Home Games

by Benjamin Markovits

  “Take it,” I say. “You’re better at it than I am anyway.”

  He stands there, next to my mom. For some reason he looks very small. He’s still in his soccer gear, in his cleats and shiny shorts, like a kid who never wants to take off his uniform. I’ve known him since he was four years old, when his parents moved to our apartment building, and my mom met them in the elevator. She came home and told me, all excited, about a boy who just moved in a few floors down. He’s exactly your age, she said. And after that we started going to the park together—Mom and Mrs. Schultz started hanging out, too. I don’t really remember what it was like beforehand—it’s like he’s always been around. Finally he says, like he’s talking to a grown-up, “That’s all right. I mean, no, thank you.” But he’s looking at me.

  When he goes home again, without taking anything, I pick up the drone and Mr. Bursar and put them in one of the boxes. If Jake doesn’t want them, neither do I.

  Five

  TODAY’S THE DAY of the flight. I never sleep well if I have to wake up early. Last night I lay in bed and listened to my mom moving around the apartment. She still had a lot to do. But before she went to bed, she came into my room. I have a digital radio, which shows the time in bright red numbers. It said 11:53. I guess she thought I was asleep. I could see her looking at me.

  “Mom,” I said, and she jumped.

  “Oh, goodness, you gave me a shock.” Then she came over and sat down next to me, so the mattress shifted and I rolled against her. “Can’t you sleep?”

  “I’m too . . . I guess, I’m too worked up.” This is what Dad always calls it. Don’t get yourself worked up over nothing, he says. You’re getting worked up. He says it to Mom as well.

  “Me, too,” she said. “It doesn’t matter if you sleep or not. You can just lie there. You can always sleep on the plane.” She put her hand on my hair. “Ben, you’re a tough kid.” Her hand is always bigger than I expect it to be. I could smell her perfume.

  I didn’t think I’d ever get to sleep, but the next thing I know Mom is still sitting there except it’s sunny. Very white sunlight, kind of cold looking. “Time to get up,” she says.

  Mom has laid my clothes out on the floor, just jeans and a T-shirt, spread out next to each other like a flat boy that’s lying on the ground. She used to do that for me when I was little, and she still does it sometimes if we have to leave the house early. I get dressed and help her carry the boxes and suitcases outside. We have to wait in the hallway for the elevator. Everybody seems to be in bed, except for the doorman, who sees us from across the courtyard and comes over to lend a hand.

  “Morning, Mrs. Michaels,” he says. “Can I get you a cab?”

  “Please.” So he walks out in the street to flag one down. Then he helps me load the suitcases into the trunk.

  “Young man,” he says. “Now you look after your mother, you hear me?”

  I smile, but I don’t say anything. There’s a fountain in the middle of the courtyard, which I used to splash around in when I was a baby. You can see the apartment building behind it, some air conditioners in the windows, but that’s not really the part of the building that I live in. I lived in. There are some plants growing around it, too. It all looks—kind of old-fashioned, like pictures of the way New York used to be. When people rode around in horse-drawn carriages. That’s the last thing I see when the cab pulls away.

  Usually I love airplane flights. I like the trays of food and the fact that I get to watch as much TV as I want. Dad always takes the aisle seat, so he can stretch his legs. Mom sits in the middle, so I can look out the window. But today it’s just the two of us, and when we walk down the aisle to our row number, there’s already a woman sitting by the window.

  “Where do you want to sit, middle or aisle?” Mom asks.

  I shrug. “I don’t care.”

  She gives me a long look. “I guess you’re just tired,” she says, but I don’t feel tired—I just don’t feel like talking. Which is probably why Mom introduces herself to that woman. Her face is very suntanned, skinny, and wrinkled; she wears a lot of makeup.

  “I’m Jenny,” Mom says, and the woman says, “Everyone calls me Bells.”

  There’s a public announcement: the captain is talking, telling us about the flight time and the weather in Austin; and after it ends, nobody says anything for a minute, and I think, Maybe it’s okay—they won’t get into a conversation, I can just sit here with my mom, but then the woman says, “You folks from Texas?”

  “I am,” Mom tells her, and lowers her voice. “He isn’t. I’ve been living in New York for fifteen years. You get to a point in your life where you just . . . want to go home.”

  I have a book open in my lap, but that doesn’t stop me from listening.

  “You haven’t lost your accent,” Bells says.

  “I guess that’s one thing I haven’t lost.” Mom smiles, in a way I don’t like. She only does it for women.

  The plane rolls into position at the head of the runaway, and then it starts revving its engines—going faster and faster, and getting louder and louder. When it finally lifts into the air, the cabin goes suddenly quiet. Mom gives me a piece of chewing gum, and I put it in my mouth. My ears feel cloggy. The FASTEN SEAT BELT sign blinks off, and I press the button on my armrest and push the chair back.

  Bells says, “You wouldn’t believe it, but I’ve just become a grandmother.” She’s the kind of person who can start a conversation just by saying stuff; she doesn’t need an invitation. Why shouldn’t I believe it? She looks old. “That’s something that nothing really prepares you for,” Bells goes on. Her accent sounds like my mom’s—she’s from Texas, too. They seem to have a lot to say to each other.

  “Is he all right?” Bells asks after a while. “He seems kind of quiet. He hasn’t turned a page of that book in about ten minutes.”

  “He’s all right,” Mom says. “He’s just got a lot on his plate. I’m sorry.” She’s crying a little, and turns her head away from the lady, toward me. I can see her face all scrunched up—she doesn’t want me to see her either, so she sniffs and puts on a smile and turns back. “I guess we both do. It just constantly amazes me . . . how kids can just . . . put up with what you dump on them. Without complaining. Don’t get me wrong, if I tell him to put his cereal bowl in the dishwasher, this can be, like . . . a half-hour argument. But then real stuff happens, and they’re like, Okay. He’s my little champion guy.”

  “I bet I know what. Maybe he wants the window seat. Am I right?” Bells says that last bit to me, leaning over and touching me on the knee. I think she thinks I’m like seven years old or something, maybe because I’m not very tall. Maybe because that’s still how Mom treats me, especially when she feels emotional.

  “I’m all right.”

  “Well, you may be all right, but there’s no point in that when you can be a whole lot better. Come on.” And she picks up her purse from between her feet. “Let’s you and me swap. I need to use the little girls’ room anyway.”

  So Mom and I have to get out of our seats and stand in the aisle so she can squeeze through. “You can sit by the window,” Mom says. “She won’t care.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t talk to people like that,” I tell her.

  “What do you mean, people like that?”

  “I mean, about me.”

  “There,” the woman says, when she comes back from the restroom. I’m sitting in her seat. “That’s better, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, thank you.”

  What else can I say? I mean, people just do what they want to do anyway—it’s not up to me. They fly to London, they fly to Texas. They tell you to apologize or change seats. They talk about you in front of your face. They play with your toys or make you clean up their messes or act like something is your fault when it’s not. At least now I don’t have to pretend to read. For a few hours I don’t have to pretend at all, not even to be happy; I can stare out the window at the clouds.

  Six


  I’VE NEVER BEEN to Texas in the summer. Usually we go at Christmas or New Year’s, when it’s nice and sunny but not too hot. But this time, when we walk out of the airport, it’s like walking into a bathroom where someone has left the shower on. In about half a minute, my shirt’s soaked through with sweat—that’s how humid it is. I can hardly look at the road, to watch out for Granma’s car, because the sunshine coming off it is too bright.

  “There she is,” my mom says, as an old white Volvo pulls up next to us.

  Granma rolls down her window—I can tell it’s the kind where you have to turn a handle. “We need a storm soon,” she says to my mom. “This is too much.” And then she looks at me and smiles. “Hey, sweetie. It’s nice you’re here.”

  Mom and I load our suitcases into the trunk, then I get in back. The air-conditioning is broken, and the leather seats are so hot I can barely sit on them. I take a sweatshirt out of my backpack and sit on that. Granma keeps the windows wide open, and the air roars through them as she merges onto the highway, overtaking people. The airport is really in the middle of nowhere—there’s a big hotel with a big parking lot around it and other than that . . . nothing. Just a lot of highways and empty land. In New York, it’s like every square foot of land has something going on. Either a neighborhood or a park or an office building or store. But here even the roads seem empty. Even the skies seem bigger. I look at my mom in the front seat. She has her eyes closed; her hair’s blowing back against her ears. And she looks . . . happy.

  About a half hour later, we pull up to the house; it looks almost wild. Bushes have grown over the front window; and a big pecan tree, full of leaves, has put most of the front yard in shade. The grass hasn’t been cut in a while. Some of it’s gone yellow, but it’s long enough you can see the seeds, too; it looks like green wheat. “I meant to get Mario to come,” Granma says. “I wanted to make everything nice, but he’s coming next week. It doesn’t matter. What matters is you’re here.”

  “Thanks for picking us up,” Mom says.

  The house needs painting, too. The walls are supposed to be white, but a lot of the boards are peeling, and you can see gray wood underneath the paint. I get out of the car and stretch my legs again; there’s a kind of dust in the air, which sticks to the sweat on my skin. I feel dirty, from the airplane, too. But I don’t really mind. It’s so hot that all you can think about is getting cool. Or not even that—you don’t even think, you just try to move as little as possible, because every time you move, you feel the heat; and what it feels like is this, like a voice in your head saying, I’m here, I’m really here. New York feels like a long time ago.

  It takes Granma a while to get the key in the lock. Mom piles the suitcases on the front porch; I help her carry them from the trunk of the Volvo. Granma is still fussing with the door. “I’m so clumsy,” she says. But the key finally turns and we go in. It’s a little bit cooler inside but not much.

  I follow Mom as we wheel the suitcases into the bedroom at the end of the hall. “Just to get them out of the way,” she says. Granma has a small house. It’s all on one floor—there are only two bedrooms, so when we stayed in Texas over Christmas, Mom and Dad had to sleep on the living room sofa. Everybody fought to get into the bathroom; nobody seemed in a good mood. “But this time around, things will be different,” Mom had promised me on the airplane flight. She meant because Dad isn’t here. We’re going to sleep in the same room, with two beds in opposite corners. At least until we find our own place to stay . . .

  “Is this okay, Ben?” she says, quietly, so Granma doesn’t hear. “I mean, you don’t mind sharing, do you?”

  I can tell that Mom is trying to give me a chance to talk, to say what I’m really thinking, because it’s not just me and her anymore, it’s Granma as well. It’s Granma’s house. I guess it’s Mom’s house, too, because she grew up in it, but it’s not really mine. I’m like a guest.

  “I don’t mind.”

  “It’ll be fun,” she says, in that voice she sometimes uses when she wants to show that everything’s going to be fine.

  My bed has little dark wood posts on all the corners, and Granma has laid a quilt over the sheet, which is stitched together from lots of rags or pieces of old clothes. Mom sees me looking at it. “You probably won’t need it—it stays pretty hot at night.” There’s a fan on the ceiling, which makes a creaking noise. It has a lamp in the middle, which you turn on with a metal chain, and the chain keeps swinging around in the breeze. I put my backpack on the bed and Granma comes in.

  “I bet you both could use something to drink.”

  Mom says, “The first thing I need is the bathroom.”

  “Who said I’m talking to you?” Granma smiles and turns to me. “What do you want? I’ve got iced tea, I’ve got Dr Pepper.”

  I look at my mom. “Go ahead,” she says.

  “Dr Pepper, please.”

  “There’s no need to stand on ceremony,” Granma tells me as she leaves for the kitchen.

  Mom is on her way to the bathroom. “There’s nothing wrong with saying please,” she calls out.

  Then I’m alone.

  For a minute I just sit there on the bed, which makes little noises when I move; you can feel the springs in the mattress. The bedroom window overlooks the backyard. But there’s a porch or something outside, and the roof goes over it, so that the sun doesn’t shine into the room directly. It’s shady and not cool exactly, but the shade is kind of . . . thick somehow, warm but not hot, the fan is creaking overhead, I’m sitting on this old bedspread in this strange house, and the grass in the yard is so bright in the sunshine that it almost hurts my eyes.

  In New York that morning, when we left the house, it was cool enough that I shivered when the fountain in the courtyard caught the breeze. But when you’re tired, you feel cold. I’m still tired, but at least I’m the opposite of cold. Eventually I get up and follow Granma down the hall and into the kitchen. She says, “I was just going to bring it to you,” and takes a bottle of Dr Pepper out of the fridge. “Do you want a glass?” she asks.

  “I’m all right.” But she takes out a glass anyway and fills it with crushed ice.

  With Mom in the bathroom, it’s just the two of us. She has a really old face, so it’s kind of hard to tell what she used to look like, because it’s so wrinkled. But she moves pretty well, and apart from her swollen hand, she looks all right. A few years ago she had cancer. I don’t really remember it, except that Mom went away for a while, and Dad’s sister, Aunt Becky, came to live with us in New York—just to take me to school and pick me up, things like that. Granma had an operation and then chemotherapy, but when I saw her again at Christmas, she looked okay, just like, a lot older, and her hair looked thin, and her hand was swollen. The hair grew back, but her hand still looks funny. Mom said it had something to do with the lymph nodes, something wasn’t draining properly. . . . I don’t like to think about it, but suddenly I feel bad about saying what I did to Jake.

  When she opens the bottle of Dr Pepper, she holds it in her swollen hand, but screws the cap off with her other hand. Then she pours it into the ice-filled glass, until it almost bubbles over. “There we go.”

  Mom comes in, and Granma says to me, “Do you want a scoop of ice cream on that?”

  I look at my mother. “Knock yourself out,” she says. “Granma’s house, Granma’s rules.”

  And that’s what it’s like for the rest of the day. It’s like a holiday, and it doesn’t matter what I do, so I watch a lot of TV. Mom is busy unpacking and I hear her talking to Granma, who is busy cooking and talking back. I think I fall asleep late in the afternoon, because it’s so hot—that’s one of the things they argue about, when to turn the air-conditioning on. Granma says you just get used to it, and anyway, she just has these little AC units in the window, which drip and smell funny and don’t really do anything anyway. And Mom says, “Well, that’s one thing we can take care of while I’m here. We can put in some real air-conditioning.” So the
y argue about that, too, and when I wake up again, the TV is still on. I’m lying on a weird, not-very-comfortable couch—it’s got wooden legs, and velvet cushions that are kind of worn through, and a sort of scratchy woolen blanket on top of it, which someone must have put over me. The sun is going down, and the air is yellow, like eggs are yellow, sort of oozy, and Mom is crying in the kitchen. Granma sees me—she sees that I’ve woken up, the kitchen and the living room just have an arch between them—and she makes a face at me, like, Don’t worry. I got this covered.

  At supper, Granma opens a bottle of wine. We eat in the kitchen. Granma made chicken casserole, and I get another glass of Dr Pepper (even though I don’t really like it; it’s too sweet) and another scoop of ice cream afterward—for dessert, a big bowl of Blue Bell’s cookies and cream. “What do you want to do tomorrow?” Granma asks me.

  I eat another spoonful of ice cream. There’s nothing I really want to do. I don’t mean to be rude, but it’s like—I don’t know anybody anyway. “I’m fine. I mean, whatever.”

  “Do you want to go swimming?”

  “That sounds nice.”

  “We could play mini-golf.”

  “That sounds great, too,” I say.

  “There’s a Peter Pan mini-golf course on the way to Barton Springs. We could do both.”

  “Okay, sure, Granma. I mean, thank you.”

  Mom says, “Stop sounding so darned polite, Ben, and say what you actually think.”

  “I’m saying what I think,” I tell her. “We could do all those things. They sound cool.”

  Apparently Barton Springs is this big rocky pool that’s sort of carved out of part of a river. I’ve heard about it but never been there. There’s also a secondhand book store called Half Price Books and a famous record shop called Waterloo Records and an ice cream place that we can walk to called Amy’s Ice Creams, where you can ask them to “crush in” anything you like, like Oreo cookies or pecans or Butterfinger candy bars or whatever, into whatever flavor you ask for. This is Mom’s idea—she took me once before, over Christmas a few years ago. I say “sure” and she sort of rolls her eyes at me, and Granma says, “Give him a break.”