Home Games

by Benjamin Markovits

  “I don’t know.” And all of a sudden I feel bad about telling Jake any of this. It feels like I’m already taking sides. I don’t mean my mom’s side or my dad’s but like I’m outside the family, talking about them. “I’ve got to go,” I say. “We’re going to dinner.”

  When I come out of the elevator, my dad is waiting for me in the hall. “Where the heck have you been?” he says. “I’ve been looking for you.”

  “I told you I went to Jake’s.”

  “No, you didn’t. Do you want to go to Carmine’s or not? We don’t have to go. I’ve got plenty of things to do at home.”

  This is his “important person” voice, which Mom hates—where he sounds like he’s talking to one of his secretaries and everything has to happen in a hurry.

  “Is Mom back yet? Is she going to come?”

  He looks me in the eyes now. He kind of slows down.

  “I think your mom wants to leave us alone tonight.”

  “Okay, we can go,” I say.

  We don’t talk much at the restaurant; it’s always pretty loud anyway, and we both just kind of look at other people. My dad has his phone out.

  “Mom says phones are bad for you,” I tell him.

  “Yeah, well,” he says, but puts it away when the food arrives—a big platter of spaghetti and meatballs, which we’re going to share. The waiter brings a couple of clean plates and wipes them with the cloth in his hand. He asks me if I want another Coke because I finished the first one already. I look at my dad, who nods. He’s drinking red wine.

  I think both of us feel better after eating something; he doesn’t seem in such a bad mood. He says, “All work and no play make Jack a dull boy.” He’s talking about himself—like he’s the dull boy. “You know what’s hard sometimes about being a kid is that when you’re growing up . . . your childhood coincides with the part of your father’s life where he’s trying to make a career for himself. I mean, this is it for me—this is where all the hard work pays off.”

  He has another sip of wine, and laughs.

  “You know how they pay you for hard work? They give you more hard work. But listen, Ben,” he says. “None of this is your problem. I plan to see a lot of you before I take off. I’ve got two or three clear days. Just a few things to sort out but mostly clear days. What do you want to do? Anything at all. You name it.”

  “I’ve never been to Coney Island,” I tell him.

  And my dad laughs again. “I had no idea you were going to say that.” Then he leans back in his chair and looks away. “There must be a lot of things I don’t know about going on in that head of yours,” he says.

  Three

  “WE HAVE TO GO on the Thunderbolt,” I say to Mom when she comes in to wake me a few mornings later. “Jake says it’s the best ride in Coney Island.”

  Mom sits on my bed. “Well, you can tell your dad,” she says, and when I look at her, she goes on: “I’m not coming along. This is boys’ time. I want you two to spend some time together.” After a moment, she adds: “That’s what he wants, too.”

  I sit up a little. “Do you want me to—”

  “What?” she says.

  “I mean, talk to him about . . . London. Do you want me to tell him that I don’t want him to go?”

  She smiles. “He knows that, sweetie. But you can tell him if you want.”

  After breakfast, Dad and I set off. “Let’s take the subway,” he says. “That’s part of the whole fun. When I was a kid, I used to ride the subway all the time.”

  He’s wearing blue pants and loafers and a collared shirt, but no jacket or tie. His sleeves are rolled up, so I can see his forearms, which are strong and hairy. Some of the other men on the street, walking toward the station, wear business suits; my dad looks like a different kind of person now.

  We take the B train downtown—it makes a huge screeching noise, pulling up to the platform. Everything seems louder underground. I guess it must be rush hour. There are a lot of people trying to push their way on, but my dad finds me an empty seat and stands next to it, holding on to one of the bars. He sways with the train as we roll through the tunnels; it’s a long ride. I read my book and my dad manages to read his newspaper one-handed; he keeps folding it over very carefully.

  At one point he taps me on the shoulder with it and says, “Hey, look. We’re about to go over the water.”

  We come out of a tunnel and I squint as sunlight pours into the subway car. The train rumbles over a bridge, and my heart jumps like when you go down too quickly in an elevator. I can see boats on the river below—it’s funny how flat the water looks. There’s a park on the other side, in Brooklyn, and some kids playing on a swing, and then we’re rolling over city streets again. Suddenly I feel very happy to be here. I love my dad and we have all day together. Maybe I can persuade him not to go to London.

  At Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn, we get out and switch to the Q train. After that it’s just a few stops. Then we walk from the station—it’s windy but sunny, too, and you can smell the ocean in the breeze blowing up the avenues. Even with all the traffic, I hear the amusement park before I see it: electric beeping sounds and music playing over a loudspeaker. My dad puts his hand on my hair, and I sort of push against him, to show I don’t mind.

  We ride the Thunderbolt, which is really just a roller coaster. First you go straight at the sky, right at the sun. The Atlantic Ocean is behind you, and Brooklyn, and streets and cars and houses, and the boardwalk and the beach are somewhere below you, but most of the time I have my eyes closed, trying not to throw up. After that, we spend about five minutes just calming down, then we play Skee-Ball. My dad plays, too, and scores high enough to win a prize. He seems pretty pleased about that and lets me pick out the prize. There isn’t anything I want, it’s mostly kiddy stuff, but finally I pick a bright bead necklace to give Mom.

  “Okay,” he says slowly. “If that’s really what you want.”

  “You can give it to her,” I tell him. “You won it.” But he doesn’t say anything.

  Afterward, we eat hot dogs with mustard and ketchup and sauerkraut by the beach, and drink soda and look at the water. You can see our shadows on the sand. Because the sun’s going down, my dad’s shadow makes him look even taller than he really is—we both look stretched out, like we’re kind of stretching into nothing. He tries to talk to me about London.

  “There are people at my company,” he says, “whose job it is just to make sure that when somebody moves to a new office, everything is taken care of. That’s their job—to make sure that everything’s okay. And that goes for the whole family—the apartment, the school. Everything. There’s a whole school in London just for American kids.”

  He shows me pictures on his phone. It has a basketball court and a swimming pool—it’s just like a normal school, except it’s in London. “It’ll be like you never left New York,” he says. “Except in London, we’ll probably live in a house. We’ll have a garden. You can walk out of your own front door.” He shows me pictures of the houses, too. They’re painted white and look like a wedding cake—the kind you see in movies. He scrolls to another picture.

  “There’s a street by the school with white lines going across it. They call them zebra crossings, you know, like the stripes. It means the cars have to stop for you. This is the most famous zebra crossing in the world because the Beatles used to make their music at a studio on the same street, right by the school. One of their album covers shows them walking across it.” He flicks through to another photo; it’s the album cover with four guys on it. They’re all wearing different colored suits. For some reason a car is parked on the sidewalk. “People come from all over the world to take pictures of this zebra crossing,” my dad says.

  “People are weird. Anyway, nobody listens to the Beatles anymore, Dad.”

  “What? The Beatles wrote five of the greatest songs of all time. ‘Hey, Jude.’ ‘Dear Prudence.’ ‘All You Need Is Love.’ ‘Let It Be—’”

  “I haven’t h
eard of any of those songs,” I say.

  “That’s because you’re young.”

  “It’s because you won’t let me have a phone.”

  “Talk to your mother—that’s her department. But you don’t need a phone to listen to music,” he says. And then he starts to sing, “Dear Prudence, won’t you come out to play . . .” His whole face looks different when he sings, even his body looks different—he kind of stretches his neck and closes his eyes. He doesn’t look like my dad. It’s like the only way I know he’s my dad is that he’s trying to annoy me.

  “Why doesn’t Mom want to go to London?” I ask him.

  He stops singing. “You’ll have to ask her that,” he says. There’s some mustard on my face, and he wipes it off with his napkin.

  “Dad,” I say. “I’m twelve years old.”

  “Well, put the food in your mouth then. It’s that hole in your face.”

  He’s not angry or anything. This is just how he talks. I think it makes him happy to talk like this to me, like I’m still his little kid. My hot dog box is lying on the bench, and it’s sticky with ketchup—he picks that up with the napkin and carries it to the trash can.

  “What’s going to happen to . . .” I start to say, when he comes back.

  “What?” He looks at me. “What’s going to happen to what?”

  But I don’t answer, and eventually he says, “Nothing’s going to happen, Ben. Right now, nothing’s going to change. It’ll just be like normal, except instead of living here and traveling all the time, I’m going to live there. But I’ll come back as often as I can.”

  “Is that what Mom wants?”

  “I don’t know what your mother wants.” He does this thing with his fingers, where he rubs them against his thumbs, like, to see if his hands are greasy. “To be fair, I don’t think any of this is what she wants,” he says. “But you can help me work on her. You can help me talk to her. That’s your job. You can say you want to move to London, too.”

  I think of Jake, and our apartment, and Central Park. “But I don’t really want to move to London,” I say. “I want you to stay here.”

  “Is that what you want or is that what Mom told you to say?” he asks.

  “She didn’t tell me to say anything.” But that’s not totally true, and maybe I sound like I’m lying, because he looks at me like he doesn’t believe me, or like he’s trying to figure something out.

  “Sometimes I think you guys are happier without me,” he says.

  “I’m not.” After a minute I say, “I don’t think Mom is either.”

  “Well.” He stands up, and I can tell the conversation is over. “This isn’t for you to worry about, okay. This is something your mother and I need to work out for ourselves.”

  We take a cab back to Manhattan. My dad needs to make some business phone calls and doesn’t want to go underground on the subway. I spend the whole time staring out the window. The highway goes alongside a river, and I can see the shore on the other side covered in trees. I don’t mind that he’s on the phone. We’re sort of talked out.

  I’m still hungry when we get home and ask if I can have a snack. Mom isn’t there, but Maria, our cleaner, is cleaning the bathroom and comes out with a mop in her hand to say hello. Dad retreats into his bedroom to finish packing. I have to follow him and ask him again.

  “You’ve had a lot of junk food already today,” he says flatly.

  His mood has changed; he seems stressed out. Maybe he’s mad because I didn’t say I wanted to move to London. But I don’t know what I want. I don’t want to choose. Maybe I said the wrong things, and if I’d said something different . . . something different would be happening. But maybe it has nothing to do with me. His bed is piled with clothes and the floor is covered in open suitcases; it looks a mess.

  “But I’m hungry,” I say. I know I sound whiny. I feel whiny, too, like nothing’s going my way.

  “Have a piece of fruit.”

  “I don’t want a piece of fruit.”

  “Have an apple,” he says. In the end we agree that if I have an apple first, I can eat something else, but then I ask him to cut up the apple and Dad gets mad again.

  “You’re twelve years old,” he says. “You can use your teeth.”

  He closes his bedroom door, not hard but not quietly either, and for a minute I stare at the closed door. I almost say something but don’t. I walk to the kitchen and take an apple from the fruit bowl. Then I flop down on the couch and turn on the TV and start flipping channels.

  When Maria has finished the bathroom, she says to me, “I’m going to do your room now, okay?” And she gets the vacuum cleaner from the closet in the hallway, so I turn the sound on louder. Maria comes out and starts vacuuming around the living room, too, moving chairs and lifting carpets. It’s annoying; there’s a baseball game on and I can’t hear the commentators.

  “Your father is busy?” she asks me.

  “What?” I pretend like I can’t hear her. And she turns off the vacuum cleaner and stands there, with her hands on her apron.

  “Your father is busy?”

  “I guess.”

  Maria has sort of a square wrinkled face and short black hair. She’s a nice woman, but the truth is I always feel a little embarrassed around her. I don’t like having other people in the house.

  “Okay,” she says eventually. “If you’re watching TV, I can do the kitchen first.”

  By the time Dad comes out, about a half hour later, I’ve turned down the volume again and feel better. The Mets are leading the Astros 5 to 1.

  “Throw your core away,” he says, looking at the apple core, which I’ve left on the sofa arm.

  “Maria can throw it away. She’s cleaning up anyway.”

  “That’s not what we pay her for, to clean up after you.”

  “What do we pay her for, then?” I ask.

  Dad looks at me, in a way that makes me blush later that night, when I lie in bed and can’t sleep. “You don’t pay her for anything,” he says.

  So I push myself off the sofa and pick up the wet core and carry it into the kitchen.

  And the next morning, Dad flies to London. He leaves so early that I’m still in bed, but I hear him moving his luggage to the door. When he comes in my room to say goodbye, I pretend to be asleep.

  Four

  MOM AND I ARE SITTING in the kitchen, having breakfast. It’s been a few weeks since Dad left, but it’s not like he was usually around that much anyway. I mean, we’re used to him being gone, even though this time feels a little different.

  “There’s something I want to talk to you about,” she says.

  Sunshine is streaming in, and I’m eating waffles with maple syrup. It’s a really hot July morning, and I’m not wearing a shirt. Mom tried turning on the air-conditioning, but that didn’t do anything to cool things off, it just made a lot of noise. So she opened all the windows. I can hear traffic on the street, a long way below. Motorcycles revving, a big truck going past.

  “You remember Granma’s house in Texas, right?” Mom says. “I think we might go there for a while.”

  “For a summer vacation?” I pour a little more syrup on my waffles. That’s the kind of thing Mom used to call me out on, but lately she’s been letting things slide.

  Most of my friends go away on exciting summer vacations, to places like Paris and Hawaii. They come back to school in September with souvenirs, key rings or stuff made out of leather or wood, and they tell funny stories about what happened at their hotels, which make me jealous. If I can’t laugh, I always just say, “Oh really?”

  We don’t usually go any farther than Cape Cod. There’s a tiny airport in a field, and the flight from New York takes about an hour. After that a taxi drives us to the house my dad always rents. It’s the same place he used to go as a kid. You can see the ocean from the garden, and my mom likes to lie on the beach, pretending to read a book. Working on her tan, she calls it. Since Dad is in London, I figured maybe we wouldn’t go
this year. That’s one of the things I’ve been wondering about.

  “Well, it will be summer when we go to Granma’s. But I think we might want to stick around for a while. Maybe move there. Go on, drink your juice,” she says, because I’m just staring at her. For some reason there are tears in her eyes. “Your granma misses you,” she says.

  “I don’t even really know her,” I say, setting down my glass.

  “Well, this is your chance.” My mom clears her throat and tries to sound cheerful. “It’s not easy for me on my own, with your father . . . away. This way I can go back to work. Granma can help out and you guys can get to know each other.” I don’t say anything, and she adds, “It would mean a lot to me.”

  “You’re talking to me like I’m a little kid. If you want to work, go work. I’m not stopping you. Jake already goes to the diner by himself. I can walk to school. I can walk home and stay here until you come back. If you’re worried about where I am, you can get me a phone. You can call me whenever you want.”

  “You sound like your father,” Mom says. The way she says it is the way she used to talk to him.

  “What do you mean?”

  “That’s what he always said. Go back to work, if that’s what you want. It’s like nobody’s paying attention to what I actually do. Okay, that’s fine, that’s my job. But who’s going to do your laundry, who’s going to pack your lunch, who’s going to make sure you do your homework and turn off the lights and wake you up in the morning. . . .”

  “Maria does the laundry.”

  “Maria only comes twice a week.”

  “So she can come more.”

  Mom takes a deep breath. “Okay, I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”

  “You always complain to me that I don’t want to talk about anything, and then when I try to talk about it, you tell me to stop.”