Jim is already elegant on the ice—Jimbo the Great! Look at him skate!—but I shuffle like a newborn fawn. The only thing holding me up is the hockey stick I use as a cane. Hockey sticks all have great names, like Sher-Wood and Northland, Koho and Jofa, and, our favorite, Minnesota’s own Christian Brothers. To curve the blade, Mom turns on a stovetop burner and Jim holds the blade just above it until it’s bendable. The glowing coils of the burner and the stainless steel of a nearby pot make the process feel metallurgical, like we’re ironmongers or ore smelters or some other obsolete tradesmen. When we get our skates sharpened—at BIG (Bloomington Ice Garden) or Westwood Skate and Bike or the Met Pro Shop; Bloomington has skate-sharpening services like other cities have dry cleaners—the machine grinding against the blade throws up sparks.
The twin blades of my “double-runners”—like training wheels for hockey skates—splay out to either side, so that the inside of each ankle nearly touches the ice. “Ankle skater,” the older kids call me, or “leatherbeater.” When my toes go numb, it’s a relief to retreat to the warming house. The heat hits me instantly, like Mom opening the oven door. The frozen stalactites of snot extending from my nostrils begin to thaw, and I lick my upper lip, enormously content to be indoors, in this lovely place with its lovely name: warming house.
Mom is happy to have us out of her house. She is due to give birth to her fourth child any day now, and so every night, kneeling beside our twin beds in the room we share, Tom and I do as we’re told. We pray for a girl.
We recite the Our Father as best we can. (“And deliver us some evil, Amen.”) We say the Hail Mary. (“Blessed is the Fruit of thy Loom, Jesus.”)
Tom recites a prayer-in-verse that goes “Good night, my sweet Jesus, the one I love best. My work is now finished, and now I must rest. Today you have blessed me, now bless me this night. And keep me from danger till morning and light. Amen.”
But I recognize the prayer’s cadence—its rhythms and its rhymes—in songs I’ve overheard in the park. And though I know it’s wrong, and God can see me in the dark, I can’t help but silently sing a response to every line that Tom utters.
“Good night, my sweet Jesus…” Tom says, and I silently sing in reply, “On top of Old Smokey…”
“The one I love best…” (“All covered with sand…”)
“My work is now finished…” (“I shot my poor teacher…”)
“And now I must rest…” (“With a red rubber band…”)
“Today you have blessed me…” (“I shot her with joy…”)
“Now bless me this night…” (“I shot her with pride…”)
“And keep me from danger…” (“I couldn’t have missed her…”)
“Till morning and light.” (“She’s forty feet wide.”)
Four months after our arrival in Bloomington, and in spite of my silent and serial blasphemies, Amy is born. The doctor finds Dad pacing in the waiting room at Fairview Southdale Hospital and tells him, “Congratulations. You finally got one with indoor plumbing.”
Our arrival in Minnesota coincides with the debut of Sesame Street, which I sit in front of twice a day, once in the morning and when it repeats in the afternoon, physically incapable of turning away.
Sesame Street has everything that Southbrook Drive does not, including graffiti, high-rise housing projects, suffocating urban heat, fire hydrants, front stoops, and black people.
From its opening theme—“Sunny day, sweepin’ the clouds away”—I want to live there. Kermit the Frog sits on a ledge next to the letter W. Cookie Monster bites off one of its constituent parts, and the W becomes an N. Cookie takes another bite, and the N becomes a V. After another, the V becomes a slanted I. Letters are Swiss Army knives, and I now see how an N is just a Z that has fallen on its face, possibly after a grand mal seizure. O is just a Q that has swallowed its tongue.
I am learning the alphabet and before long how to read, and so Mom lets me stay in to watch Sesame Street again in the afternoon while my brothers are happy to play outside. “One of these things just doesn’t belong here,” I sing along with Susan. “One of these things just isn’t the same.”
By the time the sad trumpet of its closing theme softly intrudes on the final sketch—playing Sesame Street off like an Oscar winner who is speaking too long—I’ve grown sad and anxious. When Mom hears the sponsors being read—“Sesame Street has been brought to you today by the letter M and by the number six”—she comes in from the kitchen. By the time they get to “Sesame Street is a production of the Children’s Television Workshop,” she snaps off the set and orders me out of the house, so that the last thing I see on TV every day is the PBS logo. And then I’m set out in the front yard like a garden gnome.
In the fall of 1970, Mom sends me to Saint Stephen’s Nursery School. Saint Stephen was the first martyr and the saint for whom I am named, though I’m Steven-with-a-v, because when the nurse at Elmhurst Memorial asked my parents how they wanted to spell my name, Dad answered before Mom could: “With a v. It’s easier.” He had already vetoed Mom’s first-choice name of Daniel, and now, even with my v, I am named after the saint who was stoned to death rather than the one who was tortured and beheaded. Reading my Children’s Book of Saints, I think of this as a small blessing.
My teacher is a white-haired lady named Mrs. Bakke. At home, I call her Mrs. Bakke-Hockey, and Mrs. Walkie-Talkie. I like pulling words apart and putting them back together, as if they’re building blocks or Lincoln Logs or Tinkertoys. Alliteration pleases me as much as it pleases the toy makers, one of which—Tonka trucks—was founded a few towns over in the alliterative suburb of Mound, Minnesota, and named for its alliterative neighbor, Minnetonka, Minnesota.
Romper Room, Sesame Street, Captain Kangaroo. I am not the only child who loves alliteration. “Wanda waved her wand and her washtub filled with warm water,” goes a sketch on Sesame Street. To which Carol Burnett says, “Wow, Wanda the Witch is weird.”
Words are toys. You can couple and uncouple them like model train cars. The Electric Company will soon hold me spellbound. “Who can turn a can into a cane? Who can turn a pan into a pane? Anyone can plainly see—it’s silent e.”
Wordplay is all around me, on Popsicle sticks, in knock-knock jokes, in 1,001 Riddles. Even when I don’t understand them, I’m drawn to these jokes and want to take them apart, the way other kids will take apart a radio to see how it works. “If an athlete gets athlete’s foot,” asks my Dixie Riddle Cup, “what does an astronaut get?” I’m not entirely sure what an athlete is, much less athlete’s foot, and the answer to the riddle—“missile toe”—is more mystifying still.
But I don’t care, because I’m reading everything—from street signs (“stop” backward is “pots”) to newspaper headlines (I like how “Twins” conceals “win”). I devour whatever is put in front of me. If a hungry mind leaves a clean plate, I read the way my dad eats his dinner: until I can see my reflection on the page. Tom and Jim are out riding their bikes or making friends while I sit inside reading the labels on cleaning products. One of these things is not like the others. One of these things just doesn’t belong.