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we just spent our whole afternoon talking to you and if you end up wasting our time maybe you shouldn’t be too confident about your legs or your jawbone or your windshield
, and the deal closes and it’s time to start making reservations for the cruise.
    Daniel’s right. You should stop her because even though you don’t give a shit about that couple’s marriage—they’ll be fine with their too big house with the fake Victorian eaves and the satellite dish, and they’ll have a new stroller, a more chic model with an even lighter alloy by this afternoon—still, there’s the broken window theory to consider. If you don’t stop the woman from jacking the stroller, what will she steal next? Maybe, you’ll wake one morning and there will be empty space on the street where your car slept happily the night before.
    “Do something,” Daniel says again, almost whimpering now. At heart Daniel’s a wuss and if you don’t do something, there’s no way he will, but you don’t do anything, because the woman’s moving again with her rhythmic right-left shuffle push and the night is warm and calm, and the stroller affixed to the front cart looks like the sharp prow of a ship, and you’re thinking of the boat you’ll be on in two weeks, of the beer, of so much beer, and of the ocean unfolding, and there she goes, there she goes, cutting her way through the dark.

SCRAMBLE
    THE SUMMER GORDON AND LENNIE CHRISTENED ME EUGENE was the summer Gordon was beautiful. His muscles were fresh and newly defined, miracles in the way muscles can only be the first time, when they surprise.
    He was slim and strong, his hair thick and dark. He carried thirty-pound golf bags casually, a bit disdainfully, as if they were schoolbooks. The skin on his face, and from his elbows through his hands, was the brown of wet beach-sand. Girls from our class pedaled their bicycles to his front porch in the early evenings and told him how many stuffed animals they still slept with, and how they liked to be held when they kissed.
    On a Monday night in August, he showed me an unrolled condom on the bookshelf in his bedroom. Used, he said.
    I wouldn’t see another used condom for seven years.
    That summer, I was as ugly as a fourteen-year-old can be, a sickening combination of short and pudgy, with limbs that were long and gangly. I looked like a potato an angry infant had jabbed toothpicks into for arms and legs. My head was oblong, my hair angled wrong and brittle, still cut by the half-drunk barber who’d once dated my mother. My teeth stuck out like thumbs, held in check by painful railroad tracks that cut my gums and glommed onto food-crumbs as if they had tentacles, infusing my breath with the stench of rotting vegetables. Horrible qualities for anybody, but excruciating for a kid so consistently horny, he walked around with a boner three or four times each hour.
    I had nowhere to put that boner, no idea at all what to do with it, and its nagging presence distracted and embarrassed me. I tried to hide it with long t-shirts or by offering three-quarters of my back during conversations. People thought I was rude, but I was just trying to be considerate, attempting to shield friends and strangers both from my rancid breath and the inappropriate bump in my boxers.
    Gordon and Lennie and I, and another dude named Horace, played a lot of cards that summer. Horace wasn’t Jewish and didn’t caddy because he had a job washing dishes in a deli that made dry-tasting sandwiches with too much meat. We gathered on the screened-in back-porch at Lennie’s house and his mother fed us Hostess cupcakes and off-brand potato chips and pitchers of fruit punch mixed from foil packets. She’d say, “How about some brownies? Or should I cook that homemade pizza you like, Len?” and he’d shout at her, “We’re good, Ma, for real. Just leave us alone.”
    We laughed at Lennie and told his mom to keep the food coming, which she did, so we ate a lot, if not well,