Home Field

by Hannah Gersen

  One day in the cafeteria Laura and Stephanie finally met. Dean and Stephanie usually took separate cars to school and rarely crossed paths during the day, but one morning, Stephanie overslept and stopped by the cafeteria to get the breakfast she had missed at home. When she saw Dean there, standing with Laura in their usual spot by the trophy case, she seemed amused.

  “Since when are you on breakfast duty?” she asked.

  “Since they started serving decent coffee,” he said. “Do you know Ms. Lanning?”

  Stephanie shook her head, and Dean found himself introducing Laura in an elaborate way, explaining that she was a long-term sub for Mrs. Abbott, who was on maternity leave. Stephanie excused herself after a few minutes, apparently bored, but Dean thought he caught her admiring Laura’s pretty, animated face, or at least noticing it. After she left, Laura expressed surprise at Stephanie’s cordial manner, as if she’d expected her to be sullen. That was when Dean began to worry about all he’d revealed to her about his family. Had he betrayed them? He wasn’t sure, but after that day, he was cautious, only visiting Laura every few days. Their exchanges became awkward, and Dean couldn’t say why, exactly. He weaned himself off her until one day he found an invitation to her farewell party in his mailbox, a xeroxed notice on pale orange paper with GOOD-BYE LAURA in a big cursive font and a half-dozen pieces of clip art. Dean gazed at the invitation for a long time, wondering if the notice was some kind of message. And then he looked up and saw that the orange notice was in everyone’s mailbox, and he realized that Laura had forgotten about him, just as he should forget about her. He was married. He had two thriving sons and a daughter who was graduating from high school with every honor in the book. He was happy, even if Nicole wasn’t.

  On the morning of Laura’s farewell party he dressed carefully, just in case he decided to go. He shaved slowly, flossed twice, and used mouthwash after brushing his teeth. He trimmed the hairs in his nose. On his lunch break, he filled his car with gas and then, on the way back to school, stopped at the drugstore to buy a farewell card.

  Because it was May, there was a display of Mother’s Day cards, so he picked out something for Nicole first. The cream-colored cards, with their watercolor flowers and the words wife and mother in a nearly unreadable calligraphy, looked to Dean like sympathy notes, as if being a mother was some sad, unspeakable thing. The humorous cards weren’t any better. The gist of every joke was the same: Husbands and children are thoughtless, ha ha! Dean opened and shut a dozen before giving up and returning to the flowery cards. He picked one printed on heavy blue paper, with the words To My Wife embossed in gold. Then he grabbed a Snoopy card for Laura and took it to the register. At the last minute, he also bought a small bag of Hershey’s Kisses.

  The party was in the faculty lounge. Ordinarily it was a drab place, a windowless room in the center of the building, but today it was cheery with bunches of yellow and orange balloons, streamers, and a large flower arrangement in the center of the table. There was a pile of gifts on a small desk near the door, so bright and colorful and obviously thoughtful that Dean couldn’t bring himself to add his card and bag of candy. Instead he stuck them in the pocket of his khaki pants, glancing to see if Laura was looking his way. She wasn’t; she hadn’t even seen him come in. She was talking with a group of young female teachers, women Dean knew only by the subjects they taught. For once she was wearing clothes that showed off her figure, an above-the-knee skirt and a sleeveless red silk blouse. Nicole never wore red; she said it made her skin seem too pink. Pink was the color of health; it was the color of Laura’s flushed cheeks. He looked away and let himself be drawn into a conversation with the vice principal, who always approached him at faculty events, usually because one of Dean’s players was on the verge of being suspended.

  Dean almost left twice, but the second time he headed toward the door, Laura caught his eye and gave him a gaze that said wait. So he stood by the door until she came over and then—he didn’t know what made him say this, because it wasn’t true—he said he had to do some paperwork in his office and that he would be down there if she wanted to stop by when her party was over. And she said she couldn’t because there was a dinner after and then everyone was going to a bar and maybe he could meet her there. And he said no, he couldn’t, he had to get home. And it was uncomfortable, because there were people around them and it was the first time they’d spoken in weeks, and finally she said okay, she’d stop by his office. And then he left. And sat in his office. He had no urgent paperwork, but his grades were due in a few weeks, so he worked on those. Gym grades were based on participation more than performance, so it was just a matter of counting up days missed, but he could barely concentrate as he scanned his attendance records.

  He kept thinking of those gold-embossed words, To My Wife. The blue card sat in his desk drawer, lightly poetic and sweet, and yet the words To My Wife felt heavy in his heart, sinking him instead of providing an anchor.

  When Laura finally appeared in his doorway, she was carrying a piece of cake on a paper plate. It was a corner piece, with thick borders of icing, the kind of piece Bry liked best. She placed it on his desk, among his many championship plaques.

  “I don’t think I’ve ever been in here,” she said. “It’s nice. Every teacher should have an office.”

  “Maybe at your next job.”

  “Maybe.” She gave him a bland, unreadable smile.

  “Here, I forgot to give you this.” Dean handed her the card and the candy.

  She opened the small package of Hershey’s Kisses and ate one right away. Dean couldn’t tell whether she was trying to do something rude or she just had a sweet tooth. Either way he liked the gesture; it showed passion.

  She read the card, which pictured Snoopy and Woodstock embracing underneath the banner A Good Friend Is Hard to Find. Dean had labored over his short note, trying to convey his affection without going over the line. It said, To Laura, whose conversation I have greatly enjoyed and will miss. Best of luck in all your future endeavors. Yours Truly, Dean Renner.

  “Kind of a mixed message,” she said, closing the card.

  “Sorry, I’m no good at writing cards.”

  She waited for him to meet her gaze again. “If you enjoy my conversation so much, why have you been ignoring me for the past month?”

  “I didn’t mean to.” He got up to close his office door. His plan was to return to his desk and finish what would likely be a very painful conversation. But when he turned around, she was right there and just his height in her high heels. He kissed her without even thinking about it.

  Her mouth tasted sweet, like the candy she’d just eaten, and her hair smelled like perfume and something else, something familiar—chalk, he realized. She was wearing pantyhose, which both aroused and frustrated him. He was dying to take them off, and after they’d kissed for several minutes, he began to move her toward his desk in order to do so. But she stopped him.

  “I don’t want to do it this way.”

  “Neither do I,” he said. At least not for their first time. But he could imagine a version of his life where he had sex with her in his office regularly. Where he had a private place to be with her and it wouldn’t affect anything else—a fantasy of love contained.

  “I mean, I don’t want to do it at all,” she said. “Not this way. You’re married. It’s not the kind of person I am. And you’re not that kind of person, either.”

  He stepped away, embarrassed and guilty, sickened by the thought of the cloying Mother’s Day card in his desk. To My Wife.

  “You’re a good guy and I’m just . . . I’m being reckless because I’m leaving.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “I don’t know.” She took a step back, away from him, and smoothed her skirt. “I have a tentative offer from Greenville. A teaching position. They won’t know until August, so I don’t have to decide now. I’m going on a road trip to California. My college roommate is coming with me. She just finished grad school.
She doesn’t have any real job prospects, either.”

  “That sounds great,” Dean said. What he wouldn’t give to take off and drive cross-country with her. He had never even seen the Pacific.

  “Yeah, well. I need to get my head on straight. Tim and I broke up. Again.”

  “He’s an idiot.” Tim was the last person Dean wanted to talk about right now.

  “It was more like I broke up with him.”

  “He’s still an idiot.”

  “Maybe.” Laura gave her first genuine smile. “I should go.”

  Dean watched her leave, resisting so many impulses—to run after her, to get her phone number, to sit with her in her car and say ridiculous things. But he stayed in his office, looking out the window that provided a view of the football field and the track. Some of the football players also lettered in track, and Dean remembered that he’d promised them he would attend the semifinal meet. He had future commitments. A job he loved. Family. He had to drop these fantasies of road-tripping with Laura. He was just feeling lonely. Everyone felt lonely from time to time.

  On the drive home, he resolved to take the episode seriously, as a warning. And so, for the next month, he doted on his sad, exhausted wife and planned a family vacation to his father’s bucolic corner of Pennsylvania. If and when he thought of Laura, he shepherded her memory to the dark corners of his mind, with all the other things that were too dangerous to remember.

  After several weeks of good behavior, Dean felt better, and it seemed to him that Nicole felt better, too. Stephanie’s graduation day was a triumph for the whole family, and a few days later, when they left for his father’s horse farm, Dean had an optimistic feeling about the summer ahead.

  A week later, Nicole was dead.

  After that, it wasn’t hard to stop thinking of Laura.

  STEPHANIE LOOKED DOWN at Irene Baker’s wrinkled, ringed fingers as they grasped hers, bare and young. The old woman’s veins bulged, the blood clearly blue. Mrs. Baker was in her mideighties and was beloved for sending birthday cards to everyone in the congregation. Stephanie had always thought of her in a slightly condescending way, as a cute-granny type, but as she held Mrs. Baker’s well-worn hands, she wondered what tragedies had befallen her. Stephanie wondered this about everyone now.

  “We’ve all been praying for you. It just breaks my heart.” Mrs. Baker’s eyes began to fill, and she shook her head.

  Stephanie nodded, not knowing how to reply. This was the exact reason she had been avoiding coming to church.

  “There’s a very good cobbler,” Mrs. Baker said, quickly recovering her composure. “The peaches are exceptional this year.”

  The peaches are always exceptional, Stephanie thought, sourly, but when she got to the table, she chose the cobbler, taking a big gooey bite. Bits of streusel topping clung to the tines of her fork and she licked them off. She thought this cloudy feeling might be a hangover. Before last night, she’d never really gotten drunk. She took another bite of cobbler, one with a big slice of peach, and all at once she remembered why people felt the need to say, every year, that the peaches were exceptional. Because they just were. And they didn’t last. You had two, maybe three weeks to eat them. She remembered a time when she and her mother bought peaches on a whim. It was just the two of them, and they were driving home from somewhere when her mother stopped at a roadside stand and bought a bag of peaches, which Stephanie held in her lap in the front seat, the paper bag warm from the sun. “Mmm, I can smell those peaches!” her mother said, as they drove along. And then, all of a sudden, she pulled over to the side of the road. “I have to eat one now! I can’t wait!” And so the two of them had sat there, eating peaches in the car with the windows rolled down and the juice dripping between their fingers. And Stephanie remembered her mother saying, “These really are the best peaches in the world. No one can say they’ve ever had a better peach.” It was kind of a silly thing to say, but it had made her life feel big. Her mother could do that; she could isolate a moment and make it stand out.

  “You were hungry,” her father observed.

  “Yeah, I guess.” Stephanie was surprised and a little embarrassed to see that the cobbler was already gone. “Where are Robbie and Bry?”

  “They probably went outside with the other kids.”

  “I’ll go find them.”

  “You don’t have to.”

  “I want to.” She suspected her father would like to escape, too, but he couldn’t go outside and be a part of the kid world, the way she still could.

  In the foyer she ran into a clique of girls slightly younger than she was, decked out in their new back-to-school clothes. They were dressed up more than they needed to be. Stephanie paused to reflect on which was the more un-Christian behavior, their vanity or her judgment of their vanity. In the midst of this private debate, Pastor John approached her. She liked him, even though she didn’t believe in what he was selling. And she suspected he knew that. But he never made her feel bad. Even this morning, as she stood here hungover, judgmental, with cobbler crumbs on her shirt, she felt her own goodness in his smile.

  “It’s nice to see you, Stephanie,” he said. “I know you’re busy getting ready for college. When do you leave?”

  “Next Saturday.”

  “Less than a week,” he said. “Are you excited?”

  “Yeah. I mean, I think so.”

  “You know you always have your family here, but I hope you find a new church family at Swarthmore.”

  “I’ll try.”

  “Just keep it in mind,” he said, not taking her white lie personally. He never took offense. That was what made him such a good pastor. She would be religious if it meant being that objective all the time, but in her experience, most religious people were not like Pastor John.

  Outside, she looked for her friends in the side yard, but there were just a bunch of middle-school kids sitting at the picnic tables. She waved to Robbie and Bry, who were playing with Bry’s rubber-band ball, bouncing it high in the parking lot. She was hoping they would invite her to join them, but they only gave her a nod. She stood near the church’s stone wall, feeling like a real prisspot, the kind of girl who took it upon herself to be a playground monitor.

  The kids moved from the picnic table to the row of pine trees that bordered the cemetery. Stephanie longed to join them, to sit in the shade on the soft orange carpet of dead pine needles, to smell the sharp piney smell, to hear the wind in the higher branches. Lately she had the sense that growing up meant trading in all the haphazard sensual pleasures of childhood for—what? Sex? She doubted that could make up for the loss. She stepped into a block of shade cast by the church and so narrow at this time of day that she had to lean against the stones to feel its coolness.

  All the graves at the front of the cemetery were old, dating back to the nineteenth century, their headstones slanted and engraved with names no one went by anymore, although some of the surnames were still in use. Her mother’s maiden name, Bowers, wasn’t there, but her first married name, Shank, was on several headstones. Stephanie had changed her last name from Shank to Renner when her father had adopted her—or rather, Stephanie’s mother had changed it. Apparently Stephanie had approved, but she couldn’t remember. She kept Shank as a second middle name after Geneva, which was her maternal grandmother’s first name. Stephanie sometimes thought of how both the Shank and the Renner would drop off when she got married. If she got married. She’d never had a boyfriend.

  Her mother had always had boyfriends. She had never really been single. It was as if she had to die to be alone.

  Her mother wasn’t buried in this cemetery. There wasn’t room. And anyway, her grandmother—Geneva—had a little cemetery on her farm. There was also a spot next to her biological father in a completely different cemetery. That had been a debate with her paternal grandparents—the Shanks, as everyone in her mother’s family referred to them. They pushed for her mother to be buried in the Shank family plot, next to Sam. They talked about h
ow it was “prepurchased,” so it shouldn’t go to waste. An odd argument, especially since the Shanks were practically rich. Her father joked that it was a “sunk cost.” That he was able to joke was simultaneously upsetting and reassuring to Stephanie. In the end, he let Geneva decide, and of course she chose to bury Stephanie’s mother on the farm.

  The graveside service was awkwardly cramped, with the Shanks off in the long grasses in the corner, probably getting ticks. Stephanie worried about the Shanks. Everyone thought they were so uncaring, but she saw their vulnerability. Offering a gravesite was their clumsy way of being helpful. They didn’t mean to be annoying; they were just the kind of people who always seemed liked they were butting in. Stephanie wondered what had really happened between them and her mother after Sam died. She’d heard different versions of the story, but what it came down to—according to her mother—was that the Shanks disapproved of her second marriage. And her mother had been hurt by their judgment. And then the Shanks had moved away and that had somehow frozen the relationship, so that both parties remembered only the resentment, not the attachment that must have preceded it.

  For a few years, the Shanks continued to visit on holidays—Stephanie had the photos, if not the memories—but after Robbie and Bry were born, the Shanks must have felt left out. Or maybe they had no interest in her new brothers. All Stephanie knew was that they stopped visiting, and it was up to her mother to take her for visits. Which she did, at Christmas and Easter. But it was always so stilted and overly formal that as soon as Stephanie was old enough to say no, she would rather not go, she did. And her mother let her get away with that. From age eleven to seventeen, Stephanie didn’t see her grandparents. Stephanie felt guilty about that now, but it was a guilt mixed with anger. Because why didn’t her grandparents insist? Stephanie’s mother said they were workaholics, and that their marriage had gone bad a long time ago. They were unhappy.