Whatever aggression these boys inflict on one another they learned in their parents’ playbook. Maniacs of nurturing, giving their kids a leg up, whatever the cost. The best-off are the worst offenders. Pushing at every step, staying ahead, from private school to pre-med. Laura has done it herself, wherever she can get away with it.
All these dads, yelling for the full-body check, as if their child competitor might one day make a living as a pro, if he just hangs tough. Indoor soccer, for God’s sake. By the time you start talking about the money sports, the parents are rabid. Tim’s friend, Gordy Johnson: his parents actually redshirting him. Taking him out of school for a year, just so he’d dominate varsity. Probably dosed him with bovine growth hormone. Laced his beefalo with steroids.
Standings mad, the entire country. That’s why Ellen’s the way she is. A girl too smart for the public silliness. Two summers ago, when her body hit her all at once, she took up running. Just wanted to jog, long-distance, for hours at a shot. Run until all Lacewood dissolved into fields. Run until she disappeared into blank, rolling agribusiness.
“Why don’t you go out for the team?” Laura tried. Thinking that might turn the trick. Fix things.
Stupid. The team wasn’t the fix. The team was the problem.
“I’m not good enough” was all the girl ever said.
Laura made her come today. Last thing in the world Ellen wants to admit to now, her family. What’s left of her family. Big Sister came, but only under much-declared duress. Political prisoner. Riding Tim the whole time. “Okay, Slim. Today’s your big chance. Don’t blow it, Slim. We’re all counting on you.”
She called Camille Wexner to come meet her here. Camille—her high-school brawling buddy. The two of them sit at the foot of the grandstand, now beside it, now vanished, now underneath it. Giggling uncontrollably, elbows out, pressing their palms together in manic calisthenics, shouting so everyone can hear: “We must! We must! We must develop the bust!”
Laura wants to shush the act, but doesn’t. She can’t very well force the girl to come, then force her to enjoy being here. She’s having a little trouble on that score herself, at the moment. For that matter, if Tim were choosing, he’d probably beg them all to go home right about now.
If there is a master plan, the Caldwell Glass Gladiators fail to execute it. The enemy scores again while Tim, on defense, is fiddling with the little Velcro strips on his shoes. She wants to tell the ref. The ump. Whatever he is. Unfair. Take-backs. But what difference would it make at this point? No more than the difference between humiliation and mere disgrace.
Every win has somebody’s loss pegged to it. Someone has to go down for anyone else to rise. How can any culture be so nuts about any pleasure that depends on someone else’s misery? Yet when a Caldwell player gets free by some fluke and almost makes a goal by accident, she’s right there, springing to her feet, screaming for the score.
When the game ends, she sneaks a glance at Tim’s father. Don is too mad even to think about getting angry. He’s on the sidelines, doing the good-sport thing. He sets his jaw in cheerful acceptance, the jaw he’s studied in countless pro coach close-ups. The grim, grinning jaw you have to look at three or four times every weekend. He walks across the gym to shake the enemy coach’s hand. Laughs, shrugs. Threatens a rematch.
Then he walks over to where Laura is throwing out the four feet of Styrofoam and the stale crudités that no soccer parent or kid would touch.
“Looking good, hon.” Pure phys. ed.
“You too, Don. Sorry about the, uh, game.”
“Ach.” He waves his hand. “There’s always next time.”
The prospect is too painful to consider. Tim slinks back from the locker room, his hundred-dollar indoor soccer shoes replaced by hundred-dollar cross-training shoes. Ellen and Camille stop giggling. They sit, mock-ladylike, until he passes. Then they hum the official theme song of the Olympics.
“Fuck off,” Tim snarls.
“Hey. Hey!” Don grabs him by the shoulder.
Tim struggles to break the grip. He stops when Don escalates, not wanting a scene in front of the guys he still thinks of, somehow, as his buddies.
“Remember what we talked about?”
Tim sneers.
“I said, remember?”
“I remember.”
“Okay.” The grip turns into an awkward pat that slides off Tim’s moving back. “Good man.”
Don takes Laura aside as the kids head for the car. He has fallen into that confident, confidential mode. Protective. Still shooting for Don Shula. Laura can’t deal with it. Whatever it is.
“We need to talk, hon.”
“Not ‘hon,’ Don.”
“We need to talk, Laura. About our daughter.” As if there were anything else.
“What? What about her? She’s back in good graces at school. You can see how she was with Camille today. It’s all blown over.”
“Laura. She’s getting wild.”
“Don. She was born wild.”
“Not like this. She’s up to something.”
Laura doesn’t even want to consider the possibilities. “What do you want me to do, Don? Confront her? ‘Ellen? Are you getting mixed up in things you don’t want me to know about?’ ”
“I don’t know what I want you to do. Maybe nothing. I’m just saying.”
“You’re always just saying.” Saying talk. Saying us. Saying our.
“Maybe we could sit down for five minutes sometime? When neither of us is running?”
She fishes in her purse for her keys. The large yellow plastic sunflower key chain reading Ackerman Insurance. The one-stop shop for all your insurance needs. She waits until he’s looking at her.
“You think we’re going to get back together, don’t you? Just because I’m sick?”
“Laura. I don’t think anything.”
“No. You don’t. That’s your problem, Don. That’s always been your problem.”
He smiles. Thick wax death mask smile. “Nice to see that illness has worked such wonders for your disposition.”
He turns and walks away across the empty court. The shoulders hunch as he crosses the gym. The same hunch as Tim’s, evading the ball. Genetic. Like the floppy forelock. Like those gray eyes. Their criminal bewilderment.
He walks in time-lapse. Each step turns the boy back into the father. The jaunty twenty-three-year-old she fell for and married cracks open and sets free this brittle man. She sees in the walk how much she has devastated him. Cut the legs out from under him, these ten years and longer, and she must call out. Kind, mean, wrong, right. Anything but this killing silence that she specializes in.
“’Bye, Coach,” she mumbles to the coiled back. Loud enough to hear. But he does not turn around. Does not even raise his spine.
She catches up to the kids. Herds them into the car. Tim’s still in a rage. Ellen is still all giggles.
Don’s right. She’s bitched at him forever. But he pushes for it. His way or the wrong way. Can’t even disagree with the man without his faulting her. She never saw things fast enough. Never took appropriate action. Any woman would be an emotional mess, living with that. Would have had to jump ship or die a cripple.
Tim shimmies into the backseat, his lip quivering. Always the backseat, chauffeured, even when it’s just her and him. Ellen’s manic. She bounces on the seat next to him, miming an obnoxious pompom.
“Gimme a ‘G.’ Gimme an ‘L.’ Gimme an ‘Ass.’ What does it spell? The Glass Gladiators. Shattered again.” Fake twink voice, the detested group that wouldn’t have her. “That’s all right, that’s okay, we’ll try again some other day.”
Too obvious a provocation. Or Tim is too enraged to counter. Ellen insists, pushing things past the break point. “The Glass Gladiators. I mean, really. Like, what pea brain . . . ? Who in their right—”
“Ellen.”
“No really, Mom. I’m like: what zero could possibly have come up with—”
“Ellen. I said that
’s enough.”
“You didn’t really say, ‘That’s enough,’ per se . . .”
Too smart for her own good. Tim has the right idea. Ignore her. Let her knock herself out.
“Okay, you two. Where are we having lunch?”
“Ooh. Mom’s splurging. You should lose games more often, Slimmy.”
Tim just says, “Feed Bar Buffet.”
“Totally polyester,” Ellen jeers. But she wants to go there, too. She likes the endlessness. The free returns. The pick and choose.
Tim likes it because he is in a stage where he will eat only things that are either brown or white. Laura likes it because it’s only $3.99 for teens, and it sometimes holds them for as long as two hours before they get hungry again.
Over a flowing crater lake of mashed potato and gravy, Tim croaks, “Mom?”
That small voice. She would give it anything it asks. Because it always sounds as if it’s asking its last.
“Mom? Can I have a beeper?”
“Can you what?”
“A beeper. A pager. It’s this device that, if somebody—”
“I know what a beeper is, Timmy. Why in the world would you want one?”
“They’re cool.”
“Only businesspeople use beepers. And doctors.”
“All my friends have them.”
“All his friends are businesspeople,” Ellen intones.
“His friends? Tim’s friends? What’s that supposed to mean?” But Ellen drops into her routine of ominous, suppressed giggling.
“Your friends have beepers? Whatever do they do with them?”
“You know. Like, answer them. Say somebody wants to get in touch with you when you’re not at a phone. Like at school.”
“Who would want to get in touch with you who isn’t in school with you?”
“Mom.” Don’t be stupid. “That’s not the point.”
“What’s the point?” At this stage in life, she cannot understand why anyone would want anyone else to be able to get in touch with him.
“The point is: what if I bought one with my own money?”
“Do you know what those things cost per month?”
Wrong step. The minute she starts arguing price, she’s already lost.
When they get home, the answering machine is flashing an LED 7. On Saturday. Two follow-ups on a Sloan Street duplex, a computer-generated reminder of a doctor’s appointment, a furtive, coded message from Ken that fools neither kid, two solicitations for cash from humans and one from another computer, which patiently plays music while waiting for someone to press a Touch-Tone button on the other end. Waits until the tape runs out.
When she showers that night, Laura looks down to see a patch of hair the size of Tim’s dead gerbil nestling in the drain. She jumps in fright, slips off balance, and cracks her elbow on the sink going down. She sits on the side of the tub, nursing her pain, crying as softly as she can, so neither child can hear her.
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She misses the following weekend’s match. She misses Don’s rebuilding pep talk. Misses the meager but miracle victory. Misses Tim’s one goal of this or any season, all because she has to check back into Mercy, for her own Round Two.
Dr. Archer greets her happily. Her oncologist seems glad for the chance to check her vitals and talk more politics. Cancer patients: the perfect audience. “Those Bosanians, they’ve been slaughtering themselves for over four hundred years. They want to. It’s not our problem. We should let them do what they please.”
“You might be right,” Laura says, keen to stay on Dr. Archer’s good side.
“The problem with those people is that they have to live in Bosania. You know how lucky you are? Everyone wants to live in the States. Look at my Indian interns. They come here to do their medical training. Of course they don’t want to go back home afterward. Would you?”
“No, Doctor.”
“Damn straight.”
“Doctor? Will this treatment be the same as the first one?”
“Well, the effects are cumulative,” Dr. Archer points out.
“Cumulative?”
“We can’t kill this thing off all at once. We have to sneak up on it.”
By now Laura knows that the oncology nurses will do all the work. They welcome her back like old friends.
Tracy, opening a tap in her arm, asks, “Do you think I should go blond for a while?”
Laura inspects Tracy’s mouse-brown pixie. “Go for it, Trace. Do you think I should shave?”
Tracy’s expert fingers run through Laura’s shag. “I’ll tell you what. It’s going to get patchy real quick.”
“Real quick.” Laura laughs.
Alan, on the second shift, seems a bit down. “You doing okay?” she asks.
He grimaces. “Spat with the mate.”
“Oh? What does she do?”
“He’s a junior faculty member at Sawgak.”
“No kidding,” she starts to babble. “My husband’s in Development there. Ex-husband, I guess I should say. Since he’s my . . . ex.”
“I don’t mind all his other guys,” Alan claims. “It’s just a novelty. They don’t mean anything to him. He’s a lot younger than I am. Young gay profs are expected to lay pretty much everything that moves these days. But he’s being incredibly stupid. On theoretical grounds. Says he doesn’t think a virus should run our lives.”
She thanks Alan silently for letting her pass. “What should?” she asks.
“You know something?” Alan rolls the irony around on his tongue. “He doesn’t say.”
“Tell your friend that a good third of the people I find new houses for, six months later, wish they’d never moved.”
“I’ll tell him that, Mrs. Bodey.”
The effects are cumulative. While the heavy metal toxins scour her veins this second time, she finds herself humming, “Rinso White, Rinso White, Happy little washday song!” Something ancient of her dad’s. He’d never let anything but Lever Brothers products into the house. Swan, Spry, Lux, Rinso White. All those cardboard samples piled up on the car seat, back when he was still on the road, before his promotion to Chicago regional manager. If Dad returned to earth and saw what she keeps under the sink these days, he’d have a second heart attack and go right back.
Once again, the IV is cranked to screech every time the line gets blocked, namely, every time she moves her arm. Don shows up when she is just starting the taxol, even though she told him not to come. She’s still a little high from the disguising rush, the thing she’s been waiting for. Every bit as delicious as the first time.
“Don Bodey,” she identifies him, cheerily. Happy little washday song.
“I chased down that Dr. Jenkins. Seeing as I was here.”
“I bet you did.”
“I made her tell me how you could have cystadenocarcinoma if your CA-125 level was so low?”
“Don. I’ve got cancer. There’s a big tumor sitting in the freezer here, and a couple little cutlets in somebody’s icebox out in Indianapolis.”
“Oh, I’m not denying the lab reports.”
“What are you doing? Flirting with her or suing her? Don’t badger the poor woman, Don. She’s only doing her job.”
“You see, the literature actually explains it. I was reading the article wrong. They don’t test for low or high at all. They test for whether the serum is rising or falling. They didn’t bother to determine your baseline, is all.”
“I’ve arranged a ride back,” she tells him. If Ken can get away without trouble.
“Cancel it.” Don grins.
When he leaves, the heavyset woman in the next bed leans over and confides, “Your husband’
s a gregarious kind of guy, isn’t he?”
“Hopeless,” Laura concedes. “Completely hopeless. The fastest talker in the world. He used to talk my kids out of burping, when they were infants.”
“That’s nothing, honey. I just had our fifth last year. And my husband still tries to use the a.m. diapers at four in the afternoon.”
“Don’t I know,” Laura says. “What are you in for?”
The woman groans, but not at Laura. The long sigh, low on octane, rattles into a laugh by exhale’s end. “Two to ten for sassing off. Hoping to get a reduction for good behavior.”
Her name is Ruthie Tapelewsky. She lives in a ranch on South Sutton. “Houses?” Ruthie shouts when Laura tells her. “You sell houses? Ain’t that a kick. Nice work if you can get it. I’m in Building and Maintenance. You hawk ’em, we caulk ’em.”
Laura looks up at the Damoclean drip hanging above her neighbor’s head. What intricate tubes tie the two of them together. What hopeless husbands. What precarious cocktails we all are.
From the start, Clare’s Native Balm had its share of competing secret healing extracts. Native remedies greased prosperity as much as did any machine oil. Companies everywhere sought their own brown font of patent elixir: Kickapoo Kidney Cure. Choctaw Chew. Wright’s Indian Vegetable Pills (Philadelphia, 1844), “opening all the natural drains—a general Jail Delivery, as it were, by which all impurity is driven from every part of the body.” Each cure was as pure as Nature herself.
In 1846, in Utica, New York, Theron T. Pond, together with an “Oneida Indian medicine man,” turned witch hazel into a white cold cream with preternatural abilities. But Pond’s was but one of the Native Balm rivals that Resolve Clare lost sleep over.
In an age when life was still local, soapmakers up and down the seaboard copied the Brave. Even the British tried to steal his silhouette. They matched the soap’s iodine color, but they could not quite reproduce its brackish, medicinal smell. The foreign imitation sold healthily enough in the British Isles and on the Continent. But few in North America were so foolish as to believe anything that the British claimed to know about Indians.