The Big Impossible. Edward J. Delaney

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      Sometimes, then, I don’t know how I got here. I rarely speak of who I once was, here in the rarified life. I am married to a woman who sits me down for a “serious talk” and says such things as, “I feel I need to be living a more textured existence.” She cannot imagine the serious talks at that kitchen table in the house on Route 65, as poverty and alcoholism and despair closed in on my people. Then she looks at me looking at her, and accuses me of not understanding.

      I wear all the right clothes now. The Oxford shirts and buttery loafers, the pressed chinos. After dinner I drink The Famous Grouse, on the rocks, from a crystal tumbler. I live in just the right place: I sit in my house on a leafy street, brick-sidewalked street (walking distance from the Yard), a street on which birds seemed to have been shipped in to sing their morning tunes.

      So different than the machine-thrumming summer buzz of Arkansan grasshoppers. I had a drawl then; I speak now in the canned-soup vernacular of all the places I’ve been—not enough spice to make it interesting, not so little as to not be adequate to most.

      My father would be ashamed of me.

      But he died too early. Dropped dead in the rows in ’72. On Google Street View, I find the next sad place, the apartment house in Little Rock where my mother and grandmother and I then lived on food stamps and church doles. Out there on Geyer Street, I discover, that house still stands, but barely: What was likely built to shelter a single family had then become diced into tiny compartments for unfortunates such as ourselves. Now, in my computer’s image, that house stands beaten and boarded, the low chain-link fence collapsed and the scraggly trees in front as untrimmed as a drunk’s beard.

      But there, in the city, our fourth-hand television could get a signal, and the transformation began in small increments. In that small airless living room, I began to mimic those television voices, whispering those accentless sentences as holy mantras. I wanted to talk just like the Brady Bunch did. I wanted to talk like the Partridge Family. My mother would sit in her chair looking at me, saying nothing at all.

      School was where I spoke that language loudly. My classmates would ask me where I was from. My teachers saw my hunger, and fed me; when, on my computer, I look at that boarded window to the right of the front door, I see beyond it my younger self, sprawled on the floor with pages, my limited facts and allotment of equations.

      Could I have been my happiest then? Now, looking at my iPad in my dawn kitchen, with its Italian marble tiles and its massive culinary island, I look again at that boarded window on my MacBook and wonder. It was just myself, my mother and my grandmother. We endured those hot summers with only the rattling fan. My sweat coursed onto the books in that midday heat. My mother did find a way to get me the books, and I realize I never thanked her. At sunset, she went walking, alone, to get her air. She did so every night, night after night, coming home long after dark. One night she walked home early, with a man.

      “This is Herbert,” she said.

      “No,” is what I said.