ACK IN MY ROOM AGAIN, I hit on the idea of practicing with marbles instead of peas.  I was a little beyond the age of playing with marbles.  Among the other kids my age at school, marbles were no longer in favor.  A few still played with them, but when I saw that those who did were bespectacled, small, runny-nosed, and disdained, I put my marbles away.  I took them out now and then, in private, just to appreciate them as beautiful objects, but simply looking at them was never entirely enough appreciation.  They were meant to be played with, not merely admired. 
    Luckily, I lived on a block with many younger children.  They looked up to me, and I encouraged it.  They often came to my house and asked my mother if I could play with them.  Sometimes, under the protective guise of teaching them, I played marbles with them.  I let them win my old marbles, the ones that were chipped and milky, and thereby whittled my collection down to the best of the transparent marbles—the clear, the tinted, the brilliant reds and greens—and the cat’s eyes—best of the best, clear marbles with a twisted leaf of color in the center that from certain angles resembled the pupil in the eye of a cat.  These dazzlers I protected with all my skill and effort, and because I always won with these marbles, my students came to think of them as charmed, in the manner—as I later came to learn—of so very many people who, confronted with someone who has achieved something by dint of honest labor vigorously and unstintingly applied, would rather think of it as unfairly won, the product of an unfair advantage, like luck or talent or magic or divine election.
    I tried rolling a couple of cat’s eyes and found them so much easier to work with than peas that I wondered why the Glynns hadn’t thought of them.  Possibly it was because marbles were not as likely to come so readily to the mind of a girl as they did to the mind of a boy, I thought, chuckling indulgently while I rolled the marbles upward and back and read my social studies assignment at the same time.  I did well with the marbles, well enough that I thought I might be able to get away with using marbles exclusively.
    I began carrying a pair of marbles in my pocket.  These pocket marbles were not for practice, though.  I was doing my practicing at home.  I carried the marbles so that I could show off.  At school, during homeroom or a study hall, I would take the marbles out and begin rolling them with my eyes closed, hoping that someone would notice this unusual behavior and ask me about it.  I got quite good at manipulating them, and, with an uncanny prescience that startles me even now, thirty-six years later, began to develop a repertory of manipulations, from touching them, feeling them, fingering them, handling them (all maneuvers that were harder than they sound, since the marbles had a lively reluctance to stay put while they were touched, felt, fingered, or handled), to more active manipulations, such as grazing, brushing, caressing, fondling, pawing, rubbing, stroking, and toying with the marbles, all in addition, of course, to the rollings—up and back, side to side—that one would expect to find in the bag of tricks of a marble manipulator.  Often enough, I was asked what the heck I was doing, often enough to get a taste of the satisfying fame conferred for a distinguishing oddity and for the attainment of a skill, and so I had the erroneous feeling that I was doing well.  That feeling was dispelled soon enough, one day when the Glynns again plunked themselves down on either side of me in the cafeteria just as I was scraping the raisin gravy off my ham slice.
    “Hey,” said Margot, leaning close to me and whispering into my ear, “what’s the idea with the marbles?”
    “Oh,” said I, grinning with the pleasure of having an asset discovered, as if I had been writing a poem in secret and had, by accident or design, left some rejected pages of my work out on my worktable, where they might be discovered, leading to their publication, to my passing embarrassment and lasting fame, “the marbles.”  I reached into my pocket and pulled the marbles out.  “I’ve been practicing.  Let me show you.”
    “No thanks,” said Martha.  She scooped up the marbles with the swift movement of one who in her earlier days must have been an accomplished player of jacks.  “Your marbles days are over.”
    “Or should be,” said Margot.  “Marbles are for kids.”
    “Oh, sure,” I said, suddenly embarrassed.  “Sure.  Of course.  For kids.  But they’re pretty challenging.”
    “Come on, Peter,” said Martha.
    “No, really,” I asserted.  “They take some skill.  And they’re a lot less messy than peas.  I can carry them around in my pocket and practice at any time.”
    “He’s got a point,” said Martha.
    “Please, Martha,” said Margot.  “That’s part of the problem, Peter,” she added.  “The way you keep taking them out and practicing in front of everyone.”
    “Practicing?” I said.  “But I thought you wanted me to practice.”
    “At home, Peter,” said Margot.  “In the privacy of your little room.  What you do there is practicing.  But what you’re doing with these marbles of yours isn’t practicing.  It’s just—”
    “—showing off,” said Martha.
    “No, it’s not,” I claimed, as guilty parties do.
    Martha gave me one of those looks of hers, with those incredulous eyes, that disbelieving grin.
    “We’re not ready to have the whole school know that you’re honing your little skills, honey,” said Margot.
    “Sorry,” I said with a shrug.  “I didn’t realize—” 
    To my surprise, I felt myself begin to blush, because, although I still had no idea what their intentions might be, what plans they had for using me and my pea-poking skills, Margot and Martha had made it clear that what I was doing was something that shouldn’t be seen, shouldn’t be known, and at that time of life I had so many interests that had to be kept out of sight that a blushing embarrassment and almost reflexive stuffing of my hands into my pockets was my immediate response to the vaguest threat of having any of them discovered.  Let someone call to me “Hey, Peter!” and the blush would spread over my face, my hands would fly into my pockets, and I’d look at my shoes.
    “Never mind,” said Margot.  “Just knock it off.  Now let me see how you’re doing.”  She picked a raisin from the pool of viscid gravy on the side of my plate.  Martha did the same.
    “Won’t everybody see?” I asked, concerned now as I hadn’t been before.
    “We’ll cover you,” said Martha, moving her milk carton near my hand so that it would hide my raisin work from most of the room.  I had to chuckle about this misuse of cover, since I was a devotee of the technical vocabulary of Westerns. 
    “You don’t mean ‘cover,’” I began.  “Covering is shooting at the bad guys—or it could be the good guys—any guys who are shooting at you—or might shoot at you if they got the chance—or not you, exactly, if you’re the one who’s doing the covering—but might shoot at the guy you’re covering—”
    “Never mind that,” said Margot, dismissing an entire department of my little store of learning.  “Palpate those raisins.”
    “‘Palpate’?”
    “Touch them.  Roll them.  Rub them,” said Martha.  “Get to work.”
    Nervously now, with a childish foretaste of the clammy fear known to anyone who has endured an oral examination or a job interview, I rested a finger on each of the raisins.
    “They’re sticky,” I said.  “And kind of slippery, too.”
    The girls giggled.
    “Lightly, now, Peter,” said Margot.  “Side to side.”
    I could tell that I was in trouble right away.  The perfection of the marbles’ shape made their behavior predictable in comparison to the raisins.  The marbles also had, of course, the glassy hardness marbles are known for, and the raisins, with their coating of mucilaginous gravy, were slippery, unpredictable little devils, with a resilience that was a little startling, as if there were some life in them still.  In working with the marbles, which had a tendency to skitter on smooth surfaces, I had lost the light touch.  I was being cautious now, too cautious to display any of the skill that I thought I had acquired.  I wasn’t doing much of anything to the raisins, barely moving them.
    “What’s this?” asked Martha.  “You’re not doing anything.”
    “I am,” I said.  “It’s just that, well, raisins are kind of hard to work with.”
    “Oh?”
    “Yeah.  They’re soft, and yet they kind of push back at you, and they’re not round, not even as round as peas—”
    “Mm-hmm.”
    “Up and down, now, Peter,” said Margot.
    “Up and down,” I said.  “Okay.”
    “See if you can kind of stroke the raisin instead of making it roll like that.”
    “No, I like that rolling,” said Martha.
    “Okay, make hers roll,” said Margot, “but just stroke mine.”
    I did my best.
    “What do you think?” asked Martha.
    “Back to the peas,” said Margot.  “You’re just going to have to find a way to practice rolling peas, Peter.”
    “But—” I began.
    “Listen, Peter,” said Martha.  “You know how kids in class are always asking, ‘What good is this going to do me?’”
    “Yeah,” I said.  That was a frequent topic of debate: whether the things we were learning would be at all useful to us in “life,” when we were grown up, or even while we were still kids, doing whatever we did all day.
    “Well, I promise you, Peter, that this is going to be useful,” she said.
    “Okay,” I said.  “I’ll take your word for it.”
    “Good,” she said.
    “Good,” said Margot.  She ate a raisin and giggled.

Nostalgic and very funny and just a little perverse.

A daring tour de force

At Home with the Glynns is published in paperback by Picador, a division of St. Martin's Press, at $11.00.

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At Home with the Glynns is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, dialogues, settings, and businesses portrayed in it are products of the author's imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

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First published by Crown Publishers, Inc., 201 East 50th Street, New York, New York 10022. Member of the Crown Publishing Group. 

The illustration at the top of the page is an adaptation of an illustration by Stewart Rouse that first appeared on the cover of the August 1931 issue of Modern Mechanics and Inventions. The boy at the controls of the aerocycle doesn’t particularly resemble Peter Leroy—except, perhaps, for the smile.