• • •
Not long after we agreed to move apart, I spent the day moping around the house until Kevin asked what was wrong. I was sad, I told him. He said I should stop being so serious and suggested we go play tennis. After an hour or so of rallying, we sat on a bench, chugging water, wiping our foreheads. “I just want us to be happy,” he said softly. Our lives wouldn’t change all that much, he assured me. We’d still have the same friends.
It had not occurred to me that either of us would lose friends. In that moment, I saw how much had gone uncounted: his mother’s sour cream pound cake, his father’s kisses delivered with a firm smack on my cheek, pizza nights and bike repairs and cookie dough and climbing trips and mutual friends.
I burst into hot sobs, my chest expanding and contracting with a force that drew uncomfortable glances from the color-coordinated doubles team on the neighboring court. Kevin seemed to understand as we sat together among the sweating Vancouverites, waiting for the spasms in my lungs to subside.
We walked home and cracked open beers and sat side by side in the hammock on the back porch. Deciding to break up, I thought, was like learning a star had burned out in a distant galaxy, even though you can still see it in the sky: You know something has irrevocably changed, but your senses suggest otherwise. Everything looks normal. Better than normal, even, on a summer afternoon in a hammock.
I would fall in love with a poet, he said, with pasty skin. Or maybe a monosyllabic outdoorsman named Chuck or Bud. We laughed, a little intoxicated by the possibility of laughter in the face of our unknown futures. I tried, but I couldn’t imagine his next girlfriend. She was prettier than me, I felt sure, but not smarter. I refused to allow him that.
When we settled into silence, our eyes followed the dog around the porch as he cracked cherry pits in his teeth. Kevin called him over, digging his fingers into glossy black fur as Roscoe leaned into him. “I feel like I’m losing a lot,” Kevin said quietly. I leaned my head back to watch the sky darken.
For once, I didn’t think about whether we were doing the right thing. I didn’t think about how hard it would be. Or how sad I would feel. I stopped wondering if rightness was something two people just had at the beginning or something they made together, over time. We had found a way forward—a way to be kind to each other—and, right or wrong, it was a relief.
We got up and vacuumed out his car and went for burritos on Commercial Drive. As we sipped cheap sangria, I thought about how, to everyone else in the restaurant, we must look like a normal couple eating a normal dinner: the exploded star, light-years away, still shining.
the football coach and the cheerleader
what makes a good love story?
September 1975—
He is tall. His blond hair pokes out from under his hat—a hat that sits high on his head, the kind truck drivers wear. It curls a little, his hair, and though he is a little wider at the hips, narrower in the shoulders, he is mostly lean. His face and neck and forearms are tanned from long afternoons on the football field. He wears the same shorts they all do—gray polyester, fitted, cut to mid-thigh, two snaps at the waist—coaches’ shorts. His T-shirts are from wrestling events he refereed in college. (Wrestling: a sport he, and most everyone else, pronounces as “wrasslin’.”) He chews tobacco—Red Man. Spits in an empty Coke bottle.
She’s seen him around, looking always like he knows where he’s going but is not in a hurry. He walks down the halls of her high school with wide strides, the same way he moves down the sidelines on Friday nights. But he is slower inside, making eye contact with the people he passes, always smiling, always friendly to the custodian, and the ladies in the cafeteria kitchen. He calls them by name. After only a few weeks he knows more people than she does, and she’s lived her whole life here. When he speaks, his accent is different from hers. He is not from here, she already knows, but several counties away. They both stretch the i in mines and pines and time, letting it flatten in their mouths. But when he says “coal,” he pronounces the l, unlike the people around her who clip it to coe. Coe mines.
She can see right away why they all like him—the players and the other coaches and the students in his Advanced PE class. Ease. That’s what he has, she thinks. He’s easy. When they sit down in the empty classroom, every question she asks seems entirely natural, as if it’s not an interview but a conversation between old acquaintances who meet unexpectedly—happily, even—after a few years apart. He has a knack for banter, a way of making her—or anyone, really—feel that they’ve got something significant in common: a shared love of sunny afternoons or blackberry cobbler that’s downright intimate. And he looks her straight in the eyes when she’s speaking. His lack of self-consciousness is expansive. She actually feels charming, like she’s flirting a little, something she doesn’t normally do. She finds herself smiling a lot, a big smile that shows her gums and her slightly gapped teeth. The Taylor smile, she once heard a boy say. It’s the one feature she shares with all five of her sisters.
The afternoon light warms the oiled-canvas window shades, and the chalkboards and desks glow a little. It’s sweltering September in the Appalachian mountains of Virginia. Where is he from, she asks (though she already knows—Wythe County, a farm boy), and why did he choose to move here, to Lee County, and what does he like most about coaching? His answers are straightforward, not profound but printable, quotable. She likes this. It makes her job easy. He says the people here are just as nice as can be, that the view of the mountains from the door of his trailer is plain gorgeous, that the cafeteria rolls taste a whole lot like his mom’s. “It doesn’t matter if they like you, only that they respect you,” he says about the ballplayers, looking serious but not severe, his boyishness momentarily receding. She listens intently, unconsciously fingering the straight blond hair she wears parted in the center and hanging down to her hips. Eventually she stops looking at the list of questions she’s written out in her notebook and they just talk. She does not chew on the end of her pen or stare down at her cuticles. Unlike in other interviews, she does not even think about what she should say before she says it. The conversation propels itself without effort in the regular and relaxed way the hands move around the clock. Occasionally she remembers the profile she’s writing for the school newspaper and jots a few things down in her notebook. Occasionally she thinks of her best friend and coeditor Connie, who’d offered her the interview with the new football coach, saying, “I hear he’s a real asshole.” Had she been thinking of someone else?
“Oh, gosh,” he says suddenly, drawing out his o’s, looking at the clock. “I’ve got a meeting in the field house,” he tells her, “but thank you,” as if it’s she who’s doing him a favor by conducting the interview. “You’re welcome,” she replies, before realizing she is the one who ought to thank him. He stands, but not quite straight, keeping his left hand on the desk, and extends his right hand toward her. She’s not used to shaking hands with teachers or friends, but he’s not quite either of those things. His palm is big, his grip firm, almost formal. He nods and smiles and shakes in a single, coordinated gesture, like the preacher after Sunday service. When he grins, his bright blue eyes narrow, squeezed by his cheeks.
The profile is easy to write. That night she finishes it in a couple of hours, pausing only to think up the words to describe him: Nice? Friendly? With a hint of mischief? Yes, yes, but she can’t quite squeeze it into a single sentence. There’s something about the way he hovers around adulthood but doesn’t touch down, she thinks. It’s his certainty that buoys him, the way he walks around town as if he’s lived his whole life here. The faith he places in the rules of the game. More than his ease, she envies this about him: that the world he inhabits is so ordered. Coach Catron loves football as much as his mom’s Sunday dinners, she writes. He’s one of those rare people who, at twenty-two, is doing exactly what he was born to do. When you first meet him, you’ll know this immediately.
• • •
I realize, acco
rding to all generally accepted knowledge of time and memory and biology, that it is not possible that I could remember the day my parents met, but I do. I remember it as if I lived it. I can see the way he grinned at her when she introduced herself, like he could tell they’d be friends. And the way she almost but not quite smiled back. I can see the afternoon light in the classroom, though I don’t actually know where the interview took place. Still, it is as real to me as every other memory in my brain.
I’ve always thought of stories as records, as ways of remembering our lives. And I thought it was our duty to tell them, to keep the past alive in the present—to keep ourselves alive. As in: I tell, therefore I am.
“My mom is twenty-nine,” I said smugly to the other second-grade girls as we sat around the lunch table and talked about our mothers. She was the youngest mom (though not by much), and I felt proud of this. “My mom met my dad when she was a cheerleader and he was the new football coach at her high school. She can still do a cartwheel.”
At seven I was allowed to be solipsistic about the story of my life, to tell and retell the boy-meets-girl that brought me into being. I wish I could say that I eventually outgrew this story, that I got tired of it. But I’ve spent decades recounting it for anyone who would listen.
For the first eighteen years of my life, I spent every Friday of every fall beside a football field. I was walking home from work one day when some combination of scents—the damp of rotting fall leaves, a waft of cigarette smoke—called to mind the squat cinder-block bathrooms that stood behind the end zone of a rural Virginia football field. I could see the green-tinged walls and the broken hand driers and the brown paper towels that littered the concrete floors. Just outside the bathroom, high school girls and grandmas sucked on Camel Lights and gossiped between quarters.
I remember running around behind the bleachers, palming a couple of clammy dollar bills for a plate of nachos—the plastic kind with a separate compartment for the yellow liquid cheese. Sometimes the ladies at the concession stand gave the coaches’ daughters free hot chocolate in little Styrofoam cups. Sometimes we bought Now and Laters or those gritty sweet-and-sour pastel lollipops that burned your tongue if you ate the whole thing.
Dad paced the sidelines in his polyester shorts, his hat brim tilted skyward, his clipboard in hand (a clipboard his daughters decorated with bubble letters in green and gold paint markers). His face was serious but otherwise inexpressive, a coach’s poker face. I barely watched the games, but I knew to turn toward the field when the crowd leaped up, to pay attention when our team neared the goal line. I wanted to win because I liked winning, but also because I liked walking into the field house with Mom and my younger sister, Casey, after the game and smelling the sweaty, foam-rubber scent of victory. Those nights, we stayed up late eating seven-layer dip and Jell-O salad and watching TV while the coaches and their wives drank light beer in someone’s refinished basement.
There was always a crowd, even when the away team came from over the mountains, because on Friday nights in southwestern Virginia, football was what people did. I loved the ceremony of it: the opening prayer and the national anthem and the local news crews setting up cameras. The announcer’s rumble as the boys tore through the paper banner. I liked the scent of grass stains and pepperoni, and how the bleachers shook before the first punt as the crowd thundered their feet in accelerating suspense. I liked the drum majors’ spangled uniforms and neat movements, the whirling rifles of the color guard at halftime. That I would be a cheerleader, taking my place in the drama of the game as soon as I was able, was a given from the start.
“The greatest thing in the world to me was going to a football game,” my mom said of her teenage years.
My mom was never alone as a child. She never had friends over. She never went anywhere other than to school or church, to visit family, to lay silk flowers on the veterans’ graves at the cemetery. (The cemetery was the only place family photos were taken, with the kids lined up tallest to shortest.) Football games meant somewhere to go, something to do, a ride out of town surrounded by friends. A winning team meant leaving the mountains, staying in a hotel.
Maybe, to an outsider, the world of high school football seems incidental to their love story, little more than a setting. And I understand why it might seem this way. Since I moved to Canada, football has shifted to the far margins of my life; I don’t go to games or watch them on TV, though my dad will often text me a photo of the Virginia Tech stadium on a sunny Saturday afternoon. But when I was young, love—my parents’ love and the love of our family and the daily domestic life we all shared—was tethered to football. To my mind, football made our family.
• • •
When I was a kid, I loved to say to my mom: “Tell me about when you were my age.” But her answer was always the same: There wasn’t that much to tell. She never had the nice things Casey and I did. We were so lucky—did I realize that?
I don’t think she meant to be evasive. She just couldn’t see that what seemed mundane to her fascinated me: the roads that wound through mountain hollows, the men who spent their days underground—doing what exactly? Digging? I wanted to know how it felt to have seven siblings and to sleep—all eight of you—in a single bedroom in a four-room cabin perched on the side of a mountain.
My dad sometimes joked about my mom’s childhood. He told me the movie Coal Miner’s Daughter was actually about her. He said he bought her her first pair of shoes.
Mom said that she was lucky to get a MoonPie and an RC Cola for lunch. She said she was so skinny the other kids told her to turn sideways and stick out her tongue, then they called her Zipper.
I was too young to really understand poverty; I still believed that poor people were happier than the rest of us, because a world in which some people were both poor and miserable seemed too cruel to be real. I never considered the possibility that the past might be a place my mom would prefer to avoid.
As I got older, I stopped asking about my mom’s life, but I stuck with my project of piecing the story together myself. One day she’d mention the Jeep she drove in college. Or she’d show me how to make Mamaw’s cornbread. She’d glance at my baggy jeans and tell me that when she was in high school, the girls wore pants so tight they had to lie down on the bed just to zip them up. And there were the photos hanging around the house: of her and her sisters on a swing set, her parents—young and leggy—leaning into each other by the ocean, all eight kids dressed up and standing next to a tombstone in order from tallest to shortest.
I don’t think anyone ever sat me down and told me the full story about how my parents met and fell in love. That it exists, whole and coherent, is thanks to me. I am the story’s author and keeper; I assembled its pieces, filling in any holes with intuition or inference. And I can no longer be sure what is original and what was added.
• • •
“Connie said he was an asshole and refused to interview him,” Mom told me one day. “So she made me do it.”
I must’ve been old enough for her to use the word asshole, so it can’t have been the first time I heard about their meeting. But this is how the story begins for me—an interview with an asshole. I don’t remember a time when it began differently.
I always include that word, asshole, when I tell the story. Probably because it’s such a poor descriptor for my father, a man who is so friendly and well liked that I spent my childhood avoiding trips to the grocery store with him, knowing we’d be sidelined for a lengthy conversation when we inevitably ran into someone he knew. Even people he doesn’t know—the cashier, the tour guide, the friends I introduce him to—are charmed by him immediately.
Maybe at twenty-two he still had the arrogance of a college athlete, or the seriousness of a young man new to a position of authority. Maybe he could seem like an asshole. “It’s more important to be respected than to be liked,” he told me when I was twenty-two and facing down my first classroom of college freshmen.
That Connie was so
wrong about my dad, that she was unknowingly referring to the man my mom would marry four years later, is, I think, one of my favorite parts of the story.
• • •
When Casey was in high school she had two boys vying for her attention (something I couldn’t have fathomed at sixteen). When she asked us for advice, Mom looked at her and said simply, “Date them both.” The three of us were folding laundry in my bedroom.
“You’re way too young to worry about committing to one person,” Mom said, adding casually: “You know, I was seeing other people right up until your dad and I got engaged.”
“What?” I cut in. “But you weren’t really dating other people.” It landed somewhere between a statement and an interrogation.
“I was,” she said, without elaboration.
It was such a small thing, an aside, and yet it was the first time I ever had occasion to question the version of the story I’d spent years crafting and retelling. I’d always imagined my dad was the only one for my mom, that she’d ditched her high school boyfriend for him and never looked back. Were there really other guys, other hands held in darkened movie theaters? Or, more realistically—since she was in college when they married—frat boys at keg parties? Basketball players? Or did she just like thinking of herself as someone who kept her options open? Maybe, even at nineteen, she really was too practical to put all her affection in a single basket. Or maybe that’s how she wanted her daughters to be.
How to Fall in Love with Anyone Page 3
