Home Games

by Benjamin Markovits

  Twelve

  FOR A FEW DAYS AFTERWARD, kids are talking about Pete and what happened at LBJ. There’s a rumor going around that he might be suspended from the basketball team. It’s a big deal—it’s one of those things that kids get angry about, where they get mad at the principal. Some people want to start a petition. I hear them discussing it as I wait in the lunch line for my carton of milk. Mabley doesn’t say anything to me—we haven’t really hung out since the tournament. I don’t know if she blames me, if she thinks I told on them.

  Finally, on Friday morning, I manage to sit next to her on the bus. She makes me nervous now, but I say, “I didn’t tell on you. I don’t know what you guys did or who . . . found out or whatever, but it wasn’t me.”

  “Tell on me about what?”

  “At LBJ. When you guys . . .”

  “That was my fault. I wanted to do something stupid, to see what it’s like. Now I know. It’s no big deal. If you do this kind of thing,” she says, “you have to face the consequences.”

  “What about Pete?”

  “What about Pete?” she asks.

  “Nothing, I don’t know.”

  When Mabley doesn’t want to talk about something, there’s nothing you can do—she just looks at you like everything’s great.

  “How’s Laura?” she asks, changing the subject.

  We’re pulling into the parking lot. But parents are dropping off kids in cars—there’s always a traffic jam coming into school. Kids on the bus are getting their backpacks ready, but we have to wait, even though the stop is just a few yards away. When the driver turns off the engine, the whole bus shakes and sighs.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Laura Kirkup. I thought she was your math buddy. I thought you liked her.”

  “Like her?” I’m not sure what Mabley is talking about. “She kind of scares me. You never know what she’s thinking.”

  “Who knows what anybody’s thinking,” Mabley says.

  The doors are open now; everybody’s streaming off, heading for their lockers before school—but I’ve got all my books with me and head straight to homeroom.

  Laura waits for me after math class—she eats lunch with her own friends, but we walk to the cafeteria together. “I hope they do suspend Pete from the basketball team.” She’s normally a quiet kid; she’s normally a bit like me. It’s funny to hear her talk like that, like she has all these strong feelings all the time.

  “I don’t even know what they did,” I tell her.

  “They just had lunch at KFC. But to get there, you have to cross over the highway. We weren’t even supposed to leave the campus. They could have gotten run over. Real stupid,” she says.

  But saying it like that makes me want to stand up for them. “They just wanted to get away from that gym. Don’t you think there was something . . . all of us sitting there, taking tests . . .”

  “Nobody made them sign up,” Laura says. “I’m sorry, I don’t feel bad for Pete. Those kids act like nobody else exists.” She means Mabley, too. “We could have gone to sectionals,” she says.

  But nothing happens to Pete in the end. That night, the Hornets win another basketball game—Pete scores twenty-one points. It’s almost Thanksgiving, and that’s kind of the general spirit, forgive and forget. Pretty soon, nobody cares about the Number Sense competition. We have a short week, and then four days off. Ms. Kaminski brings a pumpkin pie to class on Wednesday. “My daughter made this,” she says proudly, so I eat my piece, even though the crust tastes kind of raw.

  It doesn’t matter; we’re all going home. I hear kids making plans for the long weekend. It feels weird—it’s still sunny out, they talk about going swimming. In New York, you wonder when it’s going to snow, you can see your breath outside, the stores have lights in the windows, they’re getting ready for Christmas; but in Austin you only see stores when you drive somewhere. And I don’t have anybody to make plans with, so I pretty much stay at home.

  Mom lets me sleep in on Thanksgiving, but around eleven o’clock she comes into our bedroom. I’m awake now, reading in bed. She says, “Do you want to help me and Granma make the dinner?”

  “Maybe,” I say. “I’m just reading my book.”

  She goes to get something from her closet but then kind of hangs around.

  “What are you reading?” she asks eventually.

  “Tom Sawyer,” I tell her. “It’s our homework.”

  I’m hoping she’ll leave me alone, but she just stands there, and I finally look up.

  “In New York, you used to cook with me all the time.” She sits down on the bed next to me; I roll over a little. She’s holding the subway map apron she wore in our old apartment.

  “Granma does most of the cooking here,” I tell her.

  “That’s because I’m working.”

  “I wasn’t complaining. You’re the one who brought it up.”

  “I mind,” she says. Her voice is the voice she uses when she wants me to feel bad about something, because I’m disappointing her, or maybe just making her sad. “Come and cook with us. It’s Thanksgiving.”

  “In a minute,” I say, and go back to my book. Mom stands up at last, and the bed shifts, and I hear her footsteps on the old wooden boards. She closes the door behind her. The room feels empty again.

  For a minute I just lie there with the book on my lap. I’m propped up on the pillows, and there’s a shaft of sunlight, coming from the window near Mom’s bed, that falls on my lap. It’s another sunny day that seems even sunnier because of the yellow leaves. But I’m not reading anymore; my concentration is broken. In New York, our kitchen window overlooked 85th Street, but if you put your head out, you could just about see Central Park. With the window open, you could hear the traffic on Central Park West. It was the one place in the house Mom never cared about making a mess. Once I asked her why not, and she said, “Because your father leaves me alone in here. This is my territory,” and without really thinking about it, I get out of bed.

  I’m still in pajamas but that doesn’t matter. It’s warm in the house, and I put on some slippers and go into the kitchen. For the rest of the day, that’s what we do—make messes. We make cranberry sauce and two kinds of stuffing, and Granma bakes a kind of sweet potato pie. It’s really more of a soup, with canned pineapples and marshmallows bobbing around in it. The turkey’s already in the oven, but every half hour Mom lets me pull it out and with a baster squirt whatever juice is lying at the bottom of the pan over the bird.

  It gets really hot in the kitchen, and at one point Granma has to sit down. Her face looks red. She has wispy gray hair and a few whiskers around her mouth as well—it’s easy to see them in the heat, because they stand out. I don’t like to look at her swollen hand. It feels like it must hurt, even though Granma says it doesn’t; she says it’s just swollen. Around four o’clock, Mom asks me to set the table and Granma pulls out a kitchen chair, carries it next to the sink, and climbs on it.

  “What are you doing?” Mom asks.

  But she doesn’t answer—she’s got a wooden spoon in her mouth, and she’s rummaging through one of the cupboards over the counter and steps down again with a tablecloth in her hand. “Use this,” she says. It’s covered in yellow roses, with thorns and green leaves.

  Mom helps me drag out the table in the living room. We lay the cloth over it, and then I get Granma’s best china from the mahogany closet next to the window. I’ve never opened it before—it’s full of plates, teacups, jugs, and serving bowls, stuff like that. Old dusty bottles of alcohol stand on the bottom shelf.

  “Doesn’t it look nice?” Granma says when the table is laid, with the turkey steaming on a big platter.

  “Isn’t it too much food for three people?”

  But Mom gives me a look.

  “I’ve got everybody here that matters,” she says.

  Afterward, Mom and Granma clean up—I’m allowed to sit on the sofa and watch football games. But when the table is cleared, and the pot
s and pans are dripping on the kitchen counter (I can see them through the arch), Mom comes in and tells me to scooch over. “Where’s the remote?” she says.

  “I’m watching the game.”

  “It’s family movie time,” she says.

  “I’m watching the game,” I tell her again.

  “Granma doesn’t want to watch football.”

  “I don’t mind,” Granma says. “The only thing I care about is sitting down.”

  “Well, you can sit down here,” Mom says, making room on the couch. She’s found the remote control and starts flipping through channels. “Where are you going?” she asks me, because I’ve stood up.

  “My room.”

  “What are you going to do there?”

  “I’m going to read my book.”

  “Let him go,” Granma says, but Mom calls me back.

  “Don’t spoil it now, Ben. I thought we were having a good day.”

  I look at her for a moment. “We were having a good day, and I was watching a football game.”

  “You weren’t even really watching. Who was playing, what was the score?”

  “The Cowboys, it was . . .”

  But the truth is, I can’t remember, I was kind of zoning out, and she says, “See, I told you so. Come on, Ben. Sit down—I can see that smile.”

  “I am not smiling.”

  “Okay, nobody’s smiling. Nobody’s happy. We’re all miserable. Just sit in your room, why don’t you.”

  “Mom,” I say, and Granma says, “That’s enough, Jenny.”

  “I just want to sit and watch something on TV with my son on Thanksgiving. Is that too much to ask?” There are tears in her voice.

  “It’s fine, it’s fine. It’s not too much,” I tell her.

  “I get tired, too. This isn’t easy for me either.”

  “It’s fine, it’s okay.” I walk back to the couch. “See, I’m sitting down. The son is sitting down. The son is watching TV.”

  “There’s nothing good on anyway,” Mom says, and throws the remote control on one of the chairs. But I reach over and get it and start flipping through channels—there’s a Paul Newman movie on, and Granma says, “Let’s leave it right there,” and I squeeze up next to my mom and say, “See? Everybody’s happy.”

  So we watch the movie. Paul Newman is this old guy—I saw him in this movie called The Sting, and he looks much older now. Everybody’s kind of pissed off with him, and he pisses everybody off. He lives in a small town, where it seems to snow a lot; everything looks kind of run-down. There’s a lot of swearing. It looks more like New York than Texas, and after half an hour Granma falls asleep. Her mouth is open, and she snores. I poke my mom, and Mom looks at her for a minute.

  “She’s all right,” Mom says.

  For some reason, when she’s sleeping, you see how small Granma is—just a sack of bones, really, apart from her swollen hand. It’s kind of embarrassing; she makes a lot of noise. You can see the hair around her lips move when she breathes.

  Mom puts her arm around me. “I’m having a nice Thanksgiving,” she says.

  When the movie’s over, Granma wakes up. Nobody’s really hungry and Granma doesn’t want to cook again anyway, but I have a bowl of cereal while I watch SportsCenter on TV. Granma’s already in bed. Mom stands in the kitchen archway and looks at me. “That’s what your father always ate when he came home late from work.”

  She dries up the pots and dishes and puts them away, then goes into the bathroom to get ready for bed. When I come in, her light is already off—I get undressed in the dark and slip under the covers. I’ve got a little pocket flashlight that Granma gave me, so I can read at night . . . and I turn that on and read under the scratchy wool blanket. But it’s kind of annoying, holding the book in one hand and the flashlight in the other, and eventually I give up. But I’m still not very sleepy, and after a while, I say, “Mom”—quietly, so she can only hear me if she’s already awake.

  “Yes, Ben?” Her voice seems a long way away.

  “Is Granma all right?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Because of her hand.”

  “Don’t worry about that, Ben. It’s just the way it is now. I don’t think it hurts her.”

  “I don’t mean to be rude, but why doesn’t she—I mean she’s got lots of hair on her chin. . . .”

  “Oh, she doesn’t care anymore. You get to a point where none of that stuff matters.”

  “Couldn’t she just . . . shave?”

  “If you shave them off, they just come back worse.” Nobody says anything for a while, and I think that might be the end of the conversation. But then my mom’s voice comes out of the dark. “Are you worried about her, Ben? She’s in pretty good shape. At her age, you just get tired sometimes. At my age, too,” she says, and laughs. “Good night, Ben.”

  After that, I lie there and listen until I can hear her breathing. The curtains are closed, but somebody left the porch light on, and I can see a crack of light falling on the bedroom floor. For some reason, I start talking to my dad in my head—I just tell him everything that happened today, how I helped out in the kitchen, and Mom got mad at me about the football game and almost cried. Then Granma fell asleep watching the movie. There are a lot of leftovers, I tell him. We didn’t have enough people to eat it all.

  Thirteen

  A WEEK AFTER THANKSGIVING, Mom says to Granma and me, “Well, at least one of us has made a new friend. I thought I might invite somebody for dinner tomorrow night.”

  We’re watching TV before bed, all three of us sitting on the sofa. When the program goes to a commercial, Mom turns off the sound.

  “Are you sure that’s a good idea?” Granma says. “I don’t know if we’re ready for this yet.”

  “Oh, he’s just a friend. And anyway, Ben already knows him. It’s Mr. Tomski, your social studies teacher. He likes you,” Mom tells me. Then the show comes back on, so we don’t have to talk about it, which is fine with me. I’ve noticed that it takes me a while to react to anything—I don’t even always have a reaction. Sometimes it takes me a few days.

  Mr. Tomski is one of those teachers who’s easy to distract. He’s normal height, maybe a little fat, and he always wears a jacket and tie to school, but he never looks well-dressed. His shirt hangs out, and his jacket looks old and dirty. His shoes always have mud on them, probably because he lives on a ranch. Sometimes he wears glasses, but he can never find them when he wants to.

  If you want him to stop teaching, you just have to ask him about his ranch. He has a lot of stories: about his animals, and the people he bought the ranch from (Mr. Tomski says they were “real old Texans”), and how much it costs to feed a pig or how much you can sell a pig for at Johnny G’s Meat Market. Most of the kids like Mr. Tomski, but they don’t have much respect for him. “Just ask him about his ranch,” they say. “Then you don’t have to learn anything.”

  He’s also the head coach of the basketball team. Kids think this is funny, too. “That dude does not look like he ever played basketball.” As soon as somebody starts making fun of a teacher, everyone else joins in. “He looks like a homeless guy.” “My dad says he couldn’t dunk a donut in a cup of coffee.” That’s the kind of thing they say.

  They also tell stories about his car. Once, after a basketball game, the school bus broke down and Mr. Tomski and some of the parents had to drive the players home. “Don’t go in his car,” Pete said afterward. “It smells like a farm in there. He’s actually got straw in his car. You get covered in hay. I had to take a shower when I got home. It smells like poo.” I heard all this waiting in line at the cafeteria.

  This is the guy my mom invited for dinner.

  In class the next day, I wonder if he’s going to say something to me about coming over. I always sit at the back because I don’t want anyone to call on me. That’s one good thing about Mr. Tomski—he’s not one of those teachers who calls on you if you don’t raise your hand. But it’s just a normal class; he does
n’t seem to notice me.

  Mabley sits next to me on the bus ride home. Now that the Number Sense competition is over, I don’t have to stay after school.

  “You want to hear something weird?” I tell her. “Guess who’s coming to dinner at my house tonight.”

  “Who?”

  “Mr. Tomski.”

  For some reason, I feel bad even talking about it, but I talk about it anyway. It’s like I’m using this information to say something funny, because I want Mabley to be interested in what I say, but the information isn’t really information—it’s something actually happening to me.

  “It’s not that weird,” Mabley says. “It’s like, medium weird. It’s on the weird scale, but it’s not . . . I mean, your mom is a teacher. They’re just like colleagues, right?”

  “I don’t know. What am I supposed to say to him?”

  “Remember to raise your hand before you speak,” Mabley says. But she’s not really making fun of me, she’s just trying to go along with it.

  That night, when the doorbell rings, Mom calls out, “Can you get that, Ben?” She’s getting changed in the bedroom, and Granma’s busy in the kitchen. So I open the door and there he is. He’s got a bunch of flowers in his hand, and he looks about as nervous as I feel.

  “Good evening, Ben,” he says, and clears his throat. “Is your mom at home?”

  I notice two little pink marks on his nose, where his glasses must have pinched him—but he isn’t wearing glasses when he comes to our house. It feels funny to have a teacher on our doorstep.

  “She’s just . . .” but I don’t want to say she’s getting ready, like she’s trying to make herself pretty for him. “She told me to get the door. You can come in.”