—Same, Ryan said.
So Stephen trudged over to the macadam court by himself.
The first game of the summer season. There were maybe five boys on each side, a pitcher, catcher, shortstop, and outfielder. The game needed more people. Everyone pulled the ball to right field; lefties couldn’t really play. Lefties pulled the ball into a right field outfield occupied by a power generator in some bushes. Left field, where righties pulled, however, had a fence that led to the parking lot, creating a natural outfield.
—Can I jump in? Stephen said. He didn’t really recognize the other boys or he didn’t know their names, but he’d seen them before. It was a new season with new players.
. He heard Adam bellow as he jumped into the cold, late May water.
—Yeah, the team that’s hitting only has five, we have six at the pitcher, so… He looked like a 14-year-old: chubby, shirtless, already tan somehow, as if he’d shown up to the swim club on the first day of spring and hadn’t left.
Stephen thought his name might be Bobby.
—That’s cool. I’ll just, well, I guess I’ll bat last.
Whatever. An inning was, or each team had, two outs because it was relatively hard to get outs because the tennis balls ricocheted off the bats at high velocity. Stephen had two bats in his hand, the bomber bat and the lightning bat, and he was deliberating on which one to use.
The spindly fifth grader who was up to bat at the moment was using a stick which Stephen felt was disadvantageous, like a broom handle with tape. Use of actual metal or wooden bats, of course, was unfair and prohibited. Pitchers bounced the ball once rather than throwing them in the air directly to the catcher.
In stickball, the pitchers weren’t supposed to try to throw for strikeouts or throw hard. It was more like setting the table for the batters. Spinning the ball was okay, but not whipping it because it was impossible to hit a whipped tennis ball thrown from close up.
There was a second baseman, a first baseman, shortstop, two outfielders, or one outfielder.
The spindly fifth grader dribbled a ball to the shortstop who had red hair and well-defined pecs. He was wearing a muscle t-shirt and threw it to first base where another chubby kid in a backwards baseball hat bobbled it and caught it before the spindly kid running in flip-flops could make it down the line. Stephen was in swim trunks, a t-shirt, and still had his sneakers on with high-top socks.
Stephen was a better stickball hitter than a Little League hitter because in Little League he had basically no power, but he could generate a lot more bad speed in stickball. He really had hit a lot of home runs the previous year. This gave him the feeling of matching Adam, who could hit real home runs in real baseball.
The next batter, a Dominican kid, laced a double line drive that hit the fence and was thrown back to the pitcher from outfield. The Dominican kid, who didn’t really like running, stopped at second base. The other players on his team shrugged and gestured to Stephen, who clearly wanted to hit very badly.
They didn’t really care, and Stephen realized that he was a little too enthusiastic, a little bit too hyped up. And he shrugged, okay, sure, yeah. Tossed the lightning bat to the side and chose the bomber bat, which had a fat head.
Stephen was vaguely aware that this was a problem for him. This obvious ego, this desire to be victorious, to be the winner, to be seen, and to be better than everyone else. It was embarrassing. The fat Dominican didn’t need it. The ginger shortstop didn’t need it. The pitcher, whose name was probably Bobby, with the tan and the premature paunch, didn’t need it. Adam didn’t need it because he was good. And Ryan was a bit more like Stephen, and he needed to compensate for something. He had to show himself off, and he also, even more so than Stephen, was often mercilessly mocked.
Stephen needed to make the world resemble his imagination, because otherwise the world would be too painful, and all the fabulous and mysterious qualities that he attached to it would begin to fall away. He had to hit a home run to show that this was the nature of the world itself, that it had mythological features, and that he was an archetypal hero produced by that world.
Stephen took a hard hack at the first pitch and missed. And other players, who didn’t really know him, but were just reading his body language, laughed and jeered.
—Holy shit, Stephen heard someone say; it was very hard to miss a ball on a stickball.
Stephen laughed, shrugged, laughed it off again, whatever. He was used to Little League, he’d been playing all year, All-Stars was coming up. He was used to fast pitch, regular pitches, this was slow. He was just a little off kilter, that’s fine. He saw Adam and Ryan walking up, shivering in their towels.
—Yo! Adam called, Did you just miss? Ryan shouted, and Stephen stepped up, shaking his head.
Clearing his head. And on the next pitch, he connected with it and hit it into the parking lot. Probably the longest ball he’d ever hit at Northwest Club.
—Fuck you, Stephen laughed as he ran around the bases.
At home plate, Ryan and Adam were waiting.
—These are my friends, Stephen said, maybe we can split them up.
—We’ll take the tall guy, the pitcher said, pointing at Adam, that’s fine.
—Can I hit next? Ryan asked.
—I’m gonna hit, said another fifth grader, who was also using the broom handle back.
And to Ryan’s great annoyance, the other fifth grader grounded out, ending the inning and preventing Ryan from hitting for another few minutes. The rest of the afternoon was spent alternating between stickball and pool. Adam beat both Ryan and Stephen in basketball one-on-one at the end of the afternoon, and then Mrs. Connell, who’d been sitting, talking with some other moms in a lawn chair and a one-piece bathing suit, drove them home around 4:30.
When he got home, Stephen showered in the newly finished basement, with the newly finished bathroom. Adele was chopping salad while spaghetti boiled on the stovetop.
—Hey mama, Stephen said.
—How are you, my love?
—I’m good.
—Dinner’s gonna be ready soon, we’re gonna eat out on the porch.
—Okay, that sounds good.
—How was your day?
—Good. It was fun, swam, hit balls, threw balls, that kind of thing.
—That kind of thing, she echoed. —Sounds like a good day.
—I’m ready for school to be over, he said, I don’t wanna go back tomorrow.
It was Sunday.
—It’s just what, another week?
—Something like that.
—You’re not a big fan of school these days, are you? Adele said, noticing the sincere anguish in her son’s voice.
—I hate Northeast, he said. I gave it a year, I hate it. I tried. Middle school is not fun.
—You haven’t really tried very hard, Adele said with some light sarcasm.
—Well, it’s boring.
Adele wanted to protect him from forces that would inhibit his creativity, his joyfulness, his verbal precocity. But increasingly the source and brightness of that precocity were hidden from her.
The adolescent was slowly killing the boy. And as the boy died, something harder and, by default, less fluid, less innocent was emerging. The outlines of the future man.
Stephen was being born out of himself, Adele saw, ripping himself out of his own chrysalis. An emotionally inaccessible man was emerging to replace, absorbing and ingesting, the sensitive boy who cried, drew, watercoloured, and played the piano. Stephen was dying, falling through a mineshaft, just as Stephen was being born.
Instinctively she resisted this because this meant the dominance of Michael, the father, and the dominance, by extension, of all men. The unimaginative teachers and coaches and fathers of friends who surrounded Stephen and wanted to bring him down to their level. And maybe it wasn’t fair to include Michael in that group because he loved Stephen and saw his potential. But Michael trusted a masculine ideal of Bethlehem (the ideal of the hard-working, middle-class, post-industrial man) more than he trusted Stephen’s particular talents; he could only really recognize and trust his son if his son operated within a familiar context.
Recently Adele had run into Tom Villani, whom she’d gone to high school with and to Moravian College with, who was her first love and who was now an art teacher in Bethlehem and had never even left Bethlehem despite wanting to move to New York and become a scenic designer for the opera, a painter. Though he had grey streaks in his temples, Tom was still the same: still handsome, wiry, very Italian like herself. Tom had a son Stephen’s age, Nick, and a son a little younger than Elizabeth, whose name she couldn’t recall.
She perhaps stupidly had told Stephen all about Tom Villani. Sometimes when it was just her and her son in the house, when she would take him to the store or the mall, she would tell him about her past and her anxieties and insecurities. She talked to him like an adult, really, which he could be. There were so many different layers to her son.
There was the goofy kid, the class clown who wasn’t doing very well in school, and the sports-obsessed, video-game-obsessed adolescent who wanted to hang out with his friends, and then there was some inner pilot, some dreamer that would go up in his room and read books and draw and play with Legos and live, as far as she could tell, in an entirely imaginary world. All of his teachers complained, and sometimes even admiringly, that he was always reading books inside of his textbooks, never paying attention, always doodling or writing. Sometimes when she would go down to the basement room, she would catch him not watching porn but writing what looked to be a novel or a long short story.
Other times she would go down and find him playing Civilization II, and he would tell her about his attempts to create a world empire, and how it connected to whatever else he was reading.
Elizabeth strode into the kitchen.
—I’m hungry.
—Do you want to take the salad bowl out to the table?
—Okay, Mommy and Stephen, you should help too. Get some forks and knives and spoons. Here are some plates.
—Do I have to?
—Yes.
—Do I really?
—Yes.
Adele could tell that Elizabeth was watching to see if Stephen would be forced to perform the same minor chores that she would. She worried about her daughter too. There was lurking in every child a call for unceasing care, attention, and education, apart from wanting development into a whole. This cry was more extreme in Elizabeth because she was younger, because she wasn’t the boy, and because Stephen was so insistent on getting what he wanted and getting praise and attention and creating a wide field of receptivity around him. Elizabeth was so quiet and intense it almost scared Adele, who didn’t really recognize much of herself in her daughter. The truth, or at least what Adele perceived to be the truth, was that Elizabeth was more like Adele’s mother. Moody, fluctuating high and low. There was the possibility that both children would need to see a therapist soon for different reasons: Stephen because he was starting to struggle in school, and Elizabeth because she pushed herself to agony to do well in school, at piano, and in ballet to impress her mother and father and her teachers. Were they doing something wrong at all? Wonder. Her children were so beautiful, so bright, so funny, so random and jokey and playful. They had so much personality as kids, and now as they got older, they were becoming anxious and quiet and reserved. That was always a part of growing up, but did it have to happen so fast? Was this not a little too young? It just felt premature. Were her children growing up too fast? Did she force them to talk and think like adults too early? That was a possibility. She liked to tell both her son and her daughter about psychoanalysis and about how she saw people. Adele would spend hours with her children individually going through their friend groups and analyzing their friends and their friends’ parents and the insecurities and petty jealousies and ego needs of these people in a vocabulary that children could understand but was still a sophisticated one nonetheless. She was training her kids to project themselves into other people’s minds, to imagine what was driving them. Michael saw human behavior as binary, as good or bad, permissible or impermissible. But Adele saw the context around things. She wanted her kids to see the context around things.
A few minutes later, the family was assembled around the circular grated metal table on the slate stone porch. They were having corn on the cob, meatloaf, and mashed potatoes. Elizabeth sawed at her meatloaf with ladylike delicacy. Stephen mashed his potatoes into his meatloaf, ate big chunks, and stuck his feet up on the table.
—Stephen, his father said. —Don’t put your feet on the table.
—Okay, okay, Stephen said, and he put his feet down.
—Your feet are gross, Elizabeth said.
—No, they’re not. I just took a bath, Stephen replied.—Your feet have dog poop on them.
—Grow up, Elizabeth said.
—I am growing up, Stephen said. —Thank you very much. Can we watch The Simpsons after dinner? It starts at eight.
—Yes, you may, Adele said.
—What about homework? Michael asked.
—It’s Sunday, Stephen replied. —School’s almost over.
—That doesn’t mean you don’t have homework, their dad said.
—We honestly don’t have homework, I promise, Stephen said.
—Are you sure? their dad asked.
—Yes.
—What about math? It’s important that you finish the year strong or they’re going to put you in a remedial algebra class next year.
—I’m not going to get put in remedial algebra, Stephen said.
—Well, you have a C, Michael said.
—I don’t have a C.
—Yes, you do. You’ve got a C two quarters in a row.
—I’m not going to end up with a C. I’m going to get a B minus, I promise, Stephen replied.
—Well, it’s important you get into honors math.
—Dad, I’m in sixth grade. That’s like a bajillion years away.
—It’s not a bajillion years away, their dad replied.
—Several years.
—Two.
—Two’s a lot. I don’t want to talk about it.
—Let’s change the subject, Adele said. —It’s true that it’s almost summer; let them enjoy themselves.
—Okay. Elizabeth, what piece are you playing at your recital next week? Michael asked.
—Minuet in G by Bach.
—Sounds like a good one. What about you, Stephen?
—Some Beethoven poopydoop. I dunno. I’ll practice this week.
—I didn’t know Beethoven wrote poopydoop. I thought he wrote Moonlight Sonata, Michael said.
—That’s my favorite piece, Adele said.
—Can you play that for me after dinner, Mommy? Elizabeth asked.
—Yes. Or you can learn to play it yourself. Or you can ask Ms. McGovern to teach you.
—It’s too hard.
—I don’t think it’s too hard, darling.
—Maybe when I’m Stephen’s age.
—Absolutely.
Adele glared at her husband. She didn’t really appreciate him having nothing to say to the kids except to ask them about their homework and piano lessons. Besides, she already knew all this information. There was nothing to be gained by forcing them to recite their tasks and goals. Stephen knew he wasn’t doing well. Michael knew that Stephen wasn’t doing well. Stephen knew that Michael knew that Stephen wasn’t doing well. Wasn’t doing well at all. And Stephen was right, there was only a week left, there was nothing he was going to do to change his grade, nothing he could do. They didn’t take finals in sixth grade. There was no comprehensive exam. He hadn’t failed. That was that. It was time to start enjoying the summer. There was almost no chance that Stephen would do anything professionally using math. He was verbal, not quantitative. He would be a writer, a musician, a screenwriter, a politician, or anything that showed off his personality and his wit. It also bothered her to hear her son talking in childish words and pretending to be less articulate and sensitive than he actually was.
Just a year before, Stephen had bragged about reading a book a day and had read every book on his fifth-grade teacher, Mr. Siegfried’s, library shelf. He loved writing essays and wrote a persuasive essay about nature conservation and his grandfather that had brought Adele to tears. He had played video games and sports and did boy stuff, but he took piano seriously then and was working on his own compositions. He wasn’t yet going around telling people he was terrible at math and hated school. Later, the only class he said he liked was history. Even English, he said, wasn’t enjoyable. He didn’t like writing papers and thought the assignments were stupid. And then it was like the less Stephen cared, the more checked out he became, the more indifferent, the more Elizabeth focused and pushed herself and obsessed as if to unconsciously compensate for her brother.
—How was the pool today, Steve? Laura Connell said you guys seemed to have a good time.
—Yeah, it was pretty fun, Stephen said. —I had some stickball homers, and we swam and played basketball and that kind of thing, you know.
—Boys being boys, Michael said robotically.
—Yep, boys being boys, Stephen said, making a fart noise.
—Can we get a dog? Elizabeth asked.
—We’re thinking about it, Michael said.
It was true.
—Okay, if your father wants to, I will, but it’s a lot of work. Kids need to know how much work a dog is. I’ll help with this.
—Dogs are fun. They’re not work, Stephen said.
—Easy for you to say, Michael said.
—It better be a golden retriever. I don’t want anything other than a golden retriever, Stephen insisted.
—No, we’re going to get a small dog, Adele said. —We’re going to get a Maltese Yorkie like the Johnsons have.
The Johnsons were a family that lived up the street.
—Morkie! Stephen shouted.
—Yes, a Morkie. Literally, that’s what they’re called, Adele stated flatly.
—I like the name Morkie, but I still want a golden retriever.
—Sorry, but we’re not getting one Stephen, Michael asserted. —Under no conditions are we.
—That’s ridiculous.
—We have a small house with a small yard, Adele said; they need more room.
—Adam has a black lab.
—They have a lot more yard space; the Bethlehem Township houses are all a lot bigger than ours.
—They’re not much bigger.
—The yards are three times as big, Stephen, Michael intoned.
—I should be allowed to have whatever dog I want.
—Would you walk him every night?
—Yes.
—No, you wouldn’t, Michael said.
Adele had a difficult time saying no to her son; she was privately calculating ways to convince her husband that they could handle a bigger dog financially and emotionally.
—Maybe it would be a good responsibility for him, Adele said.
—Yeah! Stephen said.
—Adele... Michael shot his wife a look.
—I want a Morkie, Elizbeth said quietly. —The Johnson’s dog is sooo cute.
—No don’t betray me! Stephen shouted. —Hold the line!
—Let’s change the subject for now, Adele said.
—Okay, Stephen said sullenly.
—Do you wanna go watch Pat Murphy pitch in the high school playoffs tomorrow? Michael asked Stephen, referring to his older cousin, Michael’s sister’s son.
—Yeah sure. Where?
—Liberty, Michael said.
Liberty was the local public high school; Pat pitched for Bethlehem Catholic. Adele could tell the idea of watching his bigger, stronger, older cousin succeed as a pitcher pained Stephen, but it would be good to bond with his father, she thought. Father and son only really got along in the context of baseball; everything else was increasingly fraught.
This was a tragedy for both father and son. Stephen really only played for his father. He only pitched well when his dad was the coach, which is why things never worked out during the All-Star seasons. Stephen never responded well to getting buried by Mr. Hall. He didn’t fight. He gave up. He seethed and sulked and lost his personality and confidence. He would sit at second base and bat seventh and think about how he should have been batting first and pitching. He wasn’t a power hitter. He was a strong contact hitter; he hit line drives and walked a lot. He should have been at the top of the lineup. He should have been getting 5 or 6 innings in key games on the mound.
It wasn’t fair. Dougie Masterson wasn’t that good. He didn’t throw as hard as Stephen, but he was best friends with Matt Hall. Why did he get the second pitcher spot behind Matt Hall, who threw over 70, by the way?
After dinner, Michael and Adele went for a walk while the kids watched The Simpsons.
—Do you think we should be letting them watch The Simpsons? Beth Vorn was telling me that she doesn’t let Adam.
—Well, they watch whatever they want at Ryan’s house. Michael said.
— That’s true.I’m sure they watch much worse than The Simpsons. I know there’s not much you can do. The Simpsons has really smart writing. Stephen was telling me that he wants to be a TV writer.
—I could see that.
—I was thinking maybe we need to find a therapist or a counselor for Stephen. Someone who could also work with Elizabeth eventually.
—If we can find someone who’s reasonably priced, yeah, it might not be a bad idea, Michael said slowly, and Adele winced because he was such a cheapskate. He could afford it now that she had gone back to work part-time.
—As I see it, the issue is whether he’d actually agree to go.
—Yeah. I don’t think he can talk about it with his friends. I mean, the boys are great. He has a great group of friends, and they’re very nice guys, but yeah...
—They’re knuckleheads, Michael said.
—Well they’re 12 and 13, so. They’re not really equipped to have serious conversations.
—Correct.
—I just think it’s better to intervene early.
—That’s possibly true.
—You know Mike, I also don’t think it would be a terrible idea for you and I to go to couples’ therapy.
—For what reason?
—Well we don’t communicate very well.
—I don’t think that’s something I want to do Adele.
—Can you please consider it?
—I will consider, Michael said without emotion or intonation.
—Promise.
—I don’t want to be forced to promise Adele; either I come around to it or I don’t.
—Don’t you maybe... I mean can’t you just acknowledge... that there’s a lot that we don’t or can’t talk about?
—Like what?
—Michael.
—No really. Like what?
Adele could sense how subtly panicked Michael was; the man hated, because it was so technically difficult for him, to talk about not just his feelings, but anyone’s feelings. He dealt with particulars and concretes; Adele dealt with the mental: that which could only be discovered with metaphors and vague images.
She felt that basically, a certain part of her husband’s inner life was undeveloped: that he was still basically a child when it came to the realm of feelings.
Even now well into the second half of life.
Adele found her son throwing a plush football against the wall of his bedroom over and over, narrating some kind of imaginary game to himself under his breath, totally engrossed. She imagined that he imagined that he was winning the Super Bowl as the quarterback of the Eagles; nothing less would be acceptable. She watched her son through a crack in the door of his bedroom, because if he had known she was watching, he would have stopped immediately. Some instinct told her: enjoy this moment of innocence; it will not last; this is the end of this kind of un-self-consciousness.
She knocked and said, —Can I come in?
As expected, he immediately stopped throwing. He turned around, unhappy. —What?
—I just wanted to say goodnight.
—Goodnight, Mom.
Adele ignored her son and sat down on the bed facing him. He tossed the football to her, and she caught it.
—What’s up? he asked.
—Nothing, I just wanted to talk to my dear boy. I guess I’m here to bother you.
—Please don’t ask me about school.
—I’m not going to ask you about school.
—It’s all Dad talks about.
—I know, and I’m trying to get him to stop, but Dad said he won’t. Adele mindlessly smoothed out the quilt on his bed.—You get more out of this $5 plush football than every video game I’ve bought you.
—Yeah, well, I do love throwing things, Stephen said. —It’s my only joy.
—You have a great arm.
—Thanks. Your dad always tells me that after the games. Wow, Stephen just has an amazing electric arm. Your nickname should be ‘The Arm.’
—Pretty corny.
—Yeah, you’re right. That’s what happens when you become a parent. You get corny.
—I don’t want to have kids, Stephen said.
—You’ll change your mind. Did you know I always wanted kids? It was always what I wanted most in life.
—Well, that’s good, Stephen said sarcastically, —because you got them.
—Yes, I did.
Stephen jumped on his bed, curling up into a ball; Adele sat at the edge of the bed, stroking his hair.
—I don’t want to go to friggin school tomorrow.
—One more week.
—Yeah but, uggghhhhhh. Blurggggg.
—One more week.
—It’s the dumbest thing ever.
—Stephen you are being a baby.
—Waaaa waaaaaa, Stephen wailed.
—I don’t mean like that kind of baby.
—I hate math.
—You used to like math.
—When it was easier; now it’s all these funny symbols.
—Okay if you tell yourself you’re bad at it then that’s what you’ll be.
—I don’t mind being bad at something so stupid.
Stephen was reading T. H. White’s The Once and Future King, which he had gotten into because he read that it was an influence on George R. R. Martin, but he was finding to his disappointment that it was absolutely nothing like George R. R. Martin. However, the archaic, stately cadence of the language had some appeal to him, and he had a thing about finishing books the second he read a word of them. If he got to the second sentence, he would get to the end of the book.
He had planned to masturbate after reading, but his mother’s intrusion half an hour before had disturbed him. If his parents or even his sister felt they could just open the door to his room, which didn’t lock, any time they wanted, then he was never really safe, even after lights out, although lights out was obviously much safer than any other time during the day. His only hope was to touch himself when nobody was home, when Elizabeth was at piano lessons, his mom was at work, and maybe while his dad was picking her up. There were lots of times when he had the house to himself, usually after school.
It would be harder in the summer, though. Someone was always around. His dad didn’t work.
He had acquired the spring Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue, which was under his bed. He assumed that his parents knew that he had gotten it out of the mail before his dad could find it, but thankfully his parents didn’t say anything. All Stephen wanted was plausible deniability for these things. All he wanted was for no one to ask what he did in his room, for no one to come into his room, for everyone to let his room be his room.
The boy was tired. Spent all day in the sun running around. But he didn’t want to go to sleep because going to sleep meant that the night would be over and the school day would begin when he opened his eyes. He wanted to stay on the other side of the divide. He had no idea why he had to go to school. He read a lot more on his own. He could have learned more from just reading all the books at the Bethlehem Public Library, one by one. He imagined that he could set the Guinness Book of World Records record for the most books read by the time of reaching eighth grade, but he didn’t know if that was a real record or who held it. Chances are he played too many video games to break it, but he’d still read more books than anyone he’d ever met his own age. It was just too bad that nobody really cared. Adam, Ryan, Tommy: those guys had a begrudging respect for his reading, and when there was a question about history or mythology, they would ask him. They would defer to Stephen, which made him feel good. But they didn’t actually care or want to talk about anything he was reading.
Reading was more of a symptom than a cause of what made Stephen different than his friends, though. He remembered being six years old, staring up at his hands in bed and realizing that he would die one day. One of his earliest memories, in other words, was about death, about trying to wrap his head around nothingness. He still thought about that. That when somebody died, everything went with them: their inner movie, their inner voice that talked and talked and talked.
He didn’t like thinking about it, so that’s why he had to do these other things: throw his plush football, masturbate, read, watch The Simpsons; anything, really.
Because when he didn’t, he’d start to try to imagine what it would feel like to be dead, and then his brain would freak out, and he’d feel a shiver go down his spine, and he’d want to run around the house to release the tension produced by said thought.
He’d asked his dad earlier in the spring, on the way to a game, if he thought about death, and all his dad said was, —I don’t.
When Stephen asked why, his dad had just said, —Doesn’t do much good, and left it there.
That night, it started to rain and Elizabeth woke up, listening to the soft, lyrical patter of the May rain on the tin awnings which flanked the front of her house and covered the porch, which was directly below her room. She hugged Mr. Fluffy to her body, and felt a shiver of deep, almost alien happiness. She had thought about the rain, and here it was; the spring had listened to her, felt her, and water sprang from the sky. She had never been happier, not realizing that this kind of happiness was not guaranteed to last, or return.
The truth was that even with his dread of school factored in, Sunday nights at home made Stephen incredibly happy. In the fall there would be football games on at night, and in the spring he had baseball and the bursting green of his mother’s flower bed, the bushes and the trees and the colors of all the flowers, and the imminent sense of summer and the relaxation and peace that would bring. The ever-present smell of cut grass. But spring was heavier and more lush; it rained more. Instead of cut grass, you smelled soil. It was a different system of smells and sensations. And the days were a little bit shorter, still. And so twilight was more of a tease, hinting at the long June and July nights to come.
Sleep excited him: sleep meant entering the future, growing a little taller, growing a little older, transforming.
Growing up, was, though he didn’t have a vocabulary for it, for Stephen, a spiritual experience (the kind of experience he didn’t have when he had CCD on Monday nights or when he went to church on Sundays with his family). He felt implicitly that it was connected to his elongating, growing bones and his growing mind. God pressed a button and we became someone else gradually and grew towards Him. There had to be a why; unless God wanted to test you, why wouldn’t you just remain a child forever?
Much of the best course of his life had been locked inside of this routine, and the routine itself was the magic spell which held the family unit together, which supported and protected his kids, his wife, his house, from the elemental crush of history. Almost everywhere, all the time, there have been wars, long marches, revolutions, tribal skirmishes, plagues. Michael taught history, after all, and he knew how hard history was on the individual, so it seemed like a small sacrifice in the end to be tired all the time, at least during the school year, and to be a little bit bored.
So much grand sacrifice has been made so that people like himself could make a comparatively smaller sacrifice now, and so that his son, in turn, could maybe suffer a little less than his daughter, than he and his wife had. That was the idea, anyway, that was built into or implied in everything, wasn’t it? Stephen and Elizabeth would live the creative lives, perhaps, that he and his wife had fantasized about, maybe, but had never seriously pursued. Michael had tinkered with the idea of writing a novel, or a popular history book, but... really, where was he supposed to find the time? The summers, there was still so much work to be done in the summer, especially with the house, and Adele wanted to take a cross-country road trip that summer, was planning on it, taking the kids to the Great Lakes and the Grand Teutons, and the Grand Canyon, and Yellowstone. Stephen was already complaining about having to leave his friends.