THENEWYORKER,MARCH2, 2020 55
SHITTYLITTLETEVYE,
BIGBROTHER, 1980
I
liked dinner with my parents and
their friends in the dining room.
The chairs were large and hard to
move. Whenever I had to go to the
bathroom, I would crawl my way under
the table to get there.
Some of the adults, as I brushed
against their legs, made surprised
sounds and said jokey things.
“Is there a dog in here? I didn’t know
you had a dog!”
“This house must be haunted. A
ghost touched my leg!”
I knew they knew I knew they were
pretending. We were all in on the joke
together, people.
Once, we people were in the mid-
dle of the joke, and my father said,
“Honey,” to my mom in his hard voice.
He didn’t like that I was under the table.
After using the toilet, I stepped up
on the crate and washed my hands
twice so my father would be proud of
me. Then I remembered he couldn’t
see everything. He wouldn’t know what
I’d done unless I told him. And I knew
that if I told him he’d tell me not to
show off, so I decided I would sing.
Singing beat twice-washed hands by a
mile.
My father’s favorite song was not
“If I Were a Rich Man,” from “Fiddler
on the Roof,” and yet, for some reason,
I thought it was. I knew half the cho-
rus and I thought I had a pretty good
dance that went with it, a chicken-look-
ing dance where you flapped your bent
arms and threw sideways punches while
stepping high or jumping.
Returning from the bathroom, I
danced that dance and sang the half
chorus:
If I were a rich man
Yabba dabba dabba baba
Biddy biddy biddy bum!
All day long I’d biddy biddy bum
If I were a wealthy man!Except for my dad, the adults found
it cute. You could tell by their smiles.
My dad smiled, too, and said, “O.K.,”
a few times, but he didn’t mean it. It
wasn’t O.K.
I knew it was best to quit while
ahead, so, after three more half cho-
ruses, I ceased to sing and dance, stop-
ping on the biddy preceding the bum!,
and dove below the table.
It was there, amid the legs, that I
made my mistake. The adults were clap-
ping, saying, “Adorable” and “So cre-
ative,” and I thought the greatest thing
would be to give them an encore. I
thought it would be both funny and
musical to start singing again from the
bum! I’d abandoned. The part of the
dance that went with the bum! was the
part where you jumped, so I did that,
also. My head struck the table, silver
clanged china, I fell on a woman’s un-
shod foot—our carpet was white—and
the woman shrieked, the shriek became
a giggle, and my father said, “Adam.
Goddammit. Adam.” He was back to
the hard voice. But the woman kept
giggling and my mom was giggling,
too, so I thought I could win.
I came out from under the table,
clutching my head, faking a limp, and
I turned to all the adults with a cry-
face. The women made cooing sounds
and their husbands said things like
“Hey now, buddy,” and “You sang that
one great, pal.”
As soon as I sensed the fakeout los-
ing power, I tucked my fists in my arm-
pits and launched again into “Rich Man.”
My father stood and pointed at
the ceiling. He said that I had to go
to my room. My mother said, “Honey,”
to my father in her hard voice. My fa-
ther told my mother, “He’s acting like
an idiot.” My father told me, “A real
fucking idiot.”A few months later, my parents brought
my sisters home. I didn’t know which
name belonged to which sister. The
one who’d been yellow through the
window in the hospital was no longer
yellow. She was smaller than the other
one, but except for that they looked
the same, and you couldn’t see the
difference in size in their faces.
My dad had set them down at ei-
ther end of the couch, still in their
car seats, and I ran back and forth
from one to the other, kissing each
on the cheek and saying, “I love you,
Rachel,” and “I love you, Paula.” I did
this partly because my mother was
watching and she thought it was cute.
Also, though, I meant it. Their fea-
tures were huge.One sister would be mine, but I
didn’t know which. My mom said it
was up to me. That was our deal.
A few days later, I chose Rachel, the
smaller one. Her eyebrows did a thing
when she cried—a kind of inward and
upward creeping and thickening—that
seemed to signal some kind of inten-
tion, which made her more real, and
I’d rush to hug her. When Paula cried,
she looked like an animal.PUPPET, 1981
A
puppet on a show I liked to watch
in the morning was down at the
mouth and sitting on a boulder. Hes-
itantly, almost as a question, the pup-
pet remarked, “I think, therefore I am.”
It leaped to the ground and repeated
the phrase less tentatively. Then it
smiled and paced and chanted the
phrase with increasing conviction until,
at last, its pacing turned to dancing
and the chant became a song the pup-
pet sang to the tune of “The Farmer
in the Dell.”I think, therefore I am
I think, therefore I am
I think, therefore I am, I think
I think therefore I am.I told my mom that I didn’t under-
stand.
“It’s saying,” she said, “that, because
it knows it thinks, it knows it’s real.
Eat your CoCo Wheats.”
“It’s a puppet, though,” I said. “It
doesn’t think.”
“We’re supposed to forget it’s a pup-
pet while we’re watching the show.
We’re supposed to pretend that the
puppet can think, and that since it
knows it thinks, it knows it’s real.”
“That’s true?” I said.
“Well, not for the puppet, unless
we pretend. But what the puppet’s
saying is true for people. They know
that they think, so they know that
they’re real.”
“I know I’m real because I know I
think?”
“Yes.”
“How do I know I think?” I said.
“Because you can hear yourself
think,” she said.
“That’s it?” I said. “That’s the only
way?”
“Why are you making that face?” she