Stillriver

by Andrew Rosenheim

  Even baseball failed to lift his spirits, associated as it was with his mother. She had always encouraged him to play, and though completely ignorant of the intricacies of, say, the infield fly rule, was happy to let him expound on its complications for hours. In the year after her death, he stuck like glue to his memory of her at the school baseball diamond, the image of her standing by the bleachers as he took infield practice: a tall woman with straight, corn-coloured hair that came to her shoulders, in a blue dress of light cotton that was almost diaphanously thin, and sandals the colour of caramel. A pretty woman (to Michael beautiful), who never made the slightest effort to look good – no make-up, no nail polish, no jewellery except for her gold wedding band. Freckly skin that turned pink in the early summer sun and was only slightly tanned by Labor Day. A striking face, with high cheekbones, a sliver-thin nose, and eyes the colour of lapis lazuli. The effect was decorous until she laughed, with that crooked lower tooth and lips that seemed to stretch from ear to ear. When she smiled at him out on the field, Michael felt he could do anything.

  She attended all his games; his father never did. His father hadn’t even played catch with him as a little boy, and when he’d once asked him why had said only, ‘I don’t know how.’ Which proved, strangely enough, to be the truth. Unlike the other teachers at school, Michael’s father coached no sport, took no interest in the teams, extra- or intra-mural, attended no basketball games, watched no track and field events, did not help raise money through a summer bazaar to build the school new tennis courts. This distanced him slightly from most of the other teachers; more important, in Michael’s view, it distanced him from Michael. His mother tried to explain: ‘Your father didn’t have time to play sports when he was young. He had to go to work.’ Doubtless this was admirable, but Michael wanted only to have a father who would play ball with him.

  The summer after his mother died, Michael was too old for Little League, but he made it into the Colts, playing against older boys. He was used to playing shortstop in Little League, pitching on those occasions when fat Ronny Buell ran out of steam and got shellacked. He was an okay fielder with a strong arm but what he could really do was hit, not for power (he had grown two inches in the last year but still weighed all of 124 pounds), but solidly, always making contact, drawing lots of walks, batting well over .400 in his last year of Little League.

  Now against these bigger boys in the new league he was demoted to right field and batted seventh in the order. He played well enough, but found it joyless, being younger than his team-mates and therefore not their social equal, spending innings in the field trying not to think about his own misery, counting cracks in the dugout’s mud floor when there was no prospect of batting soon.

  He was nonetheless hitting a more than respectable .326 when they faced Shelby under the ancient lights in that town’s park. They were losing 2–1 in the second inning when he came to bat against a tall, lanky kid he’d never seen before – later he learned he was seventeen years old, a vacationing ringer called in for the night who’d already had Big League scouts watching him at his high school in Flint.

  He took a fastball strike that absolutely zipped in. As a team-mate said in the first inning, ‘It comes at you like a raisin-sized piece of piss.’ He stepped out of the box, ignoring the catcher who was laughing at his obvious discomfiture. He swung far too early on the second pitch, missing altogether a slower breaking ball he should have waited for and punched to right field. Cross with himself, he tensed up now, the count 0–2, and watched as the next pitch came out of the pitcher’s hand like a fastball but with obvious spin.

  SLIDER, his mind registered, which was all he remembered after the ball failed to break and hit him square in the left ear, precisely where the ear flap would have been if he hadn’t worn his lucky helmet, which didn’t have an ear flap.

  He never lost consciousness, but he was severely concussed. Stretchered from the field, he spent a night in Fennville Hospital for observation. When he woke up in the early morning, he found his father sitting on a metal chair reading a history of Michigan Indians. Michael felt dizzy and nauseated. ‘The pitch didn’t move,’ he complained.

  His father looked up briefly from his book. ‘Apparently, neither did you.’

  He missed the last four games of the season, but was relieved at this. For he was scared now, frightened at the prospect of facing pitchers again, though he felt he could tell no one of his fears. I could have told Mom. He knew that somehow he should go to the batting cage in Burlington and face the Iron Mike there, set it at top speed. Wasn’t that what you were supposed to do, get back on the horse when it had just bucked you off?

  His depression was gone, replaced by fear. At first, baseball was the obvious source, but soon he couldn’t have said what he was afraid of; only that arbitrarily, quite out of the blue, an unsettled feeling would come on which escalated into a sense of vulnerability that had him looking around, as if under attack. Even on the beach, where he had always loved to swim, he could grow frightened, finding the sand sweeping into water somehow intimidating and scary in its expansiveness. It seemed that, with his mother gone from the world, she was also gone from her supporting position in his head – as if some inner mother had disappeared too. The first time he woke up in the middle of the night, badly frightened – of what? Burglars? Ghosts? he was never really sure – he had gone to the door of the small bedroom where his father now slept. ‘Pop,’ he called out, tentatively.

  He heard the heavy frame of his father roll over in bed. ‘What’s the problem?’

  Michael hesitated. ‘I thought I heard something downstairs.’

  There was a pause. ‘Well, you didn’t,’ his father said. There was another pause. ‘Now go back to bed. You’ve got school tomorrow.’

  After that when he woke up in the night he turned his light on and read (baseball books: he finished all the works the school library held by John R. Tunis in six months of broken nights). If he concentrated hard enough on the book the fear would subside; if it was especially bad, he’d turn on his transistor radio as well, tuned low to a Detroit talk show – the company of voices was more comforting than music – until he’d suddenly wake up at daybreak with the bedside lamp on, a book on his chest, and a voice describing the traffic jams near Cobo Arena.

  It was strange, this fear, especially for a once-confident boy growing up in a small town. So where did it come from? He wasn’t sure; he knew only that it had arrived with the slider that didn’t break, that shattering pitch that seemed to have told him, You are exposed. And there is no one to hide behind. He felt small, and vulnerable, and afraid. He did not see how he would ever be able to become a man.

  He wanted to huddle, secure in his small bedroom, clutched up like a neurotic war veteran suffering from shell shock. And what he did was a variant of this, for he spent the afternoons, sitting on the carpeted floor of his bedroom, playing imaginary games with marbles his mother had given him years before. He divided the marbles into two teams, and had them play an odd kind of football game between them; sometimes, they divided into warring nations, with heroes (his favourite was the blue marble with a slight chip) leading squads into battle against marble foes. Strange? Of course, and a childlike reversion that gave him some comfort and a feeling of protection. He didn’t want to go anywhere; in his room he was safe. I am becoming peculiar, he told himself, using those very words, but I don’t know what else to do.

  Oddly, it was his father who changed things. ‘You busy today?’ he said one Saturday morning at breakfast. It was halfway through autumn, cold now but too early for snow, and a little more than six months after Michael’s mother had died. Michael shook his head. He was never busy now. His father picked up his newspaper and began reading the front page. As he turned the page he said calmly, ‘You might want to go down to the drugstore and talk to Alvin. He’s looking for somebody to help out there. Might be time you got a parttime job.’

  He didn’t make it downtown until almost noon
, torn between curiosity and resentment at his father’s suggestion. Not, actually, at the suggestion itself, but at his father’s making it. The one time he has an idea for me, Michael thought, and it’s intended to get me out of his hair. When he walked in the store he saw Alvin Simpson at the back, serving someone at the liquor counter. Michael knew Alvin to say hello to, and remembered standing as a little boy in the store holding his father’s hand, while the two men loomed above him, deepvoiced, sometimes laughing, while he tried to keep patient, hoping he would be allowed to pick out a sucker or roll of Choco-mints on the way out.

  Now Michael looked down the store and wondered how even to speak to the man without his father present. What did he know about Alvin Simpson, except that he sat on the school board and that Michael’s father would talk to him when he shopped in the store? What had his mother once said? Something about Alvin’s similarity to Pop, that Alvin too had picked Stillriver instead of letting it pick him. Whatever that meant.

  Michael walked slowly round the store, trying to gather his nerve; he didn’t understand why, but the fear was there again. Cigarettes, candy, gum, newspapers, magazines, paperback books, the soda fountain, sun tan lotion, shaving cream, beer in the twin iceboxes – like Alvin, they all looked different now, oddly alien, as if bathed in a new kind of light. Suddenly he was at the liquor counter and found Alvin looking at him.

  ‘Mr Simpson, I heard you were looking for someone to work here.’

  ‘That’s right.’ He looked amused. ‘Anyone you can recommend?’

  Flustered, Michael started to stutter until Alvin spoke again. ‘Pay is a dollar seventy-five an hour. I take taxes out at source. I want you four to six on weekdays, nine to six Saturdays and eight to one Sundays – I need help putting the papers together. Summer hours are longer. You can start tomorrow. How’s that?’

  There goes baseball, he thought with relief. ‘Okay.’

  ‘Let me introduce you to Marilyn.’

  They walked up to the front of the store where a thin old sharp-jawed lady in a white uniform stood behind the peanuts counter, her back to the cigarette racks. She was smoking herself. ‘Marilyn, this is Michael. Henry Wolf’s boy.’

  She crushed out her cigarette and shook his hand. ‘We know each other, don’t we? A little anyway,’ and she flashed a smile at him.

  He smiled back a little nervously, but there was nothing scary about Marilyn – she quickly took Michael under her wing and showed him what to do. And he took to the job at once. For the first time Michael was in a world altogether outside his family; even the world of school had the dubious benefit of his father’s presence. Here in the drugstore, no one ever mentioned his mother; no one asked him if he was scared, or how he got on with his father, or whether he liked his younger brother. People weren’t unkind (Marilyn in particular seemed to keep a mildly maternal eye on him); it was simply that they assumed his personal affairs were his business and not related to the business of the store, their joint enterprise and connecting link. He was treated, for the first time in his life, as an adult.

  Which was unnerving and did sometimes frighten him, in the essential emotional coldness of its premise – no substitute mother here. But he got used to it, and in any case was usually too busy to let it bother him. In the job itself there was a pleasing alternation of the finite with the open-ended. The finite had to do with stock: replacing liquor, loading beer into the coolers, opening fresh cartons of cigarettes (the extra-longs were a pain, and did not fit the racks). It took Michael all of three days to break the letter code – DFC, say, for $1.29 – which showed the wholesale price on the label, and discover the mark-ups involved: gargantuan for the ephemeral summertime products (sun tan lotion, ice-cream, and charcoal), modest for items full-time residents needed, or thought they did (medicines, cigarettes, and razor blades).

  Open-ended, on the other hand, was the relationship with customers – town regulars, expending a munificent two bits a day for a newspaper; sleek summer folk buying high class booze for their beach parties; poorer visitors from the trailers in the State Park, bitching about the prices. So he was never bored and always busy, since Marilyn made sure, even when the store was empty, that nobody ever just stood around; if there was nothing that needed restocking, there were always shelves to dust. At home nothing seemed to happen any more; in the store, life was an endless series of episodes.

  And there was also the matter of Alvin. An intelligent man, he ran his store with a savvy industry that would have seen him prosper in a more sophisticated business. He was, unusually, a Democrat, who couldn’t bring himself to vote for McGovern in 1972 but had voted for Carter even though Ford was a Michigan native. Alvin loved politics and baseball. Coming from a home where politics rarely got a mention and his father didn’t play sports, Michael found talking about these subjects – and with an adult – a marvellous novelty. Alvin’s own children were grown up: Marie, who lived in a suburb of Detroit, and Phil, an executive for a Chicago sporting goods firm who had never taken any interest in the store and even as a boy had never worked there. This was something Alvin had accepted, according to Marilyn, but felt sad about. ‘Alvin’s built this business from nothing,’ she said, ‘but he’s got nobody to turn it over to.’

  The only problem was that Alvin turned out to have a bad temper, which scared Michael. Alvin would become suddenly, unpredictably enraged by a smart-ass kid fingering the candy, or a summer lady complaining about prices, and retreat behind the raised pharmacy counter where, standing, he would pound out prescriptions on his Hermes typewriter, his lower lip quivering as he talked furiously to himself. Interrupting him in such moments was almost fatal, since even the most anodyne request could reignite his rage. Though this fury rarely lasted more than five minutes, Michael still found it excruciating trying to explain to a baffled customer why no, not for all the tea in China was Michael willing to go on their behalf at just that moment and ask the pharmacist about anything.

  Yet it was not the awkwardness with customers that bothered him most when Alvin flared up, it was his own fear. He’s not going to hit me, he’d tell himself as Alvin’s lips began to quiver, but knowing this rationally did nothing to make him less afraid. One morning – Sunday, so it was an early start – Larry Bottel failed to pick him up at quarter to eight as arranged. Michael waited and waited, then ran all the way downtown, entering the store out of breath to find Alvin standing behind a stack of half-assembled Sunday editions of the Chicago Tribune, lip quivering, jaw jutting, absolutely furious. Michael had the full brunt of that particular blow-up, for by the time Larry sailed in at nine thirty, hungover but acting perky, Alvin’s temper had subsided. He was actually laughing at Larry’s insouciance while Michael simmered with resentment at the injustice of Larry going scot free when an hour before, thanks to Larry, Alvin had seemed ready to kill the hapless Michael.

  But then, Larry wasn’t scared of Alvin anyway. Neither was Debbie Waller, who worked full-time until she converted a date with a Dutchman from Grand Haven one summer night into a backseat pregnancy and left her job and town on the same day. And Mary Joe, Marilyn’s niece, who lived in the trailer park with two other girls and saved her money for her marriage, though she didn’t have a boyfriend. There were others in the summertime, when the store hours were longer and business was most intense.

  It was Larry he grew to know best, for they were the only males working in the store (other than Alvin) and therefore had the heavy chores assigned them: loading the cases of liquor or taking the charcoal in and out each day from the front sidewalk. Larry was a high school senior whose father owned the bakery, where Alvin and most of the Main Street businessmen met for coffee every morning. Three years older than Michael, Larry smoked Old Gold Filters and acted towards him like a man of the world introducing a kid brother to it. How Michael admired Larry’s confidence, his sureness with girls, his lack of fear of Alvin, and his sophistication, especially about sex. No one had ever talked to Michael about sex so explicitly before.
Larry even had a girlfriend, a summer resident named Ursula Lowy, who kept her mouth closed when she spoke because she was embarrassed by her too-prominent front teeth. But she also had beautifully long tan legs, which Larry liked to describe in loving detail when he regaled Michael with next-day accounts of his multiple acts of sexual congress in the back seat of the Bonneville, handed down by Larry’s father. ‘I fucked her ’til she whimpered like a dog,’ he proclaimed one day, and thereafter this became his catchphrase for any expression of carnal longing. ‘Like a dog!’ Larry would exclaim, in not so sotto a voce, as a bikini-clad girl would skip into the store in search of a Coke or a pack of Vantage Lights.

  Larry’s was such a sexualized world that Michael wondered what arid planet he had himself been living on. He saw the same girls as Larry did, coming into the store showing their swelling breasts under their skimpy tank tops, their naked midriffs above their cut-offs – and their brown legs, so smooth that he wanted to lick them like ice-cream. But to Michael these girls were remote objects of unfulfilled and – since he felt too young and shy and unwanted – unfulfillable desire. Yet in the world according to Larry they were all available, all consumed by a lust that Larry painted as ubiquitous and usually deviant. By his account, no one was innocent of a susceptibility to outlandish sexual behaviour: he’d slam the register drawer, hand over the change, say a beaming ‘Thank you,’ then as the customer left with her aspirin announce in a stage whisper that ‘She’d feel a lot better if she fucked one guy at a time.’ Or, of some virginal sixteen-year-old girl Michael had served, buying a pack of mints, her bathing suit still wet from the beach, ‘Don’t even think of asking her out. Not unless you want a dose of clap the size of a Winnebago.’