Then one evening, tired from a long tiring day, instead of turning the TV off after coming upon an episode of Law & Order, I left it on and watched for a while. I didn’t like it, but I managed to watch the entire episode. The next day, I found myself in a similar situation, with nothing to watch but Law & Order and I lingered again, watching another entire episode straight through. And then the next day there was also nothing to watch, and so I watched it a third time, a full hour of Law & Order, followed by another full hour.

I didn’t used to watch much TV because there was never anything on besides Law & Order, but I’ve been staying home a lot lately watching Law & Order because it’s always on. Each episode of Law & Order is formatted the same. I never don’t know what’s going to happen next, which appeals to me. First, there is a cold opening that depicts an unsuspecting victim during the events leading up to his or her attack. We watch the victim struggle with his or her assailant before he or she is raped, robbed, and/or murdered. The body falls to the ground, and the show cuts immediately to a musical montage accompanied by opening credits, during which we see the lead actors posing in action as detectives of New York City’s major case squad. A short commercial break follows, and then we are back watching the detectives of the major case squad as they arrive at the scene of the crime. The detectives are then briefed on the circumstance under which the body was found. “Her neighbor says he found her in the doorway like this,” a cop explains to the two detectives. The detectives talk seriously for a few minutes before they decide what to do. “Let’s go visit his doctor,” one of them says soberly, and then they have that percussion sound that runs throughout the episode, punctuating each scene change. The screen goes black and at the bottom in white writing it says something like, “The Office of Doctor William Schwartz, Murray Hill,” followed by an address. Because I’ve been watching Law & Order a lot lately, the percussion sound is stuck in my head. I often watch the show before I go to sleep and the percussion sound is the last thing I hear before my mind goes black.

I still don’t like Law & Order, but it’s pretty easy to watch. It’s much easier to watch it than not to watch it, so I watch it regularly. The other day I read the TV Guide to find out when it would be airing next. It said it was on almost every hour on almost all of the channels. I watched one episode on one channel while recording another of its reruns on another channel in order to watch that one later. Then I flicked to another episode during the commercials of the one I was watching. I had seen all three episodes already. A few times. But there was nothing else on and it seemed easier to watch them than not to watch them when I thought about it. I thought, if I watch Law & Order then I have all this stuff to watch, but if I don’t watch Law & Order, then I will have nothing to watch. So I watch Law & Order all the time now, which is great because it’s on all the time, which is what I like most about the show. I don’t think I could live without watching Law & Order anymore. Or I wouldn’t want to anyway. Luckily, Law & Order is on most of the time, so I don’t have to think about what it would be like not to watch it. It’s hard to imagine a life not watching it.

Iris Smyles’ stories and essays have appeared in BOMB, NYPress, Nerve, and Guernica among other publications and anthologies. A former humor columnist for Splice Today, she recently edited and wrote an afterword for The Capricious Critic (Seismicity Editions, April 2010), a collection of humorous essays by Ari Martin Samsky, expanded from the original column on her site, www.SmylesandFish.com.
 

I have a tendency to scream. When I attended a scary movie with my last boyfriend, I accidentally ripped the collar off his shirt while crying out causing his ears to ring for days. Three days later, the ringing implacable, he decided, very loudly, WE OUGHT TO BREAK UP. People are partial to different thrills, I guess. I like to scream at movies, on roller coasters, and in the beginnings of relationships.

I had been looking forward to the opening night of “Land of the Dead” for many weeks and had even prepped my boyfriend with at-home viewings of the Romero Zombie film parade.

My boyfriend said he wasn’t scared; why should he be? “They don’t exist.” he noted while I looked around warily. Finding the coast clear, I shook my head. “That’s how they get you!” I explained.

“A slow-moving ghoul might very well put the teeth on you – though you could easily outrun him – simply because you wouldn’t expect that a zombie will appear and then bite you. You’re caught off guard, because you don’t believe in zombies and THAT’S how they get you!” I poked him in the chest. We came upon the large red ticker listing the night’s features. I breathed, steeling up, while he bought the tickets and we joined the crowd on the escalator up, ushered inexorably toward whatever fate.

The movie was bad. Not so bad really as not good. I screamed nevertheless, being sure to get his (my boyfriend’s) money’s worth. But, there were some legitimately good scares here and there. It was the PC treatment regarding the predicament of the zombie population that I minded mostly. “They’re just looking for a place to go,” says one of the characters at the movie’s end, while he holds back a co-protagonist from slaughtering a pack of them on their trek out of the city. Never mind that they eat people alive! I thought. The problem with politics! These flesh-eating ghouls deserve our understanding apparently. Just ‘cause YOU don’t have a taste for human intestines, that doesn’t mean eating them is wrong. It’s just different, I guessed was the moral.

We left the theater discussing the movie on a spirited walk south on Broadway. I was in love and clutched my boyfriend’s arm; breathing in the night, glad not to be undead, in my white summer dress, I wondered if there was a place for us too, a home like that for the zombies. Would we be left in peace? I looked up.

He stopped in an allnight deli just a block down from the theater and I waited outside and thought about this as I watched the Friday traffic rain down, when a man suddenly staggered into the street. A car stopped short. The figure swayed, slammed his hands against the car’s hood and–groaned. I was jostled from my revelry.

I watched the man who groaned stagger a bit more and then stagger to the sidewalk.

My date emerged and I pointed to the swaying shadow. Another pedestrian slowed in front of him. The figure stopped. His arms rose, and he stumbled toward the passerby who wrestled him off. The zombie fell to the ground. Getting up with difficulty, he began again undaunted.

The bodies of the living continued unsuspectingly down Broadway. He turned toward the locked doors of a furniture shop and pounded on it with his fists. People stopped at all corners of the street to witness the spectacle. My manfriend moved forward too. I grabbed his arm trying to hold him back, but curiosity took him.

I stayed hidden behind a phone booth watching, frightened, before I quickly turned with a yelp, fearing an unanticipated rear attack (That’s how it happens in horror movies, I’d learned.).

Finally, the shop-owner opened the door, yelled something at the figure before the ghoulish arms rose again and the man was finally forced to clock him. The zombie stumbled back and fell once more. The man approached concerned, as did others trying to help. But when he came again to his feet, he jumped out at them snarling and gnashing his teeth.

I crept up carefully to tell my date “let’s go” before the situation got the better of us, before THEY did. The street began to gather round, closing into the scene. Fire trucks blared across the city. Three trucks stopped in front. Two police cars, an ambulance.

A few cops tried to calm him while he bared his teeth demonically. The ambulance men worked to wrestle him into a gurney, strapped him down with some effort, and then, “Look!” I pointed, “They’ve muzzled him.” The attendants rolled him out of sight into the van.

“It’s begun!” I noted as we walked away.

“It’s probably just some NYU kid on acid,” my date said imitating calm, “who saw the movie and thought he was a undead.”

“There must have been a zombie in the theatre,” I looked cautiously, as I hurried him over to University Place. “He must have gotten bitten. It could have been us!”

“It’s just some messed up kid,” he repeated.

“That’s what they all say, before it’s too late.”

“Very well,” he acceded. “So would it be safer to hole up at your place or mine tonight?”

Our first night together! I screamed.

“Be careful looking back,” I told her, concerned. “. . . Should you turn into a pillar of salt.”

“I want to talk to you.” I felt compelled to stop. “There is something important happening in you… something with California.” She put her hand to her forehead.

I searched my brain for a California significance and came up with nothing.

“Your shirt,” she went on urgently, “You made it, didn’t you.” It was a turquoise T-shirt with red felt iron-on letters spelling out the uneven words, “To know me, is to love me.” (I had wanted it to say, “To know me biblically, is to love me,” but had used up all of my i’s on a previous tee on which I had spelled “incontinent.”) How did she know?

She went on, visibly agitated, vaguely concerned about the content of my future. “I want to talk to you,” she said taking my arm as I watched the hairs spring out from the mole above her lip.

“But I haven’t any money.”

“You want something. You don’t know what.” The mole hairs reached toward me like psychic feelers. “There is something happening inside you. Can you stop at a bank? Please, let me tell you what I see!”

She looked deep into my eyes, then her gaze zigzagged suddenly across my face. A revelation was underway. The mole twitched, the psychic feelers bristled.

“There is love,” she said urgently. “Your heart is a cage.” Her countenance twisted in painful confusion.

“Yes, it’s true,” I told her, moved, “but I haven’t any money today – to liberate my heart or to see about my future. I’m going to have to wait,” I said pensively, “for it to come at its own pace.”

“OK,” she said finally, retreating from our conversation, and resuming her look of stubborn belief down Broadway. She looked. The crystalline faith etched into her eyebrows, with the kind of belief that comes of necessity. She looked past me through the loose waves of more wrinkled foreheads and distracted eyes as they rolled toward her up Broadway. She looked for other caged hearts, perhaps more moneyed than mine.

I continued walking, feeling my heart beat against its bars. I looked up into the sky above the buildings rising before me; there was a thin blue sheet descending over lower Manhattan. I stuffed my hands in my pockets away from the quickening cold, and walked south toward the coming night, wondering what might happen next.

Day 1: My last affair began on a dark and stormy night. It was a Wednesday and I had planned to stay home, get some drawing done, write, read, lie around in my bathrobe, make dinner and have a glass of wine. Friends had called and invited me to meet them in various places. “No,” I protested. “I’m staying in, going to take it easy.”

A jug of wine later, my apartment covered with paper snowflakes and cigarette butts, books splayed open in haphazard piles all over my bed, my coffee table, my stereo, my window sill, the computer open to Craig’s List missed connections, and records piled up without their jackets “in or around” the stereo, I sat by the window, cursing the bottom of the bottle and Cousin Brucie of CBS FM because he had not played my song request. I changed out of my robe and decided to go out.

Across the street it was midnight and what luck? A karaoke evening. I lined up a drink, dug into the book of songs, and went to work. I requested “Ninety-Six Tears, “ and waited for my song at the crowded bar where I sat slouched, alone on a stool making faces at nothing in particular.

Finally they called my name, but then began playing the wrong song, one I didn’t know. Not one to complain, I sang it anyway holding onto one note for the duration and occasionally punctuating my routine with some light yelps, howls, and screams. I guess my soulful screams were quite terrifying, because they cut me off mid-shriek. I went on Alco Pella until the microphone was wrestled away from me. “Thank you,” I said daintily and left the stage. Commenting on my performance, the host euphemistically referred to my style as “experimental.” I decided not to hit him.

As I made my exit, a shadowy figure stepped in front of me. He was a man apparently, but I could only make out the contour of his body. The rest, the face; the booze had washed in darkness. “I really liked your performance,” said a voice emanating from the shadow.

I said, “Buy me a drink or beat it,” and continued past the figure returning to my post at the bar. The shadow sidled up beside me and my glass was soon replenished. “What’s wrong with you?” I said. Honestly, I just wanted to know. We spoke at length, about something or other – about which I went on passionately, though now, trying to recollect the subject of my treatise, my memory fails again here – and eventually I invited him back to my place, or at least, I ran off in that general direction and he followed, hot footed (excited, perhaps, by the chase; I know how men are.).

Upstairs, we drank some of the beer that I insisted he buy before I’d let him up (“A six pack of tall boys,” I had yelled down to him from my window. I sang on in the voice of a Juliet who had lived to be my age, “And some bacon and cigarettes”), I showed him some of my new snowflakes, and then we made out hard on the couch.

Day 2:

He texted me early the next morning, “Rise and Shine.” I thought for a while of the exact sentiment I wished to express. “Buhh,” I texted back. He called me that evening, and tried to fill me in on what I didn’t remember. “I’m about 6’1,” I have a medium sized head and a small face. You said you liked the way I looked.”

I cried out in frustration over the phone, “Damn it!” because I didn’t know if I could really trust any of the things that I had ever said. “I wish I weren’t such a liar!”

Day 3:

He picked me up at my place before taking me to dinner. “Would you like a drink before we go?” I said aggressively gulping a before dinner gin and juice. “God, it’s hot in here,” I said through my growing anxiety. I become quite shy and nervous, you see, whenever it happens that I’m conscious.

“Sure, I’ll have one,” he said. After I poured my second glass I shook the remainder of the bottle. “Hmmm, I hope there’s enough left for you!” I sang flirtatiously, but completely serious actually. He got lucky and there was.

“God, it’s hot,” I said. “I’m sweating like a bastard,” I said and went into the other room to change out of the nice blouse I had on that matched my skirt, replacing it with my oversized electric blue Senor Swanky’s Restaurant and Celebrity Hangout t- shirt that still had a few staples in it from when it was taken down from off the restaurant wall at my behest.

I opened the window. We played a round of backgammon. I began shivering from the cold and layered on an extra sweater giving me that chic bag lady look that’s so popular with homeless girls these days.

We decided to go, but not before I changed back into my previous outfit. “The climate’s all wrong, ” I said regarding my flushed face with the back of my hand.

“Relax, calm down,” he told me.

I cried out in alarm, “I am calm!”

At dinner, I insisted that he order for me by prefacing my choice with “the lady will have.”

“Are you serious?” he asked perplexed.

“Yes,” I explained, “I suffer from frequent bouts of social anxiety disorder, and I might have a conniption if you make me say out loud the name of the pasta I’m planning to ingest. Why must you give me such a hard time!”

“And the lady will have…” He scarfed his food down in under a minute. I sat there trying to eat artichokes through my nerves, and suck down my glass of wine fast, so the waiter would refill my glass with more frequency than he did that of my companion.

“So,” he said, diverting the subject away from my many psychological disfigurements, which I had been nice enough to begin describing at length, “What’s your impression of me?”

You self-absorbed asshole, I thought. You, you, you! But I know the rules of dating so I indulged his petty egomania. Pensively, I said, “I think you’re insane.” I ate an artichoke and polished off another glass before motioning to the waiter for a refill. “But I suspect you have a nice body. So, It all works out.”

“What’s wrong with your face?” I asked in order to keep the conversation going. He had a little pink spot beneath his left eye. I was hopeful it was the remnants of a bruise he had gotten in a street brawl. No, he was on antibiotics he told me for this “eye thing,” which he said was mostly gone. He shifted uncomfortably in his chair, which is when I started to fall hard (in love I mean. I managed to stay balanced on the chair up until dessert.).

“Can I catch it?” I cooed romantically over my pasta.

“No, I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

I leaned back playing hard to get, “Well, I don’t have insurance, so I really can’t afford to catch it.”

“It’s OK,” he assured me in the candle lit room, “the doctor gave me like tons of antibiotics, if you get it, I’ll just give you some.”

“You promise?” I said touched by his chivalry.

“I promise,” he said catching my eye. The other was closed in an effort to unify the two overlapping images of him I was seeing before me.

The check came and I did not reach for my wallet. I said simply, “You’re welcome,” as I watched him pay and took a swig from the remnants of his untended glass. He argued with me over my rudeness and presumption. I agreed with him on every point, and then said, “So where are you taking me now.”

Two martinis later and a walk back to my place with a brief emergency stop into the deli at my insistence to buy a six pack of beers: “I have to get the train in a half hour,” he said, “I won’t have time for a beer.”

“Don’t worry, these aren’t for you,” I explained gently and quickly moved to the next subject, trying not to embarrass him further by dwelling on his presumptuous mistake.

Walking into my apartment, “What stinks?” I yelled throwing a hand before my nose (I had cooked stuffed grape leaves the previous day and it really did a job on my foyer, or perhaps it was another poisoned mouse decomposing in some remote corner). “Let me know if you see any rodent carcasses,” I said softly, dimming the lights to set a romantic mood.

We sat on my couch, and I told him to quit moving and then lunged at him before I mashed my face into his for a few sloppy minutes. We talked for a few more minutes, before I explained to him gently, “I’m not that kind of girl. You cannot spend the night.” He went home, leaving my honor in tact. I put the radio on, drank the rest of the six pack to wind down, and passed out beneath the kitchen sink.

Day 4:

I opened my eyes to an odd itchy sensation around my eye that would not go away. I called him from my bathroom where I stood before the mirror inspecting the affected area. “I think I got your weird eye disease,” I said as soon as he picked up.

He said, “You’re such a hypochondriac!”

“Fine,” I calmed down. “I guess I have a tendency to jump to conclusions. Wanna make out tonight?”

He said he’d call me back but no such call was made. The creeping suspicion (the one that lately begins to arrest my thoughts prematurely, so that I no longer bother to learn men’s names – I haven’t any idea what this one’s name was as a matter of fact, I addressed him as I do all my dates by simply pointing, or in more intimate situations, saying accusingly “Listen, you”) came on as the day progressed – I knew this to be the beginning of the fizzle.

As my heart began to grow cold, my eye became enflamed. But then to my great incensed surprise, I did get a late night text message from him regarding the progress of a football game. I texted back that I was also watching the game. And “You gave me your eye disease. Bastard,” I added on in the fashion of a woman scorned.

He responded in kind. “You hurt my feelings.”

I responded, “You hurt my eye,” “Bastard,” I added mostly for the aesthetic.

No response.

Day 5:

The next day my eye was even itchier, and he still had not called! Now, fast approaching the jetty of heartbreak, I was torn in crossed purposes. Do I call him and get my hands on his medicine, or wait for him to call me in hopes of capturing his heart? I texted him. “I need your medicine!”

The day waned without a response, and every time my eye itched I was reminded of the phone’s silent aria and the tiny fissures of rejection drawing a map across my soul.

“Why can’t I at least get laid, contract Chlamydia, and THEN have a guy not call me back like a normal girl?” I thought as I tilted my head back to funnel another beer, and the tears began collecting at the corners of my eyes. “This chaste bit of Pink Eye is so unnecessarily humiliating.”

Concerned I might go blind should my condition go untreated, I called my friend Jacob who had recently underwent a Cerebral Meningitis scare (it turned out it was just a hang-nail) to consult. He suggested I check into the emergency room at St. Vincent’s. “Theirs is the best for sexually transmitted eye diseases,” he told me. Reluctant to pay for a hospital visit without any form of insurance, I put off the decision and looked up Pink Eye on-line instead. In a panic, I finally redialed my estranged lover. “Ahh,” I screamed, intimating my feeling of crisis on his voice mail, “This is not about you or me. My eye! My eye! You see, it is, is quite, irritated. Call me back immediately!” I said with all gravity.

The phone rang finally later that night. “What the hell is going on with my eye?” I said cringing afraid to hear the details of my fate.

“What, who is this? Have we met?” he said bewildered.

He wasn’t fooling anyone. Guys pull this shit on me all the time. Finally, he confessed to remembering me a little.

When pressed, it turns out, he had no eye disease. He had lied, he told me, the spot was in fact from a street brawl, but he didn’t want to create a bad impression. It was all in my head, he said.

“Yeah,” I said incredulously, “I suppose the lockjaw is all in my head too! Right?”

Day 6: After I stopped scratching it, my eye was no longer red. The next day he called me to inquire about my health. “What eye?” I said now concerned about a suspicious looking paper cut on my hand. “Oh, that. Fine. I think I’m ok.” He asked me to see some crappy movie that night, and we were all love again, but then he canceled via my voicemail because of inclement weather, presuming to make our date for the following night. How dare he presume I’m not busy, I thought shaking my head proudly, as I continued highlighting my TV guide.

Day 7: The next day there was no word. 9:00pm came and found me trying to learn Texas Hold’em with my friends George and Stinky, while we worked through another jug of chilled Chablis, before I put on my silver tap shoes and began practicing my time steps in the kitchen to my record “Tap Your Troubles Away,” while Stinky videotaped the nimble movements of my feet. We had just commenced the at home Karaoke session, singing along to “Night Fever” as it came over the radio and we read the words off my computer screen, when the phone rang.

“I can’t believe you stood me up!” I cried out wounded.

“I didn’t. We can go now.”

But I was not about to give into the possibility of any new modern form of heartbreak. I’m quite old fashioned, and believe a lady’s time should be reserved in advance. I was insulted. “Listen to this.” I tapped out a little number and pointed the phone at my footwork, and then bringing the receiver back to my face I announced resolutely, “That’s it. I’m breaking up with you!”

“Really?” he said shocked by my declaration.

“Really,” I said not allowing my voice to betray any evidence of the cracks in my otherwise stone heart. “It’s over.”

That night George, Stinky, and I went to my friend’s office downtown, to an empty unlit loft space on the floor above his to have a few drinks and shoot the shit in an unlikely place, which is sometimes all you can do. While they told jokes and talked, and generally regarded life as a good thing, I tried to tap my troubles away in the vast darkened room; the only light streaming in from a moon that appeared to me suddenly somewhat shy, and the numberless glimmering windows in the buildings that surrounded us. I shuffled optimistically back and forth across the wooden floor, occasionally slipping on a few escaped tears and the rhythm induced tidal waves overflowing from the plastic cup of my gin and juice. Shimmying toward the Hudson River that was rushing by the west window, I reminded myself with each clicking Rif-Raf how much better it was that I hadn’t, at least, gotten my heart involved in this particular scuffle, and then retreated again in Pirouettes and Traveling Time Steps back in the other direction.

Day 8: The next morning, I woke up to a vague pain in the chest. Breaking up is so hard. For a while I had it all, I thought. I stared up at the ceiling of the Staten Island Ferry Depot, where I had regained consciousness. He really seemed like the one, I told myself, in that familiar retroactive optimism that comes after the end of every affair. And in typical post-relationship fashion, I began to review the arc of our story: It was love at first sight, I recalled, remembering fondly the shadow from which his voice had first emanated. Or rather love is blind, I corrected myself, finding a truth in my blacking out. Love had struck a blow to my head causing the erasure of most of my memory of our meeting, and the memory of numbers 7 through 9 of my mathematics timetables, and any memory of the exact location of my left sock (still at large), and was probably the cause of that lump on my head, too, I reasoned.

Suddenly regretting my decision to so rashly sabotage all possible futures of this last burgeoning but delicate affair, I texted him from where I lay next to the news stand, wondering if my actions could possibly be reversed, wondering if he still felt anything for me, wondering how it was that it had all fallen apart? I chose my words carefully. Dexterously I typed, “Is the complete Men’s Wearhouse Commercials available on DVD yet?”

He never wrote or called back. And that night, back at my place, cleaning up my apartment and putting my tap shoes away in silence, like that, another affair ended with unanswered questions.

She asked the guy at the counter to taste a falafel to see if it was good enough. She had just been to Israel and knew her falafel from her ass, she told me. He had trouble understanding. “Taste?” “Try?” “Sample?” He repeated. Finally he nodded, and the fryer went on.

Sharon was over by the refrigerator looking disgusted at their drink selection. Sharon is disgusted at everything. To her, disgust is a virtue. She does it well. When she spits and curses, angels get their wings.

I leaned on the counter and worked my nonchalance.

He dropped it on the floor – just for a second – when it came out of the fryer. The two behind the counter laughed quickly and surreptitiously before putting it on a plate. It had taken so long to fry. They couldn’t do it again. No one saw, the look said. Sharon didn’t see.

The place was filthy.

Sharon tasted it, decided it was no good and went for a slice instead. I ate the rest of it. “Are you gonna eat that?” I’d asked.

We went to pay at the counter and they tried to charge her 75 cents for the falafel in addition to the slice. She argued for a while and I stood next to her. She reached for her wallet finally, defeated.

“She’s not paying for something you dropped on the floor!” I broke in. Sharon was shocked by my ingenuity. She thought I was telling stories again. “You know I saw you do it!”

They looked at me perplexed — I had eaten the whole thing. I explained, I was hungry and I’m a filthy person, so I ate it. “But we’re not going to pay for it!”

“For you,” they pointed to Sharon, “75 cents.”

“For you,” they pointed to me, enamored by the depths of my sinking, “from now on is free.”

“This one’s on me,” I said nonchalantly, urging her to put away her wallet.

As we reentered the rain, Sharon admired my ability to rouse, my storytelling, my escapes. The rain washed my face almost clean. I explained there was no ability. That I had a prescient feeling about that falafel, that I knew something might go down in the end. I saw the falafel drop, and I had looked away quickly, deciding on a course of action. Sharon was nonplussed that I had let her eat it. That I had thrown the whole remainder in my mouth–but I was thinking…

You can tell the New Yorkers from the By-Way-Of’s through a brief surveying of pizza eating technique; New Yorkers fold.

You learn this at a young age.

Hopefully, someone at some point in your upbringing takes you aside and shows you how. Or else you just pick it up somewhere – like sex or the truth about Santa – on the street. Same as the carvel ice cream cone; you learn to lick around, but never down.

The TSS mall had a carpeted atrium, and an expansive hallway down which a Carvel ice cream store, a pizza place, a pet shop and an arcade were open for business through most of the 80′s. There was also TSS itself, the department store, but that didn’t interest me much as kid, with its blenders and pillowcases; that was for my parents. On some Sundays, they would take my two older brothers and me to the mall and go shopping in the department store, leaving us to play video games in the arcade or somehow get the birds all stirred up at the pet store. This could keep us busy for quite sometime, and when my parents finally finished their shopping they knew where to find us.

Arthur, most probably, was deeply engaged in Ms. Pacman’s unending quest for points and escape in a universe that scientists have recently surmised is quite similar to our own (like a donut; if you depart on one end you will return on the other, supposedly); Alex could be found teaching the parrots to insult me for being small; and me, I was watching the hamsters in their cages, barely moving at all, while I’d stare overtly consumed, pretending not to hear the insults of the birds.

After they gathered us all together, and I had related to my parents, my brothers’ most recent cruelties – how I’d been persuaded to give a dime for a penny, for example, as a penny was bigger and its color more closely resembled gold – we ate lunch, where I learned how to eat pizza.

There was, my dad told me, an exact science to it; a simple method that I would carry with me always. Folding the crust in half was paramount, I learned. Any other way was plainly barbaric. Application of the proper technique was direct proof of a well developed cultural savvy and a fine tuned epicurean erudition. I folded and chewed. At pizza parties ever after, I was a beacon of sophistication and subtlety, and to a few of my dear, hapless friends, I gently passed on the instructions.