Albertine Appears

The Saturation Point

    Gesticulating with the slice of toast that I had saturated with cocoa, I said in a musing manner, “I’ve changed.”
    There was no response from my mother or my father.
    I prompted them: “Don’t you think I’ve changed?”
    No response.
    “Mom?” I asked.
    “I’m not sure,” she said.
    “Dad? Wouldn’t you say I’ve changed?”
    “Ask me again in a few days,” he said.
    “Okay, I will, but I don’t need to wait a few days. I know now. I’ve changed. I can tell. My experiences have changed me.”
    “Aren’t you going to eat your breakfast?” asked my mother.
    “I sure am,” I said, and I bent to the task of eating at least some of what my mother had put in front of me.
    At that point, my superior self said, “Your conviction that you are a changed boy is only partly justified.”
    “Oh, yeah?” said I, with my mouth full.
    “I grant you that the idea is not entirely groundless,” he said. “You actually did have some interesting experiences, possibly even life-altering experiences, during your summer travels and summer study.”
    “You can say that again,” I said.
    “I suppose that you suppose that your Babbington friends will be eager to hear about those experiences because they were experiences that your friends did not have and could not have had, stuck here at home.”
    “I sure do,” I said.
    “I suppose that you suppose that those friends will be impressed by the many ways in which those experiences have changed you.”
    “They will,” I said with deep, heartfelt, conviction.
    “Hmmph.”
    “Some of them will,” I said with less conviction.
    He had forced me to think. Among my friends, whom could I count on to welcome my stories, my perceptions, and my new wisdom?
    My friend Raskol Lodkochnikov was the obvious choice. I considered Raskol my best friend. He was a generous listener, and would allow me to ramble on for hours if we were spending a lazy day along the bulkhead beside the Bolotomy River, at the edge of the Bay. If he had a shortcoming as a listener, it was that he just let my stories wash over him. Sometimes it was hard to tell whether he had heard what I’d said when I was confiding in him.
    “He isn’t really interested,” said my superior self. “Half the time he isn’t listening at all.”
    “Not true,” I said.
    “Oh? Ask yourself this question: Does he ever press you for details?”
    “Press me for details?”
    “Does he ever ask a question that shows a deep interest in knowing all the juicy details of one of your fascinating experiences?”
    “He’s a boy of few words,” I said. “He’s not the type who presses people for details. He probably feels nothing but contempt for those who do. Even so, he has asked me to tell him the story of my first airplane ride, in detail, several times. So there.”
    “I suppose it doesn’t really matter whether he listens to you or not,” said my superior self, “since he has such a sexy older sister.”
    “I’m going to go down to Raskol’s,” I announced, rising from the breakfast table.
    “What about the lawn?” asked my father.
    “I’ll mow it this afternoon,” I said.
    “And when are you going to finish painting the garage?” he asked.
    “The garage?”
    “The garage,” he said.
    “You got my friends to paint the garage when they came to help me build Spirit of Babbington,” I said.
    “Your friends hardly made a dent in it.”
    “Can’t I have one day off?”
    “You’ve had the whole summer off.”
    “No, I haven’t. I worked hard out there in New Mexico—”
    “Oh, Bert,” said my mother. “Let him have one day off.”
    “Okay,” said my father. “You can have the whole weekend off. But you’d better make the best of it, because you’ve only got a week before school starts, and that garage has got to be painted—and I mean painted properly. Do you hear me?”
    “Yeah, I hear you,” said the conquering hero as he let himself out the side door.