The Girl through the Glass

When I was eleven, I spent the summer indoors. Normally, I would have passed the days by riding my bicycle in a lonely loop around the neighborhood, listening to other kids splash about in backyard pools while secretly hating my one friend for spending the season at camp. Then I would have gone home and waited for my parents to close their diner and return for the evening, secretly hating them for not giving me a sibling. It was unproductive. So that year—and if I’m being honest, it was the same year I discovered masturbation—i decided to insulate myself from disappointment by remaining inside. I had video games, the primitive, blowing-things-up-in-outer-space type. I had action figures that I was beginning to feel too old to play with. There were comic books (my one allowed trip outside each day was to get the mail, and what a thrill to discover a comic wrapped in brown paper among the bills). And my penis, of course, which I bothered until it swelled up like a cobra. But generally I occupied myself by taking things apart and putting them back together. It started with a broken cassette recorder that had been on the top shelf of the coat closet for years. Before it stopped working, I had used it to tape songs off the radio. Taking it apart was a no-risk job—i just unscrewed anything I could, using my father’s Phillips-head. A mess of plastic, wires, and solder spread over the carpet as I worked cross-legged on the floor. Reassembly was a challenge; I had to force the insides back into the recorder, breaking off a piece of green circuit board in the process. There were screws left over. From then on, I carefully diagrammed my dissections, in pencil on graph paper, and putting things back together became much easier. When, in July, I ran out of broken or unwanted things to take apart, I decided to test my skills on the countertop radio in the kitchen. I worked deliberately, finishing just before my parents came home that night. It was playing when they walked in, both of them tired and smelling like greasy aprons. My father, who cooked at the diner, went straight to the refrigerator for a can of Miller before his shower. My mother, as she always did, put off washing until after dinner, which she now began to prepare. “Isn’t that a little loud?” she said, meaning the radio. She closed a cupboard lined with boxes of pasta and lowered the volume. The dial