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nowing
the future never helped anyone. There’s that whole chain-reaction thing
to contend with… putting a stop to one thing sets in motion a whole other
series of events that sometimes add up and collectively shape an uglier
state of affairs than if things had been left well enough alone. Mom always
knew that I would break my arm in the backyard. She yelled at my dad that
Little Kenny’s going to fall off that and break his arm so why are you
still building it like that? She’d add sometimes that maybe Dad wanted
me to break my arm, that he and his Sicilian mother were conspiring to
toughen up the kid. I had no reason to doubt my mother. She always knew
when the grapes were ready to harvest, whether the olives would make good
oil this year or not, she knew that Dad would be angry every Thursday
and that by Sunday everything would be all right again—even if there were
only three days between then and the next Thursday. Mom had been struck
by lightning when she was young. I had no reason to doubt my mother.
Our house was on the side of a hill. The
backyard extended maybe fifteen feet from the house before dropping away
at a sharp angle. Most families in the area had just built fences and
ignored the rest, but my dad was different. He built walkways and planted
trees of all kinds all over the slope. When he ran out of room for trees
he simply spliced one to another, resulting in an orange-avocado-cherry
tree and an oak that gave Mom olives from the branches closest to the
house. People would tell my dad that you couldn’t do with trees the things
he was doing with our trees. He showed some and they told him that what
they were seeing wasn’t what they were seeing. Dad would tell them they
were stupid and yell at them to get the hell out of his yard. And Dad
was right to do so. My dad could do anything with plants. There was a
grapefruit tree down near the bottom hiding pomegranates near the top
of its canopy. It guarded Dad’s grapevines, which were only grapevines.
I told him that he should try to grow tomatoes on the vines and he told
me to shut up and go practice my damned silly piano lessons.
Dad wanted me to be creative, to be educated
in the arts and such, but he also wanted me to be a man, and somehow the
piano helped with the first and so he was happy, but it seemed to take
away from the second and so Dad was left in a quandary, trying to say
nothing about how girly I looked to him sitting on the bench and drilling
arpeggios. If he said anything, he’d say it in Italian, and to his mother
on the phone. They only spoke Italian when my dad was unable to hold back
his fear that Mom was raising me to be gay. The piano lessons had been
Mom’s idea, and Dad didn’t see anything wrong with it at first—then he
met my piano teacher. Mom loved him, he was tall and slight and his posture
was a source of endless comment amongst my mom and her friends, remembering
fondly all the exercises and hours of posing and posturing… Dad thought
it wrong that a man’s appearance should evoke such memories, and worse
that such a man should be in such close contact with his only son, potentially
the end of the Serrano line. My teacher was soon replaced by a lovely
woman, and almost immediately again by a squat, matronly friend of my
aunt. Dad thought at first that the crisis had been averted, but just
as the seed of possibility had been planted in his head, so too he assumed
it had been in mine. Mom wouldn’t stand for the cessation of the lessons
that my dad nearly begged for, and so he became determined to make a man
out of me some other way.
None of this has to do with anything; I’m
sure neither my mom nor my dad want me talking about them like this—I
just mentioned it… I didn’t mean to… All right, so anyway, Dad did
really great things with our yard, and though my mom thought it was beautiful,
she was also prescient and thus dreaded the day I walked in with my arm
smashed all to bits from a fall down our pretty slope.
I played baseball with the kids from the neighborhood
after school every day. I would imagine that the ball moved only in straight
lines, and so a ball we threw wasn’t the same ball that we caught. The
ball that went soaring up and up after I hit the pitch Danny was sure
I would strike out on changed places somewhere out of sight with another
ball from some other game and continued its trajectory until it slammed
into a tree up on the hillside or was caught by some other boy in some
other game. I learned later that the curvature of the earth made this
impossible, so I decided that when I was old enough I would go out into
space and collect all the balls orbiting the earth so we didn’t run out
and kids could keep playing baseball. I spent summer nights gazing up
into the sky, following the courses of the greatest hits ever, wondering
if maybe one of them were mine. Dad said they were satellites, but Dad
also worked in aeronautics, so I knew that he had to say that. It was
ok. Dad could say whatever he wanted, after all, he could do anything
with plants. As long as you’re an authority on something, you can say
whatever you want about anything else.
Thanksgiving rolled around and all of the
neighborhood kids were forced for one day to stay inside with their families.
Our relatives all lived very far away and so the turnout at our house
was looking to be pretty sparse. A friend of my mom had relatives that
all lived very far away as well, though nowhere near ours, so she came
to our house for dinner. I wandered our halls, tossing my baseball, wishing
that I could take it outside and exchange it… my dad got angry and told
me to put it away because the guest was coming for dinner. She showed
up really early. Dinner was hours away. I asked my dad why she was so
early and he told me to be quiet. I don’t think he knew either.
This friend of my mom, she was nice, and
she even brought a little dog for me to play with. A Shih-tzu. Dad went
outside to work on the system of ponds and streams he’d installed in the
backyard. They had koi and goldfish, even some frogs. He muttered on his
way out the back door something about shit… shit… shit, and then he laughed
and closed the door behind him.
It was a stupid looking dog. I sat there
and we contemplated each other and I wondered if the dog was thinking
that I was a stupid looking human. I figured a dog that looked that stupid
wouldn’t think that and then I thought that maybe the dog was thinking
the same thing. This went on for some minutes and then the dog opened
its mouth and licked its eye. Licked its eye! I figured, stupid or not,
anything that can lick its eye was all right by me. I couldn’t lick my
eye, and it could lick both. Come on, I said to the little “Shih,” lick
then both at the same time. It didn’t. Maybe you’re not so great after
all, I thought. And then I noticed something that had fallen from its
mouth. A little golf ball. This dog wasn’t stupid after all. It came prepared,
came prepared with just the right thing. A baseball would have been better,
of course, but the dog was really small. I was adaptable, I could play
with a golf ball.
Not only was it not stupid, but it was
a great catcher. I’d bounce it or throw it or roll it and every time the
little “Shih” would be right there, would catch it every single time,
no matter how hard I threw the ball. Eventually, however, the dog became
bored—not surprising, since it had no hands and could only play in one
third of the game, couldn’t throw or hit—and stopped catching when I threw.
I bounced the ball off its head a couple of times just to make sure that
it didn’t want to play anymore and then went outside to play on the driveway.
The shell of the ball made it bounce in
a wonderful manner completely unlike a baseball. I slammed it down on
the concrete and watched it rise higher and higher and then all of a sudden
out of the sun would drop the ball. I imagined myself a famous left-fielder
for the Cubs, catching fly ball after fly ball, the crowds roaring and
screaming my name, Kenny! Kenny! It turned out to be my mom calling me,
telling me to come in and wash up for dinner. But there was a game on,
and no stopping it. My greatest enemy was at bat. He glared at me from
the plate, I could feel him hating me all the way out in left field. He
spit at me and then yelled something obscene that was muffled by the distance,
but I knew what he was saying. I knew that he wasn’t going for a home
run, not even a base hit. He was going for me. I was a better batter than
he was and so he was going to take me out of the game.
I was ready. Give me your best, I said,
it won’t be good enough because I’m the famous left-fielder for the Cubs
and no one beats the Cubs. I threw the ball at the wall and it came back
hard and fast. I ran back to catch it, back… back… I’m the famous left-fielder
for the Cubs and—I went off the edge.
I wondered where I would go, who would
be traded out for me as my linear trajectory took me far away, into space
even. Was there another kid named Kenny who looked just like me and had
just jumped in just the right way and would in a few minutes sit down
for dinner with my parents and my mom’s friend? Would I really end up
in space with all the baseballs? Would I need a suit? I thought I probably
should have prepared for this in advance. I…
I woke up confused and numb. I heard my
mom yelling at my dad that I’d finally broken my arm, I heard the back
door to the house slam open and footsteps on the path. I was lying next
to one of the little ponds my dad had made. I was covered in blood. I
tried my arms and they both worked. A noise from the pond caught my attention
and I looked to see one of the koi—the one my dad named Palmerino—staring
at me. Then I looked at the water, at my reflection and I stared at me
too. My nose was gone. Well, not gone really, it was there in the pond
and it took me a second to realize that I wasn’t staring at the reflection
of the tip of my nose, but instead was staring at the actual tip of my
nose, swimming with Palmerino and the smaller one my dad hadn’t bothered
to name. I started screaming. I pulled my nose out of the pond and tried
to stick it back on, but it wouldn’t hold. That was bad. That meant stitches.
“Oh Kenny,” my mom was saying, “let me
see your arm.” She was so convinced of her clairvoyance that she had to
examine both my arms before she even looked at my face. Then Mom’s friend
came up and then my dad and then everyone started screaming.
I got to stay out of school for three weeks.
I looked like Rocky after Mr. T was through with him. I couldn’t sit so
straight at the piano anymore. My dad would stand there listening as I
practiced, sometimes making requests for pieces he particularly liked.
“My little man,” he said.
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