The Excellent Lombards(44)
There was nothing to be done about the situation but wait until the house was still and take those ten steps back down the hall, pillow and blanket in hand.
His arm was draped over the side of the bed, William now so close to the floor, his knuckles in the pile of the rug. I was still wearing zip-up fuzzy one-piece pajamas all the long way down to the enormous plastic feet, mine in red, William’s, before he’d forsaken them, in blue. Already the room smelled of him, of us, I couldn’t tell which part of our smell he’d taken with him. It seemed important to let him know that I would never ever leave him, and also that I was fine, I was near, a pull of his toe before I covered his bare leg. He did lift his head, his lids fluttering, his eyes open for an instant. I lay myself down in the corner of the hard floor, the smallest bare place between the shelf and the desk, no crib for my head. But it was all right now because his breathing, his adenoidal inhalations, that syncopated stuffiness, was my breathing, too, and mine his. And so we could safely sleep.
Did I not know, had I not been able to see that the separation, the long slow pull, had begun years before there was fuzz on his upper lip? What a stealth maneuver he had to make, that perhaps he was making deliberately, his quietness and his absorption in his projects a step-by-step, a careful tiptoe, past me. It was our first computer, a Macintosh—funny, the name of an apple—that started the marching of time.
Nineteen ninety: The computer arrived in a white carton, the cardboard itself shiny, polished, and there on the side the logo that should have been ours, the psychedelic apple with the smooth bite out of it, and the single leaf on top. It was my mother’s outrageous gift to my father, something he didn’t think they could afford. He was trying to refuse it, attempting to carry it back into the hall from the kitchen, but William was obstructing his path, arms flailing, legs doing a jig, crying, “P-p-please Papa. P-please. Maps and charts—charts!” He yanked on my father’s hand, wouldn’t let go. “You’ll see, graphs, you like graphs, and charts and maps. You have to—you can do maps, you can map every tree, you can—” He put his finger in his mouth, bit down, the dream so near. William, five years old, having witnessed the automation of the library card catalog, was the prophet.
My father said, “William! It’s all right.”
“No, no, maps and charts!”
How to explain that my father could track weather patterns, he could invent weather patterns, he could organize the family archives, he could get rid of the ledger book, he could use email, a recent household invention, he could precisely record the spray program—how to make all of that clear before it was too late?
My father said, “It doesn’t seem fair, Nellie, if we have a computer, and Sherwood doesn’t.”
“He can hallucinate one,” my mother replied. “He can build a system from a bushel basket and a piece of copper tubing.”
My father said, “This isn’t something we really can—”
“Please!” William screeched. Never in his life had he needed anything so urgently.
They carefully unwrapped it together, the decision not yet firmly made, or so my father thought. They plugged it in. William took the chair in front of the small square screen, the 512K whirring like a knife sharpener. In the glow of the soft gray light he clicked on the mouse, and down, down he fell into the infinite world.
He had Adam as his forever friend, just as Amanda was for me, and in addition there was Bert Plumly, who lived in the subdivision beyond the south end of the woods. The Plumly house may have seemed the perfect idea of a house to William, two stories with white siding, blue shutters with cutout hearts, and window boxes, and in the back sliding glass doors out to the deck. And on that deck there was a hot tub, a gas grill as long as our canoe, and an iron table with a white-and-red-striped umbrella, the Plumlys at the ready for relaxation. In the kitchen Ma Plumly served Pac-Man mac and cheese in blue plastic bowls and for a treat Dr Pepper in frosted green glasses with pink bendy straws, and for dessert she put the gluey Rice Krispie squares on holiday napkins. Also there were carrot sticks.
The rooms in that paradise opened up, one to the next, the carpet starting in the family room right where the faux-oak flooring of the kitchen stopped, the fans overhead keeping the cool air moving across the different areas that were empty except for the sofas, the chairs. When the Plumlys got tired of outdoor recreation they could enjoy the offerings of their satellite dish, the screens of their many televisions growing larger by the year, like children, until the one in the living room was nearly the length of the far wall. The poor Lombards had the single old TV that got two channels, Mary Frances and William dependent on the kindness of the neighbors. Despite the Plumly riches aboveground, the boys chose the bunker, everything important, as it turned out, taking place down the basement. That was where they lived, where, hour after hour, they sat at the long counter with the two computers, one for Bert and one for his older brother, Max. When William went to the Plumlys for an overnight he took his own terminal, his hard drives, a bag of cables, boxes of disks, and his office chair.
Ma Plumly, passing through the dark cavity in those early days of the Gaming Epoch, on her way to the laundry room, would occasionally suggest an alternative activity. “A game of basketball?” she’d say with little conviction. “Dad fixed the hoop.” As if all that stood between the boys and exercise was a repair of the court. “It’s a nice day out there.” They’d look up at her with an expression so blank she felt compelled to remind them of her identity. “It’s your mother speaking. Melissa R. Plumly. Did you want to have a little lunch?”