Free Home Game by Michael Lewis Page A

muscled her into pants and a T-shirt. The origin of vanity is not the desire to be admired by others but the need to be in charge. The other thing just follows from it.

I ONCE WENT to visit Roald Dahl at his home in the English countryside. The author of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, James and the Giant Peach , and other macabre tales for children had just publicly denounced The Satanic Verses as an irresponsible piece of self-promotion. He didn’t exactly endorse the fatwa that had just been issued against Salman Rushdie, but he came close, and I used this as an excuse to go and talk to him. He wasn’t well—he was more or less confined to an upholstered chair and wasn’t long for this world—but he could not have been better company. I remember next to nothing of what he said about Rushdie. What I recall was lunch. Several Dahls gathered, and a plate of ham cold cuts arrived at the table. Dahl said something about how closely the cold cuts resembled human flesh, and how he once thought of writing a story about children who are served cold cuts from the corpse of a missing friend. I expected someone at the table to complain, but instead his daughter giggled and told a story about how she had witnessed, firsthand, a butcher slice off his palm while running a shank of ham over a meat slicer. She went on to describe, to the delight of the entire family, how the slice of butcher’s flesh fit perfectly on top of the stack of ham. Exactly like the ham we were about to eat! Sixty seconds into the meal the Dahls were vying to outgross each other with tales of severed limbs and pulsing pink flesh, while happily munching ham sandwiches. With the possible exception of Mrs. Dahl, the entire family had preserved into adulthood a childlike delight in the grotesque.
    Once you have a small child you can see the full appeal of the Dahlian imagination. To a small child the adult world is grotesque. For a start, it’s all ridiculously out of proportion: To a child every grown-up is a monster. Then there are all these events that occur in the grown-up world that a child, in trying to get her mind around them, distorts wildly. I went out of town on business last week. “Are you going on an airplane?” Quinn asked, before I left. “Yes,” I said. “Are you going to an airport?” she asked. “Yes,” I said. “Are they going to put chickens in your luggage?” she asked. I had to think about that one. Then it struck me: check-in luggage/ chickens in the luggage. How strange the adult world must seem when filtered through the child’s vocabulary. Even those aspects of the adult world designed explicitly to give innocent pleasure to a child are often, to a child, either weird or downright horrifying. Which brings me to Mickey Mouse.
    I had taken Quinn to a birthday party around the corner from our house in Berkeley. The highlight of the birthday party was to be the appearance of Mickey Mouse. Mickey was meant to be kept a secret. The children would gather and play for a bit and then Mickey Mouse would burst through the doors and surprise everyone. But it’s hard to keep a secret, especially a good one, from Quinn, as it is so tempting to use any prospective treat as a bribe. To coax her into her car seat I had told her that if she ceased to struggle she would get to meet Mickey Mouse. In the flesh. She seemed pleased by the idea.
    We arrived at the birthday party. Quinn overcame the shyness she always experiences when she enters a crowded room and was soon playing with the other children. But there is no such thing as equilibrium in a room full of toddlers; something bad is always about to happen; and what happened was that the father of the birthday girl came over to say there was a problem with Mickey. The company that farmed out Mickey to children’s birthday parties had just phoned: Mickey was ill. The company had called around looking for a substitute. They had