by Inman Majors
PENELOPE LEMON
Yellow Shoe Fiction
Michael Griffith, Series Editor
Also by Inman Majors
Love’s Winning Plays
The Millionaires
Wonderdog
Swimming in Sky
PENELOPE
LEMON
Game On!
INMAN MAJORS
LOUISIANA STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS BATON ROUGE
Published by Louisiana State University Press
Copyright © 2018 by Inman Majors
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
First printing
DESIGNER: Michelle A. Neustrom
TYPEFACE: Whitman
PRINTER AND BINDER: Sheridan Books, Inc.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: Majors, Inman, author.
Title: Penelope Lemon : game on! / Inman Majors.
Description: Baton Rouge : Louisiana State University Press, 2019.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018001224| ISBN 978-0-8071-6951-3 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 978-0-8071-6950-6 (pdf) | ISBN 978-0-8071-6949-0 (epub)
Classification: LCC PS3563.A3927 P46 2019 | DDC 813/.54—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018001224
The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.
To Betty Winton, my aunt who left us too soon.
PENELOPE LEMON
1
Penelope Lemon sat on the bleachers at her son’s baseball practice, wondering if she’d still be married to her husband if she’d never seen him in his yellow kimono robe. The robe in question was a short little matronly number that came just to his knees and no farther. It wasn’t actually a kimono, of course. It was shorter, for one, much shorter, and made not from silk but from the same poly-satin as most of her own undergarments. James was a tall, pale man with knobby knees, and she thought, then as now, that it was an odd sartorial choice for someone hoping to entice a woman into sexual dalliance.
It had been hard for her to have sex with him after an early morning sighting of the shorty robe, especially when he’d initiated the proceedings while still wearing it, his knees poking out so obviously, and the sash cinching his midsection in a way as to make him look paunchy above and bony below. On those bleak mornings, her first order of business was to remove the robe. Her second, as they were moving toward the bed, was to try to erase it from her memory. She could do this—most of the time, in fact—unless she happened to spot his cowboy boots lying about, but that was a whole other story.
She actually found James handsome when he wasn’t wearing kimonos or boots. He had a fine head of black hair that had just been turning salt and pepper when they divorced and expressive brown eyes that reflected what he was thinking or reading, even what he was eating. A fresh grapefruit, purchased from the high school band fundraiser, could set his eyes to flickering and firing, and just one mouthful in, he could be discoursing on the hybridization of citrus, or the benefits of taking one thousand times the recommended daily dose of vitamin C, or even a roadside store in Florida with a chained bear and pecan rolls that he visited as a boy.
These discourses were predictable and frequent and Penelope tended to enjoy them, nodding her head whether actually listening or not. James had a deliberate, near-monotone way of speaking, and when he was off on one of his grapefruit jags she could go into a state of hypnosis, listening without listening, nodding rhythmically, thinking of all sorts of things besides bears and vitamin C and pecan logs. It was really quite relaxing, especially in the morning before her coffee kicked in.
The shorty robe was not predictable. She never knew when it might rear its silky smooth head. She did note that the donning of the kimono frequently coincided with amorous morning thoughts James was having. Perhaps the breeze coming in from below contrasted with the warmth and softness of the poly-satin in ways he found provocative. Perhaps longer robes didn’t offer this same arousing juxtaposition. Did airflow cause blood flow to sensitive areas? Or did amorous thoughts precipitate a mad rush for his lingerie? It was definitely a chicken/egg situation.
Regardless, one day the mini-kimono disappeared. He only asked about it once, whether she’d seen it, and when she said, no, no, she hadn’t, he let the matter drop. His morning passions waned for a while, but not for too long. He dutifully wore the full-length terrycloth robe she bought him, but bathwear was no longer an accessory or prelude to his lovemaking. She felt a little guilty about depriving him of his man-gligee, but her peace of mind had been at stake, as had their love life.
James was smart. That was what had first attracted her. She was smart too, despite the fact that she’d dropped out of college to marry her first husband, who happened to be a huge, huge redneck. Basically, if you were from Hillsboro, Virginia, and weren’t a doctor or lawyer’s kid, you likely had a bit of red about the neck, no matter how well you did in school. Anyway, her first marriage had kind of made sense at the time.
Now here she was, a twice-divorced, underemployed mother to a nine-year-old son. That same son was currently taking his turn at bat as the coach did his best to look interested and hopeful as he lobbed in pitches from the mound. Penelope had been a good softball and basketball player as a kid, but Theo, poor thing, had inherited his father’s limited athletic ability.
“Come on, Theo!” Penelope yelled after he had let the third straight ball go over the plate without moving the bat from his shoulder where it rested so comfortably. “You can do it.”
Theo could not, in fact, do it, a truth that every parent around Penelope knew all too well. The coach’s wife, sitting on the front row of the bleachers, offered a Come on, Theo, but it was perfunctory at best. Every parent in the stands and every child on the field knew that Theo generally refused to swing and would either strike out or walk depending on the accuracy of the pitcher. Oh, how Penelope longed for a walk when the pitcher had accrued three balls on young Theodore. And when that fourth ball came, and Theo had looked back to the sympathetic umpire to check that his luck had held, he would sprint headlong in his wobbly, storkish way (so like James, so so like James) toward first base where he would smile sheepishly and pretend he was like the other boys whose fathers had been working on their hitting, their pitching and catching, and yes, on their running too, since birth.
“Come on, Theo!” Penelope yelled again, though she was beginning to see the humor of the situation: a little boy who didn’t give a rat’s ass about hitting a baseball being begged and cajoled to do so by a group of full-grown adults. “Just swing it once.”
At this the coach’s wife turned and smiled. Penelope giggled and said, “Just move the bat a little.”
The coach shot her a wry grin now from the field. He was a good sort, kind even to the lesser players, and nice-looking. It was too bad he was married, and married apparently to someone who loved youth baseball as much as he did, judging from her attendance at every single practice. WTH? Penelope would have paid good money to skip these biweekly two hours in the heat and dust. Nearly as much as Theo himself would have paid.
Theo seemed to sense the adults’ levity at his plight and swung—like an unoiled robot—at the next pitch and then the next, whiffing badly at both.
“Good job,” said the coach. “Good try.”
“That’s the way, Theo, that’s the way to try!” Penelope yelled, clapping and smiling, fighting a hysterical urge to laugh as Theo trotted off, smiling himself, toward the dugout and his glove and then the comfort of deepest right field.
James didn’t play sports growing up, seeing himself as more the rugged out
doorsman instead, a kind of overachieving individualist in the mode of Theodore Roosevelt, the old Rough Rider himself. James had been reading a book called Theodore Rex during her pregnancy. The book stirred him considerably, and he would turn to her in bed while reading and blurt out that rex meant king in Latin. She told him she knew what rex meant since she’d had two years of Latin in high school. A few minutes later, he asked if she’d ever had salmon tartare, explaining that tartare meant raw, and that it was a delicacy in the Pacific Northwest, and that explorers in that region, lone frontiersmen, had been eating it for hundreds of years, and that the Indians had eaten it for eons before that. He said that one day he’d like to go off into the woods of the Pacific Northwest with just a rifle and fly rod to see what that was like. Then he said, no, British Columbia would be better, more rugged, more out there. He asked if she’d read Jack London. She admitted she had, but that she’d grown tired of reading about dogs fighting and cold weather. When she said this, he nodded in a sympathetic way that suggested she wasn’t of true frontier stock. He talked briefly of the first knife he’d had as a boy and of cooking bologna in the woods behind his subdivision. Then he said he’d like to name their son Theodore.
The next day he rose early and went to shoot beer cans at his uncle’s farm.
She thought of all this while Theo, in the far outfield, stood flinging his hat up in the air and attempting—and failing—to catch it upon its return. Now he was trying to kick it off the ground and into the air so as to catch it. Penelope noted that her son’s cleats looked shiny as tap shoes compared to the mud-caked ones of his teammates. His hat also looked newer and stiffer than those of the other boys, as if it refused to mold to his uninterested head on principle alone. But perhaps this kicking and flinging would make it appear played in, sweated in. Did Theo even sweat? He was often pungent, but she couldn’t recall visually apparent perspiration. He was indoors most of the time. James claimed he didn’t perspire due to highly evolved glands. According to him, modern man, the beneficiary of forced-air cooling and no longer having to make his way in the wild by dint of muscle and hustle, was losing the need to sweat. But this wasn’t true, at least in James’s case. A good western could lather him up plenty. His favorite gambit on these nights was to call her Miss Kitty, who he said was the kindly bordello keeper from Gunsmoke and rumored paramour of Sheriff Matt Dillon. Afterwards, their lovemaking did have a certain frontier flair, but that might have just been James’s joyous shout of yee-hi at the culminating moment.
She considered yelling out to Theo, urging him to pay attention as the other parents did, the dads especially, but found she didn’t really care if he paid attention or not. He wasn’t frontier stock, no matter how many times James took him to the outdoors store to look at canoes. The only reason she’d signed him up for baseball was in the hope that he’d find some playmates. So far nothing had developed, though the boy playing second base had potential. He was smallish and had a bright, quizzical look about him, as if he too would enjoy talking about Pokémon cards and Legos. Additionally, he wore tennis shoes and not cleats, and this, Penelope felt sure, marked him as an individualist—or his mother as one—and not the kind who would call Theo Weird Turd or Fart Boy as they did on the school bus each day. Perhaps she should introduce herself to the mother.
All the parents were up in the bleachers, the fathers who she guessed chose to be there, the mothers, many single like herself, because they had to be, the coach’s wife being the perky exception. Only the mother of the individualist second baseman sat away from the crowd, behind the backstop in a foldout chair, reading and never glancing to the field.
She had to be cool if she read at practice.
Thinking this and feeling resolute, Penelope got up, smiled once just to be polite at the father of the hulking first baseman, who seemed to enjoy ogling her in between exhortations to his son to keep his elbow up, and made her way behind the backstop. Penelope stood just behind the woman, trying to get within her peripheral vision so that a conversation might start naturally when she turned a page or something loud happened on the field.
That moment was a while in coming, for the reading woman either hadn’t noticed her or didn’t want to talk. She sat in a cheap fold-out chair, with thin tan legs sticking out of jean shorts and wearing a black T-shirt that Penelope couldn’t see, but that she gathered was for some rock band. Penelope hoped so. She was a bit of a closet metalhead herself: Zeppelin, AC/DC, Metallica, etc. The woman’s massive sunglasses had slipped halfway down her very tan nose and Penelope wondered why she didn’t push them up. Perhaps her book was that engrossing. Moving up a few feet, as if truly riveted by nine-year-old baseball, Penelope slowly, slyly, craned her neck for a look at the cover. She couldn’t make out all of it, but bursting bosoms and bare masculine chests were in no short supply. That these chests were heaving in front of an elegant desk and sumptuous leather chair suggested that executive-style hanky-panky was in the offing.
This gave her pause. She didn’t object to books with tawdry covers, or to books with horny executives who saved a lot of time by using their offices as bedrooms. God no. She devoured them by the dozen. But wouldn’t it be disconcerting to greet this woman when she was in the throes of an especially raunchy section? Enrique might just now be tying up Regina with his expensive silk tie and Penelope hated to interrupt.
It was then that the woman laughed in a scoffing way and said, “Oh give me a break, would you.”
Startled by this, Penelope tried to give the impression of deep immersion in little-boy baseball, yanking her head toward the field and squinting in appraisal as the fathers often did. She nearly shouted for Theo to Look alive out there, but thought that might be laying it on a bit thick. She could feel the woman eyeballing her and realized she was standing closer than was the societal norm. There was no question she’d been caught spying.
“Have you read this?” the woman said, brandishing the book at Penelope and shaking it in a rough way that made her blond ponytail bounce. Her voice was deeper and huskier than Penelope would have guessed from her size, and her whole manner was like an aggressive small dog.
Penelope couldn’t decide whether to maintain her ruse of engrossment or just cop to being a weird turd who stood too close to people reading inappropriate books at Little League fields. The woman was staring at her through the windshield of her spectacles and seemed so irritated by what she’d just read that she didn’t care if Penelope was looming over her, only whether Penelope was the type of person to indulge in books like The Tycoon’s Dare.
“Well, it’s total crap,” the woman said. “I can’t believe my friend recommended it.”
“I haven’t read it,” said Penelope.
This was a bald-faced lie. She’d read it two weeks ago, and the man’s name was Enrique, only it wasn’t Regina being tied to the credenza with a Savile Row tie, but Sabrina. She felt guilty now, and more than a little tawdry. She glanced unconvincingly toward the outfield to avoid the woman’s inquisitive gaze, and saw that Theo was shaking his rear end, fast and furious, bouncing side to side like an old-timey washing machine. It was his Shakira dance. Until now, she’d assumed he restricted his diva dancing to the house, but apparently that wasn’t the case. He truly was a Fart Boy, an unabashed Weird Turd.
The reading woman was glaring at her, but she didn’t care. Theo was really moving out there. And now the centerfielder was gyrating a bit too, moving his shoulders and laughing, egging Theo on. Penelope could see the bleacher parents pointing and smiling. It was clear they found this behavior in character and they seemed, for the most part, to be amused by this break in the action.
Despite the scowling book snob beside her and the parents pointing at the spectacle that was her son, Penelope found that she was smiling. She turned to the woman and said: “That’s my son.”
“The one way out there?”
“Yes,” she said. “The dancing one.”
“Oh, is that what he’s doing?”
“Which one?”
Here Penelope sang the bit about her hips not lying and how things were starting to feel right.
The woman didn’t reply, which Penelope found surprising. It was a good song and she wasn’t a bad singer. She could feel the book being brandished at her as if she was the sort—the exact sort—to like such trash. She moved from one foot to the other, unsure whether to look at the woman or the book being waved like a disapproving banner. For some reason, she now recalled that James had once taken eleven months to read Anna Karenina. He would very importantly crack the book while in bed, sigh appreciatively every few sentences, then fall asleep four pages in. During the time of Anna Karenina, she’d finished forty-two novels, not all of them trash. She’d read the books everyone else was reading, The Secret Life of Bees and The Goldfinch, all those. At some point, tired of the huffing James did about her reading choices, she’d begun the tally of Books Read versus Books Started. When nearly a year passed and James was not quite to the halfway point of Tolstoy’s masterpiece, Penelope began to tease him, gently of course, the only way possible to tease James, about their 42:1 disparity, with the result being that he spent all of one beautiful fall weekend racing through Anna Karenina, though Penelope was sure he was skimming huge chunks there at the end. Anyway, no one could ever say James hadn’t read Tolstoy.
Snapping back to the present, Penelope took another gander at the cover of The Tycoon’s Dare. On closer inspection, Enrique didn’t look like a high-powered global executive who cut billion-dollar multinational deals. He looked more like a pro wrestler, super tan, all muscled up, and faintly dewy with sweat. Did this stop Sabrina’s breast from swelling? It did not. That top was coming off and coming off soon.
