The Stories of Richard Bausch (91 page)

“Don’t go.”

“I have to get ready.”

“Does this look all right?” Joan modeled the dark blue blouse.

“It’s fine,” Lauren said. Then: “Honest.”

“I didn’t mean that about the teenager. But she’s my mother. Just please control it a little tonight—I’d like this evening not to be complicated.”

“It’s complicated already.”

“All right, I’d like it to be
less
so.”

She closed the door and went down the hall. In her room, she put the radio on, then felt annoyed by it and turned it off again, flopping down on the bed and staring at the ceiling. On the shelf next to her bed were several trophies she had won playing Little League. The room was crowded feeling now. Nothing felt right. She heard her grandmother’s crow cawing in its
cage on the other side of the wall, like a reminder. You never dared ask anyone to this house; no one ever wanted to come back. It was the surest way to lose a friend. Back when she had felt confident enough to say she had any friends. These days, people at school seemed never to be anything more than curious about her. She knew they talked about her. Well, they talked about the fact that she played baseball the way she did, and she was sure some of them talked about the weirdness of where she had to live, too. Mostly, though, it was the baseball, her natural ability, as it was called. That made the picture of her as an oddity. People had no trouble with girls playing the sport—it was just that she was so much better than all the others. Everyone defined her by this. Everybody had one subject of talk with her; nobody ever changed the subject. And she had been more lonely than she could believe; lonely in crowds, lonely at home and at school, lonely everywhere she went. No one understood.

Yesterday, on the practice field, because they had challenged her, she went through the first-team varsity boys, getting them out one by one, eight of them by strikeouts. Her fastball came in at more than eighty miles an hour and it usually veered, or moved. The boys’ team captain, Bo Brady, missing a low one that had sunk even lower, uttered the phrase “son of a bitch,” and on the other side of the backstop, Kelly Green, one of the cheerleaders, said “You mean ‘butch,’ don’t you?” Lauren heard the chattering and laughter that followed, toeing the rubber and looking down, trying to seem unaffected by it, trying to see their smirks as envy: that thing people who have no gift feel for all those who do.

Now she sat up, thinking about that moment, because it hadn’t meant a thing in the face of what she knew was the general opinion of her, that she was a freak of nature. It made her stomach hurt. They had clocked her fastball and put her in the local newspapers and in the
Washington Post.
She was officially a freak. No one wanted to talk about anything else. She turned on her side, and thought of going far away, where she could start over and be someone new.

Mother opened the room door, after knocking twice, lightly. She had changed into faded jeans, and a white cotton blouse with blue water lilies printed on it. “Hey, I am sorry.”

“It’s okay,” Lauren told her.

“Is there something you want to talk about, honey?”

“It’s fine. You look fine.”

“That’s not what I meant, Lauren, and, darling, you know that.”

“I understood what you meant.”

“You know, this—all this confusion, these confused feelings—it’s all perfectly normal for your age.”

“I’m
fine,”
she said.

How she hated it when Mother got philosophical talking about teenagers and nature and the inevitability of certain things. It was annoying to be told all the time that in spite of her freaky gift she was
normal.
It only underscored the fact that she was not normal, not close to it—no one could be anything of the kind in this house, anyway. Yesterday at school she had been sitting across the desk from Mr. Grayfield, the vice-principal, listening to him explain endlessly why it was a great opportunity for her and the school if she tried out for boys’ baseball, and she had felt a sudden, nearly uncontrollable urge to get up, reach across the desk, take hold of him by the ears, and plant a big wet kiss on his spotted, heavy-browed forehead.

Baseball. She had loved it, and now she felt weighed down by it. And she felt such sadness about everything. And a strange, confusing embarrassment, as if it were something too personal to talk about. She had been trying for days to decide how to tell everyone. Trying to do it so that she wouldn’t seem like a teenager secreting hormones, which was how she couldn’t help but think of it, since Georgia had been referring to it that way for years, anticipating her adolescence. Maybe the thing to do was to make up some big lie. Tell them all she was thinking of running away, or that she was depressed or sick or on drugs or pregnant (she recalled that time she let Bo Brady look at her and fondle her down there, and she had lived in terror that she was pregnant until her mother, with no slightest idea of the relief she was providing, sat her down and explained the way it all worked).

Lately, as Georgia had ceased speaking about secreting hormones, Mother had begun this infuriating habit of referring to her as a “normal” teenager, when not accusing her of behaving like one.

Mother seemed always to be teasing almost seriously, or serious almost teasingly.

In each instance the signals were mixed, no matter the context, and no matter who was around. “Inevitably,” she’d said recently in front of Dalton, “the, like, number
of likes
in a sentence will, like, increase, like, in direct proportion
to the, like, number of, like, years one has traveled from, like, twelve, to, like, nineteen. At which time the
likes
will, like, begin slowly to, like, subside.”

She loved to run that riff, as she called it, in company. People laughed when she did it and Dalton had laughed, too. Lauren had heard her do it enough to know she was leading up to it, and still found herself standing there while it went on. And of course she also knew that her mother meant it, too. Twenty times a day she was after Lauren, working on her speech patterns, not just the word
like
but her use of go
or goes
for
said
or
says,
and for the phrase
you know what I mean,
with which Lauren had begun unconsciously to end all her sentences. Being corrected all the time was intensely exasperating, as it was maddening to be spoken of in the third person, as though you weren’t even in the room. These aspects of life at home had put a distance between them; they were repeatedly getting things wrong, misunderstanding each other.

Because of their
family history, they were collectively afflicted with what Mother had described as an overly developed sense of crisis, and an overwhelming fear of hurting the other’s feelings: when Lauren was a baby, colicky and faintly jaundiced, Georgia had come to help out; and that week Lauren’s father drowned out on the Chesapeake Bay, where he had gone, alone, in his small skiff, to fish. Mother had chided him into going—desiring to provide relief for the stressed new father, who at the time was working two different teaching jobs, and spending part-time hours working construction on weekends. Fishing was something he loved to do, and since the baby’s arrival he hadn’t been able to spend even one morning out on the boat. Late that night, the skiff was found empty, floating with the currents, off Annapolis Point.

No one ever found Lauren’s father.

Georgia and Mother went through that together, and Georgia just stayed on. The child’s first memories were of the two women nursing their sorrow, and worrying about her and each other, and she had absorbed from this early experience the idea that life was fragile, that everything could be taken away at any moment. She knew where her love of baseball had come from: those summer nights in her young childhood when Mother let her stay up to watch the games, the soothing fact that it could go into extra
innings, and she would be allowed to lie there on the living room rug, lost in the leisurely pace of warm-ups and visits to the mound, the pitcher looking in to read the sign, the calming announcers’ voices—and she could forget about the blackness outside, the bad dreams of her babyhood. It had been established early in life that Lauren was a nervous child, with troubles about night and sleep. Doctors had put her on various medicines, and the best medicine had been the baseball. It didn’t make the fear go away, quite, but kept it at a level: what she had come to consider the world’s portion of unease. As if a person wouldn’t be anxious enough, growing up without a father, and with a grandmother like Georgia.

Who now called again from the bottom of the stairs. “We’re all going to be late for dinner, my darlings.”

Silence. Lauren waited for Mother to respond.

“Guys?”

Georgia’s word for them.

Mother said from her room: “Hey, girlie, are you ready?”

“Dalton’s not here yet,” she returned. Then she murmured, low: “Poor man.”

“Yes he is,” Georgia called from downstairs. “He’s standing right here.”

Hearing Mother in the hall, and hearing the note of worry in her voice as she strove to seem vivacious, Lauren felt a twinge of guilt, and, glancing into the mirror over her dresser, practiced a smile. She went out to follow Mother down the stairs. But here she was in the upstairs hallway, and a clamor had begun in Georgia’s room, the crow cawing and the macaw setting up its own exotic racket. The cages rattling. Farther along the hall stood Dalton and the old woman. Georgia had led him up here, and opened the door of her room to show him the jungle, as she called it. The commotion continued, though the monkey—a spider monkey with scarily long skinny arms and a screech beyond belief—was strangely silent.

“I keep it moist,” Georgia said, loud over the noise. “You can see water beaded on the leaves, there, see it? We started it together, but lately it’s just been me. Which is fine.”

“Yes,” Dalton said. There was no way at all to tell what was in his mind from the even tone of his voice. “And that’s a—what is that? A weasel?”

“No,” said Georgia, “it’s a wolverine. Have you ever seen a wolverine?”

“Actually, I have.”

“Georgia, please,” Mother said.

“You’d know a wolverine if you saw one,” Georgia went on. “Would you?”

“I think so.”

“This is Georgia,” said Mother to Dalton. “And you’ve met Lauren. And that is not a wolverine.”

Georgia said, “We introduced each other at the door, my darling. Didn’t we, Lance.”

“Dalton,” said Dalton. “And I knew it wasn’t a wolverine.”

“Lance is quick,” said Georgia. “He knows when a joke is being played.”

“I’m Dalton.”

“Of course you are.”

“Georgia, you know perfectly well—” Mother began. Then she took a step toward the stairs. “Please close the door.”

“I was just showing Lance the jungle.”

“I thought we were late,” Lauren interrupted.

“Well, it’s a ferret,” said Georgia to Dalton, still holding the door open on the glooms of humid green and the tumult of the birds. “You obviously knew that. Would you like to hold him? Actually she’s a female.”

“I had a friend where I work who had a pet ferret,” Dalton said, smiling. “Used to let it run loose in her house. It made a good pet.”

“This one would bite your finger off.”

“I guess I don’t want to hold him, then,” Dalton said in the tone of a quip.

“She,” said Georgia.

“Pardon?”

“And where is it that you said you work? I know I asked you that downstairs.”

“I don’t recall that you did ask. I’m a contractor—mostly carpentry.”

“Good for you.”

“Aren’t we going to be late?” Lauren asked.

“Well, it’s a fascinating setup,” Dalton said, obviously growing restive. Mother stood at his side, her hand on his elbow. Was she squeezing it? Lauren watched them. Georgia waited a moment to satisfy herself about something, then closed the door.

Dalton. A name
out of books. And it didn’t fit him. He had a little potbelly and soon he would have a double chin: there was already the slightest suggestion of it when you looked at him from certain angles. His hair was thin at the crown, and he parted it low on one side so he would have more of it to comb over. It was a light brown color, with a little gray in it. Lauren had heard Mother talk unaccountably of this as an attractive feature. He wore a pair of gray slacks and a white knit shirt today. Apparently he had just bought the slacks: the tag was still attached to the back pocket. Among all the other little imperfections, he was very absentminded. And for all that, Lauren liked him—and felt a sense of protectiveness toward him. He had no interest in baseball, and knew nothing about it. He talked to her as a man talks to a young
girl.

“Did you make reservations?” Mother asked him, pulling the tag off.

“Oh, I didn’t even see that,” he said about the tag. “Yes, I did.”

“Score one for the male gender,” Georgia said.

Dalton actually laughed. And then he did something quite surprising: he extended his hand. “Hello, I’m Lance.”

Georgia looked at his hand. He stood there smiling warmly with his joke, and waited. The only thing left was to say something. Lauren attempted a sardonic lightness of tone: “He’s not radioactive, Grand.”