Field of Schemes

by Coburn, Jennifer

  “Don’t know, but they committed to Gunther over the weekend. Maybe they figured they didn’t have to come back like the rest of us. There’s one arrogant son of a bitch every year, Claire.” God, my name sounded good coming from his lips. “It’s not like we all didn’t have something else we could’ve been doing instead.”

  “Oh, so your daughter made the team too?” I asked. Then I remembered Darcy telling me that Gunther had also called Mimi’s daughter, Cara, over the weekend.

  He furrowed his brow. “Yeah, I thought you already knew that.” Yep, there’s always one arrogant son of a bitch.

  “Which one’s your daughter?” I asked, wanting to see what gorgeousness Sexy Dad and Psycho Mom had created. Yes, she was crazy, but much to my regret, I had to admit she looked a lot like Angelina Jolie with her full lips, soulful eyes and powerful presence.

  “Claire?” he said, laughing. “Kelly is my daughter.”

  What? That doesn’t make any sense. Your kid’s name is Cara.

  Slowly, reality began to penetrate.

  My neighbor has a daughter named Kelly. Her father is also named Ron. Kelly is on this soccer—Oh. My. God.

  This is Ron?!

  This is Ron Greer?!

  Nooooooo!!!!!

  “You’re Darcy’s husband?!” I said, sounding far too horrified. “I mean, Kelly’s father? That’s so great.” Shut up. “So great.” Silence. Lips together and stop. “So completely great.” If I weren’t afraid of leaving Rachel an orphan, I would have dug a hole and jumped into my early grave right there and then. But I didn’t have a shovel and the field was Astroturf.

  “Yeah, Kel told me about Rachel being scouted,” Ron said, clearly enjoying his social upper hand. “I was on the lookout for you guys.” He smiled. “I liked what I saw.” Bitter chocolate. This man is still flirting even though he knows I’m his wife’s best friend. “She’s got a lot of passion. She get that from you?”

  “No,” I replied crisply. “Her father.” I could not have been more clear in my contempt for this man who flirted with his wife’s friends at kids’ soccer events. That was the end of it.

  Three.

  Two.

  One.

  Oh God, why wasn’t that the end of it?! Why didn’t my attraction flat-line with the discovery that this man was the worst kind of trouble? Even in light of this news, my heart never stopped racing at the sheer thrill of being in his presence.

  Having an extremely self-contained mother had its advantages. I could hear her voice sternly advising me that while I could not control my feelings, I could most certainly control my actions. And control them I would as I maintained laser-like focus on the field until the end of tryouts. When Ron asked a question, I gave him a cool, one-word reply without even glancing his way. Rather than being deterred by my coldness, he seemed amused, as if it confirmed that I was fighting my feelings.

  I remember seeing a therapist on Oprah who said people could reprogram their feelings by creating a new association for them. I would do the same for Ron. Every time I saw him, instead of thinking about the tasty block of fresh milk chocolate he was, I would imagine him in an unflattering light—say, clipping his thick, yellow helmet toenails as he sat on the toilet in constipation. Then I’d imagine him standing and, in addition to the ring around his ass that came from sitting on the can too long, he’d also have a minefield of butt zits. Ugh! It was working. I looked at Ron and shuddered with disgust.

  Three.

  Two.

  Oh God, it was so not working! As the whistle blew, Ron looked at me and gestured with his arm—his beautiful, muscular arm. There was absolutely no evidence of ass zits or bulletproof toenails. “Come on, Claire. We need to bring it in.”

  Do we ever!

  As we walked toward Preston and the girls, Mimi and Gia reappeared. Before they made their way to the group, Ron asked if I wanted to take the girls for a quick bite to eat at Pixie’s Diner. “To celebrate the end of tryouts,” he said.

  “No way,” slipped out.

  He looked stunned, though we kept walking and I started backpedaling. “What I meant was that I need to talk to Gunther. I want to see what he thought of Rachel.”

  “No problem,” he said, shrugging. “How ’bout I take the girls to dinner while you take care of what you need to do? The girls earned a treat, don’t y’think?”

  “Oh, sure,” I said. “That’ll work.”

  Of course he wasn’t inviting me to dinner. His offer was for Rachel, not her mother.

  Rachel ran to me as we all gathered around Preston, who thanked us all for coming to tryouts. “We’ll have teams formed by the end of the week and you’ll get a phone call over the weekend,” he said. The weekend?! It was Monday!

  “There’s no way I can make it through the week, Mom,” Rachel whispered.

  I hear you, girlfriend.

  “I’ll see what I can find out from Gunther,” I whispered back. “Go to dinner with Kelly and her dad and I’ll stay back and talk to him.”

  “You rock,” Rachel said. “Oh, by the way, Gunther said he liked my jersey.”

  “He did?!” I whispered, trying to be discreet. I didn’t need the other parents thinking I was some sort of hyper-competitive lunatic.

  “Yeah,” Rachel said. “He looked at my jersey and asked if I was a fan of Germany.”

  “And you said yes, of course, right?”

  “Yeah, then I told him all that stuff about the national team you told me today. He sounded impressed.”

  Yes! This was so worth getting bit!

  Chapter Thirteen

  “Welcome parents,” she smiled, smugly holding a clipboard. “And congratulations girls for making the Girls Under Thirteen soccer team that’s going to take the California State Cup this year!” Parents clapped and girls cheered wildly as Mimi Shasta made her enthusiastic introduction. We had not mended fences over the last week. In fact, I got a definite vibe that she didn’t like the idea of my being a regular part of her life. It might have been the way she greeted me at the front door. After pouring on the charm, hugging and welcoming Rachel at the front door, she sneered at me and mumbled, “I thought you were the fat girl’s mom.” I’m 5’8” and 116 pounds with my hair wet. I can see how you’d make that mistake.

  “Nope, I’m Rachel’s mother,” I said cheerily for my child’s sake.

  “Mmmmnnn,” Mimi dismissed. “Oh well, it’s all about the girls.”

  Golly, Mimi, you mean we’re not going to brush each other’s hair and trade secrets about cute boys later tonight?

  As nasty as she was to me, I had to admit that Mimi had star quality. When she started the team meeting, she stood in her family room with everyone’s rapt attention. Everyone, that was, except for Gunther, who looked as if his mind were elsewhere as he stared out the window as if he were waiting for the nice crafts lady to take him to make pictures with macaroni. Our coach looked like a lobotomized Bam Bam Rubble.

  Darcy told me that Mimi, in addition to being beautiful, is the heiress to her family’s import business. Life was sometimes so unbelievably unfair that I wanted to scream. If I did, though, the enormous house would have mocked me by echoing my cries.

  The entryway to the Shasta house looked like the set of Dangerous Liaisons, with white marble floors and a table with elaborate, swirling gold and enamel designs on the legs. A cobalt blue sphere with tiny inlaid gold stars was at the center of a crystal chandelier that looked as though it would take days to clean. At the top of the horseshoe staircase was an enormous and ornately framed portrait of Mimi and her father. A short man with a thick neck and heavy eyebrows, he looked outclassed by his surroundings. I could see him betting on horses at the track or sitting at a high rollers table in Vegas.

  As Rachel and I passed through the foyer, Rachel commented on the oversized vase filled with lush, exotic blooms. We passed a country kitchen where two uniformed cooks chopped vegetables as they spoke to each other in Japanese. Then we passed a dining room done i
n an Asian theme, with a black table that was so slick it looked like water, and a red tapestry hanging from the main wall. Around the room were impressive pieces in jade and ivory. Finally, Mimi led us into the family room, which was decorated modern funky with large red couches and a Frank Stella painting hanging beside a Piet Mondrian. I’m sure a decorator told her that an eclectic mishmash would give her house an offbeat, well-traveled feel, but I found the style jarring. It was as though she were warning visitors never to get too comfortable with one particular style. Mimi adopted this philosophy in her wardrobe as well, dropping the Lilly Pulitzer look for a decidedly hipper, more urban look now that she was introducing herself to the preteen girls. She wore purposefully shredded jeans and a t-shirt with rhinestones emblazoned over the words “Soccer is Life.”

  The girls cheered wildly as Mimi sounded utterly convinced that our team had already won the State Cup. Sapphire wrapped her arm around Rachel and pulled her into the huddle of giddiness. It was funny how one’s priorities changed as a parent. It used to take me a long time to determine whether or not I liked someone. I’d weigh dozens of factors, reserving final judgment for weeks. As a mother, things were simpler. If a person was kind to my child, I liked her. When Sapphire reached out to Rachel, I became her instant fan. I also decided to cut the Trophy Bride a break. How could I begrudge a woman helping to raise the benevolent Sapphire? “Yeah, baby!” shouted Dick when Mimi made her proclamation. He high-fived Bobby, who hooted in the only way he could, loudly. “State Cup, yeow!”

  The team parents were a mixed lot. Some looked normal and low-key, and others were clearly posturing, trying to establish their identity in the group. An anthropologist would have a field day observing us. Dick and Bobby immediately adopted Leo, the Puerto Rican guy with major dadditude, and Raymond, the father of Violet, the Hot Shots shooter with the rehabilitated ACL.

  I wished Darcy understood that I don’t follow sports. When she referred to Raymond as “Earl Woods,” I had no idea that she was making a joke and comparing him to the over-the-top father of Tiger Woods. Simply leaning toward me and whispering, “Oh no, we’re stuck with Earl Woods this year,” wasn’t enough of an explanation for me. I had to find out who Earl Woods was the hard way.

  Raymond gave me a puzzled look when I called him Earl, which I mistook as a signal that I needed to address him more formally. “I’m sorry, Mr. Woods. It’s a pleasure to meet you. I’m Claire Emmett.”

  “Mr. Woods?” Raymond questioned. “You calling me Earl Woods?”

  “Isn’t that your name?” I asked.

  He said nothing and turned away indignantly. I heard him muttering to the other dads about the “white bitch” who thinks all black people look alike. They all turned to look at me, and Leo made a clicking noise with his mouth before exclaiming, “Snap, that’s tight.”

  I didn’t think it would help matters to explain that Raymond was nicknamed Earl Woods because of his intensity, not his skin color.

  “Earl Woods is dead!” Loud Bobby barked.

  I thought Paulo, the Italian biker, would be a natural fit for the dad clique, but the fat four didn’t adopt the insanely fit father of Giovanna, the little girl who came to tryouts with the elderly mafia widow. In fairness, Leo wasn’t fat as much as he was doughy. He looked as if he could be in fighting shape after about eight doughnut-free weeks of working out. Ray looked pregnant, but also had bony elbows and hollow cheeks. Dick and Bobby were simply lard mountains from their chins down. Paulo wore his bicycling shorts and a bright yellow Tour de France shirt, looking as if he’d just finished biking fifty miles with his team.

  I whispered to Darcy, “Why don’t you think they’ve taken this guy under their wing?” She shrugged. A veteran of club soccer, Darcy was not nearly as interested in the parent culture as I.

  After Mimi gave her rallying speech, she told the girls that they could go downstairs to the media room and watch the new Coerver training DVD, or play video games, air hockey and ping pong. She told the girls that the parents needed to go over the “boring details” and stuck her tongue out to the side as if to tell them that they got the better end of tonight’s deal. She was the brand of mother who wanted to be friends with her daughter and her peers, the kind who might let the girls drink beer or turn a blind eye when boys showed up at Cara’s slumber parties in a few years.

  When the girls were gone, Mimi suggested we go around the room and introduce ourselves and talk a bit about our daughters’ experience and expectations. She would then tell us about the team and club structure and how our season would play out. I always wondered why people asked about our expectations if they already had a program in place.

  Nancy, who I came to know as Whole Foods Mom, introduced herself and told us that her daughter left the Turf club because it was too intense. “I want Deborah to grow as a player but also as a person, and I found the coach to be far too focused on soccer,” she said.

  Her soccer coach was too focused on soccer? What did she want him to focus on?

  Mimi raised her eyebrows and said, “Okay, well welcome. I hope Kix is more what you’re looking for.”

  Gia brought her husband Tom and her boobs with her. Daddy Warbucks thanked the team for their amazing support and friendship, and said that if Sapphire’s experience was as positive as it was last year, he’d be happy. Wow, he was incredibly undemanding. I imagined him sitting in a smoke-filled boardroom, pounding on a table, shouting that if things didn’t improve, heads were going to roll. The other thing that surprised me about Tom and Gia was their utter lack of sexual chemistry. I mean, sure, most twenty-five-year-old pop tarts are hardly growling with lust over their geezer grooms. But the husbands are usually a little more attentive to their playthings than Tom was.

  Our team had three Katies, who were coincidentally mothered by two Jennifers and a Jessica. They all seemed to go to the same hairdresser, the guy who cuts a straight line across the shoulders, blows it under and flips the bangs under a little too tightly with a curling iron.

  From the looks of Darcy and Ron, they were the perfect couple. No one would ever suspect Darcy resented the hell out of her husband, or that Ron flirted with soccer moms at tryouts. Maybe he wasn’t flirting with me. Maybe I was projecting my attraction onto him. It’s been a long time since I’ve had to use my vibometer. Perhaps it was on the fritz. They sat together smiling as if they were posing for their holiday card.

  Like the compulsion to pick at a scab, I couldn’t help looking at Ron to see if I was still in heat. Would he look like the constipated guy on the toilet, or the hot fudge sundae? Shit! Hot fudge sundae! I couldn’t understand why the realization that he was Darcy’s husband—and completely bad news—didn’t kill my attraction for him. I had never been into bad boys. Brad Pitt went down a notch when he stole Geena Davis’s money in Thelma and Louise. Even now, so many years after he played the rogue character, I look at him and think: Those girls really needed that money! Not to mention the whole heartbroken Jennifer Aniston thing. Why couldn’t I turn down the heat on this real-life taboo?

  I introduced myself and told the group that we were thrilled to have my daughter on the team because Rachel loved soccer and we recently moved to Santa Bella, so this would be a good opportunity for her to make new friends.

  Mimi immediately jumped in. “I need you to understand, Claire, that this is a serious team, not a social outlet for your family.”

  “Oh, um, I know that,” I stumbled. “I just meant that it’ll be nice to get to know all of you throughout the season.”

  “Right,” Mimi interrupted.

  Dick spoke for his package, saying that his girls moved from Hot Shots because the coach didn’t know what he was doing and the team’s record wasn’t what it could’ve been. “We’re here to win State Cup, plain and simple. The younger my girls win at State, the more they get used to the idea they’re champions. I’m always tellin’ parents colleges are looking for skills, but they also need to see confidence, and nothin’ gives a pl
ayer that winnin’ feeling more than kicking ass on the field. There’s only so much scholarship money out there and I want my kids at good colleges.”

  College scholarships?

  “Amen to that,” Raymond said as Leo nodded emphatically.

  “Straight up,” Loud Bobby added.

  When we got to Mimi, she stood in the red carpet pose, held her clipboard and flashed a wide smile. “Most of you know me. I’m Mimi Shasta, the team manager, and my daughter is a returning defender. Like the shirt says, soccer is my life. I played in college, so I absolutely love this game and congratulate you all on your choice not only in sports, but in clubs. Kix is simply the best soccer club for girls in Southern California.” She paused for Dick and Bobby to end their side conversation, then continued. “Girls who play sports are more likely to do well in school, stay away from drugs, delay sexual activity and reap a whole host of other social benefits.” Wow, I didn’t know that! “Eighty percent of the women CEOs at Fortune 500 companies played sports in their youth,” she added. Really?! “That’s why I am all about girl power. Girls playing sports is the single most effective way to keep your daughters on the right track in life,” she said. Parents nodded their heads. Thank God Rachel made the team, I thought, shaking away the image of my crack-addicted pregnant little dropout turning tricks on the corner of El Camino and Via del Mar.

  Pointing at our mute coach, Mimi continued. “You all know how lucky we are not only that your girls made the team, but to have Gunther as our coach.” Was he going to speak? “A lot of excellent players were cut from the team this year to make room for new girls—” Did she just glare at me? “so Gunther’s got a big job ahead of him getting our rookies in shape, but he knows what he’s doing, so I’m sure everyone will be fine.” Is she talking about Rachel? Didn’t Gunther think she was in shape if he took her on the team? Why wouldn’t she be fine? “I’m sure you already know that Gunther was the youngest player on the German National Team and scored more goals in the World Cup than any other single player in the world in two decades.” Whoa! Okay, the guy wasn’t a talker, but clearly he was a shooter. “Say hello, Gunther,” she said, nudging him slightly. Please dear God, do not let him reply, “Hello, Gunther.”