ONE AFTERNOON, when I got home from school, I found a stack of cartons just inside the front door. Each of them was addressed to me. I rarely got mail of any kind—I was still a child, after all—and packages were rarer still, so the arrival of these packages would have been an unexpected treat if I hadn’t been expecting it, which I had been ever since the night when, sitting at the top of the stairs out of my parents’ sight, listening to the television show they were watching, I had heard them discussing the idea of buying me the encyclopedia I’d been lobbying for and, to my astonishment, deciding in favor of it.
“I know it would help him,” said my mother. “He can find everything he needs to know there. I read that—”
“It’s okay,” said my father. “You don’t have to try to convince me anymore. I’ve been convinced.”
“You’re sure?”
“I’m sure. I was sure a while ago.”
“You were?”
“Yup.”
“Why didn’t you say so?”
“Well, at the time I didn’t know I was convinced.”
“Are you teasing me?”
“No.”
“When did you know?”
“Ella, the show’s back on.”
“Just tell me when you knew. Was it when I said that the Munsons were getting one for Lorraine?”
“Um, no, I think it was after that.”
“You’re sure? You got kind of a funny look then.”
“It might have been something on the TV.”
Carefully, I crept back into my room and got into bed. I never did learn what argument had convinced my father. My past is full of holes like that. In fact, it would be more accurate to say that most of it is nothing, Zwischenraum, vast vacancies that separate tiny particles of knowledge.
My eavesdropping had robbed me of the pleasure of surprise, but compensated me with the pleasure of anticipation. If I hadn’t known in advance that these packages were coming, I wouldn’t have experienced the anticipation, sweet pain that we love and hate. Of course, I had to fake surprise to give my mother her part of the pleasure to be gotten from the encyclopedia, and I did.
“What are these?” I asked. “Are these for me?”
“They’re addressed to you,” said my mother.
“What are they?”
“Guess,” she said, hugging herself.
I hefted them, shook them, held them to my ear, sniffed them, and guessed—candy, handkerchiefs, records—while my mother giggled and shook her head, until at last she couldn’t stand it any longer and said, “Go ahead, open one.”
“If I open one, will I know what’s in the others?” I asked.
She thought about this for a moment, and from the look on her face—the little smile, the light in her eyes—I knew that I’d asked just the right question. (That’s the one that surprises us, makes us think about a thing in a way we hadn’t even thought of thinking of it before, the one that makes the thing a little more intriguing.) “Well,” she said, “you will and you won’t.”
“I will and I won’t.” I faked a frown.
“That’s right,” she said. “In a way, you’ll know what’s in all the other boxes once you open any one of them. But in another way, you’ll probably never know everything that’s in them. You’ll probably never even know all of what’s in any one of them.”
I put on a look of puzzlement. “What does that mean?” I said.
“Open one and find out,” she said.
[to be continued]
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🎧 625: One afternoon . . .