Winning the City Redux

by Theodore Weesner

  Sensing a rush of tears, he tries to get his mind to move elsewhere. Panic rises to a breaking point, and knowing all at once that he doesn’t know how to eat in the presence of a teacher, of in the presence of any proper person—knows nothing of forks and spoons and table manners—he utters, “I can’t do this! I’m sorry, I have to go. I’m sorry.”

  In her surprise, as he had risen to grab his jacket, Miss Furbish steps to the table and is the one appearing at a loss for words. “Dale, I’m so sorry,” she says. “Of course you can’t just sit down and eat soup like nothing is wrong. I’m so sorry.”

  “I’ll just go, it’s okay,” he says, jacket in hand. “It’s nice of you to help me. I’ll just go . . . I’ll be okay.” Eyes filling, rattled on trying to get an arm into a jacket sleeve, he sees that a film has come to her eyes, too.

  “I wish you could tell me what the problem is,” she half-begs. “I might be able to help.”

  “It’s okay . . . I’ll be okay.”

  “Well, what time does your father get home from work?”

  “Oh, late,” Dale weeps in turn, jacket on, moving for the door.

  “Tomorrow at school . . . Dale, tomorrow I’m going to identify someone you can speak to. Maybe Mr. Plourde. I’ll make an appointment. I think it can help you come to terms with whatever it is.”

  Gym bag in hand, odd escape from humiliation close at hand and sensing the door behind him, there are her glistening eyes, and Dale hears himself bawling, “It’s basketball! That’s what it is! They left me off my own team!”

  Teacher or not, adolescent problem or not, his heartbreak pours forth. “They cheated me,” he cries. “I was going to take them downtown . . . to win the city . . . for my father, too.” Abject tears, unanswerable hurt. His loss may have been youthful in the eyes of a female teacher like Miss Furbish, while the misery within, as the dam is breaking, has him sobbing as before.

  “You were left off the team? I’ve heard Coach Burke say you’re one of the best players in the school.”

  “Not the school team, City League,” Dale rushes to say. “Coach Burke, he said I was too good to be on it! That’s what he said, because Mr. Bothner wants my place for his own son to do what I do even though he’s not as good as I am!”

  Miss Furbish, also weeping, is saying, “Mr. Bothner? I don’t know him.” Reaching a hand to Dale’s arm, she adds, “There, there . . . ” to soothe his sobbing heartbreak. “It’s okay,” she adds, pressing her face to his shoulder. “Don’t cry . . . it’ll be okay, I’m sure it will.”

  As she lifts away and Dale glimpses her glistening eyes, he blurts out, “I’m sorry . . . I’ll just go. I didn’t mean to come crying like this. I’m sorry.”

  “You don’t have to be sorry. I know what it is to have a dream taken away. It’s good you’ve been able to say what it is. Listen to me now, it isn’t the end of the world. It may feel like that, but it isn’t. I’m going to give this some thought, and talk to you tomorrow about someone you can speak to.”

  “I’m sorry,” Dale says.

  “Shhh, no more . . . you don’t have to be sorry. I understand.”

  “I’m sorry anyway,” Dale says, reaching to grip the door handle.

  “It’s okay. You talk to me tomorrow. Believe me, I know what it is to have a dream taken away.”

  Dale withdraws, pulling the door with him as he backs awkwardly onto the landing. Moving down the steps into full darkness, he presses out along the driveway toward Garland Street and, just ahead, Third Avenue leading to Chevrolet Avenue, the stadium, the river, and factory buildings where his father and hundreds like him are at work turning out parts for Chevy trucks and cars.

  Six or eight blocks home, twelve or fifteen in the other direction to school. Had he lived across the river, in Little Missouri, he’d have gone to Emerson Junior High, a school in a section of the city attended by hillbilly factory kids like himself whose parents came from the south.

  Bring and take. He had tried to absorb every one of Miss Furbish’s Word Power Challenges and his error, when it counted—wanting to please her—was riding like a bug on his larger disappointment. Unlike being left off the team—which team will surely win the City without him—it’s an error he can work to correct, if only for her, because learning from mistakes is something else she has taught them from the beginning. Nor, least of all, can he stop recognizing how she tried to help him like a mother, or an older sister, having him know she was on his side. Pressing her face to his shoulder and weeping with him. She knows what it is to be hurt. How could he have imagined that his adored teacher, who knew and understood everything, would not know what it is to have a dream taken away?

  CHAPTER 4

  LIKE AND LOVE. TO GET THEIR ATTENTION AND TEASE THEM a bit (to tease him? Dale wonders) Miss Furbish puts up the two L words as the next morning’s Word Power Challenge. Raising snickers of so-and-so likes so-and-so, loves so-and-so, doesn’t like so-and-so, she raises her hands to calm them. Proceeding to charm and please, she moves before their gawky legs and pert faces, drawing out definitions and differences having to do with bonding and friendship, family love and romantic love, admiration and infatuation, all of which have Dale adoring her more than ever and wanting her to be his friend, mother, big sister.

  His feelings keep ranging back to his City League exclusion, but also to her attempt to persuade him that it isn’t the end of the world. (For him it might as well be the end of the world.) He’s felt drawn to her ever since she complimented him for being able to think on his feet, and feels they bonded all the more on visiting her apartment, on hearing her confess that she knows what it is to have a dream taken away.

  Like and love. Dale tries to sort through the definitions and differences in the terms and how they apply to his relationship with the woman before him. What a gift it would be to have Miss Furbish as his mother! Was there anything he wouldn’t do for her? Was it what he had missed on not having a mother of his own?

  # # #

  THROUGHOUT HOMEROOM, NOT unaware of her whereabouts while previewing his notebook’s color-divided sections, he knows she is doing odds and ends about her desk and senses she is determined not to look his way. Does she want him to know that no matter having visited her apartment, his status as a pupil hasn’t changed? Why would she want him to know that . . . unless it wasn’t so?

  Miss Furbish. Continuing to watch the small woman on the periphery of his vision, it occurs to Dale that he knows nothing more of her name than that. For all he knows, her first name could be Miss. Glasses on a lanyard hanging most of the time on her chest. Wearing one of the tweed suits she wears so often, a skirt and a jacket over, today, a silky lavender blouse. Brown leather shoes not very high, maybe an inch and, as always, clean and without any wear on their heels, unlike the soles on heavy Mrs. Marr’s ever-angled shoes. New looking. Miss Furbish’s clothes were always new looking, Dale realizes, though her suits and jackets have reappeared time and again throughout his semester in her homeroom. Her hair, grayish unto black, always looks new, too, in its sheen, though nothing, of course, like Zona Kaplan’s gloss just before him and within reach of his ever-tempted fingers. Miss Furbish’s age? Dale has never considered her age, and finds it hard to estimate. Forties? Thirties? Out of her twenties? How can you tell a teacher’s age when she looks new every day in her clothes and shoes?

  As, turning to the board, she reaches up with a piece of chalk, Dale reads the line of her waist and hip on that side. He wonders for the first time if she wears undergarments like regular girls, and if she is put together in similar ways in her private areas? Who knows of girls and women, especially a fourteen-year-old who is a virgin and has grown up without either a mother or a sister or any females other than teachers and stand-offish classmates? It’s in this moment that Miss Furbish’s eyes, turning from the board, happen to meet his, which has her saying, “Dale, stop by for a minute after class, will you?”

  # # #

  “I SPOKE TO Coach Burke ear
lier this morning,” she confides at her desk as his fellow homeroom students empty the room. “He tells me that the team, put together by Mr. Bothner, is privately sponsored and has nothing to do with the school.”

  “It’s City League,” Dale tells her.

  “He said you’re a very good player and he’s happy to have you on the school team as a co-captain.”

  “City League teams are always the same as school teams,” Dale explains.

  “Always, or usually?”

  “Well, usually, I guess.”

  “I can see, in any case, why you feel you’ve been treated unfairly . . . though I’m not sure there’s anything that can be done here about a privately sponsored team.”

  “It’s okay. I can get on some other team. It was nice of you to help me like you did. I guess I lost it.”

  “Are you better? You look better. I’d still like you to speak with someone, maybe Mr. Plourde in metal Shop.”

  “I’ll be okay. Sorry for blubbering like an idiot. I’ll be okay.”

  “Are you sure?”

  Dale nodded yes, as if it were so.

  “I’ll talk to you again tomorrow . . . we’ll keep an eye on how you’re doing.”

  Seeing her waiting gaze, aware that it’s time to depart, Dale knows too that she cannot do anything in any case to undo his misery. Isn’t it what he tried to tell her in the beginning? Nodding, he moves to leave the room. Like and love. Admiration and Infatuation. They’re terms he could define for her by then, and might have done so, had the emotions they evoked not been so alive in his heart. Social status, pedigree, belonging . . . being screwed . . . he could define those, too, in awareness of being squeezed from his City League team and compelled to show up for Scholastic practice if he doesn’t want to lose his place on that team, too.

  CHAPTER 5

  A VOICE IS AT THE WINDOW OF HIS DREAMS AND DEMONS trying to get in. “Redsie, you awake? where are you? you awake?” The voice has Dale untangling who he is, as well as the person doing the talking.

  “You deep into some sweet dream?”

  Surfacing unto wakefulness, Dale knows from the tone of his father’s voice that he’s sober. Some days have passed since Dale had the knife of rejection inserted into his dumb heart and even as he’s told himself to find another City League team, to get on with school, he knows the endless pain will not be going away and has yet to give up on his father as someone to whom to appeal the injustice. Rubbing his eyes, however, he’s taking in that his father has other things on his mind.

  “Day after tomorrow . . . we’re moving to a new place.”

  “We’re what?”

  “Moving on, son. Sunday morning. Got lots to do.”

  “How did this happen? Moving where?”

  “Come out here and have one of these cinnamon doughnuts, and I’ll tell you about it. Come on, before they get cold.”

  Had they been asked to move? Was it his father’s drinking? The music he plays at all hours? That woman, he brought home . . . with a fourteen-year-old in the house? His father is but rarely involved with women, but Dale knows from incidents in the past how funny landladies can get when a child is present and women are brought in at night.

  Barefoot and squinting in the lighted kitchen, Dale devours a warm doughnut with gulps of cold milk straight from the jug. He’s eaten but sparsely in recent days—a byproduct of his unsettled heart—and as he packs away another doughnut his father adds, “It’s a small place, a few blocks down Atwood . . . but all ours, nobody up and nobody down, more like a place of our own.”

  “Did somebody say something?”

  “I think it mighta been coming, but nah, it’s just happened . . . when I heard about this place coming up.”

  “Everything’s okay?”

  “Hey, sleepy time guy, everything’s fine. Nothing to worry about. What I need to know is if you can help me do the job on Sunday . . . ? After we pack up tomorrow? Gonna need your help, son . . . some moral support from my boy is what I need.”

  “I can do that . . . ”

  “Cause . . . you see, there’s something else I wanna tell you. Something that I’ll need your help with in a bigger way.”

  As Dale gazes through sleep-confused eyes, he hears his father utter, “The turning over of a new leaf is what it is.”

  Awareness comes up in Dale of how sober and lucid his father is. Other times when he turned over new leaves his eyes were swimming in red fluid, his face stubbled and his neck rubbery in attempts to contain his emotions.

  “AA,” his father lets him know. “There’s this Salvation Army outfit over at Chevy Corners. The anonymous thing is you go by your first name, so nobody has to know who you are. Thought I’d give it a try . . . with your help. Tell ya, Redsie . . . you mean the world to me. But it’s gotten like the old jug is a noose around my neck and you’re growing up faster than I can keep up with. I been thinking . . . maybe it’s my last chance. I’m not so old I don’t have a few years left . . . and I been thinking maybe I could see my boy grow up more than I have . . . help him have a better life than his old man has put together. That’s what I been thinking. And moving to a new place seems like a good way to get started. I don’t mean to ask too much, but it’ll help a lot if I know you’re on my side.”

  “I can help,” Dale tells him again. “I’m on your side.”

  His father squeezes Dale’s shoulder, showing a gloss in his eyes on letting him go. “Have another one of those doughnuts,” he says. “You doing okay?”

  Dale had no intention of mentioning Mr. Bothner, not when he can see his father maybe doing something crazy on learning what was done to him and how it continues to hurt. As much as he wants Mr. Bothner dressed down—retains a glimmer of things being made right again—he knows he’s been screwed and that it isn’t going to happen.

  He also knows, lying in bed once more in the dark, that his father isn’t so bad, has never been other than loving . . . except when he gets lost along whiskey river and the miseries the bottle sets loose in him. Here he is trying to get it together . . . as impossible as it is for Dale to believe it will happen. If only he hadn’t heard enough promises by then to know that shaking the bottle isn’t likely to happen. Maybe in the wake of a terrible accident in which people get killed. Maybe if he did it without saying anything about it. But on the heels of a bender . . . as sober as he might be? In truth, his father has batted zero on the heels of benders . . . and will likely last no longer this time than another song lyric that seems to be as narcotic to his system as the booze itself.

  All the same Dale loves his father and in more than an automatic way. When he was younger it was a treat to have his father call him into the kitchen at night to eat and talk. They were the best of times for Dale . . . when his father was strong and his love for him was the biggest thing Dale knew each day . . . waiting for him to come home after working first shift. Why second shift, Dale wonders, when he went to junior high? He’s never understood why, and it’s only in the last couple years, as drinking has become evermore his father’s companion, that Dale believes he has glimpsed a reason.

  Still he loves him, does not know how not to love him. Teaching him to shoot pool. Having him touch the betting slips, for luck, when he plays the numbers. Giving him five dollars whenever he hits a winner. Driving him to the lake on sweltering summer afternoons. And walking down the street that time to level a finger at Mr. Boatwright through his screen door. Whatever people might say, his father could be great . . . except for the booze. He could be as big a deal in his way as Mr. Bothner, . . . a man of strength and independence, except for the booze.

  His father would never be a cheater, that was for sure. Maybe he drank because he wasn’t a cheater! Dale thinks, lying in the dark. One thing: His father would never do to some kid what Mr. Von Bothner did to him. Not in a hundred years or for a million dollars. His father wasn’t like that. And it was more than the Bothner brothers could say of their old man. His father might only be a factory wor
ker, and maybe he was losing the battle of the bottle . . . but he would never cheat a fourteen-year-old, because a dirty cheating liar was not what his father was. Social class or pedigree or whatever . . . being a dirty cheating liar strikes Dale as the worst possible thing for a person to be.

  CHAPTER 6

  ON SATURDAY MORNING, AS THEY FILL A DOZEN BOXES AND Dale finds himself stricken by his athletic letters and sports awards in a dresser drawer, he knows his disappointment has hardly receded. If not planning to do so, he finds himself saying to his father, “I got really screwed at school . . . in City League . . . by Mr. Bothner . . . who’s a dirty cheater no matter what he is at the plant.” In the midst of a fresh bursting of the same old gasping tears, Dale’s story comes rushing forth.

  Continuing to work, his father hears him out. Twice, three times Dale says, “Even Coach Burke said I was better . . . ” while feeling an aftertaste of shame, sour grapes, impatience with himself he knows he doesn’t deserve and can’t help feeling.

  His father pauses. “Sounds like one of the dirtiest tricks I’ve ever heard,” he says. “To steal something a young boy has worked so hard for so you can give it to your own children. He should be ashamed of himself.”

  “It is stealing, isn’t it?” Dale weeps.

  His father squeezes his arm, but in silence, and Dale knows something is different from whatever he might have been expecting. He has imagined his father being intoxicated in the old way, hell-bent on fighting back, while what he is, is sober. Dale knows, too, that his father can do no more for him than Miss Furbish could do. How can he reverse his son’s setback in sports? There can be no pointed fingers or challenges—not sober—or any way of having it out in the street. Does his father accept that he is as good as he says he is? What his father says, in any case, causes Dale’s heart to sink: “Son, I’m afraid what we have to do right now is finish packing so we can get moved to our new place.”