“Thanks,” she grunts. “Here’s your eggs.”
He breaks the yolks with the tip of his fork and rubs a piece of toast through them; it’s the way he has eaten eggs all his life. If by accident he were served eggs well-done, he’d try to break the yolks, and failing, he’d react with confusion. They wouldn’t be actual eggs to him. They’d be vegetables or cheese or fish. Eggs run and make a lovely mess that you can clean up with a piece of buttered toast.
“I can’t believe Yaz,” he says, still poring over the paper. “He’s almost ten years older than me, but he’s playing like a kid. If I tried to do what I did as a kid, I’d break my ass.” When Bob was a kid, large and fast and tireless, he was a graceful bear sweeping the puck away from a three-on-one rush to his goal, skating the length of the rink alone, long, graceful, powerful strides, with the puck swirling ahead of him across the blue line, where he ducks to one side and fakes the defenseman, cuts to the other, jerking the puck along as if it were attached to his stick by a piece of string, charging the net, driving the puck with the force of his rush a half foot above the ice over the goalie’s desperate slash, and as he glides past the goal, he watches the puck smack against the net, watches it drop softly to the ice, watches the goalie angrily whack his stick against the ice, and Bob smiles, skates slowly, smoothly, back to his end of the ice, barely out of breath.
“Y’know,” he says to Elaine, “I’m really sorry we didn’t get down here for spring training. I’d have loved to watch the Sox work out, over there at Chain-O’-Lakes Park, over there in Winter Haven. It’s only a couple miles. Now,” he says, lowering his voice, “now they’ve all gone north, it’s all up north. I used to go to Fenway with my dad once in a while when I was a kid. I haven’t been to Fenway in years….”
“We were here in time. You could’ve watched them play.”
“Well, yeah, I know. But we were still getting settled and all.” He looks up from the newspaper and peers out the window above the sink at the flat roof of the trailer next to theirs and the tops of the palm trees and the bright blue sky beyond, and he says, “It’s hard, I sort of didn’t believe they were here. In Florida, I mean. I’ve known it all my life, the Red Sox do spring training in Winter Haven, Florida, and here I am living ten miles away, only I can’t picture it, so I just sit around, like I always did, waiting for them to come home to Fenway and begin the season. Only, when they do begin the season, here I am in Florida. It’s strange. I probably would’ve got Yaz’s autograph. It’s real easy in spring training to get to talk to the players and all. They walk right over to the fence and talk to you.”
“I know,” she says.
Ruthie comes up next to him and says, “Bye, Daddy,” and purses her lips for a kiss.
Instead of kissing her, he stands and says, “Wait a minute. I’ll walk out to the bus stop with you.”
Surprised and pleased, she claps her hands together, then flips one hand for him to hold. Together, they step out the door into the bright sunlight, and holding hands, cross the yard and driveway to the paved lane, where, looking back at his station wagon, he notices once again his New Hampshire number plates and says aloud to himself, “Jesus, I’ve got to get Florida plates before they pick me up for it.”
The car looks peculiar to him. He’s owned it for almost three years and has only got five more payments to mail north to the Catamount Trust, at which point, as he’s said to Elaine many times, he knows the transmission will go. But this morning, as he walks past the car with his daughter and moves down the lane to the highway, he turns and studies the car and wonders why it looks so strange to him, as if it has been cut out of a black-and-white snapshot and pasted onto a color picture of pink hibiscus and bougainvillea, green patches of grass, pale blue mobile home, dark green star-shaped thatch palm behind the trailer, citrus groves beyond the crisp, cloudless blue sky above. He’s walking backwards, barefoot, sucking on his upper lip and no longer holding his daughter’s hand.
“What’re you looking at?” she asks, peering over her shoulder.
“Oh, nothing. The car. The house.”
“We should get a new car.”
“You think so, eh?”
“Yeah. A red one. To go with the new house.” Ruthie skips ahead of him, ponytail flying, and he turns from the car and walks quickly to catch up.
“Yeah!” he calls after her. “A new car to go with a new house to go with a new job! A whole new life!”
She slows and waits for him, and when he catches up, he takes her hand again, and they walk on in silence to where the school bus stops at the side of the highway.
By the time he returns to the kitchen, he’s sweating, and his tee shirt has large wet circles under the arms. The kitchen is empty; he assumes Elaine has taken Emma to the bathroom to wash her face, hands and arms before putting her outside to play. He checks his watch, eight twenty-three, and dropping his weight onto his chair, leans over to finish reading the paper.
“Aw, Jesus,” he says, looking with disgust at the purple smears and globs of jelly on the paper. “Jesus H. Christ,” he murmurs. He stands quickly and grabs the newspaper at the sides, as if to lift it, but then, looking down on it from above, he notices for the first time a photograph in the center of the page opposite the box scores. It’s a wirephoto of a base runner sliding headfirst, sliding into second, Bob thinks, or possibly third, though he knows right off that it’s Carl Yastrzemski, number eight, doing the sliding. It’s Yaz at forty, stretching a long single into a double by running ninety feet full speed and hurling his body against the ground, diving and stretching his arms for the base as he twists his body hard to the right to avoid the tag, spikes, shinbones and knees of the second baseman.
For several seconds Bob studies the picture, then, in a violent move, his face stiffens and he crumples the entire newspaper into a large, loose bundle, pushes, crushes and crumples it again and again, until he’s made a dense, crinkly ball of it. He steps around the table and opens the cupboard under the sink, tosses the ball into the plastic trash bucket and closes the cupboard door.
Facing away from the kitchen, through the living room to the hall beyond, he hears Emma’s angry cry, almost a howl, as her mother rubs the child’s cheeks and chin, arms, hands and belly, with a rough, wet washcloth, and he hears Elaine order the child to be still, hold still, it’ll be over in a minute if you’ll only hold still and stop squirming.
Bob knows he loves the woman properly. And he loves the children properly too, though he’s never had to ask himself that one, thank God. Those are facts, though, and a man has to give himself over to the facts of the life he finds himself living, no matter how he’s living it.
He walks quietly back through the trailer to the bedroom he shares with his wife, to get ready for work.
5
Nevertheless. Bob is obsessed with Marguerite Dill, who is not at all as he imagines and supposes her to be. It would be difficult, if not impossible, to say here who or what she is, exactly, and probably beside the point as well, except to observe that Bob knows very little of what it is to be a woman, nothing at all of what it is to be black. He’s honest and intelligent enough to admit this and behave accordingly, but like most white men, he’s not imaginative enough to believe that being a woman is extremely different from being a man and being black extremely different from being white. If pushed, and he has been pushed now and then, at least by Elaine, he’d go only so far as to concede that the differences are probably no greater than those between child and adult, and because he bears within him the child he once was, and the child he once was carried within him the seed of the man he would someday become, then understanding between the two is an easily arranged affair of one’s attention. To understand your children, you attend to the child in you; and all your children have to do, if they wish to understand you, is project themselves twenty or thirty years into the future. Therefore, to imagine Elaine and Doris and now Marguerite, the three women who in recent years have mattered most to him, all Bob has had to do is pay attention to the woman in himself. It’s harder in the case of Marguerite, but all the more interesting to him for that, because with her he has to pay attention to the black man in himself as well.