by R.P. Burnham
Live and Let Live
When Tara Wright got out of the shower on the Saturday morning that the second softball game was scheduled, she was busy wrapping a towel around her and at first did not see Meg washing the kitchen floor. Their apartment was small, with the bedroom and bath adjacent to the kitchen, however, so that just as she was about to turn left into the bedroom, out of the corner of her eye she caught sight of Meg bending over a mop.
“What in holy hell are you doing?” she asked. With the towel wrapped around her barely covering her girth, she couldn’t put her hands on her hips, but that’s what she wanted to do.
Meg, busy scrubbing a stubborn stain, did not look up. “What does it look like I’m doing?”
“It looks like you’re washing the floor. But why, I don’t know. We’ve got to get to the field to claim it.”
“I’m all ready,” she said airily. “The floor will be done by the time you’re dressed. Don’t worry.”
“Don’t worry? Hey, girl, you’re due up to the plate. It’s time for a bat and helmet, not sewing buttons.”
Tara was referring to a time when they were going to Meg’s brother’s wedding and were late. Meg had forgotten everything because a doll she kept from her childhood had lost one of its button eyes and she couldn’t stand thinking of it maimed and incomplete. Tara had razzed her all the way to the church about her priorities. “It would be one thing to be sewing a button on a blouse you were going to wear, but a doll’s eye!” After that “sewing buttons” became her shorthand for Meg’s mania for neatness and cleanliness.
Meg never conceded any mania; instead she would talk about the tribulations of living with a slob. But hearing the phrase now, she merely grinned. “Don’t worry,” she repeated. “I’m ready. Try to remember to hang your towel after you get dressed.”
She promised to try, though she could make no guarantee. Her job didn’t lend itself to a sense of neatness: she worked at a quick-oil-change place in Bedford and often came home covered with grease and grime that always managed to penetrate her overalls and get on her clothes and skin. She couldn’t do much about that, though her propensity to leave empty beer cans on the table—usually without a coaster so that their tables were all bedecked with ghostly rings—and her tendency to throw dirty clothes in the direction of the laundry hamper with much less accuracy than throwing a runner out at first base on a bunt or a dribbler to the mound were habits that she had much less success rationalizing so that when they argued about these matters she would often simply cheerfully admit that she was a slob. Neat and fastidious Meg was a clerical worker with a local manufacturer. The same precision she used to file invoices and reports was reflected in her personal habits. Sometimes these basic differences led to squabbles, sometimes even to real arguments, but because they did love one another and had settled comfortably into a life together, mostly they led to sharp bantering.
Meg was wrong about one thing. She assumed that because Tara was a slob she didn’t care about their apartment. But she did. She loved it, in fact. It was decorated primarily with sports paraphernalia, Red Sox and Bruin posters, a baseball signed by Nomar Garciaparra which was set on a wooden stand under a poster of the shortstop, game balls from championship games of the Courtney Academy softball team, team pictures of those same championship years, a hockey stick on another wall. A few sentimental pictures of children and animals and a doll collection on a shelf behind the television set reflected Meg’s taste.
It was through Tara’s efforts that they had gotten the place. She always felt a certain delight every time she remembered the day four years ago they first looked at it. Their landlady’s first at-bat was a tough out. She had answered the door and frowned at them, which caused Meg to favor Tara with an I-told-you-so look. The ad had specified that the apartment was in a quiet, residential neighbor-hood suitable for a quiet, elderly lady. Meg had argued that it was insane to even look at a place with that kind of a listing. Tara, who had grown tired of searching after two weeks of looking at accommodations ranging from hovels to dives to dumps and who had had a feeling that this place was for them, began to think she’d thrown a wild pitch.
But she didn’t give up, of course: that was not her style. “We’re here to look at the apartment,” she said in her most cheerful voice.
The woman continued frowning. “It might already be taken,” was all she said.
Still not very promising, but then came strike one. Tara, noting that the “might” allowed them an opening, introduced herself and Meg to the woman, whose name they learned was Eleanor Fournier, and who upon hearing their names softened a little. “Well, it will do no harm for you to look at the place.”
Originally the apartment was built for Mrs. Fournier’s mother, with a separate entrance on the second story of the small house and an indoors door now kept locked, they learned as they walked through the place. It had become available after the old lady died. Now a widow herself and needing extra income, Mrs. Fournier had finally decided that a tenant was needed.
It was their names that got them in the door. The strike-two pitch came as they started talking and Mrs. Fournier told them she recognized them and told them her story. It turned out she had played softball at a time when there were few accommodations for female athletes. She played all over New England and upstate New York in a semiprofessional capacity and only abandoned that life when she married at the age of twenty-seven. The marriage was childless, and her main interest through the years was following women’s sports. She told them she followed their championship years with great interest and even attended a few games. This conversation was all very nice, but a couple pitches missed the plate, for even with the ice broken and a pleasant conversation about softball going on she still made no offer to rent the apartment to them. Later she admitted to them that she was very suspicious—not because she suspected they were lesbians but rather because she thought that for two young women to answer an ad that specified a quiet, elderly lady, they had to be pulling her leg. With a full count now, Tara’s spontaneity came to the rescue and she zipped a third-strike fastball over the plate. Discussing the careers of several of their teammates who had gone on to play softball in college, Mrs. Fournier asked why they hadn’t attended college, and Tara had answered, “I can’t speak for Meg, but for me the decision was a no-brainer.” She’d made a comic face, half-closing her eyes and dropping her lower jaw. “I don’t have one.”
Mrs. Fournier stared at her for a few seconds, her face locked in a puzzled, incredulous expression, before finally exploding into laughter. The apartment was theirs and had been for four years. They had no plans to leave; in fact, Mrs. Fournier had hinted that with no living relatives she was going to leave the house to them. A thin, active woman of 65 with short salt-and-pepper hair, she looked much younger than her years. Her hooked nose and large dark eyes suggested the deportment of a predatory bird, but though she suffered from periodic bouts of depression where she would grow quiet and withdrawn for days, mostly they had discovered appearances are deceiving, for she was an exceedingly kind woman who took a deep interest in their welfare. They had grown to regard her as a second mother.
Coming down the stairs on their way to Tara’s truck, they saw her sweeping the walk. Her neatness and fastidiousness put Tara in the minority at the house. She swept every day and in the winter would make sure not a sliver of ice or snow remained on the driveway or walk. Tara did the heavy work, mowing the lawn and using the snowblower, turning over soil for a planting, and so forth; Meg had a vegetable garden in the backyard, and Mrs. Fournier took care of the flowers in the front along with her cleaning-up routines.
“Hey, Ellie, we’re playing those inferior creatures called men again today. You want to come along and watch? You could be our coach. We’ll pay you with all the beer you can drink.”
She smiled and shook her head. “Tea is more my drink of choice anyways, but, sorry girls, I’m going shopping this morning. You know I’ll be at the tournam
ents next month.”
She was referring to the two fast-pitch tournaments the remnants of the team played each summer. They used three or four ringers from the current Courtney Academy team to replace the women from the championship teams who had moved away or no longer played softball. Last year they had come in second at one of the tournaments and won the other one. The games they were playing among themselves and against the men were workouts for these tournaments.
Tara threw the equipment bag into the back of her truck while Meg carefully fastened the cooler to the hooks on the side of the truck bed with bungee cords.
“Well, it’s just a tune-up, but we do plan to have fun.”
“One thing I’ve learned about you, Tara—you always have fun,” Mrs. Fournier said as she swept the pile of debris she had collected into a dustpan.
They backed out of the driveway and with a wave were off. They hadn’t gone two blocks, however, before Tara suddenly exclaimed, “Well, looky there. Finally.”
Before Meg could fully comprehend what she was talking about and try to stop her, she pulled the truck over against the curb on the other side of the street where Darren French was walking. They knew him from high school and before but were not then, nor were they now, anything close to being friends with him. He had been a thug and a punk since he was in grade school.
Meg, now seeing exactly what Tara had in mind, was already protesting. “Don’t, Tara, don’t…”
“Hey, Darren. Yo! I’ve got something to say to you.”
He stopped and, recognizing her, favored her with a contemptuous frown. He was about to continue on his way without comment when she snared him with a cryptic remark.
“Darren, I remember what I learned from you in high school.”
He glared at her, his eyes narrowing suspiciously. “You didn’t learn nothing from me in high school.”
”Oh yes I did, and you’re still showing it to the world. Every time you open your mouth to spew out racist and sexist garbage, you prove that a man can have two assholes. You should be in Ripley’s Believe It Or Not.”
Darren clenched his fists and took a menacing step towards the car. Tara heard Meg suck in her breath in terror. Her body was tense and she whispered, “Come on, Tara, let’s go.” But Tara stared her enemy down.
“Listen, you dyke bitch. I could smash your face and no one would blame me.”
“You do and I’ll see you go to jail. That’s where you belong. Let me give you some advice, my boy. Leave decent people alone. Fiona Sparrow and Lowell Edgecomb are worth five hundred miserable scums like you. You’re a loser. You can be destructive, but you can’t make the world a better place until you shut your second asshole and keep it shut.”
He was right up next to the car, and although she was not showing it she was as scared as Meg and ready to gun the engine. Luckily Darren was indecisive, teetering between violence and prudence. Without taking her eyes off him, Tara softened her tone. “Why don’t you just keep your nose clean and mind your own business? There’s nothing wrong with that. Haven’t you ever seen the bumper sticker that says LIVE AND LET LIVE? Do that, Darren, and you might surprise us all and become a good man.”
Darren’s answer came in the guise of misdirected violence: he kicked the car door, causing Tara to gun the engine.
They were half a block away before Meg stopped screaming. “Did you even look to see if a car was coming!? My God! Why did you say that crap to him? Now you’ve made him an enemy.”
Tara had been saying ever since the night of the Sea Dogs game that if she ever saw Darren French or Rett Murray she was going to give them a piece of her mind. It was no abstract promise either; French lived only a few blocks from their house and Murray was often seen on Main Street. But several weeks had gone by without any chance meeting. She had no real answer to Meg’s objection. She had made a promise, seen her opportunity, and taken it—that’s all. She drove on in silence for a while, then said, “Don’t you think he already was? You think a man like that would like lesbians?”
“No, but you brought us to his notice. You should follow your own advice and live and let live.”
A few weeks ago they’d gone up to Lowell’s cottage to have a swim. When they were drinking beer and talking afterwards, the conversation had come around to the incident at the Sea Dogs game, during which Meg had said, “Your enemy is our enemy. If these Nazis and right-wingers got their way, they wouldn’t stop at one thing they disliked. They’d get the Jews, say, and then turn their attention to the blacks and Asians and Hispanics. Then they’d turn on the lesbians and gays. Next would probably be the Catholics and then the kinds of Protestants they didn’t like. At the end that Carter guy and Rett Murray and Darren French would have about ten thousand people left in the country. We’re on your side not only because you’re good people but because we also have selfish reasons too.”
Tara reminded Meg of her speech now, but Meg refused to concede. “You could have said it differently. Calling him was an asshole was a foolish thing to do.”
“Are you serious? We’re supposed to turn our backs on Fifi? Come on, Meg. I wanted him to know that people notice what he does. He might think twice next time.”
Without any further interruptions they arrived at the field to find Lowell and Fiona already there. They were tossing a ball back and forth, their faces shining with a concentration so focused on each other that at first they did not notice that they were not alone. Tara had frequently observed them when they were with company. Then they were reserved with each other. She knew she was witnessing the world of their secret, private love and was touched. “Get a load of the lovebirds,” she said gruffly to hide the emotion she felt. “We won’t tell them about Darren, at least not now. We don’t want to have them disturbed during the game.”
“Marilyn will be disturbance enough,” Meg answered cryptically.
Lowell was thinking the same thing, for while Fiona and Meg started putting the bases in and he and Tara were bringing the cooler with the beer and soft drinks to the diamond, he said in a voice that betrayed his anxiety, “I only hope Marilyn and my brother arrive separately.”
Tara nodded and thought for a moment. When she and Meg visited Fiona and Lowell at the lake they had also discussed Bill and Marilyn. They were very upset about this develop-ment—strangely, it almost seemed they were more upset about it than the racist incident. “Had Bill ever cheated before?” Tara asked. Lowell said he doubted it very much. According to him Bill and his wife were the perfect couple with two beautiful sons. They were, he said, one of the main reasons he had decided to come home to Maine. He was getting very serious and very morose, so Tara had deflected the conversation to Fiona. “But you’re glad you found Fiona, aren’t you?” she asked, and as expected it got the two of them talking about their life and how happy they were. She rather suspected that both he and Fiona feared that Marilyn somehow endangered their love. “Let’s hope people are discreet too. The situation is going to remind a lot of people of what happened in high school.” She didn’t have to explain the reference to Nicole Tourigny, the teammate whose boyfriend cheated with Marilyn, but she did add, “I’d say Marilyn is respected as our power hitter, but she isn’t exactly the most popular person on the team.”
Soon just about everybody showed up early, including Marilyn and Bill in separate cars. Tara noticed that Lowell felt uneasy in his brother’s presence and tried to disguise it by talking too excitedly about the game. People broke into various groups to warm up, some stretching or running, others playing catch, and after a while batting fungoes for infield and outfield practice. Tara, as usual, warmed up with Meg catching.
During this warm-up period she saw more evidence that verified Lowell’s and Meg’s separate expressions of their worry. While the guys who came were either indifferent or uninformed about the situation with Marilyn and Bill, many of the women showed how uncomfortable with or hostile to Marilyn they were. Lowell made an effort to be polite when he asked Marilyn about
her new apartment, but the effort came through more than the politeness, and Marilyn answered him curtly, “Yeah, it’s quite nice.” Fiona was quiet, only speaking to her cousin when spoken to and appearing very ill at ease. In contrast, everyone was friendly with Bill in a way that telegraphed their opinion that he was the victim of Marilyn’s manipulation. Jane Coffman, a benchwarmer during the championship years and home in Waska on vacation now, had clearly been filled in with all the details of Marilyn’s latest caper. She pointedly asked in Marilyn’s presence where Nicole Tourigny was now. Everyone knew she had married and moved to California. A bit later Phoebe Waite watched Marilyn with a deepening frown on her face as she drank some water near home plate. She had never liked Marilyn even before the stolen boyfriend business disrupted the team, but now there seemed to be another, more personal reason for the dislike. Her husband George, a tall, gawky man with a narrow face who was a member of the band in high school and who was absolutely in no danger of being seduced by Marilyn, had come along again and was prepared to play if there weren’t enough people, even though he was not very good. She was frowning because she could see that he, like most of the men, was staring at Marilyn’s body as she ran in the outfield. “That woman,” she muttered.
Tara shrugged. “She can’t help having those boobs.”
Phoebe glared at her, perhaps because she recognized a tone of neutrality she did not share, or perhaps because she was stocky and had small breasts. “No, she can’t, but she doesn’t have to steal men.”
“No,” Tara said slowly, “no, she doesn’t. But don’t you think men have something to do with it?”
Phoebe’s eyes narrowed and she looked menacing. “What do you mean?”
“Nothing much, just that the guy could say no. It takes two to tango.”
Phoebe shrugged and walked away without another word.
Tara rolled her eyes at Meg but said nothing. While even Meg disapproved of Marilyn, Tara was different and knew it. She alone was not judgmental but rather tolerant. People had to do what they had to do. She didn’t choose the way she loved. Why should she blame someone else for grabbing at love? Only because she knew it disturbed Fiona and Lowell did she wish it wasn’t so. The wife she didn’t know, and out of sight out of mind, though she knew that if she met Bill’s wife and saw that she was hurt she would probably feel different. So she liked Bill and she liked Marilyn, but she had to be careful. She didn’t want to have to take sides. Back in high school when Marilyn had stolen the right fielder’s boyfriend and had divided the team into two camps, she had stayed neutral and organized a team meeting that more or less resolved the issue, though some would say it was Marilyn’s growing tired of the boy in question that ultimately solved the problem.
She had been tolerant of human foibles for a long, long time; it was part of her discovery of herself. As a little girl she felt different and did not know why. The things her mother gave her to play with, dolls and plastic cooking pots and such, the dresses she’d wear, the blue bunnies on her pink wallpaper, none of this felt right to her. She preferred her brother’s toys and his rough games. When other girls wanted to play house and pretend they had boyfriends, she wanted to be the boyfriend even though she knew it was wrong to feel this way. She was happiest when she played baseball with her brother and his friends. They called her a tomboy, meaning to tease her, but instead it gave her her first glimmering hint of the reality of her life. By the time she was twelve she knew how she was different. It made her simultaneously strong, shy, confused about what to do, and understanding of others who were somehow different. It was in the seventh and eighth grades, the time that she seriously began learning to be a softball pitcher, that she became friends with Fiona Sparrow. Her real life was still hidden, but, strangely, as she gained con-fidence as a pitcher the knowledge of her reality began scaring her less and less while more and more she was becoming herself.
All this was part of an inheritance that made her tolerant, but other life experiences and discoveries made her open-minded and nonjudgmental in different ways. She believed in commitment but not fences. People should love one another until they stopped loving one another. There should be nothing coercive about love. Meg had hinted that she’d like to have a lesbian commitment ceremony, but Tara wanted nothing to do with it. It sounded too mushy to her, and although there was nothing legally binding in such an exchange of vows it still smacked of fences. And yet she loved Meg and planned to spend the rest of her life with her. She hoped Fiona and Lowell would always love one another as well. But if Bill had grown estranged from his wife, if he no longer loved her, then who was she to look down on Marilyn as a sneak thief. These people, her teammates, believed in fences. They were almost forcing her to act like a sneak thief herself because she didn’t think Marilyn and Bill were. It was ridiculous.
Something else that became one of her guiding principles she had learned from softball. Years ago when pitching for the team that won the first state championship she would discuss with the coach how to pitch to various opponents. A hitter should be started with a fastball, followed by a drop pitch and so forth. This usually worked, but she didn’t become the best woman pitcher in the state until she started listening to a voice inside her that told her to throw a change-up when the situation required a fastball. She started to follow these feelings and pitched two no-hitters in a row. Ever after that she started trusting her instincts, and not just in softball. Meg had shown no signs of lesbianism, but something told her that love beckoned Meg to her. She listened to that voice and found the love of her life. The same with their apartment: they wouldn’t have gotten it if she hadn’t had a feeling it was for them when she read the classified ad. So it was with Marilyn. The way Tara saw it, Marilyn was just being true to her instincts. To deny her, to turn her back on her, would be to repudiate her own life. She couldn’t do that, though she did understand the waters were a bit murkier in this case. To live and let live meant nobody got hurt; if the wife ended up hurt, then she would be forced to join the majority whether she wanted to or not.
She threw one more pitch to Meg and raised her hand.
“Your head has been somewhere else, you know,” Meg said. “You sure you’re ready?”
“I’ll be ready,” she said as she turned to Bill, who was returning a bat after hitting fungoes to the outfielders. “Think you can hit me this time, Bill?”
He picked the bat up again and swung it a few times. “I was out at Fun Town last week and used their batting cage. I had three sessions of fast-pitch baseball to get my timing back. You’re in big trouble, Tara.”
“Ha,” she snorted, “that machine ain’t me. You don’t expect me to feed you nothing but fastballs, do you?”
“All I can say is, I’ll be sitting on your fastball.”
He grinned so boyishly as he spoke she couldn’t help smiling back.
“Well,” she said, giving him a friendly pat on the back, “we’re going to have some fun, no matter what. If I get rocked I can blame it on too much beer.”
Everyone was converging on home plate. There had been some talk about dividing the men and women into two teams this time, but no decision had been reached. It looked as if this was going to be discussed now.
First she wanted to make a point. In front of everyone and rather pointedly, she walked over to where Marilyn was working on the webbing of her glove. “Hey, Marilyn, what’s this I hear about you getting one of those exercise machines?”
Marilyn, kneeling on her haunches, looked at Tara and stood up. She patted her belly, which to Tara looked pretty slim and firm. “It’s for the weight. I put on four or five pounds, first time that’s ever happened.”
“Tell me when you’ve added fifty more and we get on a seesaw together, you skinny thing.”
“Tara, you know me. I need a little heft to have power when I swing a bat, but there’s more to life than softball.”
“Tell me about it.” She looked over at Meg. “Hey, Meg! Tell Marilyn what you
were doing right before we left.”
Meg turned and regarded Tara suspiciously. “You know very well that I was washing the floor where you tracked in mud.” To Marilyn she added, “It’s like living with a big kid, you have no idea.”
Tara grinned. “See? There’s more to life for Meg too. There’s cleaning. My trouble, Timber, is that for me the ‘more’ is beer. This”—she patted her jumbo belly and slapped at her ass—“is the price I pay. No exercise machine for me, though.”
Her point being made, she turned back to the men and women gathered at home plate and said, “Let’s figure out how we’re going to play this thing.”
The group, particularly the women, decided that the original plan of a rematch of the women against the men would be a better game. George had to play because both Bob Hanrahan and Ralph Johnson were no-shows and the men were shorthanded. He disgraced himself in right field, letting three balls drop in front of him or go between his legs for errors that let in five extra runs and which turned out to be the margin of victory since the men lost 7 to 2. Eddie Du Bois pitched to Tara her first time up and did an outrageously satiric imitation of her mannerisms and taunting. He captured perfectly her habit of circling the mound and pounding the ball in and out of her glove before a crucial pitch, and said things like “You’re going down now, my man” and “Get ready for some heat” whereby he’d throw a ridiculous slow arching pitch over the plate. The men’s two runs came on an ambigu-ous home run by Lowell with Bill on first base after singling. The ball went over the left -fielder Phoebe Waite’s head after she first misjudged it and came in on the ball, but Tara generous-ly conceded that it would have been a four-bagger even if Phoebe had gotten a good jump on the ball. For the second time Tara was that supposed impossibility in the game of softball, both the winning and the losing pitcher. Eddie said that he used to think she was a pretty darn good pitcher, “but let’s face it, a five hundred pitcher is kinda mediocre.” She answered that the losing pitcher got no support, particularly from the second base man, one Eddie Du Bois.
During the game everything went smoothly in regards to Marilyn. She drove in the only two earned runs the women had with a double and a solo home run and was cheered by her teammates with reasonable enthusiasm, but after the game things got iffy once more. They had only played seven innings because the plan was to have a picnic lunch at Lowell’s cottage, followed by a swim. As everyone was collecting and putting away their equipment, however, the first hint of trouble came. While two of the men had already said they had to be elsewhere in the afternoon, Tara was surprised when three of the women, Helen Sapienza, Linda Miles and Adele Sartory, all of them good friends of Nicole Tourigny, said they had other engagements and backed out of the picnic. They managed to sound convincing, but when Phoebe said the same thing, her husband George contradicted her and they went off some little distance and argued for a while. Not much could be heard of their spat, but the phrase “that woman” was said loud enough for everyone to hear and know to whom it referred. He won the argument and they drove up to the lake with the others, but everyone, and especially Fiona, started showing signs of apprehension.
They went in six cars, following Lowell and Fiona. They made their first stop to buy more beer, Italian sandwiches and the like for their lunches, then proceeded to the lakefront property. Lowell gave everyone a brief tour of the work he had done on the cottage before they ate. Marilyn walked through the cottage without comment, but she did give Fiona a strange, knowing smile when she glanced up the stairs at the loft. Fiona, trying hard not to blush, blushed. Tara alone witnessed this exchange. The rest of them were listening to Lowell describe the work he had done. The carpenters Denny Genier and Pat Williams, appraising the cottage with a profes--sional eye, were duly impressed. The outside shingling and the windows and doors were com-pleted. Lowell, with Fiona’s assistance, was now wallboarding the insides. The main room and kitchen were completed, as was the ceiling, which Lowell said was done with the help of a couple of professionals last week, but the rest remained bare. Still one could see the final look of the cottage: it was going to be a cozy and comfortable place, with a big picture window dis-playing the lake in all its beauty.
After the brief tour everyone sat either at the table that was waiting to be moved to the unfinished deck or in folding chairs or on the ground and ate their lunch. The conversation was mostly about softball. Some of the men asked about the tournaments the women were entering and then conjectured for a while about getting a men’s team together to represent Waska in the men’s division, but after some discussion the idea fell flat. Marilyn sat next to Meg and Tara, and Bill sat by Pat and Denny. They were so discreet it was almost ridiculous, Tara thought, but, then, given the signs of hostility already shown, they didn’t have much choice. Tara thought Marilyn was growing rather impatient and angry with this enforced hypocrisy and controlling these feelings only with difficulty. She was uncharacteristically quiet.
When after lunch they all changed into their swimsuits and went into the water, at one point Bill and Marilyn swam off a little ways together and talked earnestly and quietly for a few minutes. With Eddie horsing around in the water with an old soccer ball he’d brought, Tara doubted many had taken any particular notice of their conversation.
After the swim they all returned to their seats without changing and broke out the beer. Barbara and Fiona wore bikinis, but the rest of the women, the stocky ones like Phoebe and Jane, and the slender ones like Meg, wore one-piece bathing suits and seemed self-conscious in the presence of the men. Tara herself didn’t own a bathing suit and never had. She had gone into the water wearing her playing clothes, a white T-shirt and beige shorts. Usually if time permitted she would let these garments dry out, but Meg always packed another set of clothes in case she needed them. She had swum just long enough to cool off, then was the first one to go on shore to have a beer. She didn’t have to worry about pacing herself because Meg was not a drinker and would sip one beer for hours to make sure no one forced another one on her. Tara didn’t object to Meg’s teetotal ways, for it made her a perfect designated driver. She often said that if Meg drank as much as she did they would have wrapped themselves around a tree long ago. Phoebe and Jane were also pretty heavy drinkers when a party was going on, and Bill’s friends acted as if beer was no stranger to them. They sat on folding chairs or the ground and continued talking about the game. Eddie clowned a lot with Tara, going on about pitching as if he were as experienced as she was. “Why do you suppose us pitchers can’t hit?” he asked. “We should know what to do with a curve or fastball or drop pitch because we know what they do. But what happens? We swing like an eighty-year-old man. It’s a mystery to me.”
“You’re a second baseman, Eddie. You tell me why pitchers can’t hit.”
“Come on, Tara. Tell me you’ve ever seen anyone as intimidating as me on the mound. You know you can’t. You were shaking in your sneakers.”
Tara could see that Fiona felt a proprietary regard for the cottage but that her shyness wouldn’t let her speak of the place as home. Any question about the cottage she would let Lowell answer. When Marilyn asked if the cottage was going to have air conditioning, she looked down in embarrassment. When something about softball or any general topic came up, she spoke readily enough. She wasn’t ordinarily shy among her teammates: her new life of love, Tara thought, was simply too private, too important, too new, for her to speak of it in public. But Tara also wondered if she feared the disapproval of Bill’s friends, all of them white, working-class guys not noted for their enlightenment. Yet she was pretty sure they were all basically decent. Eddie she knew was. Eddie was something else! She had never been attracted to a guy, but she did like him. For a moment she let herself daydream what it would be like to be married to him and come home to his genial, squirrely face every night, but rather quickly she found the idea ridiculous. Surreptitiously she put her hand on Meg’s lower back.
Meg turned and smiled at her. She knew
Meg as well as anyone on earth, but still many mysteries remained unknowable behind that sweet smile. Her smile seemed to understand that she was loved and loved in return, but who could be sure? Life was very strange. She looked out at the lake to see the high sun reflected on the water and making it very bright. She squinted and watched a couple of speedboats with water skiers racing across the water. She glanced over at Fiona, who looked vulnerable and apprehensive sitting beside Lowell. She noticed that occasionally he put a reassuring hand on her back in the same surreptitious way she had just touched Meg.
Denny was talking about the basement he and Pat finished for Bill last year. “I don’t imagine Bill has been much help, Lowell. He’s not too handy with tools.”
Lowell, looking embarrassed, shook his head. “No, he’s not. I do a lot for him around his house, that’s for sure.”
Now it was Bill’s turn to look embarrassed. Denny didn’t seem to know that Bill was supposed to help Lowell with the cottage and hadn’t. “I meant to help out,” he mumbled, looking at the ground and avoiding Lowell’s eyes, “but I just didn’t have the time.”
With the conversation heading in a dangerous direction, Lowell’s face grew tense. “Fiona’s been a good gofer, so we’ve made good progress anyways.”
That remark, while making Fiona the third person in a row to feel embarrassed, had the desired effect of changing the subject. Everyone started asking Fiona what she had done to help.
While she modestly explained that she did no more than hold a ladder or fetch a tool, Tara noticed Phoebe staring at Marilyn with an unmistakable look of hatred on her face. Her husband George, like all the guys, had been constantly stealing glances at Marilyn’s body, which her skimpy bikini was displaying without much need of added imagination. Unlike Fiona, she had not put on a long shirt to cover herself, but she wasn’t flaunting herself either. She was simply sitting on a towel a bit to the left of Meg and some distance from Bill, who was sitting between Denny and Pat. She was more or less alone and spoke very little.
But the hatred seething in Phoebe’s eyes wasn’t going to acknowledge that Marilyn was faultless. It was plain as the freckles on her homely face that her anger was misdirected, for it should be George with whom she was angry. The one thing that made this another dangerous situation was that Phoebe was drinking her beers very quickly. She’d had three already and from the tilt of the can when she took a swig, she was just about finished with the fourth. Of course Tara was keeping up with her nicely, but then she could hold her liquor, and even when she went over her limit she was a happy drunk. Phoebe, unfortunately, was an ugly drunk.
She wasn’t quite in that state yet, so some lazy time passed. As the sun grew higher in the sky, Jane and Marilyn separately sought unshaded areas to work on their tans, and at this point male eyes even more frequently surveyed the contours of Marilyn’s body. Then when Bill asked Denny and Pat if they’d been busy this summer, and Pat answered that they had been so busy they could hardly steal a moment for themselves during the work week, Phoebe started the trouble.
“Steal,” she said with an ugly curl of the lip. “That’s a good word. I steal bases. Marilyn, what are you good at stealing?”
The remark, which seemed to come out of nowhere, surprised everyone except Tara and possibly Fiona, who also seemed aware of the undercurrents flowing through the conversations all day. It caused an immediate hush. Tara saw Bill’s face color as Marilyn, who sat up instantly when she was addressed, glared back at Phoebe. She was about to make an angry retort when a glance from Fiona stopped her. Fiona looked as if she was on the verge of panicking; everyone else maintained an uncomfortable silence. Quietly and calmly Marilyn said, “I was not aware that I stole anything. But if the reference is somehow to my personal life, I don’t think that’s anyone’s business but my own.”
Phoebe, with her booze-clouded mind, didn’t respond immediately, so Eddie took it upon himself to break the silence. “The only time I ever stole a base was when the umpires forget to put them away after a game.”
Everyone laughed, not so much at the humor as to release tension.
“Eddie,” Bill asked rather too anxiously, “don’t I remember you belly flopping into second base once when we played South Portland? Wasn’t that a stolen base?”
“Naw. I’d singled to left and was taking second on the throw to the plate when the ball was cut off and I was in a pickle. I managed to slide beautifully into second and was safe. But if you want to call it a stolen base, I won’t argue.”
Phoebe now turned her attention to her husband. “Suppose you keep your goddamned eyes to yourself,” she said in a whisper loud enough to be heard across the lake.
“What do you mean?” George asked in a wounded tone. “I haven’t done nothing wrong.”
“Don’t give me that crap, George. I saw you ogling Marilyn every chance you got.”
“What am I supposed to do? Keep my eyes on the ground all day?” His voice had an irritating whine that made Tara wonder what Phoebe saw in the guy.
“If I may interrupt,” Eddie said in another effort to be the peacemaker, “it’s no secret Marilyn is a fine-looking woman lovingly assembled by a just and benevolent God to be a refuge for sore male eyes.” He looked at Marilyn and added, “I hope you don’t mind me saying so,” while she nodded noncommittally even while not quite able to hide how pleased she was with the compliment. “And maybe you don’t know, Phoebe, but when guys window-shop they’re not necessarily planning on buying. More often than not it’s the little woman back home who gets the new dress—if you take my meaning.” Here he winked knowingly. “So if you’ll take my advice, you’ll see there’s no problem.”
Bill stood and began pacing nervously.
Phoebe had been exhibiting signs of impatience, grimacing and drumming her heel as she listened to these little observations on life. “As Marilyn, that fine-looking woman, said, my personal life is none of your business. Marilyn is the issue, not me. Marilyn and the team, I should say.”
Denny stood to get another beer. Cracking the fliptop can, he said, “Your team is none of my business, of course, but if you’re blaming Marilyn for disrupting it because guys look at her, I think you’re wrong.” He sat down and nudged Pat Williams. “Am I right, Pat?”
Pat grinned. “You’re always right, partner.”
Phoebe glared at them in drunken disbelief. “Jesus, you guys don’t have a clue, do you. Marilyn, tell them about the boyfriend you stole in high school. While you’re at it, tell them about Bill.”
“I’ll do no such thing,” Marilyn said angrily. “And Bill can speak for himself.”
But Bill, the person in question, couldn’t make any answer. A few minutes ago he had exchanged a look with Lowell as he paced, and as if waiting for a prearranged signal, Lowell, after whispering something to Fiona, rose, and they withdrew from the group a few paces where they started talking animatedly to each other. Neither looked angry; rather both appeared deeply troubled. Fiona had told Tara they were very close, and she knew Lowell was distressed by his brother’s infidelity. Here was yet another dangerous situation in an afternoon laden with land mines. But right now her principal concern was the potential disintegration of the team if Phoebe’s squabbling continued, so with one more glance at the two brothers, who were now walking up the access road together, she turned her attention to the group.
With Bill gone, Phoebe had no inhibitions about telling the guys about Marilyn and Bill. Amazingly none of them knew anything about the relationship. While Marilyn was telling Phoebe to shut up and mind her own business, the guys were making various remarks expressing their surprise and interest. With everyone pretty much talking at once, the situation had degenerated into chaos. It was time for her to intervene.
“Hold on a sec,” she said to Marilyn. “Come on, you guys,” she said to her teammates. “This is no time to argue. We’ve been working out all summer to play the tournaments next month. They’re coming up in a couple weeks. We’v
e got to be together. We’ve got to be a team.”
“But is Marilyn a teammate? She’s nothing but trouble, if you ask me,” Jane said, while Phoebe nodded in agreement.
Marilyn leaned forward and pointed belligerently at Phoebe and Jane. “I’ll save you the trouble. If they’re so hot and bothered by my personal life, they can kiss off. I quit the team, right now, officially.” She got up and started gathering her clothes, backpack and small cooler.
“Wait a minute, Timber. Phoebe’s drunk. It’s the beer that’s talking. Don’t let a few ill-chosen words ruin a good thing. You’re our offense. You know we can’t win without you.”
Phoebe started sputtering a denial that she was drunk, but both Tara and Marilyn ignored her.
“Sorry, Tara. You’re a good teammate and always have been, but I don’t want to play with people who insult me.”
She turned and walked determinedly to her car without looking back.