At that age we took our fascination in the lot of the adult world. Through the peers we put to turmoil – musky boys of brashness or slighted vigor, and the balmy girls, the sweet or mousy, the striving harlequins – we accessed the quiet amblings of their mothers and their fathers.
Martha Levinson lived with her two small dogs in a Victorian house, high on a hill in the Berkshires. She was long-divorced from her ex-husband and had two grown children, Claire and Philip, who lived in New York and Los Angeles. In her old age her almond eyes had become watery and caked with eyeliner, and she had resigned her chestnut hair to an eternally frizzy nest.
“I look at him. He doesn’t look at me. Just stares straight ahead. He shuts his eyes for a moment, and at first I’m afraid he’s not going to open them again.”
Philadelphia, 1962. “Dirty beatnik,” he muttered under his breath. Maurice Povich sat with his roommate on the balcony outside his dorm at the University of Pennsylvania. It was the night before graduation, and Al decided to light up a joint. … Read More
“Below, the sea was moonlight, bright as commercial breakfast milk. The tide pulled forward and back, morse code telling me all the ways to escape the sleepy town.”
The toy’s full name was Slapstick: An Authentic Comedy Toy for the Whole Family!TM, Slapstick himself being a kind of flesh-colored kidney-bean-shaped almost-humanoid character with googly eyeballs and kind of oozy chunky rubbery skin (which was in fact made of … Read More
