Continental Drift (14 page)

“Sonofabitch. They’re on a tear,” he says as he enters. “They do this every fucking spring. Go on a tear and get me all lathered up, then blow it in August to the fucking Yankees.” He sits at the table next to Emma and spreads out the paper.

“You swear too easy.”

“Huh?” He takes a sip of coffee and goes on reading.

“You swear too easy. I wish you wouldn’t.” She stands with her back to the sink, holding one egg in each hand, as if about to juggle them.

“Do you still love Mommy?” Ruthie suddenly asks, somber, unafraid, but deeply interested in his answer. Emma looks up and watches his face. Elaine too. They all watch him. What’s going on? Have they made some kind of bet on it?

“What’re you telling her?” Bob asks Elaine.

“Not a thing. She asked me the same question. Before you came out.”

“And what did you say?”

She looks at the eggs in her hands and taps them lightly against one another. “I said I don’t know.”

Bob glares at his wife, then turns to his daughter. “Why do you want to know a thing like that, Ruthie?”

“I heard you and Mommy yelling last night. You woke me up.”

Bob closes the newspaper and crosses his arms in front of him. “Aw, honey, I’m sorry about all that. Of course I still love Mommy.”

“How come you said you didn’t?”

Bob looks at Elaine, who turns away and cracks first one egg into the skillet, then the other. He feels emptied out, a metal drum. He doesn’t want this. No man wants this.

His daughters wait for his answer. He looks down at Emma beside him. What can she know? “Did we wake you up too, Flowerpot?”

Nervously, Emma opens and closes her hands, squeezing jelly between her fingers.

“How come you said you don’t love Mommy anymore?” Ruthie repeats.

“Well, honey, it’s like … sometimes grownups say things they don’t mean. That’s all. They get a
little
mad about one thing, and then they act real mad about another. It’s like when we first moved here, some of the kids at school were mean to you, and now they’re your friends. They didn’t mean it.”

“But it’s different. They’re not s’posed to love me. You, you’re s’posed to love Mommy. What did you get mad for?”

Elaine turns away from the stove and waits for his answer.

“You still love
Daddy
,” Ruthie says to her mother. It’s an announcement, but it wants confirmation.

“Yes,” Elaine says. “I love Daddy.” She turns back to the stove.

“What did you get mad for?” Ruthie asks him again.

Bob sighs and looks at his wife, as if for guidance, but she’s holding her back to him. “I … I don’t know, honey. I don’t know why I got mad last night. It was late, and I was tired, and worried. In a bad mood, that’s all. Now eat your breakfast and let me read the paper, okay?” He smiles wearily, and the child returns her gaze, brow furrowed, to the cereal box.

He reads the Red Sox box score, notes with pleasure that Yaz went three for four with two doubles and Torrez pitched seven innings and struck out five. “Sonofabitch. Yaz is forty and he’s playing like a kid. I love that sonofabitch.”

“Will you please watch your language!” Elaine says, hands planted on hips. “This is a whole new habit of yours, this swearing all the time.”

“Sorry, sorry, sorry,” he says. He takes another sip of his coffee, and to win back her favor, smacks his lips noisily. “Good coffee.”

“Thanks,” she grunts. “Here’s your eggs.”

He breaks the yolks with the tip of his fork and rubs a piece of toast through them; it’s the way he has eaten eggs all his life. If by accident he were served eggs well-done, he’d try to break the yolks, and failing, he’d react with confusion. They wouldn’t be actual eggs to him. They’d be vegetables or cheese or fish. Eggs run and make a lovely mess that you can clean up with a piece of buttered toast.

“I can’t believe Yaz,” he says, still poring over the paper. “He’s almost ten years older than me, but he’s playing like a kid. If I tried to do what I did as a kid, I’d break my ass.” When Bob was a kid, large and fast and tireless, he was a graceful bear sweeping the puck away from a three-on-one rush to his goal, skating the length of the rink alone, long, graceful, powerful strides, with the puck swirling ahead of him across the blue line, where he ducks to one side and fakes the defenseman, cuts to the other, jerking the puck along as if it were attached to his stick by a piece of string, charging the net, driving the puck with the force of his rush a half foot above the ice over the goalie’s desperate slash, and as he glides past the goal, he watches the puck smack against the net, watches it drop softly to the ice, watches the goalie angrily whack his stick against the ice, and Bob smiles, skates slowly, smoothly, back to his end of the ice, barely out of breath.

“Y’know,” he says to Elaine, “I’m really sorry we didn’t get down here for spring training. I’d have loved to watch the Sox work out, over there at Chain-O’-Lakes Park, over there in Winter Haven. It’s only a couple miles. Now,” he says, lowering his voice, “now they’ve all gone north, it’s all up north. I used to go to Fenway with my dad once in a while when I was a kid. I haven’t been to Fenway in years….”

“We were here in time. You could’ve watched them play.”

“Well, yeah, I know. But we were still getting settled and all.” He looks up from the newspaper and peers out the window above the sink at the flat roof of the trailer next to theirs and the tops of the palm trees and the bright blue sky beyond, and he says, “It’s hard, I
sort of didn’t believe they were here. In Florida, I mean. I’ve known it all my life, the Red Sox do spring training in Winter Haven, Florida, and here I am living ten miles away, only I can’t picture it, so I just sit around, like I always did, waiting for them to come home to Fenway and begin the season. Only, when they do begin the season, here I am in Florida. It’s strange. I probably would’ve got Yaz’s autograph. It’s real easy in spring training to get to talk to the players and all. They walk right over to the fence and talk to you.”

“I know,” she says.

Ruthie comes up next to him and says, “Bye, Daddy,” and purses her lips for a kiss.

Instead of kissing her, he stands and says, “Wait a minute. I’ll walk out to the bus stop with you.”

Surprised and pleased, she claps her hands together, then flips one hand for him to hold. Together, they step out the door into the bright sunlight, and holding hands, cross the yard and driveway to the paved lane, where, looking back at his station wagon, he notices once again his New Hampshire number plates and says aloud to himself, “Jesus, I’ve got to get Florida plates before they pick me up for it.”

The car looks peculiar to him. He’s owned it for almost three years and has only got five more payments to mail north to the Catamount Trust, at which point, as he’s said to Elaine many times, he knows the transmission will go. But this morning, as he walks past the car with his daughter and moves down the lane to the highway, he turns and studies the car and wonders why it looks so strange to him, as if it has been cut out of a black-and-white snapshot and pasted onto a color picture of pink hibiscus and bougainvillea, green patches of grass, pale blue mobile home, dark green star-shaped thatch palm behind the trailer, citrus groves beyond the crisp, cloudless blue sky above. He’s walking backwards, barefoot, sucking on his upper lip and no longer holding his daughter’s hand.

“What’re you looking at?” she asks, peering over her shoulder.

“Oh, nothing. The car. The house.”

“We should get a new car.”

“You think so, eh?”

“Yeah. A red one. To go with the new house.” Ruthie skips ahead of him, ponytail flying, and he turns from the car and walks quickly to catch up.

“Yeah!” he calls after her. “A new car to go with a new house to go with a new job! A whole new life!”

She slows and waits for him, and when he catches up, he takes her hand again, and they walk on in silence to where the school bus stops at the side of the highway.

By the time he returns to the kitchen, he’s sweating, and his tee shirt has large wet circles under the arms. The kitchen is empty; he assumes Elaine has taken Emma to the bathroom to wash her face, hands and arms before putting her outside to play. He checks his watch, eight twenty-three, and dropping his weight onto his chair, leans over to finish reading the paper.

“Aw, Jesus,” he says, looking with disgust at the purple smears and globs of jelly on the paper. “Jesus H. Christ,” he murmurs. He stands quickly and grabs the newspaper at the sides, as if to lift it, but then, looking down on it from above, he notices for the first time a photograph in the center of the page opposite the box scores. It’s a wirephoto of a base runner sliding headfirst, sliding into second, Bob thinks, or possibly third, though he knows right off that it’s Carl Yastrzemski, number eight, doing the sliding. It’s Yaz at forty, stretching a long single into a double by running ninety feet full speed and hurling his body against the ground, diving and stretching his arms for the base as he twists his body hard to the right to avoid the tag, spikes, shinbones and knees of the second baseman.

For several seconds Bob studies the picture, then, in a violent move, his face stiffens and he crumples the entire newspaper into a large, loose bundle, pushes, crushes and crumples it again and again, until he’s made a dense, crinkly ball of it. He steps around the table and opens the cupboard under the sink, tosses the ball into the plastic trash bucket and closes the cupboard door.

Facing away from the kitchen, through the living room to the
hall beyond, he hears Emma’s angry cry, almost a howl, as her mother rubs the child’s cheeks and chin, arms, hands and belly, with a rough, wet washcloth, and he hears Elaine order the child to be still, hold still, it’ll be over in a minute if you’ll only hold still and stop squirming.

Bob knows he loves the woman properly. And he loves the children properly too, though he’s never had to ask himself that one, thank God. Those are facts, though, and a man has to give himself over to the facts of the life he finds himself living, no matter how he’s living it.

He walks quietly back through the trailer to the bedroom he shares with his wife, to get ready for work.

Nevertheless. Bob is obsessed with Marguerite Dill, who is not at all as he imagines and supposes her to be. It would be difficult, if not impossible, to say here who or what she is, exactly, and probably beside the point as well, except to observe that Bob knows very little of what it is to be a woman, nothing at all of what it is to be black. He’s honest and intelligent enough to admit this and behave accordingly, but like most white men, he’s not imaginative enough to believe that being a woman is extremely different from being a man and being black extremely different from being white. If pushed, and he has been pushed now and then, at least by Elaine, he’d go only so far as to concede that the differences are probably no greater than those between child and adult, and because he bears within him the child he once was, and the child he once was carried within him the seed of the man he would someday become, then understanding between the two is an easily arranged affair of one’s attention. To understand your children, you attend to the child in you; and all your children have to do, if they wish to understand you, is project themselves twenty or thirty years into the future. Therefore, to imagine Elaine and Doris
and now Marguerite, the three women who in recent years have mattered most to him, all Bob has had to do is pay attention to the woman in himself. It’s harder in the case of Marguerite, but all the more interesting to him for that, because with her he has to pay attention to the black man in himself as well.

When Bob talks to his wife, he is thinking about Marguerite. When he looks at his wife’s reddish hair, pale skin, rounding body, he thinks of Marguerite’s hair, skin, body—but not to the disadvantage of either woman. It’s just that hair, anyone’s, reminds him of Marguerite’s hair; skin, if he happens to notice it, reminds him of Marguerite’s skin; and breasts, belly, thighs and so on, remind him of Marguerite’s. Which aspects, of course, he’s never actually seen and therefore must imagine, relying for components on the
occasional Playboy
and
Penthouse black centerfold
he’s seen.

Elaine tells her new friends at the trailer park and her sister-in-law Sarah that Bob is distracted, preoccupied, worried, and she adds that she’s concerned. But in fact she’s more than concerned. She’s frightened. She believes he doesn’t love her anymore. And to make matters worse, she believes that it’s because she is pregnant. The sad truth of the matter, however, is that Bob often forgets she is pregnant, and when he remembers, it’s as if he’s remembering something that was true long ago.

His obsession with Marguerite has become his sole companion. He talks to it, argues with it, admires and respects it, gives it all the attention and time he can steal from his family and job. He’s almost grateful that he has no friends here and that his job, where he’s often alone for hours at a time, blocks him off from the voices and needs of his wife and children. Though he is not aware of it, he has recently taken up humming a tuneless tune, hour after hour, whenever someone else is within hearing range. As soon as that person, George Dill or Elaine or one of the kids, leaves his proximity or closes the door between them, he ceases humming and lets his obsession loose, as if it were a dog wanting exercise, to leap and run about the room, dart out the door and gallop in wild circles in the parking lot and across
the marshy fields, until it’s almost lost from sight, where it wheels about and comes racing happily back to him, leaps into his arms and licks his face with joy.

Months pass, and little changes. Elaine’s body has gone on swelling steadily, and Emma, knowing something threatening is going to happen, has become sullen and withdrawn, not exactly a behavior problem, but not pleasant to be around, either, and Ruthie has complained increasingly of school, even feigning sickness to stay home, until it turns out that she has what’s called a learning disability, which, the school nurse tells Elaine, and Elaine reports to Bob, may be merely emotional or she may be slightly dyslexic. Time will tell, but not to worry, many children pass through phases like this, especially when adjusting to a new environment. But if it persists into the second grade, when reading is essential for learning, special instruction will be necessary. Bob barely hears the report, for he’s suffering from a learning disability of his own, a disability fed and encouraged by his Monday, Wednesday and Friday visits from Marguerite, which have become part of her weekly routine too, possibly rationalized as, but nonetheless essential to, her caring for her father, a man who drifts through his days as lost in his private past as Bob is lost in his private future.