The Whore's Child

this was hardly cause for regret.
    At age ten, Lin himself had not given much thought to these characteristics of his family tree, though he would have conceded he was prone to philosophical rumination. His leisurely reveries, if he thought about them at all, seemed perfectly natural. “Hasn’t it occurred to you,” his mother remarked, her brow knitted in concern after he’d given voice to one of his odd queries, “that somebody would’ve thought of it already if it were true? Millions of people have lived before you. What makes you think
you’d
be the first to think of something? That’s what I’d like to know. What do you think you are? Special?”
    Lin understood that this was a rhetorical question whose answer was supposed to be “No,” even though, most of the time, he thought it might be “Yes.” It was hard to imagine that all of his personal thoughts had already
been
thought. When he lay on his stomach in the grass and watched an ant climb up one side of a blade and then down the other, his truest sense of things was that in the world’s long history, no one had ever witnessed this
exact
event, and he couldn’t help feeling special to have done so. Why shouldn’t his thoughts be special, too? What if he was right to think them, even if no one else had?
    For instance, why
shouldn’t
inanimate objects be capable of desire? Take leaves. They wanted to dance, didn’t they? He understood that it was caused by wind, of course, but this didn’t explain why they didn’t all get up and dance with each new gust, instead of just certain ones. Leaf A would rise and do its jig while Leaf B, right next to it, wouldn’t even stir. The ones dancing in this gust might rest during the next, and to Lin, this meant they were expressing a desire. And Wiffle balls. Their frantic wiggle after leaping off a plastic bat suggested a similar desire, though his father, who at the moment wasn’t living with Lin and his mother, explained that the symmetrical holes cut into the plastic sphere were responsible for the ball’s erratic and exciting flight. Okay, but to Lin’s way of thinking, the holes merely set free the inner spirit of the ball.
    Baseballs might not want things as badly as Wiffle balls did, Lin allowed, though they were certainly capable of expressing desire. When a ball struck his stiff new mitt, he could feel it searching desperately for an exit. When it hit in the webbing, the ball immediately tried to burrow out the heel, and when it hit in the heel, it seemed to know that it had to climb out through the webbing. Covering one exit with his bare hand merely ensured that the ball would spin and lurch toward freedom in the other. Even if they weren’t as exuberant as Wiffle balls, it was clear that baseballs, left to themselves, preferred not to be caught.
    At times, the secret desires of inanimate objects were clearer than people’s yearnings, adults’ in particular. Before his father moved out, Lin would wake up in the night and hear him asking his mother, “What do you
want
from me, Evelyn? Could you tell me that? Just what the
hell
do you want?” Lin listened hard, but he was pretty sure his mother never answered this question. Sometimes he’d come upon her unawares and she’d be staring off at nothing and shaking her head and muttering to herself, “I don’t know. I just don’t know.” Lately, she’d taken to listening to a popular record by Jo Stafford, who sang about how the wayward wind was a restless wind that yearned to wander. If you didn’t put the skeletal arm of the Victrola directly over the spindle, the record would just keep playing, over and over, which seemed to suit her fine. According to what she said, his father couldn’t answer that question either. Sure, he could be charming, she admitted, and fun to be around, but when it came to knowing what he wanted out of life, he didn’t have Clue One. Were all grown-ups like this?
    MR. CHRISTIE
    Of all the adults Lin knew, though, his American Legion coach was the most perplexing. During the week Mr. Christie painted houses for a living and always wore paint-splattered overalls and a Boston Red Sox baseball cap. On Sundays, hatless and bald except for the pale fringe around his ears, he looked so different that for a long time Lin hadn’t realized that the two men were one and the same. Dressed in