with termites.”
Why doesn’t he correct her?
Cole knows Tracy doesn’t have children not because she didn’t want any (“It was my dream since I had my first doll”), but because of a kind of cancer she had before she was married. When he asks if the cancer treatments made her go bald, she looks startled, but she tells him. All her straight blond hair fell out and grew back the way it is now, chestnut and wavy. She tells him also that because she lost so much weight when she was sick, even some people who’d known her all her life would walk right past her without recognizing her.
Cole would have thought that having cancer—which he knows can always come back and kill you even if it didn’t the first time—and not having the thing you most want in life would keep a person down. But though at times he sees PW with a faraway expression on his face that could be called at least partly sad, Tracy always looks as if everything is going her way.
Sometimes she accuses herself of being negative, or she apologizes for getting up “on the bad side of the bed.” Cole never knows what she’s talking about. Even when the subject is something she hates—abortion, unnatural marriage, the elbow bump—Tracy does not seem particularly angry or upset. She’ll bunch her lips or shudder or shake her head—“If that isn’t enough to make you spit”—but in the very next breath she’ll say, “How about yegg salad on rye fer yer lunch?”
He thinks of his mother and the pills she took every day to make her less negative. There were other pills she took to make her less afraid, especially if she had to get on a plane, or to help her sleep. When she did not get enough sleep, almost anything could make her cry. A dead robin on the lawn . . .
His father didn’t take any pills and Cole had never seen him cry, but he can’t remember a time when he didn’t have to watch out for his father’s moods. A bad mood often had something to do with work. His father and his mother were both overworked. One time he heard his mother tell someone on the phone, “I have to work as hard as she does and I’ve got a kid. Compared to mine, her life’s a fucking piece of cake.” Too much work. But also, as Cole understood it, fear of not having enough work. Or of losing the work that they had.
The people his parents disliked most were people who cared about money. But from the way his parents talked, money was the most important thing to them, too. He remembers the time their accountant made a mistake and they ended up owing a lot of taxes. When the accountant called to break the news, his father had started screaming at him, and when the accountant hung up on him, he threw his cell across the room. For days after, the house was like a tomb.
Cole knew the school he went to was expensive, as the schools his parents had gone to were expensive, so expensive that they’d had to keep paying the bills for years after they weren’t in school anymore. He knew they were worried about paying for his own education for years to come, and he wished he could bring them around to his own view, which was that school was not worth it.
As Cole understands it, if things had been different—if his parents had not had to work so hard all the time, and if they had not had to worry so much about money—he would have been born sooner. But he has always wondered about this. If he had been born sooner, on a different day in a different year, would he be exactly the same? Would he still be himself?
And if they had never moved, if they had stayed in Chicago, would his parents still be alive? Cole thinks the answer is yes, even though he knows that many people got sick and died in Chicago, too. In the big cities, so many people died so fast that bodies kept piling up and there were corpses everywhere, even outdoors. It is another one of Cole’s guilty secrets that he wishes he could have seen this with his own eyes. That, and the riots.
Cole has heard people call Tracy pretty, but again he has no opinion about this. Or rather his opinion is that