His new teacher’s rule was stupid, Art thought. Making him print when he had already begun using cursive last year in kindergarten. This was going backwards. But she said everyone in the class was printing, that’s what first graders did in this school, so he had to print too. He was tempted to ignore her.

Lots of the world did dumb things, he learned from his father. For instance, that man with the long bald head, Adlai Stevenson, stood up for Alger Hiss even though anybody could see Hiss was a Communist. Art’s father explained it after dinner one night: people who voted for Stevenson were Communists at heart, he said, or else fools, "the type that can’t find their own rear end when they’re sitting on it." Art’s mother argued with that, saying Stevenson was "just as good an American" as Eisenhower. Dad clamped down on his pipe stem, puffing out his pale upper lip with its bristly dark stubble, while Mom clattered the dishes.

Art didn’t have much idea of what a Communist might be, but he understood that the Russians might drop an atom bomb any minute and the Chinese might run all over Korea shooting soldiers dead and then come to Rhode Island to shoot regular people. Before the family moved here for Dad to teach at the university, he had made radar for planes in Korea, plus he’d fought Japs in World War II, so Art figured he knew when people were being dumb about enemies.

Then it turned out there was a stupid thing in their own house—the furnace pipe. Art’s family had bought the house in the summer. It had two stories and a porch and a tree in front and a backyard big enough for the swing set Mom said they might get someday. But when the weather grew cold and the furnace came on, a terrible banging started. Art’s mother panicked. She ran to the thing on the wall where you set the temperature and she stared at it and wiggled it and then opened the basement door and peered down the steps. When Art’s father came home, she was telling him about it before he took off his suit jacket or put down his briefcase, which made him take a sharp breath through his nose.

"The thing on the wall?" he said. "You mean the thermostat?"

"Yes, it scared us when the—it was so dark all day and the weather report said it’s getting chilly tonight and we’ve never spent a winter this far north so I wanted to make sure the—but the banging was—I thought it’d shake the house apart!"

"There’s nothing in the furnace that should bang."

"Art can tell you, he heard it too. I switched it off right away, it sounded ready to explode!"

Art saw the crease in his father’s forehead, the bending of the eyebrows and the way a tooth caught the bottom lip. Art kept silent at first, but when Dad looked at him sideways he blurted, "It was loud, real loud."

Dad sighed. He threw his jacket on the couch, tugged his necktie loose, and ignoring both of them, walked slowly to the thing on the wall. "You pushed this to ‘On,’" he said over his shoulder. "That was all you did."

"Yes," Mom answered.

Dad moved the switch. From below they heard a whooshing sound. Dad listened a minute and ran his tongue across his lips. Then he lifted his shoulders and made a little outward gesture with his hands.

"That’s not the noise," Mom said. "It was worse."

Dad passed one hand through his thinning hair, then picked up his suit jacket and briefcase and tramped up the stairs. Art was embarrassed; clearly Dad thought they didn’t know what they were talking about. Being an engineer, Dad understood just about everything.

Art tried to play with a plastic motorcycle policeman on the kitchen floor while his mother set the dinner table. About five minutes later, the banging started.

Utensils crashed from Mom’s hands onto the table. She put one palm on the side of her face, squeezing down on the eyelid. But in a few seconds she straightened her shoulders and blinked, and she picked up the knives and forks and went on laying them out like nothing was happening.

Wham! Crack! Grrrr-rick! went the noise. Art could feel the floor shake, and his stomach turned upside down. His glasses, which he had worn for a year now, bounced on his nose. He stared at the linoleum wondering how fast they all would die.

Feet thumped on the stairs; from under the table Art saw legs thrusting forward. The basement door scrawked open, the feet stamped down, and metal whanged and clanked. In a minute the curses came echoing up. Jesus H. Ch-christ! Sonofabitchin idiots!

Art’s mother finished with the knives and forks and set a bowl of mashed potatoes and a plate of meat on the table. She was moving in jerks like Howdy Doody and his puppet pals on TV. "Go wash your hands," she said to Art through taut lips, "we’ll eat as soon as your father’s ready. If we don’t go up in smoke."

Art skittered to the bathroom, and when he returned his father was washing up at the sink, splattering soapy water and tossing aggravated words over his shoulder. "You know what they did? The jackasses?"

"Which jackasses?" Mom asked, keeping her voice flat.

Dad’s head shuddered violently. "The ones that installed the ra-radiators! Whenever they switched from coal to oil. They ran one of the pipes right through a joist!"

"Uh-huh," Mom said.

"So when the hot water starts up and the pipes expand and shift around a little, this one pipe cracks into the wood and shakes the whole damn house. The imbeciles! I can widen the hole but you shouldn’t do that to a joist, it’s supporting the floor. You’d think they’d know better. Some people are so stupid it’s hard to believe."

Dad dried his hands on the towel that Mom said was only for dishes, and then, taking some deep breaths, sat down at the table and helped himself to meat and potatoes. Mom passed him the lima beans, and he took a small spoonful of those as well. Mom put some of each on Art’s plate, and meanwhile the cracking and banging continued, though it tapered off as Art felt warm air rising from the radiator behind him.

"It’s not as loud now," Mom said.

"Yeah, once the pipe has a steady flow, it shouldn’t vibrate so much." Dad let out a growly sigh.

"I was right that the noise wasn’t correct, then. That something was wrong."

"There’s nothing wrong with the furnace, it’s the pipe. It’s just a giant nuisance. Which I have more than enough of in my department." Dad rolled his shoulders before stabbing again with his fork. "This is decent beef," he added.

As the tension eased, Art managed to chew a lima bean. Nothing else made Dad angry that night, and after dinner they watched I Love Lucy on the television Dad had built for them. Sitting close to the set because of his nearsightedness, Art turned around during a commercial to see his parents cuddling on the couch.

In spite of the stupid thing in the basement, life had generally been calm in this house—no times like before when the arguments got loud and Dad smashed furniture. One day recently (the same day she talked about putting the swing set in the backyard), Mom had said, "You know, Art, I think we can be happy here. University life agrees with your father. And can you see me as a faculty wife, holding tea parties?" Grinning, she pinched finger and thumb together like she was holding a tiny cup. "I won’t tell the snooty types I dropped out to get married."

Though Art grinned as well, his insides twitched; his image of a tea party came from a condensed version of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland that Mom had read aloud to him. He remembered crazy animals playing senseless games at a table full of dirty dishes, plus Alice stretched way out of shape and a queen with a flat body like a playing card who yelled "Off with her head!"

The Saturday after the furnace problem, the weather turned warm again and Dad said after breakfast, "Artie, you want to work on your bike today?" The bike was a two-wheeler he’d received for his birthday in August. Blue and white with streamers on the handlebars, it was beautiful and also scary, since he had no idea how to balance on it. The first afternoon he tried, with his mother watching, he couldn’t get in the saddle without tipping over. Twice his glasses fell off. Since then, the bike had stayed in the storage shed in the backyard, but now Dad announced, "If you’re having trouble riding, we can get you some training wheels."

Though apprehensive—what did it mean to be trained with wheels?—Art got in the car with Dad and rode to a toy store jammed with bicycles of all sizes. Dad’s long forehead (not quite as long as Adlai Stevenson’s) shone in the overhead lights as he bent to search the lower shelves. Black hair curled from under his shirt cuffs. At last he located a pair of small wheels attached to metal posts.

"Where do those go?" Art asked, picturing the posts strapped to his legs.

"They bolt to the back wheel and keep you from tipping over."

"Oh," said Art, concealing his relief.

On the way home Art got up on one knee to peek at the contraptions in the back seat, imagining how he would ride with them. As he braced a hand on the car door for balance, Dad said, "Watch out! Don’t push that handle down!"

Art jerked his hand away. "I’m not!"

"OK, fine. Just be careful, it’s a stupid design, these old De Sotos. Good car otherwise, but the door shouldn’t open when you push down. People have a tendency to lean on doors. Your mother fell out once."

"Mom? Fell out?"

"Before you were born. We were driving back from your grandparents’ late one night and she went to sleep with her arm against that door, and all at once she was gone. We were going just 10, 15 miles an hour, starting up after a red light, so she wasn’t hurt much. Bumped head, a few scrapes. Good thing I noticed the door flapping," his father grinned. "She was so quiet that night I could’ve got all the way home before I missed her."

Art moved away from the door and sat erect, hands at his sides. He pictured his mother suspended in the air before the impact, then waking to the mucky smell of a dark road, abandoned as the car vanished round a curve.

It was the car’s fault—the handle was stupid. But Mom understood how it worked and still she got hurt. She had a "tendency" to lean on doors. It was a creepy story, not quite believable but frightening, like the Wonderland tale.

But soon they were home, where Dad fetched the bike from the shed and brought out his tools and put on the extra wheels without getting mad, muttering only once about a sticky bolt. When the bike was ready, Art started out slow with Dad’s grip strong on his shoulder. Suddenly the riding was easy. Dad released him, yelling, "Attaway, Artie, you got it, boy!" and Art was rolling down the sidewalk on his own, proud and tall.

A few days later, after school, Art was invited to Tom Garibaldi’s house, on the same block of a parallel street. Art rode his new bike over, with Mom walking behind. "I’m making a stew tonight," Mom said, "and I can’t leave the stove on while I come after you," so they arranged that Art would ride home alone at 5 o’clock. When Mom explained the plan to Tom’s mother, she said "Sure," as if Tom did such things all the time.

Tom’s house had strange furniture, odd smells and a little sister who toddled clumsily into the middle of whatever game they were playing. Nevertheless, Art had a good time, eating so many cookies that he knew he had broken the rule about spoiling his dinner.

Happy and full, he left with the streamers on his handlebars curling in the breeze and his glasses fogging in the cold. Tom waved goodbye from the door. Later, Art guessed it must have been right then he made a mistake, turning the wrong way at the sidewalk, because soon he realized that the houses looked unfamiliar—in fact, some of the buildings were stores he’d never noticed before. He turned around and pedaled the other way but couldn’t identify Tom’s house in the dimming light, and he got confused about how the streets connected and how many corners there were. His brain went panicky blank as he tried first one way and then the other.

His eyes teared from the breeze, and when he tried to wipe them he bumped his glasses askew. He stopped and planted his toes on the ground, dried his eyes, readjusted the earpieces. His heart was racing. The street and the houses and the parked cars and the weak sun blotted by purple-gray clouds looked fake, like they were painted on a sheet of plastic.

Art held his breath and began to pedal again. Then he choked and got red in the face. He was crying—no, he refused to cry, it was disgraceful. He pedaled, and in the blur of his watery vision searched for something, anything that signaled home. He thought of how Mom fell out of the car and Dad just happened to notice she was missing. How soon would somebody notice Art wasn’t there?

At the busy intersection near the stores a policeman directed traffic. After passing by three times, Art imagined himself riding all night until everyone in the city went to bed and the shadows wiggling behind the trees turned into cruel soldiers who, at the evil Queen’s command, would throw him in a pit with worms and spiders. So he pushed his bike out in the crosswalk, remembering a story Mom had read him about a helpful policeman.

All Art did was give his street name and number and ask for directions, but the policeman immediately grabbed Art’s shoulder and steered him back to the sidewalk. The man’s dark blue uniform was rough, his face blotchy white and red, his hand heavier than Dad’s. He herded Art over to the police car, where he lifted the bike into the back seat and boosted Art himself (who didn’t need such assistance) into the front and drove around three corners before stopping in front of Art’s house.

Art felt like a criminal, and to make matters worse, the officer pushed the bike up the walk and onto the porch, where he rang the bell and waited for Art’s mother to appear. Then the policeman claimed gruffly that this "little boy" had been "wandering in the middle of the street," which wasn’t true, since Art had left the sidewalk only to ask directions. He thought his mother believed the policeman, which was humiliating. "Oh, I’m sorry, Officer," Mom said in a fast low voice, blinking behind her glasses. "I thought he knew his way home, he should have known, he didn’t have to cross a street at all! He walks home from school every day! I’m not a negligent mother, I assure you. Art, how could you possibly get lost?"

Art slunk to his room, where he sat in a tight bundle on his bed. He’d been stupid, stupid, stupid, he knew. Worse than Mom leaning on the door handle. She’d been asleep at the time but he had no such excuse. He figured his father would hear about his blunder and see that Art was so useless even training wheels didn’t help. Art would be classed with the furnace idiots, the Communist dopes, the people who made De Soto door handles—all the dumbbells who ought to be despised. When the side door clapped, meaning Dad had come in from the garage, Art buried his face in his pillow.

But when Mom called Art to dinner, Dad was already talking about Eisenhower and Stevenson and stabbing at onions in the stew. Art slid silently into his chair. For the whole meal, nothing was said about the bike or Tom’s house or the policeman. While Art fidgeted, Mom kept her eyes on her plate as if she too had something to hide.

The next day Art discovered his bike on the porch, where the policeman had leaned it against the wall. Quietly Art pushed it around the side of the house, through the gate and into the shed in back. He never wanted to see it again.

At school he took care to print his lessons, not provoke the teacher with cursive. As the class did addition problems, he checked his answers twice, even though he hadn’t missed one yet. When he wrote an 8 clumsily (he had trouble getting the loops balanced), he erased every speck and did it over, perfectly.

He had his own tendencies, he knew now, but if he worked really hard he might cover them up.