Bird in Hand - Christina Baker Kline [39]
For a long time, while Ben was growing up, the world outside his head held little interest. Outside his head, his mother was bustling around in the kitchen, fixing a family dinner his father wouldn’t show up for. The dinner would get cold as they sat there, Ben and his mother and his younger brother, Justin, and then his mother would say, in a strained, careful voice, “Well, you two go ahead,” and push her own plate away. Ben would struggle to eat the chicken and peas that tasted like dog food in his mouth. His mother would watch them silently for a few minutes, then rise abruptly and start clearing up around them, an angry clatter of dishes reverberating in the still room.
Ben could read anywhere. He read waiting for the bus, sitting on the bus, walking into school. He read at recess and before orchestra. He read at night in the room he shared with his brother after his mother had turned off the overhead light, squinting to see the words by the eerie glow of the night-light in the socket beside his bed. In his world the wizard Merlin was as real as Jim Townsend and Tyler Green, two boys who lived on his block and threw gravel at him when he walked by, hiding in the stairwells of their split-levels. Ben rode the trains with the Boxcar Children; he stepped through a wardrobe into a land where a great lion saved children from an evil witch. He was three inches tall, navigating the perilous terrain behind his house, where sparrows were airplanes and rain puddles lakes. At home Ben often felt helpless, at school he was invisible, but in his head he was a fearless traveler, a brilliant inventor, a hero.
Before Ben knew what an affair was, he sensed that his father was having one. The distraction and irritation, the careless lies—Ben could see that he was tearing away from the family, as slowly and painfully as an animal caught in a steel trap chewing off its own limb. To Ben it made no sense: they were a family, in a house with a yard—a tiny, scrubby patch of yard, but a yard nonetheless—in a neighborhood filled with families, mothers and fathers and kids. The only thing he could fathom was that his father must have another, better, family somewhere else. Later Ben would learn that, essentially, he did. Across town, in a small, second-floor apartment, a mistress and a baby were waiting.
At school, where he got As without even trying, Ben felt like a fraud. He couldn’t articulate what he really thought or felt or saw, so mostly he stayed quiet. By the time he was in ninth grade he was drifting through his classes, smoking pot with the stoners behind the school between periods. He joined the chess club, won every match, and then quit; he discovered Nietzsche and shaved his head. It was at this particularly confused point in his midteens that a high school guidance counselor stepped in. Handing Ben a stack of prep-school brochures, he’d given him a thirty-minute seminar on the ins and outs of scholarships and financial aid. A year later, Ben was at a small school in New Hampshire where there were so many smarter, weirder kids that he seemed fairly normal, even ordinary, by comparison.
When, in April of his senior year, he called his mother to tell her that he’d gotten into Harvard, she squeaked and started to cry. He was standing at a pay phone in the student center, using the phone card she’d given him for his birthday. All around him, other kids were opening their college letters, the contents telegraphed by the size of the envelopes. As his mother carried on he watched the faces register a flickering range of emotion. Ben had kept his application to Harvard a secret. There were kids in his class, legacies of legacies, for whom getting in seemed as inevitable as getting a driver’s license. He hadn’t wanted to set himself up