I know, isn’t it a shame we look nothing alike? Okay, let’s see if he’s home.
Ring, ring, ring, ring.
I told you. He’s probably not—
DAD: Hello?
ME: Oh, hi! I didn’t think you’d be home.
DAD: It’s raining here.
ME: Well, then, that explains it. Hey, remind me—why did we live on a houseboat that time?
DAD: Who is this?
ME: You have other children you lived on a houseboat with?
DAD: No, I have other children who call me more.
ME: Dad, please. I call you all the time. So this is for the book, and—
DAD: Is this going to be another befuddled father character, like in your last book?
ME: Dad, I wouldn’t call that character befuddled in general. He’s just a little befuddled by technology.
DAD: Wait—what did you say? I couldn’t hear you. I just hit one of these dumb phone buttons wrong.
ME: Um, yeah. I was just saying that the father character in my first novel—the New York Times bestseller Someday, Someday, Maybe, published by Ballantine Books, an imprint of Random House, and now available in paperback—is not exactly befuddled, and anyway, he’s only a little bit you.
DAD: Why are you talking like that?
ME: Like what? I was just thinking about how Christmas is right around the corner, but no matter how you choose to celebrate the holidays, books in general make great gifts!
DAD: Like that. Like you’re selling things to an audience. Are you on Ellen right now?
ME: Dad, I wouldn’t be calling you from the set of Ellen.
DAD: Oh, oh, I’m fancy, I live in Hollywood, where people aren’t allowed to call their fathers from the set of the Ellen show.
ME: Dad, please. Why did we live on the houseboat again?
DAD: Well, I was working for that congressman, and the hours were long, and I’d drop you off in the morning and not see you until after 6:00 p.m., and I felt bad about that. I wasn’t sure I was on the right career path anyway. Also, I was sort of seeing this girl—you remember the one who owned the horse? Well, she lived there off and on, and I thought I’d go there too, and write, and…
I’m going to interrupt my father here (well, actually, he’s still talking, so shhh—don’t tell him). But I have to explain to you that, as a kid, I thought my father never dated anyone at all until he met and married my stepmother. It wasn’t until years later that I figured out the young ladies who sometimes came around may have been a wee bit more than the “cat sitter,” that “nice woman I play tennis with,” and the “girl who owned the horse.” And I don’t blame them. I mean, who wouldn’t want to “cat-sit” for this guy?
By the way, can we talk about the unnecessary thickness of children’s belts of the 1970s? I mean look at the— Oops, my dad’s still on the phone!
DAD: …and anyway, she knew these people at the marina in St. Thomas.
ME: So did we, like, sail around the island and stuff?
DAD: Oh, no. The engine didn’t work on the boat.
ME: The engine didn’t…? We lived on a giant floating bathtub that went nowhere?
DAD: It was a strange place, I’ll admit, that marina—but friendly. Very bohemian. Everybody there was sort of dropping out from society, which we were too, in a way—for weeks after we’d left D.C., I’m pretty sure my mother still thought I worked on Capitol Hill. But I got to spend more time with you, which was the goal. It was beautiful there. We drove around a lot and went to the beach. It probably seems strange to you now, but it was a 1970s thing to do, I guess. And we had fun.
(A pause as we both reminisce.)
ME: You did a lot for me, Dad. I love you.
DAD: I love you too, kid.
(Another pause.)
DAD: Who is this again?
When I was about five years old, we moved to Southampton, New York, presumably to live in a house you couldn’t dive off of, and I started kindergarten. One day, during my first few weeks of school, the teacher left the room (leaving youngsters alone with open jars of paste was also very 1970s), and when she came back, she found me reading a book to the class. At first she thought maybe I’d memorized it from having it read to me at home, but after I wowed them with a cold read of another one—take that, Green Eggs and Ham!—they had to admit I could actually read. My father had read to me every night for as long as I could remember, and at some point, I guess, I just sort of got it. But this confused the teacher and the school, because I’d unintentionally undermined their entire plan for the year. If I wasn’t in kindergarten to be taught to read, could they really justify sharing and finger painting as a comprehensive year-long curriculum? If not, what were they supposed to do with me?
I was sent to the office of a groovy guy named Mike. I don’t know what Mike’s actual job at the school was, but I remember sitting in his office drawing pictures of my feelings or whatever (the seventies!), while he leaned back in his chair with his feet up on the desk, which is how I knew he was groovy in the first place. This went on for days. Mike kept asking me if I was bored in kindergarten. Not really, Mike—have you seen the awesome books they have in there? And that’s about all I remember. But by the end of the week, I had apparently convinced Mike that making chains out of construction paper for an entire year would be beneath me intellectually, and he sent me on to first grade.
During my first day in the new class, the teacher held a mock election and asked each student to come up and mark on the blackboard whom they’d vote for in the upcoming presidential election: McGovern or Nixon (the seventies!). McGovern won by a landslide (not in real life but, weirdly, in this class), and I was one of very few kids who voted for Nixon. This gave me an uneasy feeling. Even though I had no idea who either of the candidates was, or even what the word “candidate” meant, I knew that in not being part of the majority, I’d somehow made the wrong choice. Also, how could the entire room not vote for a guy named Nixon, because seriously, how cool was it to have the letter x in your name? That this distinguishing feature didn’t similarly blow everyone else’s mind the way it did mine was my first indication that I was in over my head.
Initially, skipping a grade seemed like an accomplishment of some sort, but what I remember most was how totally baffled and uncomfortable I felt, especially for the first few weeks. I’d never really had trouble fitting in before, and now, instead of feeling special or gifted, I just felt awkward and out of place. Suddenly this thing that had made me stand out and had impressed some people now made me feel like an oddball.
But skipping a grade also gave me the sense, throughout my entire childhood, that I’d been given an “extra” year. It floated around in my head like a lucky coin, something I wanted to hold on to as long as I could, until the day I really needed to use it. I don’t know why exactly, but somehow I got the idea that life was just a massive competition to get to some sort of finish line, like one long extended season of The Amazing Race. In skipping a grade, I’d been given the ultimate Fast Forward. This would ensure I’d be able to skip over whatever the life equivalent is of the shemozzle race in New Zealand, beating out even the most awesome teams like the Twinnies or the Afghanimals, then arrive first and be met by an adorable gnome, an oversized cardboard check for a million dollars from Phil, and a trip from Travelocity.