Choosing Sophie

by Leslie Carroll

  It was close to midnight by the time I arrived home from the Ashes. Sophie hadn’t come back yet from the Clash’s team Christmas party. I undressed and slipped on a vintage silk kimono, a gift from a Kyoto businessman who used to frequent one of my nightclubs back in Vegas. Then I fed one of Sophie’s game tapes into my VCR and cuddled up with a cup of cocoa—no kidding.

  It was 1:47 when she stumbled through the door. Believe me, I’d been watching the clock. With a significant amount of wobbling and weaving, Sophie managed to make it into her bedroom, but not five seconds later, fell to her knees and threw up right in the middle of the carpet. When I flicked on the light, she turned toward me, wincing like Dracula at dawn. Her face was a sickly greenish tint that spelled too-much-to-drink.

  With my adrenaline still pumping, my first reaction was not maternal solicitude for her delicate condition; it was rage at her evident flouting of my warning not to drink herself sick or silly. “What were you thinking?” I demanded. “Did you hear a single word I said before you left for the party?” Her hair was a mess, her makeup smeared and streaked. She resembled a nauseous raccoon. What happened to the girl who continually asserted—often to the point of sanctimoniousness—that she wasn’t a partier?

  “I hate you!” she shouted. “I hate you, I hate you!!”

  She tugged at her boots and threw them against the wall, then wriggled out of the eight-hundred-dollar leather dress I’d commissioned for her, and willfully tossed it into the stinking puddle of vomit.

  “What—why do you hate me, Soph? What’s going on? What the hell happened tonight?” I wanted like anything to hose down the bedroom and disinfect Sophie, the rug, the dress, and everything within smelling distance. I was about to throw up, myself, from the odor. As an old pro at propping up drunk and hung-over girlfriends, I knew from the looks of things (and the smell) that she’d unwisely mixed the grain and the grape, and had then tried to soak it all up and keep it all down with large bites of pizza. Yuck!

  Sophie burst into hysterical sobs, in between which she managed to tell me that “Everything was great at the party and everyone was totally blown away by how I looked and everything, and I was drinking rum and caffeine-free Coke and then someone handed me a beer, which was really cold, and I guess I sucked it down really fast, but I didn’t want anyone to take my cocktail away while I wasn’t looking, so I finished that pretty fast, too, I guess; and then after a while Tommy DuPree—who thought I looked like a babe—invited me upstairs to talk, he said; and I thought ‘what the heck,’ so I started kissing him and stuff; and he was pretty wasted—but he’s still a good kisser—and then he asked me something like—” and here she lapsed into an imitation of Tommy’s voice—“‘Hey, Soph, your birth mom’s a babe. You think she’d be interested in a three-way?’ And then he started going on and on, really drunk, about how gorgeous your legs are, and your hair, and how you had the best tits he’d ever seen on a woman over twenty-five and that you were probably a really great lay; and I wanted to deck him, but I was afraid to; and besides, I liked him sooo much before he said that; and I should really let Carleen have the pleasure of decking him, anyways; and then I went back downstairs and started making drinks from whatever bottle was open on the counter; and no, I don’t know how many I had, but there was orange juice in some of them; and then I lost the holiday home run derby; so I snagged a ride home with the Clash’s equipment manager because you didn’t want me to drink and drive and no one else wanted to leave when I did, which was about the time I realized that I couldn’t see straight very well, so no wonder I lost the derby, except everyone else had been drinking too; but if I stayed at the party any longer I was going to do something awful to Tommy DuPree; and the coach put your car in his garage; oh and right before I got to the party, the campus police pulled me over because they said I ran a stop sign and they gave me a sobriety test, but I hadn’t had anything to drink yet; and they looked in my purse and found all the condoms I had in there. And they asked me what I planned to do with all of them, and I turned totally red and now the campus police call me the Rubber Maid. And I have a final at 9:00 a.m. and I totally hate my life! And I hate YOU, too, for ruining it!”

  “How did I ruin your life, honey?” I sat beside her on the bed and smoothed her hair off her glistening forehead. Come morning, we’d need to have a talk about the dangers of riding in cars with men she barely knew.

  Sophie physically pushed me away. “Because you made me beautiful and you made me believe that I was desirable—but it was all a big fucking joke, because all the guys want YOU instead, Mom! No one wants ME. You tried to make me into Cinderella, but I’m just one of the ugly stepsisters!” she wailed.

  I tried to hold her, hug her, calm her down, remind myself that it was the booze that was doing most of the talking. She passed out in my arms, just as I’d discovered the one positive that emerged from her in vino veritas. During Sophie’s distraught and sadly self-deprecating tirade, for the first time ever—she’d called me Mom.

  Top of the Fourth

  As it was nearing noon, I tiptoed into Sophie’s bedroom. She’d somehow managed to make it up to Clarendon for her final, but crashed again as soon as she came home. I’d left her with a cold, wet washcloth over her forehead and eyes, as she moaned that she thought her head was going to explode, adding grimly that she wished it would, so she’d be put out of her misery.

  “Feeling any better?” I whispered.

  “I’m not dead. Or dehydrated anymore. So I guess it’s an improvement,” Sophie murmured. She tried to sit up. “Whoa.” I sat beside her and helped prop up her back against a couple of pillows.

  “This isn’t going to work,” she said finally.

  “What isn’t, sweetie?”

  “Us. This arrangement. I made a mistake. I want to go home.”

  I felt as though I’d just been sucker punched. “You are home, Soph.”

  “No. Back to the Ashes, I mean.”

  I couldn’t exactly try to stop her. That would only have made things worse and cemented her decision to bolt.

  “B-but what about closing the circle?” I said gently? This wasn’t about earning the Cheers; that meant squat to me. I’d lost Tom to gain Sophie. I couldn’t bear losing her, too. “Aren’t you the one who told me a couple of months ago how disappointed she’d be if I decided to throw in the towel? You said you didn’t want to think that you had sprung from the loins of a quitter, if I recall. So I have to tell you, I have no idea why you suddenly want to bail.”

  “It’s not suddenly. I told you last night. Because you ruined my life!” She winced in pain. “Ow, my head!”

  “I’ll get you a couple of aspirin. Be back in a minute.”

  She swallowed the pills with Herculean effort. “You’re welcome,” I said. I perched on the edge of her bed. “What’s really bothering you, sweetheart? You can tell me.”

  “It’s—it’s just that you can’t make something happen just because you want it to. I don’t know what I expected, but I didn’t get it.”

  Whoa.

  We took this conversation up to Westchester, where I retrieved my car and the two of us drove over to the Ashes. They welcomed her with open arms, and gave me dirty, questioning looks, as though I had somehow tortured our daughter into fleeing my nest. Joy headed to the kitchen to make a fresh pot of coffee as the rest of us retreated to the den. Glenn had a roaring fire going, and the room was as cozy as a Currier and Ives print.

  “I have to say I’m surprised at you, slugger.” Glenn had nestled himself into a roomy armchair upholstered in a black-and-white plaid. “I won’t use the word disappointed, because that’s demoralizing. But I’m surprised. You’re not a quitter. Your mother and I—” he glanced at me. “Your other mother and I didn’t raise you to be a quitter.”

  “I’m not a quitter,” Sophie sullenly replied. “It’s just not what I thought it would be.”

  “And what did you think it would be, Sophie? Did you want to be infantilized with Cream
of Wheat for breakfast and cups of cocoa before bed? You couldn’t start over with Livy as though you were a newborn for her to raise—birthday parties with silly paper hats and pony rides. You had a great childhood, slugger, if I remember correctly. But you don’t get a do-over. You grow up and the nature of your relationship with your parents changes. It has to! Or we’d all be in therapy.”

  Just then Joy entered with the mugs of coffee on a metal tray embossed with images of kitty cats. Speaking of infantilizing…but, heck, the woman likes kitty cats. So what.

  “Daddy’s right, slugger. Both of you have to learn how to love each other for who you are now, as a mother and daughter, but also as adults.”

  Something about Sophie’s little drunken escapade last night came out, and I thought for sure the Ashes would change their minds. They both frowned, then scowled, then regarded each other, regarded Sophie, looked back at each other and remained silent for a least a minute. It was so quiet in their den that I could have sworn I heard the pendulum swinging on the grandfather clock.

  “Well, I think we know what’s best for Sophie,” Glenn said with great finality.

  This did not bode well.

  “Sophie’s a real daddy’s girl, so whatever Glenn says, she’ll listen,” Joy added.

  “Good coffee, hon,” remarked Glenn.

  “Thanks! It’s from Trader Joe’s.”

  Another uncomfortable silence settled on the room.

  “Slugger…what happened last night was a prime example of free will, and what happens to people when they exercise it and do dumb things. No one made you get pie-eyed at that party.” He tapped his head with his knuckles. “I just have a hunch, in here, that Livy lectured you about drinking, before you left her house. And about the dangers of drinking and driving. And you sure as heck know that your mother and I have done the same. But you were feeling your oats, and you decided not to listen to anything any of your parents ever told you. Lord knows you’re not the first young lady to fall all over herself over some guy who doesn’t deserve the time of day from her. But no one made you do it. So I’m not going to condemn Livy for being a bad parent. What really bothers me is that you wanted to immediately cut and run when the going got tough. And I’ve never let any of my players get away with that kind of behavior. You tough it out, slugger. Life isn’t always peaches and cream, a bowl of cherries, and raspberry ices. It was a hard decision you made to look for Livy. Well—you found her. And your mom and I don’t want you to break your mother’s heart by running out on her and the arrangement you begged for just three months ago.”

  “Besides that,” Joy said, nodding her head in agreement, “there’s the Cheers to consider. Now I know that takes a backseat to getting to know Livy, but I’ve never known you to be so hung up on anything more than you are on that baseball team. Now you have a chance to make a difference—in your life, and Livy’s, and in who runs your precious baseball club. It’s like—what’s that called, honey, when a player has one of those two-for-one things?”

  Glenn chuckled affectionately at his wife’s cluelessness, even after all these years, about the terminology of the game. “A double play,” he said.

  “That’s it—a double play. Now, we love you, Sophie, and we always will. And this house is always open to you as your home. But we think,” Joy said, sharing a look with Glenn, “that right now, your place is with Livy.”

  Well! You could have knocked me over with one of Sally Rand’s feathers.

  Wow. The Ashes hadn’t disappointed me, but they sure as hell had surprised me.

  “Well, that was Sherman,” Linda said, hanging up the phone. “We were so close,” she muttered angrily. “Sherman has a private detective following Venus and Sophie, and they went up to Larchmont yesterday to the Ashes after some sort of blowup between them.”

  “How does he know about the blowup?” Marty pictured some guy in a trench coat with his cauliflower ears pressed to keyholes.

  “I’m not sure I even want to know these things. The gist of it is that Sophie wanted to call off the arrangement, but the Ashes talked her into staying with Livy. What are those people thinking? If my kid came crawling back to me, I wouldn’t kick her to the curb. I can’t imagine what was going through their heads.”

  Linda’s hairbrush snarled in Rosebud’s topknot. The hapless Yorkshire terrier yelped in pain, which was nothing compared to Linda’s agony at remaining one step further removed from one-upping her friends by calling herself the wife of a baseball club owner, even if the team was pathetic. “We need someone on the inside. I don’t even care if it’s not legal, as long as no one finds out.”

  Marty looked up from the minor league baseball magazine’s scouting report. “So Sophie’s still in the duplex. What am I supposed to do? Bribe the doormen?”

  “It’s not a bad idea.” Linda pursed her lips. Men! Was she going to have to take matters into her own hands? High-powered cousin Sherman had lost the decision on a motion to preclude Venus from having anything to do with the team until the case was closed. This meant that the judge was permitting Olivia to have a say in how things would be done during the tryouts for nondrafted players, spring training, and the upcoming season. Tryouts were due to begin shortly, with talent scouted from all across the country, including Marty’s favorite prospect, Tommy DuPree. Linda couldn’t trust Tommy—a jock with mush for brains—to keep tabs on Ms. Va-Va-Venus and her duckling, and bribing Olivia’s doormen was an iffy prospect. Linda needed someone seasoned. Someone who’d given his life to the game and would rather die than see the Cheers helmed by Olivia deMarley, no matter how much of a knockout she was. Someone like…Dusty Fredericks.

  “Can I sit in on tryouts?” Sophie asked me.

  “Won’t you be too busy with softball practice?”

  “Practices are held in the evenings, when no one’s got classes.”

  “Ahh. Classes. Shouldn’t you be at them instead of sitting beside me in Farina Arena?”

  “Don’t worry about me! My study habits are impeccable,” she crowed. “Joy and Glenn were always pretty strict with me about hitting the books. Glenn was always, like, ‘no dessert unless you’ve finished your history assignment.’ Probably why I don’t really have a sweet tooth.”

  “Whereas, no one ever encouraged me to do my homework at all, let alone on time. Augie was too busy lecturing me about not becoming a slut, or pulling my own weight, or paying my own freight to focus on anything else I was doing. Do you know what he said to me before I went away to college?” I asked rhetorically. “He said, ‘Don’t become a mattress.’ ‘Don’t worry, Daddy,’ I assured him, ‘I’ll get on top instead and be a comforter.’ Well it was funny to me at the time,” I muttered. “And my mom—well Mom was too busy dying.” I blinked back tears. “I know that sounded cavalier just now, but I really miss the hell out of her. I think about her every day. Believe me, there are lots of times, even at my age, where I wish I could throw myself on the bed and cry, ‘I want my Mommy!’”

  Sophie handed me a tissue. “She loved your dad, even if you didn’t, and it would have made her proud, I bet, to see him proud of you, even in the afterlife, assuming there is one. He wouldn’t have given you the team in his will—‘closing the circle’ and hoops of fire to jump through or not—if he didn’t think you’d carry on his work with dedication and commitment. Either that or he knows Barry Weed is a slime bucket and Peter and Dick are a peter and a dick. Dusty Fredericks seems pretty cool, though.” I widened my eyes. “Don’t look so surprised, Livy; I’ve been following the Cheers for years. Did you know his wife was in a sanatorium someplace?”

  “Dusty’s?”

  “Yeah. She’s had cancer on and off for years. Her name’s Rosa. She’s very Roman Catholic. The only thing Dusty practices is baseball. That’s his religion.” Sophie tugged at a cardboard box on the shelf of her closet, and lifted it down, plopping it onto her mattress. Inside the box was a scrapbook bound in pebbled black cardboard and filled with photos and articles on th
e Bronx Cheers. “See, I’ve been kinda talent-scouting them since I was in Little League. Every time there was an article in the paper, I’d clip it out—Barry Weed arrested for DWI back in 1992—Carlos Carlito pitching the team’s only shutout in twelve years—Rosa Fredericks to undergo surgery—” Sophie flipped through the yellowing pages. “Anything you want to know about the Cheers: I bet it’s in here.” She confidently tapped the cover of the scrapbook.

  “Let me see that, please.” Sophie handed me the book as though she were passing me the Gutenberg Bible. I fully expected her to ask me if my hands were clean. I gingerly leafed through the pages; in a way, it was a stirring tribute, not just to her love of this scrappy little minor league ball club, but to the grandfather she never knew.

  “Aw, Livy, please don’t cry on it.” My daughter reached for her treasure just as my teardrop splattered onto the black pressboard. I was wishing she’d call me Mom again, which was part of the reason I’d teared up. She had still used the word only once, and that was during a drunken rant.

  It was our second day in court. One of those post-snowstorm February days when you wake up and wish you could just go back to sleep instead of slogging through gloopy gray puddles that always seem to be deeper than you’d anticipated; when the taxi drivers and dry cleaners join forces to soak the citizens who’ve had their winter whites sprayed with pewter-colored slush at forty-five miles an hour.

  “I’d like to welcome back the deMarley mishpacha and their crazy meshuggaas,” Judge Randazzo said sarcastically. He was the only Italian American I knew who peppered his speech with Yiddishisms. The judge told me he grew up in a Jewish neighborhood. “Besides, all real New Yorkers speak a little Yiddish. I’ll bet you every goy you know uses the word schlep.”

  Cap Gaines opened old Augie’s mystery letter in front of the court and handed it to Judge Randazzo, who got out his bifocals and read it aloud.