“Maybe he was scared of being lonely,” Stephanie said.
“I hope all the Brown girls ignore him.”
“There’s probably only a certain percentage of girls who like a guy with a ponytail, so already he has pretty low odds.”
Theresa laughed. “I know! That stupid ponytail! I really hated it. I tried to tell myself it was cool. He could trick you into thinking things were cool that weren’t. He was kind of a snob, I guess. I still miss him, though. I really miss him a lot. Isn’t that the stupidest thing?”
“It’s not stupid,” Stephanie said. “I’m sorry I didn’t know about it when it happened.”
“Honestly, I probably wouldn’t have told you anyway. I was too embarrassed. I think he’s already going out with someone else. I called him last week. I swore I heard a girl’s voice in the background. Something in the way he was talking to me, too; it was like he didn’t actually need to talk to me anymore.”
“I’m pretty sure my dad’s dating someone. I even think they may have been dating before my mother died.”
“Oh my God, that’s awful. Is that why you’re so mad at him?”
“Sort of. It’s hard to explain.” The easy thing to say was that she blamed her father for her mother’s death—except that wasn’t an easy thing to say. And she didn’t blame him. But she wanted to. She wanted to blame someone and she couldn’t. But what would it mean to blame someone? Would it be a way to absolve herself? And why couldn’t she just blame her mother? Was it that she didn’t really believe it was her mother’s fault? Or was it that it would hurt too much, there would be too much blame, it would be all-encompassing? Her mother’s life choices had determined Stephanie’s life; her mother’s choices were her father and her brothers and the landscape she’d grown up in. She didn’t want to take any of that back.
“The weirdest thing,” Stephanie said, “is I want to talk to my mother about it.”
Theresa nodded. “I can see that.”
“What did your mom say about Jason breaking up with you?”
Theresa shrugged. “She wasn’t very sympathetic. She doesn’t want me having boyfriends right now. She says I need to concentrate on school. She says ‘wait until graduate school’ because that’s when she met my dad. But that’s not good advice. I mean, why would I meet my husband in graduate school just because she did?”
“Do you think you want to get married?”
“Yeah, eventually. Do you?”
“I think so,” Stephanie said, although she remembered telling her mother she didn’t, just to be contrary. She had always felt pressure from her mother to have a boyfriend; it had started in middle school when her mother would arrive early to pick her up from school dances to see if she was dancing with anyone. And Stephanie would feel as if there was something wrong with her because she felt nothing in particular when she slow-danced with boys from her school, and she found it hard to believe that other girls did, because the boys in middle school were just slightly taller versions of the noisy and hyperactive boys she’d known in elementary school. These other girls were pretending, they were acting out a love they’d seen on television and in the movies. But when Stephanie had shared this theory with her mother, her mother looked at her with such sadness that Stephanie felt guilty. And then her mother told her she was wrong, that it was possible to fall in love at age twelve or thirteen and that it was a very special kind of love, an easy kind of love, and that the only reason she pushed Stephanie to attend dances was that she wished for Stephanie to have it, because she’d had it, and it had meant the world to her. And Stephanie had felt guilty, because she knew then that her mother was speaking about her father, her real father, a man she had supposedly met but did not remember or miss.
Sometimes Stephanie was even secretly grateful that he had died, because she couldn’t imagine a father better than the one she’d grown up with.
She couldn’t believe she’d told her father that he wasn’t real to her. It was so far from what she actually believed. In the moment it had seemed simpler to cut herself off from him, to say to herself that both her parents were dead.
Theresa wanted to discuss boys from school, a topic that naturally dissolved into a more general discussion of sex. They told each other about their first times, and Theresa was shocked that Stephanie’s was so recent and that she had told no one. Beneath her romantic attachment to Jason, Theresa had a kind of analytical attitude toward sex, and she gave Stephanie advice for the future, for how to make it feel better.
They started to get sleepy and eventually gave in and went to bed. Stephanie was given Andrew’s room, a boyish blue space that reminded Stephanie of her brothers’ room. As she drifted off, she wondered if Robbie had taken over her room yet, or if he was still too scared to sleep alone.
Chapter 13
The days disappeared in a haze of flu, with Robbie catching it just as Bryan was recovering. Dean was making a batch of cherry Jell-O when he realized that he was coming down with it, too. He had a sore feeling at the back of his throat that wouldn’t go away. That night he woke up with aching limbs and a violent urge to use the bathroom. He took a shower in the middle of the night, as if he could wash off the illness, and shivered under the hot water. By then he’d already missed two days of work to take care of the boys. He ended up taking the rest of the week off. It was unsettling to be alone in the house during the day. He tried to distract himself with TV, but the commercials depressed him. They seemed pitched toward some unhappy population, a host of minor Jobs in need of credit consolidation, mortgage refinance, diets, vitamins, antidepressants, and kitchen knives. Dean had to stop watching. Instead he sat on his porch wrapped in blankets and listened to the portable radio. Karen dropped by one afternoon and found him dozing there. She brought sick-person food: soup, saltines, and ginger ale.
“Why are you being so nice to me?” Dean asked her, his tongue loosened by fever.
“Because you’re nice to my kid,” Karen said. “The other coach, she was fine, but she didn’t care as much.”
“I’m missing a week of practice,” Dean said. “I’m hardly coach of the year.”
“Don’t worry, See is under the weather, too, and I heard that Aileen missed a few days of school.”
“I guess I don’t need to do a taper, after all.”
“What?”
“It’s when you ease up the mileage for a week or so. But we got the flu instead.”
“This is what I’m talking about,” Karen said. “You’re turning sickness into strategy!”
“Thanks for the soup. When I feel better, I’ll take you for a three-course dinner at the Red Byrd.”
“Sounds classy,” she said, smiling. But then she paused, as if considering whether or not to say the next thing she was thinking. Dean liked her mix of openness and reserve, the mild unpredictability of it and the way it fell away completely when she was having sex.
“You know, you don’t have to ask me out,” she said. “I don’t like to jump into things. I don’t need the drama.”
“Who’s jumping into things?”
“You are,” she said. “I know where you’re at. I’ve been there. If we’re really going to date, I’d rather wait.”
“Fair enough,” Dean said. He quickly changed the subject. He didn’t like that his careening emotions were so transparent to women. After Karen left, he dozed off, thinking of Laura. He wondered if she knew he was sick.
With more than half the team downed by the flu, Dean decided to forfeit Saturday’s meet and spent the morning on the sofa with the boys, watching cartoons and eating toaster waffles. By then, he was starting to feel better. He could smell the sickness in his house: it was finally a thing apart from him. He did four loads of laundry, washing all the sheets and towels, and then he scrubbed down the bathrooms and kitchen. On Sunday he made a big spaghetti dinner with garlic bread and a salad, and served ice cream for dessert. He and the boys ate ravenously, thinned by their week of illness, and went to bed early
. Monday morning, it was as if he were returning from a long, strange vacation.
Adding to the strangeness was the fact that it was Homecoming Week and the school had been transformed. Every hallway was garlanded with streamers and blue and white balloons, and the doors were adorned with posters announcing the week’s events: the rally, the game, and the dance. Photos of the homecoming queen nominees were hanging in the cafeteria, and all week long there was a special menu of “pep” foods—basically, all the junky items that were sold à la carte at football games, plus cupcakes with blue frosting. Dean viewed the hoopla from a distance. He recalled Stephanie’s complaints, her idea that the football team got too much attention and adulation, and that it was all out of proportion to the actual accomplishments of football players. Dean had always argued that the institution of cheerleading was to blame, but he could see now that the entire school was in cahoots with them. His girls seemed somewhat cowed when he met them for practice in the big gym, lined up beneath a football banner that read WINNING IS A HARD HABIT TO BREAK.
“Let’s get off campus today,” he said. “Now that we’re all back in good health, we should do some hill work.”
They drove in two cars, his and See-See’s. Dean wasn’t completely sure where he would take them and told See-See to stick with him. His backup plan was to go to the battlefield, but as they turned onto the highway, he had an inspiration and changed course.
The Pleasant Valley Country Club was in the southwestern part of the county, a hilly wooded region close to West Virginia. It was a somewhat wild area, a place where well-to-do families bought large plots of land on the hillsides. They would cut down two or three acres of trees to create sloping yards with sunset views. Down low, on the road, there were shabby trailers and ranches surrounded by chain-link fences, usually to contain a bored, barking dog. Many of the people who lived in this area worked at the prison just over the border, and Dean remembered Nicole remarking that they had seemed to re-create their working conditions at home.
The club was situated in such a beautiful spot that it had become a place for tourists to visit in the midst of vacations to Civil War landmarks—a break from history to play a round. The course’s rolling hills were landscaped with swaying locust trees, pine copses, low limestone walls, and a narrow feeder stream that eventually emptied into the Potomac. In the midst of so much natural beauty, the putting greens did not seem quite so artificial, and even the turquoise-blue pool seemed semipastoral.
The pool had been emptied for the year, and its lounge chairs were pushed up against the fence, stacked and pillowless. It looked exactly as it had the last time Dean saw it, sometime last April, when he had picked Nicole up from work because her car was in the shop. Nicole didn’t play much golf and neither did he, which was why they never came here on the weekends and why the club still struck him as unfamiliar. He had always felt that management was not the best place for Nicole, that it stressed her unnecessarily, but she had been good at it, and the money had been good, and she had taken so many years off to be with the boys that it was the easiest thing to return to. She took pride in the club, having been there back in the early days, a part of its transformation from a random, out-of-the-way golf course to what tourist maps now referred to as a “family recreation retreat.” Dean could barely remember its prior incarnation; all he could really recall was seeing Nicole at the front desk and wanting to know her, wanting to make her smile, wondering about her thoughts and the world she came from.
As soon as Dean saw the expression on the manager’s face, he realized there was something awkward about his coming here. And he further realized that it was within the manager’s rights—in fact, probably his responsibility—to deny a group of random girls access to the grounds. But the manager—whether out of pity or a desire to avoid conflict—said it would be fine.
So the girls did their workout, with Bryan running to the tops of the hills and calling to them when they got tired. And as the girls ran up and down, up and down, their bodies disappearing and reappearing as they crested and descended, crested and descended, Dean found himself thinking of Nicole. How she was down when he met her and how he brought her up. How she was down after Robbie’s birth and how he brought her up. How they had not planned on Bryan, but there he was, beckoning to a bunch of teenage girls from the top of a hill, and how could he not have existed? Nicole hadn’t wanted to have Bryan. It was the first major fight in their marriage. Dean remembered thinking that he was lucky that it took them so long to have a big fight. That was his way of comforting himself. Because he was frankly shocked by the idea of abortion within marriage. “I think God would forgive me,” she said. As if that were the issue. He’d promised her that she wouldn’t regret having another baby, and she had cried and said, “I know, I know, I know.” After Bryan was born, she begged him to forgive her for even thinking of terminating. And he had. In fact, he rarely, if ever, thought about it. He wasn’t even sure that she had meant it; she was the kind of person who said extreme things when she got overwhelmed.
Their last big argument: June 26, 1995. Their thirteenth wedding anniversary. They’d made plans to go out. They’d been getting along. Not great, but getting along. Dean thought the summer would help them. He’d decided not to coach football camp, his usual occupation for the month of July. Stephanie had a full-time job. So it would just be him and the boys and Nicole most nights. Less fighting that way, without Stephanie around.
Their anniversary fell on a Monday and the plan was for Dean to pick Nicole up from work. She would bring clothes so that she could change out of her uniform at work, like she used to do when they were dating. It would be romantic, nostalgic, sexy. She would surprise him, he would surprise her. But when he got there, she was still in her uniform. She’d forgotten her dress. And when they drove back home, anticlimactically, so she could change, she said she really didn’t feel like going out after all, and would it be okay to just have dinner with the kids? And he had pulled over to the side of the road and said no, it would really not be okay, that it was their anniversary, and that she wasn’t even trying, she wasn’t even pretending to try, and if she wasn’t going to try, then he wasn’t going to, and when they got home, he sat on the porch and drank whiskey while she took forever to get ready, so that when she finally came down in her dress, he was too drunk to drive anywhere, and she was too angry to drive him. For thirty, maybe forty silent minutes they sat on the porch in their dress-up clothes, waiting there as if they’d both been stood up by the same asshole jock. Finally Dean gave in, his drunkenness lifting like a heavy fog, and he made them sandwiches. And then, while the kids were still awake, watching a movie downstairs, they had sex upstairs, quietly, furtively, the only way of communicating to move each other’s hands and bodies into place. And when it was over, Dean felt close to his wife again, and grateful that they could still be close, that they had this relatively easy fix at their disposal. But he also wondered if it was enough for him.
The next day the director of the football camp had called to say that one of the coaches had dropped out at the last minute. Dean accepted the job with relief. The summer became about logistics as he and Nicole balanced their schedules that revolved around other people’s leisure activities. They had one, maybe two dates. On one of them, they went to a movie that was supposed to be romantic, about a farmer’s wife who falls in love with a visiting photographer when her husband and children are out of town. Dean remembered thinking that he would never be drawn in by the attentions of a kind stranger, that he wasn’t susceptible to having an affair. He remembered feeling vaguely superior to all the moviegoers swooning in their seats. That fall, he met Laura.
AT THE END of their workout, after the girls stretched on the playground, Jessica asked Dean if he would mind dropping her off at home, because she lived close by. The other girls had already squeezed into See-See’s car anyway.
“Sure,” Dean said. “I had no idea you lived around here.”
Jessica shrugged.
“My parents finished the house last year.”
Her house was at the end of a long, winding dirt road that was the driveway of either someone very poor or someone well-to-do. Jessica’s family obviously fell into the latter category. Built on a slope, the front part of the house was raised up on tall sturdy posts, with a wraparound front porch overlooking the valley. Its architecture was modern, all angles and windows. Jessica’s mother came out onto the porch to greet them.
“Hey, honey!” Mrs. Markham called. “I was just about to leave to pick you up.” She waved to Dean. “Come on up, let me get you an iced tea.”
Dean and Bryan followed Jessica through the garage and up a set of narrow stairs, which led to the kitchen, a large marble-and-stainless-steel affair that opened onto the living room.
“Would you prefer hot tea?” asked Jessica’s mother. She was a redhead, like Jessica, but the color was softened by strands of gray, and her hair was cut in layers to frame her face. “I can make some, it’s no trouble.”
“Iced tea would hit the spot, thank you.”
Mrs. Markham prepared four glasses of iced tea, dropping a slice of lemon in each. It was unsweetened and slightly bitter. Dean worried that Bryan would complain, but he said nothing. He seemed awed by the large living room with its vaulted ceilings and high windows. There were oversized pots and vases everywhere, and after a few minutes of small talk, Dean learned that Mrs. Markham was a potter. Her studio was below, next to the garage. Behind the house there was a kiln. Jessica’s father worked for the Department of Labor and commuted into Washington three days a week.
“What made you decide to live all the way out here?” Dean asked.
“It’s just so beautiful. And it didn’t hurt that there’s a golf course right down the street. I love that you practiced there. Jess, did you tell Coach Renner about all the times we left you there last summer?” Mrs. Markham smiled at Dean. “It took us forever to build the house, and we kept dropping her off at the pool while we argued with contractors. Poor thing had to do all her summer reading in the clubhouse.”
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