Free Bicycle Days by John Burnham Schwartz

practice. Only he would get up then and turn on the television and the stereo. He would sit down at his father’s antique rolltop desk, uncap the lacquered fountain pen, and fill one sheet of notepaper after another with the signatures of his family. He would sign imaginary letters and contracts and school forms, working at it every afternoon until he could write four different signatures, all of them perfect, his own included.
    He always saved his parents’ bedroom for last. He went through their closets. The hanging clothes brushed against his face. He breathed in the smells of mothballs and flannel and leather, and traces of his mother’s perfume. He looked into their bureau drawers, felt the gold weight of a pocketwatch that hadbelonged to his grandfather. And then he walked out of their bedroom, closing the door behind him. He stood a few feet away from it, his body pressed tight against the wall, and imagined that he and Mark were listening to another one of their parents’ fights, adding their own mental pictures to the words they heard. He thought of his mother teaching the piano to strange children, of his father running a business that his family didn’t really understand, of Mark playing football with the older boys because he was as big as they were. He remembered how much he had liked sitting at the kitchen table after school. And he felt fear come to him as he stood in the short, dark corridor that connected his parents’ room to the rest of the apartment. It held him and pressed him harder against the wall until his shoulders and back began to hurt, until he slid down and sat on the carpet.
    He didn’t often go into his parents’ room after that; the apartment began to seem dangerous. He stayed in his own end of the house. His was the smallest room—he always assumed it was because he was the smallest person—but during those afternoons he rarely left it. There was a black-and-white TV he could watch if he felt like it. But mostly he just sat by the window, looking out over the reservoir and Central Park.
    He began to daydream, sometimes for hours at a time. He became good at it. He went places and did things and never told anyone about any of it. Often he was a famous child actor or a tennis star. Or both. He owned a motorcycle and rode it across the country. He stopped in places where he had never been before, but where everyone seemed to know him. And then he rode off again. He never needed anything else; he took it all with him wherever he went.
    One afternoon, he went with his class on a trip to a children’s museum, where a traditional Japanese house had been built. He saw plastic figures dressed in stiff robes sitting around a low table. There was no other furniture, and he thought it must be strange to live in an empty house. And the floor wasn’t really a floor at all, but large woven mats placed together with no spacein between. The teacher told him that the mats were called
tatami,
and that Japanese people never wore their shoes inside the house. When Alec took off his shoes, he felt the reed floor tickle his feet; it moved when he did, as though it were alive in some way. And it smelled good, like running barefoot in the country.
    The house was all clean emptiness and he felt close to it, as if he knew it. The wood was what he thought wood should look like, it wasn’t painted or stained. There weren’t any pictures, only tall, beautiful flowers in a bowl with white pebbles. The flowers sat on a shelf in one corner of the room where the table was.
    When he got home that day, Alec told his mother he didn’t want to wear shoes inside the house anymore. But she didn’t ask him any questions this time about what he had seen and done and felt. She just smiled absently and touched his hair.
    She never asked him about Japan, so he never told her how often he thought about it. Never told her that the motorcycle dreams were all gone now, that he was no longer a famous child actor or a tennis