The Position

  The truth was that if you paid attention to it, the sound of childhood ending was a terrible thing. If you were one of those supernaturally gifted people and could actually hear it, you would know that it was similar to glass shattering, or a body falling and hitting a surface, expecting that surface to be the accommodating body of a mother or father who would break the fall, but finding, instead, only the hard, hot sidewalk of the rest of life. These sounds were right now being made everywhere, Michael knew—children disappearing, as if through violence, and a troop of awkward but somehow authoritative adults replacing them. The world was packed with these new people who were granted permission to drink, and vote, and drive, and argue, and matter, and sometimes, if they were particularly unlucky or perhaps lucky, to grieve for things that had happened a very long time ago.

  At age forty-one, Michael Mellow remembered almost everything that had ever happened to him, both before and after he had changed from that thin, brainy boy with prominent ribs and longish dark hair into a handsome, too tall, often worried, antidepressant-addled, non-ejaculating man. His grown face was creased in the forehead like a shar-pei’s, and his clipped hair had gray tossed in with the black. At Dimension D-Net, though he was considered brilliant, he was also seen as not particularly ambitious, which puzzled some of his colleagues, who didn’t grasp the subtleties of being considered golden your whole life, and how it sometimes bestowed upon people a certain paralytic despair.

  It glazed you early, this goldenness, or else it never glazed you at all. Michael Mellow had always been intelligent and directed, preternaturally good at standardized tests and at getting smart, sexy girls to go out with him, and at impressing heads of personnel. The woman who interviewed him at Dimension D-Net had immediately written in a red Sharpie across his application, “Steve: HIRE.” And though Michael’s childhood had of course ended, soon the firm became a consoling parent, a flatterer who took care of his needs. There were bonuses each year. There were dinners in hushed, icy restaurants, where diners were encouraged to put together their own meals, comprised of various dissonant elements: grasses, seeds, the meat of innocent birds. He was celebrated by the company for being original, free-thinking, for being himself, just the way his mother and father had occasionally celebrated him long, long ago, when they weren’t too busy celebrating each other.

  “Go to sleep, Michael,” Thea said, leaning over to kiss his cheek. “You’ll be wrecked tomorrow. You’ve got a big day. First work, and then your flight. Are you packed, even?”

  “I can do it in the morning.”

  “Sweetie, you won’t have time.”

  Thea wasn’t worried about his sexual failure and despair, but she was worried that he would not have time to pack. What kind of sense did that make? To avoid any more discussion about it now, he got out of bed and began to pack a few items in the small leather carry-on bag that Thea had given him for his last birthday. He would only be gone for one week, and he didn’t need to take much with him. Michael Mellow dug deep into the bottom of a drawer and pulled up a black Speedo swimsuit, which he flung into the bag with frustration, though it landed so silently that she didn’t appear to notice.

  All those years ago, when he was the boy he no longer was, when he’d brought his brother and sisters downstairs to look at their parents’ book for the first time, to look at it and enter its world as he had done the day before, he was unprepared for the lifelong effects of looking. That November day in 1975, after Pleasuring was read by the children in one sitting and then snapped shut and returned to the shelf between the impassioned vegetarian cookbook and the handsome volume on golden retrievers, the four Mellow children had quickly dispersed. Over time Michael had learned what each of them had done that day.

  He himself had walked outside coatless, heading into the woods, as the children called the place at the edge of the property, which had none of the qualities of real woods: no overgrowth, no underbrush, no fallen, rotted logs. There were just immature trees there with tentative, grasping roots, and the soft, once-fragrant cocoa mulch that had been spread by three men from Garden World. He walked and walked through these nominal woods, eventually emerging out the other side into the place where the Mellow property ended and the service road off the expressway began.

  “New York City 55 Miles,” a sign read in reflective, wet letters, and his parents were out on the expressway, heading into the city, or perhaps they’d already arrived in the city, where today they would speak about their “work,” their beloved opus, to two hundred paying listeners. Apparently no one could ever get enough of sex; it needed to be replenished again and again, filled up like a bucket in a well. It wasn’t enough for people simply to have sex with each other, they also had to examine pictures of it, and read about it, and hear it described in agonizing and exhilarating detail.

  He had decided that he would go to that auditorium, sit down in a plush seat, and then, during the Q & A, he’d raise his hand and shout, “How do you think this makes me feel?” His throat almost closed up as he thought about making a scene, for he’d never made a scene in his life. No one ever thought about how it felt to be Paul and Roz Mellow’s children, he realized, how it felt to have your parents display their bodies, their preferences, their most private selves. When you leafed through those delicate drawings of the naked and entwined couple, you could only imagine them childless, floating on a disembodied bed as private and isolated as an outlying planet. But they had children, all right, and Michael wanted everyone to know.

  He stepped out onto the service road and walked until he came to the expressway, and then he stuck out a thumb. A succession of big American cars went by, and finally a burgundy Seville cruised to a stop. The driver, he saw with a sinking heart as he opened the door, was Elaine Gamble (“We’re not the Gambles/’cause we’d be covered with brambles”), the woman who lived down the street and whose twenty-three-year-old son Stu was missing in action in the Mekong Delta, having been drafted back in 1970 even though, people said, he could probably have gotten out of it like almost everyone else they knew. But no, no, Stu Gamble had said he wanted to go. He’d been a gun enthusiast, a reader of Arms magazine, an owner of a Glock, model 17. So he’d gone, and he’d been captured by the Vietcong and probably shot, and now his mother was nearly dead herself, or wished she were.

  Mrs. Gamble had black hair that was kept up in a kind of fixed meringue; on her thin wrist she wore a 24-karat gold POW/MIA bracelet with a clasp that only opened with a special key when the person who had been missing, and whose name was etched on the side—in this case, Stu Gamble—was returned home. Her bracelet hand held a cigarette, and the carpeted burgundy interior of the Seville stank with the absorbed weight of all the cigarettes she’d begun to smoke since the army had paid a call to her house one day in their own enormous sedan, black with darkened windows.

  “Hi, Michael,” she said. “So where are you headed?”

  “New York City,” he mumbled.

  Rumor was that Elaine Gamble had gone insane after Stu was declared MIA, drinking heavily and systematically calling up her son’s former high school teachers late at night to say that they should have given him better grades, that he had deserved to make the honor society, and that he was probably dead, and that there was “no school in the afterlife.”

  “Do me a favor, Michael,” Elaine Gamble said now. “I’ll take you to the city, but I need to stop off at King Kullen first. Be a good kid and run in there for me, would you?”

  He just looked at her for a moment, trying to temper his anger at having been lured in and now told it wasn’t going to be as simple as he’d been led to believe. Oh please just take me to the city, he wanted to say. Just take me there. But she was pathetic and couldn’t be spoken to harshly, and he was a kid, a boy, and he had no rights in front of this woman, and so he had to submit. The shopping list she reeled off was surprisingly long: “I’ll need V8. And a package of Stouffer’s French bread pizzas. Oh, and a frozen vegetable too for when I don’t fe
el like cooking. Which is basically every day, so corn niblets if you would be so kind, or French-cut green beans. A six-pack of Tab. A carton of Larks unfiltered. Oh wait, they won’t sell that to you. Maybe a gallon of Dolly Madison instead.”

  Then she was done, and she nodded at him tersely, as though he was supposed to have instantly remembered all of these items. What she didn’t know, Michael thought as he entered the supermarket, clutching Mrs. Gamble’s twenty, was that he was the kind of person who could in fact remember all those items. His memory had always been extraordinary, keeping him at the top of his class in all subjects and making life itself endlessly and sometimes involuntarily memorable. So Mrs. Gamble’s V8 and her green beans were locked in there beside the names of all the rivers of Europe, and the process of egg osmosis, and the drawing of a woman, who totally resembled his mother, performing fellatio (“from the Latin word fellare, meaning ‘to suck,’” said the book) on a blissful man who looked like a clean-shaven version of his father.

  Once inside the supermarket he roughly grabbed all the items in his arms, and then brought them back to Mrs. Gamble in an armful of paper sacks. She was asleep when he reached the car, her head flung back against the seat, and he saw for the first time that she wore only a yellow nightgown under her parka and house slippers on her feet, and he realized that if she hadn’t run into him today, she would certainly have entered the supermarket dressed for bed.

  Thoughts of his own suffering, his own mortification at the hands of his parents, seemed self-indulgent in the presence of the genuine article. They sat together in complete silence. There was no more question of whether she would take him into New York City today; he knew she wouldn’t. She’d apparently forgotten all about it, and he couldn’t bear to remind her. Having marched through the supermarket aisles and then returned to the car of this torn-up woman, he saw that there was nothing for either of them to do but go back to their separate houses, and so they did, and in a way he was relieved.

  Michael entered the front door of his house and soon disappeared into the deep blue funk of his room, where he would spend much of his time until high school graduation in four years. The younger set of siblings had by now joined forces in the kitchen, Claudia with her trolls and Dashiell with nothing but a song in his head and a desire to sit on his beanbag chair and sing it. But his little sister wouldn’t let him; she was all pepped up now, wanting to play.

  “I know. Let’s do horsie,” she suggested. It felt necessary to her, because even though she no longer wanted a husband, even though she now knew exactly what a husband and wife might do to each other, and how awful that would be, she had to do something with her restless, antsy, thick little body.

  “I don’t do horsie,” Dashiell said with derision. “Daddy does.”

  “You could do it, Dash,” Claudia said coyly. “You’re bigger than me.”

  As though he wouldn’t recognize this for the desperate flattery it was! But she looked so eager, and there wasn’t anything else to do, so Dashiell got down on all fours on the white mock-brick kitchen floor, and let his sister climb onto his back.

  “Go, horsie, go!” she cried. And then, in afterthought, she said, “On Donner! On Blister!”

  “What?” her brother said, craning his head around, but she slapped him lightly, saying that horsies don’t talk and that he should just ride.

  Dashiell carried his little sister around and around that kitchen, feeling the weight of her body on his spine, not yet knowing that throughout his life he would experience himself as the misunderstood slave to other people, yet would not be able to resist them. He stirred with resentment now, made some typical horse-sounds, the loose-lipped equine spluttering he’d heard on cartoons but had never witnessed in real life, for he’d never seen a horse up close. He would have been too afraid of its shuddering skin and articulated flanks and enormous, unknowable opaque eyes. Dashiell had seen nothing of the world, really, except the bit of it he’d seen today in that book. Suddenly he went into overdrive, like a horse that’s just been bitten on the side by a blue-bottle fly, and he began galloping across the floor, not caring if he dropped his passenger with a thud, in fact almost hoping he would.

  “Whoa!” Claudia shouted from above him, but he didn’t listen. And even so, she held on tighter than she’d thought possible, her legs pushing against her brother in fear and pleasure. Her hands jerked on the back of his hair and on the collar of his stretchy blue shirt, and her eyes closed shut, for even at her age she was able to intuit that closed eyes would enhance the game of horsie, and give the illusion that it would never end.

  Holly, meanwhile, was up in her bedroom. Earlier, she had gone into the kitchen in desperate search of something to eat, and in the walk-in pantry she found an unopened box of Yodels, which seemed at that moment a gift from God. She took the box upstairs, closed her door, shoved an 8-track cartridge into its deck, sat on her bed, and systematically began to eat through the box. The lava-flow of macerated chocolate was soothing, and she turned the music up as loud as it would go because she knew that music had a way of warding off thinking entirely. By the middle of the afternoon, Holly Mellow had eaten six Yodels and listened to a loop of Led Zeppelin over and over, then lain bloated and stupefied on her bed, and finally called Adam Selig on the telephone to say, “So. What are you doing?”

  “Nothing,” he’d answered, for this was in the script for a lazy, potentially sexy boy like him, his upper lip slightly shadowed, the edges of his brown hair touching the collar of his velour shirt with its brass-ring zipper pull. “What are you doing?” Adam asked her from his own bed, one-sixth of a mile away along the network of shaded streets. His bed was nut-brown and old and narrow, and above it on the wall hung various black-light posters of tigers and women.

  “Nothing,” Holly said, sinking down into her bed. She wouldn’t tell him about looking at her parents’ book; she didn’t want to talk about it, or think about it anymore today. “Bored out of my fucking brain pan,” she added. “Fucking weekend.”

  “No shit, milady,” Adam Selig said, nodding as though she could see him. “You have Hellinger?”

  “Yeah. Third period. You?”

  “Fifth. She give you that assignment?”

  “Yeah.”

  And then both of them, pointlessly, snickered, their laughter covering the lameness of the assignment, the passive helplessness of their own lives. Their conversation continued apace, patched together with pauses. There was silence and breathing, a dialogue between two sets of lungs, and in the background of the Seligs’ house a woman could be heard screaming words that sounded like “. . . dishwasher . . . forks and knives . . . the bottom! I said the bottom!”

  “So,” Holly said after a moment. “You want to come over?”

  Within twelve minutes, Adam Selig was ringing the doorbell on Swarthmore Circle. No one answered, and so he just let himself in. Holly Mellow’s house was empty of parents, unlike his own; right now, in the kitchen over on Princeton Court, Adele Selig stood in a bathrobe trying to pry a fork from the motor of the dishwasher. But in here the coast was clear, and Adam walked upstairs to the pink temple of a bedroom, where the remnants of the game of Life lay abandoned on the carpet, and where, improbably, this blonde and pink confection of a girl sat on her bed, waiting for him.

  The path from telephone call to bed-sitting to body-touching was remarkably linear. They had already had a nominal conversation on the telephone, and so they didn’t need to attempt too much more of that in person. Instead they nodded together to the emphatic bass of the music, and Adam scooted close beside her on the bed, and she turned her face to his. Her breath, chocolate-driven, and then her tongue, were offered in the slightly dispassionate way of people who are new to sex, but just the presence of that tongue was enough to create an über-boner in this boy whose Saturday was supposed to have been spent manipulating a three-ring binder.

  Without even thinking it through, his hand went from Huk-a-Poo blouse to brassiere-cup to breast,
and then from the click of silver Levi-snap to bikini panties which, had he actually seen them, would have been revealed to be decorated with a faded repetition of Roadrunners chasing Tweety Birds around and around from subnavel to ass.

  “Oh, that is so, so nice,” Adam Selig sighed in an angelic voice he hadn’t known he possessed.

  By 5 P.M. that day, with Adam sent back to his own home and the music turned off, the Mellow children found that they needed one another’s company. Without any prearrangement they slowly and separately drifted into the kitchen, where the older ones filled a pot with water and took out two boxes of Kraft macaroni and cheese dinner. Holly poured the curved, cooked widgets of pasta into an enormous colander, and the water surged into the sink, sending up a wave of steam from which she recoiled, although in her teenagerdom and desire to cleanse herself, she suddenly realized that this was like a minifacial, and so she leaned over the sink, letting her pores open.

  They all sat down together under the yellow light in the kitchen with the silhouettes of a few dead bugs speckling the inside of the dome, and none of them mentioned the book. It was almost as if they’d forgotten about it, so deeply had they taken it into their bodies and into their growing, replicating, breathing tissue. Instead, Dashiell lightly swiped at his nose and Holly scolded him, and Claudia began to cry in her tiny, rusty little way, and Michael said they’d all better eat their dinner, “or else.”