to make; he tends to think of his uncle as a weird neighbor who shows up for a free dinner from time to time. He tries to picture his mother and Stan growing up in the same house—Nana’s old place on Route 7, near Northampton. Robin can still remember it, back when Grampa Leo was alive: the front porch with the broken railing, the dusty pantry under the staircase, where you could hide and jump out at someone to scare them, those smelly chicken coops in the backyard with the crusty turds along the edge. Dorothy tells a story about Stan as a child, peeing into the coop and a chicken taking a nip at his wiener. It is one of the few stories he has heard his mother tell about their childhood.
He squints his eyes at Stan, looking for a physical resemblance at the very least. The nose, maybe: it’s a good nose, really, not too big but definitely not a pug like Larry’s. And the cheekbones have that same curve as on his mother’s face, enough to create a decent smile without looking like a chipmunk. He could even imagine that Stan was a handsome guy before he grew up and his stomach bloated from too much beer and his face got rubbery around the jaw.
He watches the lasagna piling up behind Stan’s thin lips, mush shoveled in upon mush, suddenly fascinated by the grotesqueness of it all.
“Your mother just doesn’t know how to get it right,” he is saying as he chews, “with the spices and everything. I tell you, I’m a lucky SOB, having a mother who cooks for a living. Only time I ever see my wife in the kitchen is when she’s raiding the fridge. Women today, terrible cooks.”
“Aunt Corinne makes that Jell-O cake for my birthday. That’s pretty good,” Robin says. “With the different colors and the Cool Whip holding it together.”
“Yeah, you and that Jell-O cake. Damn thing would fall apart after one bite. I’d say, ‘Corinne, how ’bout a pumpkin pie,’ and she’d say, ‘I’m making Jell-O cake. It’s Robin’s favorite.’ If it wasn’t for you and that Jell-O cake I might have had a decent dessert once and a while.”
Robin decides he has had enough and begins to stand. He spits out a phrase he has heard his mother say a thousand times, whenever he or his brother and sister complain too much: “I didn’t know I caused you so much grief.”
Stan drops his fork and leans forward. “Sit down, Robin,” he commands. “Let’s have a talk.”
Robin buckles under the authority in Stan’s eyes and lowers himself onto a chair.
“You, Robin, are the kind of kid who’s been mollycoddled all his life and thinks he’s better than everyone else. I knew a kid like you when I was growing up. Dodo Scanlon. Donald, but we called him Dodo. Which is funny, now that I think about it, ’cause a dodo is a bird, and you’re named after a bird, so there’s something to it.”
“Dodo Scanlon?” Dorothy is suddenly in the doorway, her voice trembling. “Dodo Scanlon was a little genius whose life became the ninth circle of hell thanks to you. You and that bunch of greasers you associated with! Stan, you just don’t know when to stop—”
Stan interrupts, his voice smug. “At least I know when to stop drinking.”
“You bastard.” A curtain of silent tension descends upon the room. Robin’s head is spinning; it feels as if he’s on a playground, waiting for the punches to fly. He wants to speak up, to help his mother, but before he comes up with anything to say or do, Dorothy’s gaze meets his. “I think,” she says, “you should go fetch your brother and sister.”
Summer has made one last defiant appearance. The evening air is warm, the streets bruised with orange light punching through the empty oaks. Robin heads toward the playground. He makes a path between the sidewalk and the curb, kicking up leaves as he goes. The ones on top are dry and crisp and flutter to his side; beneath these, a slick layer has already been flattened into the dying grass.
He walks down Bergen Avenue, where he has lived for nine of the thirteen years of his life, past the Delatores’ and the Feeneys’, past the house where Mr. Kelly, whose wife died last year, lives, past Mrs. Lueger, who is sweeping her cement stoop as she does every night before her husband comes home from work. Robin waves to Mrs. Lueger out of habit, and she waves back without a word. He watches her turn her gaze across the hedge, trying to catch a look at the young couple next door, who are laughing over a flaming hibachi at the back of their driveway. Robin doesn’t know their names; they are new to the block. Everyone refers to them as The Hippies. They have friends who ride motorcycles. A few days before, Robin heard Mrs. Feeney announce that she is sure the couple smoke dope, to which Mrs. Delatore responded: “They’re probably growing it back there.” There has been a lot of talk about drugs lately; in group guidance, Robin has sat through several films depicting teenagers who were “slipped a mickey” and wind up throwing themselves from open windows or losing their minds into a trippy haze of colors and wild sounds; even the ones who try to return to regular lives are always at the mercy of acid flashbacks.
He turns left onto Hopkins, crosses Kickmer and then Whalen and then Tully. The streets of Greenlawn are all named for local men killed in wars. Every year the names are read at the Memorial Day rally in the park. He turns down Lester, takes it to the end, where the woods begin. There is a broken concrete path that cuts between the old oaks and winds into the playground behind Crossroads Elementary.
The school is an orderly brick building, one story high with a flat roof, tucked between the street and the woods. He has spent more time in this building—kindergarten through sixth grade—than any place except home, but in the three years since he’s gone to school here everything, he realizes, has changed. The building is so small. The windows are low to the ground, the doors, painted green, look quaint, like doors on a clubhouse. Crude, construction paper goblins and witches and pumpkins are taped to the windows. He remembers creating such things himself. It didn’t change, he realizes. I changed. He sticks his hands in his pockets and fingers the sharp foil edge of the Trojan wrapper. He is unexpectedly struck by the notion that he was a child here, that he is not a child, not in the same way. He wonders, how did this happen? I didn’t plan for it.
The sun is now quite low in the sky, a blood red disk licking the tops of trees and houses. Across the playground, almost in silhouette, is the slide. With the asphalt ground, its two legs form a triangle: on one side the ascending ladder, on the other the metal trough. Ruby is in a dress on the tiny platform at the top, gripping the handrails, Jackson stands at the base of the ladder, and Larry leans upward from the mouth of the chute, yelling, “Ruby MacKenzie, slide on down!” As Robin gets closer he can see that Larry is wagging his tongue at her and wiggling his butt in the air like an excited puppy ready to pounce.
Ruby pivots to climb back down the ladder, but Jackson, at the bottom, is an obstacle to her escape. “Come on, Ruby,” he says. “Time’s a-wastin’.”
“I mean it,” she says.
“No way,” Jackson says. “Only one way up, only one way down.”
Larry lets out a “Woo-hoo!”
Robin calls across the playground, “You guys.” And then louder when they don’t respond, “It’s suppertime.”
“Move it, Ruby,” Jackson says, then steps onto the ladder.
“No fair,” Ruby yells. “Get off!” Jackson takes another step. Ruby sees Robin approaching. She calls to him, “Make him cut it out.”
“Jackson, get off,” Robin says.
So many years of recess on this playground have imprinted certain rules in Robin’s head, and one of the first ones is that you can’t get on the ladder until the person before you slides down. The ease with which Jackson dismisses this concept angers Robin, not because he cares about the rule so much but because Jackson cares about it not at all. He is nagged by Jackson’s carefree attitude, more so by the way it intimidates him.
“Get out of the way, Larry,” Robin says.
“Shut up. I’m not doing anything.”
Jackson is now halfway up the ladder. Robin reaches up and swats his leg. “Jackson, get off.” But Jackson continues