Fic: The Elephant in the Chair (Part I)
The Elephant in the Chair; PG13, Leonard, gen.
Written for the 2011 bigbangbigbang. Please see the Masterpost for details.
I
In 1980, a survey of American children born of that year revealed Michael to be the most popular boy's name. Though they would some two years later choose this for their youngest, the fact itself was not general knowledge to the Hofstadters of 121 Carlyle Avenue, Princeton, New Jersey, and so no such consideration was taken when deciding on one for their first-born son. At least, none that didn't come from a professional respect Beverly Hofstadter held for the bedrock challengers of her field, and that this particular name just happened to flash into her head in that post-delivery haze when the brain is generally, and disappointingly, unpredictable.
All Leonards supposedly have the strength of a lion. And certainly that would be true, if such origins are to be believed as one might believe in past lives, or the wearing of sharks' teeth to guard against misfortune; but as it was this boy came into the world with barely a cub-like mew. With so little evidence to support this theory, his mother could hardly give it merit.
He was born on a Friday, at eleven minutes past midnight. She held him in her arms, thinking, with some objectivity, that he looked raw and small, and how unfocused his eyes were, even for a newborn.
On that list of one thousand names, Leonard came in at two hundred and ten.
::
Forty-four minutes. Forty-four minutes and seventeen seconds: this is exactly how long it takes the woman sitting next to him to realize that a one-sided conversation, however entertaining, cannot possibly last the six hours it takes to fly across the breadth of the continental United States.
At some point in minute number forty-five, when all he can hear is the sound of glossy magazine pages being turned over, Leonard risks opening his eyes. To his right the leading tip of the Boeing's wing cleaves a sharpened, invisible line through the clouds. Small droplets of water cling to the window's outer layer. Rain over Colorado, never to reach the ground. He wonders what the weather's like in Princeton, if the box hedge his father tended for so many years is still thriving and threatening to swallow the mailbox whole; or has Beverly, as a blatant display of disinterest at the end of nearly thirty-nine years of marriage, chopped the whole thing down because she has neither the time nor the patience for pruning shears. It wouldn't surprise him one bit.
Your father has taken a small apartment near the University, she had written in an email. I think it would be beneficial if you were to stop there for the duration of your stay. Here is the address. And on the same day, in the same hour even, as Leonard sat gazing at the walls of his Caltech office, rolling a dry erase marker from one end of the desk to the other in an attempt to circumvent actual work, just like magic an almost identical email had appeared in his inbox from his father, as if this whole event were an exercise in therapy, and yet another excuse for his parents to substitute clinical observation for love.
Sincerely, Dad. Really, that's all he gets? No wonder his reaction was to promptly close his eyes and feign sleep the minute his friendly but chatty neighbor managed to glean from his mumbled pleasantries the fact that yes, he was flying home, and yes, to the closeted and small world he'd grown up in, to attend his brother's wedding.
"Can I get you a drink, sir?"
The stewardess smiles pleasantly from behind her trolley. The woman beside him-oh, ironic, perfect timing-is well and truly asleep, so he sits up as quietly as he can, straightens his glasses and smiles back. "Coffee. Please."
"Any cream?"
He shakes his head, no. They perform an awkward dance of trying to pass cup to hand while the cabin shudders briefly. The seatbelt signs flicker on. Fumbling for the strap, he notices that the light outside has dropped a shade darker, the clouds turned thicker and more imposing. The tip of wing he'd been staring at before has disappeared completely. The coffee is supremely bitter, but strong. Strong is good.
Leonard is not entirely sure how long a single weekend can last, apart from the hours and minutes. Apart from the units of time he knows, with a familiar sinking feeling, he's going to have to make a conscious effort not to count as he plunges, head first, into everything he was sure he'd left behind.
in these woods lives a memory
Sunlight falls across the room in thin, vertical lines, illuminating the plain white cot in the far corner. There is dust in the air, weightlessly captured in the light and circling current, but the space is otherwise quite bare. Walls painted a washed-out blue are the only source of real color; the wooden floors and panelling seem to be cut from the same tree, so uniform are they in pattern and shade. If not for the few toys lined up in rag-tag formation along a shelf (bear and soldier and duck-fur brushed and buttons bright), there is little evidence that this room even belongs to a child, or to anyone, really, of distinct character. It is simply a room, nothing greater.
On a high dressing table sits a single framed photograph in black and white. In it a man and a woman stand by a waterfall. They appear posed and still, eyes fixed somewhere beyond the lens, their faces unreadable.
Alone and undisturbed, for the figures in the photo are meaningless in his small and dreamless world, the child sleeps. With every breath his fingers clasp and unclasp the satin fringe of the blanket; faint whisperings at the intake of air foreshadow a common disorder that will not manifest itself until his early teens, by which time he will have other worries to deal with. Now, though, there is unburdened comfort in this tactile sensation, something given with the barest minimum by his mother.
Of course, none of this matters, as sleep and silence are impenetrable at an age so young. First memories do not plant themselves without some influence, and this is not that moment. It is merely a place and a beginning.
Time passes. Distantly the sound of cars come and go, the faint tread of tires interposed with things heavy and utilitarian-a garbage truck, fire engine, a school bus. The light from the near-drawn blinds has changed angles and grown weaker. Far off voices make softened impressions in the quiet, though not nearly enough to disturb him. He is listening to things that come to his ears from distances even farther than the strange outside.
When he wakes, finally, it is to the measured steps of a woman. She wears a sombre pantsuit, and walks on stockinged feet. She is twenty-eight years old, the face in the photograph. She is his mother.
"Leonard."
Their eyes meet, and the child, stirred by recognition, his name and her voice, pats the blanket away with chubby fingers and holds up his arms to be taken.
She lifts him, gazes without expression into his small face, his crown of curly hair, his eyes wide and calm, the color of Teddy's button nose. Though she does not hold him close, maternal instinct heightens the feeling of security, that she would not let him go.
"Good," she says. "That was six hours. Room for improvement, yes, but...good. Come."
Together they leave the room. Her words, of course, have no meaning; still clinging to sleep, he places his head against her sternum, listening to the whisper of wool against cotton against skin. Her scent is faint and unobtrusive.
(Later, he will try and recall it, mostly out of curiosity, and mostly without success. It is what sons and mothers do.)
Beverly was just nineteen when that photo was taken. She proposed marriage to her friend John Hofstadter that same day, because it was the sensible course of action, and that procreation, in the future at least, seemed inevitable. He could come up with no reason not to. The promises of an established career and financial stability were still some ways off, and both were realistic enough to accept that there were inherent benefits in partnership and mutual support. Love stood farther down that particular list, and did not need to be mentioned, as much (in Beverly's opinion) as it played an unnecessary part in things. The year was 1971. They would work on their dissertations solidly over the next ten years, bear two children and be carrying a third by the close of it.
Leonard blinks in the false new light of the hall and living room. He would like to be back in the quiet again, but does not have the means or understanding to communicate such feelings, so he starts to cry. His mother stops and turns in half circles, turns in her working clothes, the suit of her job still buttoned and neat. One hand cradles his head, back and around, around and back, until he stops. And he burrows into her, this child, with the world outside and the sun fading, as a cub in the woods.
::
There's a moment when he stands before the door to his father's apartment, closed fist an inch away from knocking, and it occurs to him that he has no actual memory of what was said the last time they met. Everything seems to come from when he was so much younger, as if nothing since the day he left has made any impact at all.
"Leonard?"
He turns. A figure emerges from the shadow of the stairwell, two boxes cradled in his arms. Textbooks and pizza. It's hard to make him out in the dark light.
"Dad." They both move at the same time, into a sort of hug that doesn't quite avoid knocking a number of things to the floor. Books, mostly. Lots and lots of books. Leonard grins, flustered at being in such close proximity; the corduroy of his father's jacket smells of dust and wood smoke. The familiarity hits him quite suddenly, a full belt right in his chest. "Hey...uh, good to see you."
"Yes, yes." Greeting apparently made to his satisfaction, John Hofstadter starts patting his pockets with his free hand. He looks up and shakes his head. "I'm sorry-I...well. I appear to have misplaced my key."
Leonard is about to reply when his father's expression changes. "No," he says. "I tell a lie. It's in my other jacket. I was doing some work on my speech, and it was getting stuffy in that shoebox of an office, so I took it off...you know, son, it's a good thing that you're here, because I can use you as a test audience. This is a very important day for Michael and I want it to be just so...if you could hold these-" he shoves the boxes into Leonard's arms and hastens back down the stairwell. "I won't be a minute."
He's left standing with a cooling pizza, alone in an echoing hallway, and it's not until he finds the energy to sit among the textbooks that it occurs to him that his father has managed to say more words in less than a minute than he somehow managed in ten whole years.
what's a little leakey between friends?
Today Marianne is fourteen, but as the family does not celebrate birthdays, the cake batter she is pouring into a carefully lined tin is not for her. It is a Mothers' Group cake, dark chocolate and ginger, not to be touched. Still, Marianne has a knack for culinary exploits, and so Beverly allows her a small participatory role in the baking. Allowances among the Hofstadter children are rationed out with consideration, rare enough to enjoy with quiet triumph when they happen.
"Where are your brothers?" asks Beverly, touching the tin to make sure the batter settles evenly. It isn't required, but she does it anyway; her daughter's hands appear steady enough.
"In the Castle."
"Of course. Well, when we are finished here, you may go outside and bring them in."
The Castle is a tree house without a tree. In the Hofstadters' modestly sized yard, it sits beneath a withered peach tree that flowers for about two days of the year and fruits for even less. Its drooping branches have no strength to support a childish enterprise of broken planks and rusted nails, so the tree simply provides cover, but that is enough. In this small monarchy of eighties New Jersey, the falling leaves are enemies storming the battlements. Beverly, in the middling warmth of the kitchen (for the oven is temperamental and often overheats) watches as her daughter sets the mixing bowl upright and walks it to the sink. She will do as her mother bids, but won't do as the boys and be warriors at play in an imaginary world. Birthday or not, fourteen is fourteen and Marianne no longer a girl, and both know that time is quickly passing.
"Sure, Mom."
But she doesn't leave, not immediately. She stands by the kitchen island, flour on her fingers. Her eyes dart about as she searches for a cloth to wipe them. Beverly peers studiously at the cake, at the smooth and shiny mixture; she can already tell that it will turn out perfectly. She unfolds a new dishcloth and hands it to her daughter.
"Thanks." Marianne presses her lips into a smile, and dutifully cleans her hands, the countertop, the dripping wooden spoon. Careful, sweet child, for the chocolate is bitter and still running warm. She trots outside, with a glint in her eye.
"Bam! Bam!"
"That's not a sword, stupidhead! Sword's go swish!"
"Too bad-this is a club! A club with explosive spikes, Leonard Leakey...and you're dead!"
With a battlecry shrill enough to break glass, five-year-old Michael cleaves his weapon through the air and sets off after his brother. Two pigeons that have been sitting unobtrusively in the peach tree startle at the noise, and with a whistle of feathers take to the sky. They rise to nearby power lines and settle again, watching the fight unfold.
Leonard doesn't move.
For a moment he can't, he's frozen, and all he can do is watch Michael run towards him, arms flailing and voice at a strangled and otherworldly pitch, as if calling the world to join his cause. Even at the tender age of seven, in Leonard's experience the powers of younger brothers are too often given free rein to roar and cause havoc; it is the unvoiced rule of kids growing up close in age, so near in temperament. He can't fight because it's wrong, but he must because it's there. So Michael, magical sword-slash-club with explosive spikes in hand, comes hurtling closer and closer, until finally, suddenly, the freeze turns to fire and Leonard is gone. Gone, off and running, the weapon of his own creation (a fallen stick, for the tree provides armoury as well as shelter) clasped firmly in both hands.
He'll win this game, for though he's quiet, he's lighter of foot. And he's fast.
"Hey!"
With all his attention focused on the chase and how many looping concourses of the yard it's going to take for Leonard to emerge the victor, he fails to notice the extra body emerging from the back porch until it's too late. He crashes into Marianne with an almighty thud!-the impact knocking the breath from his lungs and the glasses from his face, and with a gasping wheeze Leonard tumbles to the grass.
From across the yard, Michael snorts with laughter and pulls up quickly, the game happily forgotten now that there's some actual misfortune to examine. "Nice landing," he says, in a voice altogether too knowing for a boy so young. "Now you're really dead."
Leonard coughs and spits out a leaf. The shadow that was his big sister looms briefly, and then she is at his level and looking right at him.
"You okay, little b?"
She stretches out a hand to his smaller one, helps him stand. Her hair is long and still in plaits, honey-blonde like their mother. But her eyes are studious and all warmth, and the hurt that threatens to bubble over changes into an embarrassing tear. It is blinked away before she (or anyone) can see.
He sniffs, pats his face. "I lost my-"
"No, here they are," she says, quickly, ducking down to retrieve the glasses. Marianne smiles, and places them back on his nose. "See? Good as new."
It's frighteningly true. They're not even a week old, these thick, shining, heavy frames. (Picked by Beverly straight off the display rack, without any heed at the saleswoman's suggestions. She'd had bright pink lipstick, and an even brighter smile for Leonard. "What about something softer?" were her words as they'd stood as a trio to choose. "He's got such a sweet face..." "Frames are a necessity," said Beverly, "but it is the lenses that correct. How they look is of no matter." Economy and logical thought winning out, as always. He was happy to get out and back home for a glass of apple juice. Besides, the lady smelt funny.) Leonard attempts a smile now to show that he is brave as well as light of foot, but hesitation takes over and he shrugs instead. He wonders what could be good and what could be new about something that makes him feel top heavy and light headed all at once. The Knights of the Tree don't wear glasses. The enemy would laugh, throw down their weapons. They would refuse to play.
(Michael laughs anyway. But he thinks a club with explosive spikes can beat a ruby-red sword. So that doesn't count.)
"You've got white on you," Leonard says. He points at her t-shirt, to a dusty splotch on the bright pink cotton.
Marianne frowns. She looks down. "Oh!"
It's Thursday, so Leonard knows what it is and why it's there. Mothers' Group is always on a Thursday. Mothers' Group means dark chocolate and Beverly making lists with talking points and agendas and things he doesn't understand. But he knows his days well; he can keep track of time despite seeing the world in a blur. Small boys who live in castles, they have senses other than sight.
The winter of that year sees the Hofstadter family lose and gain a portion of their number, two strange and curious events from which none of them quite recover.
The first is when Beatrice and Benedict, a pair of black moor goldfish who have lived happily in an octagonal-shaped tank since before Leonard was born, are discovered one day floating incongruously and upside-down among the anubias fronds. The whys and hows of this possible suicide pact are debated briefly between Beverly and John, while the three children stand as one in the kitchen, observing the stately passing in the form of their father with a bucket and their mother a net. It is the first experience of death for any of them, and they are silenced by the thought of something so familiar being suddenly no more. Nevertheless, as deemed by Beverly to be a critical and important life lesson, the subject has several airings as part of the weekly family discussion circle, though perhaps without success, for the tank remains in the living room, filled but fishless. Her insistence that it be left as a reminder of the intangible grasp of mortality ends up simply confusing matters, not to mention visitors who happen to gaze through the glass and wonder innocently where the fish are hiding, only to be informed that it is empty on purpose so that the children might learn. They never do get another goldfish. Or, for that matter, is Leonard able to watch, in his later school years, amateur college productions of Much Ado About Nothing without thinking of strange, aquatic funerals.
The second event, one even more surreal if that were possible, is the arrival of a dog.
Leonard is in his bedroom when he hears the noise. He is recovering from a cold, and is supposed to be tucked beneath the covers, but he feels perfectly fine and is instead lying flat on his stomach, searching in the dark space beneath his dresser for a marble. It's the blue Tom Thumb, his favorite, and there's no way he's going to let it die a lonely death in a dusty corner. Never mind that he doesn't really play marbles; he just likes to arrange them; but there's a touch of the neurotic fastidiousness in him passed through his father's genes, and so the thought of a marble lost and alone under the dresser fuels him to reach just that little bit farther, until he grasps it and rolls out with a triumphant grin.
Still prone on the floor, he squints and aims a perfect roll into the middle of the rug. He's just admiring the way his arrangement of canis major catches the light, when raised voices from outside make him look up. His mother's voice, sharp and steady, and his father's, questioning.
And then he hears barking.
In an instant Leonard is springing upright and running to the front door, which he finds Beverly blocking, like some sort of strangely gallant sentry in tweed and pearls.
He can see his father standing by the front gate, wrapped in his scarf and long overcoat. By his feet is a ball of unidentifiable fluff.
A pink tongue emerges. The ball wriggles, and barks again.
"John," says Beverly. From the tone of her voice it sounds as if this is a repetition, and one not entirely new. "This is completely unacceptable."
"Not my intention, dear," comes the reply. John Hofstadter smiles amiably, carefully. "I was followed home by a vagrant..."
"How poetic. And how perfectly naive. We cannot house a canine, John."
As she speaks, Beverly leans to one side, creating a gap between her body and the doorframe. Leonard spots his opportunity and darts through.
"Dadmomdadcanwekeephimcanwekeephim-" The cold air, sudden and sharp, makes his breath hitch, but still his words fly without thought or coherence. He tears to the gate and his father's legs, falling to his knees right there on the hard concrete of the sidewalk, into the fur and pink tongue, causing the aforementioned wriggling to intensify with nuclear speed. He is enveloped in a volley of happy barks, and licked all over, and manages an awkward combination of a laugh turning into a cough and then a sneeze.
Beverly sighs.
"I would like to record my displeasure at this unconsidered addition to our home. But as I see imprinting is already underway, it would appear that my voice must go unheard." She walks to the gate, heels clicking. "Look at it. It's a stray, probably disease-ridden, probably full of neuroses picked up from goodness knows how long a life on the streets. As an anthropologist, Jonathon, you should not have to be reminded that canines live in packs. Do you really want our children to grow up with that sort of mentality?"
"It looks like there's a bit of Lhasa Apso in there," John remarks, quietly and somewhat curiously, ignoring most of this speech but still considering the dog, which is now spinning circles around his son in a strange combination of advance and evasion, "but definitely not a wolf. I hardly think they'll tear each other to bits for food."
Leonard emerges dishevelled and grinning from the doggy embrace. "Can we?" he asks again. "Please?"
"I suppose there is no harm in at least considering the idea." His father thumps his hands together and breathes out sharply. "Perhaps if you were to give him a name, Leonard."
Beverly's lips tighten. She looks on as her husband speaks, but she says nothing.
Leonard thinks for a moment. A name? There are so many possibilities: Einstein, Newton, Nelson, Flash, Zip, Captain Fantastic, Luke, Spock, Buzz, Apollo-how can he possibly choose? But the honor is on him, and soon the others will be home, and there will go any chance of being the first, the first to decide anything, so-
He opens his mouth, and...
"Mitzephalie?" John repeats, with a frown. "Well, okay then. You'll have to explain the origins of that to me later, son."
And this is how Mitzy Hofstadter, the very un-wolf-like stray, comes to be named after a sneeze.
::
"Dad? It's almost half past. We're meant to be at the breakfast by nine, and I'm not sure if I have a whole lot of faith in that car of yours."
He rinses the coffee mug and looks about the kitchen. On the windowsill there's a ceramic vase in the shape of a skull, with a cactus growing out of an eye socket, stretching towards to light as if it wants to escape. He prods it with a finger and murmurs, "I know how you feel." Then, louder, "Dad?"
"I need your opinion on these ties."
Leonard sighs and wanders into the hall. The door to his father's bedroom is half-open; he can see pieces of clothing scattered about the floor. "The blue one," he says, without looking.
"I think Michael was wearing blue."
"Then you'll all blend in together...look, Dad, didn't you have four or five rehearsals for this?"
John appears at the door. "You want a cup of coffee?"
"I've had three."
"I think I need a cup of coffee..."
He brushes past, still muttering about ties and clashing colors. Leonard keeps his mouth shut and starts picking things up off the floor. His father wasn't this bad at Marianne's wedding, but then, he was still a married man himself. There's just too many loose ends floating round this whole weekend, and it's barely started.
He's bending to retrieve a pair of balled-up socks when he notices something poking out between the pages of Chernow's Washington. A yellow wedge of silk, screen-printed with fading letters: Princeton Day Science Fair, 1988.
"Leonard?"
Book and ribbon still in hand, he's about to say something when John pokes his head around the door, gesturing with a frown at the pile of clothes on the bed. "Pass me that darned tie there, would you? No, the blue one. And what are you standing about for? We're going to be late."
lima beans verb adverb to noun
It's the tiniest thing. Soft brown earth in an egg carton, and in the first cup, a thread of green. This particular one, the smallest, is yet to unfurl, and sits wound tight in a spring, reminding him of fossilized primordial ferns under his father's microscope, spiralling over and again to the point where he can no longer see. Mathematicians have discovered formulas that explain why this is, but all Leonard knows is that it's alive and in his care, and right now that's all that matters.
This is his responsibility. It's a big deal.
He fills the eyedropper with a little more water, and squirts it very gently into the mix. He watches with interest as it darkens and disappears slowly, turns to his notebook and makes a note of the date and time, and then takes a measurement with a small plastic ruler. Winnie-the-Pooh and Piglet look up at him with fixed and cheery faces, Piglet's ears at one and three quarter inches marking the position where the biggest stalks now reach.
The bedside clock reads 7.58. Leonard watches for a moment as the eight clicks into a nine, before reaching for his tape deck. This recording isn't the best quality, but it was the only one he could find at the library, and he especially wanted this version because it's the one his grandpa had. He died a few years ago, and in one of those memories that remain stuck like a burr, Leonard remembers being shown how the old record player worked, that big cumbersome thing that looked like it belonged on the bridge of the Enterprise (used by Uhura, of course, to transmit important interspace signals and brownie recipes). He was shown how the grooves in the vinyl were positioned, and how the little needle floated above, and then, amidst the crackles, suddenly there were the warm notes of a piano, played by a Canadian man his grandpa would refer to, with nothing but admiration, as a humming-bird, weird as all hell but a genius. Always a genius.
(Leonard didn't like to ask why-there was already so much strangeness in the world-but he listened all the same to that echoless sound, and maybe as the record turned and the needle flew, maybe he understood.)
Now the numbers change again, all three at once. Time to begin.
"So. Do lima beans grow better to classical music?" He looks around the empty room, to the absent audience. The anticipation, that quiet thrill of being so near to discovery, makes him grin. "Well, let's see. Today is Day Three, and the time is nearly eight. Prepare to do your worst, little guys."
He presses play.
Down in the Hofstadters' laundry, next to the washing machine and dryer, another cluster of lima beans sit without any musical accompaniment whatsoever. These beans will not know that famous interpretation of the Goldberg Variations currently being played to the all important test batch; and nor will they ever, as far as their short lives are concerned, be witness to the following:
Leonard, running his young vocal cords almost hoarse by repeatedly singing-in a very touching but not-exactly-in-key boy soprano-the Clown's Aria from Leoncavallo's Pagliacci;
Leonard, again, making use of his Winnie-the-Pooh ruler for less than scientific purposes when his brother Michael comes crashing into the room to subject the lima beans to a screeching rendition of Ernie's Do De Rubber Duck from Sesame Street;
Mitzy, eating bean number five (and unceremoniously bringing it up again fifteen minutes later on the kitchen floor);
And Beverly, standing by the doorway at an indiscriminate hour late one night, observing the quaint tableau of her son lying asleep and drooling into his comforter, glasses turned backwards in his hair and eyedropper clutched like a talisman in his hand. While across the room, the last notes of The Nutcracker trail quietly from a tape deck, watched with great stillness by a forest of green.
The letters read SCI-NCE FAIR, but the missing E, having some time ago fallen from its position high above the assembly stage to land behind the microphone stand, appears mostly forgotten as people mill past busily and without notice. The remaining squares of silver-blue construction paper waft gently in the circling air, announcing to all present that today's event will go ahead as planned-until, much like the projects (or possibly just the teachers) it very quietly falls to pieces.
Twenty-four tables are arranged in a horseshoe pattern in the center of the room, each presided over by a small child, sporting-as reflecting the degree of messiness, thrills, or outright danger involved in their grand experiment-a various array of goggles, gloves and lab coats, be it inspired by Actual Science, or, with what seems to be the more popular choice, the less challenging guise of Evil Genius. In the case of one Freddy Truman, the gloves have the slightly worrying appearance of having last been used to handle radioactive isotopes, while little Bethany Llangton isn't so much wearing her lab coat as being drowned in it.
And here is Leonard. He is wearing a pair of protective goggles, but this is not for fear of his lima beans suddenly turning into triffids and attacking every third grader in sight (though he would not say no to the situation if it means being a Hero and gallantly throwing himself in front of the paper-mache table, saving Christie Parchetski and her blonde curls from a sticky and unpleasant end). He wears them because in the morning's excitement he'd dropped his glasses and snapped one of the hinges, and the oversized piece of moulded plastic now pinching his nose and crimping his hair into tufts is basically the only thing preventing the world around him turning into a blurry dream.
He looks at his watch. It's digital, and pretty neat, square with buttons on the side. Dick Tracy had a watch like this, would look at it steely-eyed and then turn in the one motion and sock a bad guy right in the jaw-bam! pow! In the comic book store downtown, in his permitted Friday after school browsing with his father waiting in the car with a newspaper, Leonard likes to rummage through the bargain boxes. The old comics smell of dust balls and crackle thickly when opened, and he often thinks that it's unfair to be relegated to the back of the store, these older, wizened heroes, when they have done so much and saved so many lives without complaint or fanfare; to be revered by small boys seems too a small a reward.
Bam! Pow! Take that, taller, bigger, brainless buffoon...
"Just a couple more minutes, Leonard. Sit tight."
Miss Newman's smile is brief as she walks past, clipboard in hand and heels a loud chime on the wooden floor. She teaches Math, keeps Leonard in the seat by the window because he won't daydream like the other kids. His eyes are always on the blackboard, the calculations running through his head always faster and always cleaner than she can write them.
Leonard frowns. A couple more minutes? But he wants to start now! His hands jiggle against the table; the heavy watch slips around and he has to stop and pull it straight, and his elbow flies out and nearly knocks over one of his poster boards. It's the one listing ten fun facts about lima beans and ten interesting facts about classical music (his reasoning being that classical music operates at too serious a baseline to be categorized as fun...but that lima beans are just beans). He closes his eyes, steadying himself briefly with a stern reminder that while he's jiggling about and fussing with watchstraps that don't quite fit, the lima beans are still growing-admittedly on a fairly microscopic level-and therefore still under his influence. So he must be calm. This is his project, every last measurement and every mark, pencil smudge and splash of water on and inside the specially bound notebook labelled L. Hofstadter, Third Grade Science; this, and every part of it, his. Be calm...wait...except he's sick of waiting; he's been here since seven-thirty, when the janitor came to open up the hall with his big set of keys. And once inside, Beverly, who had driven Leonard in, had stood for exactly two minutes looking at the room and contemplating its emptiness. She even told him as much, as he fought with a tablecloth that stubbornly refused to lie straight. The mind, Leonard, is an empty space. She then remarked that his choice of table was not wise because the light was too direct and would make the leaves wilt, and left to retrieve the rest of the family.
But that was two hours ago. At this rate he's going to have to start a new test batch from scratch, and seeing as he's already returned Glenn Gould to the library, that means he's not going to have the right set of variables, so of course it will be all wrong, and-
"Good morning everyone."
The large bulk of Principal Hubert looms behind the microphone. There is a pause as he flattens out a sheet of paper, adjusts his tie and gazes across the room. "Today's Science Fair is to honor our Third and Fourth Graders, who have been working very hard over the past few months to present what I hope will be an exciting array of wonderments..."
Leonard watches, not really listening. It's too hard to hear with plastic goggles, anyway. Or nerves that leap to notes of disquiet.
"Ah, now here's Mr. Hofstadter. And what are these?"
"Lima beans."
"Yes, yes, that I can see. If you would be so good as to elaborate..."
He leaps into his presentation. He has practised this speech many times over, mostly alone, once to Beverly (who hadn't listened) and once to Marianne (who had), and has it timed to exactly three and a half minutes.
It's a good speech. It's an informative speech. It's both fun and interesting (to quote his list of facts) and he even decorated his banner with the elaborate fronds of a magic beanstalk, plus a cartoon of Beethoven's cat. He doesn't even know if Beethoven had a cat. He just thought it looked kind of neat.
He begins, very calmly, very clearly. But it doesn't last, because he starts to hear his own voice, the inflections, the way it climbs higher towards the end of each sentence and how some words start runningalltogetherandhecan'tmakethemSTOP-
The adjudicators nod and listen. They seem to understand, so maybe, maybe-It's okay, he thinks. I can make it stop. I can. There. Just like that. They make marks on clipboards and look on benignly at his goggles and unruly hair. And they look to the table, at the three-dozen green shoots, lined up in neat, parallel lines. He's worked and worked so hard for such a modest return.
"Very good, Leonard," says one.
"And what a sweet little cat," says another, with a smile. "You certainly did your research."
Really, he should have known how it would end. How events would conspire against the simplest of triumphs or the plainest of congratulations. Yes, some might think that it's a shame for a boy who hasn't reached double digits in age to be thinking these things, but he isn't like other boys, and they aren't like other families, and so if he doesn't know what normal is, it's all relative and then, yes really, whose fault is that?
Kermit the Frog said that it isn't easy being green. He was a wise enough creature; he might as well have said it isn't easy being young.
Beverly, as chair of the Parents' Committee, has been given the task of handing out the prizes, and she stands on the assembly stage with the last of the ribbons in her hand.
"The honorable mention," she says, peering down at the paper, "for ages eight to ten, goes to...oh. Leonard Hofstadter."
Everyone is looking at him, but he doesn't care, he rushes up the steps, lab coat flying, coming to a skidding halt by his mother's legs. His heart is thumping like a cannonball. He won! Well, okay he didn't win, but still. A prize!
Beverly adjusts her glasses a little, and leans into the microphone.
"I must say, it is a curious adjudicating process that rewards what is really just a revisit of last year's stand out entry, 'Do lima beans grow worse to rock and roll'." She looks out at the audience, a note of careful amusement in her voice. "I seem to recall my youngest, Michael, winning that particular challenge. So advanced for his age...his father and I both felt that this year the competition was simply beneath him...but I digress. We must be accepting in all things, no matter how erroneous." She holds out the ribbon. "There you go, Leonard. Well done."
He leaves the stage to warm but slightly confused applause. It's hard to hear them; the claps sound so distant and fuzzy. His throat is tight. When he reaches the bottom step and the darkest corner of the wings, he bumps into Miss Newman, maybe on purpose, he doesn't know. But he pushes the triangle of silk into her hand without thinking, and does a masterful job of pretending not to care or respond as she looks with shock at his retreating back, and moves her lips to the shape of his name.
::
He sees the back of her first. Shoulders upright and neck straight, dark blouse and pants cinched high at the waist, hair twisted in a knot; she doesn't notice them until they're hovering a little awkwardly at the end of the room, and then it's as if she is seeing them in reflection, and she half-turns and looks the two of them over, her fine features masked by angular frames and something quizzical in her eyes. He stands beside his father, surrounded by bouquets of roses, and attempts a smile. She walks towards them. She doesn't smile back.
"Hello, Leonard."
"Mother."
"John," she says. And then, almost in the same breath, "There's a mark on that tie."
"Microscopic, I think. Most unnoticeable."
Beverly merely nods at this, but the way her mouth sets at the corners is all Leonard needs to know that she is already disinterested in the conversation. Or simply in his father's conviction. He fidgets, embarrassed for one or both of them, he's not sure. As his hands duck in and out of his suit pockets, he finds a ticket stub. From the dry cleaners, or a toll booth maybe, but the ink's long faded. He starts to smile at his ability to be distracted by something so mundane and then realizes that nobody's talking. Which, really, he could apply to so many different things, most particularly to the fact that he's been here approximately twenty-nine hours and already he wants to hang his head and crawl for home. Talking? That's a joke. Nobody talks in this family. Nobody's been talking for a very long time.
"And have you spoken to your brother yet?" asks Beverly.
They're both staring at him. He blinks rapidly and clears his throat.
"No, Mom. We kind of just got here. Hey, uh, so the place looks really nice. Did-did Nicole choose the flowers?" Leonard has to force himself to leave his pockets alone. He's going to end up unpicking the lining at this rate.
Beverly shrugs. "I hardly think so. They had a woman organize such matters...Leonard, you're doing that thing with your hands again. Have you some dermatological condition that needs seeing to?"
"I-what? No, no, I'm fine. You know me, just nerves."
"Well, when we are gathered to acknowledge something of significance on your part, dear, then I will allow nervousness to a degree. Otherwise it is plainly psychosomatic and quite frankly something I thought you would have grown out of by now." She brushes at an invisible mark on her sleeve and sighs a little under her breath. "Something your father here knows all too well, I'm sure."
Before anyone can respond to this there's movement at the door, Beverly is walking away, and Leonard is left standing there, sweat in the palms of his hands, struck quite still by the fluttering of nerves so accused by his own mother. He swallows, hard. It doesn't help.
"So," he says. "Mom looks well."
"Yes. She's an absolute picture." John rocks on his feet for a moment and then clears his throat, eyeing the back of the room. "I'm going to...get a glass of water."
Leonard exhales slowly and glances at his watch. Six minutes in, and already abandoned by both parents. It's comforting to know that some things never change.
mother duck
John is a collector. But not of things, not of objects that clutter shelves and take up space in boxes or draws. What he collects are ideas, and they exist in his mind in pure, elementary space, categorized to order, and always there. His work is dry-coated to the extreme, necessary, of course, and intellectually stimulating-but it's books and words and data, lots and lots of data, and these days relies less on what first drove him to anthropology, than a whole lot of administrative blather that in all honesty would be better suited to his pot plant. So he retreats to daydreams, the emphatic pulse of things that exist because they can. And don't have to be explained to anyone.
Back in the early days, when he and Beverly weren't so much getting to know one another as slowly edging around the periphery of what could only very loosely be described as a courtship, she would accuse him of being too much in his own shell. Not exactly the approach to a loving and supporting relationship, but then, he was mostly of the same opinion, so he could hardly contradict her. Truthfully, he didn't mind being pushed. He'd grown up with five brothers and one sister, so had little means to battle the average (or, in Beverly's case, un-average) female persuasion. So he went about his work locked in that shell as if he were a tortoise, wandering in his own way through fields scattered with bones, hedged into a sort of parallel existence, with family, children and the traps of university on one threading plane, and his mind on another.
And throughout everything, there was love, not mentioned once. It remained an idea.
The Saturdays of the school year see most kids out and about on the tracks, diamonds and fields scattered about the district. There are skills to be honed, plays to master and times to beat. Girls wave pompoms and jump in formations, their cries a staccato chorus in the morning air. They are almost military in execution, as are the boys and coaches, for the sporting calendar is a pursuit to be compared to a great infantry preparing for battle. And come the end of the season, they will turn around and begin it all again, perhaps with the same faces, perhaps with a new string of recruits, but all with the overwhelming desire to win, impress, dig in and achieve. Latin quotes and team chants sit alongside broken egos and the beginnings of rivalries that will continue well into the law firms or boardrooms in fifteen, twenty years' time.
Unless, of course, that kid happens to be Leonard. In which case Saturday morning will see them in the engineering workshop, building, piece by painstaking piece, a contraption so simple in its outcome and yet so very, very complicated in its meaning, that when asked they will say it's a work in progress (patent pending), and elaborate no more.
It should be mentioned that the workshop is mostly empty, but not quite, because there is a bird at the window, balanced on the ledge but unwilling to fly. And what he is building is a hugging machine.
He sits, hunched a little over the soldering iron, concentrating hard so as to not make a mistake. He likes how the metal softens and pools into tiny bubbles; it makes him think of the T-1000 in that new movie Judgement Day, but in slightly less murderous form. (He won't admit to having nightmares of being chased by a man who runs fast, and faster still. Or waking up to find his mother with exoskeleton appendages. On the other hand that would probably liven up family therapy, so maybe there is an upside to post-apocalyptic doom.) The wing where the workshops are located sits in a U-shape around a parking lot, and beyond that is the running track. Through windows that are beginning to cobweb a few of the hardier students can be seen running up their long-distance miles. Leonard occasionally thinks if he were to take up a sport, it would be something like hurdles, if only because years of having Michael chase him to all corners of the neighborhood has given him a seriously honed ability to avoid confrontation with the aid of obstacles. (Often corners weren't even involved, sometimes there were dead-ends too, resulting in brief but unfairly physical scraps, at which point Mitzy would jump to Leonard's defence and the whole thing would devolve into dog yips and tears. And counselling. Lots and lots of counselling.) Of course, he thinks a lot of things that laughably will not happen, so he ends up spending his Saturday mornings in the company of a bird that refuses to fly, and a pair of robotic arms.
And there's probably a metaphor in there somewhere, if he only cared enough to look.
Leonard continues soldering until he has things basically in the right places. He's about to make a first attempt at trying out the radio controls, when he hears footsteps approaching.
"Aha! So you're the one who left that outside door open..."
Behind his grey beard, Jack Mosley's voice comes out in a gruff rumble. But his eyes twinkle ever so slightly as he weaves his way around the workbenches to where Leonard and his pile of metal sit accused. God knows trying to corral a small community of pre-teens into sitting still for long enough in order to take in the finer aspects of science and engineering is not the easiest job on the planet, but the man plainly has the patience of a saint, and Leonard, momentarily fearful of getting into another round of excuses as to why he's holed up in here when most people are outside being useful and productive, relaxes enough to answer back with, "Sorry, Mr. Mosley. My bad."
The teacher comes to a stop, crosses his arms, and ponders the contraption carefully. "I hope the Home Economics department know that you have one of their dressmaking mannequins. Do I dare enquire as to the nature of this beast? Or shall we remain ambiguous and just call it an untitled project to while away the hours."
"They said this one was being eaten up by moths." Leonard shrugs. "So I was welcome to it. And I'm a fan of ambiguous."
"As am I, young man, as am I."
He feels relief at not having to explain any further, almost intensely so, and together they set about adjusting and tinkering with the mechanisms. This ends up taking a while, as it turns out that Leonard maybe isn't so fantastic with the soldering iron as he'd thought.
"Now that I'm here," Mosley says, quietly contemplating a wrench as if it were a relic from another age, "I should mention that your mother came to see me the other day. She was a little concerned about your, how shall we say, lack of self-discipline and general inattention to life? To which I replied, well, his marks are not the issue, because quite honestly I don't know how you could improve on one hundred per cent accuracy."
"Oh," says Leonard. "Uh...thanks?"
"I'm not after thanks, Mr. Hofstadter, I am simply informing you of the facts. But I have to agree with her diagnosis. There's a lot going on inside that head of yours."
He puts down the wrench and looks briefly at Leonard over his reading glasses. Leonard fiddles with the switch on the radio control but doesn't respond.
"How are things at home?"
"Okay."
"Okay? Well, okay is good. Life is a series of okays. It's a sort of universal mean, a middling shrug. My dentist asks me how my teeth are. They hurt like a dog, but I'm a tough guy so instead I say oh, sure, they're okay." There is a pause as he tests the hinges on the right arm. It swings and squeaks. The bird up high at the window taps its beak on the glass and Mosley looks up. "D'you think he wants to come in?" he wonders.
Leonard isn't sure. He reaches with the oilcan instead, and pours a few drops on the hinge. The squeak disappears.
"There's an electric blanket," Leonard explains. "It's...stuffed inside. I adjusted the thermostat so it stays at 98.6."
Mosley nods, carefully, with interest. "Core body temperature."
"Yeah."
They fall quiet again. Voices echo distantly from somewhere in the building, footsteps passing by and fading away. He pushes absently at a screwdriver until it's right at the edge of the bench. Out in the field, the group of cheerleaders break formation, and just as he is about to tap the screwdriver one last time so that it falls either to his lap or the floor, he sees the shape of a station wagon, turning slowly into the parking lot. It's his father, come to take him home.
"My dad's here," Leonard says, standing up. He reaches for the mannequin, holding it awkwardly against his small body. "I'd better go."
"You need some help there?"
"Oh, um...no."
He's twisting around, looking for the radio control. Mosley picks it up and tucks in beneath Leonard's chin.
"As you wish."
Leonard offers a small smile, and makes his way, a little precariously but in one piece, to the door. "I'm okay, Mr. Mosley," he says. "Really. Thanks for helping me with the joints."
In the workshop, the teacher pushes back his glasses and studies the figure of his student, trailing cords and wires, as he shuffles across the parking lot. A muffled slam of the rear door resonates in the quiet. At the exit the vehicle seems to wait for an improbably long time, signal light ticking on and off. He can see the balding head of John Hofstadter behind the wheel, but he can't quite see the boy. The car pulls into traffic, and disappears.
He makes to leave, but in the process of turning his eyes are drawn back to the window, where, tail feathers swirling like the coil of a spring, the bird flies away.
(Part II)
Written for the 2011 bigbangbigbang. Please see the Masterpost for details.
I
In 1980, a survey of American children born of that year revealed Michael to be the most popular boy's name. Though they would some two years later choose this for their youngest, the fact itself was not general knowledge to the Hofstadters of 121 Carlyle Avenue, Princeton, New Jersey, and so no such consideration was taken when deciding on one for their first-born son. At least, none that didn't come from a professional respect Beverly Hofstadter held for the bedrock challengers of her field, and that this particular name just happened to flash into her head in that post-delivery haze when the brain is generally, and disappointingly, unpredictable.
All Leonards supposedly have the strength of a lion. And certainly that would be true, if such origins are to be believed as one might believe in past lives, or the wearing of sharks' teeth to guard against misfortune; but as it was this boy came into the world with barely a cub-like mew. With so little evidence to support this theory, his mother could hardly give it merit.
He was born on a Friday, at eleven minutes past midnight. She held him in her arms, thinking, with some objectivity, that he looked raw and small, and how unfocused his eyes were, even for a newborn.
On that list of one thousand names, Leonard came in at two hundred and ten.
::
Forty-four minutes. Forty-four minutes and seventeen seconds: this is exactly how long it takes the woman sitting next to him to realize that a one-sided conversation, however entertaining, cannot possibly last the six hours it takes to fly across the breadth of the continental United States.
At some point in minute number forty-five, when all he can hear is the sound of glossy magazine pages being turned over, Leonard risks opening his eyes. To his right the leading tip of the Boeing's wing cleaves a sharpened, invisible line through the clouds. Small droplets of water cling to the window's outer layer. Rain over Colorado, never to reach the ground. He wonders what the weather's like in Princeton, if the box hedge his father tended for so many years is still thriving and threatening to swallow the mailbox whole; or has Beverly, as a blatant display of disinterest at the end of nearly thirty-nine years of marriage, chopped the whole thing down because she has neither the time nor the patience for pruning shears. It wouldn't surprise him one bit.
Your father has taken a small apartment near the University, she had written in an email. I think it would be beneficial if you were to stop there for the duration of your stay. Here is the address. And on the same day, in the same hour even, as Leonard sat gazing at the walls of his Caltech office, rolling a dry erase marker from one end of the desk to the other in an attempt to circumvent actual work, just like magic an almost identical email had appeared in his inbox from his father, as if this whole event were an exercise in therapy, and yet another excuse for his parents to substitute clinical observation for love.
Sincerely, Dad. Really, that's all he gets? No wonder his reaction was to promptly close his eyes and feign sleep the minute his friendly but chatty neighbor managed to glean from his mumbled pleasantries the fact that yes, he was flying home, and yes, to the closeted and small world he'd grown up in, to attend his brother's wedding.
"Can I get you a drink, sir?"
The stewardess smiles pleasantly from behind her trolley. The woman beside him-oh, ironic, perfect timing-is well and truly asleep, so he sits up as quietly as he can, straightens his glasses and smiles back. "Coffee. Please."
"Any cream?"
He shakes his head, no. They perform an awkward dance of trying to pass cup to hand while the cabin shudders briefly. The seatbelt signs flicker on. Fumbling for the strap, he notices that the light outside has dropped a shade darker, the clouds turned thicker and more imposing. The tip of wing he'd been staring at before has disappeared completely. The coffee is supremely bitter, but strong. Strong is good.
Leonard is not entirely sure how long a single weekend can last, apart from the hours and minutes. Apart from the units of time he knows, with a familiar sinking feeling, he's going to have to make a conscious effort not to count as he plunges, head first, into everything he was sure he'd left behind.
in these woods lives a memory
Sunlight falls across the room in thin, vertical lines, illuminating the plain white cot in the far corner. There is dust in the air, weightlessly captured in the light and circling current, but the space is otherwise quite bare. Walls painted a washed-out blue are the only source of real color; the wooden floors and panelling seem to be cut from the same tree, so uniform are they in pattern and shade. If not for the few toys lined up in rag-tag formation along a shelf (bear and soldier and duck-fur brushed and buttons bright), there is little evidence that this room even belongs to a child, or to anyone, really, of distinct character. It is simply a room, nothing greater.
On a high dressing table sits a single framed photograph in black and white. In it a man and a woman stand by a waterfall. They appear posed and still, eyes fixed somewhere beyond the lens, their faces unreadable.
Alone and undisturbed, for the figures in the photo are meaningless in his small and dreamless world, the child sleeps. With every breath his fingers clasp and unclasp the satin fringe of the blanket; faint whisperings at the intake of air foreshadow a common disorder that will not manifest itself until his early teens, by which time he will have other worries to deal with. Now, though, there is unburdened comfort in this tactile sensation, something given with the barest minimum by his mother.
Of course, none of this matters, as sleep and silence are impenetrable at an age so young. First memories do not plant themselves without some influence, and this is not that moment. It is merely a place and a beginning.
Time passes. Distantly the sound of cars come and go, the faint tread of tires interposed with things heavy and utilitarian-a garbage truck, fire engine, a school bus. The light from the near-drawn blinds has changed angles and grown weaker. Far off voices make softened impressions in the quiet, though not nearly enough to disturb him. He is listening to things that come to his ears from distances even farther than the strange outside.
When he wakes, finally, it is to the measured steps of a woman. She wears a sombre pantsuit, and walks on stockinged feet. She is twenty-eight years old, the face in the photograph. She is his mother.
"Leonard."
Their eyes meet, and the child, stirred by recognition, his name and her voice, pats the blanket away with chubby fingers and holds up his arms to be taken.
She lifts him, gazes without expression into his small face, his crown of curly hair, his eyes wide and calm, the color of Teddy's button nose. Though she does not hold him close, maternal instinct heightens the feeling of security, that she would not let him go.
"Good," she says. "That was six hours. Room for improvement, yes, but...good. Come."
Together they leave the room. Her words, of course, have no meaning; still clinging to sleep, he places his head against her sternum, listening to the whisper of wool against cotton against skin. Her scent is faint and unobtrusive.
(Later, he will try and recall it, mostly out of curiosity, and mostly without success. It is what sons and mothers do.)
Beverly was just nineteen when that photo was taken. She proposed marriage to her friend John Hofstadter that same day, because it was the sensible course of action, and that procreation, in the future at least, seemed inevitable. He could come up with no reason not to. The promises of an established career and financial stability were still some ways off, and both were realistic enough to accept that there were inherent benefits in partnership and mutual support. Love stood farther down that particular list, and did not need to be mentioned, as much (in Beverly's opinion) as it played an unnecessary part in things. The year was 1971. They would work on their dissertations solidly over the next ten years, bear two children and be carrying a third by the close of it.
Leonard blinks in the false new light of the hall and living room. He would like to be back in the quiet again, but does not have the means or understanding to communicate such feelings, so he starts to cry. His mother stops and turns in half circles, turns in her working clothes, the suit of her job still buttoned and neat. One hand cradles his head, back and around, around and back, until he stops. And he burrows into her, this child, with the world outside and the sun fading, as a cub in the woods.
::
There's a moment when he stands before the door to his father's apartment, closed fist an inch away from knocking, and it occurs to him that he has no actual memory of what was said the last time they met. Everything seems to come from when he was so much younger, as if nothing since the day he left has made any impact at all.
"Leonard?"
He turns. A figure emerges from the shadow of the stairwell, two boxes cradled in his arms. Textbooks and pizza. It's hard to make him out in the dark light.
"Dad." They both move at the same time, into a sort of hug that doesn't quite avoid knocking a number of things to the floor. Books, mostly. Lots and lots of books. Leonard grins, flustered at being in such close proximity; the corduroy of his father's jacket smells of dust and wood smoke. The familiarity hits him quite suddenly, a full belt right in his chest. "Hey...uh, good to see you."
"Yes, yes." Greeting apparently made to his satisfaction, John Hofstadter starts patting his pockets with his free hand. He looks up and shakes his head. "I'm sorry-I...well. I appear to have misplaced my key."
Leonard is about to reply when his father's expression changes. "No," he says. "I tell a lie. It's in my other jacket. I was doing some work on my speech, and it was getting stuffy in that shoebox of an office, so I took it off...you know, son, it's a good thing that you're here, because I can use you as a test audience. This is a very important day for Michael and I want it to be just so...if you could hold these-" he shoves the boxes into Leonard's arms and hastens back down the stairwell. "I won't be a minute."
He's left standing with a cooling pizza, alone in an echoing hallway, and it's not until he finds the energy to sit among the textbooks that it occurs to him that his father has managed to say more words in less than a minute than he somehow managed in ten whole years.
what's a little leakey between friends?
Today Marianne is fourteen, but as the family does not celebrate birthdays, the cake batter she is pouring into a carefully lined tin is not for her. It is a Mothers' Group cake, dark chocolate and ginger, not to be touched. Still, Marianne has a knack for culinary exploits, and so Beverly allows her a small participatory role in the baking. Allowances among the Hofstadter children are rationed out with consideration, rare enough to enjoy with quiet triumph when they happen.
"Where are your brothers?" asks Beverly, touching the tin to make sure the batter settles evenly. It isn't required, but she does it anyway; her daughter's hands appear steady enough.
"In the Castle."
"Of course. Well, when we are finished here, you may go outside and bring them in."
The Castle is a tree house without a tree. In the Hofstadters' modestly sized yard, it sits beneath a withered peach tree that flowers for about two days of the year and fruits for even less. Its drooping branches have no strength to support a childish enterprise of broken planks and rusted nails, so the tree simply provides cover, but that is enough. In this small monarchy of eighties New Jersey, the falling leaves are enemies storming the battlements. Beverly, in the middling warmth of the kitchen (for the oven is temperamental and often overheats) watches as her daughter sets the mixing bowl upright and walks it to the sink. She will do as her mother bids, but won't do as the boys and be warriors at play in an imaginary world. Birthday or not, fourteen is fourteen and Marianne no longer a girl, and both know that time is quickly passing.
"Sure, Mom."
But she doesn't leave, not immediately. She stands by the kitchen island, flour on her fingers. Her eyes dart about as she searches for a cloth to wipe them. Beverly peers studiously at the cake, at the smooth and shiny mixture; she can already tell that it will turn out perfectly. She unfolds a new dishcloth and hands it to her daughter.
"Thanks." Marianne presses her lips into a smile, and dutifully cleans her hands, the countertop, the dripping wooden spoon. Careful, sweet child, for the chocolate is bitter and still running warm. She trots outside, with a glint in her eye.
"Bam! Bam!"
"That's not a sword, stupidhead! Sword's go swish!"
"Too bad-this is a club! A club with explosive spikes, Leonard Leakey...and you're dead!"
With a battlecry shrill enough to break glass, five-year-old Michael cleaves his weapon through the air and sets off after his brother. Two pigeons that have been sitting unobtrusively in the peach tree startle at the noise, and with a whistle of feathers take to the sky. They rise to nearby power lines and settle again, watching the fight unfold.
Leonard doesn't move.
For a moment he can't, he's frozen, and all he can do is watch Michael run towards him, arms flailing and voice at a strangled and otherworldly pitch, as if calling the world to join his cause. Even at the tender age of seven, in Leonard's experience the powers of younger brothers are too often given free rein to roar and cause havoc; it is the unvoiced rule of kids growing up close in age, so near in temperament. He can't fight because it's wrong, but he must because it's there. So Michael, magical sword-slash-club with explosive spikes in hand, comes hurtling closer and closer, until finally, suddenly, the freeze turns to fire and Leonard is gone. Gone, off and running, the weapon of his own creation (a fallen stick, for the tree provides armoury as well as shelter) clasped firmly in both hands.
He'll win this game, for though he's quiet, he's lighter of foot. And he's fast.
"Hey!"
With all his attention focused on the chase and how many looping concourses of the yard it's going to take for Leonard to emerge the victor, he fails to notice the extra body emerging from the back porch until it's too late. He crashes into Marianne with an almighty thud!-the impact knocking the breath from his lungs and the glasses from his face, and with a gasping wheeze Leonard tumbles to the grass.
From across the yard, Michael snorts with laughter and pulls up quickly, the game happily forgotten now that there's some actual misfortune to examine. "Nice landing," he says, in a voice altogether too knowing for a boy so young. "Now you're really dead."
Leonard coughs and spits out a leaf. The shadow that was his big sister looms briefly, and then she is at his level and looking right at him.
"You okay, little b?"
She stretches out a hand to his smaller one, helps him stand. Her hair is long and still in plaits, honey-blonde like their mother. But her eyes are studious and all warmth, and the hurt that threatens to bubble over changes into an embarrassing tear. It is blinked away before she (or anyone) can see.
He sniffs, pats his face. "I lost my-"
"No, here they are," she says, quickly, ducking down to retrieve the glasses. Marianne smiles, and places them back on his nose. "See? Good as new."
It's frighteningly true. They're not even a week old, these thick, shining, heavy frames. (Picked by Beverly straight off the display rack, without any heed at the saleswoman's suggestions. She'd had bright pink lipstick, and an even brighter smile for Leonard. "What about something softer?" were her words as they'd stood as a trio to choose. "He's got such a sweet face..." "Frames are a necessity," said Beverly, "but it is the lenses that correct. How they look is of no matter." Economy and logical thought winning out, as always. He was happy to get out and back home for a glass of apple juice. Besides, the lady smelt funny.) Leonard attempts a smile now to show that he is brave as well as light of foot, but hesitation takes over and he shrugs instead. He wonders what could be good and what could be new about something that makes him feel top heavy and light headed all at once. The Knights of the Tree don't wear glasses. The enemy would laugh, throw down their weapons. They would refuse to play.
(Michael laughs anyway. But he thinks a club with explosive spikes can beat a ruby-red sword. So that doesn't count.)
"You've got white on you," Leonard says. He points at her t-shirt, to a dusty splotch on the bright pink cotton.
Marianne frowns. She looks down. "Oh!"
It's Thursday, so Leonard knows what it is and why it's there. Mothers' Group is always on a Thursday. Mothers' Group means dark chocolate and Beverly making lists with talking points and agendas and things he doesn't understand. But he knows his days well; he can keep track of time despite seeing the world in a blur. Small boys who live in castles, they have senses other than sight.
The winter of that year sees the Hofstadter family lose and gain a portion of their number, two strange and curious events from which none of them quite recover.
The first is when Beatrice and Benedict, a pair of black moor goldfish who have lived happily in an octagonal-shaped tank since before Leonard was born, are discovered one day floating incongruously and upside-down among the anubias fronds. The whys and hows of this possible suicide pact are debated briefly between Beverly and John, while the three children stand as one in the kitchen, observing the stately passing in the form of their father with a bucket and their mother a net. It is the first experience of death for any of them, and they are silenced by the thought of something so familiar being suddenly no more. Nevertheless, as deemed by Beverly to be a critical and important life lesson, the subject has several airings as part of the weekly family discussion circle, though perhaps without success, for the tank remains in the living room, filled but fishless. Her insistence that it be left as a reminder of the intangible grasp of mortality ends up simply confusing matters, not to mention visitors who happen to gaze through the glass and wonder innocently where the fish are hiding, only to be informed that it is empty on purpose so that the children might learn. They never do get another goldfish. Or, for that matter, is Leonard able to watch, in his later school years, amateur college productions of Much Ado About Nothing without thinking of strange, aquatic funerals.
The second event, one even more surreal if that were possible, is the arrival of a dog.
Leonard is in his bedroom when he hears the noise. He is recovering from a cold, and is supposed to be tucked beneath the covers, but he feels perfectly fine and is instead lying flat on his stomach, searching in the dark space beneath his dresser for a marble. It's the blue Tom Thumb, his favorite, and there's no way he's going to let it die a lonely death in a dusty corner. Never mind that he doesn't really play marbles; he just likes to arrange them; but there's a touch of the neurotic fastidiousness in him passed through his father's genes, and so the thought of a marble lost and alone under the dresser fuels him to reach just that little bit farther, until he grasps it and rolls out with a triumphant grin.
Still prone on the floor, he squints and aims a perfect roll into the middle of the rug. He's just admiring the way his arrangement of canis major catches the light, when raised voices from outside make him look up. His mother's voice, sharp and steady, and his father's, questioning.
And then he hears barking.
In an instant Leonard is springing upright and running to the front door, which he finds Beverly blocking, like some sort of strangely gallant sentry in tweed and pearls.
He can see his father standing by the front gate, wrapped in his scarf and long overcoat. By his feet is a ball of unidentifiable fluff.
A pink tongue emerges. The ball wriggles, and barks again.
"John," says Beverly. From the tone of her voice it sounds as if this is a repetition, and one not entirely new. "This is completely unacceptable."
"Not my intention, dear," comes the reply. John Hofstadter smiles amiably, carefully. "I was followed home by a vagrant..."
"How poetic. And how perfectly naive. We cannot house a canine, John."
As she speaks, Beverly leans to one side, creating a gap between her body and the doorframe. Leonard spots his opportunity and darts through.
"Dadmomdadcanwekeephimcanwekeephim-" The cold air, sudden and sharp, makes his breath hitch, but still his words fly without thought or coherence. He tears to the gate and his father's legs, falling to his knees right there on the hard concrete of the sidewalk, into the fur and pink tongue, causing the aforementioned wriggling to intensify with nuclear speed. He is enveloped in a volley of happy barks, and licked all over, and manages an awkward combination of a laugh turning into a cough and then a sneeze.
Beverly sighs.
"I would like to record my displeasure at this unconsidered addition to our home. But as I see imprinting is already underway, it would appear that my voice must go unheard." She walks to the gate, heels clicking. "Look at it. It's a stray, probably disease-ridden, probably full of neuroses picked up from goodness knows how long a life on the streets. As an anthropologist, Jonathon, you should not have to be reminded that canines live in packs. Do you really want our children to grow up with that sort of mentality?"
"It looks like there's a bit of Lhasa Apso in there," John remarks, quietly and somewhat curiously, ignoring most of this speech but still considering the dog, which is now spinning circles around his son in a strange combination of advance and evasion, "but definitely not a wolf. I hardly think they'll tear each other to bits for food."
Leonard emerges dishevelled and grinning from the doggy embrace. "Can we?" he asks again. "Please?"
"I suppose there is no harm in at least considering the idea." His father thumps his hands together and breathes out sharply. "Perhaps if you were to give him a name, Leonard."
Beverly's lips tighten. She looks on as her husband speaks, but she says nothing.
Leonard thinks for a moment. A name? There are so many possibilities: Einstein, Newton, Nelson, Flash, Zip, Captain Fantastic, Luke, Spock, Buzz, Apollo-how can he possibly choose? But the honor is on him, and soon the others will be home, and there will go any chance of being the first, the first to decide anything, so-
He opens his mouth, and...
"Mitzephalie?" John repeats, with a frown. "Well, okay then. You'll have to explain the origins of that to me later, son."
And this is how Mitzy Hofstadter, the very un-wolf-like stray, comes to be named after a sneeze.
::
"Dad? It's almost half past. We're meant to be at the breakfast by nine, and I'm not sure if I have a whole lot of faith in that car of yours."
He rinses the coffee mug and looks about the kitchen. On the windowsill there's a ceramic vase in the shape of a skull, with a cactus growing out of an eye socket, stretching towards to light as if it wants to escape. He prods it with a finger and murmurs, "I know how you feel." Then, louder, "Dad?"
"I need your opinion on these ties."
Leonard sighs and wanders into the hall. The door to his father's bedroom is half-open; he can see pieces of clothing scattered about the floor. "The blue one," he says, without looking.
"I think Michael was wearing blue."
"Then you'll all blend in together...look, Dad, didn't you have four or five rehearsals for this?"
John appears at the door. "You want a cup of coffee?"
"I've had three."
"I think I need a cup of coffee..."
He brushes past, still muttering about ties and clashing colors. Leonard keeps his mouth shut and starts picking things up off the floor. His father wasn't this bad at Marianne's wedding, but then, he was still a married man himself. There's just too many loose ends floating round this whole weekend, and it's barely started.
He's bending to retrieve a pair of balled-up socks when he notices something poking out between the pages of Chernow's Washington. A yellow wedge of silk, screen-printed with fading letters: Princeton Day Science Fair, 1988.
"Leonard?"
Book and ribbon still in hand, he's about to say something when John pokes his head around the door, gesturing with a frown at the pile of clothes on the bed. "Pass me that darned tie there, would you? No, the blue one. And what are you standing about for? We're going to be late."
lima beans verb adverb to noun
It's the tiniest thing. Soft brown earth in an egg carton, and in the first cup, a thread of green. This particular one, the smallest, is yet to unfurl, and sits wound tight in a spring, reminding him of fossilized primordial ferns under his father's microscope, spiralling over and again to the point where he can no longer see. Mathematicians have discovered formulas that explain why this is, but all Leonard knows is that it's alive and in his care, and right now that's all that matters.
This is his responsibility. It's a big deal.
He fills the eyedropper with a little more water, and squirts it very gently into the mix. He watches with interest as it darkens and disappears slowly, turns to his notebook and makes a note of the date and time, and then takes a measurement with a small plastic ruler. Winnie-the-Pooh and Piglet look up at him with fixed and cheery faces, Piglet's ears at one and three quarter inches marking the position where the biggest stalks now reach.
The bedside clock reads 7.58. Leonard watches for a moment as the eight clicks into a nine, before reaching for his tape deck. This recording isn't the best quality, but it was the only one he could find at the library, and he especially wanted this version because it's the one his grandpa had. He died a few years ago, and in one of those memories that remain stuck like a burr, Leonard remembers being shown how the old record player worked, that big cumbersome thing that looked like it belonged on the bridge of the Enterprise (used by Uhura, of course, to transmit important interspace signals and brownie recipes). He was shown how the grooves in the vinyl were positioned, and how the little needle floated above, and then, amidst the crackles, suddenly there were the warm notes of a piano, played by a Canadian man his grandpa would refer to, with nothing but admiration, as a humming-bird, weird as all hell but a genius. Always a genius.
(Leonard didn't like to ask why-there was already so much strangeness in the world-but he listened all the same to that echoless sound, and maybe as the record turned and the needle flew, maybe he understood.)
Now the numbers change again, all three at once. Time to begin.
"So. Do lima beans grow better to classical music?" He looks around the empty room, to the absent audience. The anticipation, that quiet thrill of being so near to discovery, makes him grin. "Well, let's see. Today is Day Three, and the time is nearly eight. Prepare to do your worst, little guys."
He presses play.
Down in the Hofstadters' laundry, next to the washing machine and dryer, another cluster of lima beans sit without any musical accompaniment whatsoever. These beans will not know that famous interpretation of the Goldberg Variations currently being played to the all important test batch; and nor will they ever, as far as their short lives are concerned, be witness to the following:
Leonard, running his young vocal cords almost hoarse by repeatedly singing-in a very touching but not-exactly-in-key boy soprano-the Clown's Aria from Leoncavallo's Pagliacci;
Leonard, again, making use of his Winnie-the-Pooh ruler for less than scientific purposes when his brother Michael comes crashing into the room to subject the lima beans to a screeching rendition of Ernie's Do De Rubber Duck from Sesame Street;
Mitzy, eating bean number five (and unceremoniously bringing it up again fifteen minutes later on the kitchen floor);
And Beverly, standing by the doorway at an indiscriminate hour late one night, observing the quaint tableau of her son lying asleep and drooling into his comforter, glasses turned backwards in his hair and eyedropper clutched like a talisman in his hand. While across the room, the last notes of The Nutcracker trail quietly from a tape deck, watched with great stillness by a forest of green.
The letters read SCI-NCE FAIR, but the missing E, having some time ago fallen from its position high above the assembly stage to land behind the microphone stand, appears mostly forgotten as people mill past busily and without notice. The remaining squares of silver-blue construction paper waft gently in the circling air, announcing to all present that today's event will go ahead as planned-until, much like the projects (or possibly just the teachers) it very quietly falls to pieces.
Twenty-four tables are arranged in a horseshoe pattern in the center of the room, each presided over by a small child, sporting-as reflecting the degree of messiness, thrills, or outright danger involved in their grand experiment-a various array of goggles, gloves and lab coats, be it inspired by Actual Science, or, with what seems to be the more popular choice, the less challenging guise of Evil Genius. In the case of one Freddy Truman, the gloves have the slightly worrying appearance of having last been used to handle radioactive isotopes, while little Bethany Llangton isn't so much wearing her lab coat as being drowned in it.
And here is Leonard. He is wearing a pair of protective goggles, but this is not for fear of his lima beans suddenly turning into triffids and attacking every third grader in sight (though he would not say no to the situation if it means being a Hero and gallantly throwing himself in front of the paper-mache table, saving Christie Parchetski and her blonde curls from a sticky and unpleasant end). He wears them because in the morning's excitement he'd dropped his glasses and snapped one of the hinges, and the oversized piece of moulded plastic now pinching his nose and crimping his hair into tufts is basically the only thing preventing the world around him turning into a blurry dream.
He looks at his watch. It's digital, and pretty neat, square with buttons on the side. Dick Tracy had a watch like this, would look at it steely-eyed and then turn in the one motion and sock a bad guy right in the jaw-bam! pow! In the comic book store downtown, in his permitted Friday after school browsing with his father waiting in the car with a newspaper, Leonard likes to rummage through the bargain boxes. The old comics smell of dust balls and crackle thickly when opened, and he often thinks that it's unfair to be relegated to the back of the store, these older, wizened heroes, when they have done so much and saved so many lives without complaint or fanfare; to be revered by small boys seems too a small a reward.
Bam! Pow! Take that, taller, bigger, brainless buffoon...
"Just a couple more minutes, Leonard. Sit tight."
Miss Newman's smile is brief as she walks past, clipboard in hand and heels a loud chime on the wooden floor. She teaches Math, keeps Leonard in the seat by the window because he won't daydream like the other kids. His eyes are always on the blackboard, the calculations running through his head always faster and always cleaner than she can write them.
Leonard frowns. A couple more minutes? But he wants to start now! His hands jiggle against the table; the heavy watch slips around and he has to stop and pull it straight, and his elbow flies out and nearly knocks over one of his poster boards. It's the one listing ten fun facts about lima beans and ten interesting facts about classical music (his reasoning being that classical music operates at too serious a baseline to be categorized as fun...but that lima beans are just beans). He closes his eyes, steadying himself briefly with a stern reminder that while he's jiggling about and fussing with watchstraps that don't quite fit, the lima beans are still growing-admittedly on a fairly microscopic level-and therefore still under his influence. So he must be calm. This is his project, every last measurement and every mark, pencil smudge and splash of water on and inside the specially bound notebook labelled L. Hofstadter, Third Grade Science; this, and every part of it, his. Be calm...wait...except he's sick of waiting; he's been here since seven-thirty, when the janitor came to open up the hall with his big set of keys. And once inside, Beverly, who had driven Leonard in, had stood for exactly two minutes looking at the room and contemplating its emptiness. She even told him as much, as he fought with a tablecloth that stubbornly refused to lie straight. The mind, Leonard, is an empty space. She then remarked that his choice of table was not wise because the light was too direct and would make the leaves wilt, and left to retrieve the rest of the family.
But that was two hours ago. At this rate he's going to have to start a new test batch from scratch, and seeing as he's already returned Glenn Gould to the library, that means he's not going to have the right set of variables, so of course it will be all wrong, and-
"Good morning everyone."
The large bulk of Principal Hubert looms behind the microphone. There is a pause as he flattens out a sheet of paper, adjusts his tie and gazes across the room. "Today's Science Fair is to honor our Third and Fourth Graders, who have been working very hard over the past few months to present what I hope will be an exciting array of wonderments..."
Leonard watches, not really listening. It's too hard to hear with plastic goggles, anyway. Or nerves that leap to notes of disquiet.
"Ah, now here's Mr. Hofstadter. And what are these?"
"Lima beans."
"Yes, yes, that I can see. If you would be so good as to elaborate..."
He leaps into his presentation. He has practised this speech many times over, mostly alone, once to Beverly (who hadn't listened) and once to Marianne (who had), and has it timed to exactly three and a half minutes.
It's a good speech. It's an informative speech. It's both fun and interesting (to quote his list of facts) and he even decorated his banner with the elaborate fronds of a magic beanstalk, plus a cartoon of Beethoven's cat. He doesn't even know if Beethoven had a cat. He just thought it looked kind of neat.
He begins, very calmly, very clearly. But it doesn't last, because he starts to hear his own voice, the inflections, the way it climbs higher towards the end of each sentence and how some words start runningalltogetherandhecan'tmakethemSTOP-
The adjudicators nod and listen. They seem to understand, so maybe, maybe-It's okay, he thinks. I can make it stop. I can. There. Just like that. They make marks on clipboards and look on benignly at his goggles and unruly hair. And they look to the table, at the three-dozen green shoots, lined up in neat, parallel lines. He's worked and worked so hard for such a modest return.
"Very good, Leonard," says one.
"And what a sweet little cat," says another, with a smile. "You certainly did your research."
Really, he should have known how it would end. How events would conspire against the simplest of triumphs or the plainest of congratulations. Yes, some might think that it's a shame for a boy who hasn't reached double digits in age to be thinking these things, but he isn't like other boys, and they aren't like other families, and so if he doesn't know what normal is, it's all relative and then, yes really, whose fault is that?
Kermit the Frog said that it isn't easy being green. He was a wise enough creature; he might as well have said it isn't easy being young.
Beverly, as chair of the Parents' Committee, has been given the task of handing out the prizes, and she stands on the assembly stage with the last of the ribbons in her hand.
"The honorable mention," she says, peering down at the paper, "for ages eight to ten, goes to...oh. Leonard Hofstadter."
Everyone is looking at him, but he doesn't care, he rushes up the steps, lab coat flying, coming to a skidding halt by his mother's legs. His heart is thumping like a cannonball. He won! Well, okay he didn't win, but still. A prize!
Beverly adjusts her glasses a little, and leans into the microphone.
"I must say, it is a curious adjudicating process that rewards what is really just a revisit of last year's stand out entry, 'Do lima beans grow worse to rock and roll'." She looks out at the audience, a note of careful amusement in her voice. "I seem to recall my youngest, Michael, winning that particular challenge. So advanced for his age...his father and I both felt that this year the competition was simply beneath him...but I digress. We must be accepting in all things, no matter how erroneous." She holds out the ribbon. "There you go, Leonard. Well done."
He leaves the stage to warm but slightly confused applause. It's hard to hear them; the claps sound so distant and fuzzy. His throat is tight. When he reaches the bottom step and the darkest corner of the wings, he bumps into Miss Newman, maybe on purpose, he doesn't know. But he pushes the triangle of silk into her hand without thinking, and does a masterful job of pretending not to care or respond as she looks with shock at his retreating back, and moves her lips to the shape of his name.
::
He sees the back of her first. Shoulders upright and neck straight, dark blouse and pants cinched high at the waist, hair twisted in a knot; she doesn't notice them until they're hovering a little awkwardly at the end of the room, and then it's as if she is seeing them in reflection, and she half-turns and looks the two of them over, her fine features masked by angular frames and something quizzical in her eyes. He stands beside his father, surrounded by bouquets of roses, and attempts a smile. She walks towards them. She doesn't smile back.
"Hello, Leonard."
"Mother."
"John," she says. And then, almost in the same breath, "There's a mark on that tie."
"Microscopic, I think. Most unnoticeable."
Beverly merely nods at this, but the way her mouth sets at the corners is all Leonard needs to know that she is already disinterested in the conversation. Or simply in his father's conviction. He fidgets, embarrassed for one or both of them, he's not sure. As his hands duck in and out of his suit pockets, he finds a ticket stub. From the dry cleaners, or a toll booth maybe, but the ink's long faded. He starts to smile at his ability to be distracted by something so mundane and then realizes that nobody's talking. Which, really, he could apply to so many different things, most particularly to the fact that he's been here approximately twenty-nine hours and already he wants to hang his head and crawl for home. Talking? That's a joke. Nobody talks in this family. Nobody's been talking for a very long time.
"And have you spoken to your brother yet?" asks Beverly.
They're both staring at him. He blinks rapidly and clears his throat.
"No, Mom. We kind of just got here. Hey, uh, so the place looks really nice. Did-did Nicole choose the flowers?" Leonard has to force himself to leave his pockets alone. He's going to end up unpicking the lining at this rate.
Beverly shrugs. "I hardly think so. They had a woman organize such matters...Leonard, you're doing that thing with your hands again. Have you some dermatological condition that needs seeing to?"
"I-what? No, no, I'm fine. You know me, just nerves."
"Well, when we are gathered to acknowledge something of significance on your part, dear, then I will allow nervousness to a degree. Otherwise it is plainly psychosomatic and quite frankly something I thought you would have grown out of by now." She brushes at an invisible mark on her sleeve and sighs a little under her breath. "Something your father here knows all too well, I'm sure."
Before anyone can respond to this there's movement at the door, Beverly is walking away, and Leonard is left standing there, sweat in the palms of his hands, struck quite still by the fluttering of nerves so accused by his own mother. He swallows, hard. It doesn't help.
"So," he says. "Mom looks well."
"Yes. She's an absolute picture." John rocks on his feet for a moment and then clears his throat, eyeing the back of the room. "I'm going to...get a glass of water."
Leonard exhales slowly and glances at his watch. Six minutes in, and already abandoned by both parents. It's comforting to know that some things never change.
mother duck
John is a collector. But not of things, not of objects that clutter shelves and take up space in boxes or draws. What he collects are ideas, and they exist in his mind in pure, elementary space, categorized to order, and always there. His work is dry-coated to the extreme, necessary, of course, and intellectually stimulating-but it's books and words and data, lots and lots of data, and these days relies less on what first drove him to anthropology, than a whole lot of administrative blather that in all honesty would be better suited to his pot plant. So he retreats to daydreams, the emphatic pulse of things that exist because they can. And don't have to be explained to anyone.
Back in the early days, when he and Beverly weren't so much getting to know one another as slowly edging around the periphery of what could only very loosely be described as a courtship, she would accuse him of being too much in his own shell. Not exactly the approach to a loving and supporting relationship, but then, he was mostly of the same opinion, so he could hardly contradict her. Truthfully, he didn't mind being pushed. He'd grown up with five brothers and one sister, so had little means to battle the average (or, in Beverly's case, un-average) female persuasion. So he went about his work locked in that shell as if he were a tortoise, wandering in his own way through fields scattered with bones, hedged into a sort of parallel existence, with family, children and the traps of university on one threading plane, and his mind on another.
And throughout everything, there was love, not mentioned once. It remained an idea.
The Saturdays of the school year see most kids out and about on the tracks, diamonds and fields scattered about the district. There are skills to be honed, plays to master and times to beat. Girls wave pompoms and jump in formations, their cries a staccato chorus in the morning air. They are almost military in execution, as are the boys and coaches, for the sporting calendar is a pursuit to be compared to a great infantry preparing for battle. And come the end of the season, they will turn around and begin it all again, perhaps with the same faces, perhaps with a new string of recruits, but all with the overwhelming desire to win, impress, dig in and achieve. Latin quotes and team chants sit alongside broken egos and the beginnings of rivalries that will continue well into the law firms or boardrooms in fifteen, twenty years' time.
Unless, of course, that kid happens to be Leonard. In which case Saturday morning will see them in the engineering workshop, building, piece by painstaking piece, a contraption so simple in its outcome and yet so very, very complicated in its meaning, that when asked they will say it's a work in progress (patent pending), and elaborate no more.
It should be mentioned that the workshop is mostly empty, but not quite, because there is a bird at the window, balanced on the ledge but unwilling to fly. And what he is building is a hugging machine.
He sits, hunched a little over the soldering iron, concentrating hard so as to not make a mistake. He likes how the metal softens and pools into tiny bubbles; it makes him think of the T-1000 in that new movie Judgement Day, but in slightly less murderous form. (He won't admit to having nightmares of being chased by a man who runs fast, and faster still. Or waking up to find his mother with exoskeleton appendages. On the other hand that would probably liven up family therapy, so maybe there is an upside to post-apocalyptic doom.) The wing where the workshops are located sits in a U-shape around a parking lot, and beyond that is the running track. Through windows that are beginning to cobweb a few of the hardier students can be seen running up their long-distance miles. Leonard occasionally thinks if he were to take up a sport, it would be something like hurdles, if only because years of having Michael chase him to all corners of the neighborhood has given him a seriously honed ability to avoid confrontation with the aid of obstacles. (Often corners weren't even involved, sometimes there were dead-ends too, resulting in brief but unfairly physical scraps, at which point Mitzy would jump to Leonard's defence and the whole thing would devolve into dog yips and tears. And counselling. Lots and lots of counselling.) Of course, he thinks a lot of things that laughably will not happen, so he ends up spending his Saturday mornings in the company of a bird that refuses to fly, and a pair of robotic arms.
And there's probably a metaphor in there somewhere, if he only cared enough to look.
Leonard continues soldering until he has things basically in the right places. He's about to make a first attempt at trying out the radio controls, when he hears footsteps approaching.
"Aha! So you're the one who left that outside door open..."
Behind his grey beard, Jack Mosley's voice comes out in a gruff rumble. But his eyes twinkle ever so slightly as he weaves his way around the workbenches to where Leonard and his pile of metal sit accused. God knows trying to corral a small community of pre-teens into sitting still for long enough in order to take in the finer aspects of science and engineering is not the easiest job on the planet, but the man plainly has the patience of a saint, and Leonard, momentarily fearful of getting into another round of excuses as to why he's holed up in here when most people are outside being useful and productive, relaxes enough to answer back with, "Sorry, Mr. Mosley. My bad."
The teacher comes to a stop, crosses his arms, and ponders the contraption carefully. "I hope the Home Economics department know that you have one of their dressmaking mannequins. Do I dare enquire as to the nature of this beast? Or shall we remain ambiguous and just call it an untitled project to while away the hours."
"They said this one was being eaten up by moths." Leonard shrugs. "So I was welcome to it. And I'm a fan of ambiguous."
"As am I, young man, as am I."
He feels relief at not having to explain any further, almost intensely so, and together they set about adjusting and tinkering with the mechanisms. This ends up taking a while, as it turns out that Leonard maybe isn't so fantastic with the soldering iron as he'd thought.
"Now that I'm here," Mosley says, quietly contemplating a wrench as if it were a relic from another age, "I should mention that your mother came to see me the other day. She was a little concerned about your, how shall we say, lack of self-discipline and general inattention to life? To which I replied, well, his marks are not the issue, because quite honestly I don't know how you could improve on one hundred per cent accuracy."
"Oh," says Leonard. "Uh...thanks?"
"I'm not after thanks, Mr. Hofstadter, I am simply informing you of the facts. But I have to agree with her diagnosis. There's a lot going on inside that head of yours."
He puts down the wrench and looks briefly at Leonard over his reading glasses. Leonard fiddles with the switch on the radio control but doesn't respond.
"How are things at home?"
"Okay."
"Okay? Well, okay is good. Life is a series of okays. It's a sort of universal mean, a middling shrug. My dentist asks me how my teeth are. They hurt like a dog, but I'm a tough guy so instead I say oh, sure, they're okay." There is a pause as he tests the hinges on the right arm. It swings and squeaks. The bird up high at the window taps its beak on the glass and Mosley looks up. "D'you think he wants to come in?" he wonders.
Leonard isn't sure. He reaches with the oilcan instead, and pours a few drops on the hinge. The squeak disappears.
"There's an electric blanket," Leonard explains. "It's...stuffed inside. I adjusted the thermostat so it stays at 98.6."
Mosley nods, carefully, with interest. "Core body temperature."
"Yeah."
They fall quiet again. Voices echo distantly from somewhere in the building, footsteps passing by and fading away. He pushes absently at a screwdriver until it's right at the edge of the bench. Out in the field, the group of cheerleaders break formation, and just as he is about to tap the screwdriver one last time so that it falls either to his lap or the floor, he sees the shape of a station wagon, turning slowly into the parking lot. It's his father, come to take him home.
"My dad's here," Leonard says, standing up. He reaches for the mannequin, holding it awkwardly against his small body. "I'd better go."
"You need some help there?"
"Oh, um...no."
He's twisting around, looking for the radio control. Mosley picks it up and tucks in beneath Leonard's chin.
"As you wish."
Leonard offers a small smile, and makes his way, a little precariously but in one piece, to the door. "I'm okay, Mr. Mosley," he says. "Really. Thanks for helping me with the joints."
In the workshop, the teacher pushes back his glasses and studies the figure of his student, trailing cords and wires, as he shuffles across the parking lot. A muffled slam of the rear door resonates in the quiet. At the exit the vehicle seems to wait for an improbably long time, signal light ticking on and off. He can see the balding head of John Hofstadter behind the wheel, but he can't quite see the boy. The car pulls into traffic, and disappears.
He makes to leave, but in the process of turning his eyes are drawn back to the window, where, tail feathers swirling like the coil of a spring, the bird flies away.
(Part II)