The bottom line was that the ability to run a house in the way Grandma was legendary or infamous for doing, to keep the personal grooming up to that standard, to send out a few hundred Christmas cards every year, each written in flawless fountain-pen longhand, etc., etc., that all of these things taken together took up as much space in her brain as, say mathematics might take up in a theoretical physicist’s.
And so when it came to anything of a practical nature she was perfectly helpless, and probably always had been. Until she had gotten too old to drive, she had continued to tool around Whitman in the 1965 Lincoln Continental, which was the last vehicle her husband had purchased, from Whitman’s Patterson Lincoln-Mercury, before his untimely death. The vehicle weighed something like six thousand pounds and had more moving parts than a silo full of Swiss watches. Whenever any of her offspring came to visit, someone would discreetly slip out to the garage to yank the dipstick, which would always be mysteriously topped up with clear amber-colored 10W40. It eventually turned out that her late husband had summoned the entire living male lineage of the Patterson family—four generations of them—into his hospital room and gathered them around his deathbed and wrought some kind of unspecified pact with them along the general lines of that, if at any point in the future, the tire pressure in the Lincoln dropped below spec or the maintenance in any other way lapsed, all of the Pattersons would not merely sacrifice their immortal souls, but literally be pulled out of meetings or lavatories and dragged off to hell on the spot, like Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus. He knew that his wife had only the vaguest idea of what a tire was, other than something that from time to time a man would heroically jump out of the car and change while she sat inside the car admiring him. The world of physical objects seemed to have been made solely for the purpose of giving the men around Grandma something to do with their hands; and not, mind you, for any practical reason, but purely so that Grandma could twiddle those men’s emotional knobs by reacting to how well or poorly they did it. Which was a fine setup as long as men were actually around, but not so good after Grandpa died. So guerilla mechanic teams had been surveilling Randy’s grandmother ever since and occasionally swiping her Lincoln from the church parking lot on Sunday mornings and taking it down to Patterson’s for sub rosa oil changes. The ability of the Lincoln to run flawlessly for a quarter of a century without maintenance—without even putting gasoline in the tank—had only confirmed Grandmother’s opinions about the amusing superfluity of male pursuits.
In any event, what it all came down to was that Grandma, whose grasp of practical matters had only declined (if that was even possible) with advanced age, was not the sort of person you would go to for information about her late husband’s war record. Defeating the Nazis was in the same category as changing a flat tire: an untidy business that men were expected to know how to do. And not just the men of yore, the supermen of her generation; Randy was expected to know about these things too. If the Axis reconstituted itself tomorrow, Grandma would expect Randy to be suited up behind the controls of a supersonic fighter plane the day after that. And Randy would sooner spiral into the ground at Mach 2 than bear her tidings that he wasn’t up to the job.
Luckily for Randy, who has recently become intensely curious about Grandpa, an old suitcase has been unearthed. It’s a rattan-and-leather thing, sort of a snappy Roaring Twenties number complete with some badly abraded hotel stickers plotting Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse’s migration from the Midwest to Princeton and back—which is completely filled with small black-and-white photographs. Randy’s father dumps the contents out on a ping-pong table that inexplicably sits in the center of the rec room at Grandma’s managed care facility, whose residents are about as likely to play ping-pong as they are to get their nipples pierced. The photos are messed out into several discrete piles which are in turn sorted through by Randy and his father and his aunts and uncles. Most of them are photos of the Waterhouse kids, so everyone’s fascinated until they have found pictures of themselves at a couple of different ages. Then the pile of photos begins to look depressingly large. Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse was evidently a shutterbug of sorts and now his offspring are paying the price.
Randy has a different set of motives, and so he stays there late, going through pictures by himself. Ninety-nine out of a hundred are snapshots of Waterhouse brats from the 1950s. But some are older. He finds a photo of Grandpa in a place with palm trees, in a military uniform, with a big white disk-shaped officer’s cap on his head. Three hours later he comes across a picture of a very young Grandpa, really just a turkey-necked adolescent costumed in grownup clothes, standing in front of a gothic building with two other men: a grinning dark-haired chap who looks vaguely familiar, and an aquiline blond fellow in rimless glasses. All three men have bicycles; Grandpa is straddling his, and the other two, perhaps considering this to be not so dignified, are supporting theirs with their hands. Another hour goes by, and then there’s Grandpa in a khaki uniform with more palm trees in the background.
The next morning he sits down next to his grandmother, after she has finished her daily hourlong getting-out-of-bed ritual. “Grandmother, I found these two old photographs.” He deals them out on the table in front of her and gives her a few moments to switch contexts. Grandma doesn’t turn on a dime conversationally, and besides, those stiff old-lady corneas take a little while to shift focus.
“Yes, these are both Lawrence when he was in the service.” Grandmother has always had this knack for telling people the obvious in a way that is scrupulously polite but that makes the recipient feel like a butthead for having wasted her time. By this point she is obviously tired of IDing photographs, a tedious job with an obvious subtext of “you’re going to die soon and we were curious—who is this lady standing next to the Buick?”
“Grandmother,” Randy says brightly, trying to rouse her interest, “in this photo here, he is wearing a Navy uniform. And in this photo here, he is wearing an Army uniform.”
Grandma Waterhouse raises her eyebrows and looks at him with the synthetic interest she would use if she were at a formal affair of some kind, and some man she’d just met tried to give her a tutorial on tire-changing.
“It is, uh, I think, kind of unusual,” Randy says, “for a man to be in both the Army and the Navy during the same war. Usually it’s one or the other.”
“Lawrence had both an Army uniform and a Navy uniform,” Grandmother says, in the same tone she’d used to say he had both a small intestine and a large intestine, “and he would wear whichever one was appropriate.”
“Of course he would,” Randy says.
The laminar wind is gliding over the highway like a crisp sheet being stripped from a bed, and Randy’s finding it hard to keep the Acura on the pavement. The wind isn’t strong enough to blow the car around, but it obscures the edges of the road; all he can see is this white, striated plane sliding laterally beneath him. His eye tells him to steer into it, which would be a bad idea since it would take him and Amy straight into the lava fields. He tries to focus on a distant point: the white diamond of Mount Rainier, a couple of hundred kilometers west.
“I don’t even know when they got married,” Randy says. “Isn’t that horrible?”
“September of 1945,” Amy says. “I dragged it out of her.”
“Wow.”
“Girl talk.”
“I didn’t know you were even rigged for girl talk.”
“We can all do it.”
“Did you learn anything else about the wedding? Like—”
“The china pattern?”
“Yeah.”
“It was in fact Lavender Rose,” Amy says.
“So it fits. I mean, it fits chronologically. The submarine went down in May of 1945 off of Palawan—four months before the wedding. Knowing my grandmother, wedding preparations would have been well advanced by that point—they definitely would have settled on a china pattern.”
“And you think you have a photo of your grandpa in Manila around th
at time?”
“It’s definitely Manila. And Manila wasn’t liberated until March of ’45.”
“So what do we have, then? Your grandpa must’ve had some kind of connection with someone on that U-boat, between March and May.”
“A pair of eyeglasses was found on the U-boat.” Randy pulls a photo out of his shirt pocket and hands it across to Amy. “I’d be interested to know if they match the specs on that guy. The tall blond.”
“I can check it out when I go back. Is the geek on the left your grandpa?”
“Yeah.”
“Who’s the geek in the middle?”
“I think it’s Turing.”
“Turing, as in TURING Magazine?”
“They named the magazine after him because he did a lot of early work with computers,” Randy says.
“Like your grandpa did.”
“Yeah.”
“How about this guy we’re going to see in Seattle? He’s a computer guy too? Ooh, you’re getting this look on your face like ‘Amy just said something so stupid it caused me physical pain.’ Is this a common facial expression among the men of your family? Do you think it is the expression that your grandfather wore when your grandmother came home and announced that she had backed the Lincoln Continental into a fire hydrant?”
“I am sorry if I make you feel bad sometimes,” Randy says. “The family is full of scientists. Mathematicians. The least intelligent of us become engineers. Which is sort of what I am.”
“Excuse me, did you just say you were one of the least intelligent?”
“Least focused, maybe.”
“Hmmmm.”
“My point is that precision, and getting things right, in the mathematical sense, is the one thing we have going for us. Everyone has to have a way of getting ahead, right? Otherwise you end up working at McDonald’s your whole life, or worse. Some are born rich. Some are born into a big family like yours. We make our way in the world by knowing that two plus two equals four, and sticking to our guns in a way that is kind of nerdy and that maybe hurts people’s feelings sometimes. I’m sorry.”
“Hurts whose feelings? People who think that two plus two equals five?”
“People who put a higher priority on social graces than on having every statement uttered in a conversation be literally true.”
“Like, for example… female people?”
Randy grinds his teeth for about a mile, and then says, “If there is any generalization at all that you can draw about how men think versus how women think, I believe it is that men can narrow themselves down to this incredibly narrow laser-beam focus on one tiny little subject and think about nothing else.”
“Whereas women can’t?”
“I suppose women can. They rarely seem to want to. What I’m characterizing here, as the female approach, is essentially saner and healthier.”
“Hmmmm.”
“See, you are being a little paranoid here and focusing on the negative too much. It’s not about how women are deficient. It’s more about how men are deficient. Our social deficiencies, lack of perspective, or whatever you want to call it, is what enables us to study one species of dragonfly for twenty years, or sit in front of a computer for a hundred hours a week writing code. This is not the behavior of a well-balanced and healthy person, but it can obviously lead to great advances in synthetic fibers. Or whatever.”
“But you said that you yourself were not very focused.”
“Compared to other men in my family, that’s true. So, I know a little about astronomy, a lot about computers, a little about business, and I have, if I may say so, a slightly higher level of social functioning than the others. Or maybe it’s not even functioning, just an acute awareness of when I’m not functioning, so that I at least know when to feel embarrassed.”
Amy laughs. “You’re definitely good at that. It seems like you sort of lurch from one moment of feeling embarrassed to the next.”
Randy gets embarrassed.
“It’s fun to watch,” Amy says encouragingly. “It speaks well of you.”
“What I’m saying is that this does set me apart. One of the most frightening things about your true nerd, for many people, is not that he’s socially inept—because everybody’s been there—but rather his complete lack of embarrassment about it.”
“Which is still kind of pathetic.”
“It was pathetic when they were in high school,” Randy says. “Now it’s something else. Something very different from pathetic.”
“What, then?”
“I don’t know. There is no word for it. You’ll see.”
Driving over the Cascades produces a climatic transition that would normally require a four-hour airplane flight. Warm rain spatters the windshield and loosens the rinds of ice on the wipers. The gradual surprises of March and April are compressed into a terse executive summary. It is about as tantalizing as a strip-tease video played on fast-forward. The landscape turns wet, and so green it’s almost blue, and bolts straight up out of the soil in the space of about a mile. The fast lanes of Interstate 90 are strewn with brown snow turds melted loose from homebound skiers’ Broncos. Semis plummet past them in writhing conical shrouds of water and stream. Randy’s startled to see new office buildings halfway up the foothills, sporting high-tech logos. Then he wonders why he’s startled. Amy has never been here, and she takes her feet down from the airbag deployment panel and sits up straight to look, wishing out loud that Robin and Marcus Aurelius had come along, instead of turning back towards Tennessee. Randy remembers to glide over into the right lanes and slow down as they shed the last thousand feet of altitude into Issaquah, and sure enough the highway patrol is out there ticketing speeders. Amy’s duly impressed by this display of acumen. They are still miles outside of the city core, in the half-forested suburbs of the East Side, where street and avenue numbers are up in the triple digits, when Randy pulls onto an exit ramp and drives them down a long commercial strip that turns out to be just the sphere of influence of a big mall. Several satellite malls have burst from the asphalt all around it, wiping out old landmarks and screwing up Randy’s navigation. Everything is crowded because people are out returning their Christmas gifts. After a little bit of driving around and cursing, Randy finds the core mall, which looks a little shabby compared to its satellites. He parks in the far corner of the lot, explaining that it is more logical to do this and then walk for fifteen seconds than it is to spend fifteen minutes looking for a closer space.
Randy and Amy stand behind the Acura’s open trunk for a minute peeling off layers of suddenly gratuitous Eastern Washington insulation. Amy frets about her cousins and wishes that she and Randy had donated all of their cold-weather gear to them; when last seen they were circling the Impala like a pair of carrier-based fighter aircraft orbiting their mother ship in preparation for landing, checking tire pressures and fluid levels with an intensity, an alertness, that made it seem as if they were about to do something much more exciting than settle their asses into bucket seats and drive east for a couple of days. They have a gallant style about them that must knock the girls dead back home. Amy hugged them both passionately, as if she’d never see them again, and they accepted her hugs with dignity and forbearance, and then they were gone; resisting the urge to lay a patch until they were a couple of blocks distant.
They go into the mall, Amy still wondering aloud why they are here, but game. Randy is a little bit turned around, but eventually homes in on a dimly heard electronic cacophony—digitized voices prophesying war—and emerges into the mall’s food court. Navigating now partly by sound and partly by smell, he comes to the corner where a lot of males, ranging from perhaps ten to forty years old, are seated in small clusters, some extracting quivering chopstick-loads of Szechuan from little white boxes but most fixated on what, from a distance, looks like some kind of paperwork. As backdrop, the ultraviolet maw of a vast game arcade spews digitized and sound-lab-sweetened detonations, whooshes, sonic booms, and Gatling farts. But the
arcade seems nothing more than a defunct landmark around which has gathered this intense cult of paperwork-hobbyists. A wiry teenager in tight black jeans and a black t-shirt prowls among the tables with the provocative confidence of a pool hustler, a long skinny cardboard box slung over his shoulder like a rifle. “These are my ethnic group,” Randy explains in response to the look on Amy’s face. “Fantasy role-playing gamers. This is Avi and me ten years ago.”
“They look like they’re playing cards.” Amy looks again, and wrinkles her nose. “Weird cards.” Amy barges curiously into the middle of a four-nerd game. Almost anywhere else, the appearance of a female with discernible waist among these guys would cause some kind of a stir. Their eyes would at least travel rudely up and down her body. But these guys only think about one thing: the cards in their hands, each contained in a clear plastic sleeve to keep it mint condition, each decorated with a picture of a troll or wizard or some other leaf on the post-Tolkienian evolutionary tree, and printed on the back with elaborate rules. Mentally, these guys are not in a mall on the East Side of greater Seattle. They are on a mountain pass trying to kill each other with edged weapons and numinous fire.
The young hustler is sizing Randy up as a potential customer. His box is long enough to contain a few hundred cards, and it looks heavy. Randy would not be surprised to learn something depressing about this kid, like that he makes so much money from buying cards low and selling them high that he owns a brand-new Lexus he’s too young to drive. Randy catches his eye and asks, “Chester?”
“Bathroom.”
Randy sits down and watches Amy watching the nerds play their game. He thought he’d hit bottom in Whitman, out there on the parking lot, that surely she would get scared and flee. But this is potentially worse. A bunch of tubby guys who never go outside, working themselves into a frenzy over elaborate games in which nonexistent characters go out and do pretend things that mostly are not as interesting as what Amy, her father, and various other members of her family do all the time without making any fuss about it. It is almost like Randy is deliberately hammering away at Amy trying to find out when she’ll break and run. But her lip hasn’t started to writhe nauseously yet. She’s watching the game impartially, peeking over the nerds’ shoulders, following the action, occasionally squinting at some abstraction in the rules.