Father Knows Less Or: Can I Cook My Sister? Read online

  4.

  Boys and Wheels

  The windows of our apartment look out on New York Harbor and downtown Manhattan. It’s not a skyscraper-eye view but a rooftop view: we are below the tops of the big cranes at the container port, at about the height of the wheelhouses of the freighters that bring sacks of cocoa beans from the Ivory Coast. At night the harbor is dark except for the lights on the piers, and on the ships, and off in New Jersey; early in the morning it is a black-and-white photograph in a hundred variations of gray.

  Above and below is the weather, the clouds on a windy day rushing above green water rough with whitecaps. You can see storms coming from the west, black smudges that grow until they take over the sky. You can feel the first winds of a cold front rattling the windows. One evening we saw a rainbow over New Jersey, the arc landing in the middle of the Bayonne Bridge.

  I got used to the early view when Dean was an infant, never sleeping, always screaming, his mother in the bedroom with a pillow over her head. I held him in my arms as the sun came up. If it weren’t for him, I never would have seen the harbor just as the sky becomes perceptible. Or an hour later, when the orange of the sun hits the Staten Island ferries, the first big ships coming in to unload and, as it did one December Sunday, the Queen Elizabeth 2 arriving from England.

  By the time we started counting Dean’s age in months and not weeks, he began to focus on the foreground, on the streets below us. When the empty early-morning buses wheezed by, his eyes lit up. Same with the fire trucks returning to the nearby station house, or the private garbage haulers—their engines roaring, their brakes screeching, their long hoods lit up with strings of yellow lights as they emptied Dumpsters as noisily as possible.

  He couldn’t have been more than one when he started picking out PT Cruisers and Mini Coopers and then our Honda Accord from the other cars on the street, sometimes from more than a block away. He was soon able to tell our Honda apart from another Honda Accord of the exact same year and color that also lived on our block—no small feat, especially to his mother, who was less adept at distinguishing between them, once even angrily trying to force her key into the wrong one. She thought our son was some kind of automotive savant.

  But I was coming to understand: little boys just have an eye for things that move.

  What sparks a child’s first interests, creates questions before he or she can ask them? I had my phases when I was little, too, and they were also machines—cranes and, later, ships and airplanes. I had other obsessions, I know, childhood passions that faded away for no reason beyond the fact that I got older, but they’ve been lost to the fog of the last thirty-eight years.

  Everyone in the family got excited when Dean chose trucks and cars as his first interest. This made gift-giving especially easy. His first birthday, his second Christmas and his second birthday were automotive extravaganzas: trucks, buses, cars made of metal, plastic and rubber filled his room. Someone even bought videos: scenes of groaning dump trucks hauling mountains of dirt, and cranes lifting girders, and hard-hatted workmen shifting gears, everyone bathed in clouds of dust, all set to a folk-guitar soundtrack. He was riveted.

  Dean and my dad watched car races together. On Thursdays, the day Brenda took over for ten hours, a trip to a big four-lane avenue near us was always required. There he’d sit in his stroller, no matter the weather, his fingers pointing, watching the eighteen-wheelers go by. His favorite gift on his second birthday, given by my father, was Mack: Driven for a Century (Publications International, Ltd., 1999). We read it every night, the grand finale always the same and always satisfying: the 460-horsepower, twelve-liter E-tech engine-powered Vision eighteen-wheel tractor trailer.

  Dean learned to imitate the beep-beep-beep of a reversing garbage truck in perfect pitch, perfectly timed. Vehicles made up his first words: truck was “uck” and bus was “bah.” Though he was too young to ask questions, I could tell what he was wondering: Why are they so long? Why do they have so many wheels? Why do they go beep-beep-beep? Even “bah” was phrased like a question, his finger pointing, his eyes on me: “Hey, do you see what I see?”

  Helene and I worried that we were giving in to sexist stereotypes by so enthusiastically encouraging Dean’s love of trucks and buses. I became defensive: he had the whole harbor, the whole city to choose from—the towering clouds above, the massive ocean liners below, the airplanes, long celestial strings of them, lining up to land at Newark Airport. But he chose dump trucks. What could I do?

  Boys just love things that move.

  Helene thought we should give him other options. We bought him a toy kitchen of red, blue and yellow plastic, with a play oven, microwave and burners. This did distract him, for a while. He’d mess with the pans, slam the oven doors, mix imaginary recipes. It was an interest I encouraged: I can think of nothing better in my old age than having a son who runs the kitchen of one of the hottest restaurants in the city, a place of estimable charm with a kitchen of considerable merit. We’d always be guaranteed a table.

  But the kitchen wasn’t enough.

  Helene bought Dean a girl doll.

  She had blond hair and a blue-checked dress. I winced a little when Helene showed it to me, but figured I’d let nature take its course. I’m secure enough to have a son who plays with dolls, I really am. I stuck to my line even when a police officer friend of ours mocked me for allowing this to happen. I assured him I had my limits: had Helene come home with a glittering gown and a golden tiara for my son, or a pink tutu and slippers, or a fitted black dress with lace on the sleeves and along the hem, and a set of castanets, then I definitely would have put my foot down.

  But the cars ran over the doll as Santa ran over the tooth fairy in my childhood. She was ignored, even neglected. It was the kind of thing that the city’s Child Welfare Department might have called “parental abandonment” or “severe neglect.” Little blond blue-checked-dress girl was not fed, or cuddled, or bathed, or taken to the imaginary doctor to cure any imaginary sickness or have an imaginary checkup, or cared for in any way.

  Eventually, we found her in the microwave.

  Dean’s car and truck obsession obsessed me, so I decided to get to the bottom of it. Surely, I figured, someone had a theory. Searching back twenty-five years, I found just the right person.

  In my first semester in high school I sat next to a girl in geometry class named Gia Rosenblum, who managed to be very cute despite wearing giant glasses and having a mouthful of braces and a spectacular amount of hair tumbling from her head, as was the style at the time. She was also smart and funny, so much so that for the first and last time in my life I looked forward to math class.

  We whispered to each other outside the teacher’s gaze, and cemented a friendship that lasted through high school and college. After that, our encounters became less frequent, but I still looked forward to them: Gia laughed more easily at my jokes than almost anyone I’ve known before or since. That’s something you don’t forget.

  I went into newspapers and she kept studying, first for a master’s, then for a Ph.D. She moved to New Jersey and got married. A psychologist, she focused on issues of child development. I figured Gia was the best person I knew who could explain Dean and his love of trucks. I called her and told her my mission. We agreed to meet and I hopped the train, New Jersey Transit’s 6:11 local on the Northeast Corridor line from Penn Station.

  After joining hundreds of commuters in a mad scramble through the concourse when the departure gate was announced, I watched from my window seat as we traveled beneath the Hudson, through the grassy, stream-divided Meadowlands and the deserted and crumbling brick factories outside Newark, their loading docks long unused, and then through the little downtown of Elizabeth, its main avenue crowded with people going home from work. The industrial landscape gave way to more suburban vistas as we neared my stop, Metuchen.

  Gia picked me up at the station: she looked remarkably as she had twenty years earlier; if anything, she looked better—a phenomeno
n I’ve noticed in many women who were forced to endure early 1980s fashions when they were teenagers. We caught up on this and that—her daughter Genevieve is a little younger than Dean—as she drove us on the final leg of my journey, to a Latin-fusion restaurant in downtown New Brunswick called Nova Terra.

  I can think of few more enjoyable ways of doing research than drinking a caipirinha and sitting at a table with an old friend who likes to laugh at my jokes. Also, it was rodizio night, so we were free to eat all the meat we could for one price.

  I started explaining about Dean. I felt the need to establish that Helene and I had never forced car-themed toys on him; in fact, we’d bought him a kitchen and a doll. It was a pretty defensive opening. She listened closely, laughing and smiling here and there. Then she warned me: whenever anyone in her profession talks about gender differences, a backlash is almost guaranteed. Could I handle a backlash? I said I could.

  “At birth, like thirty-six hours after they are born, there is a difference in what boys and girls will pay attention to,” she said. “Boys are more likely to pay attention to a sort of mechanical object, and girls will pay more attention to a human face. By age seven, kids will categorize things by gender like an adult would—what’s a boy’s profession, what’s a girl’s profession, what’s a girl’s toy, what’s a boy’s toy, what’s a girl’s trait, what’s a boy’s trait…”

  I asked: “Is that because we’re projecting that on them?” I thought of the cars and trucks Dean had received as gifts, the videos, and Mack: Driven for a Century.

  Gia nodded. “If at thirty-six hours old babies are already expressing different preferences about what they are going to pay attention to, then you layer on top of that the fact that society bombards them with stereotypical messages about what’s right for boys and what’s right for girls, it becomes impossible to separate those two things.”

  She told me how she once went through all the hand-me-down clothing friends had given her when Genevieve was born, and how those that came from friends with little girls were covered with objects—flowers, butterflies, princesses, fairies—while the clothes from little boys were covered with occupations, like astronauts and firemen. She paused briefly while a waiter came over with a huge cut of lamb on a spit and carved off a few slices for us.

  I took advantage of the pause to get us back on track—I wanted to know about boys and trucks.

  “Well, there are definitely differences in what male brains and female brains seem to be designed to pay attention to.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “One theorist describes the differences between male brains and female brains this way: that for some reason, male brains have a drive to understand systems—mechanical systems, organizational systems, structural systems. Those are the things that mechanical objects like cars and planes and Tinkertoys and Erector sets all provide, the opportunity to figure out how the system works.”

  I thought of the kitchen with its microwave and oven (systems) and of the girl doll (no systems). Trucks and cars and buses, on the other hand, had all those spinning wheels— especially the 460-horsepower, twelve-liter E-tech engine-powered Vision—and made an incredible racket as they banged over potholes and spewed exhaust everywhere. Their systems were on dramatic display.

  Gia moved on to the second part of her explanation. “Girls’ brains seem to have the drive to understand the way interpersonal interactions work, and to understand the way that emotions work and understand the way that people relate to each other.”

  “Okay, okay,” I said. “We think that this is so. But do we know why it is so?”

  She took a sip of her mojito.

  “The evolutionary theorists would say there had to be some survival value for males to have one particular strategy and females to have another one, because that’s what they got selected for.”

  I picked up this thought: “So the boy who could tell his Honda apart from another Honda of the same make and year and color—”

  “Got to mate with the girl!” Gia said, finishing my sentence.

  When we first looked at our apartment before Dean was born, I got excited about the view because of the ships moving across the blue water through the open window frames. The real estate agent yammered on as I gazed out the window at longshoremen heaving ropes off bollards and tossing them into the water. I convinced Helene we should buy the apartment with the view and not a bigger apartment on a lower floor, something I came to regret a little bit when I realized how much noise a tiny screaming baby could make, and when my mother-in-law, having returned, became a semipermanent part of the household.

  Ships were a bigger deal when I was a kid, when ocean liners still docked in Manhattan and still merited complete chapters in children’s books devoted to machines that moved. Their size, not their speed, made them inspiring. In my grade school, we sang a song about the Titanic going down. I visited relatives on sailing days: my great-aunt Jane on the Cristoforo Colombo bound for Genoa; my grandmother Nonna, sailing to Romania on a freighter for a vacation.

  After two years of trucks I decided it was time for Dean’s first obsession to make way for something else. Through it all, the ships had sailed back and forth outside our windows. Now it was time to pay attention.

  We watched as a big green-hulled freighter from Saudi Arabia navigated the shipping channel on one of those windy green-water days, a gang of tugs helping it pirouette. We watched tankers come and go. We watched the little yellow water taxis fight the current.

  Then, four years later, a ship was front-page news: the Queen Mary 2 arrived in New York City on her maiden voyage.

  I had followed the news of the liner’s construction for years. Then I told Dean this huge new ship was coming the next morning, and we agreed we’d get up early to watch. At 5:00 a.m., the harbor in that early orange phase, I went to get him and he popped right up. We put coats over our pajamas and headed to the roof, where we joined other fathers and sons. The morning was moist and cool, but the warmth of the sun suggested it was going to be a hot day.

  It was hazy to the south, but then the liner’s shape came into view, materializing all at once. It was an apartment block on the water, so tall with decks that it made the Queen Elizabeth 2 look like a low-slung racing yacht. Ahead of it, a fireboat sprayed a towering plume of water, the traditional New York City greeting for a ship’s maiden visit.

  Now Dean looked beyond the garbage trucks and fire engines and early-morning buses, over the blue water and beneath the dissolving clouds. He borrowed my binoculars. As the liner passed behind Governors Island, it blocked the Statue of Liberty before disappearing behind downtown Manhattan.

  “Whoa, that was big,” Dean said. “It blocked the Statue of Liberty.”

  He was sold. In our apartment the Queen Mary 2 became a measurement of size, of displacement and height, against which all other giant objects were soon measured. Is it bigger than the Empire State Building? What if you stand it straight up?

  Two years later, the Queen Mary 2’s berth was moved to Brooklyn, right outside the windows on the left side of our living room. It is not the most elegant ship, squarish and stacked high as it is with balconies, yet there is something powerful and even graceful in its sheer black hull and towering red funnel.

  It’s out there some mornings, filling the frame, the sun bright on all that white paint. It always sails around sunset. Dean and I watch from the roof or from a nearby pier that juts into the shipping channel leading to the Atlantic. I’ve promised Dean we’ll take a trip on her someday.

  “How old is the ship?” he asked me as we walked back to our Honda from the pier following one departure.

  “Two years. Don’t you remember: we went on the roof the first time she was here?”

  “Why do you call the Queen Mary a she?”

  “You know, I don’t know.”

  “How many times has she crossed the ocean since they built her?”

  “Hmmm. I’m not sure. Maybe thirty times a year.”
r />   “How old will the ship be when we go on it?”

  “I don’t know—maybe four years old.”

  “How many times will she have crossed the ocean by then?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I guess there’s a lot of things you don’t know, huh?”’

  “Yeah, I guess so.”

  “Why do ships have round windows?”

  —DEAN, looking at New York Harbor

  Richard Burke, Ph.D., professor and chairman of engineering, Maritime College of the State University of New York, Fort Schuyler, the Bronx:

  “It’s because round windows don’t have corners, and corners are places where the steel frames of the windows could crack, and we are very worried about cracks in the steel structure of ships. A ship is like a building that is going through a constant earthquake because a ship moves around in the waves. And consequently the structure is always being stressed and strained, and therefore the corners of windows could be sources of cracks.”

  “Why do people race cars?”

  —ALEXANDER GIVOTOVSKY, age six,

  Litchfield, Connecticut

  Sam Posey, retired race car driver, a fixture at major racing events throughout the 1960s and 1970s who placed in competitions as varied as 24 Hours of Le Mans and the Indianapolis 500:

  “It is the joy of control. It is power without effort; it appeals to the lazy, the intuitively lazy—you get so much out of doing so little in a car. And then there is the prospect of this immense machine which can do so much, and you just sit there doing so little but it is the right stuff, and it adds up to this tremendous extension of what you do yourself, and it is such a high. You can see a glimmer in the street when you take a car through a turn and it feels good, that control over the arc and the resulting G-forces that comes from the vector of trying to turn—the car wants to go straight and you are sort of managing that slipping force. It is a sensual thing; it is a sensual act. I think it comes down to those points of power and control, of the lateral motion of the car.”