by Aimee Bender
“Why are you picking me up?”
“Get in,” she said, pushing the door open more.
I had, right then, a fast stab of fear in my stomach, like maybe she would kidnap me. Except for the fact that she had birthed me. It was confusing.
I settled into the passenger seat.
“So,” she said, as she pulled out of the school lot. “How was your day?”
“Fine,” I said.
“How are your friends?”
“Fine,” I said.
“That’s good. What did you do today?”
“We played war. How are you?”
…
…
“You played war on the playground?”
“Yes.”
“War is not a game, William. Your uncle—”
“I mean we played tag. I forgot. Sorry.”
“Oh. And was that fun?”
“Sure.”
“I’ve always enjoyed tag myself.”
“Tag is a classic.”
We turned onto the main street, by the shopping area. My mother used to work nearby as an administrative assistant, but she had lost her job the month before. “We have nothing left to administer,” they told her.
“And who do you like the best of your friends?” she said.
“Mom,” I asked, picking at the seat belt, “why are you here? It smells like French fries.”
“Is there a friend you like more than the others?”
“Not really,” I said. “I like them all the same.”
She eyed the driver behind us in her rearview mirror, waving as she changed lanes.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“Nowhere special. Do you have someplace to be?”
“Me?”
“Yes.”
“Do I have someplace to be?”
“Yes.”
“No.”
“Good, then. Now, why don’t you tell me one of your friends’ names.”
“Why are you so interested all of a sudden?”
“I just want to know one of your friends’ names,” she said, slowing down at a light.
“Gath,” I said.
“Last name?”
“Gath.”
“First name?”
“Gath.”
“Gath Gath?”
“Sure.”
She smiled straight ahead, but her eyes were wavering.
“What do you mean, sure?”
“That sounds about right,” I said. “Can we stop for fries?”
“But is it his real name?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?”
“Gath Gath?”
“Sounds good to me,” I said.
“You don’t know your friends’ names?”
I opened the glove box to discover many neat stacks of paper about cars and their insides.
“So what do you call them if their back is to you?”
I thought about it for a second. The car in front of us had a kid facing out in the backseat, waving and waving.
“I call them Hey or You,” I said, waving back.
She almost laughed, but it turned into a grunt. The kid turned left. Bye. We drove into the mall, and I sat in the parking lot while she went shoe shopping. Half an hour later, she returned, smelling suspiciously of chocolate cake. “The shoes in there,” she said, “are so expensive!” She handed over a bread roll. She didn’t want to bring me in with her because last time mall security found me quietly moving items in the department store into the wrong departments.
She brought it all up again at the dinner table that night, over spaghetti and red sauce.
“My friends have many names,” said my little sister, Ginny, promptly. “Angie, Kevette, Marjorie, Orrel—”
“Shut up,” I said. “Eat your dinner.”
Dad tilted his head down to his plate. He wasn’t often home before nine, so this was a rare encounter, to be all eating at the same time. It felt like some kind of grand coincidence.
“What’s the problem?” he asked.
My mother shook her head. “You don’t get it,” she said. “He honestly doesn’t know his friends’ names, and these are kids he sees at school every single day.”
“I know who they are,” I said. “They’re my group of friends.”
“Do they look different to you?” she asked.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean can you tell them apart from each other?”
I took a sip of juice to stall. “What do you mean?”
“I mean—do you know one from the other?”
“Three of them are kind of the same,” I said, wiping my mouth. “Then there’s the really tall one! He’s different.”
My mother stared at my father. “Are you hearing this?”
“I’m exhausted,” he said, drawing his hand down his face. “I think I single-handedly saved the company today.”
“Which company?” asked Ginny.
“The one that sells bottles,” he said. “The plastic-bottle one.”
“Oh!” she said. “My favorite!” She jumped down from her chair and sped into the bathroom, then returned with a yellow plastic bottle of shampoo, just to show she could identify his work in the world at large. He mussed her hair. My mother poured herself a little glass of cheap sherry and forwent her spaghetti altogether, and who can blame her, since it was pretty much just noodles stirred with ketchup.
“So,” said my mother. “You can’t tell your friends from each other. Can you tell me from your father?”
“Sure, Dad,” I said. “Easy.”
She coughed mid-sip. Dad was explaining plastic-bottle structure to Ginny and didn’t hear, which is too bad, because he, for one, might’ve laughed.
“Am I Mom?” asked Ginny, pretending to listen to Dad.
“Your uncles,” asked Mom.
“I’ve never met,” I said.
“Your grandparents?”
“Which ones?”
“Any.”
“I can mostly tell them apart,” I said. “For example, there’s the demented one.”
“William!” said my mother, clearing her dish. She scraped spaghetti into the trash can.
“There is a lipid in the cellular structure,” said Dad.
“We need to take you to the doctor,” Mom said. “There’s something very wrong with you.”
“He is so messed up,” murmured Ginny.
“Why’d you pick me up today in the first place?” I asked.
My mother sipped her sherry in the kitchen and sniffed. My father had evaporated from the table by now; I found him reconstituted on the sofa, asleep, with a book on his lap about the history of plastics, and the bottle of shampoo nestled against his stomach like a baby.
The next day, my relentless mother:
“Enough kidding around, William,” she said. “You’re very funny. Now, who, specifically, did you eat lunch with today?”
“All five Gath brothers,” I said. “They were at school two days in a row!”
“And which one is the nicest?” she asked.
“None of them is the least bit nice.”
She stopped dusting a birdbath made of wire, complete with wire birds and little wire-looped water drops falling from a wire tree.
“Or which Gath brother talks the most?”
“All of them the same.”
“No one talks more than the others?”
“No,” I said. “All of them at once.”
“How can you possibly understand anything if they’re all talking at once?”
“Easy,” I said, swaying. “You just go with the flow of it.”
She shook her rag in the air, and a muggy cloud of dust sank to the carpet. “This is rapidly becoming like a bad Abbott and Hardy routine,” she said. “Except it isn’t funny.”
“Why are you so interested all of a sudden?” I said. “Who are your friends? How come I don’t know any of their names?”
She closed the shelf and locked it, half-dusted. She always locked it, like I was going to steal a wire birdbath and keep it for my very own. Then she brought out a series of knickknacks and put them on the coffee table. A stone lizard, an ashtray of rock, a glass princess.
“Never mind me,” she said. “Now, which one is glass?”
I pointed to the princess. “I’m not stupid,” I said.
“Which one is a lizard?”
I pointed to the ashtray.
“The lizard, William,” she said.
I pointed at the ashtray again, with no expression.
She blinked up at me, alarmed, and I held it for a second and then just laughed and laughed until I fell on the floor, laughing. I had to eat dinner that night in my room. Leftover ketchup spaghetti, cold. I have no problem at all identifying objects.
Later that night, when I took out the trash, I found a magazine called Mother Magazine on top of the pile, and to make my sleuthing even easier, it fell right open to a quiz called “How Well Do You Know Your Children?” I could see her fresh pencil scrawls all over the page. Questions like: Do you know where your child is after school? She had G: “yes.” W: “no.” Do you know the names of your child’s friends? G: “yes.” W: “no.” Do you know your child’s favorite color? G: “yellow.” W: “blue.” (Which is wrong. I don’t believe in picking a favorite color; it seems like a pretty dumb thing to rank, if you ask me.) Do you know any of your child’s fears? G: “death, and chemical warfare.” W: “?Friends?” And: Do you know what your child might like to be when he/she grows up? G: “vet or singer.” W: “?army?”
The magazine had a rating scale too—if you got 85–100 percent of the questions, which she did with Ginny, you were “A Mother to Be Reckoned With!” and it said how great you were, how tuned in, how involved. The middle category was something like “Hang In There, Mom, You’re Trying!” and the final one, which she got for me, was “Mother, May I Suggest Some Mothering?”
“This was all for a quiz?” I said to her when I went inside, washing trash juice off my hands, and she finished folding up the newspaper into neat rectangles and said she was sure she had no idea what I was talking about.
The following day, after school, we drove half an hour away to the doctor, who was both a specialist in perception and also miraculously covered under our scant insurance. In the waiting room, we sat on different sofas, and my mother read the magazine on brides and I read the one with the weekly news report that has a section in the back about how to raise your kid, which I find hilarious.
“Robertson!” called out the receptionist. I grabbed a handful of hard candies on my way in.
The doctor’s chambers were white-walled and blue-trash-canned and orange-chaired. I ate a cinnamon and a peppermint at once. The doctor strode in with coat and clipboard, and my mother launched into it right away: “Hello there, Doctor, thank you so much for seeing us, my son has this funny thing where he has trouble telling the difference between a group and a person.”
“Well,” chortled the doctor, “isn’t that interesting.”
Her neck was so long it seemed strange that she was a doctor specializing in perception.
“Let’s see what we can discover here,” she said. “Hi, William.”
“Hi.”
She stuck instruments into my eyes. She made me read various letters across the room. She had me close one eye and then the other.
“His vision is fine,” she said, after ten minutes.
“Ah,” said my mother.
I chomped down on a butterscotch, and a little shard of gold sugar flew up and stuck on the doctor’s white coat collar.
“Sorry,” I said.
She brushed off her coat and put a few slides up on the wall and had me explain them: Does the line appear to be wavy? It’s really straight. Does the circle above appear to be smaller? It’s really the same size as the one below. “But doesn’t everyone have these perception problems?” I asked, after identifying both the witch and the young girl in the same drawing of a face. “True,” she said. “Sure. But they’re fun to look at, aren’t they?”
She turned the slide projector off and rummaged in a drawer, returning with a photograph of a group of people.
“Let’s try this,” she said. “William, who are these people?”
“They’re a group of people,” I said.
She bobbed her head. “Mmm-hmmm. Okay. And what do these people do?”
“They’re all nurses,” I said.
“That’s right!”
I pointed to the bottom of the photo, where it said Nurse Convention on a black plaque in big white letters.
She nodded; her neck was so long that a nod for her took about four seconds to complete.
“And what can you tell me about any of the people in the picture?”
“They’re all nurses,” I said again.
“And how are they different?”
“They’re different heights,” I said.
“Okay.” She looked in my ear while I was talking.
“My ears feel fine,” I said.
“She’s checking your balance,” whispered my mother, sitting perfectly still in a stiff orange chair in the corner.
The doctor straightened the photo in front of me.
“Now, William,” she said, “can you tell me if any of the nurses are older than the others?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, are there elderly nurses in the photo?”
I peered at it. They all looked pretty old to me. I found one with white hair.
“This one seems old,” I said. “He has white hair.”
She looked over my shoulder at the photo. “Okay,” she said. “Good. And you can tell that it’s a man there.”
“Yes,” I said. “It’s an old man nurse, right there.”
“And what else can you tell me about them?”
“Nothing much,” I said. “A bunch of nurses in a photo. For a convention.”
She returned to the drawer and brought out another picture. The second photo was of a bunch of young men in the army.
“Soldiers,” I said, pleased with myself. I could tell from the camouflage clothing.
“Okay,” she said. “And?”
“And what?”
“And … how are they different?”
“What do you mean?” I asked. “From each other? They’re all soldiers.”
“For example,” she said, “are some happy?”
I looked at it again. They were moving around, some of them. “Sure,” I said. “I suppose some are.”
“Can you tell?”
“Not really,” I said. “You can’t ever tell for sure if someone’s happy or not.”
She pointed to the corner with her fingertip. “What about this one here?”
“What about him?”
“How is he doing?”
I peered closely at his face. “I don’t think he looks too good,” I said. “His expression is weird.”
The doctor blew her nose into a tissue. “He’s getting shot,” she said.
“Oh,” I said. “Huh. I didn’t see that part yet.”
“You didn’t see his torso?”
“No,” I said. “I was looking at his face, like you asked. Now that I look at his body, I can see that he is getting shot.”
“And so is he happy?”
“Well, I certainly doubt it,” I said. “I’m not a moron.”
“And are any of them dead?”
I looked again at the photo. It took me a long time. Several of the soldiers were lying down. One of the ones lying down had his face in the dirt.
“This one could be dead,” I said, after about five minutes. “But maybe he’s sleeping.”
She unscrewed the earpiece from her instrument and took the photo out of my hands. “Thank you, William,” she said. “Fine. Let’s take a break and try something else for a minute. Of your friends at school, whom do you like the best?”
I could
actually hear my mother’s jaw stiffen behind me.
“I like them the same,” I said.
“Really?” she asked.
“Really.”
“And do you have friends at school?”
“I just said so, didn’t I? I have a couple of groups I float between; I’m not really in one main group.”
“And can you tell the two groups from each other?”
“Of course,” I said, ripping up the corner of the papery doctor-visit shirt.
“How?”
“They sit in different parts of school,” I said.
“I see,” said the doctor. “And is there a leader in these groups?”
“They change around,” I said.
I turned and glared at my mother. She had her head down, her eyes on the wall, the ceiling, the floor.
“Can we move on, Doc?” I asked. “Any more photos?”
The doctor wrote something on her clipboard and returned to the drawer to take out another picture, this one of a family. I wasn’t sure why she had all these group pictures in her drawer, but maybe she saw people like me all the time.
“How about them?” she asked.
“Yes?”
“What can you tell me about them?”
“They’re all black,” I said. “I can see that.”
“Can you pick out the grandfather?”
I looked for a while. No one had white hair. “No.”
“Can you pick out the baby?”
I looked for a while again, and finally I found a baby stroller, off in the corner.
“There,” I said. “A baby.”
“Can you find the young man?”
I stared at it, but I couldn’t find the young man any more than I could tell who was the grandfather. And just because someone was old didn’t mean he was a grandfather anyway.
“No,” I said. “And it’s not because I’m racist.”
She brought out a similar photo of a family of white people. All I got was the shape of the group made by their heights and the positions of arms and feet.
“This one is sitting,” I said, pointing.
The doctor looked at my mother now. They exchanged a meaningful look.
“What?” I said. “Do I have brain damage? What? Who cares who’s who? I enjoy the general. What’s so wrong with that? Why is this important? If I meet the person and talk to them, I’ll know who they are then.”
My mother was silent.
The doctor was silent.
“Why did you say that?” asked the doctor, after a minute.
