Oblivion_ stories - By David Foster Wallace Page 0,37

I was old enough to be aware of anything that was going on had been burled walnut, with a large number of diamonds, sapphires, and rhinestones inset in the top in the likeness of the face of Queen Elizabeth I of England (1533-1603) as seen from the right side, and that the disappointment of its loss was part of the reason our father often looked so dispirited on coming home at the end of the day.

The easternmost row’s second to last desk had a deep stick figure with a cowboy hat and much oversized six-shooter gouged deeply into it and colored in with ink from some previous 4th grader, obviously the product of much slow, patient effort over the course of that previous academic year. Directly ahead of me were the thick neck, upper vertebrae, and severely bobbed hairline of Mary Unterbrunner, whose neck’s pale and patternless freckles I had studied for almost two years, as Mary Unterbrunner (who would later become an administrative secretary at the large women’s detention center in Parma) had also been in my 3rd grade homeroom with Mrs. Taylor, who read the class ghost stories and could play the ukulele and was a great deal of fun as a homeroom teacher so long as you didn’t get on the wrong side of her temper. Mrs. Taylor once hit Caldwell on the back of his hand with her ruler, which she carried in the large kangaroo pocket of her smock, so hard that it swelled up almost like a cartoon hand, and Mrs. Caldwell (who knew judo, and who you also did not want to fool around with in terms of her own temper, according to Caldwell) came down to the school to complain to the principal. What teachers and the administration in that era never seemed to see was that the mental work of what they called daydreaming often required more effort and concentration than it would have taken simply to listen in class. Laziness is not the issue. It is just not the work dictated by the administration. For the sake of the visual interest of the narrative that day, I wish that I could say that each panel of the story that the window generated from the view of the two dogs either mating or struggling for dominance remained animated, so that by the end of the class the window’s wire mesh squares were all filled with narrative panels like the pictorial stained windows at Riverside Methodist Church, where my brother, mother, and I attended Sunday service each week, along with my father when he felt up to getting up early enough. He often had to work at the office six days a week, and he liked to call Sunday his day to try to glue what was left of his nerves back together. But that was not how it worked. It would have taken some kind of mental marvel to hold each square’s illustrated tableau in memory throughout the whole narrative of the window, not unlike the backseat game on trips where you and someone else pretend that you’re planning a picnic, and he says one item that will be brought, and you repeat that item and add another, and he repeats the two mentioned previously and adds a third, and you must repeat and then add a fourth which he must remember and repeat, and so on, until each of you is trying to hold a memorized string of 30 or more items in your mind as you each keep adding to it further by turns. This was never a game I excelled at, although my brother could sometimes perform feats of memory that amazed my parents and may even have frightened them a little, given how he eventually turned out (our father often referred to him as the brains of the outfit). Each square in the window’s mesh filled and recounted its part of the story of the poor unhappy owner of the brindle dog only while that particular square was attended to; it reverted to its natural state of transparency once the entire panel was actuated and filled and the story moved on to the mesh’s next square, in which the little girl whose young and unworldly brindle-colored dog, Cuffie, had dug its way out under the shabby back fence and escaped down to the banks of the Scioto River, wearing a lemon-colored pinafore, pink hair ribbon, and shiny black patent leather shoes with polished buckles, was sitting in