Home Field (8 page)

Her mother had always had boyfriends. She had never really been single. It was as if she had to die to be alone.

Her mother wasn't buried in this cemetery. There wasn't room. And anyway, her grandmother—Geneva—had a little cemetery on her farm. There was also a spot next to her biological father in a completely different cemetery. That had been a debate with her paternal grandparents—
the Shanks,
as everyone in her mother's family referred to them. They pushed for her mother to be buried in the Shank family plot, next to Sam. They talked about how it was “prepurchased,” so it shouldn't go to waste. An odd argument, especially since the Shanks were practically rich. Her father joked that it was a “sunk cost.” That he was able to joke was simultaneously upsetting and reassuring to Stephanie. In the end, he let Geneva decide, and of course she chose to bury Stephanie's mother on the farm.

The graveside service was awkwardly cramped, with the Shanks off in the long grasses in the corner, probably getting ticks. Stephanie worried about the Shanks. Everyone thought they were so uncaring, but she saw their vulnerability. Offering a gravesite was their clumsy way of being helpful. They didn't mean to be annoying; they were just the kind of people who always seemed liked they were butting in. Stephanie wondered what had really happened between them and her mother after Sam died. She'd heard different versions of the story, but what it came down to—according to her mother—was that the Shanks disapproved of her second marriage. And her mother had been hurt by their judgment. And then the Shanks had moved away and that had somehow frozen the relationship, so that both parties remembered only the resentment, not the attachment that must have preceded it.

For a few years, the Shanks continued to visit on holidays—
Stephanie had the photos, if not the memories—but after Robbie and Bry were born, the Shanks must have felt left out. Or maybe they had no interest in her new brothers. All Stephanie knew was that they stopped visiting, and it was up to her mother to take her for visits. Which she did, at Christmas and Easter. But it was always so stilted and overly formal that as soon as Stephanie was old enough to say no, she would rather not go, she did. And her mother let her get away with that. From age eleven to seventeen, Stephanie didn't see her grandparents. Stephanie felt guilty about that now, but it was a guilt mixed with anger. Because why didn't her grandparents insist? Stephanie's mother said they were workaholics, and that their marriage had gone bad a long time ago. They were unhappy.

When Stephanie finally visited the Shanks again, in the fall of her senior year, she found that her mother was wrong. Her grandparents seemed quite happy together, proud of their growing franchise and eager to show it off. They'd had Stephanie meet them at one of their newest branches in Frederick, a small city about an hour east of Willowboro. They took her on a tour of the store, giving her samples from the deli, the olive bar, the bakery, and the Cheese Cave, the innovation for which the stores were most famous. At the back of the store, adjacent to the parking lot, was an outdoor café with a stone patio and an artificial pond with a fountain that her grandfather referred to as a “water feature.” Stephanie ordered a wheat berry salad for lunch, wheat berries being something she had never tried before, and she remembered their gummy, foreign texture in her mouth while her grandparents held forth on Nicole and her various missteps in the wake of Sam's diagnosis. There had been a question of malpractice, because the
doctors might have caught the disease earlier. And then, there was the general shabbiness of the hospitals in Hagerstown, the city closest to Willowboro. They had begged Nicole to take him to Johns Hopkins, but she wouldn't because the long drive made her “anxious.” And Stephanie just listened, chewing her way through her fibrous salad, thinking they sounded a little manic but at the same time wondering if what they said had any merit. At home, she asked her mother to show her the medical files pertaining to Sam's illness, a request her mother had honored without question, pulling down the ceiling ladder that led to the attic and handing down the dusty boxes. Stephanie couldn't make much sense of the files—it was mostly insurance billing—but she found a snapshot of Sam's leg, postsurgery, and she could see it was a young, muscular leg beneath the angry red stitches, the leg of a boy she might know. And she could see no point in blaming her mother, or even the doctors, for never suspecting that a young, muscled leg could conceal a large, soft, festering tumor.

But her mother felt blamed, and instead of telling Stephanie about Sam, she told Stephanie about the way she had been treated in the aftermath of his death. How the Shanks had basically abandoned her, leaving her alone with her baby, their grandchild! How her parents had been in serious debt, scrambling to save the farm, too preoccupied with their own problems to help her. How Joelle was the only one who seemed to care. But Joelle was in college at the time, and she could only visit on the weekends. During the week, Stephanie's mother was left by herself. That was the first time that she began to feel what she referred to as “the dread.” But she told Stephanie
that it felt like the dread had always been inside her, like it was waiting for an excuse to get out.

“I know a stronger person would have handled it better,” she told Stephanie. “I know I let you down. But I was dying of loneliness. I talked to you—a little baby. I told you everything. You listened, it really seemed as if you were listening.”

And as Stephanie's mother spoke, Stephanie felt cast in the role of listener again. For the first time, she was aware of how angry she was to always be put in this position. Here she was, asking for stories about Sam, and what did she get? More stories about her mother. About her mother's pain.

Finally, one night, when her father was out at a Boosters event, Stephanie's mother brought out a small album Stephanie had never seen before, a cheap-looking drugstore album with clear plastic sleeves for pages. It was from a trip, her mother said, a trip that she and Sam had taken to Chincoteague Island when they were in college. It was on this trip that Stephanie's father had proposed. And as Stephanie's mother stared at the photos, she began to cry, saying it was difficult to talk about Sam because she didn't remember him as clearly as she once had. And then she started telling Stephanie a bunch of random, disconnected facts about him. She told her that he had big, fleshy hands. That he wasn't as tall as he seemed. That he loved mustard—he put it on everything—and that on game days he always wore the same blue-and-white-striped tie. That he had a good singing voice and for a while he was in a rock band. That he didn't read very much but he liked books about Civil War history. That he'd considered volunteering for the draft but his parents had objected. And then, after he
got sick, he wished he had gone into the draft, because maybe he wouldn't have passed the physical and then he would have known earlier. Either that or he would have died nobly, for his country. Sam had actually thought that would be a better way to die—in a foreign country, away from his family. Being sick hadn't given him any clarity. It hadn't made him a better person. He didn't die in peace or in love. Instead he died angry, not knowing what he wanted to do with his life or what it had meant to him.

Once her mother started talking, it was as if she couldn't stop. Stephanie was quickly overwhelmed. She'd gotten what she'd wanted, but it didn't answer the question that seemed to grow more and more with each passing day, expanding to fill her body as well as her mind, the question of
Who am I? And who will I become?

The Shanks told her she looked like him, an observation Stephanie wasn't sure how to take. Sam had been attractive in a masculine way, with a jutting chin and a heavy brow. Stephanie had always felt that her features were lacking in delicacy and that her jaw was perhaps a bit too pronounced. She could pass for pretty with plucked eyebrows and mascara to bring out her hazel eyes, but she wasn't like her mother; no one would ever compare her to Tuesday Weld, or any movie star.

And that was okay with Stephanie, for the most part. She felt that people were inordinately fixated on her mother's beauty, especially after her death, as if it was beyond them to imagine how anyone with symmetrical features could be unhappy. As if her mother's death could have been averted by her looking in the mirror. It dawned on Stephanie that the whole culture of women's magazines was premised on this idea, that
if you seemed healthy and pretty you just wouldn't die, and now when she saw the glossy covers of magazines and catalogs with their smiling blond models—everyone was always blond!—she wanted to rip them off. And yet listening to Courtney Love and Bikini Kill and Sleater-Kinney and all the riot-grrrl bands she loved didn't make her feel better. Instead she listened to John Denver, because her mother had loved his voice and Stephanie felt guilty for all the times she'd made fun of her taste in music.

Stephanie hated to think of how hard she had been on her mother. Her father had told her that her mother's death was no one's fault, but then what was that thing he had said last night? About her giving her mother the silent treatment? It wasn't true or fair, but her father got like that when he was angry and feeling out of control. She remembered a time last November when her mother was supposed to go to the football awards banquet and she said she couldn't face it. And her father had lost it and said, “What can't you face? You don't have to do anything! You just have to sit there and look pretty!” His dismissal had shocked Stephanie, but what was even more shocking was that her mother had actually gone to the banquet and she had sat there and said nothing and her father had seemed okay with that. After that it was like her father gave up trying to make her mother happy. Stephanie couldn't tell if he'd given up because he was tired or because he was afraid, and she couldn't decide which was worse. And she also couldn't decide whether or not to blame him for escaping into coaching, because hadn't she begun to visit her grandparents, in part, to get away from her mother?

The Shanks turned out to be a lot of fun. The sour ru
minations of their first visit were never repeated—it was like they had to get it out of their system—and they devoted her remaining visits to spoiling her. They had season tickets to the Baltimore Opera and they took her once a month, treating her to dinner beforehand. One night they took her to Haussner's, an old-fashioned place with oil paintings stacked up the walls and a coat check and a dessert cart, a kid's idea of what a fancy restaurant should be. And Stephanie let herself be a kid, getting a little thrill out of their dinner of oysters and crab cakes and filet mignon—and for dessert, German chocolate cake! They took her there a second time to celebrate her acceptance to Swarthmore, allowing her one small glass of champagne. It was their idea for her to apply to Swarthmore (and Johns Hopkins, and Haverford, and Carnegie Mellon). They told her not to worry about money, that they would pay if she got in. When Stephanie told her parents, they shrugged, slightly baffled. It didn't occur to them that her academic record was good enough to compete with kids from prep schools. And it didn't occur to them that she would want that. Stephanie herself was unsure, but as she read the Fiske Guide that the Shanks bought for her, she began to imagine herself attending the kind of brick-and-ivy places she'd only seen in movies. And then Mitchell borrowed it and began to share her daydreams. Her life got busy as she wrote her applications and studied for her SATs and then her subject tests (she was one of only three people in the county to take them) and then her AP exams. And when she wasn't doing that, she was either hanging out with Mitchell at his house or hanging out with Mitchell backstage, because he did the lights for the school play. Stephanie liked standing in the wings during rehearsals, watching the same scenes unfold
again and again, but never in exactly the same way; it was like getting glimpses into subtly altered worlds.

So much of Stephanie's imaginative life was devoted to the construction of alternate universes. In the weeks after her mother's suicide (without warning, without explanation, without even a note) she kept reimagining the day it happened, different versions of it: a day when she didn't go for a horseback ride; a day when she did, but with her mother instead of her father; a day when the whole family rode together, having a picnic, laughing in the sun; a day when she woke up sick with a stomach bug, so sick that her mother had to take care of her, had to bring her a bowl to vomit in and a cold compress to drape on her forehead when she was through. For some reason this last fantasy was the most compelling; it seemed to be the scenario that might have convinced her mother to stay on earth just a few days longer.

Stephanie breathed deeply to dissolve her gathering tears. She stepped out of the shade of the church and headed toward the sidewalk, where Robbie and Bry were still playing. She called to them to say she was going to get Dad and they barely nodded in her direction. Stephanie remembered how much her mother hated this, how she would point to herself and say “Acknowledge me!” She wondered if Robbie and Bry remembered the last thing their mother said to them. Stephanie couldn't. She had tried so many times, but she could only guess. It must have been something banal and forgettable:
have fun
or
see you later
or
bye now
. It made Stephanie think that her mother's act must have been impulsive, because if she'd been planning it, wouldn't she have said something of significance before Stephanie went on her ride? Wouldn't she at least have
said “I love you”? Then again, maybe she had, and Stephanie hadn't even noticed.

Her father was in the lobby, talking to a woman with shiny brown hair and dangling leaf-shaped earrings that Stephanie admired. She looked familiar, and when her father introduced her, he acted like they'd met before. Apparently she was Ms. Lanning, a sub at the high school.