Home Field (5 page)

“Just do it.” Dean chose not to remind them that they fell asleep every night in front of the TV, a habit he hadn't meant to foster but had stopped trying to resist. TV, along with snacks, worked like a sedative to get them past the precarious border between waking and dreaming. It worked for Dean, too, although his snack was beer or bourbon.

“Can we have microwave popcorn?” Bryan asked.

“Sure, sure,” Dean said. Outside, someone was pulling into his driveway. His first thought was Stephanie, but when he
checked the kitchen window, it was Garrett's shiny white Geo. He probably got it washed every week.

“Garrett,” Dean said, meeting him at the side door.

“Hey, Coach. I just wanted to drop off the playbook, like I said.” Garrett held up a manila envelope.

Dean opened the envelope and flipped through the book. There were notes on almost every page. Dean couldn't believe so many plays were going to be affected by Laird's departure.

“I got a little carried away and ended up staying late,” Garrett said. “And then Brett Albright stopped by.”

“What did he want?” Albright was his QB and team captain. He was one of Dean's favorites, a smart kid who had learned the game from his older brother, borrowing his playbook and memorizing it for fun. Dean had taken him out of JV his sophomore year even though he wasn't quite physically ready.

“His right shoulder is acting up, but we can talk about it later. I gave him some stretches. And, uh, I told him about Laird. I told him not to mention it.”

“Okay.” Dean didn't really feel like being annoyed with Garrett. “You want to come in for a beer?”

“I would,” Garrett said, “but I have plans with Connie.”

In the spring Garrett had begun dating a tennis instructor, a woman Dean had inadvertently introduced him to when he gave Garrett free passes to the country club where Nicole worked. Secretly Dean felt that Connie, who was fit and young and innocently pretty, was out of Garrett's league.

“Another time,” Dean said. As he watched Garrett leave, he felt jealous, not only of Garrett's night ahead, but for the entire phase of life that Garrett was in—the beginning phase,
when everything was still unknown, but your goals were clear. If someone had told Dean last fall that he would be envious of his excitable assistant coach, Dean wouldn't have believed it. But here he stood, in his own yard, wishing he were the one driving away in that spotless little white car.

S
TEPHANIE STARED UP
at Robert Smith, tacked to Mitchell's ceiling. His pale face seemed to glow in the dim light of the room. Mitchell's room was always dark and gloomy, the windows draped with layers of gauzy scarves from Goodwill and the lights turned down low. When Mitchell's parents were gone, he burned incense and played music that his father did not approve of, bands like Nine Inch Nails and Nirvana and, if Stephanie was visiting, Tori Amos. The incense was purely theatrical; Mitchell wasn't trying to cover the smell of anything. He didn't smoke pot or drink, although everyone assumed he did, with his laid-back persona and baggy, patchouli-drenched clothes. It used to be that only Stephanie knew how smart and driven he truly was, but getting into MIT had changed that. Now everyone called him Doogie Howser.

“You going to take all your posters with you to school?” Stephanie was trying, for what seemed like the tenth time, to get a conversation going. They usually talked easily, but they were having trouble tonight.

“Nah, I'm starting fresh,” Mitchell said. “Maybe I'll be a minimalist.”

“Yeah, right.” Stephanie nodded to his dresser, crowded with a zoo of Tetley tea animals he'd inherited from his grandmother. Hung above them was his collection of black velvet
paintings, scrounged from yard sales. “You're like the king of kitsch in here.”

“And you're the queen in that dress.”

“It was my mother's,” Stephanie said, with an awkward laugh. Her dress
was
kind of Holly Hobbie–ish, but she liked the simple print of yellow sunflowers on a black background.

“Sorry,” Mitchell said. He looked at her dolefully but without pity. He was the only person in her life who hadn't treated her like a fragile flower after her mother's death.

“You think it's strange that I'm wearing her dress?”

“A little,” Mitchell said. “So what? You should do more strange things.”

Stephanie took this as a jab at her conventionality—one she would have welcomed before her mother's death, but which now felt like a criticism. Lately she felt overly sensitive. She couldn't handle Mitchell's or anyone's wisecracks; it was as if they put real cracks in her.

“It's a little bit long,” Mitchell said. “Maybe you should shorten it.”

“You think so?” She and Mitchell often altered items they bought at thrift stores, usually with help from Mitchell's mother. But this wasn't the same thing, exactly.

“Definitely. I'll go get my mom's scissors.”

He left the room before Stephanie could protest. She had the sense he'd been looking for an excuse to leave.

Lying back down on his bed, she returned her attention to his collaged ceiling. Next to Robert Smith was Tuesday Weld, peering out from beneath a fur-collared coat, which was draped over her head, as if she needed to hide from something just out
of frame. The photo was from the cover of Matthew Sweet's album
Girlfriend—
Stephanie's favorite album, at one time. Mitchell just liked the cover—the romance of it, the lavender light, the borrowed glamour. He'd told Stephanie that her mother reminded him of Tuesday Weld. Stephanie couldn't see the resemblance, but one day when Mitchell was over, they got out her mother's old yearbooks and looked at pictures of her as a teenager. Then Stephanie got it: the bright blond hair, the delighted smile, the little nose and teddy-bear eyes. Her mother was a dream. Looking at those photos, Stephanie felt cheated. What happened to that buoyant girl? And at the same time she wanted nothing to do with that kind of femininity. It was no coincidence that Stephanie had decided to dye her hair after looking at those yearbooks, and no coincidence that she began to distance herself from her best friend, Bethany, who was on the junior varsity cheer squad and wore silk ruffled shirts and Red Door by Elizabeth Arden perfume and whose goal in high school—if not explicitly stated—was to like and be liked by absolutely everyone.

Her father, Sam, was in those photos, too. He seemed like a nice person. And also exactly the kind of guy she had grown weary of. She and Mitchell had a love-hate relationship with the football players at their school. They were so banal and clueless, so spoiled and doted upon, and yet physically, they were rather outstanding. There was one player in particular, Brett Albright, who was so attractive that Stephanie had to look away when she saw him in the hallway. He was always tanned, no matter what the season, and he wore his sandy-brown hair cut very short, almost a crew cut, which highlighted his sharp, grown-man's jaw. According to her father,
Brett was small for a football player, but Stephanie thought his body was perfect: his torso a classic inverted triangle, and his arms and legs thick with muscle—but not too thick. His only flaw was the oily patches of acne on his forehead and sideburn area, but even this seemed a piece of his masculinity. Once last spring he came to her house for dinner, and Stephanie spent the whole meal thinking of what it would be like to run her fingers along the stubble at the back of his neck. When she told Mitchell that later, he said he would have thought of running his fingers along something else.

Stephanie wondered if Mitchell had ever fooled around with any of the boys at her school. She thought not, because he would have told her, but then again, maybe he wouldn't have.

The one person she thought she knew best in the world, her own mother, had it within her to shorten a rope, fashion a slipknot, and climb a wooden stepladder. But Stephanie could not actually imagine that moment in her mother's life. And when Stephanie looked back on her childhood, she sometimes felt as if her mother had not really lived with their family at all, but instead had wandered in and out of their lives, like a visitor. It was as if they were on the road, and her mother was walking in a field beside the road, a wide field of tall grasses, or maybe corn, so that sometimes you got a glimpse of her, but mostly you did not see her, you could only sense her presence behind the screen of wild growth.

And yet even from this distance her mother was perceptive. It was her mother who had first noticed Mitchell's proclivities. “Well, he's different, isn't he?” was how she put it, after his first visit to their house. “Different how?” Stephanie asked. And as soon as the words were out of her mouth, the pieces
came together and she saw it, too: he liked boys, not girls. In that instant all of Stephanie's fantasies were blown away. She had thought she was in love. She had thought being in love was easy, like having a best friend.

Now it was funny to remember that she had ever thought Mitchell was straight. She had been so naive when she started high school, a lamb of a girl who believed her football-coach father was beyond reproach and that her mother's blue moods were normal, the price of motherhood. It was Mitchell who taught her to examine her family, to see them as an outsider might. The two of them had formed their own little unit of judgment. They practiced being smart together, training their newly acquired analytical skills on everyone, especially their families. They were both obsessed with their parents. Mitchell's father was a preacher who thought AIDS was a message from God. He had no idea his son was gay. Stephanie thought he had to have figured it out by Mitchell's senior year, when it was obvious that her and Mitchell's four-year friendship had never evolved into a romance; but on prom night, when she and Mitchell posed beneath the cherry tree in Mitchell's front yard, both of them wearing ragtag looks inspired by Courtney Love and Kurt Cobain, he made a remark about the importance of chastity. They had laughed hard about that, harder than they laughed when Stephanie's mother, upon seeing her ill-fitting baby doll dress said, in a completely befuddled and nonbitchy way, “Is it the style not to look pretty?”

“My mom thought you might be hungry.” Mitchell stood in the doorway brandishing a pair of yellow-handled scissors. In his other hand was a plate of chocolate-chip blondies, cut into neat triangles.

Stephanie reached for one, though after months of front porch offerings, sweets no longer felt special. By some miracle, she had not gained a pound. It was working at the Red Byrd, she decided. Or maybe it was like people said: she was young, she could eat what she liked. Stephanie had always had a hard time remembering that she was young.

“All right, off with your dress,” Mitchell said. He tossed one of his T-shirts her way so she could cover up. Stephanie stepped behind his open closet door to change, realizing halfway through that her backside was reflected in Mitchell's full-length mirror, which hung on the opposite door. But he wasn't even looking! In moments like this Stephanie thought Mitchell's mother must have some inkling of his sexuality. Why else would she let them stay up here by themselves for hours?

Mitchell flattened the dress across his desk and held it in place while she cut it. She didn't bother to measure and mark it; she just let the sharp blades slide quietly through the fabric. She thought of her mother's clothes on her father's bed. She'd left them there on purpose, wanting him to be disturbed by their presence.
She
was disturbed by his weird suggestion that she take them with her to college. They weren't even her style.

“That's pretty short,” Mitchell said, examining the new hem.

To Stephanie's oversensitive ears, this sounded like criticism, but she tried not to take it the wrong way. She wondered if Mitchell was sick of hanging out with her. She should have just gone to work. She liked waitressing because any awkwardness with customers or coworkers was dispelled by the fast pace of the dinner rush. And the exhaustion she felt at the end of the night was a satisfying distraction. Before she drove home she would sit out back with Jon and Becky, the line cooks, listening
as they bellyached over their shift drinks. Once she asked for a cigarette and they admonished her, telling her never to start, that it was the filthiest habit. And even though that had been annoying, she felt protected. They were constantly telling her she was “a strong young lady” and somehow that felt like an expectation that she had to fulfill. She found she liked having an expectation—or at least she liked it when it came from Jon and Becky, whose ideas about her were based on observation, rather than, say, her father's stoic ideal.

She put the dress back on. The new hem hit midthigh, and it was jarring to see her mother's dress so radically changed. As always, Stephanie thought her knees looked bony and overly large. Her father said they were
strong, athletic knees,
the kind that wouldn't blow out. Everything came back to sports for him.

“Looks better now,” she said, pulling on her jean jacket. She put her hands in the pockets and found the half pack of cigarettes she'd scrounged from one of the booths. She held up the rumpled package. “Want one?”

Mitchell frowned, his long features turning dour. He had a haunted, thin face, one that had always reminded Stephanie of photos from the Civil War, the daguerreotypes of teenage soldiers. She remembered, with a twinge, the intensity of her old crush on him.

“You think you're going to look like Marlene Dietrich with a ciggie in your hand? Please, you're Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm.”

This time she was sure she wasn't imagining the irritation in his voice. “Why are you being so mean?” she said. “All night long you've been acting like you don't want me here.”

“Sorry, I'm just stressed,” he said. “I'm supposed to go to school next week and now my dad's saying I can't even bring my car. He's still pissed I'm not going to Frostburg. I have to take the bus from Hagerstown. It's going to take, like, ten hours.”