My parents’ marriage has always baffled me. Now more than ever I want to comprehend it because next week the woman I hope to marry will move her things into the small house I’m renting. She’ll bring her daughter with her — if she can — an eight-year-old named Cassie.
“Mommy!” Cassie calls to Sharon now. “Watch me do a cartwheel!”
Sharon’s husband chuckles, sitting next to her, next to me, on the cool grass. He has no clue what will happen on Monday (“He hasn’t had a clue about me in years,” Sharon insists). He doesn’t see me yet as the man who wrecked his life by falling in love with his wife. Tonight, I’m just a good friend, sitting with his family on this dusty old baseball diamond, in the heat of south Texas, watching the Fourth of July fireworks.
Dozens of other families crowd around us, on blankets, in lawn chairs, eating potato chips, swigging Cokes, keeping an eye on the sky. Several yards away, behind a chain-link fence, golfers knock balls into the dark on a dimly lit driving range.
Cassie and about half a dozen other girls cartwheel near the pitcher’s mound. Sharon claps. So does her husband, Clay. So do I.
I’m aware that I’m about to do something my father would never have dreamed of. I’m about to violate the sanctity of marriage, what he called the “great romance.” More to the point, perhaps, I’m about to take decisive action. That, more than anything, is what he never dreamed of. At least until the end. If even then.
On the other hand, my mother might appreciate what I’m going to do, and why. I haven’t spoken to her in nearly five years, so I can’t say for sure. I have only the past, my parents’ puzzling dance, as an answer to my questions.
Decisive action Mom understood — though she considered me, like Dad, woefully incapable of it (the way Sharon apparently sees Clay).
The sanctity of her marriage to my father Mom understood as a useful fiction, I think, until something better came along.
“Ta-da!” Cassie shouts, coming out of a cartwheel. She raises her arms, then bows.
My mother’s family was rich, descendants of the first Irish blacksmiths in Oklahoma City. Her maiden name was Kelly, also Grandfather Darnell’s Christian name. When I arrived on the scene, I was christened Kelly, in his honor.
In the mid-fifties, around the time I was born, my mother’s father, already flush with real estate and oil, established a chain of department stores called Duffy’s, in Oklahoma City. Duffy’s sold kaleidoscopes, hula hoops, 3-D glasses, baseball cards, cheap crystal goblets, Christmas lights filled with bubbling water. I loved these stores. The salesclerks were friendly, easygoing; they’d let you dawdle in the big, wide aisles as long as you wanted, a strategy that usually seduced customers into buying at least one useless item before they left.
My father’s father ran up enormous bills with the clerks. Rings and bracelets for his wife. Lawn furniture, an outdoor grill. Seat cushions for the pews in his church. It seemed to me, when I was old enough to understand the concept, that he had a limitless charge account with Duffy’s.
In time, Dad referred to the stores, and to all of my mother’s relatives, as “Duffers”—a disparaging term he’d picked up from his golfing buddies, I learned in later years. It meant someone who couldn’t hit the ball well. At some point, the word became, for Dad, an all-purpose insult. “That old duffer shouldn’t be allowed on the road!” he’d say of a man who cut him off in traffic. Listening to the State of the Union speech on television, he’d grouse about the President, “This duffer’s bound to raise our taxes.”
In his view (for reasons cloudy to me at first), the biggest duffers on the planet were my mother’s folks and her sisters.
“You’re just jealous of their assets,” she’d tell him. She hated it when he twisted the sounds of words.
“Assets? You mean the stuff they sell? Half-assed is more like it.” Always, he offered his comments good-naturedly, with a disarming, just-a-joke offhandedness. But he’d rarely go shopping in the stores. Mom and I went alone, often, to one Duffy’s or another, buying crayons, Elmer’s glue, or panty hose and eyeliner.
Usually I’d find something — a flashlight, a package of nails, a box of Titleist golf balls — to take back to Dad. If he’d been particularly sardonic that day, kidding Mom about her family, she wouldn’t let me get him anything, and I’d cry.
I remember standing with her one cold, misty evening in front of the flagship store, in downtown Oklahoma City. “Confidence,” she told me. I was eight or nine years old. “When you’re grown, you want to be successful like your grandfathers, don’t you?”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said, noting the way she’d skipped over Dad, a silence she fully intended me to grasp.
“All right, then. Confidence — and ease.” She squeezed my shoulders and made me stand up straight. “Ease with people, with business, yourself. Look over there. See our Duffy’s sign?”
She pointed out the “warmth” of its curly red letters, the U’s “friendly” scoop, the “comfortable” Fs. My father could scoff all he wanted, but she made it clear that the name itself — down-to-earth, intimate, firm — was a big reason for the stores’ success. “My father was a genius to think of it. He knew the sound of it was right. Can you hear it?”
“Yes, ma’am.” I had no idea what she was talking about.
“Straightforwardness, without apology. People want that. They respond to openness. See what I mean?”
“I guess so,” I said. Why did she sound so angry?
“Good.” She licked her thumb and smoothed my curly hair. “Don’t let your father kid you. There’s a lot to be learned from that sign.”
“You mean I should imitate it?”
“Exactly.”
I remember thinking, as the tall letters glimmered in the gold and purple dusk, she seemed nervous, unsure of me, the way she responded to my father’s silly puns. She sounded like my grandfather, scolding his flock.
Cassie walks on her hands, along the third-base foul line. “Kelly, catch me if I fall!”
“You got it, kid.” I laugh and step behind her, holding my arms like a loving embrace, ready to encircle her legs if she starts to topple. Watching us, Clay smiles and takes his wife’s hand. Sharon flinches, ever so slightly, then rubs his arm stiffly. My good friends.
Above us all, green and white fireworks unspool like spider webs. Golf clubs thwack in the grass. Tonight, on its “birthday,” as Cassie puts it, America is prosperous, at peace.
Now she wobbles, says, “Oh!” then pitches forward. I snap shut my arms, but somehow I miss her. I stand there, in the outfield, hugging warm air while she wails at my feet, staring in disbelief at the grass burns on her knees.
Her father comes running, scoops her up with ease. Instantly, she’s giggling.
If I can’t take care of a little girl.
Still gripping his daughter, Clay pats me, reassuringly, on the back. We turn and smile at Sharon.
Shortly after finishing college with a degree in petroleum geology, Dad married my mother, landed a job with an oil company in Dallas, and drove her, with two suitcases and a set of bone china, across the Red River in an old rented Ford.
“All right, good riddance,” Grandfather Darnell told him bitterly the day he left. “Anybody who’d choose to live in Texas hasn’t got the sense God gave a squirrel.”