Michael Cocchiarale
Late for Play
Dad struck every single hole on Pearl Road. Mom’s head beat soft time
against the passenger side window. I straddled the backseat hump, the
seatbelt unlocked but resting on my legs, looking through the breach
between the bucket seats at the open ashtray crammed with frustrated stubs
of cigarettes. We were bound for Southland Shopping Center to buy the
navy blue pants and pallid Oxford
shirts that St. Paul’s decreed. Mom didn’t like the Catholics
much, having been (as she said) force-fed their fear and guilt and obscene
superstition for eight long years—-but she knew for certain that St.
Paul’s would save me from the hell of public school punches or
pocketknives or worse. My dad was far from happy with this plan. More than
once throughout that summer he mumbled, sure, you take my money. I’m
good enough for that.
We pulled into the crowded shopping center lot. I saw a family heading
out of Sears, a contented mom and dad trailing daughters who swung
held hands, their round eyes darting both ways before they skittered
across the lot toward their station wagon, which pointed North, toward home,
where E.J. probably had the teams split up for wiffle ball by now, and
his father off the front porch
swing to be official pitcher. I could almost hear the laughter, the
happy thrust of fists in gloves, the high-pitched whack of plastic bat
meeting plastic ball.
Sears stunk badly of back to school. The smell wafted from the
stupidly cheerful sale signs draped across the aisles; from the stiff and
uncomfortable clothes skewered by hangers and jammed onto circular racks;
even from the adolescent automatons ringing up merchandise between sad
sips of pop from cardboard cups. While dad escaped to the main aisle to
sift through remainder bins, mom led me through the Boys Department
until my arms were full. Then it was off to the dressing room, where I
danced and shook into shirt and pants, still clinging to the idea that
this could all be done quickly—-that I could get back home with just
enough light for an at bat or two. More than
anything, I wanted to be laughing off the jeers from Jody, Boog, and
E.J. as I stood at the plate; smashing a shot over everyone, as I usually
did; then scampering around the bases, while Mr. Bliss did something
crazy like pelt me with buckeyes and holler, “you’re out, you’re
out, you’re out, that’s three!”
Hope slid from my face when I ripped the dressing room curtain aside
and saw mom’s brows pinch like tweezers. The hem of these pants is too
short, she complained. The neck size of the shirt is much too big.
The stitching—-they expect you to pay good money for this? As she
orbited around me, pulling and pinching and smoothing, I felt seconds ooze
like blood drops from my watch.
Ten minutes passed. Twenty. Thirty. Dad wandered back in view just
as I emerged from the dressing room for what may have been the seventh
time. Mom examined me closely yet again, and then stepped back with a
handclap, exclaiming, “Now I absolutely love this!”
Dad shook a can of WD-40 he held in his hand.
“What do you think?” she asked him, her voice warbling with
uncertainty halfway through the question.
Dad looked her up and down. Up again and down.
“Shut up,” mom said, as if he’d already spoken.
Dad just sighed and tapped a middle finger at his watch. There was
this police drama on at nine, and he watched it faithfully despite the
weekly objections of my mom, who sat down for a look three weeks ago and
promptly got back up, muttering about all the explicit sex. You’d
make a good one of them, dad shouted into the kitchen to where she had
retreated. Maybe you should even join the nuns. You’ve got at least
one of those vows down like a pro!
I was coloring on the dining room floor at the time. I finished my
picture in thick swirls of gray and brown and black.
Back in the car, the acrid smoke from dad’s newly lighted cigarette
making me nauseous, I tried to calculate how many minutes it would take
for him to get us home, how many seconds it would take for me to bolt
to my room and grab my glove and get back downstairs, out of the house
down five doors to where the wiffle ball game was in full, luxurious
swing.
Dad broke hard for slowing traffic, and we all lurched forward.
“Don’t think you’re doing anything when you get home,” he said
suddenly, as if the transcript of my thoughts had just tickered under
his nose.
“But you said I could play.”
“You’ve got a bath to take,” mom said softly. “We’re
dropping you off at grandma’s tomorrow at nine.”
Last night at the supper table, mom explained that she and dad had to
meet with a doctor in order to discuss some things about their lives.
Things? Like what?
Mom put out a hand in my direction, the tips of her fingers, all those
pretty crimson nails, lying across my placemat. Dad tossed a butter
knife over our heads and it landed in the sink. He said, we’re going
to have a nice little conversation about your mom, because she’s got
problems being a wife, isn’t that right dear? Mom looked straight
ahead; slowly then, and surely, the air
seemed to come right out her eyes.
“You said that if I had all my homework done and my room—”
“We can’t always do what we want,” mom explained. “Sometimes...we make sacrifices...so that
other people can do what they...feel they need to do.”
At that moment, a series of long trucks thundered past, heading south
on Pearl, their clank and clatter drowning out additional debate. On
the back of each vehicle was a different carnival ride: an ornate
miniature Ferris wheel, its vacant carts swinging excitedly; a merry-go-round
with unicorns, horns like golden drill bits boring into the sky; and
then, most stunning of all,
the smooth sinuous blue of a fiberglass water slide. The trucks were
coming from a festival in Parma—the one I’d pointed out the other
day to dad in the Friday magazine. He had stood over me reading, drops
from his beer plunking onto the advertisement, blurring the words and
pictures. Sorry son, he said. Your mother isn’t into fun.
Monday was right around the corner. This evening might be the last
chance I’d have to play ball with E.J. and the gang before the new
school year began. I felt a seizure of panic. While I squirmed in my
uniform and endured the admonishments of shrouded, wrinkly women, the guys
would continue to meet at recess for paper football games. At lunch
they’d continue to tell dirty jokes
until milk came out their noses. After school, they’d head off to
Brookside Park to ride the trails. By the time I took my busses home,
their phone messages would be irrelevant. And when winter came-—snow
and cold and all that early darkness—-I’d never see them again.
They’d have their sleepovers and maybe call me for the first one or two,
but after awhile it would be as if
I had never existed. I wanted to scream; instead, in my frustration, I
inadvertently kicked the back of the seat.
“That’s it,” dad said. “You’re taking a bath and going
straight to bed,” dad said. “No TV or anything.”
“But I didn’t do—-”
“You kicked the seat.”
“It was an accident!”
Dad’s eyes swelled in the rearview mirror.
“And you never buckled your belt. I warned you.”
I turned to the back window. The carnival trucks were gone, of course,
but I still saw their cargo clearly in my mind: the tremendous wheel,
the otherworldly merry go round, the blue blue slide.
Dad ran the light at Snow. A few horns blared.
“Do you want to kill us?” mother asked, her voice low and
indifferent.
“Trust in the Lord.”
“Don’t start—”
“Aren’t you now a bride of Christ? Don’t you have some sort of
‘in’?”
Mom pulled a cigarette from the pack on the dash and placed it between
her lips. Dad reached across and batted it to the floor.
“When we get home,” he said. “Look ...you and me...after
he goes to bed, we’re going upstairs, dammit...”
Instinctively, I clicked my belt.
“I don’t believe you,” was all mom said.
The words worked just like a period, quiet but definitive at the end of
a long, complex sentence. The silence made me think of the previous
Sunday, when mom took me to a Catholic church service. You’ll have to
go to these once a month, she said, so you should have some idea. We
sat in the back
corner, safe and unobtrusive. Above was a stained glass window angled
open for air. A colorful, elongated man, his eyes huge with agony,
peered down at me. Then a burly priest who’d been intoning prayers and
such for what seemed like hours suddenly bounced off the altar and down
the aisle, swinging a silver genie lamp from side to side and creating
insidious balloons of smoke that drifted toward the pews. I put a
hand over my face and tried to hold my breath against what I was sure were
poison fumes.
At last, dad bumped up over the curb in front of our house and rammed
the shifter into park. We walked in a somber line toward the
house—mom first, then dad right on top of her, each thudding up the wooden
stairs. I stopped to look down the street for Mr. Bliss, the heavy bag of
clothes banging at my leg. All was quiet except for the harrowing buzz
of the streetlight. It was
nearly dark—too late for baseball, for the carnival, for summer
itself. But not too late for what happened later, after my bath and
dad’s favorite cop show, when mom closed my door behind her kiss and walked
across the hall, where minutes later I heard the two of them in low
voices at first, then the springy sounds of the bed and dad’s voice,
dad’s strong voice only, then its gradual faltering, like he was young
again, and out of breath from playing.
©2007 by
Michael Cocchiarale
