“That’s something I’ve been thinking about, actually.”
Ruth sits up, pulling the sheet to her chin. She looks at him and waits. She no longer has access to her own expectations.
“I think I’m happy being an uncle? I think maybe it’s enough to be close to my sister’s kids, available if they need me. And I’ve been nervous to tell you this, because I don’t want you to think that our age difference is, like, convenient for me. It’s not that I’m trying to avoid a conflict with someone else down the line. Wanting to marry you and not wanting kids are two separate decisions; I’ve made them independently, I swear. But I’m hoping they both work for you. Is that . . . is that okay?”
Ruth’s heart is racing, the phantom panic that follows the mistake you almost make but don’t. “In the restaurant the other night . . .”
“I know. I got caught up in the moment. But you’re one-and-done, right? You’ve always said that.”
She could tell him. They could walk to a twenty-four-hour drugstore together and buy a pregnancy test. The fancy kind, sensitive to even the slightest presence of HCG hormone, with the pink plastic cap to place demurely over the part of the stick you peed on. It’s 2:00 a.m., but they’re awake, the night isn’t over. It’s unfair to withhold a crucial piece of information from the man who wants to marry her—however, in this moment, Ruth would like to hide the information from herself. Who’s to say she doesn’t have the flu?
Ruth’s phone dings on the nightstand. With palpable relief, Joel grabs it. Phillip has sent Ruth a video of her walkout interview with Emory Turner. Her boss has written Be more charming, Ruth. I dare you.
“We don’t have to watch this,” Ruth says.
Joel reaches over and taps play. Together they watch Ruth toweling off a soaked Emory Turner. The picture shrinks to accommodate a screenshot of Emory’s tweet from the morning of Game One. Beneath it, Ruth’s reply materializes.
Not once has Joel joined the online chorus accusing Ruth of wielding her sexuality on the job. One tweet in particular is lodged in her memory: Does Ruth Devon think good journalism is slobbering all over every man in the NBA? Because it’s embarrassing to watch. Ruth recognized the name: a woman who used to play for Georgetown back when Ruth was calling games on the radio. The recognition stung. Though Joel has never resented the men in Ruth’s professional sphere, she knows he envies basketball itself, the game’s hold on her. And in this particular clip, isn’t it clear? Ruth is so far from letting it go.
“How do you do that?” Joel asks.
“Do what?”
“Ask people the questions they’re most excited to answer.”
The compliment is undeserved. On a normal night Ruth pays razor-sharp attention to the game, noting the details that might stand out most to a coach or a player: the defensive scheme altered midgame, the star’s excellent shot selection—only threes and dunks—in the fourth quarter. Tonight, sprinting around the arena, she missed a substantial amount of the action.
Ruth shrugs and rolls out of bed. She pulls Joel toward the shower. He likes the water scalding. The steam releases every odor clinging to Ruth’s body: sweat and sex and stale perfume. Ruth remembers her best friend from high school, a varsity swimmer, holding her arm above a pot of boiling pasta water and presenting her wrist for Ruth to sniff. Katie’s flesh smelled like chlorine year-round, no matter how often she bathed. Her long blond hair was tinted green. Ruth was jealous; she wanted the game of basketball to seep into her pores, alter her chemistry.
Standing naked in the bright lights of the bathroom, Ruth worries Joel will scrutinize her breasts or her abdomen and know, somehow. Know, at least, that she’s physically compromised. But Joel is oblivious, happily brushing his teeth and spitting toothpaste directly down the shower drain, a time-saving ritual.
“I’ve never seen anyone else do that,” she tells him.
“My father did it,” Joel says, talking around the toothbrush in his mouth. “And his father before him.”
“What a legacy,” Ruth says, hair plastered to her neck, skin pink.
“Your parents didn’t pass down family hygiene secrets?”
“I guess my mom taught me how to shave.”
“Really? I didn’t think girls needed lessons. Seems pretty straightforward.”
“I was eleven. I wore my swimsuit in the bath so she wouldn’t see me naked. Cheryl gave me an orange plastic razor and taught me to shave from ankle to knee, no higher. And when the deed was done she said, ‘Now that you’ve shaved once, you have to shave forever, because when the hair grows back it’s not the same. It comes in dark and thick and makes you look like a werewolf.’ ”
Joel chucks his toothbrush over the shower curtain rod. It lands in the bowl of the sink.
“Swish,” she says.
“Hm?”
She takes a breath and says, “Not wanting children is big. Bigger than getting married. At a certain point, it’s irreversible.”
With suds in his stubble, Joel nods. “I know. But I swear you don’t have to worry about me changing my mind.”
She engages him in the unwavering eye-contact she normally reserves for players she’s interviewing. “You say these are separate decisions: marrying me. Not having kids. Are you sure about that? If my sights were set on a late-in-life pregnancy, if I wanted to try IVF or adoption, would you be open to it?”
Joel shakes his head, confident he’s landed on the correct answer to her trick question. “No. That’s not what I want. I’m not going to put you through all that.”
She doesn’t need a correct answer; she needs an honest answer. “No kids,” she presses. “Not now, not ever?”
“Look, I couldn’t stand being a half-assed father. And I’m not sure I have what it takes to be a good father, the way my sister’s a good mom. I know how hard she works. She hasn’t slept in years. Maybe it’s selfish, but I like my life the way it is.”
Ruth’s laughter is feeble, shot through with doom, which she hopes Joel misreads as relief. He seems to, squeezing her shoulders and stooping to catch her eye.
“What else are you worried about? That you won’t have time to plan a wedding?”
“No!” Ruth is still laughing. “I wouldn’t want a wedding.”
“No?”
“I don’t need a bunch of photos preserving me at peak hotness. I peaked a long time ago, anyway.”
He looks her up and down. Groans. “False.”
“And I don’t need a big crowd paying attention to me—I get that nightly.”
“Fine,” Joel says. “San Francisco City Hall. My family and Ariana. Lester, if you want. And you’re still wearing a dress, and I’m still hiring a photographer.” He shakes shampoo from the diminutive bottle into the palm of his hand, massages it into Ruth’s scalp. That she still hasn’t said yes or no does not appear to be weighing on him. “Is that true about shaving your legs? The hair grows back thicker?”
“I have no idea. I’ve shaved every day since.”
He looks skeptical, working the shampoo into the ends of her hair. “Seems excessive.”
“Nah,” Ruth says. “Makes me fast.”
When Ruth was young and first married to Lester, she could not fathom the circumstances that might lead to their divorce. It would have to be something dizzying in its corruption: a dead child, an affair, a bout of psychosis. In the end, the problem was clear-cut and banal: She and Lester became very mad at each other. The only way to stop being mad was to break up.
The last years of Ruth’s twenties were the first of Lester’s forties. Mostly they worked—Ruth as an analyst for college tournaments and a small package of WNBA games; Lester as the assistant coach of the Washington Wizards, a job he had landed after four years at American University. Mostly they were apart. When they were together—after Ariana was in bed, and after the nightly chores of dish-doing and tra
sh-bagging and bill-paying and laundry-folding had been silently divided between them—they fought.
The fights were never about their lives as such. Each spouse was still pretending to admire and support the commitments the other had made; each was, ostensibly, the other’s biggest fan. Rather they fought about the bathroom floor, which was carpeted in human hairs and pairs of underwear and towels that, having long since absorbed the puddle to which they were assigned, lay in a twisted heap at the base of the toilet. Lester wanted to hire a cleaning lady. Ruth was constitutionally incapable of hiring a cleaning lady; these were her floors, her hairs, her puddles. She would clean them up herself someday.
They fought about what they owed Ruth’s mother, who drove up from Hampton most weekends to babysit. Ruth wanted to send Cheryl on a Caribbean cruise for the holidays and promise not to contact her until the new year. Lester thought the honest thing would be to write her a check each month. “We can’t just make everyone our employee,” Ruth told him.
“We can, and should, if we’re accepting their labor,” Lester said.
A few weeks before Ruth turned twenty-nine, they fought about the precise number of nights the family could tolerate her absence. Ruth’s childhood friend Katie was getting married the day after the NCAA Championship. Ruth was in the wedding. Her plan was to fly straight from the final game in Minneapolis to Richmond, then drive to Virginia Beach in the middle of the night. As the assistant coach of a playoffs-bound NBA team, Lester might as well have been deployed overseas for all he saw his wife and daughter. Ruth was not counting on him to manage the roster of babysitters and after-school programs, or even to host his own mother, since Ruth’s would be at the wedding. She would make the arrangements herself. All she needed was his blessing, which he withheld.
“It’s too long to be away,” Lester said, two weeks before the championship. “You’ve spent most of the year on the road already. Pick one—the tournament or the wedding. Your call.”
This conversation took place over their Nokia cell phones as Lester drove to the Wizards’ practice facility and Ruth sat in traffic on I-95. Ruth was tearful in a way that undermined her credibility, the knowledge of which made her more tearful. “Les, I am calling the game on the country’s highest rated network. And I am Katie’s motherfucking maid of honor. I can’t pick one.”
She wanted him to laugh. He did not laugh. He dropped the subject, hung up the phone. In the days before her flight to Minneapolis, when she asked if he was still mad at her, Lester would fake-smile and say “Nope,” meaning yup. Meaning indefinitely. Ruth returned from Katie’s wedding with a hangover and a spring sunburn streaking her cheeks, and Lester declined to kiss her goodbye before flying to Boston. The Wizards lost to the Celtics in Round One. In four humiliating games, their point guard frequently, demonstratively falling on his ass, gesturing for a foul call that wasn’t coming. Ruth’s insistence on attending Katie’s wedding had no bearing on the Wizards’ crumbling defense, but in the unspoken narrative of the Devons’ marriage, Ruth’s two nights in Virginia Beach had cost Lester something he could not get back.
After their now nightly fights, Ruth would retreat to the master bedroom to read articles or watch a game by herself. Still reeling from the argument, she would have trouble concentrating, distracted by the comebacks she did not deploy, moments of rage imperfectly articulated. And then she would think: What if I didn’t care? What if she dismissed Lester as she would a rude motorist, or even a colleague with whom she never saw eye-to-eye? Caring what Lester thought of her—whether his heart alighted or hardened when she walked into a room—was optional. It occurred to Ruth after they separated that people in healthy marriages do not take comfort in emotionally divorcing their husbands. What if this man meant nothing to me? ought not to have been such an inspiring thought experiment.
During the off-season the year she turned thirty, the network offered her a permanent spot on the sideline of NBA games. Accepting the offer felt almost counterproductive—she was an announcer, not a reporter—but it was her invitation to the league. As colleagues warned her, Ruth was unlikely to move straight from the college booth to the NBA booth. The standards were higher, and if she wanted to call NBA games she would have to pay her dues. Fans needed to see her face and connect it to her voice—which should probably be higher? Or else deeper. Realistically, it might take years for a blond and bespectacled girl from Virginia to earn their trust.
The night of the offer, Ruth came home with a plan. After Ariana was in bed—thankfully, the girl still slept with a white noise machine whirring like a 747—she would make Lester a drink and lay out the facts. She would be working fifteen NBA games per year. She would not stop announcing WNBA games or college games, unwilling to lose her chops as an analyst. She would hire a maid to come once a week. She would also talk to her mother about establishing a more formal weekend arrangement, and she would find a full-time nanny to work Monday through Friday. All of this—the hiring, the employing—anguished her. Excepting Ruth’s own mother—and excepting temporary guests, privy to pre-gleamed countertops and performed harmony—Ruth did not want anyone in her house who did not live there. She hated to think of an outsider stripping the oily sheets from the water-marked mattresses or pulling a comb through Ariana’s damp hair. If freeing herself from her family’s needs meant assigning those needs to other women—most likely, other mothers, for whose finite maternal resources Ruth would pay—she would take the grimy bathroom. The shavings coating the mirror, the toothbrushes side-lying on the wet edge of the sink. She would rather lean on friends, relatives. Lester, she knew, would disagree.
Ruth stepped inside the house and smelled garlic browning in olive oil. She rounded the corner into the kitchen. Strewn across the countertop were the ingredients for pasta all’Amatriciana; hunched over the stove was Lester. Their daughter, in a periwinkle Power Puff Girls hoodie, sat at the island with a math workbook. Happiness overwhelmed Ruth. An announcement climbed her throat, propelled by incautious joy. For a moment she didn’t know what it would be. Was she taking a new job or was she calling it quits? Thirty years old. She could have three more babies if she wanted them. They would clamber up the sides of her hospital bed to meet their newest sibling. Ruth’s body would dimple and droop, conceal her strength.
“I’m going to be a sideline reporter! I have to learn how to wear lipstick!”
Shit. She sounded like a child.
Lester turned from the stove, his features already compressed with dread. Ruth’s heart broke along its fault lines.
“Congratulations.”
Ruth stared at him. Had someone died?
Lester said, “They made me head coach.”
Turning the memory over in her mind—as she still does, sometimes, when Lester’s hand lands on her shoulder, or when a particularly radical comment of his, midbroadcast, takes her breath away—she has trouble understanding what the problem was, exactly. Certainly not money. Their new roles would catapult them into a kind of wealth that, growing up, had struck Ruth as mythical. They could pay maids and babysitters and the mortgage and the car insurance and still have money left over for lavish vacations. For Ariana to attend whatever college she wanted. Maybe they would see less of one another than other families—but couldn’t love compensate for hours? Ariana was smart and funny, stubborn and seven—and in another few years, when Ruth had sufficiently dug her heels into the industry, they could have more babies. One more at least. How far Ruth had come from the moment her left knee and body flew in opposite directions and she, grief-walloped, believed the rest of her life would be defined by the absence of basketball.
In the kitchen, while the garlic burned and Ariana white-knuckled the edges of a barstool, they finally fought about their lives as such. The problem was not money or even time, but rather Ruth. She was supposed to be there when Ariana got home from school, snacks arranged on a cutting board, pen poised to sign permission slips. And al
so when the washing machine flooded, before the suds ruined everyone’s shoes. And definitely when Lester called the house in the middle of the day, unable to remember his own social security number.
Ruth could not argue because she did not disagree. She had wanted to be a housewife. And not in the idle way of girls dreaming up sweet-smelling infants, husbands with bouquets of roses ever-clenched in their fists, but deliberately, with her eyes wide open. Ruth knew she was cut out for the work. The twenty-four-hour shifts. The physical feat of changing a riotous toddler’s diaper, or of vacuuming crumbs from the dark crevices of the couch while being straddled like a horse. Popsicles melting into the carpet, handprints on the walls. The boneless tantrums. The fevered nights. Ruth had the stamina and the endurance. She wanted all of it.
This other line of work had snuck up on her. Calling basketball games was exhilarating, the way playing basketball had been exhilarating. And while motherhood often demanded the suspension of intellect—a roaring ocean of patience to wash away Ruth’s interiority—sports reporting lit up her brain like nothing else. And at the end of the day, Ruth’s status as Ariana’s mother would go uncontested. As Mom she was irreplaceable, no matter how vibrant the babysitters or indulgent the grandmas. Ruth knew this because she had been, still was, someone’s daughter.
If she walked away from the league, the loss would be permanent. Everyone on the sideline is replaceable—especially the girl.
From his wallet Lester withdrew his frequent-flier card, which, galvanized, indicated he had achieved Premium Platinum Status. “Do you know what this means?” Lester’s flannel shirt was untucked, his cap on backward, his head already bald. His white cheeks were flushing a bright, panicky red.
Her husband’s hysteria took her by surprise, or she would have laughed. “It means you fly a lot,” Ruth said.
“It means I fly twenty thousand miles per year. Actually, I do it twice. Per year.” Between his fingers the card shook.
The Second Season Page 10