Going for the Record

by Julie A. Swanson

  We have a good visit with Enzo. He’s brought us sandwiches from the restaurant for lunch, and while Mom and I eat, he tells jokes and fills Dad in on everything at the restaurant.

  Right after Enzo leaves Dad falls asleep. I go over and peek under his sheet. Same rust-colored urine as this morning. And lots of it.

  CHAPTER 23

  Wednesday, August 20

  You’d think I had a dentist appointment this morning, the way I’m dreading this. Geez, I’m tired. Bone tired.

  It’s getting harder and harder to go to practice these days. It’s not just that I’m tired. And it’s not just that I have to face Clay. Worse than that is this gut feeling I have that I should be home right now.

  Mom’s all alone. Well, not really, but Gram’s no help. And Dad’s going downhill again. This blood in the urine is freaking us out.

  But I go to practice anyway, and once I’m there and get into the flow of things, I almost enjoy it. I can tune Clay out, I can forget about Dad. I can lose myself in the drills and the scrimmages.

  Saturday, August 23

  We’ve got our first scrimmage this afternoon, against Ludington, so we’ve got the morning off. I sleep in late, and then I hang around the house eating, reading, and talking with Mom and Dad. I even challenge the hermit to a game of Scrabble. Poor Gram. Sometimes it’s easy to forget she lives here.

  I yawn and look at the clock. Time to get ready.

  Uncurling from the wicker chair, I rise slowly, arching my back, stretching.

  After sitting around all morning, I could use a good workout. And Ludington will give us one. They’re a bunch of wealthy downstate transplants who’ve grown up playing on club teams that have the luxury of hiring the best coaches, playing on the best fields, and traveling to the best tournaments. So they’re a little soft, but they’re polished.

  I can’t remember the last time I went to a match alone, no one coming to watch me or pick me up. No Mom, no Dad, no Clay. It was like that in Colorado, but that was different. Everyone was alone there.

  “Ready, Weez?” Kristin offers her hands up high. “Come on, let’s go get these Ludington pansies.”

  Pansies? First play of the game I’m taken out by a vicious slide tackle. No whistle. That pretty much sets the tone for the game.

  Two plays later, this girl practically rips my jersey off. These Ludington girls are not quite as soft as I remembered.

  Funny how sometimes you can’t adapt to the situation. You know the ref’s letting a lot go. You know you should start dishing it out yourself. But you don’t.

  I don’t feel like playing nasty. I want to play nice, clean soccer today, to knock the ball around and lose myself in the flow of the game.

  Coach Pfieffer gives it to us during half time. “Where is your intensity?” he yells. “Ludington is out-hustling us. They’ve won every fifty-fifty ball. Every single one!” He’s talking a million miles an hour. Spit’s flying. “You’ve got to show me you want it! Show me you’ve got some heart! Show me some passion!”

  Passion? Heart? Sounds like a religious experience.

  “Dig deep, ladies. Show me you’ve got some guts.” Coach Pfieffer’s red in the face, pounding his fist into his hand with every syllable. He acts like this is a matter of life and death.

  Well, let me tell you something, Mister—this is nothing. If you want to know about life and death, come on over to my house. Then we can talk about guts and intensity and digging deep.

  “You’ve got to have desire! You’ve got to be willing to sacrifice your body!”

  Sacrifice my body? Not on your life. We only get one body, Mister, and this is just a game.

  “Play like this is the last game you’ll ever play!”

  It just might be. The last game I play, that is.

  How did I ever listen to this stuff before? How could I have ever bought into it? I mean, if everyone would just shut up and play, I could handle it, but I can’t take all the motivational speeches and rah-rah stuff anymore. This is not that important; it’s just a game.

  I wait in the locker room until everyone’s gone, and then I walk up to Coach Pffiefer as he’s pulling up corner flags on the field.

  “Coach? Can I talk to you?”

  He turns, kind of startled. “Leah. Sure. What’s up?”

  “Well, you know about my dad, right?”

  “Yes. How is he?”

  “He’s pretty bad.”

  “I’m sorry,” he says, putting a hand on my shoulder.

  “Yeah, we have to do everything for him and it’s real hard on my mom. I feel like I should be at home now. I don’t know, by the time I go to practice and come home each time, we’re talking three hours. Three hours twice a day. That’s six hours. I hate the thought of quitting but—”

  “Whoa, whoa, quitting? Wait a minute. Let’s talk about this, Leah. In less than two weeks we’ll be down to one practice a day.”

  “But then I’ll be in school all day.”

  “Oh. Right.” Coach Pfieffer’s brow furrows. “Hey, I understand. I do. I just think that your teammates’ support is something you could really use right now. And you’d miss it. You’d miss soccer.”

  “I know. But right now it’s just another source of stress for me. I’m so exhausted I hardly make it through practices. Whether I’m physically tired or emotionally tired, I don’t know. But my heart isn’t in it anymore.”

  “I understand, Leah. I just want you to be sure you’ve thought this through. We’ll all hate to see you go. But don’t worry; nobody’s going to think you’re a quitter. You stay home if that’s where you need to be right now. Your spot will always be here waiting for you.”

  CHAPTER 24

  Monday, August 25

  It’s a beautiful afternoon and Mom’s cutting Dad’s hair on the deck. His hair is thin from the chemo, but there’s this fuzzy new growth pushing up from under the long, white hair. Mom waves me over to show me.

  “Look, Leah. It’s brown. Isn’t that funny?”

  The scissors flash in the sun as she clicks away at one side of his head. Curly wisps of Einstein frizz float to the redwood decking.

  “You’re going to feel so much better after this, Pete. How long has it been since your last haircut? You’ve even got mutton chops.”

  Dad’s patient, but his jaw muscles are twitching, and I can tell he’s had enough.

  I hardly recognize him. I don’t know if it’s the haircut or if it’s because he’s lost so much weight in his face, but his ears look huge and they stick way out from his head. When Dad’s not looking, I pull my ears out and make a face at Mom. We try not to laugh.

  Mom and I are in such a giddy mood as we pick up the deck. Mom clowns around behind Dad, holding two fingers over his head as she vacuums his neck. I stifle a snicker, bend down, and busy myself sweeping up hair so Dad won’t see my face. Out the corner of my eye I see Mom with her hand over her mouth, her face bright red, and my insides turn to Jell-O.

  It’s like getting the giggles in church. I bite the inside of my cheeks and look down. If I look up at either of them, I’ll burst out laughing. I know I will. And we can’t let Dad know how bad his haircut looks; he’d be so mad.

  We help Dad back to the sunroom for a nap and scurry off to Mom’s room, where we collapse on the bed and bust out, roaring and rolling around.

  “Oh, ho, ho …” Mom’s coming down from one of her shrill trills, holding her side with one hand and wiping her eyes with the other. “Did you see what I did to him?” She cracks up again.

  “Mom, people are going to laugh at him!”

  “I hope not! Oh, Leah, we can’t let him get anywhere near a mirror.”

  I explode, snorting out of my nose at the thought of Dad’s fury if he were to see what Mom did to him.

  “What?” says Mom. “What’s so funny now?”

  “We’re afraid of a ninety pound weakling!” I can barely get the words out, I’m laughing so hard.

  Mom is purple, jiggling an
d pounding the bed with her fist. “Oh, this feels so good! Let’s not stop! Tell me something else!”

  “Did I tell you what happened yesterday while you were out walking?”

  “No, what?”

  “Get this. Dad calls me to his side like he’s got something really important to say, so I hustle over. He asks me to get him a board, three feet long. So I hurry out to the garage and find a piece of wood. I measure it, cut it, and bring it back to him, dying to know what he could possibly want it for. He looks at me like I’m crazy and says, ‘What the hell is this for?’”

  Mom throws her head back and laughs—a big, free, ha-ha of a laugh.

  “It’s strange, isn’t it, how his mind’s been affected?” She dabs at her eyes. “Yesterday I brought him a glass of water with a straw in it and he looked at it and said, ‘Do I blow or suck?’”

  “Wow. That’s like when he was trying to open that little jar of lip balm. He sat there staring at the lid for the longest time and finally he asked, ‘How do I get this off?’”

  Mom starts to laugh, then puts a hand to her lips. “Sometimes I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. Maybe I’m warped, but there is something really comical about all this, isn’t there?”

  “There is. You have to laugh about it. Did you hear what he said to Mary? She was feeding him chicken noodle soup and the noodles kept slipping out of his mouth. So she’s picking all these noodles off his chest and dabbing at him with a napkin, and he looks up at her and says, ‘Mary. Please. Just let the noodles fall where they will.’ In this real serious, professor-like tone.”

  Mom shakes her head and smiles. “How about the day he used the word convalesce? He’s never used words like that!”

  “Yeah, it’s weird. His vocabulary seems to be growing. Did you hear him the other day when Enzo was over?”

  “No, what?”

  “Well, we must have been talking too loud, because Dad said, ‘Would you all please disperse for a while?’”

  “Oh, yes, disperse! How could I forget?” Mom slaps her knee. “Did you notice how he calls me Rita now, too, instead of Mumma? In the twenty-eight years we’ve been married he’s never called me by my name, and all of a sudden I’m Rita. It sounds so formal coming from him.”

  “That’s the thing; it’s not so much what he says as how he says it. Like he’s trying to impress us, to be so civilized despite everything’s that’s happening to him.”

  “I know. He tries so hard.” Mom smiles a crooked smile and her chin trembles. “These things, they’re really not as funny as they are pathetic. We must be pretty desperate if this is all we have to laugh about.”

  In less than thirty seconds, Mom’s gone from laughing to crying. The tears never stop flowing for long. It’s exhausting. As fast as everything has happened this summer, living it is some kind of slow torture.

  Friday, August 29

  Jack Murphy, Dad’s golfing buddy, is sitting on the daybed drinking a beer and talking about the time he took Dad hunting in the Upper Peninsula.

  “So we’re behind a tree and this deer comes into the clearing and just stands there. It’s a beautiful buck, an eight-pointer. ‘It’s yours, Petey,’ I whisper to him.”

  It’s a story we’ve heard Mr. Murphy tell a hundred times, but we always enjoy it. Mr. Murphy is loud and funny, very theatrical. His deep bass voice even draws Gram out of her bedroom.

  “Mrs. Weiczynkowski!” He takes both of her hands in his. “You look wonderful.”

  Gram waves him away and blushes. She loves Mr. Murphy’s flattery. It even earns him the can of cashews she’s been stashing somewhere in the kitchen.

  “Why, thank you, Mrs. W.” He pats the daybed for Gram to sit down. “Anyway, the buck’s in the clearing, frozen, staring straight at us. Pete lifts his gun and gets the deer in his sights.” Mr. Murphy is up now, acting it out. “But he doesn’t shoot. He puts the gun down and says, ‘I can’t. He’s looking me right in the eye.’ So we let that sucker go!” He laughs like thunder rolling. “Do you remember that, Petey?”

  Dad smiles and nods.

  “Your dad’s no hunter, Leah, that’s for sure. I never invited him again.”

  Mr. Murphy talks about golf games, outrageous bets, foolish arguments, trips he and Dad made downstate for Lions games, all that nostalgic stuff Dad loves.

  He certainly has a way of lifting Dad’s spirits.

  Mr. Murphy’s not the only one. More and more people come everyday. I can’t believe how many people care. They bring cookies, cakes, baskets of fruit, warm casseroles. Betty Schmidt from church brings him Communion when Father Pat can’t. Enzo comes almost every day to play cards with him.

  Dad rallies for their visits and holds up amazingly well, but as soon as they leave, he crashes. Sometimes all the company gets to be too much for Dad, and we have to ask people to come back another time.

  But it’s not just the visitors. The phone rings non-stop, everyone wanting to know how Dad is. People from far away who just found out, Dad’s brothers, Mary and Paul.

  Speaking of Paul, he should be here any time now. He left work right after lunch and is going to stay through Labor Day to work on that list of things Dad gave him to get the house ready for winter.

  Saturday, August 30

  All afternoon Paul hustles around, dirty and sweaty and dressed in clothes the likes of which I’ve never seen him in—a ratty old T-shirt and a pair of Dad’s paint-splattered khakis.

  Dad barks an endless stream of orders from his bed. I’m holding a ladder for Paul, and we can’t help but hear him through the screen door. “Use the square brush in the chimney, not the round one. And when you’re done with that, stack the wood on the deck.”

  “Okay, Dad,” we say, and Paul winks at me as he lowers the round brush down the chimney.

  Little does Dad know the wood has already been stacked—on the front porch, where it won’t get wet. For the first time we can do things our own way and Dad can’t come check.

  Tuesday, September 2

  Tick, tick, tick goes the rain against the window. It’s so quiet in this house. Paul went home, and the lake is quiet again. It’s September. The summer people have gone home to the city. Everybody’s back to work, back to school.

  Except me. It’s the first day of school, and Mom hasn’t even asked me why I didn’t go. Neither has Dad; he doesn’t even know what day of the week it is anymore. Nobody from school calls asking where I am. It’s been weeks since the last college coach called. I guess it’s an unspoken thing.

  As nice as it is that no one’s expecting anything of me right now, it’s also kind of weird. It’s like I don’t exist to anyone outside this house. We don’t go to church anymore. My soccer team plays on without me. I’ve cut myself off from Clay. And most of the time I like it that way.

  I want to be here just for Dad. And Mom. They’re all I have energy for. Mom and I are up and down all night, caring for Dad. Even when I do sleep, it’s real light. I keep one ear cocked, listening to Dad’s breathing. Sometimes it falters; I won’t hear anything for a long time and then he puffs out with this huge breath he’s been holding. He’s always had sleep apnea, but not like this. Each breath seems like it could be his last.

  I stand up and look out the rain streaked windows. You can’t even see the lake today. Everything’s fuzzy, foggy, steamy gray.

  Labor Day. What a depressing holiday. Summer’s over. Fall’s begun.

  I used to love fall—the beginning of soccer season, the crunch of leaves, the smell of wood burning, Halloween, Thanksgiving, the first snow.

  Now I hate it. Everything’s coming to an end. Leaves will be falling, leaving bare stick branches. The landscape will go from green to red, yellow, and orange, and then to brown and gray, everything brown and gray. There’ll be rain and mud, freezing winds, snow. And everything will die or go to sleep for the winter.

  I grab yesterday’s unread Record Eagle for something to do and flip through to the sports section. The headline reads
TROJAN GIRLS CONTINUE TO DOMINATE WITHOUT THEIR WORKHORSE.

  The article and two pictures—one of Coach Pfieffer and another of Kristin punching a ball away—fill the bottom half of the front page.

  The Traverse City Trojan girls’ soccer team may have lost their star, All-American striker Leah Weiczynkowski, but they seem to be doing just fine without her.

  It sure feels good to see my name in ink, even if they are doing fine without me.

  In the title match of the Northern Michigan Kick-Off Classic Friday, the senior high girls beat Alpena 5-0, clinching the tournament title for the fourth consecutive year. On Wednesday, they similarly defeated a highly-touted Harbor Springs squad, 6-1, to advance to the finals.

  Asked if he’s surprised with the early victories and the ease with which they came, Trojan coach Ron Pfeiffer said, “Yes, I’m amazed. I really am. We’re playing without our leading scorer (Weiczynkowski). Leah’s accounted for ninety percent of our goals over the past three years. I never expected we could make up for her loss.”

  Weiczynkowski, who left the team shortly after preseason practices began to be at her father’s side during his battle with cancer, is out indefinitely. “Her family needs her more than we do right now,” said Pfeiffer. “For the time being, we’re doing fine, far better than I could have hoped.”

  So, to what does this group of over-achievers attribute its success?

  “We’re a highly motivated team. We’re on a mission this year,” said senior co-captain and starting goalie Kristin Blaichek. “We’re playing for Mr. Weiczynkowski.”

  It’s true, said Pfeiffer. “They’ve really pulled together as a team. The younger girls are filling in the gaps nicely, and our veteran players have stepped up their level of play.”

  Even so, Pfeiffer misses Weiczynkowski’s leadership. “We haven’t found a go-to player to take Leah’s place,” he said. “You know, that person you look to come up with the big goal in a pressure situation. So it’ll be a little scary in the tight games. Leah’s left some awful big shoes to fill.”