Michael Chabon: Werewolves in Their Youth

“Are you going to make him go to Special School?” I said.

“All right, Paul, thank you,” said Mrs. Gladfelter. “You may go back to class now. We’re watching a movie with Mrs. Hampt’s class this afternoon.”

Mrs. Maloney had reappeared in the doorway, her cheeks flushed, her lipstick fresh, smelling of cigarette.

“I’ll see that he gets there,” she said — uncharitably, I thought.

“See you later, Timothy,” I said. He didn’t answer me; he had started to growl again. As I followed Mrs. Maloney out of the office I looked back and saw Mr. Buterbaugh and Mrs. Gladfelter and poor old Mrs. Stokes standing in a hopeless circle around Timothy. I thought for a second, and then I turned back toward them and raised an imaginary rifle to my shoulder.

“This is a dart gun,” I announced. Everyone looked at me, but I was talking to Timothy now. I was almost but not quite embarrassed. “It’s filled with darts of my special antidote, and I made it stronger than it used to be, and it’s going to work this time. And also, um, there’s a tranquilizer mixed in.”

Timothy looked up, and bared his teeth at me, and I took aim right between his eyes. I jerked my hands twice, and went fwup! fwup! Timothy’s head snapped back, and his eyelids fluttered. He shook himself all over. He swallowed, once. Then he held his hands out before him, as if wondering at their hairless pallor.

“It seems to have worked,” he said, his voice cool and reasonable and fine. Anyone could see he was still playing his endless game, but all the grown-ups, Mr. Buterbaugh in particular, looked very pleased with both of us.

“Thank you very much, Paul.” Mr. Buterbaugh gave me a pat on the head. “Remember to say hello to your mother for me.”

“I’m not Paul,” I said, and everybody laughed but Timothy Stokes.

When I got home from school my mother was down in the basement, at my father’s workbench, dressed in the paint-spattered blue jeans and hooded sweatshirt she put on whenever it was time to do dirty work. She had pulled her hair back into a tight ponytail. Normally I would have been glad to see her home from work already and dressed this way. One of the sources of friction between us, and among the various angers that I had supposedly been attempting to manage, was my dislike of the way she looked as she went off to work in the morning, in her plaid suit jackets, her tan stockings, her blouses with their little silk bow ties, her cabasset of hairsprayed hair. In the days before she went back to work my mother had been a genuine hippie — bushy-headed, legs unshaven, dressed in vast dresses with Indian patterns; she was there to fix bowls of hot whole-grain cereal in the morning and to give me a snack of dried pineapple and milk in the kitchen when I came home. Now, every morning, I fixed myself a breakfast of cornflakes and coffee, and when I got home I generally turned on the television and ate the box of Yodels that I purchased at High’s every day on my way back from school. But my pleasure at the sight of her in her old, ruined jeans, patched with a scrap of a genuine Mao jacket she had bought as a student at McGill, was diminished when I saw that she was dressed this way so that she could stand at my father’s workbench and toss all the delicate furniture of his home laboratory into an assortment of battered liquor cartons.

“But, Mom,” I said, watching as she backhanded into a box an entire S-shaped rack of stoppered test tubes. The glass, in shattering, made a festive tinkle, as of little bells, and the dank basement air was quickly suffused with a harsh chemical stink of bananas and mold and burnt matches. “Those are his experiments.”

“I know it,” said my mother, looking grave, her voice filled with vandalistic glee. My father was a research chemist for the Food and Drug Administration. He was a small man with a scraggly gray beard and thick spectacles. He wore plaid sports jackets with patches on the elbows, carried his pens in a plastic pocket liner, and went to services every Saturday morning. He held a national ranking in chess (173) and a Canadian patent for a culture medium still widely used in that country, where he had been born and raised. “And he worked very hard on them all.” She hefted the heavy black binder in which my father kept his lab notes and dropped it into a box that had once contained bottles of Captain Morgan rum; there was a leering picture of a pirate on the side. “For years.” The laboratory notebook landed with a crunch of glass, breaking the throats of a dozen Erlenmeyer flasks beneath it. “I’ve asked him many, many times to come over here and pick up his things, Paulie. You know that. He’s had his chance.”

“I know.” On his departure from our house, my father had taken only a plaid valise full of summer clothing and my grandfather’s Russian chess set, whose black pieces had once been fingered by Alexander Alekhine.

“It’s been months now, Paulie,” my mother said. “I’ve got to conclude that he just doesn’t want any of his stuff.”

“I know,” I said.

She surveyed the wreckage of my father’s home laboratory — a little ruefully now, I thought — and then looked at me. “I guess it must seem to you like I’m being kind of mean,” she said. “Eh?”

I didn’t say anything. She held out her hand to me. I grabbed it and tugged her to her feet. She lifted the Captain Morgan carton and stacked it atop a Smirnoff carton filled with commercially prepared reagents in their bottles and jars; there was a further crunch of glass as the upper box settled into the lower. She hoisted the stacked boxes to her hip and jogged them once to get a better grip. One carton remained on the floor beside the workbench. We both looked at it.

“I’ll come back for that one,” my mother said, after a pause. She turned, and started slowly up the stairs.

For a minute I stood there with my hands jammed into my pockets, staring down into the box at my father’s crucible tongs, at his coils of clear plastic tubing, at his stirrers, pipettes, and stopcocks wrapped like taffy in stiff white paper. I knelt down and wrapped my arms around the carton and lowered my face into it and inhaled a clean, rubbery smell like that of a new Band-Aid. Then I lifted the carton and carried it upstairs, through the laundry room, and out into the garage, trying to fight off an unsettling feeling that I was throwing my father away. The rear hatch of our Datsun was raised, and the backseats had been folded forward.

“Thank you, sweetie,” said my mother, gently, as I handed her the last carton. “Now I just have to load up a few more things, and then I’m going to run all this stuff over to Mr. Kappelman’s office.” Mr. Kappelman was my father’s lawyer; my mother’s lawyer was a woman she called Deirdre. “You can just stay here, okay? You don’t have to help me anymore.”

“There’s no room for me anyway,” I said.

Most of the space in the car was already taken up by packed liquor boxes. I could see the fuzzy sleeve of my father’s green angora sweater poking out of one carton, and, through the finger holes in the side of another, I could make out the cracked black spines of his college chemistry texts. Stuffed into the spaces among the boxes and into odd nooks of the car’s interior were my father’s bicycle helmet, his clarinet case, his bust of Paul Morphy, his brass wall barometer, his shoeshine kit, his vaporizer, the panama hat he liked to wear at the beach, the beige plastic bedpan that had come home from the hospital with him after his deviated-septum operation and now held all his razors and combs and the panoply of gleaming instruments he employed to trim the hair that grew from the various features of his face, a grocery bag full of his shoe trees, the Montreal Junior Chess Championship trophy he had won in 1953, his tie rack, his earmuffs, and one Earth shoe. There was barely enough room left in the car for the three boxes my mother and I had dragged up from the basement. I helped her squeeze them into place, audibly doing more damage to their rank-smelling contents, and then my mother put her hands on the edge of the hatch and got ready to slam it.