The Business of Naming Things

by Michael Coffey

  She wore hose with that thick black line down the back of each calf like an angry vein. She wore heels, making her taller than her son, who was in khakis and tennis shoes and a light jacket over a sweatshirt. As she strode down the aisle of Merkel’s, greetings of “Mrs. Touhey, good day to you” came from two men on the floor. Michael walked in her wake.

  Michael knew he was the only boy from Oreville, a poor town, to be shopping at Merkel’s—aside from Norton & Sons, it was the most expensive around. The Merkels’ shop—long and narrow and high-ceilinged—featured chocolaty cherrywood shelving and cabinets. You could open a little glass door on sweet hinges and look at ties, or you could gently tug a drawer that slowly rolled toward you with a pleasing rattle and inspect the folded shirts there arrayed. It was as if everything had already found a home and was in its place, and you were just there viewing someone’s magnificent personal collection. But it was all for sale.

  A grid of pigeonholes, like something you might see behind the desk at a hotel on a TV show, held plush cotton socks, each pair folded in half so that what you saw was a soft turn of color—blues on blacks on grays on greens—stacked in long columns. On the higher shelves, above offerings of men’s colognes standing on a marble mantel, were the sweaters—V-necks, crews, cardigans, turtlenecks.

  “The cornflower is nice,” Michael’s mother said. “Goes with your eyes. But I’ll leave you alone. I’ll pop into Norton’s next door. I need a hat.”

  Through several costume changes in the fitting room, Michael tried to imagine himself in different guises. But since he was concentrating on how he might look to Jody Favaro, in his class, or the incoming Sandy Champaigne, who already had a reputation, his choices were fairly narrow: Those girls were both from Morrisonville, how different could they be? He looked at himself in the full-length mirror. He looked at himself as he was—a dopey kid in Nowheresville. He wanted to look like George Harrison. He wanted a long, lean face with sunken cheeks and high cheekbones and big teeth. He wanted a face that was sad and witty; that would do. But he looked like Opie Taylor—no glamour, no forelock. He couldn’t wait till he had to shave.

  After an hour or so, his mother came calling. She seemed rushed and excited, in high color. She was rocking one toe up on a high heel. Michael was glumly looking through a glass-topped cabinet—at tie pins and men’s grooming implements. He wished for the future. He wanted to go home but could never say so in words. She didn’t ask what had happened. It was up to him to say. And nothing had happened. He looked at her as if to say, So?

  Michael’s mother spoke rapidly and spun two parallel streams of content. First, that she had found, next door “just the style for you—more Continental, shall we say. Come see.” And that she had run into Mrs. Newman there—“of the Newman family moving into the Dashnaw house.”

  The Dashnaw house was where Michael had spent much of his childhood—it was where his friend Terry Dashnaw lived, had lived, and where Terry’s older sister, Pearl, had lived, and grown, and ditched Bucky Weir because of what happened at the keg party, and slept, in that bedroom Michael could see from his own, where when her light went out, so did his. Perhaps she’d notice. But now it didn’t matter. They’d moved.

  “Come, let’s go next door to Norton’s.”

  Norton’s was a traditional English shop, always out of fashion except to the few folks in the area—college deans and surgeons and such—who might fancy custom shirts or have need of a boot maker. But Michael’s mother, perhaps correctly, had connected the staid British style to what the new music bands from England were wearing.

  Michael’s mother had an odd respect for the Beatles. As a family, they had watched the band’s ballyhooed appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show two years before. Everything was dark, a snowed-in winter Sunday night. Not long after the president had been killed and the Catholic priest in town had had a breakdown, these longhaired boys appeared to all that screaming and Michael’s mother decided they were polite, well-dressed boys with lovely voices. Michael’s father snorted at that but seemed to agree. And Michael thought all the boys seemed strange except George, who was the youngest, still a teenager.

  Mother and son walked into Norton & Sons.

  WHEN THEY GOT HOME, Michael carried all his packages into his room, where he planned to array them on his bed in private to see just what he had done, but his mother insisted he come to the kitchen table for some lunch. As he helped prepare, working the can opener, setting out “fork, then knife, then spoon,” he sensed his mother had something to say. There was something she wanted.

  “I know this Mrs. Newman,” she said brightly. Now Michael remembered: the new neighbors. “It is the most extraordinary thing, running into her—I had just wandered into Norton’s to give you some time to yourself, and there she was! I recognized her as a Farthing, and I introduced myself. I knew her sister, it turns out, Mabel Farthing, at St. Rose. Mabel and I were in the same house. I think I even met her younger sister, this Hilda, during one of the parents’ days, oh so long ago. And now she’s a neighbor.”

  Michael didn’t know what to make of this. He pressed finger marks into his sandwich, five of them, in a circle. “The Farthings are a very, very good family,” said Michael’s mother, flapping her napkin square over her lap. “Stop that, Michael. Mabel was a beauty, and she played piano beautifully. The family was in steel, I believe. Mabel married an Aldrich. Hilda told me that she went to Smith.”

  Michael had to ask what Smith was and was told, but he wondered who else was in this new family. His mother moved quickly to dispense more of the intelligence she’d gleaned on the floor of Norton’s.

  “You will be delighted to know that they have two boys and one boy is exactly your age.” She bit lightly into her sandwich, maintaining a strained smile. “His name is Thomas. He plays the piano. They have a piano. And he will be in your homeroom—you do have Jane Davies again, don’t you?”

  He did have Mrs. Davies. And this certainly was of interest to Michael. “The back street,” as their road was called, ran for about a mile through the small town. Although the local school was a centralized school, attracting kids from half a dozen surrounding towns whose schools had closed, Oreville itself, in the dead of summer, was just another little empty hamlet, and having enough boys to get up a ball game was always a challenge. Two more would help. Having a piano was unusual, for Oreville. But maybe that’s interesting, Michael thought.

  “What about the other kid?” he asked.

  “A kid is a goat, Michael.” She put her sandwich down as if in admonition but then resumed her testimony. “The other boy is two years younger; he’s in the lower school, with Liz Canning, fifth grade. And school starts next week, as you well know. But I made an arrangement for you to visit them tomorrow and introduce yourself to the boys. You will do that, won’t you? Of course. After lunch, let’s see one of your outfits.”

  Michael wasn’t so sure of his outfits. He wondered what he had done or let happen. English modern fashion—fancy shirts and “waistcoats,” pants that fit tight and pointy toed boots. Was this a style for northern New York, where most men farmed or guarded prisoners or cut wood? What would Sandy Champaigne think? He pressed a finger dot in the middle of his tuna sandwich and studied its design. His thinking cut the circle into five identical sectors, each seventy-two degrees, he reasoned. He was grateful for the intercession of his father, who came banging in, wearing his usual work clothes and grin.

  “How’s Mickey?” he asked. “Comment ça va? How’s your crosscut saw, eh?” He rubbed his boy’s head with his knuckle, and swooped to kiss his wife of twenty years, who offered her left cheek, which Patrick Touhey pecked with merry exaggeration, teasing her reserve, as usual. “Don’t be shy, Gwendy,” he said, which, as always, made Michael cringe and his mother flinch. Patrick Touhey just laughed.

  “Mick, what do you say we hop in the truck,” he said. His father had the freezer compartment door open and was fetching an Eskimo Pie—two, then.


  “Okay, Dad.”

  The ride up the hill was nice. Michael had always liked it. From the top, he could look back at the valley, and see the river, and their house standing tall down there, taller than the trees on the back street. Soft sunshine glazing the windshield, his father chatting about his Giants and Juan Marichal. “Tied for first,” he said. But Michael didn’t follow the National League much. “With who?” He looked across his father’s shoulder to the settlement on the other side of the valley, where there were mostly farms and stands of trees and the one road going over it, to the top. Down the other side was yet another valley with other small towns. It gave Michael perspective.

  “The Dodgers. It’s a pennant race.”

  “What about the Sox?”—Michael’s team, if he had one. He liked Tony C., the youngest home run champ of all time.

  “Boston’s way out of it,” said his father, shouting over the old truck boards rattling loud. “And in the other league.”

  The cows, all thirteen of them, were kept in the lower part of the barn. His father would buy yearlings for a little money (this is how Michael understood it), then feed them for a couple of years and fatten them up, keep them free of disease, and then sell them for milking cows to one of the dairy farmers along the lake, for good money. A big cow would bring four hundred dollars. Michael understood from his father that it was “a good payday” when it came. He bought his truck with the proceeds a couple of years ago, and bought Gwendolyn a brooch.

  The job was to feed them. Mostly, the calves spent their time in their own stanchions. That was the word, and Michael had never heard it outside the farm, but now he knew it. Steel rods running vertically that opened a bit and closed around the calf’s neck just behind the ears. They chomped on hay bales they could reach and tumbled turds like knots of rope and gushed urine out their back ends into a running gutter (“Watch your step!”). In the morning, Michael’s father would break up the bales for them to eat, and then in the afternoon or early evening, like now, he’d would go up to the barn, pull a lever that opened all the stanchions, and the cattle would back out and mill about like they had no idea what to do.

  “It’s good for them to walk around, get their legs under ’em,” said Michael’s father, who had to encourage them to get out into the little pen for some fresh air and to see what the world was like—fields and farm and distant tree lines, same stuff Michael saw, though they seldom raised their heads. There were several salt blocks on posts out in the pen. What Michael didn’t like was this part and the part that followed.

  In this year’s crop, there was one calf that was a lot smaller, and she couldn’t even think about getting to the salt lick—she was butted out of the way as soon as she approached, not big enough to get a lick in. And the next part, after Michael’s father herded the calves into the barn with a few “heps” and waving of his straw hat, was worse, when in a big barrel his father mixed a kind of powder and water—“enriched,” his father said—and the battle for gobbling the paste was even more fierce and the little one just stood off to the side in surrender. Michael felt sorry for the little thing.

  “Dad, what about the little one?” Michael often asked this. He prided himself on the times he didn’t.

  “Don’t worry about the mooley,” said his father, who watched the frenzy at the barrel for a while. In about five minutes, when the other dozen had fed enough in his view, he cleared a path and escorted the mooley to the barrel by the scruff of its neck and there added a little mix with a tin scoop for the mooley’s private meal. “Needs the nourishment,” he said. “She’ll be too small to sell. She’ll end up your pet.”

  “I don’t want a cow for a pet, Dad.” His father winked at him, the paste lathered up his forearms like long white gloves. And the mooley looked at Michael with one big eye of alarm.

  THAT NIGHT AT HOME, suddenly, Michael was the entertainment. After supper and the evening news, his father called for “a fashion show.” Michael thought this was a joke at first, or that perhaps The Liberace Show was coming on—his father’s voice had that edge. But no, and his mother went along.

  “Let’s see your new duds,” his father said. “Turn the TV off.”

  “Yes, let’s,” said his mother.

  Michael trudged to his bedroom. He’d already laid out everything he and his mother had bought, across his (this really had to go) chenille cowboy bedspread: four shirts, including two paisley numbers and one with a ruffle; four narrow pairs of trousers that already looked too short for him; a short jacket with a wide lapel like a munchkin’s; and those leather boots—with heels. His face was hot.

  He walked out to the living room, and his mother said, “Want some help?”

  “I wanna die,” he said, appealing to his father, who gave a quick shake of his head, like it was a punch line to a joke he’d missed. His father said, “What?”

  “Michael, now,” said his mother, rising. “Transitions are difficult. You looked very sharp in the shop.”

  “I’ll look like an idiot!”

  His father got up and left.

  His mother, casting a disapproving glance at the space her husband had left, counseled patience. “Michael, you’re tired. Give it some time. It’s a new year and it should be a new you, in every way.” She went over to him and gave him a rare hug, and pinched his fiery cheek. “You’re warm, Michael.” His chance.

  Feigning fever, Michael went to his room—moving everything off the bed onto the floor of his closet. He undressed, tuned the radio to a station far away. He heard his father back the truck out, bound for the tavern, no doubt. His mother, he could hear, made her phone calls.

  THE LAST MOVING VAN HAD LEFT the Dashnaw place. Michael had tried not to watch as the items left behind by the Dashnaws, including the old sprung convertible couch he himself had slept on, were trundled out. An entire family’s stuff had been moved in—large cabinets and dressers, dozens of boxes, and then the delicate on-its-side entrance of what must be the piano, wrapped in a white sheet. No sign of the boys, only what looked like Mr. Newman, a tall man wearing a hat, directing things and at times putting a shoulder to the effort. By Friday evening, all the lights were on in the two-story house Michael knew so well, just like when the Dashnaws were there on any Friday night. Michael had what he thought was a very adult thought: I’m too young for nostalgia.

  “They’re all in,” Michael’s mother asserted, looking out their picture window at the lit-up house. “You can visit in the morning.”

  Michael Touhey was in possession of the bulk of the sports equipment at his end of the back street. Some kids didn’t have mitts or decent balls or a selection of bats. No one else, in fact, had a real leather football, just plastic things that floated unpredictably and were more like bath toys. So Michael, who was excited to meet the two Newman kids, put three mitts—his brand-new one and two he had outgrown—in his bike basket, and tossed in a hardball, a softball, and a Wiffle ball. Just as he was ready to go, his mother came out with a wrapped loaf pan. “Banana bread for Mrs. Newman,” she said. “A housewarming gift.”

  When he got up to the house, he leaned his bike against the front porch railing as he always had, and put the baseball mitts on the porch, where the boys or Mr. or Mrs. Newman, when they came out, if they came out, would see them. He carried the banana bread in the crook of his arm like a football. When he got to the door, he realized that, unlike in the Dashnaw days, he’d better knock.

  Through the screen, he saw Mr. and Mrs. Newman already standing, both of them tall and young-looking, younger than his own parents. They could be TV parents, like the Cleavers. They looked efficient. Mr. Newman had a tie on. Mrs. Newman wore a flowered apron over her dress, and had earrings on and lipstick. She wore cat’s-eye glasses with a kind of chain that went around her neck, beneath her hair. She was pretty.

  “You must be Michael,” said Mrs. Newman, pushing the door open. “Can this be Michael?” said Mr. Newman, extending his hand, his left hand. He had a big gold watch. His ri
ght sleeve—his right arm—was missing.

  Michael shook his hand awkwardly, but it was a nicer, warmer handshake than the normal kind. He said hello as best he could and caught himself walking into the familiar hallway.

  “Oh, here,” he said, turning, stopping. “From my mother. It’s banana bread.”

  Mrs. Newman made a delighted fuss and took it from him. “My!” she said.

  “Mmm,” said Mr. Newman, leaning in a bit to smell. “Do you prefer Mike or Michael?” he asked, patiently waiting for an answer to a question that Michael had never heard.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Michael.”

  “Boys,” Mrs. Newman announced. “A new friend is here!”

  At the foot of the stairs, Michael waited. He could hear footsteps above. He wondered which one had Terry’s room and which one had Pearl’s. What he figured was the little one headed down first, the sounds of skipping and whistling. He jumped with a thud to the landing above—he had new Keds on—and then took the last three steps in another leap and landed right at Michael’s feet.

  “Hey!”

  “Phillip, this is Michael Touhey, from down the hill. He goes to your school. Or I should say, you go to his.” She winked at Michael. She was nice.

  Michael said hi. He could see that the little kid thought the name Touhey sounded funny, although he didn’t say anything. Good. Michael wanted to get outdoors or go farther inside, but there were slow footsteps still descending. The older boy’s tread sounded as if he were carrying something. Indeed, when a figure arrived at the first landing, Michael saw an unsteady step—new Keds, too. Everyone—Phillip, his parents, and Michael—were looking expectantly. And the boy—“Here’s Tommy now,” said his mother—turned the corner, carrying something on his shoulder, like maybe a ball, Michael thought, one of those big, soft yellow kick balls, when Michael realized it was the boy’s head.

  The little hallway was suddenly cramped and warm, and Mr. Newman opened the screen door and everyone trooped out. Michael was invited to exit first and the others followed. Michael looked off the porch, across the road, into the big oak tree that had one patch going lightly orange, and he wished he were there. His scalp needled and his thoughts weren’t his own. He took a deep breath. When he turned around, the new family in town was before him, like a strange cartoon. The slender poles of parents, the little cute boy, and the boy with the head shaped like balloon listing to the side, as if it was losing air. The boy—Tommy—seemed to strain to keep it where it was, which wasn’t straight. It looked like he, or it, his head, might fall to the porch. But he was grinning, looking down at the porch, where the three baseball mitts were.