Danny was hunched over the first of the five battered primers Jack had dug up by culling mercilessly through Boulder's myriad secondhand bookshops. They would take Danny right up to the second-grade reading level, a program she had told Jack she thought was much too ambitious. Their son was intelligent, they knew that, but it would be a mistake to push him too far too fast. Jack had agreed. There would be no pushing involved. But if the kid caught on fast, they would be prepared. And now she wondered if Jack hadn't been right about that, too.
Danny, prepared by four years of "Sesame Street" and three years of "Electric Company," seemed to be catching on with almost scary speed. It bothered her. He hunched over the innocuous little books, his crystal radio and balsa glider on the shelf above him, as though his life depended on learning to read. His small face was more tense and paler than she liked in the close and cozy glow of the goosenecked lamp they had put in his room. He was taking it very seriously, both the reading and the workbook pages his father made up for him every afternoon. Picture of an apple and a peach. The word apple written beneath in Jack's large, neatly made printing. Circle the right picture, the one that went with the word. And their son would stare from the word to the pictures, his lips moving, sounding out, actually sweating it out, And with his double-sized red pencil curled into his pudgy right fist, he could now write about three dozen words on his own.
His finger traced slowly under the words in the reader. Above them was a picture Wendy half-remembered from her own grammar school days, nineteen years before. A laughing boy with brown curly hair. A girl in a short dress, her hair in blond ringlets one hand holding a jump rope. A prancing dog running after a large red rubber ball. The first-grade trinity. Dick, Jane, and Jip.
"See Jip run," Danny read slowly. "Run, Jip, run. Run, run, run." He paused, dropping his finger down a line. "See the..." He bent closer, his nose almost touching the page now. "See the..."
"Not so close, doc," Wendy said quietly. "You'll hurt your eyes. It's-"
"Don't tell me!" he said, sitting up with a jerk. His voice was alarmed. "Don't tell me, Mommy, I can get it!"
"All right, honey," she said. "But it's not a big thing. Really it's not."
Unheeding, Danny bent forward again. On his face was an expression that might be more commonly seen hovering over a graduate record exam in a college gym somewhere. She liked it less and less.
"See the... buh. Aw. El. El. See the buhaw-el-el? See the buhawl. Ball!" Suddenly triumphant. Fierce. The fierceness in his voice scared her. "See the ball!"
"That's right," she said. "Honey, I think that's enough for tonight."
"A couple more pages, Mommy? Please?"
"No, doc." She closed the red-bound book firmly. "It's bedtime."
"Please?"
"Don't tease me about it, Danny. Mommy's tired."
"Okay." But he looked longingly at the primer.
"Go kiss your father and then wash up. Don't forget to brush."
"Yeah."
He slouched out, a small boy in pajama bottoms with feet and a large flannel top with a football on the front and NEW ENGLAND PATRIOTS written on the back.
Jack's typewriter stopped, and she heard Danny's hearty smack. "Night, Daddy."
"Goodnight, doc. How'd you do?"
"Okay, I guess. Mommy made me stop."
"Mommy was right. It's past eight-thirty. Going to the bathroom?"
"Yeah."
"Good. There's potatoes growing out of your ears. And onions and carrots and chives and-"
Danny's giggle, fading, then cut off by the firm click of the bathroom door. He was private about his bathroom functions, while both she and Jack were pretty much catch-as-catch-can. Another sign-and they were multiplying all the time- that there was another human being in the place, not just a carbon copy of one of them or a combination of both. It made her a little sad. Someday her child would be a stranger to her, and she would be strange to him... but not as strange as her own mother had become to her. Please don't let it be that way, God. Let him grow up and still love his mother.
Jack's typewriter began its irregular bursts again.
Still sitting in the chair beside Danny's reading table, she let her eyes wander around her son's room. The glider's wing had been neatly mended. His desk was piled high with picture books, coloring books, old Spiderman comic books with the covers half torn off, Crayolas, and an untidy pile of Lincoln Logs. The VW model was neatly placed above these lesser things, its shrink-wrap still undisturbed. He and his father would be putting it together tomorrow night or the night after if Danny went on at this rate, and never mind the end of the week. His pictures of Pooh and Eyore and Christopher Robin were tacked neatly to the wall, soon enough to be replaced with pin-ups and photographs of dopesmoking rock singers, she supposed. Innocence to experience. Human nature, baby. Grab it and growl. Still it made her sad. Next year he would be in school and she would lose at least half of him, maybe more, to his friends. She and Jack had tried to have another one for a while when things had seemed to be going well at Stovington, but she was on the pill again now. Things were too uncertain. God knew where they would be in nine months.