Chapter 9

By late afternoon the moving truck was gone.

It left tire marks in the gravel, several empty furniture pads folded near the garage, and a house that looked much as it had that morning except that some of Focus Man's family's possessions were now inside it.

The adults had spent the day carrying boxes, directing furniture, opening cupboards, deciding where things belonged. Focus Man had helped where he was asked, though most of the important decisions seemed to require knowledge he didn't possess. He carried lamps and boxes of books. He brought things in from the car. Once he carried a carton into the wrong bedroom and had to carry it back out again.

Mostly he watched the merger taking place.

The wedding had been simple by comparison.

At the wedding, people had stood in a room and said certain words, and when the words were finished his mother had a husband and Focus Man had a stepfather and six additional brothers and sisters.

The house was where the arithmetic became real.

He stood for a while in the front yard holding a small box of things he had kept with him rather than putting on the truck. There was a baseball glove inside, a few books, a flashlight, and several objects whose importance would have been difficult to explain to anyone else. Boys accumulated such things without needing reasons. A stone picked up somewhere. A pocketknife. Something traded with a friend and therefore valuable long after anyone remembered what had been traded for it.

He carried the box inside.

The first thing he noticed was the noise.

His old house had never seemed especially quiet while he was living in it. There had been three children, after all, and three children were capable of producing enough sound. But this house seemed to contain voices everywhere.

Someone was upstairs.

Someone else called from the hallway.

A radio played in the kitchen. A cabinet door closed. One of the younger children ran through the room for reasons that appeared urgent to the child and irrelevant to everyone else. Two people were talking in the dining room while another conversation passed directly through it.

Focus Man stood inside the front door listening.

There were a lot of them.

That was the simplest fact of the new family.

His stepfather's six children ranged from nearly grown to still quite young. The oldest had already begun moving toward adult lives of their own. Two of the others were teenagers, occupying that territory where children were old enough to have considerable independence but not always enough judgment to use it well. Then came the younger ones, including the girl close to Focus Man's own age.

His own brother and sister were somewhere in the house too.

nine children altogether.

He tried counting them once.

Not because he doubted the number.

It simply seemed worth confirming.

The older children already knew the house in ways he didn't. They knew which doors stuck and which light switches controlled which lights. They knew where the glasses were kept and which bathroom was likely to be occupied in the morning. They moved through the rooms without thinking about where they were going.

Focus Man had to think about everything.

His bedroom contained furniture now, some familiar and some not. He put his small box on the bed and began arranging his possessions. The baseball glove went on a shelf. The books beside it. He moved them once, decided the first arrangement had been better, and moved them back.

That helped.

A room became less strange once your things were in it.

He went looking for the bathroom and opened the wrong door.

A girl was inside putting things into a closet.

They looked at one another.

"Bathroom?"

"Other door."

"Thanks."

She returned to what she was doing.

This, apparently, was how becoming siblings began.

By dinnertime, enough boxes had been opened that someone could find plates.

The table impressed him.

It had to.

A family of eleven could not eat around an ordinary table without either considerable engineering or several people waiting their turn. This one seemed built for the purpose, though even so chairs had to be added.

Focus Man found a place and sat down.

Then wondered whether it was someone else's place.

Nobody objected.

That was useful information.

Food began moving around the table.

There was no orderly progression. A bowl traveled in one direction while a plate went the other. Someone asked for something that had just passed him. One of the younger children wanted more of whatever was at the opposite end. Two conversations began at once, then a third joined them without displacing either.

Focus Man listened.

The family already possessed a history he hadn't lived.

Names appeared in conversation without explanation. Someone mentioned a neighbor Focus Man didn't know. One of the older children referred to something that had happened at school. A joke produced laughter from half the table while the other half seemed not to understand it.

Then his mother said something about their old neighborhood, and his brother answered.

For a moment the unfamiliarity changed sides.

Now several people at the table didn't know what they were talking about.

Focus Man noticed this.

Perhaps everybody at that table was learning something.

There were no speeches about becoming a family. Nobody proposed rules for how eight children who had grown up in two different households should now relate to one another. The adults did not ask them to hold hands and promise to love their new siblings.

They ate dinner.

That was probably better.

Someone wanted the last roll.

Focus Man had been wondering about the last roll.

In his old family there were three children, and certain understandings had developed over time concerning scarce food. In a family with nine children, he suspected the rules might be different.

He watched.

One of the teenagers took it.

Apparently that was the rule.

Focus Man filed this away for future reference.

After dinner there were dishes. Considerably more dishes than he was accustomed to seeing after a meal.

People dispersed through the house. The older children disappeared first. Someone turned the television on. A disagreement arose over what to watch, though it never became much of a disagreement. One of the younger children was told to get ready for bed and responded by doing several things unrelated to getting ready for bed.

The house seemed to have absorbed all of them remarkably quickly.

Focus Man had expected something more difficult.

He wasn't sure what.

Perhaps he had imagined there would be a moment when he would feel himself officially becoming part of this family. Something would happen that made the arrangement clear.

Nothing did.

His new siblings treated him mostly as children treat another child who has suddenly become part of the household. They spoke to him when there was something to say. They ignored him when there wasn't. Nobody seemed particularly interested in whether he belonged.

He simply did.

That night, after the younger children had gone to bed and the older ones had become quieter, Focus Man returned to his room.

His possessions looked better now.

The baseball glove on the shelf was still his baseball glove. The books had not changed because they were in a different house. His clothes were in drawers. His flashlight was beside the bed.

He lay down.

The house sounded different from his old one.

That would take some getting used to.

Footsteps crossed the hallway. Water ran somewhere in the plumbing. A door opened and closed. He heard laughter farther down the hall, then another voice telling somebody to be quiet.

Focus Man smiled in the darkness.

Eventually the house settled.

Morning brought another set of discoveries.

Breakfast for eleven people required more milk than seemed reasonable.

The bathroom mattered more than he had anticipated.

Someone had used a towel he thought was his, although establishing ownership of towels in the new household appeared likely to be difficult. He opened a cupboard looking for cereal bowls and found drinking glasses instead.

Nobody regarded any of these things as problems.

By the second morning, he knew which door was the bathroom.

By the third, he knew where the cereal bowls were.

The last roll remained uncertain.

Years later, Focus Man would remember very little about those first days beyond impressions: the large table, the voices, the strange bedroom gradually becoming his room. The blended family itself would continue beyond those days, of course. The children would grow. The oldest two would become doctors. The teenagers would occasionally provide the adults with reasons to worry. Everyone would gradually acquire separate lives.

But that wasn't what he remembered about moving in.

He remembered how little ceremony there had been.

At twelve, he had expected that entering another family ought to feel more consequential than it did. Instead there were boxes to unpack and names to remember and a bathroom to locate before somebody else got there first.

Perhaps that was why the arrangement worked as well as it did.

Nobody seemed to spend much time deciding whether they were a family.

They were too busy living in the same house.