Step-Ball-Change: A Novel

by Jeanne Ray

  “I would have done it,” I admitted.

  Taffy leaned up against the counter and sank her fingernails into the rind of the orange. “So,” she said to Neddy, “you flew?”

  “I wanted to get here as fast as I could.”

  “You could have walked from Atlanta in the time it took you to get here.”

  Neddy turned to me. He looked frightened. He was still in the first inning, but things weren’t shaping up the way he had expected them to. “Carolina, I don’t mean to be rude, but would you mind if Taffy and I went and talked privately?”

  I was going to say that was fine. I could stand to go to the bank, anyway. I started to stand up, but Taffy had other ideas.

  “If she leaves, then I have to just repeat the whole conversation to her after you go. If she stays, it saves me time. It’s like cutting out the middle man.”

  I sat back down.

  “Okay, then,” Neddy said. “Okay. Carolina is family, I understand that. Okay. The thing is this, I think you should come home.”

  It was hardly a declaration of love. It wasn’t even an apology. But for Neddy, I’m sure, it had been difficult to come up with.

  Taffy peeled back the skin from her orange and then started removing the white pulpy strings. Taffy was very meticulous when it came to oranges. “How was Fiji?”

  “Ah, honey, let’s not get into that.”

  It was the kind of thing a husband might say to a wife if she brought up the fact that he had forgotten her birthday five years previously just as he was sitting down to watch the Super Bowl, but given the context here, it seemed a profoundly stupid thing to say.

  Taffy’s voice got very dark. “I want to know.” She popped a section of orange in her mouth.

  Neddy rubbed the back of his neck. “Well, I guess we could say if I had loved it, I wouldn’t be here.”

  “You must have loved it a little. You were gone a hell of a long time.”

  “I had some things I needed to work out over there.”

  Taffy slammed the orange down on the counter and it blew apart in a thousand bright spots of seed and juice. “Goddammit, Neddy. You’re wasting my time.”

  Neddy was shaken. He wasn’t used to being yelled at, especially not by his wife. “What do you want me to tell you? I couldn’t get a decent steak to save my life, and the fish was all fried up greasy. A glass of scotch cost twelve bucks, and the fruit didn’t look like fruit at all. I ordered a banana for my cereal one morning, and it was about three inches long and three inches around. I didn’t like Fiji.”

  She stared at him. We both stared at him. I had my opinions about Neddy in the past and they weren’t so good, but I had no idea how much credit I’d been giving him.

  “Go on home,” Taffy said finally.

  That was when Neddy’s mouth started to quiver a little, and it reminded me so much of the way that Kay’s big cries started, it frightened me. I couldn’t even imagine what a mess there would be if Neddy broke down. “I can’t go home without you,” he said. “I don’t like it there without you. The house doesn’t feel right to me anymore. You know you’re supposed to be at home. Do you want me to say I was wrong? Okay, I was wrong. I said it. Now cut out all this foolishness.”

  “What about your girlfriend?”

  Now the sunburn was back in Neddy’s face and his mouth was really shaking. “I’ve never known you to be like this,” he said. “You never were cruel to me. I told you I was wrong, I told you I didn’t like Fiji, and I told you I want you to come home. That’s what matters here.”

  “Did you know that our daughter got married? I’ve been trying to get ahold of you for weeks.”

  “Yeah, I know. I talked to her over in France.”

  “She called you?”

  “We didn’t talk for very long.”

  “Do you have her number?”

  Neddy reached into his back pocket and pulled out a wallet the size of a Big Mac. I didn’t even know how he could sit on it. It looked like he was carrying a couple of thousand dollars in cash, but they could have all been ones. “I’ve got it in here somewhere.” He started to thumb through the bills, laying out various scraps of paper with numbers scrawled on them on the kitchen table. Then suddenly something occurred to him and he scooped them all back up with a sweep of his giant paw. “Come home with me and I’ll give you the number.”

  I knew it was my role to be the silent observer in this affair, but enough was enough. “You want her to forgive you and come home so that she can get a telephone number? That’s the pay-off?”

  “She wants the number,” Neddy said.

  “Go home,” Taffy said.

  Neddy stood up and removed the chair from between his legs. He started to walk toward the door, but then he went over to Taffy and enveloped her in his arms. He swallowed her. She was not a big person and he was huge, and when he folded her up, you couldn’t see her at all. “I need you at home, Taffy.” He was whispering in her hair. “I make mistakes. You’ve always known that about me. I always make mistakes. But the General sets me right. You’ve got to come home and set me right again.”

  I could hear small, muffled sounds and I knew that Taffy was crying, and I knew that this couldn’t be a good thing, but there was nothing I could do about it. I got up and left the room.

  chapter fifteen

  TOM SLICED THE POT ROAST AND PUT IT ON OUR PLATES. It was just the three of us at dinner that night.

  “I’m not saying what I’m going to do,” Taffy told us. “I’m just saying I’m thinking about it.”

  I cut into a cooked carrot. I put it in my mouth and chewed. I had no idea what to say.

  “Sometimes you get a second chance,” Taffy said.

  “Sometimes the second chance is with a second person,” Tom said.

  “Not at my age it isn’t.”

  “You can’t be with Neddy just because you’re afraid of being alone,” I said.

  “I don’t think that’s such an uncommon reason for staying with somebody. Besides, I’ve learned a lot since I’ve been here. I think I could do a better job at being married now. I look at the two of you and I think, I could do that.”

  “With Neddy?”

  “I’ve got thirty-seven years tied up in this thing.”

  The doorbell rang and Tom got up to answer it. “God, I hope it isn’t another telegram,” he said.

  It was Woodrow. He wasn’t wearing a tie tonight, but he looked very nice. Taffy paled at the sight of him.

  “Did I get the night wrong?” he said.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I completely forgot.”

  Woodrow raised his eyebrows and a slight flash of disappointment crossed his face. “No big deal. It was just a pizza.”

  “Stay and have some pot roast,” Taffy said.

  “She made it,” Tom said. “It’s good. And we already know that you’re free for dinner.”

  So then there were four. It was important to always think of meals as flexible, expandable. I always had something in the freezer that I could throw in just in case the crowd got too big. Tom served up a plate for Woodrow and Taffy got him a glass of wine.

  “How’s the garage going?” I asked.

  “The garage is going well. What’s been going on around here today?”

  Tom and I stopped to examine our napkins and left any truth or lies that were to be told up to Taffy. “My husband came by,” she said.

  Woodrow nodded like a man who had just been given a bad diagnosis. “How was he doing?”

  Taffy put down her knife and fork and put her palms flat on the table. “He.” She waited for a beat. “Was not so good.”

  “And he wants you to come back to Atlanta.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because sooner or later even the stupidest man, with all respect to your husband, would wake up and realize what he’d done by letting you go.”

  It was one of the sweetest things I’d heard anybody say in a long time.

  �
��Thank you,” Taffy said quietly.

  “So are you going to go?” Woodrow said.

  “I’m thinking about it.”

  “Because you love him?” Woodrow was looking straight at her. He wasn’t touching his pot roast. He was going to pin her down, be as specific as Neddy had been vague. He was going to be able to say everything I couldn’t say because it wasn’t right to try to talk your sister in or out of a marriage. I was glad he had shown up for dinner.

  “Because that’s my life. That’s my home.”

  “Well, you can have your life there, and if this lawyer is half as good as you say he is, then you can probably have your home, too. What does that have to do with being married?”

  “Maybe it has more to do with not being divorced than it does with being married. I don’t want to be divorced. I feel like Neddy needs me.”

  “I’m sure he does, but do you need Neddy? This is your life we’re talking about here.”

  Taffy pushed her hair back and then wrapped her arms around her waist as if she were trying to hold herself in place. “I don’t think I want to talk about this anymore.”

  “That’s okay,” Woodrow said. “But let me talk for one more minute. I have a vested interest in this thing because I’d like to see you be happy. What you need to ask yourself is this: Are you a better person when you’re with him? Are you kinder or smarter or happier? Do you think you do more good in the world? That’s what I said to Erica. One man can be perfectly fine, but maybe he doesn’t bring out what’s good in you, in which case I’d suggest you best not stay with him. But if you find a man who makes you better, or if you’re better being on your own, then you need to listen to that.”

  I looked at Tom, my husband of forty-two years. I knew what Woodrow was talking about. This was a man who had made me better.

  NEDDY CALLED ALL the time now. His strategy wasn’t to woo her back exactly. He seemed to think he’d get her back by showing her what a desperate mess he was without her. He called because the electricity had been cut off, and then he called from his cell phone because the phone went dead as well. He claimed not to understand why. He called about trash pickup, a sore tooth, and once, in the very depths of neediness, a broken shoelace. Should he just throw the shoes out? he wanted to know.

  “He’s making this up,” I said.

  “Don’t be so sure,” Taffy said.

  Even though she took the calls and dispensed her advice, I think it was Woodrow’s words that were making their way inside her head more than Neddy’s. She had dinner with Woodrow almost every night now. She came in later and later. Then one fine afternoon Woodrow emerged from the basement and said our foundation was secure.

  “We’ll have the Florida room finished in two weeks, absolute maximum.”

  “Electrical sockets and everything?” I asked.

  “Everything.”

  I could hardly believe it. Woodrow had never promised a finishing date before. We were moving out of construction. I wondered if he would still come by in the morning for coffee on his way to other jobs. It was one more reason to hope that Taffy didn’t go back to Neddy.

  Taffy didn’t talk about Neddy, no matter how much she may have thought about him. She wasn’t the kind of person to engage in long bouts of “What if?” and “What do you think?” If she was worried about what to do with her life, she kept it to herself. She wound up doing what I had done all my life when I didn’t know what to do: She poured herself into dancing. Taffy worked harder and harder at school. She bought a television set and a VCR for the studio and would watch tap-instruction videos after the students had left so she could teach herself new steps that she could pass on to them. She would watch Fred Astaire and Eleanor Powell and Gene Kelly movies and rewind the dance scenes over and over again while she tapped along. She said she wanted to be reincarnated as Ann Miller, but I thought she resembled no one as much as the young Buddy Ebsen; everything about her was so incredibly easy and loose, as if at any minute she might sail up the wall, her feet as light and fast as wings.

  Taffy received a couple of postcards from Holden and Jack, one sent from Cap Ferret and another from a small town on the Italian coast. Holden said they had rented a boat, that they were eating persimmons, and that they would be coming home soon. Work, she said, had gotten completely out of control in her absence.

  “What are you going to say to her when she comes back?” I asked.

  “By the time she comes back,” Taffy said, “I think I’ll be over it.”

  Sometimes, when Taffy needed a partner, she would ask George to come to the studio and dance with her. He was happy to do it. He missed teaching his class even though he didn’t have the time for it now. They would tap together in wide circles across the empty studio, their feet rattling out such perfect staccato time that when the tape was over, they didn’t stop to put another one on. George was a relentless dancer and he took a certain pleasure in trying to run Taffy into the ground. She could go pretty far, and then finally she’d throw up her hands and scream, collapsing into a heap on the floor. “You’re too good,” she said. “And you’re too damn young.”

  “Get up,” he said, his feet still slapping and riffing.

  “I’m dead. You’ve killed me.”

  So then George and I would go a couple of rounds. I was sorry he was going to be a lawyer. I couldn’t help myself. I didn’t understand how anyone could dance as well as George and not want to make it his life’s work. When we were all three lying on the hardwood floor in puddles of our own sweat, George rolled over on his stomach and looked at us.

  “I’ve got to tell you something,” he said.

  “What?”

  “I’m going to ask Erica to marry me.”

  Taffy and I both sat up, light-headed from exhaustion but suddenly, fully alert. “Another wedding?” Taffy said.

  George shook his head. “Just an engagement, I swear. We wouldn’t get married for at least two years. We both want to finish school first and we don’t have the money to live together.”

  “So why not wait?” I asked. “I mean, I’m happy for you, don’t get me wrong, but is there a hurry?” I hoped I was happy for him. I wanted to be happy for him, but George and Erica were so impossibly young, despite my own personal history. If they really did wait two years, that would be better. Twenty-seven sounded more marriageable than twenty-five.

  “I just want her to know, I want everyone to know, this is absolutely it for me. This is the woman I’m going to marry even if we can’t do it right now. I just wanted to tell you first, what with everything that happened with Holden and Jack, and I don’t think this is the time for any more surprises in the family. I was going to wait and tell you and Dad tonight, but I don’t know, dancing always makes me think about getting married now. Everything makes me think about getting married.”

  “How could it not?” Taffy said. “It’s all anybody in this family ever talks about.” She put her sweaty hands together and pulled one of them over the other. “Here,” she said, and slid something bright and shiny across the floor in George’s direction. “Give her this.”

  George held it up to the light. It was Taffy’s engagement ring.

  “I’d have it reset,” she said. “Just to make it Erica’s, but there’s no bad luck in the diamond. Diamonds are too hard to absorb bad luck. It’s part of their charm.”

  “I can’t take this,” George said.

  “Of course you can.”

  “What would Neddy say?”

  Taffy smiled and looked at her hand. There was just a little platinum band there now. It looked nice, simpler. “Neddy would never notice it was missing. Anyway, Neddy and I are getting a divorce, so I won’t be wearing it.”

  “You’re getting a divorce?” I said.

  “I called Buddy Lewis yesterday.”

  “Were you going to tell me?”

  “I wanted to try it on by myself first, see how it felt.” She shrugged. “It feels okay.”

  I scooted over nex
t to George and looked at the beginnings of Taffy’s married life. “I remember the day you got that ring,” I said. “Mother called me over to the house so I could come see it. You were so excited you could barely hold your hand still. I thought it was the most gorgeous, frivolous thing I’d ever seen in my life.”

  “You don’t remember the day I got that ring,” she said. “It was seven years ago, it was at Tiffany’s, and I picked it out myself. That is actually my fourth engagement ring. Neddy let me get a new one every ten years. He called it my upgrade.”

  “But shouldn’t you give this to Holden?” George said. He was turning the ring from side to side. Now that he was holding it, he wanted it.

  “She can have the other ones.”

  “You kept the other ones?” George said.

  “Of course I did. A diamond doesn’t mean anything, not in the long run. That’s why your mother never bothered with them, which is why she doesn’t have one to give to you now.”

  “You’re wrong,” George said. “It means a lot.”

  “It means a lot to you, right now. That’s why I want you to have it.”

  THE NEXT WEEK we had four reasons to have a party: Kay and Trey set the date for their wedding, George and Erica announced their engagement, Holden and Jack came back from France married, and the Florida room was finished if not paid for. We would need to invite all of the Woodrow girls, and their families, and Jack’s family, and Trey’s family, and all of their friends. By the time the guest list reached one hundred and fifty, we decided instead to simply reassemble the crowd from Taffy’s birthday party and have a little dinner party at which to discuss larger parties that would follow in the future. Still, Erica thought we should have invitations, and so she wrote each one by hand.

  Caroline McSwain and Tom McSwain and

  Taffy Bishop and Felix Woodrow

  Invite you to a celebration of the marriage of

  Holden and Jack Carroll

  and the engagements of

  Katherine McSwain and Trey Bennett

  and