Free Solos by Kitty Burns Florey Page A

have dessert. Marcus could live with that. He figured out early on that his father’s disciplinary efforts had nothing to do with Marcus’s behavior but were only about a need to dominate him, and so he knew that they would be erratic, contradictory, and not to be taken seriously. As for his father’s remoteness and sloppiness and boozing, they didn’t bother him either. He was almost glad Hart was such a slob, because cleaning up after him gave Summer something to do.
    But what got to him was the way Hart hated everything. His commonest facial expression was a sneer—his lip curled up on one side to expose a yellow canine.
    Hart approved of a few artists, and he liked pro football, old movies, and pre-1960 jazz. But he had only scorn for a long and eclectic list of items, including pop music, opera, junk food, what he called “yuppie food,” Indian food, Chinese food, baseball, lawyers, doctors, accountants, banks, the checkout clerks at the supermarket, supermarkets, the neighbors, and his own apparently immense and underachieving family back in Wisconsin, whom he brought into the conversation only to denounce as “bourgeois cretins.” He hated politicians, scientists, academics, and critics. He claimed that most writers were illiterate, journalists were corrupt toadies, and activists were phonies, no matter what cause they worked for. He seemed to get the most fun out of sneering at the TV shows Summer liked, providing a running commentary about people’s clothes, hair, and weight problems. When he said, “They should shoot people who look like Roseanne and put them out of their misery,” his malevolent glee was like a bad smell, as though he had farted instead of sneering.
    Not that Hart’s objections to TV kept him from watching. He never missed a Jets game, and he was also partial to late-night talk shows and black-and-white movies. While Hart was in residence, Marcus didn’t like watching TV, even the game shows. In the evenings, instead of curling up on the couch against Summer’s friendly bulk, Marcus would leave the two of them in front of the set—Summer with popcorn, Hart with a tumbler of Jack Daniels—and go upstairs with his dog to do crossword puzzles or page through a phone book.
    Regularity, number sequences, certain words and combinations of letters, puns, anagrams, lipograms, pangrams, palindromes, word games, crosswords, the rhythms of poetry—these things gave Marcus a deep sense of peace and contentment that he achieved otherwise only in the company of animals. With people, he tended to be friendly and curious, even nosy, but people often disappointed him, and he became glum and silent very quickly when they turned out to be boring or uncommunicative. With his dog, or at the dairy farm down the road where he went to watch the cows, or in the woods surrounded by invisible wildlife— wildlife , how he loved that word—then he was happy, and himself, and free. Once Hart arrived, all this became more important to him than ever.
    The year he was ten, Marcus was preoccupied with three things in particular: crossword puzzles, phone books, and his puppy, Phoebe. Crossword puzzles were a fairly recent discovery. With a quarter in his pocket he walked down the road every morning to the Honesdale CVS to buy the New York Times . He noticed right away that the puzzles got harder as the week went on—they didn’t get at all interesting until Thursday. He still did the Monday through Wednesday puzzles, but on those days speed was the important factor. His record was ten minutes for a Tuesday puzzle; it was so easy his pen could hardly keep up with his brain. He had a small stack of Friday and Saturday puzzles that were unfinished, and that he would go back to from time to time. If he plugged away long enough, he always finished them.
    As for the Sunday puzzle, it was basically just a big Thursday one, and he could usually polish it