The First I Heard of It

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She shut the ignition. She sighed. She raised her arm — I flinched. She rested her hand on the side of my face.

“You’re going to be spending a lot of time in bed, Carl — I’m sorry. You’ve got a lot of suffering to do. You won’t be able to play much. Not like the other kids. You’re going to have to rely on your imagination. So you can build what’s known as character.”

“What are you talking about, Mom?”

She looked at me. She wasn’t angry. She wasn’t anything. She was scaring me a little, actually.

“Dr. Hill says that as time goes on, you’re going to become a novelist, Carl.”

“Huh?”

“A person who writes books,” she said, punctuating it with a ridiculously out-of-place smile, like I was some kind of mental patient. “Long books.”

I was surprised, to say the least. “Long books?”

“You won’t be able to help it, honey.”

I wasn’t sure how I felt, having my future all laid out like that.

“None of this sounds fun, Ma.”

“Life isn’t fun, sweetie.” My mother fumbled for her purse. She opened it, poked around, closed it. A nervous habit. It was where she used to keep her cigarettes. 

“Dr. Hill says lots of writers live long and productive lives and have lots of fun with never any problems.”

I looked into her eyes. She could probably tell I wasn’t buying it.

Something out the windshield caught my mom’s attention — a mailman kneeling a little ways away. He was gathering loose mail from the sidewalk and dumping handfuls back into a canvas sack that looked like it had been pummeled with dirty sneakers. 

“I mean, there are worse jobs in the world, aren’t there?” she said. Then she spun around to me with tears in her eyes. “Oh, sweetheart! Doctors don’t know everything, now do they?”

I handed her a tissue from the glove compartment. 

“Look, Ma,” I said. “I’m eight. Eight is the new ten. I can handle it.”

“Stop saying clever things like that!”

The mailman turned his head. Even with the windows up, he had caught a piece of it.

“All right, all right,” I said. I let my window down a little. The air had gotten pretty thick in Mom’s Tercel. “I’ll stay in bed, I’ll build my character. I’ll write long books — even though I’ve never written anything longer than six sentences about my summer vacation.”

My mom blew a bunch of breath out her lips. Her eyelids, her cheeks, her jaw, all got real saggy. Like her face had just thrown in the towel. She started the car. We made the right onto Wilmore Avenue, then Oyster Bay, and we headed in the direction for ice cream. From the looks of it, she was going to need it more than me. 

We stopped at a light. For some reason — just then — it hit me: I wondered if all this crap today might be worth writing about. 

I thought about asking my mom. I stopped myself.

I realized a much better idea would be to keep my mouth shut.

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