MY FIRST IMPRESSIONS of Marvin’s family were of bustle and plumpness. There was a lot going on at Marvin’s house. He had two younger siblings, a sister and a brother, and they provided running, hopping, tussling, crawling, squealing, and giggling enough for many more children than two. Marvin’s mother was rushing around in the kitchen, making the clatter that arose from making dinner, humming and singing while she worked, calling out to the children in what seemed to be a foreign language, laughing at nearly everything Marvin said.
“Mom,” he said, “this is Peter.” She laughed. “I know him from school,” said Marvin, and she laughed again. “He’s in my group in science.”
“Peter,” she said to me. “Peter what?” She laughed again.
“Peter Leroy,” I said, and I laughed. She made it seem the thing to do.
“Leroy,” she said. “Le roi.”
I heard it as ler-wah. I didn’t know what she meant by it, so I laughed again.
“The king,” she said.
“Heh-heh-heh,” said I.
“Are you French?” she asked.
“Um, no,” I said. “American.”
She laughed again, and I didn’t have any idea why, but it seemed polite to join her, so I did.
“He’s a funny guy, this King Peter,” she said to Marvin. She would call me that, off and on, for all the years she knew me.
Later I learned that Marvin’s mother was from New Orleans. His father had been a railway mail clerk when he was a young man, traveling in mail cars from North to South and back again, sorting the mail as he rolled along. He had carried a letter of introduction to her family for months but shyness had kept him from using it until, driven by loneliness during a layover, he had at last come to call and fall in love. They—but all that is another story, and I knew none of it at the time.
My impression of bustle was amplified by the fact that I was working so hard at taking it all in, my eyes darting here and there, my senses working overtime. So much was new to me. On my later visits to Marvin’s I noticed none of this bustle. All seemed calm. We tend to see disorder in the unfamiliar—and to discover in it an underlying order only as the unfamiliar becomes familiar.
The plumpness I sensed wasn’t a quality of the Joneses themselves, but of their furniture. It was the same plumpness I felt in my grandparents’ houses, in their bulbous sofas and ottomans and comfy chairs. It was comfort without opulence; in fact, a certain permissive shabbiness was essential to it, a shabbiness that allowed you to feel at ease, told you not to worry about breaking things or making a mess. I associate this plump comfort with certain foods too, the ones that are thick or soft or round, like dumplings and stew and biscuits and pudding. Mrs. Jones might have been making some comfortable food like that, but I couldn’t have said. Nothing she was making was familiar to me.
I had brought the plans for the lighthouse with me, to make a good impression, to show off. I was going to show them off on the living room floor, but when I began spreading them out Marvin suggested we take them upstairs to his room. The aromas of Mrs. Jones’s cooking followed us up there.
[to be continued]
In Topical Guide 603, Mark Dorset considers Real Reality and Fictional Reality from this episode.
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