sister, and stormed right through the basement and up the back stairs. You couldn’t blame her. She had friends with brothers the same age as me, and instead of spending the day inside of Robotron 9000 with the dog, they played songs on guitar about ending the war.
“Jimmy,” my mother said, “come out of the box.”
Boing, I replied.
“I’ll write down some questions,” my father told her, as if to say, I’ll handle this.
There was a long pause. I looked down at my feet at Playboy. He growled resentfully, to let me know—as if I didn’t already—that this whole enterprise was doomed.
I heard my father writing upon an index card with the pencil I had thoughtfully attached to a string on the front of the Anser Machine. After a moment, the card came through the slot.
What can you hold without touching? he asked.
The dog looked up at me. Well, Robotron? Playboy observed. He’s got you there.
* * *
Even though we no longer went to the same school, I would occasionally spend a weekend at Lloyd Goodyear’s house. It was pretty clear our paths were diverging, though. One Saturday I arrived at his house to find two girls lying around Lloyd’s room. They were listening to Mott the Hoople.
Lloyd was lying on the bed with one of the girls. The other lay on the floor next to the record player. She looked me up and down, then said to Lloyd, “This is your friend?”
Later we all wound up on the playground of our old school, Culbertson Elementary. Lloyd and his girl climbed the backstop of the baseball diamond and sat there suspended high above home plate, going to first base. The other girl and I sat on a bench in the dugout. Something about the situation suggested that if Lloyd got into a jam, either she or I would be summoned by the coach to warm up in the bullpen.
But Lloyd found himself in no jam. By all appearances, he was on his way to pitching a perfect game.
I didn’t know what to say to this girl or how to say it. I think in my heart I wanted to say something like What is it like being you?
But it wasn’t the kind of question you could ask, and even if you did, how would she respond? In my experience, it turns out that many people don’t have the slightest clue what it would be like not to be themselves and, in fact, find the question kind of strange. But of course, it was all I could think about.
On the field before us, not so long ago, we had shot off model rockets that had disappeared in the blue skies of Pennsylvania. Off to the right was a flowering laurel tree. One recess, Lloyd and I had sat beneath its branches and eaten the flowers. We missed the call back to class, and the teacher, Miss Wolff, had remarked upon our empty chairs. They’re eating flowers, she was told. When we finally got back to the class, Miss Wolff just looked at us as if she knew something about us we did not.
From over our heads came the sound of laughter.
I turned to the girl I was with and said, You know, we could get us a couple of malteds. I did not know what malteds were, but I knew that getting us a couple of them was what you were supposed to do, if you wanted to be in love.
* * *
For years we’d just let Playboy run free, which suited his resentful, mulish character just fine. It suited Sawmill Road as well, a place that was an even mix of Christopher Robin’s enchanted Hundred Acre Wood and that forest where they filmed The Blair Witch Project.
The village—Newtown Square, Pennsylvania—had been settled in the eighteenth century by Quakers from Wales. There were three Quaker meetinghouses and a shuttered one-room octagonal schoolhouse. Miles and miles of the township were made up of dense forest. There were farms, too—rolling hills dotted with Angus cows and horses. One of our neighbors was Mrs. du Pont, on Liseter Farm. Years later, her son would murder a wrestling coach on their property. They made a movie out of the tragedy: Foxcatcher. Steve Carell was in it. He wasn’t usually given to fake noses, but he made an exception in this instance.
Our road cut through a swath of the old forest. On one side of Sawmill were a dozen late-1950s split-level homes. On the other was the