Zoology. Ben Dolnick

forests full of trees with shiny black leaves. “I don’t really know what they’re ‘about,’” she said, “in the sense of if I were writing a paper or something. I just want them to … well, capture what I saw, I guess. David and I were on the train up to Connecticut—did he tell you this already?—and we passed a graveyard behind some woods, and after that I just kept thinking about those dead people climbing up through the roots.” Dad—who’d said, “Well, they aren’t how I’d paint it,” the first time he’d seen Lucy’s catalog—turned to me now and thumped the table. “You see?” he said. “That’s art. Taking life and turning it inside out. I love it.” I’d put on too much bug spray before we went out, and besides my lips being numb, every bite I took had a dark green hint of poison.

      After dinner Dad handed each of us a DoveBar (Olive barked and leaped up for Lucy’s), and while Mom and Dad tried to get her inside, and while Walter stood by the fence and looked sad, David said to me, “Lucy and I have a proposition for you.” He squeezed my shoulder. “Move in with us. Come live in our second bedroom for a little.”

      “Even just a month or two, we’re thinking, could be really fun,” Lucy said.

      “I can’t stand thinking of you here losing your mind.” And then quietly, “Doesn’t being here just depress you?”

      My throat filled with tear-snot, my heart ached and seemed to lean out of my chest—it was as if David had yanked away a sheet and shown me, for the first time, the real wreck of my year.

      “Could I come next week?”

      “Of course,” he said.

      “Tomorrow?”

      He laughed and said the job he had in mind for me—he knew someone at the Central Park Zoo—wouldn’t be able to start for a few weeks. I said thank-you so many times that he finally said, “I get it. You’re welcome. Shut up.”

      Now that I knew I wouldn’t have to put up with them, the hundred little shames of home felt unbearable. Having to answer, again and again, “Oh, just taking some time off right now.” And all the Sundays when the sun would set and I’d realize that I hadn’t even put pants on. Or the lunches that summer when Uncle Walter and I would sit together not talking at the kitchen table and even he’d seem worried for me. Lately he’d been knocking on my door some evenings (did he wait for the sound of my bed creaking?) to ask if I felt like coming downstairs to talk. And when I said OK, when I pulled up my pants and gritted my teeth and stomped down to the living room, he wouldn’t even have anything to say, he just liked having me around.

      Walter has never gotten married, and he’s never had a real job, so when I was ten he came to live in our basement bedroom. It was first going to be for a month, then for a year, and then we all stopped talking about it. He makes his bed every morning, drinks tea that tastes like hot water, keeps his five shirts folded and clean. His room looks like a hotel room between guests. He inherited just as much money as Dad did when my grandparents died, so even without a job he could live in a place of his own, but Walter alone is too depressing to think about. He’s a balder, skinnier, sadder version of Dad—a failure who thinks, or pretends to think, that he’s chosen this life, that he’s living out some principled decision too obvious to explain. Being cheap is part of it. On the wall of his shower he keeps dried strings of dental floss, used and waiting to be used again. His clothes all smell sweet like cigars, even though he’s never smoked, and he’s got a permanent squint, Dad says because of how much he used to read. When I was home I’d go up into the office where he works, since it was right next to my room, and if it was eleven in the morning or four in the afternoon, he’d be snoring in his chair. “Quit sneaking up on me,” he’d say. “I can’t get anything done when you’re always poking your head in.”

      Dad once said that when they were growing up, everyone thought Walter was going to be either a senator or a surgeon, but for three years now he’s been writing a self-help book. “He’ll be his own best customer,” Mom likes to say. At least once a month Walter ends dinner in tears. He’ll be talking, ordinary as can be, and then while he tries to get some word out his lip will start to shake. You hope at first it’s just a twitch, but then he’s looking down, and soon his eyes are red and full and he’s gripping his fork too hard. Usually it’s about being lonely, but just about anything can do it. How Olive never asks for anything from us, a sick kid he saw at Safeway, how lucky he is to be part of such an incredible family. The one topic that’s always safe—the one topic guaranteed to cheer him up, even—is spine care. He’s never had a mood so far gone that it can’t be set right by someone saying, “See, even when I try standing with my head up like this, after a while my back starts hurting again right down here.”

      Within five seconds his eyes are dry and he’s standing up slowly from the table, pushing you gently against the wall. “But of course your back hurts,” he says. “You aren’t changing how you hold your shoulders. Standing like that’s an assault. Here. Now. Shoulders back. No, like this. Now try walking around like that.” He’ll sit down with a shy smile, and for a few minutes he’ll be as proud as a kid after a talent show. When I was little he gave massages part-time at the Rockville Sport & Health Club. Even now, fifteen years after he gave his last professional massage, at any moment during the day he might appear behind me and start kneading my shoulders.

      Before I’d finished my DoveBar, I’d already moved in with David. I’d keep my saxophone in the corner, and I’d practice every night, do theory exercises on the subway. Whenever I learned a new song, I’d come out and play it for David and Lucy and any neighbors who were over having cocktails. I’d knock packs of cigarettes against my palm outside of bars and get drunk on drinks with real mint in them. David and I would go for walks at night and we’d talk strategy for his team, whether they should maybe move this guy to cleanup and that guy out to center field. I’d start getting gigs and David would take the drums back up and someone, some fan or writer, years from now, would say, “And it never would have happened at all if Henry hadn’t failed out of school.”

      * * *

      When I told Dad that I was moving he took off his glasses and covered his eyes. You would have thought I’d told him Olive had died. But then he said, “You know what, that’s great news. You’re going to love New York. That’s all I want, for my boys to be happy and together and for you to go give something an honest try. The kids’ll miss you, but you’re no music teacher, I know that. It’s like making Larry Bird teach PE.”

      Mom hated the idea of me in New York, and for a few days she just sulked whenever it came up. Finally, after Dad had been bugging her at dinner one night, she said, “If this was part of a plan for school then OK. But the fact that he flunks out and we reward him—”

      “I’m not rewarding him,” Dad said. “He’s deciding to move, and we’re not imprisoning him. Is that a reward?”

      “Stop,” she said. “You’re being a shit and you know it.” She turned to me, still carrying her anger at Dad. “We’re not going to pay for you to have a year-round summer. That’s not the deal.”

      “It is summer, for Christ’s sake,” Dad said, mostly to himself, and stood up from the table making more noise with his chair than he had to.

      “Go to hell. Henry, promise me you’re not blowing off school.” So I promised, and I did the dishes while Mom looked mad at the TV and Dad and Walter finished their chess game from the night before. Olive stood wagging nervously next to me, sensing some change or just wondering if I’d hand her scraps.

      The next morning I took my coin box to the bank and, while everyone behind me glanced at the clock and gave each other looks, I cashed it in for $143.56. With that I went shopping at the Banana Republic on Wisconsin—the air in the store is so fresh and leather-smelling that just walking in makes you feel more handsome. A pretty black saleswoman with a gap in her teeth came up to me at the mirror and said, “You look good. I think that shirt is you.” So I got two of them, and I walked out feeling something I hadn’t felt since I was about nine. It used to be that when I’d buy sneakers (at the Foot Locker in Mazza Gallerie, just