Read Online Lost in the Meritocracy (v5) by Walter Kirn - Free Book Online

tortured soul. I set down my cup of coffee as she said this, rose from the kitchen table, left the house, and walked a few blocks to the town hall, a two-story white clapboard building with a bell tower, where I’d performed in Tom Sawyer as an eleven-year-old. Its doors were locked, both front and back, but I was able to climb over a gate and mount a staircase on the building’s south side which led to a third door fitted with a window. I looked into the empty auditorium, at the century-old painted curtain in the front which depicted a summer river scene of paddlewheel steamboats sailing up a channel lined with leafy, overhanging trees. I thought back to the night I’d stood behind the curtain, huddling in the wings with Mr. Hulbertson as two of our class’s strongest boys tugged hand over hand on a stout rope, revealing, in one continuous, long motion, an audience made up of everyone I knew. Their faces were smiling, their postures straight and patient, and on their laps and in their hands were white paper programs printed with all of our names.
    Thrilling. Astonishing. It couldn’t help but be.
    Then my teacher touched one of my shoulders and I flinched.
    “Tonight,” he whispered to me and those around me as we peered out through our makeup at our town, “be proud of yourselves. That’s all I ask. Is everyone ready?”
    We touched our costumes, nodded.
    “Terrific,” he said. “Now go put on a show!”

M Y FATHER HAD A SPELL. HE QUIT 3M. HE DECIDED America’s future lay out West, moved the family to Phoenix in a U-Haul, flew off to Tampa to watch his own dad die, lost weight, lost his marbles, opened the Yellow Pages, turned to a page headed “Churches,” and called the Mormons. They came over right away. They came in the form of a pair of clean-cut missionaries with clip-on neckties and wrinkle-free white shirts. They asked us to kneel. They asked us to do a lot of things. There were also some things they asked us not to do. For me, the main one was to not touch myself. When we understood all the instructions, we were baptized. Then, a month later, my father bought some wine, which was one of the things he’d been asked not to do. His attitude was: “The Hell with it.” Ours was: “Oh, God, what’s going to happen now?” especially after my father lost his new job and called the Mayflower moving people. They parked a semitrailer in front of our house and loaded it full of our belongings, but my father couldn’t tell them where to take them. He couldn’t decide where we should move. He said he had a good feeling about Idaho, but he also retained a fondness for Minnesota. The Mayflower people grew impatient, padlocked the trailer that held our stuff, detached the cab, and drove the cab away.
    We lay on the floor of our empty house in sleeping bags while my father discussed his options. He only discussed them with himself. If someone else chimed in, he cut him off. The only times he left the house were to stand on the lawn and stare at the long trailer or walk around it in slow, deliberate circles, as though considering his options. My mother consoled herself with her Book of Mormon and quoted verses from it to my brother and me when we showed signs of panicking. Seeing her try to hold our family together, I realized I’d never appreciated her plight as the lonely bearer of aspirations for a more refined existence. When we’d first moved to Marine, she’d taught herself French in her spare time, progressing from a series of cassette tapes to translations of Peanuts comic books to, after no more than a year or so, works by Voltaire, Balzac, and Camus. She repeated the feat with Italian later on, without neglecting her housework or her nursing career. And her interests also ran to subjects other than literature. Now and then I’d catch her in an armchair reading a popular history of philosophy by Will and Ariel Durant, and once, stacked high on the floor beside her bed, I found a complete edition,