And Give You Peace Page 3

  When we reached high school, they taught us a different form of cross fire. Now, if you were hit, you had to go to the strip of floor at the back of the other team’s territory, collect the balls that got past them, and try to hit them from behind. If you nailed someone, you earned your way back in. It meant that the game never ended, and you had to defend on all sides; you could never be safe. I suppose the teachers thought it was good for us to learn this lesson, a preparation for life. I never knew anyone who genuinely liked this version, except maybe Phil Cunningham, who was six feet tall, hid gin in his locker, and could never be hurt.

  I knew I was a disappointment to my mother, who, as a teenager, had been a member of the All-State girls’ basketball and field-hockey teams. And my mother didn’t consider cheerleading a real sport. So it fell to Meggy to carry on the athletic tradition. She played basketball and soccer and ran the hurdles at track meets, her legs blurry flashes over the level slats.

  After she died, the Kiwanis Club founded the Margaret O. Dolan Memorial Scholarship, which grants five hundred dollars each spring to a graduating senior girl who excelled in athletics throughout her high-school career. The school invites my mother, Justine, and me to the ceremony every year, but none of us has ever attended. We always receive a copy of the award program and, sometime over the summer, a thank-you note from the most recent winner. The notes usually start off by saying, “I didn’t know Margaret, but…” and end with some variation of, “I will do my best to honor the memory of your daughter’s and sister’s name.” After three years of reading remarkably similar letters, I finally figured out that the school must keep them on file somewhere, so that each new recipient will have a model to consult when her mother forces her to sit down and write to us.

  Meggy’s favorite sport was baseball, probably because everyone in my mother’s family had been a devoted Mets fan since Casey Stengel days. Every April our grandfather, who had connections because of his position in the Presbyterian church, took us down to Shea Stadium for the home opener, and once our grandmother caught a home run off Mookie Wilson’s bat.

  Meggy wanted to play baseball, but when the Little League in our town wouldn’t let her, my mother organized a separate league for the girls. By the time Meggy was in high school, the league had eight teams in each of three age groups, and my mother, as founder, was honored at the end-of-season banquet every summer.

  We all used to go to Meggy’s games together in her early playing years, when she was an outfielder. The spring my parents separated, only a few months before Meggy died, she was promoted to pitcher, but by then it was usually only our father who went to watch her play. I was at college in Boston, Justine was busy with her friends, and our mother had moved out. She wasn’t all that far away—an hour and a half or so west, to the town (actually, it liked to call itself a “hamlet”) of Delphi. But of course it was a different school district, so after our mother left in March, Meggy and Justine stayed behind in Ashmont to finish out the year.

  Mom was going to turn down the job at the Delphi newspaper when they offered it to her, because she couldn’t take Justine and Meggy right away. But Justine told her, Go ahead, it’s only for three months, we’ll see you on weekends, we’ll be fine. I remember realizing that our mother’s absence, and our father’s distress over it, would actually benefit Justine during that final semester of her senior year, when it came to staying out late and going unchaperoned. She moved into the guest room at Sue Shooby’s. Justine and Sue and their friends liked to hang out at the Cat House, the attic of Sue’s garage, where the Shoobys stored their old couches and where all the cats in the neighborhood sunned and slept during the day. At night it became a party den for the kids in Justine’s crowd, the room rocking with shrieks and music, the air sour with filched beer.

  So Justine was never around to talk to whenever I called that spring, but it didn’t seem to bother my father. This should have been a clue to me that he was preoccupied by something deeper than the divorce, but I only recognized the clues afterward, when it was too late to do anything but feel guilty.

  I graduated from college in May, watching through drizzle as the marching band formed a crooked 1988 on the football field. My parents and sisters came to Boston to attend the commencement as a family, and we went out to dinner afterward. My father kept looking at my mother, but whenever she caught him, he looked away. Meggy tried to make everyone laugh with her imitation of Pee-wee Herman, but we were all distracted by the energy it took to keep our grief within bounds, and in the middle of her shtick she had to stop suddenly and swallow. When the tears appeared on her cheeks nobody said anything. My mother handed her a clean napkin while my father raised his hand for the check.

  After the ceremony my mother wanted me to go back to Delphi with her, but I wasn’t ready to leave home. Instead I returned to Ashmont with my father and sisters, to the house on Pearl Street that other people—a family named Crowell—would soon call home. Our father had rented an apartment in Grandview Arms, staggered stucco units with a communal Jacuzzi and badminton court. I could no more picture my father living there than in an igloo, but he seemed surprisingly resigned to it as the Fourth of July approached. That was moving-out weekend; his suitcases would go across town to the Grandview’s square, white, empty rooms, and my sisters and I would help the Crisafulli brothers load our belongings onto the truck they would drive out to the condo in Delphi, which my mother had already bought with money her parents gave her.

  The condo was small, but Justine was scheduled to start college at Syracuse, our mother’s alma mater, that September, so the extra bedroom at the new place would really be Meggy’s alone until she graduated from Ashmont High.

  But Meggy and our father died at the end of June. By then, she had already decided she didn’t want to play softball anymore. She told Dad it was because she wanted to spend her last evenings in Ashmont at the town pool, but he didn’t believe her and he kept pestering her about it until finally she said, “Okay, okay, if you really want to know, I can’t stand going to games knowing you’re afraid you’ll see Mom there. It makes me sick that you can’t even look at each other; it makes me want to puke.” Then she flung her Parrelli Hardware team cap at him in a little fit of drama and went outside to sit on the swings.

  Later, she told Justine and me that she’d overheard our parents talking on the phone. Our father was crying, pleading with her not to go through with the divorce, saying it would be too much for Meggy to handle. “But he’s the one,” Meggy told us. We’d turned up the radio in her bedroom so we could talk. Meggy and I were eating Chips Ahoy cookies straight out of the blue bag. Justine, who always wanted to be thinner than she already was, sipped at her seltzer. “The three of us are handling it just fine.”

  Meggy was almost sixteen then. Although we never said anything about it, we all sensed that the three of us was changing in ways we could not guess. I remember going to the last game she pitched. I watched from the top bleacher, the aluminum under my bare legs hot from a long day’s sun, which came in slanting at that hour and made the field hard to see. My sister’s face was only a shadow under the bill of her cap, and her hair hung in wheat braids between her shoulder blades. Gail Harvey, Meggy’s best friend, had hair of the same length and color, and when they were younger the girls asked for matching clothes at Christmas and pretended to be twins. Occasionally, from a distance, even my mother and Justine and I mistook one for the other. The only person they never fooled was our father, who could pick out his favorite daughter instantly across three playing fields.

  Before each pitch, I remember, Meggy would tap the bill of her cap for luck. Her windup was slow but the ball flew fast from her fingers, and she struck out many of her opponents.

  In the younger teams, you got a strike counted against you only if you swung at the ball and missed. But in the major league, where Meggy played in the end, the umpire would call it if you just stood there while a pitch went through the strike zone and over the plate. By then,
you were supposed to have some judgment. You were supposed to be able to tell if what was coming at you was something you should want.

  2. The universe is unfolding

  Q. Is there a “method” for eating animal crackers?

  — E.S., Cheviot

  A. According to a spokesman for the National Biscuit Company (Nabisco), which in 1902 introduced Animal Crackers in those little boxes with the string handles (the boxes themselves were supposed to be used as Christmas tree ornaments), there is no official etiquette for eating the baked goodies. However, based on hundreds of letters to the company, it is known that most children prefer to nibble first on the back legs, then the forelegs, then the head, and lastly the body.

  Criminally speaking, nothing much ever happened in Ashmont, which lies just south of Albany between the Hudson River and the Helderberg mountain range. Sometimes kids spray-painted graffiti on the brick walls of the junior high, or tipped a parked car on its side, but unless your father went off the deep end, you didn’t have to worry about being shot to death in your own bed.

  We moved to Ashmont the summer I was nine. For weeks I didn’t meet anybody on our new street except Russell Stinson, the Vietnam vet who lived next door to us and sat on his front porch, in his wheelchair, smoking and calling out to cars. The realtor had warned us about him. “He’s a little loud sometimes, but completely harmless,” she said. “It’s more of a nuisance than anything else.”

  All the girls in the neighborhood who were my age already seemed to belong to their own crowds, and I was afraid to ask them if I could be let in. Instead I sat on the porch, listening to Russell and reading books from the fourth-grade list my father had requested from my new school. (My favorite was The Long Secret, which I could have finished in a few days but managed to stretch out for an entire delicious week.) I kept hoping someone might approach me as I read—I held the books with the most intriguing covers up to my face so they could be seen from the sidewalk—and invite me to play. This didn’t happen, but I consoled myself with the idea that at least I would be ahead in my reading when school began.

  Even as a first-grader, Justine found her clique right away. She spent entire days at the town park with other six-year-olds whose mothers made a habit of hanging out by the pool, drinking Diet Cokes, while their kids played Marco Polo in the shallow end. Justine had already been to three birthday parties and to Saratoga to see The Nutcracker by the first day of school.

  My mother didn’t seem to notice that I did everything alone, or with her and Meggy, but my father stopped one morning on his way to work and sat down next to me on the top porch step, where I was watching ants crawl across my toes. “It’s hard, isn’t it,” he said. If he had told me to cheer up or tried to make me feel better, I would have continued sulking. But when he said what he did, I felt my face fold and then I turned into the jacket of his suit, wanting to make myself small enough to fit inside his pocket. He held me until I finished crying. It was only a short burst, but it left a circle of wetness on his suit coat. I was afraid it would make him nervous—like dirt or germs—but instead of going inside to change clothes he kissed me on the forehead, gave me a complimentary Zenith Realty pen from his briefcase, and went on to work, still carrying the stain of my sadness on his shoulder.

  In Ashmont, in the summer, you could be reading on your front porch when you found yourself dozing to the blended buzz of lawn mowers, the ice-cream truck, basketballs slapping driveways, and children splashing and screaming in backyard pools. On snowy days you could count on one of your neighbors to give your car a push, especially if other neighbors were watching from their windows. If you painted watercolors or took pleasant photographs, you could show them on the walls leading into the library. The air you pumped into your bike tires was free. The police station stood across from the Shamrock, and on their lunch hour, officers went over there to drink beers with the men they would decline to arrest later the same night, when they stopped cars for creeping or veering and found their friends at the wheels. Everybody felt taken care of, and there was the sense, even for those of us who didn’t understand why we went to church, that God knew who we were.

  The day my father and Meggy died was hot and sticky. The weather had been like that for a week. At Justine’s high-school graduation the Friday before, two grandmothers had fainted, and the news was filled with warnings about a hazardous quality to the air.

  I had a baby-sitting job that day. I’d started working for the Melnick family when they only had two children, Donald and Sarah; then, while I was in college, Josh was born. Nostalgia, more than the money, was what made me agree to take care of all three kids for a whole day. I knew that after my sisters and I moved out to our mother’s condo in Delphi, I wouldn’t be running into the Melnicks at the park or the post office anymore. We had all finished packing, and there wasn’t much to do except sit around and absorb our father’s gloom as we waited for our family’s failure to become official.

  Mr. and Mrs. Melnick were catching a 7 A.M. train to New York, so I got up at 5:30. My father was sitting at the table in the kitchen when I came into the room and switched the light on. I was so surprised to see him there that I sucked in a gasp.

  He turned when he heard me and seemed to smile. The early-morning fluorescence caught the dampness of his hair, just washed, where it was smoothed at the sides of his head. He had scrubbed his face so hard I could see the pores stinging in red flesh.

  “Hi, honey,” he said, but it sounded more like a question than a greeting.

  “What are you doing up?” I asked, taking the chair across from him.

  He shrugged. “Couldn’t sleep. I had a dream about Mom.”

  Although I dreaded the answer, I knew he expected me to ask. “What was it?”

  “She was having some kind of operation. They were knocking her out. The doctor came over to me and said, ‘We’ll be opening your wife up in a minute, sir. But I wanted to let you know, as a courtesy, that during the surgery, you’ll be the one doing the bleeding. We gave her the option, and she chose you.’” When he said this last line, my father sounded as if he couldn’t get enough breath, and there was something new in his eyes that I hadn’t seen before. Or maybe something that had always been there was suddenly missing; I couldn’t be sure which.

  I told him, “It’s just a dream, Dad. She wouldn’t do that.”

  “I know,” he said, but he didn’t sound convinced. “I’m not going to work today,” he added, playing with the spoon in the sugar bowl. I couldn’t tell whether he wanted me to approve or to try to talk him into changing his mind.

  “Well. Maybe you need a day off.” I didn’t point out that he’d missed more days of work at Wolf Subaru than he’d shown up for, since I’d been back home. “If you haven’t been sleeping, you should get some rest. You and Meggy could go to a movie or something.”

  “Where is Justine, again?” He was trying to concentrate, I realized—to recall what he already knew.

  “Lake George. Remember? A bunch of them went up last night.”

  “And when is she coming back?”

  “I don’t know, Dad. She’s not exactly living here anymore.” I waited for him to remember that Justine was hardly ever home except to change clothes—as she would be later that night when she found his body—but when he didn’t respond I said to him, “Listen. I’ll leave the Melnicks’ number by the phone, in case you need anything. Okay?”

  He laughed slightly, sounding not at all amused. “What could I possibly need?”

  When I went to leave, he stood up and insisted on giving me a hug, a long one, and though he held me close, there was no strength in it. “Be good,” he told me. It was only later that I realized what he’d said, instead of his standard “Be careful.”

  “Well, you too,” I said, a little confused, trying to smile.

  “I never wanted to be like this.”

  “What?” I turned from the door, not sure I’d heard correctly because he had murmured whatever it w
as.

  “Nothing.” He smiled back and gave me a wave. “Never mind, honey. Anastasia.” He lingered over my name, giving it the elaborate, Slavic-sounding pronunciation he once used to amuse me when I was a child. “’Bye.”

  I started out the door and turned back one last time. “Listen, let Meggy sleep in, okay? She was up late watching TV.”

  “Okay.” My father was staring at the tablecloth. A gnat hovered above the sugar bowl, and when he didn’t even move to swat it away, I felt a quick drizzle of dread.

  It was not a premonition, exactly. A few days after it happened, I tried to remember if my body held any foreboding as I walked away from our house, down the same street I had walked every school day to the bus stop since the fourth grade. But it was pity I felt, more than fear. He’ll go to bed, I thought, and Meggy will be nice to him, bring him tea and toast as if the problem were in his stomach. She’ll stick around the house today, tell Gail to go ahead without her to the pool. There was no real reason to think Meggy would do this and give up a day with her friends, but I wanted to believe the scene I had conjured. I resolved to call home at lunchtime and check up on things.

  When I got to the Melnicks’ house, the kids were already having their cereal, and from the moment their parents left, the day was a frenzy of play. We spent the morning making forts in the backyard; for lunch we made pizza, and I gave each of them a piece of dough and let them put on whatever they wanted for toppings—they chose chocolate chips, marshmallows, and broccoli, which Josh, the baby, called trees. He went down for a nap after he threw up, and I thought about calling my father and Meggy then, but the older kids had started a game of croquet and demanded that I play. When Josh woke up I took them to the park to go swimming, and we camped out on our towels by the kiddie pool. I was in the water with the baby when I heard someone call my name, and I looked up to see Matt Lonergan squatting beside me, slurping the last of a Dr Pepper.