Albertine Appears

I Am Impertinent Several Times

    My mother served her conquering hero a conquering hero’s breakfast. It included poached eggs, corned beef hash, sausages, bacon, English muffins, French toast, a Spanish omelette, a one-eyed Egyptian, graham crackers broken into milk and allowed to stand until they reached partial sogginess, and a glazed cruller, but it began with a cup of cocoa and a slice of buttered toast. I dunked the toast in the cocoa, as I had done for years, but on this morning, while I watched the dunked portion of the toast soak up some cocoa, gauging the degree of soaking, ready to remove it when it reached the right degree, I discovered that I was also observing myself dunking the toast, and that the part of me that was observing myself was saying in a superior manner, “A boy who has tasted life as you have, who has taken a mighty swallow on the way toward drinking it to the lees, should not childishly dunk his toast in cocoa.”
    I was, apparently, already on my way to becoming the crowd of selves that I am today, because while the outer me was monitoring the dunking of my toast, and an inner me was criticizing the dunking, yet another inner me was enjoying the company of a buxom blond beauty who had graduated from my high school several years earlier and had won the right to wear the rhinestone-encrusted crown of Miss Clam Fest in open voting at the Clam Festival in the spring, just before I began my heralded journey.
    “I’d love to hear about some of your experiences,” she was breathing into my ear.
    “I don’t know where to begin,” I said. “There’s just so much to tell.”
    She began unbuttoning my shirt. “Why don’t you begin at the beginning?” she said suggestively. Then she slipped her hand inside the shirt and ran it over my chest.
    “Well, Miss Clam Fest,” I began. Hmmm, I thought. That’s no good. I can’t call her “Miss Clam Fest.” I wonder what her real name is.
    Meanwhile, my superior self persisted in his criticism of my toast-dunking. “Not only is it childish,” he was saying, “but it is also redundant. You ate buttered toast dunked in cocoa on the day of your departure from Babbington.”
    “So?” I said.
    “So you ought to start this day in a way that emphasizes the start of whatever exploit you are going to undertake next,” he said. “A repetition of that childish toast-dunking is not the way to make a new beginning.”
    “Oh, yeah?” I snapped assertively. “Why couldn’t toast-dunking become a tradition with me, something that marks the beginning of every new adventure?”
    “What?” he asked, taken aback my assertiveness.
    “Rather than a mere relic of my childhood,” I continued, “my repeated toast-dunkings would become milestones along my path to maturity. Each time I dunked my toast, I would see the dunking through older and wiser eyes. Eventually I might come to regard it with tolerant amusement, and I might even come to feel a similar tolerant amusement for the supercilious contempt with which you regarded it on the morning after my return from New Mexico.”
    “Are you being impertinent?” he asked.
    “Are you talking to me?” my father asked.
    I looked at him. I couldn’t imagine why he would think that I’d been talking to him.
    “You said something about being impertinent,” he said. He had lowered the newspaper, and he was scowling at me over it.
    “Oh. No. No, no. Not 'impertinent.' No. I said ‘impermanent.’ It’s, ah, my word of the day.”
    “Word of the day?”
    “Yeah. The word of the day. It’s a trick I learned out in New Mexico. At the summer institute. Learn a word a day. That helps you get ready for the College Competency Exams.”
    “That’s very smart,” said my mother. “Good for you! What did you learn about impertinent?”
    “You mean impermanent,” I said with a chuckle.
    “About impermanent, then.”
    “It’s—well—ah—basically it’s the opposite of permanent.”
    “The way pertinent is the opposite of impertinent?” she asked.
    “Sure,” I said.
    “But impertinent means ‘rude,’ doesn’t it?” she said.
    “Right,” I said confidently.
    “Then why doesn’t pertinent mean ‘polite’?” she asked.
    “I have no idea,” I admitted.
    “I hope that doesn’t come up on the College Competency Exams,” she said, knitting her brows with worry.
    “Me, too,” I said.