Domestic Affairs Page 11

  Audrey, meanwhile, had discovered the dehydrated meals, in their little foil packets. “We can have ice cream,” she said, calling out flavor possibilities to Charlie. Steve was still standing back at the ninety-nine-dollar green tent, like a man on the deck of a sinking ship.

  “The great thing about this tent,” he was saying, stroking the green one, “is that it’s light enough to put on your back. When you get out into the wilderness you don’t want to be carrying any extra baggage.”

  I don’t think anybody was listening, though. Audrey was testing back rests. Charlie was inspecting compasses. And I—always a comparison shopper—found myself drifting over to the deluxe four-man tent in the display (the one with the marshmallows). “I thought I’d see how much this one costs,” I said. “Just out of curiosity.”

  The deluxe model—on sale that week—cost a hundred ninety-nine dollars. Just a hundred dollars more than the little green tent (that’s how I put it). Or twice as much (if you were talking to Steve).

  Audrey, seeing me glance at the price tag, rushed right over. “Wouldn’t it be great if we bought this one?” she said dreamily. Charlie was playing with the pretend campfire. “I like the rocks,” he said.

  We got inside. (With this tent, you didn’t even need to crawl—it was that roomy.) We lay down—Audrey, Charlie and I—on the sleeping bags and stared up at the roof of the tent. Which had a skylight.

  “Cozy,” said Audrey.

  “Awesome,” said Charlie.

  Out in the store, meanwhile, I could hear Steve asking the saleswoman if she’d seen his wife anywhere. “Do you have a little boy who was trying out butterfly nets?” she asked him. “Probably,” said Steve. “Well,” she said, “last time I saw him he was over by the hunting knives.”

  It wasn’t easy, but we tore ourselves away from the big tent. I went over to Steve. Told him maybe this one made sense for us. “The green tent is fine now,” I said, “but think of what it will be like when our kids are teenagers.” And then I mentioned an issue of occasional debate: the possibility that someday we might have another child.

  “My sister!” Audrey cried out. “We have to leave room for her.”

  “I don’t think so,” said Steve—and I decided not to ask whether he was referring to deluxe tents or additions to our family.

  Well, from then on things got dicey. Suddenly Audrey didn’t even like the green tent. Steve said the one she liked was way too big. Charlie pointed out that it would have lots of room for stuffed animals. And camp stools. And pillows. And some books, and a few puzzles.

  “Hold on,” said Steve. “If you want all of that stuff, why bother going camping?”

  I had been the original advocate of the big tent, of course, but suddenly I felt a wave of indecision. Actually, the little green one would be cozier. It did get hard, lugging stuff to our campsite. And then there was the issue of money. “For the amount we’d save by getting the green tent,” I pointed out to Audrey, “we could buy you a winter jacket and ski pants.” (She had been studying some earlier, over in the other half of the store.)

  “You mean you’re going to get me some?” she asked.

  “No,” I said. “You’re missing the point.”

  We went back and forth for almost an hour. Just when I’d become totally convinced that we should get the smaller tent, Steve would say maybe we did need the big one after all. I’d lie down under that skylight and think, yes, it would be nice to see the stars overhead. And then Steve would stick his head in and say, “A hundred dollars more is nothing to sneeze at.” “Right,” I’d say. “Let’s get the green one.” And then Audrey would look disappointed, and Steve, observing her, would look unsure. And meanwhile, it was becoming increasingly clear that another half hour of debate could mean the total destruction, by Charlie, of the marmot tent. So it was decided.

  “We’ll take the big blue tent,” said Steve, taking a deep breath while he wrote out the check.

  “Right,” I said. “Good choice.”

  But out in the car, buckling up our seat belts, I could see he wasn’t happy. “That’s an awful lot of tent we got,” said Steve, pulling onto the highway for home. “I hope we didn’t make the wrong decision.”

  “Fine,” I said. “Let’s turn back right now.”

  “It was going to be so simple,” he sighed, another mile down the road. “I was going to walk into the store, pick up the green tent, and go home. How did I get off course?”

  “Turn back,” I said.

  He drove another ten miles, looking miserable.

  “Turn back,” Audrey begged. “I don’t care which tent we get, I just want to be happy.”

  We drove back to the store. We sat in the parking lot debating tent sizes for another five minutes. In the end we decided—without even getting out of the car again—to keep the big tent and go home. Not so much because it seemed better, anymore. Only that we couldn’t stand one more complication.

  “Are you going to be mad every time we look at this big, expensive tent?” I asked Steve.

  “No,” he said. “I’m just going to let it be a reminder. To keep things simple.”

  Which is, of course, the whole reason why we go camping in the first place.

  TALK OF THE TOWN

  Softball Season

  Ursula Leaves Town

  Marlon Brando’s Phone Number

  The Norton Fund

  School Play

  Travelers Pass Through

  More Babysitter Problems

  EVERY SPRING STEVE DEBATES whether or not to join up with the softball team again. (Two games a week, plus occasional umpire duty, take up a lot of time. Then there is the risk of injuries—something he never thought of seven summers back, when both of us were younger and felt invulnerable.) In the end, Steve always signs up again for his old spot, center field, and though time was I would have welcomed the end to his summer softball career, the truth is now I’d miss watching him from the bleachers nearly as much as he’d miss playing. It’s six years now that he’s been on the team—six years I’ve been packing up children, juice, cold chicken, diapers, nerf balls, and Goldfish and heading out to games. It has become as much a part of the rhythm of summer as tending my zinnias or picking blueberries.

  We were less than two years married, new to this town and to small-town ways, the summer Steve first joined the team. Of course the softball league had been around forever, but his was a new team, just starting up—a team of men who had little in common but the fact that they had not grown up here. That, and the love of softball (although for nearly every one of them it had been more than a few years since his last time at bat). The local paper sponsored the team, which meant that its editor (also an outsider and a would-be ballplayer) bought a dozen regulation balls and black T-shirts with THE MESSENGER printed on the front. We were assured of press coverage, if nothing else.

  It was a motley crew of players then (and still). It happens that Steve is a good ballplayer, with a long Little League history behind him and plenty of all-around athletic gift, but in fact he would have been urged to play even if he’d never before put his hand in a glove. I had simply gone into our local bookstore one afternoon, and the owner asked me if my husband might like to play ball. I said I thought he might. The bookstore operator said, well, that’s two people on the team, anyway. He—a (predictably) bookish fellow named Jake—had never played the game himself, but he was open to learning. He was even reading up on the sport. And of course there would be other players.

  And there were. There was Mark, a young lawyer, new to town, recently separated from his wife. A smart, sophisticated, highly articulate man—gourmet cook, music lover, wine connoisseur—whose fondest childhood memories were of sandlot Little League. Fred, a big, bearded carpenter who lived in a cabin in the woods. Phil, a private-school administrator, Princeton graduate—a fellow who knew every obscure rule in the playbooks, and the batting average of every Red Sox player from 1955 on. Douglas, a friendly, easygoing local bo
y who worked at the lumberyard. Pete, a shy, gangly naturalist who hitchhiked fifteen miles to games (and then home again) because he didn’t own a car. Gus, who’d left a job at Procter & Gamble to live, without electricity or running water, on a piece of old family land he was farming at the farthest end of town. Ray and Jim and Marty, three bachelor brothers, house painters, who rode to games on motorcycles, with different girlfriends on the back every time. Sam, the hearty, beer-bellied manager of a local plant, an unexpectedly erudite man who quoted Camus and made his own Polish sausage. Ernie, the newspaper editor, and David, his one and only reporter-photographer, a red-bearded former high-school track star. Steve, my artist-and-house painter husband. Jake, the bookstore owner, son of a former Russian ballerina and a Harvard classics professor, who’d never swung a bat in his life. And a few others, who dropped in and out, over that first summer.

  They weren’t exactly cheered into the leagues, those Messengers. Even then (seven years ago), the players were mostly older than those on any other team, and a pretty alien-looking lot, with their beards and their leftward-leaning bumper stickers, Gus’s multicolored old pickup, Mark’s Peugeot. Not everyone on the team fit the label, but the Messengers swiftly acquired the reputation for being nonconformists, a little weird. Different, mainly. That was enough.

  But it turned out that those Messengers could play ball. The team had a few stars. Hot-tempered Fred, a power hitter who might strike out twice in a row, then come up with a crucial home run when the bases were loaded. David, a smooth, effortless-looking pitcher. Mark, the cool, analytical shortstop. Big Sam, in his catcher’s mask, more agile and graceful than his shape would have suggested. Six-foot-four-inch Phil, at first base, with arms and legs so long he seemed able to span the distance between first base and second. Steve, known for his speed as a runner, and for making occasional impossible catches in the field.

  Behind the bench, the glory of the husbands belonged to the wives. The women—I among them—lined the single row of bleachers, sipping beer and catching up on town news, but always when it was our own particular favorite coming up to bat, each of us would focus on him. Some, like Fred’s wife Maria, liked to call out encouragement just before her man went up to bat (and later, when he made it to home). My way was always to go suddenly tense and quiet.

  Of course it was only a game (I used to say, especially in the early days). I used to make fun of them all, and how seriously they took their playing: the way Fred would sometimes come close to striking the umpire on an unfair call, the gloom that would overtake the players on the bench when they lagged by half a dozen runs. Then, gradually, I saw the thrill of a good play: Ray to Marty. Marty to Mark. Mark to David. I’d feel, for myself, the euphoria that came when (to the jeers of a particularly hostile opposing team) Fred would hit a home run and the Messengers would rally. I saw the men embracing on the field, as if they were brothers, and wished I could play ball too, wondered if I could ever make a hit out there.

  In fact, there was one woman on the team (the only woman in the league. Naturally she belonged to us). Doris was a mother of two, well into her thirties: a small, tight-muscled woman who showed up for every game, even though she seldom played more than an inning. She made hits, she caught the ball. She could run. She simply wasn’t as good as most of the men, and so, like Jake from the bookstore and Ernie from the newspaper, she warmed the bench a lot. She was the source of some fierce debate too. Some players felt that everyone deserved equal time on the field (the point was simply having fun out there). Some players had the killer instinct, their eye on the league pennant, and because of them, Doris sat out a lot of games.

  There were plenty of bitter moments that summer and every one after it. Fights with other teams, fights among our own (brothers when they won, hotheads when they lost). Back on the bleachers, the women arbitrated battles among the children (just a couple of kids, that first summer, and then new babies every season after). We followed the progress of a dozen pregnancies over those half-dozen summers (kidded each other, every year, about whose turn it would be next June to wear the maternity tops that went the rounds). Many of us saw each other only in the summer, and so the children seemed to shoot up, mysteriously, from the September playoffs to the first practice the following May. Audrey went from diapers and eating dirt, that first year, to riding a baseball bat as if it were a hobby horse, to organizing softball games of her own on the sidelines with the children of other players. She and Fred’s daughter, Chloe, were the senior children, presiding over a growing band of babies and toddlers. Every year the two old-timers would lead the young ones off, instructing them in the peculiarities of each playing field. Poison ivy growing here. A good cemetery to play in over there. In one favorite playing field, a swingset and teeter-totter and a water fountain.

  The passage of years showed in other ways, too. In the final game of the Messenger’s second season, Steve collided with Ernie in the outfield, both of them running to catch the ball on a crucial play. Steve broke his leg, and after that the wives always looked worried when they saw two players running for the same ball, and someone always yelled, “Call it!” The next season a carpenter named Bill broke his shin, slamming into a second baseman, and developed complications. The next summer he came back, but only to watch, not to play. When he told us he’d had to give up carpentry, and was studying for his real estate license, a kind of chill went through the group. Nearly everyone had kids by now, mortgage payments, doctor bills. The Messengers didn’t take so many chances anymore.

  Somewhere around the fourth season, David, the red-bearded pitcher (sports editor for a bigger newspaper now), had to sit the summer out on account of having broken his arm in a winter basketball game. Steve broke his arm too, skiing. The wife of one star player left him (“He’s always loved ballplaying more than me,” she said before leaving town for good). Doris gave up benchwarming in favor of amateur theatricals. Douglas got married and switched to bowling and volleyball. Gus got a telephone. Ricky, the team hellion, became a cop. Phil got a job near Boston as headmaster of a large private school. Sam turned forty and turned in his catcher’s mask.

  Steve still played, and so did a handful of others from that first summer’s team—most of them even improved their playing, one way or another—but none was so quick to slide into home plate anymore or to try to steal a base. The players no longer went out for beers after the game (the kids had to get to bed, and besides, they’d be up early the next morning).

  Of course, the roster changed considerably over those six seasons. The team changed its name when The Messenger stopped sponsoring. For one season, the players all wore T-shirts proclaiming “This shirt not paid for by The Messenger.” Then they became Homestead Builders, with a whole group of young and unfamiliar faces on the bench. And though they have yet to win the league championship, summer after summer they come close.

  One odd turn of events is the surprising alliance the old Messenger players have built up over the years with the once-hostile adversaries on other local teams. Rivals on the field, still, they meet in the streets or at a wintry town meeting and shake hands, comparing summer plans and team rosters. They call each other Stevie, Freddie, Davey, Boomer. There is something that happens to men who have played ball together. They may not have dinner at one another’s houses, may not even know where the other fellow works (certainly almost none of my husband’s teammates has ever laid eyes on his paintings). And still the bond is tight, and deep.

  They haven’t gotten around to taking a team portrait these past few seasons. We keep Steve’s from that first summer framed and hanging on our bedroom wall. The familiar faces in their black T-shirts catch my eye often, through the year: sober-looking young men, with babies and toddlers on their knees who are second-graders now. Younger, slimmer, with longer hair, and more of it. They are smiling, most of them, even though they’d lost a game moments before the picture was taken. It was summer, after all. There was still beer in the cooler. There would be other games, m
ore victories.

  I remember a night (we were in the sixth inning of a game against J and J Auto Parts) when an unexpected rain began to fall, just as the sun was setting, and a rainbow stretched clear across the field, from third base to first. Even the youngest children looked up from their hot dogs and squirt guns to watch. There was another night, when a giant purple hot-air balloon landed smack in the middle of the outfield during the seventh inning of a game against Contoocook Furniture. And then there was the night we played Profile Seafoods (this goes back to that first season, the only one in which Jake, the bookstore owner, ever played). It was August, and though the team always let Jake go in for an inning or two, as long as the score wasn’t close, he had yet to make a hit or catch a ball in the field. That night someone hit a pop fly, right in his direction, and he reached up his arm (more of a wave than a catching attempt) and caught the ball. He was so dazzled and amazed that he began jumping up and down, right there in the outfield, doing a little dance, screaming, “I caught it. I actually caught it.” The other Messengers joined in, yelling and calling out his name. Everyone was so happy that not one of us even noticed the runner from the other team, sliding into home plate to score. That night, nobody even minded.

  I first met my friend Ursula more than ten years ago. We had just moved to town and knew no one.

  Ursula and her husband Andy were outsiders too—though they had lived here close to thirty years. In their early sixties then, their children grown and gone, they didn’t belong to the big white church on Main Street, or the Moose lodge, or the local American Legion post. Andy was a longtime leftist who still reminisced fondly about the presidential campaign of Henry Wallace. He was a printer by trade, and briefly (until local sentiment forced him out) editor of the town paper, The Messenger. Ursula was a retired elementary-school teacher, the daughter of Finnish immigrants, raised on a nearby dairy farm where her sisters and various nieces and nephews still lived. From the first I could see in her a melancholy streak I always imagined as having something to do with Finland and those long sunless months among the fjords—even though she was born in Massachusetts.