And One More Thing

Autofiction by Peter Krause

On a hot July day after the end of kindergarten, a five-year-old version of me sat on a stoop before a green-painted door marked with the number 2, in a courtyard of two-story brick apartments. A white sidewalk ran along each side of the courtyard enclosing a large rectangle of grass. Beside me were two round white plates, each of which bore a bologna sandwich consisting of one piece of bologna on top of a slice of plain American style white bread. Lunch for my older brother Bill and me. There may well have been a thin smear of mayonnaise between each slice of bread and its cover. It has become convenient over the years to consider that moment a marker between what happened in my life before I was five and what has come after.

I could, if I wanted, have looked to the left of the stoop where my five-year-old self sat, toward the apartment of a former classmate. Near the end of the school year, I went home with him for lunch. We’d stepped off the bus each with a piece of construction paper colored in crayon. His mother had seemed to enjoy his art a great deal, cooing “how beautiful” while looking at the composition. What I saw was black covering every square inch, even the corners. Alarmed and confused, I had pulled my own drawing around behind my back.

Whenever details return to me of that sunny July day, they often come freighted with other details, not attached to the five-year-old me with the two bologna sandwiches. These details are free to move around in both time and space, just as the boy is. One day in a previous year, while running to show my mother a new slide whistle, I fell in such a way that the flute pushed four of my teeth out of the way. I was taken inside, into the first apartment we lived in, where my mother moved the teeth back in place and let me read on the couch until I fell asleep. In that apartment I recall a much earlier time, of myself in a highchair at dinner, looking at the heads of my father, mother, and Bill, checking to see if anyone noticed while I put my spoon in my mouth upside down. A thing I had been told not to do.

At a certain point on that hot July day, I had eaten my sandwich and was looking at the plate waiting for Bill. His bologna had begun to sweat. I expected that he would shove me to the ground if he were to come home and find a plate with no sandwich. There had been the time, early one Saturday morning before our parents woke up, when Bill stuck a pencil into my arm and broke off the point. We had not even been fighting.

One day well after the incident with the flute but before the morning of the pencil, a version of me can be seen walking with great care down the middle of that sidewalk, near the door of the former classmate whose blackened drawing had earned him a compliment. That version of me had expressed to my parents a fear of the bees that circulated among small white blossoms in the short weeds among the grass. I had been told that if I left the bees alone, they would return the favor. I had applied my knowledge on that day to one particular bee, whereupon it floated up to my kneecap and stung me. The tears I brought home to my mother were of outrage, but she dabbed some vinegar on the offended knee and sent me back outside.

Or another time, the boy, myself at four years of age. Feeling in his pocket for a coin, finding the nickel. Thinking, a nickel is so much larger than a dime but oddly means not as many things. Compared to these, a silver dollar—like the one the tooth fairy had put under his pillow in exchange for his cherished first tooth—means so much more it seems almost a burden.

You could look to the right of the stoop, in the manner of the five-year-old me, and see the candy store. In the image, it appears behind and to the right of the railroad station house, itself occupying the middle distance just beyond the length of lawn in the wide courtyard. You would then see, as the boy does, his own feet crossing all three pairs of tracks—the main line, the spur, and the siding—and would feel in his pocket the coin whose value allowed him to stand inside the coolness of the store, staring intently through the glass of the candy case at open top boxes of jawbreakers, licorice whips, wax teeth, candied fruit slices, circus peanuts, Mary Jane taffies, Pixy Stix, bubblegum, and Necco Wafers. The man with a striped paper hat behind the counter would smile until the smile faded, frown until the smile came briefly back. He’d ask the boy if he would like help. He’d wait in vain for an answer. Leave. The boy would use (by some estimates) the full worth of the coin in his pocket, making and revising plans for purchase.

The candy store burned down one night after dinner; five-year-old me and Bill watched from the window of our apartment, above the stoop. Flames reached twice the height of the store. Screams were heard, and we begged to be allowed to go down.

Were the boy of five to walk from the stoop where he sits waiting for his brother with the uneaten bologna sandwich, bearing left past the railway station house, hopping across the tracks, then cutting through a field of waist high grass which had at its middle a row of vacant greenhouses, then onward across wide level lawns around stone and glass corporate buildings, one mile and two tenths away, he would find the house where his ten year old self and his family would one day live. This route could be reversed, as it was when his ten-year-old self walked with friends to throw rocks at the glass of the vacant greenhouses.

What would be the use of telling him, this boy of ten, anything at all? The best or maybe safest thing to do would be to tell him nothing. Or lay a token in the path in front of him, to be found some years later when he will want what young men so often want–sex before love–a token he will stumble over and pick up and regard briefly in wonder. Valerie.

If the boy of ten could see with the eyes of his twenty-three-year-old self, there would be in his mind an image of Valerie, her dancer’s lithe body, at the sink in her apartment, hands clad in a pair of yellow neoprene gloves. Steam rises as she passes dishes under a stream of nearly boiling hot water. The only way to get things really clean.

So, tell the boy: hold that image in memory until it becomes relevant to a particular moment with a particular woman, then use it to suppress that urge that motivates you to surrender to what you feel are forces outside your control. For me, the gloves, and the fact that her music collection was all show tunes, were all the guidance I needed about Valerie.

But the boy of ten is perfect. So is his five-year-old self, who has gone off somewhere, leaving behind a plate bearing a slice of plain American style white bread covered by a single slice of bologna, its edges curling toward the sun of a hot July day.