ANTHONY VARALLO
Toro
When Jonas was nine the job of mowing the lawn fell to him, and offered, like the binoculars his father left behind, a magnified view of the world. The lawn, which had always seemed to him a dull carpet, where horseshoes could be pitched, sprinklers hopped, and footballs made to stand on end, now revealed itself to be the stage upon which the house faced, whose proper care was a kind of drama where Jonas, pushing the mower with socks rolled to his ankles, became his father’s sudden understudy. Neighbors, spotting him, waved. Bees, indifferent to the mower’s path, lingered. How had his father negotiated the hydrangea bush?
The mower, a self-propelled push job, was difficult to start. Dry grass caked the roof of its mouth, which Jonas chiseled away at with a screwdriver. A mower, underneath, was really not much at all, he discovered. Oil, previously imagined precious, like gold, actually came in squat bottles with necks like pulled balloons. A funnel was needed for the gasoline; filling it a kind of game. Jonas’s hands shook in the effort. A T-topped pull cord grew from the motor’s head—like Frankenstein’s bolt, Jonas thought, then grew angry at himself for thinking that. Twice already that summer he’d woken from sleep convinced that a convict had a gun to his ear, when really it was his pillow’s zipper, pressing against his side. Lightning was not, he reminded himself, aiming for his window. His house was just his house in darkness or in light. The lawn was just a lawn. The mower just a mower. Why then, did the mower seem to know something? Why did it feel, on those summer evenings when he’d waited until the sun had nearly set, as if it were trying to hurry him along? OK, OK, Jonas said, following the mower around the lip of the flower bed, whose wood chips he had often used to draw four-square courts on the driveway, and whose border the mower seemed to honor, like a car at a crosswalk.
The lawn had its own geography, unknown to him all those years of running, playing catch. The grass along the driveway wasn’t really grass at all, but a kind of hay that must have grown there accidentally. The grass around the mailbox grew especially thick; he would have to use the yellow clippers tacked to the garage wall, the ones he had once used to cut a pizza box into the moons of Jupiter for a class project. He would need gloves for this. Gloves, in summer. The lawn pulled seasons inside out. The grass near the front porch was as soft as fine hair, perhaps something to do with the shadow of the house, Jonas guessed. The side yard sloped more steeply than he had remembered, tugging the mower forward. The ground near the air- conditioning unit always felt soggy underfoot. Why?
If the lawn was wet, the mower breathed tiny wisps of smoke.
Dry, the mower turned dandelions into wishes.
Daytime mowings embarrassed Jonas, with cars passing by, seeing him stopped before a stalk of ragweed, waiting for wasps to take flight. He didn’t like to sweat, something new to him, as were the showers he took afterwards, forgoing the tub, which had swallowed his dirt for years now, its greedy drain finishing with a satisfied ah! The shower cared less, somehow. Now, its spout seemed to say. Now, now! The water stung his face and pinked his shoulders. But, when Jonas lifted his chin, he found a surprise: the water could be swallowed, gargled, and noisily spit wherever he wanted. From this piece of knowledge, came another: all the water in the house was the same water and did not know which kind of water it was. Jonas, after deliberation, allowed himself to pee into the drain.
At his mother’s request, Jonas kept a log book of all his mowings for allowance purposes. The notebook had a speckled cover and a wide, white nameplate where Jonas blocked in his name, putting LAWN in the space for “Grade,” and MOWINGS in the space for “Semester.” It bothered him to leave the space for “Homeroom” empty, like a painted-over window, so he wrote the name of the lawnmower there, TORO, pleased with the idea of someone finding the book later on. He kept the book inside his nightstand, sometimes thumbing through it at night, reviewing his stats. He had mowed on every day of the week, except Wednesday, and had twice mowed on a holiday, Good Friday and Memorial Day. He rarely mowed on Tuesday. Saturday the hands-down winner. Longest stretch without: thirteen days. This, a vacation with his school friend, Alex Gregg, at the Gregg’s beach house, which, the notebook reminded him, had been a disappointment. They’d walked the beach with flip-flops pinching their toes, T-shirts damp at the hem, spying on girls and rolling their R’s, a school joke that no longer seemed funny, any more than did Alex’s impression of Mr. Bowden, their homeroom teacher. “So what do you think?” Alex had asked, lifting his shirt and drumming his pale belly. “You think chicks will wanna lick this six-pack?” Nights, Jonas slept on a fold-out bed, feeling, for the first time, the kind of loneliness particular to houses where the pantry is stocked with cookies, chips, and soda, and all along the stairway, family photographs hang like bright glass.
But how boring mowing was. Such magnificent nothing! Such shapelessness! The lawn had no head or tail; Jonas would fix that. If he began with the strip of grass along the road, that was the “front” of the lawn, or, imagined from above, the “top.” Moving horizontally, then, towards the house made the side yard the “middle” and the last few rows beneath the back deck, where Jonas was afraid to duck underneath, as he had seen his father do, must be the “back” or “bottom.” What about the other side yard, though? The driveway side with a collapsed woodpile rotting at its base, bee-ridden and smelling of damp leaves. Jonas always saved it for last, hurrying through. He had never played there, even when they’d first moved in. Unlike the air-conditioner side, this side—the opposite side, Jonas thought—was not a passageway to another yard, nor could you use it to cross from the front yard to the back, unless you hopped the woodpile, which seemed to Jonas a kind of cheating, like dragging your pencil through the wall of a maze. He finished there by mowing a square pattern that diminished into smaller squares upon smaller squares until all that was left was one square less than the width of the lawnmower, which the mower happily accepted into its maw, the motor surging as the blades spun free. If Jonas thought of these squares as a curled tail, like the monkey tails in his favorite video game, the side yard would assume its proper place in the body of the lawn. Finishing with a tail. The idea pleased him.
But mowing was slow, repetitive. The lawn, seen through the mower’s handles, repeated itself frame after frame, like empty slides in a carousel. Grass, green in storybooks, photographs, and dreams, in truth nurtured yellow buds and yellow-brown stalks, whose tops turned purple when left to grow too long, and emerged from the underside of Jonas’ mower slickly transparent, like the wings of a fly. In the shade, grass appeared black. A consolation: blades of grass were exactly that, sharp to the touch, when Jonas rubbed them from his legs, pausing beneath the shade of the house while the mower spun its wheels —he had maintained, too, his father’s fastidiousness. After each mowing, he left his grass -mowing sneakers in the garage, their bottoms wetly green, like halved limes. This leaving, was part of a repetition, as was the feeling, when Jonas dared to push the mower underneath the back deck, of someone trying to call his name. A trick of the enclosed space, Jonas figured, without actually believing it. He’d had the exact same thought, too, every time he’d mowed around the mailbox, a memory of a puzzle he and his cousin had once vainly tried to assemble atop a picnic table, the table sheltered within a park gazebo whose roof hung five curtains of rainwater around them, the puzzle missing several key pieces, the rain sometimes blowing in. The sense of their mission, its hopelessness had stayed with him, in dreams, car rides, and now in the stubborn grass around the mailbox’s pole, which, when edged, caught the mower’s wheels and made the handle shake. Jonas had twice taken the same number of steps to finish the side yard.
There were problems with mowing. The lawn needed cutting when Jonas least felt like it, for one. For another, dog shit. One time Jonas mowed over a rabbit hutch, releasing three baby bunnies, each taking off in a different direction. He’d tried placing the rabbits back into the hutch, but they pushed through the flimsy grass roof he’d dropped on top of them. An idea: he topped the hutch with a trashcan lid, weighting it with a rock. When he’d lifted it again, afraid that they’d suffocate, he found the hutch empty. He put his hand inside the hole, feeling its grassy nothing.
The lawn made him complicit in miracles. Mysteries.
If it rained for several days, Jonas was unable to mow without the mower blades getting stuck. The lawn, sensing its advantage, sent up unlikely foliage to mock him. Red vines appeared from behind the air-conditioning unit, their leaves hooking the underside of the machine. Purple flowers drooped from the ends of a weed whose roots made a sound like cloth tearing when Jonas pulled them from the side yard. White mushrooms appeared at the base of the woodpile, like trolls.
Like vines, lawn problems clung to something larger. For months Jonas had been troubled by a hitch in his infrequent prayers, whereby praying for one person begged praying for another, so that there was always a displaced person, hopelessly left out, looking in through the fence of his attention. If Jonas thought And please watch over Mom and Dad, Grandmom and Grandpop and Mom-Mom, this left out Pop-Pop, who died when Jonas was five and who had once taken Jonas on a tour of a historical battlefield, where Jonas was allowed to press buttons on a display in which toy soldiers described bloody battles that looked perfectly pleasant to Jonas, with everyone dressed in smart caps and roped jackets, riding muscular horses into blue streams. And Pop-Pop, too, Jonas prayed, including him among the loved and living, but displacing Uncle Al, who showed up only at Christmas, like eggnog, and cousin Cathy, from Ohio and pretty, whose presence in these prayers only made it clear that Jonas loved cousin Michael and Aunt Frida and Aunt Stephanie less. These unlucky few congregated behind the fence with Kevin Forrester and Chris Orner, school friends displaced by Josh Boyd and Jim Stevens, neighborhood pals, whose bedrooms Jonas had slept in and whose sinks had received his spit.
Likewise, the lawn made displacements. If Jonas tried to align the left edge of the mower along the indentation left by his first pass, he sometimes strayed, leaving an archipelago of uncut grass between the rows, requiring him to double back, fixing it. But these repairs then tugged the right hand margin of uncut grass to the left, forcing Jonas to repeat the mistake over and over again for the sake of continuity. If Jonas concentrated, the mistake could be corrected in two passes, simply by starting a new, mistake-free margin just to the left or right of the ragged one, and following it across. But the correction involved a kind of wastefulness that bothered Jonas, who had acquired his father’s habit of tearing scrap paper into reusable quarters and stacking them by the downstairs telephone. For every corrected row hid the broken one underneath, and made the expenditure of the second pass appear thrifty, pennywise. Jonas watched the jagged edge spool itself beneath the mower’s front, feeling vaguely guilty but clever, too. He gripped the mower’s handle and felt sweat trickle past his ear.
But Jonas could not concentrate. His thoughts—something happened to them while he mowed. They broke. They hid. Jonas tried to score them with a Walkman, but the Toro’s motor was too noisy, no matter how high he turned the volume, or how well he could follow the songs without actually hearing them. This truth revealed another one: it was just as good to think of songs as to listen to them. Better, even.
So Jonas did. He started with a record, pulled from its staticky sleeve, placed on the dual drive turntable he was only recently allowed to use, whose top could be lifted with the side of his hand, the record making a pleasing, plunking sound when dropped onto the platter, whose sides were illuminated by an amber strobe. Through some optical trick the platter’s banding looked like it was moving in opposite directions, like a helicopter’s propeller. It was these bands that Jonas imagined when he pulled the mower’s cord from its head, starting both machines, as it were, one imagined, one real. Jonas’s first steps across the driveway were the leader groove on side one, the mower, the stylus “playing” the grass grooves. Jonas edged the mower along the front porch, singing.
Why then, even with songs to cheer him, did the back deck frighten him? The ground beneath it sloped upwards, softly, always damp, even on the hottest of days, which troubled Jonas’s footing, and made him feel as if he might fall. Was that it? Or was it the lone wasps’ nest hanging like a brown disco ball from the beam above the basement door? His first time mowing, Jonas had nearly walked right into it. He’d run away so quickly he was in the neighbor’s yard, looking back, before the image of the nest, its papery shell tapering to a single hole from which two wasps descended, returned to him in utter clarity, the wasps black legs dangling from their bodies like tucked hairs. He’d left the mower underneath the deck until after dark, when he figured the wasps would be sleeping—did wasps sleep?—then pulled it out and dragged it back to the garage, his heart pounding.
He was also afraid of the weeds behind the front porch rainspout, whose leaves were shiny like poison ivy, and from which he had once seen a garter snake emerge, racing along the house wall and, Jonas imagined, working its way into the plumbing to wait inside a toilet. A dark green circle marked the spot in the lawn where Jonas had once buried a robin inside a cookie tin, and this spot, too, bothered him, since he remembered lining the tin with paper towel, when he should have used cloth napkins, or at least an old shirt. Did the robin hold it against him? Jonas, when mowing over it, said, “Sorry.”
Jonas’s house, which he had always imagined as a kind of fortress, was really nothing of the kind. Cracks fanned from corners of basement windows, like squints. The siding beneath his bedroom was missing two strips, a third hanging out, like a pouch. A brown dampness clung to the base of the chimney where weeds grew from between the bricks. What was worse, the house wore some of its organs on the outside, like the grey electric box that sat beneath the dining room window, with two grey wires climbing the wall; the electric meter visibly crouching behind the hydrangea bush, its head eyed with white dials. Jonas had tried to decipher them once, but it was like trying to read the stock page, as his father used to do, and which he sometimes attempted when no one was around. Anyone could read these dials, these vital signs. Anyone could cut these wires or smash these boxes, which made a slight thrumming noise, as did the electric wires which sloped towards the lawn, then disappeared into the ground, mysteriously skirted with weeds. As if to prove the house’s vulnerability, Jonas once saw a white truck park itself in their driveway, and a black-booted man emerge with a clipboard and a measuring stick, which he promptly stuck into the hole Jonas secretly believed might be a passageway to Narnia. The man looked at the stick, wrote something on the clipboard, then dropped the heavy lid back into place. Spotting Jonas mowing the lawn, he offered him a wave. When Jonas waved back, the man smiled, then saluted him.
If the house was less substantial than it was supposed to be, Jonas thought, then being inside was little different from being outside. He had had the same feeling during his last trip to the dentist, whose office used to be a house, a sootless fireplace in the waiting room, a business sign hanging from the front porch. Inside, a little sink swirled blue water into itself, endlessly, in a room where meals must have once been eaten, coats hung on pegs. Here Jonas bit down on a foam mouthpiece gelled with bright paste and later placed his chin against a fixed perch while a camera—the dental assistant kept calling it “Pinocchio”—peered into his jaw. All of these things happened in rooms where windows looked out onto a lawn, greener and more neatly manicured than Jonas’s own. Jonas felt the dentist’s fingers pressing against his lips and watched a lawn crew at work. Had someone once looked out this window, feeling the satisfaction of a freshly mowed lawn, as Jonas often did? His bedroom now seemed like the backside of the window where cut grass sometimes stuck, and where the sun lingered, on those evenings when Jonas raced it, picking up his pace. The basement no longer a strong vault, secret to the world, but a flimsy box sealed within the lawn. All the first-floor rooms—kitchen, dining, living, and family—a wall away from fat ladybugs climbing grey milkweed. Sometimes Jonas allowed himself to push the Toro into the garage while it was still running, letting it pass over oil stains and tire marks, the motor’s noise like the house was holding a note. Jonas, his mother mouthed, opening the kitchen door, and covering the phone with her hand. I’m on the phone. Jonas cut the engine, but the sound rang in his ears, and followed him into the house, where it accompanied the removal of his socks, from which shavings fell, bringing the lawn into his bedroom.
One day a neighbor stopped Jonas as he began edging the grass around the mailbox. “You’ve got to change your pattern,” he shouted. “It’s drying up your lawn.” He held out his hand and demonstrated a vertical line, then horizontal, diagonal, criss-cross. “Makes a world of difference.” Jonas considered this. For weeks he’d been mowing less— a gap in the log book—while the grass dried and drank sprinkler water like a colander beneath a running tap. So he began with the side yard, the monkey’s tail, and worked his way out into the back yard, which he now crossed diagonally. The new angle tugged his attention towards his neighbor’s yards, fences, houses, and patios. Beyond them, trees. Beyond the trees, roads with cars hugging corners, trucks air-braking. These places were closer than he had imagined, Jonas realized, his neighbor’s windows affording a full view of him pushing the Toro towards them. Certainly people had watched him mow without his knowing it. Certainly people had seen him filling the mower with gas. The stage that he had imagined facing in, in truth faced out. A magnified world could also be viewed from the opposite end of the binoculars. Jonas, sensing an audience, picked up his pace and neglected the grass beneath the deck.
