That Saturday afternoon of reunion weekend, Lou took Louie on a tour through his alma mater. Penny had gone off with her girlfriends to play tennis, and the buddies went golfing, a sport Lou only pretended to like because SportsAMER!’s golf line was a big seller. He begged off playing (“Gotta babysit, guys!”), and instead wandered the campus until he found the old bookstore, open for the alums and stocked with memorabilia, a rocking chair with the college’s insignia, a mug with the college’s insignia, pennants and even a yuppie espresso cup set with the college’s insignia. He bought little Louie a college sweatshirt he’d take a few years growing into and a college bib he could dirty this very day. Then he moved on to the book section to get a present for Penny, and there it was on a shelf of books by faculty authors: Return from Left Field, by Yolanda García. So she was still here! He bought the book, and once outside, while Louie slept on his blanket in the shade under a tree where Lou and his pals had downed many a beer and exchanged many a leer at the young coeds passing by, he began to read.
The book was a collection of short stories. In a brief introduction she wrote pretty much what Lou remembered her saying during their last conference. How these stories had kept her going through some pretty dark days. How all these stories had been in one way or another gifts from her family and friends and students over the years. How she’d like to thank so and so, and so and so. Lou ran his eye over all the names hoping to find his own, but there was no mention of the young football player who’d learned to take risks in her class. Obviously, he hadn’t made too much of an impression on her. And why should he? Hadn’t he been the one to cut off their last meeting when he sensed she had needed to talk with him? And what would she have said? Maybe something not much different from what he would say now to her about his own loneliness and fears for this marriage.
He skimmed through the book, reading first paragraphs to see if he’d get hooked by any one story. It was a diverse bunch all right. In some of them, he thought he recognized a certain character or situation, probably because she’d told them some of these stories in class. Then he got to the title story, the one that began, That morning, Tío Marcos was so nervous, he put juice in my cereal instead of milk, he boiled my egg soft instead of hard, he went out to get his paper and came back empty-handed saying, ‘Now what was it I was going to get?’ It was the day of the Little League State Championship, and Tío Marcos had been training me since the day he walked into my life, six years before, and replaced my father.
Lou’s eye was caught like a fish in the hook of the print. This was his story, his goddamn story, right down to the kid at the end sitting in the car, his face in his hands, bawling. Only difference was this Yo-yo lady had made all his characters Hispanic, changed the sport to baseball, and written up the story nicer than Lou had been able to write it.
Lou combed through the rest of the book, reading the stories that sounded familiar. Maybe she’d lifted stories by other kids in the class? Jesus, maybe they could bring a class action suit together? He looked for her picture in the back, but there wasn’t one. A brief biography mentioned that Yolanda García had written numerous works of fiction, that she taught at this college, that she was living on a farm in New Hampshire with her cats, Fidel and Jesús. Lou remembered the story he had heard from his buddy five years ago. Yolanda was having emotional problems. Well, she sounded settled down now, so he didn’t have to feel protective of her. It crossed his mind that she must be on her next to last go-around on the tenure track
He was re-reading the story so intently, Penny’s voice made him start. “Looo-oo, Looo-oo!” She was calling him from the window of the dorm they were staying in, waving and laughing! Her pretty hair hung down like the girl in the fairytale they’d be reading little Louie in a few years.
She was waiting at the dorm room door, and her face lit up again when she saw Lou and the baby. “My two boys,” she greeted them, taking the baby. Lou hadn’t heard that lightness in her voice in a while. He put his arm around her shoulder. “You having a good time, sweetheart?”
She smiled warmly, her eye wandering by force of habit to his book. “What you reading?” She cocked her head to one side and read the name on the spine. “I remember her! Must be good. I called you five or six times before you heard me!”
He thought of telling Penny about the plagiarized story then, but watching her, happily nuzzling the baby, he held back. Years ago, when she had been co-editor of Musings along with—what was his name?—Lou had submitted a couple of the Henry stories to the magazine, including this one. He had been too afraid to do so under his own name, so his roommate had sent them in like they were his. A note had come back from the editors, saying that the stories did not quite work. They were a little too maudlin. Maudlin? Lou looked it up just to be sure. Maudlin? What the hell was wrong with being sentimental? That rejection note had made it even harder for Lou to ask Penny out.
So for now, he kept his secret to himself. He could feel a closeness growing between them, and he didn’t feel like admitting this small failure to her. Instead, while the baby napped, they made sweet, silly love in one of the small twin beds like in the old days. From the room under them came the clowning thumps of one of the envious alums.
During the president’s cocktail party, Lou kept an eye out for Yolanda. He had brought the book in Louie’s diaper bag for her to autograph. He wouldn’t say a thing to her about the title story and see if she acknowledged she had lifted it from him. He didn’t know where he’d go from there. It was like he remembered when he was writing a story. You never really knew what the ending would be until you’d written yourself right up to it.
The chairman of the English department came up to Penny to meet her little boy. He was heavily freckled, and so his skin looked like a tweedy continuation of his jacket. “And this is my husband,” Penny said, turning to Lou, who stood holding the diaper bag, plastic cradle seat, and Big Bird rattle, grinning at the chairman who didn’t remember him. After some catch-up between Penny and the chairman, Lou asked after Yolanda García. “She’s up for tenure in the fall,” the chairman informed them. “We’re very hopeful,” he said confidentially. “She’s published a new book with Norton, and she seems happy here now.”
“She wasn’t happy before?” Lou asked. Yolanda’s little crime made him feel intimately tied to the secrets in her life.
“It’s hard for our young women professors, a remote place like this, a good old boy network firmly entrenched—”
Penny was nodding away like the chair was talking about her. In fact, he sounded just like Penny when she complained about living in Dayton and wasting her life away. “Not to mention that being a minority in New Hampshire is no picnic—” The chair threw up his hands. “Anyhow, she has done well. Says her students have saved her—quite enthusiastic about her classes.”
Lou felt like saying, Let me tell you just how quite.
Penny and the chair looked at him, sensing he was about to say something.
“Yolanda García is a plagiarist,” he would start. He had a sudden picture of her standing on her desk the first time he had come to her office, reaching up for a book on her shelf. Her legs had surprised him, skinny like a schoolgirl’s, a faint, white, endearing scar just below one knee. He remembered, too, her fingers, nervously tugging at her hair, the nails bitten back but still painted a bright red. That she should paint her nails red, and then, bite them off! And her lipstick, she never could get it on right, so she looked as if she’d just eaten something messy and red. Suddenly, Lou knew he wasn’t going to tell on this Yolanda García he had pictured in his head. Details, she had always said, the goddamn details could break your heart.
And so he said, “As one of her ex-students, I can tell you she was terrific!” His marketing vice president voice put extra punch in his recommendation. The chairman lifted his pale eyebrows.
“I didn’t know you’d taken a course from her,” Penny said, looking at him with surprise. “You took a writing course?�
��
Lou nodded. “My favorite course, too. Made me wish I’d been an English major. Not to mention I would have met you a lot sooner!” Lou laughed, and the chair laughed. Everything had worked out so well for his star student.
Driving away the next day, they waved to their friends. Once on the highway, Lou looked over at the silent Penny. She was turned towards the window, one of her wistful moods that could so easily turn dark. It had been good for her to be with her friends, but she was readying herself for the long days with a little baby and no companionship but a pile of books. He thought of how Yolanda had said her students had saved her, and he wondered what he could do to make Penny happier.
“Baby asleep?” he asked, hoping to engage her in the one subject in which she was always interested.
Penny nodded. “Little guy’s exhausted.”
Lou looked in the rearview mirror, and sure enough, baby Louie lay pooped out in the car seat. “Tell you what, why don’t you read us one of those stories? Get our minds off leaving.”
“You’re really turning into a reader.” Penny picked Yolanda’s book out of the carry-on bag beside the baby and opened to the table of contents. “Why don’t I read all the titles, and you tell me which one sounds like a story you want to hear.”
It was not hard for him to decide, of course, and Penny began the story, Return from Left Field. Her tense voice relaxed as she read paragraph after paragraph. She turned pages eagerly, smiled and sometimes chuckled. “That was the first failure in my life, and I can’t say it prepared me for the rest.” She read the last sentences. “But whenever they’ve come, I’ve thought of sitting in that car, looking out at that deserted diamond, thinking, I’ll never get over this. And Tío Marcos leaning over and saying, Don’t worry, Miguelito. You’ll return from left field.”
Penny closed the book and stroked the cover with her open hand. “That was a sweet story,” she said. There was no irony in her voice.
“Really?” he said. “You didn’t think it was just a little sentimental?”
Penny shook her head. “It took risks, if that’s what you mean. That’s what I loved about it.” She was defending that story as if it were little Louie or something.
His heart was making such a racket in his chest, he was sure she would hear it and tell him to quiet down, he was going to wake up the baby. But instead she reached over and squeezed his hand. “Funny, but that story reminded me—” she began.
“Yeah?” he said, grinning, on the verge of telling her.
As Lou listened, her voice opened up into a story of a remembered childhood loss. Out the window, the landscape blurred into the emerald green of a playing field. “Wow,” he kept saying.
The suitor
resolution
Dexter Hays wants to go down there and visit Yo while she’s in the Dominican Republic this summer. She has stopped in for a weekend at his place on her way to the island, and he has been trying for two days nonstop to convince her.
But she says no. He has to understand that, down there, women don’t have lovers out in the open. Down there, he’d have to clean up his act. Throw away his joints, get a nice pair of pants. Her aunts would try to convert him. “It’s different, Dex. I mean, people are still old world, down there.”
“Baby, baby,” he says, shaking his head, so in love with this bright colorful bird that has flown into the cage of his middle age. “You realize the way you talk about this place is the way my mamma used to talk to my baby sister about her private parts. ‘Now, Mary Sue, you mustn’t let anyone touch you down there.’” He mimics his mamma by pitching his accent half a note more southern.
Dexter is tall and skinny with just a trace of the buck teeth his daddy paid a lot to fix. His daddy also paid a lot to send Dexter up from Fayetteville, North Carolina, to Harvard, but that didn’t take either, and inside of a year, Dexter had dropped out and joined, not just a hippy commune, but a Yankee hippy commune.
“Poor Daddy,” Dexter drawls, shaking his head. “That about did him in.”
Yo laughs, taking his face in her hands, cooing over him in Spanish, so he believes that despite what she says, she really does want him to come and visit her down there this summer.
“I’ll behave myself, I promise,” he promises. He hates the way his blond, babyfine hair stands on end with electricity. He runs his hands through it, clamping the cowlicks down. But still she looks doubtful. “What is it, baby? It’s my accent, isn’t it? I’m not good-looking enough? You wanted Rhett Butler and you got Gomer Pyle?”
“Ay, Dex, come on. You know if you come, everyone’s going to assume we’re getting married.”
“Maybe we will get married someday,” he suggests. This is the most excited he’s been about a woman since Winnie Sutherland sat in front of him in fifth grade with her two braids tied with blue ribbons, and he couldn’t help himself. Out of true love, he yanked at those ribbons and the dark ropes of her hair came undone. Winnie Sutherland ended up being his first wife. “You’re still that kid pulling on my braids,” she accused him when she sued for divorce ten years ago. “You’re never going to grow up!” It is still a matter of pride with Dexter Hays that he’s as much of a live wire now as he was back in the fifth grade. Who wants to grow up and be Winnie Sutherland’s second husband? Donald What’s-his-face is a fat dough-boy type guy who looks like he’s not done yet the way his skin is so pasty white. But Donald is also a rich man, some big accountant with an aggressive silver Mercedes with windows you can’t see in and a swimming pool shaped like Winnie’s hourglass figure in their fenced-in backyard.
But Dexter Hays’s time is coming. He can feel it in the air. This Yo lady is Missus Right, all right. Another maverick, another fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants person with the added pizzazz of being Latin. In the movies Spanish ladies have roses tucked behind their ears and low-cut peasant blouses with little crucifixes like hexes above those heaving bosoms, yeah! They met at a rally in support of Nicaragua or maybe it was Cuba—one of the two. Even though Dexter doesn’t really follow the news, he likes going to these rallies because he’s likely to meet people with whom he feels simpatico. Ex-hippies who never forgot their roots as flower children to become big-time CEO cogs in the wheel of fortune. Most guys his age make him feel like maybe he’s wasting his life being a free spirit, the Donalds riding their air-conditioned German cars from one safe place to another. Anyhow, at these rallies there are naturally lots of natives from these countries, and Dexter has always had a weak spot for Latin women. Yo is right up his ethnic alley.
They’ve been having a long distance relationship—every weekend he flies up to New Hampshire or she flies down to D.C., where he lives. And already he is sure he wants to marry her in the not too distant future. “So maybe we should tie the knot,” he continues, testing the waters. “It’d solve the problem of explaining who I am to your mammy and pappy.”
“Whoa!” she says, laughing. “It’s only been five months, Dex,” she reminds him. “Twenty weekends, in fact—which means we’ve only really known each other forty days.”
“And people say girls can’t do math.” Dexter makes a joke of it. But hey, it hurts to be rebuffed even if he’s trying to get away from all that male ego stuff Bly and his buddies are always howling in the woods about.
“We’re not teenagers,” Yo continues as if he is some teenager who needs a lecture. “And I don’t know about you, amorsito, but I want to be sure this time around.”
“Well, I am sure!” he says, a bit huffy. Ambivalence is for northern girls whose daddies sent them to psychiatrists instead of riding camps. “We’re perfect for each other.”
“Ay, Dex,” she coos over him again, kissing his eyes shut.
But this time he’s not going to let himself get romanced out of what he wants. “Come on, Yo-baby,” he persists. “Why can’t I come down and visit you?”
“I told you. It’s a bad time for scandal in the family. My uncle’s running for president again.”
“I
’ll campaign for him, swear to God. I worked for Jesse Jackson.”
“Well, Dex, I hate to tell you but there’s no comparison.”
She has told him it is a democracy down there, but she claims that the word doesn’t mean the same thing as here. She has told him her uncle is a good guy, but that he is surrounded by advisors and military thugs she doesn’t trust. “You get the picture,” she says.
Dexter rolls his eyes. “It’s like I’m going out with Caroline Kennedy or something.”
Yo laughs. “More like one of the crazy Bobby Kennedy kids.” She’s filled him in on how she and her sisters have been disowned a couple of times each for going their own way, how the family holds them at arm’s length, loving them to bits but still hoping and praying to set them straight. “My aunts tried to marry me last year to this old, alcoholic Dominican guy. He looked seventy. Can you believe it? It would have been like being a nursemaid. But I guess I’d have proven that I could be a self-sacrificing wife after all.”
“So just marry me and take care of me and you can still have good sex—”
“Dex!” She slaps him playfully. Every time she talks about all this disowning stuff and aunts with rosaries wound in their fingers and suave uncles running for president, it’s like he has fallen in with the Mafia or something. He gets a charge from all the intrigue that seems to be going on always in her family. Whenever she comes down to visit him, he can’t answer his own phone because her father might call. She’s supposed to be doing research at the Library of Congress and staying with a friend, presumably female. “I just don’t get why a grown woman can’t do what she wants?”
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