“I passed this place on the way to a conference once,” she said,
“and then this morning it just popped back into my head. I got up
and I said, ‘Jared, we’re going to see that fascinating bubble on the
hill today. And we’re going to learn something from it.’ ”
I looked at Jared again. His magnified green eyes were like
beacons.
“Here’s admission for both of us,” she said, and handed me a
twenty. “Are you the tour guide, Sebastian?”
“Oh, no,” I said, “my Nana will be happy to . . .”
I stopped at that point and realized that she wasn’t there. Usually,
Nana was outside in her special tour pantsuit at the slightest
sound of a muffl er. I gave Janice her change. “She’ll be out in sixty
seconds,” I said. “Give or take.”
She looked toward the dome then, studying it anew. I wanted to
ask her more about Jared. But I sensed that he had turned down the
volume on his music and was listening and observing now. His eyes
were locked on the photograph of the dome, sitting in the display
window. He seemed to consider it deeply. I watched his eyes scan
every room, moving up from the living room.
Janice took a deep breath and shivered a little. “Probably the last
of the real fall days,” she said.
“Is that a fucking sock in there?” asked Jared.
His voice was grating, high-pitched. Janice and I both turned to
look at him.
“What did you just say?” she asked.
“I see a sock in that picture,” Jared said. “That’s all I’m saying.”
“Jared!” said his mother. “What’s the matter with you? Don’t
you have any sense of . . .”
But Janice was not given time to finish her question. Because, at
that moment, Nana burst out of the house dressed completely in her
pantsuit, waving her arms over her head, as if signaling for a rescue.
“Welcome, visitors!” she said. “Greetings. Greetings.”
Nana’s hair was a bit out of place. But she carried two stickers on
her fingertips. They were black-and-white, with a cartoon of Buckminster
Fuller’s bespectacled head in the center, a wry grin on his
face. Nana fastened one on Janice’s wool lapel. She pressed the other
one on Jared’s T-shirt, directly on his left nipple.
“We’ll start inside right away,” said Nana, immediately shepherding
us over the lawn. “Welcome to the future.”
“I already told them,” I said.
“Oh,” she said, and laughed a little too long.
“Nana,” I said when she was finished, “maybe you should slow
down a little, I . . .”
She interrupted me with a pinch on the side. Then she gave me
a confident grin and tromped ahead of me. We proceeded right
into the dome, past the NordicTrack, into the very center of the
living room. There was something wrong with Nana’s appearance
that I couldn’t put my finger on. As she cleared her throat to begin
her speech, I looked down at her arch-supported dress shoes and
discovered what it was.
They were on the wrong feet.
“In his famous book Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth,”
said Nana, looking up, “R. Buckminster Fuller, the greatest mind of
our age, states that in order for mankind to progress, ‘We must first
discover where we are now; that is, what our present navigational
position in the universal scheme of evolution is.’ ”
She paused a moment and caught me looking down. She glanced
at her feet, and then her eyes met mine. It only took a second, but
her face changed entirely. Her eyes unfocused. Her teeth found her
bottom lip. The Whitcombs were still gazing skyward.
Fearless, gripping, at once darkly funny and tender, spanning three continents and numerous lives, Americanah is a richly told story set in today's globalized world.
The story of an American family, middle class in middle America, ordinary in every way but one. But that exception is the beating heart of this extraordinary novel.
The most mature work yet from an incomparable storyteller, TransAtlantic is a profound meditation on identity and history in a wide world that grows somehow smaller and more wondrous with...
From the first page, I was drawn in by the lyrical writing of the author and mesmerized as the narrator, eight year old Raami, remembered the years...
read more
Trite but true, all good things must come to an end. I so wanted to keep reading the wonderful prose, the settings that let one think they are part...
read more
A magical book, an enchanted house, a cast of characters who previously lived there but remain on the walls in photographs to be talked to whenever...
read more
Kenn Nesbitt is new Children's Poet Laureate(Jun 12 2013) Kenn Nesbitt has been named the new Children's Poet Laureate: Consultant in Children's Poetry to the Poetry Foundation, which noted that the two-year position...
Full Story
