Dangerous Games
In the middle of eating his bowl of cereal with a banana sliced on top, Bill Paine looked over at the shelf where he had left Lowell’s glove after giving it a treatment with saddle soap last night. It wasn’t there. A feeling of extreme annoyance came over him, and he paused for a moment to compose himself before asking Becky, “Where’s the glove I treated last night?” Despite the pause his voice still betrayed his exasperation.
Becky looked at him fixedly from where she was kneeling in front of the dishwasher. “I put it in the breezeway.”
Without responding he went back to his cereal and the sports page in front of him. The Red Sox had lost yesterday on an error in the eighth inning, and he read a column about that until his cereal was finished. Getting up and bringing his bowl to the sink, he said, “I wish you told me. If you’d left before me, how would I know where it was?”
Becky, calculating the placement of the dishes in the full, if not overfull, dishwasher, did not answer at first. She took two smaller plates from the bottom rack and placed them in the top between coffee cups. “Hand me your dishes, would you?” she asked, then placed the bowl in the bottom and his glass on top. She stood and reached for the soap. “It’s hanging on the hook by the door right next to your glove. You couldn’t miss it.”
Bill nodded on his way to the downstairs bathroom to brush his teeth. He felt angry and misused, and even angrier with himself for feeling this way. As he brushed his teeth rather savagely, he thought about his life as the father of two children and the husband of his college sweetheart. He didn’t know what Becky expected of him. She seemed content with his providing the money that bought the clothes, shelter, food and entertainment for the two boys. She was glad when he helped around the house or played with the boys, but she didn’t encourage these things; she didn’t ask him for anything, in fact. It was as if all that was required of him had already been accomplished in providing the seed that led to the boys’ births. Lowell, the eager uncle, now envies him, and in a role reversal that confuses Bill, looks upon his younger brother as a model. He tells Bill in so many words that he is a lucky man who has everything that life can bestow. Did he feel lucky? Did he have everything? He was an accountant, not a philosopher: he feels empty, dissatisfied, superfluous. He feels cheated. He in turn envies Lowell his freedom. Worse still, he feels guilty because he feels Lowell’s point of view should be right. He feels he should be happy. Everyone except him, it seems, thinks that he is lucky.
He drove to work in Portland with Darren Bolt, alternating weeks as driver and passenger. Darren, who was recently divorced, began talking about it just a few weeks ago after months of stoic silence. “We dug ourselves into a hole until we found ourselves buried in hatred. We became strangers to each other,” he said, looking straight ahead at the road and speaking in a low voice that sometimes was hard to hear over the noise of the traffic. “It was probably my fault. I was too involved in work, but the other thing I see is that we fell in love too early—before we were fully ourselves, you see. Becky was your college sweetheart too, so I know early love is not always bad, but it was for us.”
Bill had listened to this account of the death of a marriage with an uneasiness he still felt. Becky was the only girl he had ever loved. In high school he had some girlfriends but nothing that ever approached the way he felt for Becky. Darren’s belief that he and Becky were different from him and his divorced wife had the opposite effect, for Bill began wondering if he and Becky also had fallen in love before they fully became the people they were. He wondered if they were growing apart because they were becoming their real selves. His arguments with himself that they had simply hit a dead spot in their life together, that Becky was exhausted from being with the two boys twenty-four hours a day, and that their love was strong enough to withstand transitory misunderstandings were like a burr in his mind that the slightest thing (such as the misplaced glove) could rub into an open sore.
When he returned to the kitchen, Becky was going over her shopping list for the cookout later today and had a question for him. “Does your mother like rosé wine? We have some, but I’ve only seen her drink white.”
“I don’t think she cares. She only drinks one glass to be polite.”
“But still it might be that she only likes white wine.”
He sat down and began lacing his sneakers. Lowell should be arriving any minute.
“Well?” she asked.
“As I said, she doesn’t really care.”
“Is anything wrong?”
He looked up from lacing his sneakers to see her looking at him. Her mouth was set determinedly, but her eyes seemed puzzled, even hurt. It was her mouth he responded to, however. “No,” he said in an airy tone that suggested that something was indeed wrong, but in the meantime Johnny, who was in the living room watching a children’s show on public television while his brother slept, called, and she went to him instantly.
He had spilled his orange juice on the rug, and for five minutes Becky busied herself with the crisis, cleaning up the spill and lecturing their son on being more careful. Bill’s impression was that she had totally forgotten he was in the house. “You have to hold the glass with both hands,” he heard her say. “Your hands aren’t big enough to hold it with one.” She was not scolding him or yelling at him—she didn’t believe in those techniques—she was, rather, explaining patiently as if he were a miniature adult.
Bill went down to the basement to collect a couple of bats and some new softballs. By the time he returned to the kitchen Lowell was just driving into the yard. Instantly his spirits lifted. A whole morning of having fun playing softball lay before him, the kind of fun that concentrated the mind so that he didn’t have to think about any slight, any misunderstandings, any painful thing.
He went to the door and shouted a greeting to his brother. Hearing him, Becky came out wearing the gracious, lady-of-the-manor smile she always had for any guest or family member who paid them a visit. “Good morning, Lowell. Before you go, Johnny has something to show you.” Johnny peeped out from behind her as she spoke and shyly stepped forward. He was hiding something behind his back.
Lowell walked over to the porch. “What have you got there, tiger? Are you going to show me?”
Johnny grinned. “It’s your picture, Uncle Lowell. I drew it.” He handed the sheet of paper to Lowell.
It showed an oval face with a happy smile and a shock of dark hair on a disproportionately small body wearing a red T-shirt and blue jeans. A tree and a house were in the background below a blue sky and a yellow circle representing the sun. Johnny had scrawled his name in the lower right corner in the way his mother had taught him, and below that in Becky’s neat handwriting was written, “picture of Lowell by John Paine, age 4.”
“Is this a gift for me, Johnny?”
“If you want.” The artist smiled shyly, still clinging to his mother’s leg.
“I do. I’m honored and I like it very much.”
Bill tousled Johnny’s blond hair and grinned as widely as his son. “Keep an eye on your mother, partner. Me and Uncle Lowell have got to go now.”
Wasn’t this it? His dream, his own boy, blue skies? He tried to make the joy he was feeling for softball channel into his other more real life with his family, but the kiss he gave to Becky was perfunctory. They drove away talking about Johnny and the game while he crammed Becky into a dark corner to be considered later. Lowell noticed nothing.
The plan was for them to get to the field early to claim it before the rest of the guys showed up half an hour later. There were two diamonds in the park—one for city league night games and one used by the middle school. The city league park had lights, two small stands holding about seventy people each, a backstop, and a well maintained infield; the other diamond, about three hundred yards away on the opposite side of the field, had no amenities whatsoever. It was used by the kids at recess and often was in very bad shape that could cause ground balls to take erratic h
ops. Both Bill and Lowell realized that the odds were against them getting the good diamond since people were known to claim it as early as six o’clock, and it was sometimes used for league games postponed because of rain and so forth. A holiday Monday upped the odds slightly, but when they arrived they saw the good field was already claimed by what appeared to be a large group, some of whom were in uniform. They drove by slowly to see if the early comers could be challenged to a game, but there were clearly two teams warming up. So it was the secondary diamond for them. They turned left on North Street and drove up to the parking lot of Wentworth Middle School. The school was one of those long and low one-story buildings reflecting the architectural taste of the 1950’s and 1960’s. Both Bill and Lowell had gone through grades five through eight here, and neither had fond memories of those years. The ugliness of the architecture matched the sad ugliness of their home life, for some of those years were the times of economic hardship and chaos. Bill’s father had long deserted them just as Lowell’s father had before him, and frequently the electricity would be turned off, food would sometimes be scarce, and some of their classmates treated them with contempt. But even then playing baseball on that field had made Bill forget every extraneous thing and lose himself in the game. What was more beautiful than a baseball field? He’d asked that before, and someone answered that the body of a beautiful woman was. Yes, but that was a different kind of beauty. Baseball belonged to the part of him that gave continuity to his life. Always it was a refuge, a place where time stood still. Both Lowell and he had played Little League, and both were on the Courtney Academy baseball team, though of course not at the same time and Lowell had been a bench warmer only getting into games with lopsided scores whereas he was a four-year starter at shortstop. After high school Bill continued playing softball, not in the night league but as today in spontaneous pickup games. Thus it was with an experienced eye that he examined the infield. Even though it was not maintained as well as the other diamond, it was in reasonably good condition, and the outfield grass was the same as the other field and mowed at the same time. Sometimes when he had played here before the game would be interrupted by a long ball rolling into their playing field from the other game. If it went this far it was usually a home run, so a player would simply retrieve it and toss it back to the other outfielders. That would be the only interference, and it was rare. Cars from North Street were far enough away not to distract one. And the weather today was perfect—the sky was almost totally blue with only a few wispy clouds lurking near the eastern horizon where five miles away the North Atlantic lay. A slight breeze was welcome on a day prematurely hot with summer’s promise.
Dew still glistening on the grass wherever shadows lay made his socks damp as they walked about surveying the field. The dirt of the infield had a strong earthy smell that he liked. They started tossing a ball back and forth to warm up. Lowell said, “This is great,” to which he smiled and nodded in wordless acknowledgment. The other guys were expected before nine. There were only going to be five, maybe six, on a side, so they planned to make right field foul territory. But then a pickup truck came into the parking lot and two women got out. They looked over to see Lowell and him but affected to be indifferent.
One was a very tall woman with a thin, angular face and stringy, nondescript blond hair, and the other was a heavyset woman, darker in complexion. They gathered an equipment bag from the back of the pickup and slowly walked over to them.
The short stocky one had a face scarred by acne. She had short brown hair, so short it was more like a man’s haircut, and a face already worn, though Bill vaguely remembered her from high school. It looked as if she drank a lot, and yet her face wasn’t hard. There was a twinkle in her blue eyes and a certain devil-may-care way she carried herself.
“Good morning,” Lowell said politely. “I’m Lowell Edgecomb and this is my brother Bill Paine.”
“Hi, guys,” the short one said. “Nice day. I’m Tara Wright and this here”—she pointed with her thumb to her tall friend—“is Meg Sirois. We’ve come to play softball. We could use this diamond. Eight others are coming soon. I hope there’s no problem.”
Bill exchanged a glance with Lowell, who was smiling bemusedly at the staccato way the stocky woman had fired off her informational volley. “There might be. We have the same plan. We’re expecting about the same number of guys to show up any minute.”
“Oh, shit. There is a problem then.” She looked at her companion, who rolled her eyes. “You’ve got dibs, of course, but…perhaps we could play you. That is, if you guys are any good.” She said this more to herself, as if she were thinking out loud. But before they could say anything, she looked at them through narrowed eyes and asked peremptorily, “Well, you guys any good, or are you weekend wonders?” Despite her belligerent words, she grinned as she asked the question.
Bill exchanged another glance with Lowell, who was now grinning broadly. Here was a girl with attitude, his grin said. He shrugged. “We’re okay. We can play the game.”
“We play fast-pitch. We throw peas, so if you guys are looking for humpbacked camels, we ain’t for you.”
“Who’s your pitcher?” Lowell asked.
Tara turned and regarded him for a moment. Her eyes narrowed. “Who’s our pitcher?” She broke into a grin. “That would be me. I don’t want to psyche you, but you’d be facing me.”
Lowell returned her grin. “You’ve already psyched us, but we’re willing to give it a go. Suppose we have a test while we’re waiting for the others to come. How about pitching some batting practice to us?’
She agreed, and after warming up for a few minutes she told Lowell she was ready. Bill went into the outfield and Meg, who still hadn’t said a word to them, stood fifteen feet behind home plate to return the balls. Lowell’s first efforts were pretty ineffective—he missed several and fouled off a few more before he got his timing down. Then he started putting the ball in play, some good ground balls and some line drives hit with authority. “I’ll have to keep my eye on you, Lowell,” Tara said in a friendly tone that showed he had earned her respect, then threw him a change-up that completely fooled him just to let him know she wasn’t going to be pitching batting practice during the game.
Bill took his turn but only got four or five pitches to swing at before three cars pulled into the parking lot. He hit everything she threw but not very effectively. He popped up her riser and beat her drop pitch into the ground. Today’s game was going to be a challenge.
The guys came over with puzzled looks on their faces. Who are these two women and what are they doing here? their facial expressions asked.
“Change of plans, boys. We’re going to play a women’s fast pitch team,” Bill said, then added after their faces expressed doubt, “I think it will be interesting.”
Most of the guys who played in these games were townies, classmates of Bill’s who went into the trades or factories after high school. Bill was the only one who went to college. They drank a lot, raised hell, sometimes got into trouble with the law for driving under the influence, disorderly conduct, drug use, or wrecking cars. Two of them, Pat Williams and Denny Genier, had been buddies since grade school. They were good carpenters and last winter had finished Bill’s basement for him. Eddie Du Bois was a plumber’s assistant and a jovial soul who was the class clown at Courtney Academy. His face bore a remarkable similarity to a squirrel’s. He was also a good ballplayer who played the game the way Bill liked to—seriously but with grace. So did most of the other guys, but he was a bit worried about two of them. Bob Hanrahan and Ralph Johnson he didn’t particularly like. There’s a way to play hard and intensely without arrogance or ego where it was really true that it wasn’t winning or losing but how you played the game that was important, but these two had never learned that. They hated losing and hated even more those who beat them. If they started macho posturing and sexist ragging of the women, trouble was going to occur. He’d only known Tara for half an hour, but he already knew
she wasn’t going to take any crap. He and the others would have to be ready to quiet Bob and Ralph if they started down that trail. But the prospect of having a challenging and interesting game was too pleasant to let him dwell too long on any problems that might occur. With a feeling of elation, he grabbed a bat and started hitting fungoes to the team.
Not long after they started warming up, a car drove into the parking lot, but nobody got out. The car waited there a few minutes before it was joined by two others, and then all the women emerged from their vehicles and gathered together. Tara went over and talked to them for a while. The conversation grew animated and sometimes voices were raised, though he could not hear the words. Obviously, though, some of them objected to playing men. But Tara prevailed, for in five minutes all of them walked over to the infield with their gloves and equipment. Bill was pleased to see that they had even brought canvas bases. Two of them went around the infield and attached them to the pipes buried in the ground at first, second, and third bases.
He recognized some of them. They were freshmen or sophomores when he was an upperclassman at C.A. The black woman, he recalled, worked with his mother one summer as a waitress. He even remembered giving her a ride home with his mother once, but the exact occasion and her name he couldn’t recall. Phoebe Waite was the sister of one of his friends. He remembered she was a tomboy and would play baseball with them. He also recognized some others simply as faces he’d seen some time or other in town or in high school and recalled that at least some of them were on the C.A. softball team that won two state championships several years back. Belatedly he remembered that Tara Wright was on that team. She was much heavier now and looked older than her years. He suspected she and some of the other women lived lives not much different from the hell-raising life of some of his teammates.
Feeling friendly and glad to be having a much more interesting game than he anticipated, he went over and chatted with them for a while as they got their equipment out and got ready to warm up. He asked Phoebe Waite about her brother, who was a lifer in the Navy, and said hello to the black woman. She smiled shyly and seemed to recognize him but didn’t volunteer any information. Then he went out to the diamond to field fungoes at shortstop. After ten minutes they went out to right field while the women had infield practice. Between shagging flies and fielding ground balls, all the men would steal glances at the women, trying to gauge their level of skill. Bill and Lowell told them that Tara was a good pitcher, but they didn’t know about the rest of the team. Pretty quickly, though, they saw that they were going to have their work cut out for them.
“They don’t look too bad,” someone said, unconsciously using litotes. Bill had a college English teacher who drilled that figure of speech into his head, and he noticed its use all the time.
“Yeah,” Eddie said, “I’ve seen some of these women play before. They are pretty good.”
Bill nodded. “They’re athletes. You can see that.”
Bob Hanrahan spat and said, “None of them throw like girls, that’s for sure.”
“Times change,” Eddie replied. “No one throws like a girl anymore.”
“Hey, Tara,” Bill yelled, “the guys think you all look pretty good. Hope you’ll go easy on us.”
Tara looked over and grinned. “We can be merciful,” she said, then made a windmill windup and threw a pea to the catcher for their benefit.
Some of the guys yelled back the usual stuff: “Was that your change-up?” “I thought we weren’t going to play slow-pitch.”
One of the women was hitting fungoes to the outfielders. They watched a latecomer, a husband of one of the woman, dropping easy fly balls.
“You know what?” Pat said. “The worst guy on their team is the guy. What’s he doing playing with them, anyways?”
“Every American thinks he can play softball,” someone else said.
They watched the infielders gobble up everything hit to them, then throw bullets to first base that made a pop sound hitting the glove.
“What’s the story? Have they played men before?”
“Christ, I don’t know. I think they could play the Red Sox,” Eddie said.
The one named Marilyn came over to retrieve a ball and overheard the question and answer. Bill had noticed her watching him closely awhile ago. He liked the way she carried herself. She was both very feminine and self-confidently an athlete at the same time. She wore tight shorts and had magnificent legs, and of course he like the rest of the guys had observed her mammoth breasts when she ran. She picked up the ball and fired it back to the women. “This is the seventh anniversary of our first state championship game. Does that explain anything?” She asked the question with the same mixture of demure femininity and self-confidence that her body language showed, followed by a mischievous smile that was unmistakably aimed at him. She was regarding him again, sizing him up. The mischievous smile had come after he seemed to pass muster.
“Yeah, I think I knew that. You’re going to give us a good game.”
“Good,” she said with another smile. “I like to give a man a good game.”
He was momentarily nonplussed. Her voice, dripping with sexuality, spoke directly to his solar plexis.
Lowell saved him from his mute idiocy by saying, “Maybe we’ll need a handicap. We don’t have a pitcher.”
Tara had finished warming up and had come over. “I’ll pitch for both sides, then. My teammates like peas both ways.”
“Will you hit?” Lowell asked.
“We can work something out.”
The game started with ten on a side, with a short outfielder as in slow-pitch so that everyone could play. The inept husband wisely confined himself to coaching third base for the women. It took the men three innings before they even got a hit off Tara. She struck out five and retired the rest on pop-ups, weak ground balls and lazy flies to the outfield. Only two reached base, one on an error and one on a walk (on the honor system since there was no umpire). The women in the meantime got three runs on three hits and—to the shame of the men—four errors. “We can’t blame it on the pitching,” Eddie observed with a grin. “It’s us, guys.” Most of the men reflected this good-humored response to the situation, but to no one’s surprise Bob Hanrahan and Ralph Johnson grew noticeably sullen and quiet. Tara didn’t help, what with her mouth working as much as her arm. She’d get two strikes on a batter and say, “You’re going down now, my man. Here it comes, baby!” and similar remarks, all of which were said with a good-natured grin. She also had the grace to say “Nice hit!” to Lowell when he smashed a line drive right down the third base line which was caught in a great leaping catch by the black woman.
Bob and Ralph, scowling and gritting their teeth after they struck out on rising fastballs, didn’t appreciate the banter. In slow pitch they were power hitters who ragged the other team without any trace of the good humor that Tara showed, so Bill actually thought it was good for them to get a taste of their own medicine.
Lowell, not knowing them very well, tried to give them a pep talk. “Hey, lighten up, you guys. You’ll get your timing down next at bat.”
“Easy for you to say,” Bob said. “You would have doubled at least if that black girl hadn’t robbed you.”
Unfortunately they also struck out their second times around, and their mood grew even blacker. On the bench and listening to Tara good-humoredly rag Eddie when he came to the plate, saying, “The inning’s over, girls. Our man Eddie is going to try to hit me,” they began first muttering to each other, then speaking loud enough that the woman playing first base could hear them. When Eddie actually got a base hit, though only a dribbler that he beat out, Tara said, “You were lucky that time, Eddie. You know you can’t hit my stuff.”
Bob positively hissed as he glared out at the mound. “I wish that lesbian bitch would keep her mouth shut. She’ll get it smashed if she doesn’t.”
“Take it easy,” Pat said calmly. “She says the same things to the women when she’s pitching for
us. It’s just the way she is.”
“And besides,” Denny Genier said, “you don’t hit a girl, remember.”
“This isn’t a hitting a girl thing. Smashing a dyke in the mouth is different.”
Lowell’s head snapped around upon hearing this. His face blackened. “Hey, I don’t want to hear shit like that. She struck you out. Take it like a man.”
Several others nodded in agreement as Bob stared at Lowell through narrowed eyes. His fists clenched. When Lowell didn’t back down, he said, “It’s her mouth I’m talking about. After a while it gets rather obnoxious.”
“Never mind her mouth. As Pat said, it’s just the way she is. She’s an exuberant player. She’s psyching you, that’s all. You know the score—you let your bat do the talking.”
Seeing that his teammates weren’t going to support him, Bob clammed up, but for the rest of the morning his stony face suggested he was playing under personal protest. Even when in the sixth inning several players got their timing down and tied the game with three runs, he remained unhappy and aloof, having contributed nothing to the rally.
Bill had watched the argument between Bob and Lowell with a strange detachment. Only if physical violence had been imminent and Lowell in danger was he prepared to intervene. The truth was that despite his resolve to monitor the two potential troublemakers on his team, his mind was occupied during the game with Marilyn and, indirectly, Becky. He found himself watching Marilyn at every opportunity. When she played left field he observed her from the sidelines, and between pitches when he was at shortstop he’d constantly steal glimpses of her sitting on the ground with her hands clasping her knees. Her first time at bat she hit a sharp line drive between the left and center fielders that rolled all the way into the playing field of the other game for a home run. “Nice hit,” he said as she flew by second base, but he wasn’t sure she heard him. Her teammates had all yelled “Timber!” when the ball left her bat. Later he learned that was their nickname for her as the power hitter on their team. He had struck out his first time at bat, not because he couldn’t hit the fastball but because he was overswinging in hopes of impressing her with an equally mammoth blow. She was both pretty and plain, which was to say she wasn’t pretty in any conventional sense—her nose was too short and her eyes too deep-set—but she was attractive and somehow had mastered the mysterious receptivity to male attention. She knew he was watching her because she was watching him too. Within the larger game they were playing a private game with their eyes. Wordlessly and by those exchanged glances alone he felt himself being drawn into her gravitational field. He kept thinking about her remark about giving a man a good game to such a degree that he lost his concentration a few times, even booting an easy ground ball that made him embarrassed enough to try to dispel her from his mind for an inning or two afterwards, though only with marginal success. And as much as he thought about her, he also tried reasoning with himself about this obsession. He was a married man with two kids, and here was a woman he’d never met before today putting him in danger of forgetting this most salient of facts. And how did he feel about this? Quite pleased, he had to admit. It meant he was still attractive, something Becky didn’t seem to believe anymore. He had lost count of the number of nights she had turned away from him. He had been fighting the feeling of being neglected for months, had been struggling against the impulse to explode and become angry. He knew he wasn’t being fair to her; almost every night she was awake for hours tending to the baby; sometimes she was so tired she would fall asleep at dinner. Nor did he forget that they had shared dreams together for many years, the principal one being the state of his life right now, living in their own home and having children along with a good job to give them security. So while he enjoyed Marilyn’s obvious attraction to him, he was aware of vast reservoirs of shared life with Becky that made him feel safe in indulging in a harmless fantasy that could easily become a dangerous one. But that danger was what made it fun. She was giving him a good game all right.
Because his attention was fixated on Marilyn it wasn’t until late in the morning that he realized something was happening between Lowell and the black woman. He had heard their first conversation when he was coaching third base during their rally. Lowell’s triple was the big hit in the inning, but sliding into third base he had knocked the black woman down and was very concerned that she was hurt. After she assured him she was all right, they started talking between pitches.
“That was a great play you made on me my first time up. When the ball left the bat I was thinking of extra bases or even a home run because the left fielder was playing towards center.”
She smiled shyly. “It was just reaction. I didn’t have to think.”
“That’s why I like third base. When you have time to think there’s more of a chance of making an error.”
“I know what you mean.”
Then a few pitches later she asked, “Are you from Waska?”
“Yes. I’ve been in Chicago for the last ten years, though. Just came home this spring.”
She crouched in the fielding position, and then after a foul ball that rolled all the way to the school parking lot she said, “I’ve heard softball is very big in the Midwest.”
“It is. I played in a night league in Chicago. There’s zillions of them. I’m a bit rusty now, though.”
“Oh, you play well. I heard someone call you Edgecomb. Are you related to Pat Edgecomb?”
“She’s my mother.”
“Oh, really? I worked with her as a waitress for a summer job one year when I was in high school. I liked her a lot. She was always good-humored even when we were so busy everyone else was snapping at each other.”
“Yeah, that sounds like my mom. She’s Bill’s mother too,” he said, pointing to Bill.
They introduced themselves, each recalling that ride many years ago. Her name was Fiona Sparrow.
That conversation had been simply routine as far as Bill could tell. It didn’t register with him that anything further was developing until he started noticing both of them saying a few words to each other at every opportunity. A bit later he also came out of the fog Marilyn had induced in him to notice that she and Lowell were keeping an eye on each other just as he and Marilyn were. The effect of this observation was momentary embarrassment as he wondered if anyone else had noticed him and Marilyn.
When it started getting close to noon someone on the women’s team suggested a lunch break. A discussion ensued wherein it was decided that Eddie from the men’s team and Bette Curier, who played second base for the women, would drive to Amato’s and get Italian sandwiches and drinks for everyone. To no one’s regret, Bob Hanrahan and Ralph Johnson took this opportunity to make their excuses and leave. Lowell and Bill would have to leave by two o’clock for the family cookout, and with others having similar plans, they decided to play three more innings after lunch. In the meantime they got two more innings in without any change in the score before Eddie and Bette returned. It was 5 to 3 at the break. With the two malcontents gone, the atmosphere was much more friendly and they went together to the shade of some maple trees to eat. Several of the women had brought lawn chairs, but most sat on the ground. By a not too subtle maneuver Bill managed to sit with Marilyn at a little distance from the rest, and, he noticed, Lowell sat with Fiona, though closer to the main group.
For a while they talked about the game, but both felt an underlying secret tension that wanted to get into the open. He held back, however, until they had finished their sandwiches and the lunch break was almost over. Whatever he felt or wanted to say, he was too much of a coward or—to put his hesitancy in the best possible light—he had too much honor and feelings of fidelity to express it. Yet just as he experienced a mixture of relief and regret that any chance of going forward was slipping away, she began the process of bringing the undercurrents into the light of day. “You work in Portland, don’t you?” She affected a too casual tone that confirmed to him that she was as interested in him
as he was in her.
“Yes, but how did you know?”
“I’ve seen you getting out of work on Congress Street. It took me a couple of hours to place you, but I never forget a face—especially a good-looking one.”
He grinned, feeling absurdly pleased. “Well, the secret’s out. I do work in Portland. Do you?”
She shook her head. “No, I teach school in South Portland, but I do socialize in Portland. Most Fridays I have a few drinks at Tony’s. Maybe I’ll see you there sometime?”
He looked over at Lowell, who was deep in conversation with Fiona, then turned to see if anyone was behind them. “Hmmm. As a matter of fact I have been known to have a few drinks in Portland.” He paused to see the effect of his little white lie. Her face was intent, interested. “Isn’t Tony’s a rock club?”
“It is later in the night. Four to seven it’s just a good place to have a few drinks and meet people.”
“Do people wear suits there? Casual Fridays haven’t hit my place yet. They expect you to be zoot-suited up. I wouldn’t want to feel out of place.” He realized that by asking this question he’d already agreed to meet her.
She realized it too. The tension drained from her face and she looked pleased as she explained, “You won’t. There’s all kinds of people there—three-piece suits to tie-dyed T-shirts, dresses to almost topless. It’s a friendly place. That’s why I like it. I’m there by 4:30 at the latest.”
His eyes had gone to her breasts when she said the word “topless.” She saw his glance and for a moment he had the unpleasant feeling he was being manipulated. He nodded, not ready to make the final commitment. He looked over at Lowell again, as if he were a compass and his brother the North Pole. They were leaning against a tree side by side and turning to look into each other’s eyes frequently. Sometimes Lowell would laugh and reach over to touch her shoulder lightly as if they had known each other for a long time. Lowell was by nature a quiet man, and his impression of Fiona was that she was shy and unsure of herself, so to see this behavior meant they found each other compatible.
“Tell me something, would you. What’s the story with that black girl Fiona with my brother. Who is she? I know she once worked with my mother years ago, and I’ve even met her before, but I don’t know her story.”
Marilyn turned and followed his eyes over to the two. She watched them for a while, then smiled in a way that showed she was pleased. “That’s Fiona Sparrow. She’s my cousin. Her mother is my mother’s sister. Her father was a black man from Boston, but he’s never been around. In fact, I’ve never met him. She just graduated from USM and works at a halfway house for schizophrenics in Portland.”
“Is she nice?”
“Fiona? She’s so sweet she could open a candy shop.” She turned and regarded them again. “They look like young lovers,” she said as an expression of spontaneous pleasure grew on her face that he had never seen before.
It pleased him very much to see another aspect of her personality. She couldn’t possibly have been trying to manipulate him. He stood. “Unless I get caught in the middle of something at work, I’ll probably be at Tony’s this Friday.”
After that conversation Bill had even less concentration when the game resumed. He got a base hit, but it was almost by accident, for he could not clearly remember seeing the ball he hit. All he could think about was Marilyn. When she hit a sharp ground ball her last time up, he fielded it cleanly but was so flustered he threw the ball five feet over Eddie’s head at first. That led to the women getting one more run, which turned out to be the last run of the game. At a little before two o’clock they stopped playing with the final score 6 to 3.
Everybody agreed they had a great time, and they made plans for a rematch later in the summer. He didn’t get a chance to speak privately with Marilyn again, but he gave her a special good-bye with his eyes while he waited for Lowell to finish talking with Fiona. She looked at him as she got into her car and inclined her head slightly. Even that inconspicuous and inconsequential gesture was enough to send a thrill down his spine.
“It looked to me like you and Fiona were really hitting it off,” he said to Lowell as they drove away from the field.
His brother looked at him and smiled enigmatically. “Remember the other day when we were talking about meeting someone and knowing she was the one?”
He nodded as he waited for the car in front of him to make a left turn.
“And that it would be a feeling? One you’d know?”
“What are you saying, Lowell?” He tapped the steering wheel impatiently. The driver ahead had had two chances now to make his left turn, but he was too timid and was waiting until there were no cars in sight.
“Well, just that I have that feeling. I’m telling you, there’s something special about that woman. I felt it almost instantly. Then I talked to her for almost an hour when we had lunch, and it only confirmed the feeling.”
The way now clear, he accelerated rapidly, going too fast for the residential street. He felt Lowell’s uneasiness and slowed down. Lowell was a very careful driver. “Are you talking about love at first sight?”
“That may be too strong a word, but…”
“Well, well, well. This is most interesting. She’s a shy girl, isn’t she?”
“Yes, I’d say so, but after we started talking she lost her shyness. I think she felt something too.”
“So did you make a date?”
“No, it was more vague than that, but still good. She gave me her phone number.”
They came to a stop sign, and he stole a glance at his brother. His eyes were looking up into his mind as he stared dreamily into vacancy. “So what did you talk about for that hour?”
They drove on while he thought about Marilyn, trying to convince himself that it was just a lark to plan on meeting her.
“Our lives, I’d guess you’d say,” Lowell said after some reflection. “I told her about dropping out of the University of Chicago, my father, how I never felt I fit in, things like that, and she told me she understood those feelings. She said she was the only black girl in Waska. And you heard her talking about Mom. She also said that besides being nice, she always felt comfortable with her. She said she met a woman last week who said to be black in America was to be schizophrenic, that people always had expectations about her and didn’t see her. She said Mom saw her. And then she said—get this—that in that regard I was like Mom. She’s pretty as hell too, didn’t you think?”
Bill conjured up the image of Fiona and thought for a moment. Like Marilyn, she was not stunningly beautiful and she wasn’t plain. Her dark eyes were very bright and intelligent, and when she smiled she exposed a sweet vulnerability that was attractive. Her teeth were a bit crooked, though, and her hair was too short for his taste. He didn’t really think she was pretty, but he could see how Lowell would think she was. “Yeah, she’s pretty—and well built too.”
“Yes,” Lowell said with a grin. “I noticed that too.”
Bill felt himself blushing and quickly checked to see if Lowell noticed. He was still looking dreamily ahead, his mind filled with innocent and happy anticipation. The blush led to a rush of inchoate feelings—guilt, shame, a feeling of duplicity made doubly repugnant because he couldn’t tell the truth to his brother, regret that he could contemplate betraying Becky, and confusion because he did not know what he would do or even who he was. He had been thinking of Marilyn’s large breasts all the time they were speaking of Fiona. Already he was leading a secret life.
He turned right onto his street, lined with trees just beginning to achieve enough height to be thought of as real trees and not nursery plantings. His neighborhood was a new development, having been built about twenty years ago, and the houses were all small colonials not much different from the white one he lived in. They arrived home to find Becky and his mother in the yard looking at Pat’s new car. Pat was pointing at something on the dashboard and Becky was leaning over to look at it. His mother was wearing a bro
ad grin; Becky was politely curious. On the lawn near the driveway the baby slept in the windup crib with the sunshade up to protect his eyes and skin. Johnny was playing with the child-size basketball with the five-foot backboard, but stopped and squealed with delight when he saw his father and uncle. The scene was so Norman Rockwell normal that all thought of Marilyn evaporated from his mind as if she were a mere daydream.
“Daddy! I got three baskets in a row,” Johnny said.
Lowell picked up the tiny basketball and took a shot, which banged off the top of the backboard.
“Did you boys have fun?” Pat asked.
“Take a shot, Daddy!” Johnny yelled.
Lowell retrieved the ball and tossed it to him.
“Yes, we did,” he said as he squared up to take a long set shot. He let it fly. “Nothing but net,” he said to Lowell. “We played a women’s fast-pitch team. They were good, so good, in fact, they beat us.”
“Mom, do you remember a girl named Fiona Sparrow?” Lowell asked.
“Fiona Sparrow?” She recollected for a moment, scratching her chin. “I surely do. She was a sweet kid. Shy as a fawn, and she needed looking after.”
“Did you do that, Mom? Look after her?”
“Well, I taught her the ropes. She was raw, and some of the other workers took advantage of her. They would be told to go down to the basement freezer and get some more French fries, don’t you know—chores they should have done themselves—and they’d say, ‘Fiona, the cook wants you to get French fries.’ The little filly would do it too, that is until I told her she was a waitress, not a kitchen girl. And sometimes a demanding customer would have her running in circles. I told her to be nice to nice people and ignore the creeps. There’s a way to walk across a restaurant without seeing people trying to get your attention. I taught her that necessary little trick. I do believe by the end of the summer she could hold her own.”
Lowell listened with interest to this story. “She was one of the players on the team we played. She remembered you. She said she liked you a lot. You were always nice to her.”
“Hey, ain’t I always nice?”
“Someone else has been very nice too,” Becky said. She had gone over to the baby and was winding the rocking mechanism. “I mean you, Lowell. I was just telling Pat before you came that when my brother got promoted to vice president of his company a few years ago he bought my mother and father cruise to the Caribbean. I thought that was the best gift any son ever gave his parents until you got the car for Pat.”
Pat laughed with delight. “Oh, it is the nicest gift anybody ever gave me. All the girls at the restaurant were saying they wished they had a son like you, Lowell. Ain’t I lucky.”
Lowell was by the backboard, feeding Johnny the ball after each shot. “It was really no big thing. I got all that money from the stocks. But I’m glad you like it, Mom.”
“You’re just being modest, Lowell. Really, it was a wonderful thing to do,” Becky said. She gave Bill a sharp look.
Bill busied himself collecting the softball equipment from the car and pretending to be uninterested. He went into the house and down into the basement to put the stuff away. The now all-too familiar feeling of being neglected in his own house came over him, and he hated it. He either imagined or actually perceived in Becky’s comments an implicit criticism of the way he treated his mother, and after hanging the gloves on hooks, putting the bats in a closet and the balls in a box on a shelf, he lingered for a moment thinking about it.
Before Lowell came home Pat was rarely invited to the house, a situation that he and Becky often argued about, though she would describe the exchange of words as a discussion. She would maintain that with a mother living in the same town, less than three miles away, it wasn’t right to see her only on holidays and special occasions. At first he thought she was merely being conventional, finding it improper and a potential cause of wagging tongues, but although she was stolidly middle-class, it wasn’t that. Nor was it any deep affection she had for Pat. Orderly and conscientious herself, Becky was the diametrical opposite of his mother. But she believed very strongly in duty, particularly familial duties. Coming from a close and loving family, she had no conception of what it was like to have a parent who, while loving and kind, was irresponsible and incompetent. To her the notion that parents were something to overcome—as if in water struggling not to drown they were a weight that pulled you down instead of rescuing you—was as incomprehensible as living in a tent when you could afford a house. Sometimes to shame him into being a dutiful son, she would ask, “Don’t you love your mother?” Yes, he loved her. He knew she had a good heart and never consciously hurt Lowell or him, but he could not forget the way his friends’ parents treated him because he was her son: as if he were not good enough. To this day he remembered the insecurity, anxiety and fear he felt that they would be forced to move again or their electricity would be turned off. He knew Lowell felt the same way, for they had often talked about Pat through the years. But here was his brother being praised for filial duty while he was relegated to the shadows. He remembered that the brother who stayed away for almost fifteen years and who would sometimes let three years go by without a visit to Maine was not he. When something was wrong at his mother’s house he was the one who would take care of it. Unlike Lowell he couldn’t fix things, but he could arrange to get people who could. This reality made him almost resent Lowell, something that was close to impossible since his brother was the one person who had inspired him to better himself when he was young. To the extent anyone had ever been a father to him, it was Lowell.
That thought was enough to shake him out of his funk. He returned to the sunshine under control and resolved to be pleasant. For the next few hours he played games with Johnny and Lowell, helped set the table and cook on the barbecue, and ate the meal, all with a pleasant demeanor and only an occasional dark thought or recollection of Marilyn. Then after they cleaned up and got both boys off to bed for a belated afternoon nap, and as they were sitting in the backyard on lawn furniture, Becky asked Lowell an innocent question that plunged him back into the shadows.
She asked him when he expected to start work on the cottage he was planning to build at the family lakefront property, and when Lowell answered that next week was the target date depending upon whether he got a permit or not, she said, “We did our basement last winter without one. I told Bill that was illegal and could get us into trouble, but he said it didn’t matter. What do you think?”
Lowell looked at Bill, clearly not wishing to get between husband and wife, while Bill rolled his eyes to encourage his doubts. He shrugged and said, “Oh, I don’t know.”
“I told you, Becky, we were just putting walls up. There was no plumbing and only a little electrical work. A permit was just a waste of time.”
In the bright sunshine she squinted and shaded her eyes as she looked at him. “If it’s a waste of time, why is Lowell getting one?”
She turned and looked at Lowell, who nervously took a sip of beer as he exchanged another glance with Bill. “Well,” he said after a deep breath, “it’s different at the lake. There’s all kinds of ecological and safety concerns. The water has to be protected and so forth. And of course it’s a new building, not minor repairs to an existing one.”
Bill clucked his tongue in irritation. Lowell had delivered the message he wanted, but instead of letting the matter fade away he suddenly felt he would rather annihilate her argument. “Becky has to do everything by the book, even when it’s not necessary.”
Ignoring his obvious irritation, she was maddeningly under control. “The neighbors saw those friends of yours doing the work. Sally McNabb told me she saw them drinking beer one day when I wasn’t at home. What if the neighbors told the authorities about the illegal work?”
“Come on, Becky. Be reasonable. Neighbors object to things like fences or cutting a tree down that affect them. They don’t care about the inside of a neighbor’s house. Ask Lowell. He was a builde
r.”
Still looking uncomfortable, Lowell drained his beer. “They might care if some work caused a threat of fire or whatever, but if it was just walls and a hung ceiling they wouldn’t. Of course it’s always safest to have a permit. The city can force you to undo work if they find out. I’ve known it to happen.”
Pat, who had appeared to be dozing from the effect of her glass of wine, snapped to attention when she heard that. “Oh, Lord, so have I. One of my steady customers, Mr. Talbot, he has lunch every day at the restaurant and runs some kind of investment business or something to do with being a lawyer but not practicing law. Mr. Talbot, anyways, came in one day at his usual time looking like he’d swallowed an elephant whole. You know what he’d done? He’d built concrete embankments at his lake cottage without a permit, and he was found out. They made him tear it all down and fined him five grand. The work to take it down cost another five grand, and it had cost that to build in the first place. When he told me that, I was a bit worried about getting my tip that day. But bless his heart, he left me a twenty-dollar bill under his plate, four times the usual tip. It pays to be a good listener.” She threw her head back and laughed heartily.
Lowell had been telling him that she looked like a laughing Buddha when her eyes disappeared into folds of fat. For a moment he noticed the accuracy of the observation; then he felt the bile rising in him. The truth was that he didn’t know he was supposed to get a permit until after he hired Pat Williams and Denny Genier to do the work. They assured him it was not important. They rather preferred not having a permit, in fact, since that way they could get cash payment and keep the work in the underground economy safe from Uncle Sam’s prying eyes. When he told Becky about this arrangement, however, she immediately suggested they have the work stopped. He didn’t think he was ordinarily self-righteous, but to save face he refused. Both Pat and Denny often joked about marriage being the voluntary act of putting your neck into a yoke. He simply couldn’t bring himself to tell them to stop the work. That was how the fiction that he knew about the permit requirement but still hadn’t bothered to get one was born.
So he was a fool and felt like a fool, but he didn’t fight the self-alienation from growing into hostility to Becky. Marilyn’s face came into his mind. She listened intently to everything he said, positively hanging on every word.
“Well, it’s too late now,” he said, still thinking about Marilyn. “What’s done is done and can’t be undone.”