Jonathan Strong
SUPPERBURGER
To have a town house in town, in the center of things, has
heel, one of my desires, like the red brick town houses with black
trim and iron balconies on the street that curves down the hill to
the river. I think it would be nice to sit in a dark red Victorian
chair in the afternoons, reading, looking at the balconies across the
street as they catch the sunlight on their ironwork and the red of the
bricks deepens.
In
fact that is how it is now, that is where I am
sitting, but the house is not mine. I am on the second floor,
in
the
living room. The first floor has a dining room in front and a kitchen
in back. I caught sight of a bowl of peaches on the dining table
when I was let in and sent directly upstairs. The back room on the
second floor seems to be a study, or perhaps a music room. Arthur
Supperburger owns the house, and he is a composer. I am just a boy,
or a kid, as I like to say. Boy sounds round and soft, but kid is a
little more straight up and down, a little harder, perhaps a little
less likely to grow old. It includes a n attitude, a free way of knowing
people, a sense of unattachment.
If
I am a kid, I can come here
for supper a couple of times, for a few weeks, and then go off for a
while.
It
would be my privilege.
If
I am a boy, I have to report,
I have to let them know what I am doing so they can watch over
me. When I grow up, and I do not think I will have to for a
while because people still mistake me for fifteen and I am already
eighteen and I imagine it will go on like that for some time and
perhaps when I am twenty-six they will think I am twenty, but when
I do grow up I will have to come to supper only if I am prepared
to make something of it, to keep being friends with the people who
ask me, to bear the responsibilities and maybe ask them to supper
