Uncommon Type

by Tom Hanks

  They lay on the Murphy bed together, eating popcorn. His mom kicked off her shoes and put her arm around her son’s shoulders, her fingers playing in his hair. At one point she sat up and said, “Rub Momma’s neck some.” Kenny rose onto his knees and tried to give her neck a massage, moving her hair out of the way and avoiding the little chain around her neck. After a few minutes she thanked him and said that she loved her little Kenny. They both lay back down. The next TV show came on—Bracken’s World, in which grown-ups went on and on about things Kenny could not understand. He was asleep before the first commercial.

  —

  Music was playing on a radio when Kenny woke up in the morning. His mother was in the kitchen, having already made coffee in a glass percolator on the stove. Kenny had to hop down from the Murphy bed because it was a bit high.

  “Well, hello, sleepy-bear.” His mother kissed his head. “We have a big problem.”

  “What?” Kenny rubbed his eyes as he sat at the two-seat kitchen table.

  “I didn’t get milk yesterday.” She did have a can of something called Evaporated Milk—there was a cartoon cow on the label—that she was using for her morning coffee. “Can you go around to Louie’s Market and get a half gallon of milk? You’ll need some for your cereal.”

  “I can.”

  Kenny had no idea where Louie’s Market was. His mom explained that it was out the front door, one right turn, then one left turn. A three-minute walk. There were some dollar bills on her dresser in the bedroom, he could take two and buy himself a treat for later.

  Kenny dressed in the same clothes he wore the day before and went into his mom’s tiny bedroom. There was money on her dresser, so he took two one-dollar bills. Her closet door was open with the light on inside; Kenny could see all her shoes on the floor and her dresses and skirts on hangers. There was also a man’s suit jacket and pants hanging in the closet and some ties on little hooks. A pair of man’s shoes were in there with her high heels.

  The streets around the apartment were lined with big trees, but not the blue gums of Webster Road. These trees had wide green leaves and branches that were thick and high. The roots of the tall, old trees had grown so large they buckled the sidewalks and made them uneven. Kenny carried the two one-dollar bills in his hand as he turned right, then left, finding Louie’s Market in less than three minutes.

  A Japanese man was behind the cash register, surrounded by candies and sweets on display. Kenny found the dairy case and carried a half gallon of milk over to pay for it. As the Japanese man rang up the sale he asked, “Who are you? I’ve never seen you before.”

  Kenny told him his mother lived nearby and had forgotten to buy milk.

  “Who is your mother?” the man asked. When Kenny told him, he said “Oh! Your mother is a nice lady. A very pretty lady. And you are her boy? How old are you?”

  “In nine days ten,” Kenny said.

  “I have a girl just like you,” the grocer said.

  For the treat he would have later, Kenny picked out a twin pack of Hostess CupCakes, chocolate with the swirl of white icing down the middle. They cost twenty-five cents, which Kenny hoped was not too much. His mother said nothing when he got back with the milk. She made him toast to eat along with his bowl of Rice Krispies and cut up sections of a seedless orange.

  Kenny was watching Channel 40—a whole morning of cartoons and commercials for toys—when the phone on the wall of the kitchen rang. After saying hello, his mother said something he did not understand.

  “Que paso, mi amor? What? Oh, no! He was looking forward to it. Are you sure?” Kenny looked at his mom, she at him as she listened. “Oh! Yes, that could work. Yes, two birds with one stone. Love it. Okay.” She listened on the phone for a moment more, then giggled as she hung up.

  “Kenny Bear,” she sang, coming into the room. “Change of plans. Jose, Mr. Garcia, had business come up and he can’t fly you in his plane today. But…” She cocked her head, as though a more exciting possibility was about to be floated, like there was a trip on a rocket ship available instead. “He can fly you all the way home tomorrow! We won’t have to drive.”

  Kenny did not quite understand how a flight home on an airplane was possible. Would the plane land on Webster Road right at his house? Wouldn’t they crash into the blue gum trees?

  —

  With the whole day now to fill, Kenny and his mom spent the late morning at Fairytale Town, a place for kids run by the Parks Department. There were little houses painted to look like they were made of straw, sticks, and stones; a long and curling version of a yellow brick road; and puppet shows every hour until 3:00 p.m. The whole family used to visit the storybook village when Kenny was little, although never with Dad, who was always sleeping at home. Since Kenny was now nearly ten years old, the fairy-tale sets were too young for him. Even the swings were for kids littler than Kenny.

  The zoo was nearby. That, too, had been a favorite destination when Kenny was smaller. The monkeys still aired out their limbs by swinging on the rings in their cage, the elephants were still in a pen on the other side of the fence that was no longer as tall as it had been, and the giraffes could still be fed carrots from pails full of them, kept on hand by the zookeepers. He and his mom stayed at the zoo longer than they did Fairytale Town, lingering in the Reptile House. There was a huge python in there, wrapped around part of a tree with his head, as big as a football, right next to the window glass.

  For lunch they ate at a little market that also had sidewalk tables with checkerboard cloths. Kenny had a tuna sandwich with no lettuce or tomato, just the tuna, and his mother had a small tub of pasta salad. To drink, there was golden juice that came in bottles shaped like apples—this was instead of a Coke. Kenny was disappointed at first, but the apple juice was so sweet, so thick that his whole body felt good when the drink slid down his throat and into his tummy. He imagined that must be what drinking wine was like, since grown-ups were always making such a big deal about “fine wines.” He had his Hostess cupcakes for dessert.

  “What shall we do now, Kenny Bear?” his mom asked. “What if we tried our hands at peewee golf?”

  She drove the red Fiat onto the freeway, heading west toward the foothills. When they crossed the river, Kenny realized they were near the exit for Sunset Avenue, which was the off-ramp they used to take to get home, to his old house. He recognized the big green sign with the white arrow and SUNSET AVE, and he saw the Chevron station on one side and the Phillips 66 station on the other. But his mom didn’t merge into the exit lane. She kept going. Farther down the highway a colorful little town of tiny windmills and castles appeared, the Miniature Golf & Family Fun Center. The place looked brand-new and magical.

  Because it was a Saturday, there was a pretty good crowd made up of carloads of families and idle kids who had ridden their bikes or been dropped off, kids who were supplied with enough money for a day of Fun-with-a-capital-F. There was a circle of baseball batting cages with automatic pitching machines, an arcade filled with pinball and shooting games. A snack bar served corn dogs and giant pretzels and Pepsi-Cola. Kenny and his mom had to wait in line to get the balls and the right-size putters from a teenage boy who smiled at his mom with the same cow eyes as the man at the Shell station in Iron Bend. There was a choice of two courses to play and the young man behind the counter not only suggested the Magic-Land course, with the castle, but also walked them to the first hole and took pains to explain how to use the little pencil to keep score on the card. He also explained that if they got a hole in one on the eighteenth, they’d win a free game.

  “I think we have the gist of it,” his mom said to the kid, hoping to get rid of him. Still, he lingered until they both putted. He wished them a good round and went back to the counter to hand out more putters and colored golf balls.

  They never bothered to keep score. Kenny hacked at his ball, the purple one, caring more about distance than accuracy, taking as many strokes as necessary to make the hole. His mom was a bit more ca
reful. The most fun hole was the one where Kenny hit his ball into a polka-dotted toadstool and it disappeared for a few seconds before coming out of one of three tubes onto a lower circular green. From there, he had to hit the ball into a giant frog’s mouth that moved up and down like the drawbridge on a castle. Again, the ball disappeared, coming out at an even lower green and nearly rolling right into the cup. He only had to tap the purple ball with his short putter. His mom took forever to make it through the frog’s mouth.

  “Peewee golf is pretty fun,” he said to his mom when they were back in the Fiat. She had gotten him a corn dog, which he ate before getting into the sports car.

  “You’re awfully good at it,” she said, shifting gears as they pulled out of the Family Fun Center parking lot and headed back into the city, back toward the Sunset Avenue off-ramp.

  “Mom?” he asked. She was lighting another of her long cigarettes with the Fiat’s lighter. “Can we go see the old house?”

  His mother blew smoke out of her mouth, and she watched it disappear into the wind. She did not want to see the old house. She had brought Kenny home from the hospital to that house two days after he was born. His brother and sister had been born in Berkeley, but they had few memories of the apartment there. She had watched her older kids play in the backyard of that house as she carried little Kenny around in the crook of her hip. Kenny had crawled on the hooked rug—her mother’s old hooked rug—in the living room until he learned to walk on it. That house carried memories of Christmases and Halloweens, of birthday parties for the kids in the neighborhood, the sweeter memories of her marriage and her life as a mother.

  But unhappiness also lingered in the corners of the place, arguments sure to be echoing still, a loneliness that haunted the nights after the kids were asleep as well as the days when they were a maddening handful. To escape—the house, the kids, the boredom found in the shadows of discontent—she took a job at the Leamington Hotel. There was an opening for a waitress. She’d drive in early, before her husband came in for the lunch and dinner shift, leaving the kids with one of the Mormon teenage girls who lived down the block. The money was nice, of course, but the activity was what she looked forward to every day—having a place to go, work to do, and people to talk with. She was still Mrs. Karl Stahl, and her husband was the head of the kitchen, but everyone, including Jose Garcia, called her by her first name. She proved to be so very good with numbers that the hotel’s general manager moved her from the coffee shop to a bookkeeper’s desk. She had risen to the sales office after she divorced Kenny’s father and was no longer Mrs. Karl Stahl.

  She had walked away from that old house a lifetime ago. She did not want to see the place again.

  “Sure,” she said to her son. “I’m flexible.”

  —

  She turned off the freeway, made a right at the Phillips 66 station, and continued down Sunset Avenue to Palmetto Street. She turned left on Palmetto to Derby Street, downshifted as she made the right turn, crossed Vista and Bush Streets, then pulled over and stopped in front of 4114.

  Kenny had just two homes, and this was his first. He stared at it. The mailbox by the driveway was the same, the X-frame railing on the porch was as he remembered, but the tree in the front yard looked weirdly small. The lawn was mowed, he’d never seen the grass so neat, and flowers were planted in arrangements along the front of the house. They had never had flowers along the front of the house. The big window had blue curtains in it, not the white ones from when he was a kid. The garage door was closed, unlike when he lived there and it stayed open for easy access to all the bikes and toys and the back rooms of the house. Rather than his father’s old station wagon or his mother’s Corolla, a new Dodge Dart was parked in the driveway.

  The Anhalters had lived next door. Kenny expected to see their white pickup truck, but it was not around. The house across the street had a For Sale sign in the front yard. “The Callendars are selling their house,” Kenny said.

  “Looks like they’ve already moved,” his mother told him. Yes, the house looked empty. The Callendar kids, Brenda and Steve, were not twins but looked like they’d been born on the same day. They rode Schwinn bikes, had a dog named Biscuit, had been on a swimming team, and now lived somewhere else.

  Kenny and his mom sat in the Fiat for a few minutes. Kenny looked at the window of what had once been his bedroom. The shutters with the moving slats were still there, but had been painted blue, like the living room curtains. The shutters had been a natural wood when he and Kirk slept in their twin beds in that bedroom. It didn’t seem right that they were now blue.

  “I was born here, right, Mom?”

  She was looking down the street, not at the house with the blue window shades. “You were born in the hospital.”

  “Oh, I know that,” he said. “But I was a little baby here, right?”

  His mother started the Fiat and put it into gear. “Yep,” she said over the growl of the motor. On the night she left the house at 4114 Derby, her children were asleep in their beds and their father was standing in the kitchen, silent. She did not see any of them again for seven weeks. Kenny was five years old.

  By the time they had driven back to the apartment, she had smoked three of her long cigarettes, the smoke sailing away in the wind of the open-top sports car.

  —

  She took him to dinner at the Senator Hotel, which was downtown like the Leamington, but much fancier and crowded with men in suits who all wore name tags. They ate in the coffee shop. Jose Garcia stopped by to see them as Kenny was eating his dessert, a huge slice of cherry pie with ice cream on top of it—à la mode, the waitress called it. Kenny didn’t care too much for the cherries, but he finished every bite of the ice cream.

  “What say we wheels up at noon?” Mr. Garcia said. “We’ll see the delta for a while then head up north. Have you ever been in a plane before, Kenny?”

  He had already been asked that question but politely answered again. “Never.”

  “You may just fall in love with the sky,” Mr. Garcia said. As he left, he kissed Kenny’s mom on the cheek. Kenny had never seen that happen in real life before, a man kissing a woman on the cheek. His dad never kissed Kenny’s stepmom like that, just because he was leaving the room. Kissing on the cheek was something men and women did on TV.

  —

  Jose Garcia took them to breakfast the next morning, to a coffee shop called Pancake Parade with a décor that made the place look like a circus. The two men ordered waffles and, for Kenny’s mom, another igloo of cottage cheese. As they were eating, car after car of well-dressed families came in, filling up the place. They were all in Sunday church clothes—the dads wore suits, the moms and girls were in nice dresses. Some of the boys wore neckties and were the same age as Kenny. With all those people talking and ordering breakfast the place sounded as loud as a circus.

  When Jose and his mom finally finished their coffee—the waitress kept coming over and offering refills—Mom re-redded her lips and they went back out to the Fiat. Mr. Garcia drove, wearing a pair of gold metal-frame glasses with mirror lenses and hooks to go around his ears. His mom had on her skier’s shades. Kenny sat in the little area behind the seats, where the wind was the wildest and made it difficult to hear. For the whole ride, he never knew what the grown-ups were saying.

  He had fun back there, though, sitting sideways and waving his hands up in the slipstream of the open top. They drove past solid brick houses with wide lawns and a huge green park with a golf course. They came to a place called Executive Field, which turned out to be an airport, but Jose did not use the parking lot. He drove around to a gate that opened and stopped by some small airplanes that were parked side by side.

  “Ready to cheat fate, Ken?” Mr. Garcia said.

  “Are we flying in one of those?” Kenny pointed to the planes. They were not like the model airplanes he had at home, which were from the war—fighters and a B-17 bomber. These planes were small and had no machine guns, and they did not loo
k like they could go very fast, even though some had two motors.

  “The Comanche,” Mr. Garcia said. He was walking toward a white plane with a red stripe, one of the single-engine aircraft.

  The doors opened on the plane just like a car, and Mr. Garcia left them ajar to cool off the inside. Kenny got to stand on the wing and look inside, at the gauges and the dials and the steering wheel and the foot pedals. There were two of everything—plus some odd switches and controls that all looked very scientific. Mr. Garcia walked around the plane a few times, then looked at some papers he had folded into sleeves on one of the doors.

  Kenny’s mom came from the car with the pink suitcase. “I think you want to ride up front, don’t you?” she said to him. She folded down one of the seats and climbed into the back, setting the pink case beside her.

  “I get to sit here?” Kenny meant behind the wheel, like the copilot.

  “I need a copilot,” Mr. Garcia said. “Your mom’s shaky on the stick.” He laughed, then showed Kenny how to buckle his harness. Mr. Garcia had to pull the straps tight for him, though. Then he pulled a small pair of dark sunglasses out of his pocket and handed them to Kenny. “The sun is bright up there.”

  The glasses were gold metal–framed like Mr. Garcia’s, but not nearly as expensive. They, too, had hooks that went around the ears. The sunglasses were oversize for Kenny’s almost-ten-year-old head, but he didn’t know that. He turned to show his mom how he looked. He gave her the thumbs-up and all of them laughed.

  The starting of the engine was very loud, and not just because the Comanche’s doors were still open. The body of the plane shook and the propeller seemed to snap with each turn. Mr. Garcia worked switches and knobs and made the engine roar a few times. He put on a set of earphones and did something that got the plane moving even though the doors were still open. They passed other parked planes, then wide strips of grass where little signs with letters and numbers were planted. At one end of the long runway, the plane came to a stop. Mr. Garcia reached across Kenny and latched his door closed, then did the same to the door on his own side. The motor was still very loud, but the plane was not as wobbly.