A Model World and Other Stories by Michael Chabon
Author:Michael Chabon [Chabon, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Short Stories (Single Author), Fiction
ISBN: 9780060790608
Google: GZmk2KzpaSwC
Amazon: 0060790601
Barnesnoble: 0060790601
Goodreads: 13273362
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 1991-01-01T05:00:00+00:00
Part II
The Lost World
The Little Knife
ONE SATURDAY IN THAT last, interminable summer before his parents separated and the Washington Senators baseball team was expunged forever from the face of the earth, the Shapiros went to Nags Head, North Carolina, where Nathan, without planning to, perpetrated a great hoax. They drove down I-95, through the Commonwealth of Virginia, to a place called the Sandpiperâa ragged, charming oval of motel cottages painted white and green as the Atlantic, and managed by a kind, astonishingly fat old man named Colonel Larue, who smoked cherry cigars and would, if asked, play catch or keep-away. Outside his office, in the weedy gravel, stood an old red-and-radium-white Coke machine, which dispensed bottles from a vertical glass door that sighed when you opened it, and which reminded Nathan of the Automat his grandmother had taken him to once in New York City. The sight of the faded machine and of the whole Sandpiperâlike that of the Automatâfilled Nathan with a happy sadness, or, really, a sad happiness; he was not too young, at ten, to have developed a sense of nostalgia.
There were children in every cottageâwith all manner of floats, pails, paddles, trucks, and flying objectsâand his younger brother Ricky, to Nathanâs envy, immediately fell in with a gang of piratical little boys with water pistols, who were always reproducing fart sounds and giggling chaotically when their mothers employed certain ordinary words such as âhot dogâ and ârubber.â The Shapiros went to the ocean every summer, and at the beginning of this trip, as on all those that had preceded it, Nathan and his brother got along better than they usually did, their mother broke out almost immediately in a feathery red heat rash, and their father lay pale and motionless in the sun, like a monument, and always forgot to take off his wristwatch when he went into the sea. Nathan had brought a stack of James Bond books and his colored pencils; there were board gamesâhe and his father were in the middle of their Strat-O-Matic baseball playoffsâand miniature boxes of cereal; the family ate out every single night. But when they were halfway through the slow, dazzling weekâwhich was as far as they were to getâNathan began to experience an unfamiliar longing: He wanted to go home.
He awoke very early on Wednesday morning, went into the cottageâs small kitchen, where the floor was sticky and the table rocked and trembled, and chose the last of the desirable cereals from the Variety pack, leaving for Ricky only those papery, sour brands with the scientific namesâthe sort that their grandparents liked. As he began to eat, Nathan heard, from the big bedroom down the hall, the unmistakable, increasingly familiar sound of his father burying his mother under a heap of scorn and ridicule. It was, oddly, a soft and pleading sound. Lately, the conversation and actions of Dr. Shapiroâs family seemed to disappoint him terribly. His left hand was always flying up to smack his sad
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