"Baby," Timmy said. "Ya can't cry every time ya lose."
"I'm not cryin'!" Ivan stared down the two boys as they crossed his backyard to the driveway. He heard their sharp laughter, each snicker needling him worse than the pain from his skinned knee. They're laughin' at me; they're laughin' at me. He wanted so badly to pick up a rock and nail them—Timmy, especially—right in their foul mouths, then punch them in the gut. He wanted to do anything to shut them up. And the snickers kept coining.
"See ya later, girlie," Timmy said.
"Jerk," Ivan yelled back.
"Crybaby," Josh said.
"Jerks," Ivan yelled louder.
The back door swung open, the thin wood frame slapping against the house. Ivan's mother, slender, in her blue shorts and white blouse, said, "Ivan, we do not use that language in this house."
"I'm not inside, Mama."
"That is enough. Boys," she said, looking toward Timmy and Josh, "your mothers would not like all this carrying on, now would they?"
"But Mrs. Korske—"
"No buts, Timmy. You are the oldest here; you should know better," she said. "Besides, it is too beautiful a day to be yelling at each other."
Timmy hung his head. "Sorry, Mrs. Korske," he said. Ivan loved that about his mother; everyone listened to her.
"Run along now, boys. Ivan will be out again after dinner." She looked down at Ivan, sitting on the back stoop. "And no more yelling for you, too, young man."
"My knee, Mama," Ivan pleaded. "It's smashed." He had held out as much as he could, but the tears now flowed like the blood from his wound. Ivan limped up the stairs. His mother knelt down, catching him in her arms. "It hurts," he managed between sobs. "It hurts a lot."
"There, there," she said. Her warm voice had returned. "I'll take care of you."
Ivan sat on the countertop, his spindly legs dangling off, checking himself for other scrapes. His mother went to the pantry, then returned with the medicine chest and a clean cloth. She ran warm water over the cloth, rubbed in some soap, and gently washed the exposed skin. Ivan flinched.
"That hurt?" his mother asked.
"No."
She smiled and applied a generous amount of iodine.
"Looks like paint," Ivan said. "Orange paint."
"It will go away," she said.
Ivan heard the sound of crunching pebbles coming from the driveway as his father drove up in the family's new Chevy Nova, the maroon hood gleaming in the sun. He worried what his father might say, thinking he was some kind of weakling.
Soon, the car door shut. His mother was coming back from the pantry when the screen door opened and his father stepped into the kitchen. Ivan was sure his father could whip any other father in Lennings.
"What is the problem?" his father said, wiping his brow with his forearm.
"Nothing," his mother said. "Our son is a brave young man, playing with those bigger boys."
His father said nothing, walking over to the refrigerator and pulling out a pitcher of iced tea. He filled a tall glass and drank it down in one long gulp. He filled the glass again. "You hurt your knee?"
Ivan wanted to look like a man in his father's eyes. He sat up tall. "Me and Timmy and Josh were playing out back."
His father turned on the kitchen faucet, putting his hands under the running water for a few moments. Ivan noticed dried blood of a half-dozen cuts and scratches on his thick fingers, and he saw the strain etched on his father's face when he made a fist. His father finished the second glass of iced tea, then looked at Ivan again. "And?"
"I was hidin' real good. And I had this chance to win. So I ran real hard." His voice cracked. "But they cheated, Papa, they cheated and tackled me."
His mother tore open a large Band-Aid, carefully touching one end of the adhesive tape just outside the scrape, covering the wound with the gauze, then fixing the other end. "There," she said, with a kiss on his cheek.
Ivan pulled back. "I'm okay, Mama."
"Did you win?" his father said, drying his hands on a dish towel. "Did you beat these boys?"
Ivan hesitated. His shoulders slumped. "Not exactly."
"Why not?"
"I tried, I really did. Both of them tackled me, or else I coulda made it."
His father walked over to the kitchen counter, kissing Ivan's mother on the top of her head. Ivan saw her smile, and he liked that. "Our son is strong," she said.
His father's hands were immense next to his knee. His father said nothing, turning Ivan's leg slightly one way, then the other, then looking straight at him. "Did you cry?"
Ivan prayed he wouldn't notice the tears on his cheeks.
His mother stepped in. "He did not cry," she said. "My son does not cry."
"It looks like he did."
"You are mistaken."
His father again stared at Ivan. "Did you cry?"
"No," Ivan said.
"See," his mother said, wiping Ivan's face with the other end of the moist cloth. "I made some sausage and peppers. Enough of all this talk. Let us eat."
Ivan jumped off the countertop and stepped to the kitchen table. His father put a hand on his shoulder...
Ivan gathered the pages from the floor, arranging them neatly. He looked down at the application. Let's get this over with. He read the essay question out loud, "'If you could have dinner with any person, living or dead, who would it be, and what would you discuss?'"
He had read the question silently a hundred times before, but hearing the words from his own mouth sparked something. Living or dead. He thought about it more. Did he dare write about his mother? Did he dare take the chance of spilling his emotions?
At the top of the first page, he wrote the date, then an inch below that his hand abruptly stopped. Sometimes he tried to shut out memories of his mother. He couldn't love her any more than he did right now, as he did yesterday, and the day before, and every other day of his life. And because he loved her so much, he couldn't keep the sadness at bay. Every day, every hour, every minute, held something that reminded him she was gone.
And what Ivan couldn't control confounded him. He could control any opponent. By ignoring them, he could control Holt and McClellan and the others on his team. But what Ivan couldn't control was the disease that had riddled his mother's body. And he couldn't control the relentless ache of having lost her.
"Who would you have dinner with?" he whispered.
Ivan again looked down at the pages before him. He remembered that day, long ago, when his mother bandaged the skinned knee he got playing out back with the Scott brothers, and he remembered a night, not long after, when he watched his parents kissing in the dark, their silhouetted bodies intertwined. The memories flowed easily, and suddenly he felt comforted. The pages would no longer stay blank.
Ivan picked up the pen, held it between his fingers, and let it move. Slowly, but with an unexpected confidence, he wrote: I would have dinner with my mother, Anna Korske....
27
We gonna be together Saturday night?" Carmelina asked. "After I'm done with work?"
Bobby switched the telephone receiver from one ear to the other and propped another pillow under his head. It was dark outside, yet a tepid breeze blew through his bedroom window. Winter had given way to spring, if only for the day. Before practice, Bobby sat in the sun on the school patio, listening to the trickle of melting icicles. He was restless. Unsettled. All around him, it seemed, change was imminent.
"How 'bout we drive into the Village," he heard Carmelina say. "Ya know, walk around a bit, shop the stores, eat dinner. Well, I'll eat and you can watch, okay? Please, it's real important we talk ... Bobby, are ya listening?"
"I'm tired, Carmelina," he said. "I gotta get to sleep."
"You'll come over, then?"
"Maybe."
"What's 'maybe'?"
"We got a match Saturday. It's the last match of the season. I'm sure Kenny and the guys'll wanna do something after."
"Maybe I wanna do something with you,"
Carmelina said. "Ever think about that? We should be together, Bobby; that's what boyfriends and girlfriends do."
He drew in a breath, loud enough for her to hear. "Look, Carmelina, the districts are in two weeks. I gotta focus. That guy I wrestled on Wednesday was a region champ last year, and I beat him badly. It would've been nice if you'd been there."
"Bobby, ya know—"
"Yeah, yeah," he interrupted, "you have to work."
"Ya know I do."
"Yeah, well, who knows how far I can go if I keep Wrestling like this? Know how important that is to me?"
"Sure, I understand," Carmelina said, but it didn't sound like she did.
"Things'll change," Bobby said.
There was a hesitation. "When?"
"After the season."
There was a pause. "You're done with me," Carmelina said. "I can tell."
"That's not it."
"You're such a liar."
"I'm not lying," Bobby said. "I just feel like ... like something really important is gonna happen soon. It's hard to explain. Carmelina, I don't know, maybe we should—" Something had caught his attention. Bobby covered the receiver.
He heard music. Bobby sat up and looked out the window at the back walkway. He could tell a light was on in the family room. He looked at the clock. It was quarter to eleven, yet his father wasn't home. He listened more closely. It was that same music.
"We'll talk tomorrow night," Bobby said into the receiver. "I gotta go."
"Why?"
"I just gotta," Bobby said.
"Now?"
"It's late and I'm thirsty and hungry and tired."
"You wanna break up," Carmelina said. "I can hear it in your voice."
"Carmelina—"
"Don't be an asshole, Bobby. Don't do this over the phone. Promise we'll talk in person. Saturday night. It's important. We'll figure everything out."
"Yeah, sure," Bobby said, before hanging up.
He walked down the stairs to the living room, where a bay window overlooked the front lawn. In the dark, he moved quietly along the silk sofa, then past two glass tables upon which sat some of his mother's treasured crystal figurines. The music started again.
Bobby crouched down, recognizing the voice of Dionne Warwick on the stereo. He had heard the music before but had never paid any attention, never listened to the words, never wondered why his mother played the same songs over and over, late at night, when his father wasn't home.
A car turned down Joanna Way, its headlights shining through the bay window. The crystal pieces sparkled and the light brushed his body, then disappeared. Bobby watched the car as it drove past their driveway, feeling relieved—and disappointed, too—that it wasn't his father. He crawled to the archway between the living room and the dining room. It felt wrong to spy on his mother. In her own house. Still, he sat back against the wall. The next song began.
"You see this girl" his mother sang. "This girl's in love with you ..." Her voice was star ding. Elegant. As elegant as she might look in her most beautiful evening dress. Bold. As bold as she had been some time ago, before this mess had started. "Yes, I'm in love ... Who looks at you the way I do..."
Bobby peeked around the wall, through the dining room, into the family room. His mother, as if onstage, swayed to the music, eyes closed, smiling softly, the music climbing to a crescendo, piano keys pounding, Dionne Warwick's voice and his mother's overlapping into one, stretching the final note into one long wail.
The song ended, and another began....
And then another...
Bobby's eyes welled up. Why was this the first time he had heard his mother sing? he wondered. Why had he never seen her dance before?
He thought for a while. Eventually, slowly, it was apparent that something about this made him feel older. He always wanted to act like a man, to be treated like a man, to live in a man's world. But this time, it was too much.
He wasn't ready to see his parents as people. They were his parents. But it was now so clear that he didn't know anything about his mother. What she thought about, or wanted, or dreamed of. And as he watched his mother in a way he had never done before, he wondered where she really wanted to be at that moment. It certainly wasn't in this house. On Joanna Way. In Short Hills, New Jersey.
Bobby's eyes clouded. Not much longer after that, he cried. He was confused and scared about his family. And especially his mother. And if it was true about his mother, he realized, it could be true about his father. It was obvious Bobby could only trust what he could control. And he could only control who and what he could trust. The who was himself. The what was Wrestling.
Bobby stiffened. The music was still playing, his mother still singing. He wiped away the tears, stood up, and walked out of the living room—different from earlier. For the better? He wasn't sure. Did it matter? He was too tired for deeper consideration. His legs plodded up the stairs, heavy. The music faded when he turned the corner at the top of the stairs. He closed his bedroom door.
His world had changed.
28
The snowflakes pricked Ivan's cheeks, gusting winds rushing one way, then another. He leaned against the shovel handle and looked back. A fresh layer of white had already covered the walkway. His father would be home soon. He would not be pleased.
This'll never get done. It seemed like everything was that way. Like the application for Western Arizona. Whenever Ivan sat at his desk and tried to finish the dozens of intrusive essays and prying questions, he'd lose interest, thinking about Wrestling, or Shelley, or stocking his hatred of McClellan. There wasn't much more he could write about his mother. Now, he had to pretend to care about school and classes and teachers. He'd write a paragraph, maybe two, then throw down his pen in frustration and mutter, "Screw it, another day won't make a damn bit of difference."
A trickle of sweat ran down his cheek. At least I'll cut some weight today—
Something hit Ivan. A snowball. His anger sparked. What the hell? And he spun around.
"Ha! Surprised you, didn't I?" Shelley shouted.
Ivan mustered a smile, but not much of one. Something was very wrong, he could feel it. Frustration had been building all season. Everyone was pissing him off; everything was pissing him off. Being on a lousy team. McClellan and his ridiculous pep talks. Now Ivan's anger had ignited. There was nothing he could do.
"Saw you from my window," Shelley said. "Thought you could use some company." She scooped snow into her mittens. "I'll get you again, Champ. I don't care how fast you are on a Wrestling mat. You can't duck this." She raised her arm.
Ivan stood motionless.
"I will," Shelley said. "I swear I'll hit you with this." She pulled her arm back. "I got a pretty good arm."
"You'll miss."
"You sure?"
"Sure as McClellan's an asshole."
Shelley looked at him, oddly.
"Come on," Ivan said. "Take your best shot."
Shelley smiled, hesitantly. "Oh, you'll duck. Just when it's coming right at you."
Ivan shook his head. "I won't move."
Shelley packed the snowball, rounding it in her mittens. "Remember when we were little kids and I hit that huge pinecone at the top of the tree behind my house? That was on only my second try. Remember?"
Ivan unbuttoned his jacket and dropped it in the snow. He laced his fingers behind his back.
"Like I'm going to be distracted if you take your clothes off," Shelley said. "I've seen you in a singlet dozens of times, Ivan." She smirked. "It's no big deal."
"You won't hit me."
"How do you know?"
"I know."
The whipping wind blew beneath Ivan's sweatshirt. He shivered.
Shelley stood, arms at her side. A surge blew open the scarf from her neck. She quickly wrapped it around again. Her skin was red, her eyes slits, her mouth stiff when she spoke.
"Big deal, Champ, you took off your jacket. You still have on a sweatshirt, probably long underwear underneath. A s
tud would—"
Before she finished, Ivan pulled off his sweatshirt, his chest now bare. Shelley's smile withered as Ivan threw his gloves aside, too.
The frigid cold came at Ivan from every direction, feeling as if it scraped against his puckered skin. His first breath was halted by the spasm of his diaphragm. He fought it. And fought it. And fought it.
Until he simply refused to feel the cold.
Soon, he was breathing calmly, almost comfortably. Again, he clasped his hands behind his back, staring at Shelley. What the hell am I doing? He hadn't a clue.
"You're crazy," Shelley said; the lightness in her voice was gone. "God, it's like twenty degrees out here. Colder with the windchill." She shielded her face from another swirl.
"Hit me," Ivan said.
Shelley turned away, then looked back at him, as if she couldn't believe what she was seeing. "Ivan," she said, almost pleading, "it's really very cold."
Ivan didn't flinch. Flakes bounced off his skin, and those that didn't melted in a moment or two. A thin cap of white had settled on his spiked hair. What's happening to me? He couldn't control himself. He was trapped in that muscles-flexed, heart-racing, supremely arrogant mode. As if he was about to step out on a mat for a match.
Shelley dropped the snowball. "You win. This is stupid—"
"Try to hit me." Ivan tried to hold back, but his voice was harsh. "You said you could. I'm giving you a chance."
"I don't want to."
"Why not?"
"I came out here to joke around, not watch you undress in a damn snowstorm." She shook her head. "Ivan, what's happened to you lately?"
"Nothing."
Ivan knew he was losing control. It wasn't just this moment. It was pushing Ellison in practice last week. Skipping home ec class the week before. Telling the reporter from the Daily Record to screw himself when he asked about last year's state semifinal match. But his mouth wouldn't stop.
"I'm standing here waiting for you to throw a snowball so we can see if you'll hit me in one throw like you said you would but I said you wouldn't."
"Put on your clothes."
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