by Sue Miller
When Mack’s team came up again, Lainey tried to focus her attention on the game. She lighted a cigarette and hunched forward. She cheered with the kids for each batter, and especially loudly for Bobby Soletski, a friend of Mack’s. He was smaller than the other boys and homely, with a big nose that had grown much faster than the rest of his face. Lainey felt a special fondness for him. It was no use, though. Soletski struck out, and the inning ended with two men left on.
When Latin was up, Lainey lost interest again. It was boring, just as Mary had said. Lainey found herself instead watching the kids standing around on the packed dirt and scrubby grass near the bleachers. They were talking, punching each other, wrestling. This was how the boys touched the girls, via the artful half nelson, the Indian grip on the wrist. Occasionally they watched the events on the field, and the cries of enthusiasm or encouragement alternated with the pained, indignant shrieks of that other conversation.
Lainey felt a pleasant sense of her own invisibility to them, her absence as a sexual person generally. She’d let herself gain weight since David left; she’d stopped wearing makeup. She was amazed at how quickly and easily she’d given up the idea of herself as possibly attractive. There were old women on their street, and she’d found herself noticing their eccentricities, their solitary rituals, like promised pleasures. One of these women, Mrs. Dodge, had stopped her recently as she lugged a bag of groceries from the back of the car, and after the briefest pleasantries had said abruptly, “You’ve put on some weight, haven’t you, dear?”
Lainey had smiled ruefully. “Oh, Mrs. Dodge, of course you’re right.”
“Oh, no, my dear! I think it looks marvelous on you. Just marvelous. It makes you look quite jolly.” And she’d teetered off, a lingering smile on her face, as though she’d been welcoming Lainey into some kind of club.
Jolly, Lainey thought now, and she had to stop herself from laughing out loud at the memory of it.
Suddenly Lainey was aware that Mack was in the on-deck circle again, swinging at the air over and over. She’d been dreaming, she’d missed the beginning of this half of the inning. She leaned forward, determined to concentrate on the game again. “Come on, U-High,” she cried, and clapped. She surveyed the bases. Empty. No one on.
The kid ahead of Mack hit a hard ground ball, but their shortstop was right there, flicked it over to first base neatly, and he was out.
“How many outs is that?” she asked down to the bubble-headed girl.
The girl turned. “One,” she said, frowning at Lainey.
Now Mack walked over to the batter’s box, performed four or five of those batter’s tics, as Lainey thought of them—tapping his cleats, digging into the dirt with a sideways shimmy of his hips and legs—and then he placed himself. He fouled the first pitch down the first-base line. The next two pitches were outside, one of them clearly a ball even to Lainey’s uncritical eye. But the fourth pitch seemed to rise directly toward the bat as he pulled it around. There was a sharp retort, and the ball shot straight and level between the first and second basemen. The right fielder threw it back in. Mack held, hopping, on first.
Lainey was standing with the screaming kids, clapping and yelling, glad Mary wasn’t next to her to scold about her behavior. Slowly they all quieted and sat again. Lainey leaned forward, ready to watch the game more attentively.
“You must be Mack’s mother;” the man said. He had swung himself up on the bench next to her. Now he sat down.
“How could you tell?” she said, and laughed.
“I’m one of his teachers. Mr. Skelly. History.”
Lainey looked at him. She realized she had seen him standing around with the kids behind the stands and thought he was one of them, though his neatness should have been a giveaway. And up close now, she saw that he had some gray in his hair and, smiling at her, a skein of wrinkles around his eyes. He was perhaps only seven or eight years younger than she was, one of those small, trim men that age is kind to.
“Oh, he likes you,” she offered. This was true. Mack had said he was “hip,” which had made the girls laugh.
Mr. Skelly smiled. “And I like him. Though he makes me angry sometimes.”
He was still smiling, so she didn’t foresee any danger. “Why so?” she asked. She’d turned back to the game. She didn’t know this kid, the one standing, swinging. Mack had taken a big lead off first.
“Well, he won’t really work. In class, I mean. It’s all private with Mack. In class you’d never know he’d even done his homework. It’s as though he doesn’t want to separate himself out or make himself remarkable in any way. I’ve actually given up calling on him. And that’s a real shame. He’s a bright kid, you know.”
“I do know. I’m not his mother for nothing.” She watched the next kid swing, miss. Mack moved back to the bag.
Mr. Skelly started again. “At first I thought maybe he lacked confidence, he was afraid to try—you know? But you just have to read a paper or two of his to know that’s not it. And then look at him out here.” He gestured.
Lainey made no response.
“Is there anything going on at home that might explain it?”
She looked at him sharply. He was frowning; his eyes were kind. The amateur shrink. “Yes and no,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
The next kid swung, hit a hard single into left field, and Mack scampered to second. When Lainey sat down again, she turned to the teacher. “Well, the thing about home is, there’s life at home. I don’t want to start in, or you might think I was trying out for ‘Queen for a Day.’” She tried a charming bright smile, one that always made Bob DeGroot, the student she’d hired for Randall, beam back at her. “It’s just life, that’s all. And life is sometimes not easy. Don’t you agree?”
“Well, sure, I understand that.” Mr. Skelly’s voice was reluctant. He wasn’t charmed.
“You should, teaching history. I mean, that’s history’s first lesson, isn’t it?” She made her voice an announcer’s, deep and loud: “Life can’t be cured.” He looked startled. “Or that’s what I learned from history,” she said apologetically, in her own voice. “From my own history, and then also what I’ve read in books.” She smiled again, nervously this time. She wished he would go away. She realized abruptly that she had been worried about Mack—a kind of abstracted withdrawal in him sometimes; his bitterness toward David; his sudden emotionality, occasionally—and that she’d consoled herself with his accomplishments, his increased sweetness to her and the girls, when perhaps she should have probed deeper. Cared more. “I’m sorry, Mr. Scully,” she said.
“It’s Skelly.”
“Oh. Sorry. Again.” She could feel the stupid smile cracking her face. “But my point simply is, I think, that being troubled, or a little neurotic anyway, is kind of what comes of being alive. Isn’t it?”
Mr. Skelly frowned.
She shrugged. “I just mean, we’re all a little crazy.” She watched the game, unseeing, for a moment, then turned to Mr. Skelly again. “I think what I’m saying is just that you don’t need to worry about Mack. Mack is strong and healthy, and he’ll be okay.” Then, because she thought she might have been rude to Mr. Skelly, because she wasn’t sure Mack would be okay, she started again. “You know, it all just depends—doesn’t it?—on how you think about childhood, childhood and adolescence. And I just feel that it’s a big mistake to try to separate it from things that are … troubling. Or difficult.”
“Well, but surely, some separation …”
The noise suddenly rose around her. She looked up and saw Mack slide into third. Safe. Safe. She smiled. When it was quiet again, she turned once more to Mr. Skelly. “Look, don’t you think it’s an invention of ours, this idea of childhood innocence? Of sheltering kids and giving them this period of not having to know anything about life? Kids know anyway. They see more than we think they do.”
Lainey was aware that a couple of the kids below her had turned around and were watching her. She
realized she’d been talking too loudly again. Mr. Skelly had looked quickly at them, too, and then back at her.
She made her voice softer. “In my humble opinion,” she said. She shook her head. “I don’t know. I think what I feel is actually that they should know all along that life is tough. Why not? They’re young, they can be generous, they can understand it. Or stand it anyhow.” She shrugged and tried to smile once more.
“I see,” he said, and nodded. She knew he was sorry he’d got her going, that he’d leave now as soon as he could.
“Anyway,” she said. “Yes, there’s lots going on at home. Always will be. But that’s just the luck of the draw, isn’t it? I mean, none of us, surely, would volunteer for life’s little lessons, would we? And whether that explains anything anyway, whether you can say that causes anything in Mack, I’m not sure… .”
There was a sudden shift in the stands, everyone moving at once, and with it, from several places, cries: “Heads up!” “Heads up!” Mr. Skelly’s hand lifted quickly. Lainey’s head swung, she was confused, the faces turned to her, and then her leg flashed with burning pain, she heard the dull whump!, she cried out. Mr. Skelly bent toward her. She had doubled over the stab in her thigh, was gripping it. They were all talking at once: Mack’s mother, Eberhardt’s mother. Then there was silence, waiting. She kept her eyes shut, grunting, a few seconds more, until she could get control of the pain. Then she opened them and looked around at the grave, questioning faces. “It’s all right,” she said. “I’ll be okay.” Surprised tears had sprung to her eyes. She sat up slowly, looked at the flesh of her thigh, reddening in an oval. Everyone started talking again; there was nervous laughter.
Then Mack’s coach was there standing behind Mr. Skelly. He stepped across him and leaned over her. He was a heavy man, paunchy, with a lined, kind face. “Did it hit you?” he asked. She nodded.
“Your leg?” he asked, and sat next to her. He smelled of pipe, he smelled comforting.
“Yes,” she said. “It’s okay, though. I think.”
He leaned over, grabbed her leg with both hands. It was a thing to him, an injury only. He held it as impersonally as a doctor might, her wide bare thigh which had bothered Mary so. He looked at it clinically. Then he turned and shouted something to the bench. One of the boys in uniform came running over, held up an ice pack. The coach took it and set it firmly on Lainey’s leg. “Here you go,” he said. “Now, you keep this on it.” He was patting the ice pack, and his voice was reassuring and professional. “This is just the ticket. You take this home with you, okay? You keep this on till you go to bed, I promise you it’ll keep the swelling down.”
And Lainey, a trusting patient, felt only grateful for his wisdom. She smiled obediently back. She thanked him. She said yes. Yes, she would.
Before dinner, Lainey changed into a muumuu which had doubled as a bathrobe since she’d gotten heavier. She used the ice pack as an excuse to sit at the kitchen table and boss the children around. But they were cooperative and cheerful. Nina set the table, Mary and Sarah cleared. Mack loaded the dishwasher.
Retta had left chicken salad and rolls she’d baked that morning. Randall was hungry after his long walk with Bob, and he ate without fuss and toileted himself successfully after the meal. Everyone was so relaxed that Lainey thought the children must feel, as she did, the sense of blessing that came from Randall’s sunny moods, his cooperation, what might even be his happiness.
After dinner, everyone scattered. Mack called back the time he could be expected home, but Lainey barely listened. She was sitting with Randall in the swing on the front porch, waiting for Bob to return from the dining hall at the university and put him to bed. Randall liked the motion; he could be happy for hours out here. Lainey began to sing him a song about what he’d done that day, to the tune of “Danny Boy.”
Oh, Randall boy, you went to school with Mikey.
When Mikey came, you jumped into his bus.
He drove you there, with Monica and dah dah Len.
You played with sand, with water, and with paints.
He crooned along, smiling at the air. Lainey watched him. He looked so remarkably like Mack to her—the same dark hair, the same fine, almost delicate features. Like Mack, but also like a two-year-old, uncomplicated, simple. His face was open now in pleasure, open in a way Mack’s hadn’t been in years, and for a moment she felt overwhelmingly the pull of her response to the sweetness in his nature. She stopped swinging in this stunned pulse of love, and Randall rocked his body forward, grunting, to get the motion going again.
Lainey invented another verse to the song, and then she sang the chorus without invented words, just changing the name. She remembered how Liddie’s voice had floated down from upstairs when she was singing this in high school, pure and clear as a violin. Lainey had had a second bourbon by now; she felt the tears rise at the memory. The Lainer’s getting drunk, she thought. Soupy, sappy. She set her glass down under the swing.
When Bob turned into the square and approached through the twilight, she stopped the swing and pointed him out to Randall. But Randall was unresponsive. He whimpered and jerked the swing forward with his body again, so she went back to swinging and watched Bob’s approach. His rocking, graceless stride was so unlike any of her own children’s that she felt a moment’s mean pride in their collective beauty, their grace, as though she were in some sense responsible for it. She called out to Bob at the halfway point, and he called back to her and then to Randall, whose face stayed blank and enraptured with motion.
Bob came up the stairs. He stood, holding the railing and watching Randall’s happy, empty face tipped up at him.
“He doesn’t want to look at me,” Bob said.
“No,” Lainey answered. “He likes to swing too much.”
Bob leaned against the post. “I meant to ask you how Mack’s game went.”
“They won, thank the Lord. But even more to the point, Mack had a good one. He can be so surly if he does badly, I’m always grateful for a good performance.” She swung Randall in silence for a moment. Then she asked, “Were you like that?”
“I wasn’t like anything. I was awful at sports. Terrible.”
She nodded. “Me too. The only physical test I ever passed well was labor. I was good at having babies.”
She watched him blush. He had a crush on her; Lainey knew it. She even played to his feelings a bit, saving her worst tirades for moments when he was out of the house. It was harmless enough, she thought. And after all, he—and of course Retta too—had become, in some measure, most of Lainey’s social world. She no longer fit at parties, a single person, and she felt the coolness of her friends in her presence. They didn’t know what to make of her life now, her conspicuous, awkward aloneness. She was, she supposed, a kind of freak in some ways. And she knew that she’d been difficult and hysterical those first few months, scary to herself and the children and probably everyone else too, with her fury at David, her drinking, her erratic rage.
Now she was embarrassed for Bob, though, and glad when he recovered himself, when he started recounting the details of his afternoon with Randall. He kept calling Randall “the big fella”: “The big fella got his own shoes on.” “The big fella and I walked along the lake.” As he did each day, he chronicled every little achievement of Randall’s as though it signaled the beginning of the end of his illness, as though each were a developmental milestone.
Lainey had to force herself to listen. She thought abruptly of how she must have sounded sometimes to David when he got home at the end of a day. Now she was the one who had to consciously hold herself back from saying to Bob, “Don’t, don’t tell me this stuff. I’ve seen everything he can do.”
But she knew she should be grateful for his involvement with her son. And she was, truly she was. Though she thought Bob did too much for Randall. It was her policy, for instance, when he fussed helplessly at the table, to put his spoon in his hand and go through the motion once or twice, then leave him on his o
wn; or when he pushed her hand to make her do something for him, to return the gesture, to lift his hand to the refrigerator door and curl her fingers outside it on the handle until he gripped it himself. But Bob would feed Randall, or open the door for him. So far, Lainey hadn’t said anything. She kept hoping that Bob himself would see that it didn’t help. Then she wouldn’t have to correct him, which would be painful for them both.
Of course, she reminded herself, nothing she did really helped, either; nothing changed, nothing developed. It wasn’t as though she’d even really “taught” Randall to open the refrigerator. But she’d taught him, at any rate, that she wouldn’t do it for him. And perhaps that was something. Now she watched as Bob took Randall’s hand and led him into the house. Randall was taller than he was. As they mounted the stairs inside, she could hear the kindness and energy in Bob’s voice talking about the tub, about the warm water, about the bubbles Randall could have.
After they’d gone in, Lainey sat alone on the swing. The children weren’t in the square tonight, but she could hear their voices down the block, calling for each other, arguing across some distance. She wanted another drink, but she knew she’d better pace herself. If nothing else, Bob’s presence in the house had made her aware that she went to bed drunk too many nights, and she’d been trying lately to stay in control of that. From inside the house she could hear the tumble of Randall’s bathwater. There was a motion on the porch next door. Lainey looked over. Mrs. Hayakawa was draping a small rug over the railing. She stood looking up for a moment at where the sky was still light above the darkening square, then went inside without seeing Lainey.
Lainey swung herself slowly, the ice pack burning on her leg, and watched the darkness fall.
Then Mary’s voice was audible, and the girls rounded the corner into the square and straggled toward her. Mary was complaining about some unfairness on Nina’s part. She seemed like a small child again. When they came up the stairs, Lainey greeted them. They were startled.
