Winning the City Redux

by Theodore Weesner

  No, Dale tells himself at last. In truth he would not look the other way, would not cave . . . because he’s been a leader, has always thought of things, and stepping to the fore is one thing he has always done. It’s exactly why Mr. Bothner did not want him on his team, pre-empting his sons with quick decisions and no-look passes. Look at all the times he’s led the way. Making sure slow kids and fat kids get to play. Standing to fight if fighting has to be done. You could ask anybody. He was always a captain—on most teams for which he played!—and always stood up for his team, which, he can see, is exactly why Mr. Bothner excluded him.

  Talk about being deprived and in need of help. He’d rather be dead, Dale thinks, than be a suckass like Coach Burke for not standing up to Mr. Bothner when he selected a team to give to his sons like a present. How could Burkebutt not have said no, sorry, Dale Wheeler has been one of my most loyal players for two years, is a co-captain and a fighter, is going into his final year of junior high, and it wouldn’t be fair to interfere with his dream of winning the City League title.

  It’s what Miss Furbish would have said in a second! Dale tells himself in a rush of emotion. Maybe she’s small physically, but she has more balls and brains, for sure, than toady old Burkebutt. She would have looked Mr. Bothner in the eye and told him his proposition was unfair, unacceptable . . . that he and Coach Burke had to clean erasers all year for even suggesting such a thing!

  CHAPTER 22

  EXCITEMENT OF ANOTHER KIND IS RIDING THE AIR, FILLING Dale’s chest. It’s his day of walking Miss Furbish home . . . if only part way. In homeroom he keeps his eyes elsewhere than on the wondrous woman who appears to be avoiding looking his way, too . . . all while he keeps her within his peripheral view. He fears that a perceived glance might spoil everything, that any sign of adoration will have her changing her mind and canceling their date. Heart in throat, fixated on a pending mile under a darkening sky as the day turns, he grows preoccupied to such an extent that when Zona Kaplan swivels to whisper, “I thought you were on the team but I heard you aren’t?” he feels too startled to think straight.

  Close before him, Zona, as always, is beautifully dressed and made up. (So lovely is her smooth skin, her touches of blush and earthworm-colored lips, her sparkling eyes and crisp fabrics, that she, too, resembles a figure in a cosmetics poster!) Still, her question has been like a slap in the face.

  “I’m on the school team,” Dale tries to explain. “It’s the City League team from this district that I’m not on.”

  “They aren’t the same?”

  “They usually are, and they were, before the winners of the Nationals at Akron came to town.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “Forget it.”

  “I’d like to know what it means, if you don’t mind.”

  “Well . . . school teams are rinky-dink next to City League,” Dale tells her. “Eight games and no play-offs. City League plays twelve games, plus play-offs, plus a big game for the city in March.” As Zona looks aside, appearing to be thinking of something else, Dale adds, “On Scholastic, I’m co-captain. Me and Sonny Joe. On the Flintstone Truckers, I’m not at all . . . because I live on the wrong side of the tracks and don’t go to Sunday School.”

  Oblivious to his biting words, her head swivels as she confides, “Don’t tell anybody but we’re having a party for the whole team!”

  “You are—who is?”

  “Shhh . . . I said don’t tell!”

  “Don’t tell what?” he whispers back. Having attended but a handful of childhood birthday parties—plus some Halloween occasions that included exquisite pressings together of lips over spun bottles—parties are not something Dale, as a fourteen-year-old, knows much about. Still, he’s aware that they’ve become a ninth-grade topic and is as intrigued as anyone with the exciting boy-girl pairings they seem to imply. “Where’s this going to be?”

  “Don’t tell anyone and maybe you’ll find out!” Zona teases.

  Girls, Dale thinks. She didn’t even hear what he just said.

  Returning his attention to his true love at the head of the room, Dale sees that Miss Furbish is writing at her desk. On a shift of her head he believes her eyes, meaning to or not, catch his peeking back. Reservoirs of desire, private dreams, subconscious fantasies, worlds of passion flashing from behind irises and optic nerves. Love is the emotion racing through him, he knows that. Is it weird for a fourteen-year-old to know pure love for an adult woman? For Miss Furbish with her trim body, her breast expression and her dark eyes? Her shared tears and a pressing, with one hand, of his virginal adolescent shoulder?

  # # #

  THROUGHOUT THE DAY Dale keeps foreseeing sundown, when he will stop by homeroom and walk Miss Furbish from the building and maybe a mile along the dimming city streets. Walking between street lights just coming on. During their sharing of a sidewalk, she’ll be of a mind to lecture, he’s sure, to help him in his need to be helped, his being ‘deprived’ and ‘grasping after human contact.’ He can see that she is open to walking with a boy who has a crush on her and to whom she has spoken of love and like, infatuation and friendship . . . of a mind, as his teacher, to keep him from ‘crossing a line’ she isn’t averse to at least discuss, on a city sidewalk, as a means of teaching a lesson.

  Does Miss Furbish fear him? Might she fear, in herself, what she fears in him? Why dislike a student who adores her as she knows he does? Does she want someone who adores her gone from her life? Suppose he shows some muscle, lets her know in fact that he is bigger and out to kiss her like any other girl? Why is it wrong to feel as he does just because she’s older? Given that what he feels is true, isn’t it truth of the kind that she has said in class will stand on its own if observed objectively? Verifiable truth? Not subjective but objective? Actual truth?

  CHAPTER 23

  HAIR WET AFTER BEING TOWELED, DALE HURRIES ALONG THE half-dark hallway at five-forty carrying his gym bag, and enters the lighted room where she sits, glasses on, working at her desk. “Dale, oh of course,” she says, as if she has forgotten. “Listen, you go along and I’ll catch up with you near the bus stop. I have some things yet to do.”

  Dale gets it, thinks it isn’t just okay but a good sign: she doesn’t want a nosy custodian or assistant principal to see them walking from the building because she knows in her subconscious heart that dark desire is on her lovely mind. He’s younger, still he’s a grown-up boy, a ninth grader . . . isn’t he? Okay, maybe she does have some things yet to do. He can dream, can’t he?

  Twenty minutes later, as he lingers at a corner, there comes a silhouette through the shadowy air, briefcase in hand. “Dale?”

  “It is I,” he says.

  She laughs, and they walk along the sidewalk beside each other. “I’ve been looking forward to this . . . am so accustomed to driving I kept forgetting that we had agreed to meet.”

  “Let me carry your bag,” he says.

  “Thank you, I’ll carry my own bag . . . this isn’t a date,” she says.

  “It could be,” he hears himself reply, unsure if she is grinning with him or not.

  “You’d look funny carrying bags in both hands,” she says, letting him in on her amusement.

  “It’s nice of you . . . to let me make up for how I acted,” he says.

  “Like I said . . . I could have been more understanding. But let’s just leave all that in the past and work on the future.”

  “I only wanted you to like me,” he dares to tell her.

  “Dale, you’re a special person . . . I do like you—”

  “Okay, here it comes,” he says, hoping to make her laugh.

  “Here comes what?”

  “The lecture . . . from my teacher.”

  “Your teacher is what I am!” she tells him. “And you can bet your life that a lecture is coming. One to which I expect you to listen, and to take heed.”

  Deciding to stab again at winning her over by being funny, he says, “I was hoping we’d ta
lk more about friendship and infatuation. Lust and desire,” he hears himself add as if on an impulse from his hungry, daring heart.

  On a glance her way, he can’t tell in the dimming air if she is amused or not, until she says, “Don’t get fresh, or this walk is going to be very short-lived.”

  As they go on, she adds, “You’re a bright young boy, Dale . . . capable, gifted . . . but I’ll tell you something right now: You need to forgo once and for all any foolishness you have in your mind about your teacher. Please don’t try anymore emotional blackmail or manipulation with me. It isn’t working. It isn’t going to work.”

  Proceeding into a gathering silence, Dale hears himself utter what he knows to be true and possibly safe: “I like you—a lot. Maybe it’s what it would’ve been like to have a mother, you know, to talk about stuff. Only I like you in other ways, too,” he adds.

  She gives no reply, continues walking, which has Dale also walking in silence.

  # # #

  AFTER THEY’VE WALKED part of a block, she says, “What we’re going to focus on is my helping you. Maybe in the role of a mother, because that is something I meant to speak to you about. Maybe in that role, we can be friends. You can regard me like a mother, if you like . . . because a mother might have given you the kind of help I believe you need. But that’ll be the extent of our friendship, which you will need to understand. You’ve been trying to manipulate me . . . you just did it again by saying ‘liking you in other ways.’ That is something I am simply not going to tolerate. I hope you understand what I’m saying.”

  In the wake of her strong tone they walk part of another block without speaking. Seeing that his time with her is going to pass quickly, Dale thinks again to win her over with humor and says, “Does that mean we can’t hold hands?” She can’t help snickering, and as he adds, “Just kidding,” he’s thrilled to think he may have just scored from outside.

  Thinking again that she may be disposed to at least discussing the reality of love, he says, “When we walk like this . . . the street lights coming on . . . it’s like you’re Zona or somebody, and we’re ice-skating, fooling around on the way home, and I’m trying to impress you by being funny . . . on the way to stealing a kiss! The last thing I want is for us not to be friends.”

  After a moment, Miss Furbish says, “Zona is very pretty and you should concentrate on liking her . . . which I believe you do. But you’re straying toward the line again, as you very well know!”

  “Well, it’s because I don’t like her like I like you,” Dale says. “She’s like a doll in a store window or something. You’re a real person.”

  “Dale, you have to stop it! I mean that! You are going to ruin any friendship you might have with me if you keep saying things like that. I mean it!”

  “Sorry.”

  “So you say. I’m not sure you’re sorry at all.”

  “Truth is, I’d like to do a lot more than just press your shoulder,” Dale hears himself tell her from the heart.

  His words seem to stun the air while, as before, they proceed in silence. Expecting her to let him have it, maybe order him to go on his way at once, he adds, “I had to say that because it may sound crazy, but it’s true.”

  “Dale, there’s a reason I did not let you ‘press my shoulder’ that I’m not sure you understand.”

  Now—further from school, Dale knows, than she meant for them to walk—he feels confused. Is she angry because he wanted to press her shoulder, or that he failed in the end to do so? They’re approaching her house, in any case, and though she pauses to cut him loose—is she thinking she has to get away?—he pauses with her at the head of her driveway. “When I say I think of you, it’s only because it’s true,” he tells the silhouette before him. “It doesn’t mean I don’t want to be friends, or wouldn’t like your help or anything like that. Aren’t we just people?”

  From before him the silhouette says in a whisper, “Dale, listen to me. You cannot keep using the truth in an attempt to manipulate me! What you are doing is making it just about impossible for us to be friends. I don’t want to give up on you. But there are codes of behavior that have to be obeyed! If you value my friendship at all you have to forgo this improper sweet talk and be in control of yourself! I mean it! You are making me angry.”

  “No more sweet talk,” Dale promises while feeling—he can’t help it—an urge to joke or tease with something that might make her laugh.

  On heading up the driveway, she says, “I’m going to look into getting you some help. I have to tell you, though, that I don’t think I can have you bothering me anymore like this. I’m sorry for that. I know the trauma you experienced is right under the surface . . . but I also know that sympathy of the kind you need does not fall within my role as your teacher. What I will do, is call the district nurse about getting someone to speak to you.”

  The silhouette departs. As Dale stands in dimness, he hears her climb her steps and unlock her door at the rear of the house. A moment later, uncertain what to do, he senses having been uncool, and seeing that he cannot follow into her apartment—as he longs to do—decides to go on his way, though not until another moment passes and he relinquishes his fantasy of her stepping back along the driveway to invite him in.

  Knowing he’ll have a difficult time being at home alone, he proceeds into Lower Downtown with its neon lights, its passing cars and buses, where he can escape a bit and nourish his heart by way of something on a jukebox. Maybe he’ll read his notebook and do some homework at a Coney Island counter. Did he ruin everything with her . . . she who had wept with him when he lost it like an idiot? What he wants above all is to be with her as in his wildest dreams. But isn’t that but another objective truth that she doesn’t want to hear? Why was she so threatened by him wanting to press her shoulder? Did he miss his chance by not just doing it . . . as he would have with Zona Kaplan?

  CHAPTER 24

  AT HIS DESK IN HER ROOM IN THE MORNING DALE KEEPS HIS eyes on his notebook. If Miss Furbish allows her eyes to glance his way he doesn’t let himself notice. Nor does he care if she does, he assures himself, while knowing within that he cares about little else. Is he lovesick and in need of motherly help? Is this what it is to be deprived?

  All Dale knows with certainty is that the emotions traveling his veins have him gripped with longing to be with her and that he has little idea of how to free himself. Nor any desire to do so, as his emotions ache with love he wishes only to savor.

  In being uncool, did he present himself as a fool . . . of all things? The answer’s in the asking, isn’t it? For playing it cool is the only tool when you’re out to rule, as he well knows. Still, how do you work into work and sweat into sweat and remain cool when it comes to a beautiful female and a game of the heart that is more powerful than a game on the court?

  # # #

  A FRIDAY AT SCHOOL means a weekend offering freedom. Overhearing a remark about a party on Saturday night—likewise the opening day of City League—Dale concludes that he will not be invited no matter Zona Kaplan, the hostess, sitting inches away in homeroom. Zona, his friend, classmate, spin-the-bottle inamorata of earlier grades and by way of flirtation, his tacit girlfriend . . . until he was all blackballed as a hillbilly at Walt Whitman and precious Zona went over to the Flintstone Truckers and their silky white uniforms.

  Undressing for gym in the locker room, Dale keeps putting together (without wanting to) what is happening in the world in which he was previously a member in good standing. While his season with the Little Ms will likewise open tomorrow—a bus ride and a transfer away on the other side of the river—it will be followed neither by “tons of fried chicken” nor a party in Zona’s rec room on Welch Boulevard given to “tons of making out.”

  Heart on hold and eyes evermore on the floor, Dale survives the day while Miss Furbish retains her grip within his chest. With no school practice on Friday, he tells himself to dig into hoop at the park. Dig deeper and try harder. Practice into practice. Recover the rout
ine that has been thrown for a loop by a betrayal of friends and a pressing of his shoulder by his favorite teacher. Do as you have for years, he tells himself. Show the speed and do the deed! When it’s time to play . . . take the ball and lead the way! Rough and tough, and hard to bluff. Can’t get enough of that wonderful stuff.

  Alas, the wonderful stuff to which Lucky Bartell is referring is not only winning on the floor but scoring with girls! The fire Dale feels for Miss Furbish! Love and romance. The pressing of his shoulder.

  CHAPTER 25

  TO DALE’S SHOCKED SURPRISE, THE LITTLE MS SMOKE IN the locker room! Outrageous defiance is their thing and, he has to admit—unable not to snicker—it gives them glue and ferocity as teammates. Exuding physical toughness in the presence of clean-cut opponents and opposing parents, their strategy is to leave opponents aghast in the face of brash muscle and direct confrontation. Their response to any objection, as Dale begins to see, is “Screw you . . . we’ll kick your ass on the court and if that won’t do the job, we’ll do it in the parking lot. Orange and black, take no flak! Always show up, always fight back! The Little Ms.”

  Opposing parents and spectators shake their heads; supporters grin, hoot, applaud. “Hillbillies!” a fan calls from the stands.

  “Ask your sister who she loves!” Lucky Bartell shouts back with a grin.

  Most of the Little Ms are sharp dressers, the sharpest in town—led by Lucky—wearing elaborate DAs with spit curls drooped on their foreheads. The outfits in which they enter locker rooms wows even Dale: broad-shouldered, double-breasted dark blue overcoats suggesting mobster muscle no matter being draped on fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds, good athletes and the most mature boys in the city. The Little Ms of Little Missouri, boys, Dale can see, who know who they are.