Blackberry Winter
Page 7
At the end of one particular fishing outing, Brian, his father, and his uncle were sitting by a campfire cleaning the fish they had caught for the evening meal. Brian had been astonished to find the remnant of an old fish hook in the innards of one of his fish. He showed it to his father who remarked, “Probably been in there for a long time, from the looks of it.”
“But, Dad, how could that be? Why didn’t it kill him?”
“Maybe it would have eventually, or maybe not. Some hurts are like that. Some hurts are merciful, you bite the hook, and it’s your time, and you’re gone. Other hurts just work themselves inside you, and maybe they kill you eventually, or maybe they don’t, but you hurt for a long time waiting.”
Brian hadn’t understood the look on his father’s face. He wondered what hurt might have put it there. But as the past twenty years had gone by, he understood exactly what his father had meant. It was better to face some hurts right at the beginning so that they didn’t work their way inside. Twenty years is a long time to walk around being stuck by a hook.
Chapter 4
For some people, summer means days at the beach, a slower pace to life, or fresh vegetables. For Brian McClellan, summer meant baseball.
For a serious baseball fan, living in North Carolina can be both a curse and a blessing. On the one hand, there is no major-league team in the state, and few prospects of getting one. On the other hand, Baltimore and Atlanta are both a tolerable six hours drive away. In addition, there are a number of minor-league teams, ranging from Class A to AAA. There is a Class A Carolina League team, bizarrely named the Dash, in town so Brian could even go to a game and be able to get into the kind of mood that only live baseball can provoke.
“I went to my first game in 1977,” he told Emily as they waited in line to buy their tickets for the first Dash-Keys game of the season. “My father had to go to New York for a convention of some kind, and he took my mother and me along. I wondered at the time why he was going—I’ve told you how much he hated leaving home—but then I found out when he said that we were going to Shea Stadium.”
“The Mets, right?” Emily commented.
Brian nodded, impressed that she knew the city that the Mets played in. “I’ll bet that was an exciting day for both of you,” Emily said, knowing a play-by-play account was coming.
“I’ve never forgotten that game,” he said as he paid for their tickets and headed off toward the reserved seats near first base. “More New Englanders are Red Sox fans than any other team, but Dad preferred the National League, and especially the Mets. It had been a long time since he’d been to New York, and he didn’t want to pass up the chance. They were playing the Dodgers, who had a terrific team that year. They got to the World Series.”
“Did they win” Emily asked.
“Oh, no,” Brian said. “They lost to the Bronx Zoo Yankees.”
The moment passed, and the game began. The Keys are an Orioles affiliate, and reflected the long standing futility of the parent club. Their lead-off hitter, an outfielder named Crawford, was only hitting .257. The Dash’s pitcher, a young man from California with the odd name of Overall, looked confident as he completed his warm-ups and looked to his catcher for the signal for the first pitch.
Brian seemed to have forgotten his story as he concentrated on the duel between aspiring major-leaguers. When Crawford popped up the second pitch to Baker at third, he shrugged and resumed.
“I was telling you about that game in New York, wasn’t I?” Emily nodded, and glanced at the scoreboard to see that the Bulls’ second baseman, Collins, was just a .246 hitter. “It was wonderful. Tom Seaver pitched for the Mets. That was the last year he won twenty games, though only seven of them were with the Mets—he got traded mid-season. And he was pitching against Tommy John, who also won twenty that year.
“That’s the fellow the surgery was named after, right?” Emily asked.
“Yes, as a matter of fact it is,” Brian replied, his respect for her growing by the second. “The Mets were pretty bad that year, but it was still great to get to see a Hall of Famer like Seaver pitch. Between him and John, it was a great pitcher’s duel. And the Mets won, I’m happy to say, on a home run by ol’ Ed Kranepool in the bottom of the ninth.”
As he spoke of , the Keys’ first baseman, Chance, must have thought that Brian was referring to him, because he hit a tall shot down the right-field line in the direction of the clubhouse. Clarke, the Spirits’ right-fielder, took off in pursuit, and was rewarded with a rousing ovation when he slid under the ball near the fence. That ended the inning, and while the public address system played old rock ’n roll, Brian continued to think of old ballplayers. Emily found it fascinating, though the names were mostly new to her. She asked what the source of his dedication was, not just to the game, but to its history. Brian pondered for a moment and said, “I don’t know exactly. Baseball is a game that honors tradition. There have been rules changes, some fairly drastic like the designated hitter, and changes in the structures of the leagues, over the years, but in its essence baseball is the same game that was played in the nineteenth century. It doesn’t cater to any of the things that drive modern America—speed, violence, that sort of thing. It’s slow and deliberate, cerebral in a way. Maybe that’s why people like George Will like it. But for me, it’s more aesthetic. Baseball has a wonderful symmetry to it. It’s...”
At that point he stopped. He realized that she was looking at him with genuine amusement. He realized he’d wandered away from the subject of her question, but saw nothing funny in what he’d said. For Brian, baseball was serious business. “What’s so funny?” he asked.
“Nothing, really,” she replied. “I just think it’s adorable when you rattle on rhapsodically about something. You don’t do it very often, and it’s a side of you I really like.”
He let out a comically overblown sigh. “Women,” he said, shaking his head. “Try to talk baseball with them, and look what happens. They think it’s adorable.” He gave her his widest grin. “That’s okay, I think you’re adorable, even if you don’t know anything about baseball.”
“Watch the game,” she replied, taking his head in her hands and turning it toward the field.
Brian was in a period of increased intensity in his work. He found himself working longer hours. He observed that this not only deprived him of leisure time, but tainted the time he did have because he was often tired and impatient. He was wishing that he had arranged to have his vacation time in the summer instead of lining it up for the fall. When that decision had had to be made back in January, he hadn’t met Emily and could not have envisioned the turns his life would take.
For Emily, the summer was usually a slow time at work as people vacationed and so read less. She had mixed feelings about her work. On the one hand, she was not as averse to dealing with people as she used to be, but on the other hand, she was more prone to find the work boring. The thought would sometimes strike her as she performed some task, “I can certainly think of things that would be more interesting to do than this.”
In the long summer evenings, they would sit together in Brian’s great room talking of unimportant, fascinating things like what was on their list of what summer was good for (fresh tomatoes, sweet corn, the beach, and a lot of the truly obnoxious people go on vacation), why baseball was a superior sport to any other (it was symmetrical, it was statistical, and you could see the players’ faces), and which books it was more fun to read in the summer time (Dr. Zhivago and Lost Horizon because of all the snow and The Canterbury Tales because it was about people going on a sort of vacation).
Brian would go on at great lengths about the amusements and delights available to a boy in summer time in Vermont. Emily was used to this, and it didn’t bore her. Of course, she was at the stage of emotional involvement when she would gladly have listened to him read the phone book. To listen to Brian tell it, the reason astronauts in outer space never reported seeing heaven up there was because it was in fact located
in the state next to New Hampshire.
Emily said, “Your childhood was a real idyll, wasn’t it? Let’s see, you were born in the fall of 1964. That was the hey day of the Beatles. The beginning of the counter-culture. It must have been an unsettling time to live in. And yet, you tell it as if your parents were Ward and June Cleaver. I love listening to you talk about it, but do you think it was really as good as you remember it?”
Brian smiled, “I doubt that I thought so at the time, but at my current advanced old age, it looks pretty good to me. You were born at the end of the seventies. I guess we’re really two separate generations, aren’t we?”
“Oh, don’t worry, you’ve held up remarkably well for a man of your years.” There was something in her grin, something just the least bit suggestive in her voice that made him look at her quite closely.
“You don’t look too bad yourself, you know,” he said drawing her closer.
There is something about a kiss in the middle of a conversation that is tentative, as if one is trying to ascertain whether this is the first kiss of many more to follow, or if this is just a small token of affection after which the conversation will continue. When Emily kissed him, there was no doubt that she intended it to be just the first kiss of a series. There was a warmth to it, a hint of passion. Always willing to oblige, Brian began to kiss her more fervently, to match her passion and add some of his own.
Emily was finding as her relationship with Brian progressed, that there was a change in the way her other relationships functioned. She experienced a switch in her outlook to her job which she hardly expected. She had once preferred the rote tasks that she did alone over the tasks which involved dealing with other people. She now realized that her co-workers were interesting and, in some cases, fun people. Now when they politely asked her to join them for lunch, she accepted, and enjoyed the time.
On one particular lunch break, she was listening to Janet Barstow relating her child care problems. It appeared that the Barstows were planning a big evening on the upcoming Friday night, but were having trouble finding a babysitter for their six year old daughter. Emily surprised the group, herself included, by volunteering to have little Jessica come to spend the evening at her apartment. Her offer was gratefully accepted, and she began to wonder what she had gotten herself into. She knew quite a bit about children’s literature from her work in the library, but she didn’t feel she knew too much about children. She began to think of strategies for keeping a six year old occupied for an evening.
When Brian called her on Friday at noon to see if she would like to come to his place for dinner, he was surprised to hear the reason she declined his invitation. “You’re babysitting? I thought you didn’t like children.”
Emily sounded a little insulted. “I have nothing against children on principle. I was a child once myself. I’m just not exactly sure what six year olds like to do. But I thought it would be a friendly gesture to make the offer. Janet is a nice person to work with, and she was very helpful to me when I had my accident last winter.” She went on to add with a mischievous tone, “Why don’t you come over and help me entertain the little girl, Brian? I’ll bet little girls just love you.”
“No, thank you. I don’t do children.”
As it turned out, Jessica Barstow did most of the entertaining that evening. She was a loquacious child, ready and willing to voice her opinion about a myriad of subjects. As in, “My mom doesn’t make macaroni the way you do. She gets hers out of a blue box,” and “I don’t ever go to bed early on Friday nights, even if I’m at the babysitter’s house, because my mom lets me sleep real late on Saturday,” and “You mean you haven’t seen the Disney princess movies? Not even one. I’ve seen them all. I even have Disney princess underwear.”
When she finally dropped off to sleep on Emily’s couch, it was a toss-up as to who was more worn out. The Barstows arrived at about midnight to pick her up and were profuse in their thanks. Emily said she would be happy to do it again some time.
One of Paul Lawrence’s favorite off-duty activities was volunteering with an educational/ social program run at the Community Center for underprivileged youth. He refereed basketball games, participated in drug education programs, and counseled young people on the dangers of promiscuous behavior. The center was chronically in need of funds, and so hosted a number of fund-raising events throughout the year. In the summer there was a picnic supper held in the center’s backyard.
Paul had sold Brian two tickets for the festivities, as he had every year since its inception, but he made it clear that this year, he actually expected to see his friend among the assembled throng.
“You don’t have your usual excuse this time, pal. You have someone to go with, and besides,” he added in a slightly more serious tone, “you two need to get out more.”
It was true that Brian and Emily had a tendency to isolate themselves. They spent their evenings together, generally at Brian’s house, which he kept at a constant seventy degrees. Emily had weak air conditioning in her apartment, and always felt it to be stuffy. Brian excused his energy wastefulness by saying that he made up for it in the winter when he kept the thermostat at sixty-four. Dislike of the heat was basically just an excuse to avoid going out, however. The truth was that Brian felt that when he wasn’t working, he should be relaxing, and the only place he ever really relaxed was in the privacy of his own home.
Emily not only went along with this preference for privacy, she endorsed it wholeheartedly. A lifetime of avoiding contact with people was a hard habit to break without some compelling reason, which Emily didn’t feel that she had. When she did on occasion feel like a change of scenery, she suggested a trip to the mall. There she could indulge the illusion that she was being sociable without having to actually deal with people.
When it came to Paul’s picnic, Emily took the position that it wouldn’t be very nice to Paul not to go, and besides, it went against her frugal grain to buy tickets to a meal and then not be there to eat it. So the balmy August evening found them hobnobbing with the cream of the philanthropic community.
The first thing Emily noticed was that she was more informally dressed than the other women. It did rather seem to her that a gingham blouse and denim skirt ought to be perfectly appropriate for a picnic, but from the finery that she saw all around her, she got the impression that she was a bit dowdy. Commenting on this to Brian, his response was, “Did it ever occur to you that it might be the other women that have poor judgment and are overdressed? Anyway, I like the way you look.”
“Men just don’t understand these things,” she thought. When the meal was actually served and she watched those ladies in silk trying to eat fried chicken legs off paper plates in their laps, she had a good laugh, and agreed that he might be right after all.
After the food came the “stand around and mingle and try to look like you’re having a good time at the party” phase. Emily was amusing herself pointing out people to Brian. There were several faces that she recognized, the director of the county library system, the mayor, the alderman who was reputed to have a lady friend in every ward of the city. There was a news crew filming footage for the eleven o’clock broadcast. Emily found the whole thing rather exciting. Paul made his way in their direction.
“So, how are we enjoying the festivities?”
“Paul, did you know the mayor is here?” Emily gushed.
“Of course she is. It would be politically incorrect for her not to be.” Turning to Brian, he observed, “You don’t seem impressed by the rich and famous you see assembled before you.”
“I guess I’m hopelessly politically incorrect. We’re at a party to benefit young people and I haven’t seen anybody under the age of thirty all evening.”
“It’s not their kind of party,” his friend said.
“I think they’ve got the right idea.”
Emily was going to scold him for being a killjoy when she saw a look of pain in his face. “Brian, what’s the matter?”
“I’m sorry, sometimes I forget. Let’s make our way home,” she said.
The noise of the party had masked the rumble of distant thunder in the air, but as they drove toward Brian’s house they could see vivid flashes of lightning. They were just closing the door of the house behind them when the sky opened up and sheets of rain poured down. Emily was chuckling, “Think about what those silk dresses must look like right about now.”
Brian was enjoying a cold bottle of beer and Emily was sipping away at a tall glass of milk when the lights went out. Looking out the window of Brian’s great room, they saw that unrelieved darkness covered the whole neighborhood. Brian speculated that lightning had probably struck the power station.
“That will take a while to fix. The street lights are out and it’s still pouring. You’d better stay here tonight. You can sleep in my room, and I’ll take the couch.”
“You’ll do nothing of the sort. If you sleep on the couch, then we’ll both be sleeping in strange beds. I’ll take the couch. I’m not sleepy, anyway. I want to write about the party in my journal.”
“Well, it’s probably ungallant of me, but I’m not going to argue with you. That couch is about six inches too short for my frame.”
After making sure that she had a pillow and blanket, and a candle to see by, Brian bid Emily a warm goodnight. The sounds of the rain on the roof lulled him quickly to sleep.
The next thing he knew, there was sunlight pouring into his room. Brian loved nights like that, no waking up in the middle of the night to check the time, as if it mattered a great deal to anyone who wanted to be sleeping whether it was three o’clock in the morning and they weren’t asleep or four o’clock in the morning and they weren’t asleep. And best of all, no dreams.