Love Is a Canoe: A Novel (18 page)

“I mean, they didn’t get along. You saw that, right?”

“Did I?” Eli pointed to his chest. He laughed. “Yes, I guess I saw that. They had that timing thing with their stories that was funny. The no-you-tell-it thing. They’re not a disaster, though. He loves her. She’s way out of his league.”

“That’s so nice of you to say!” Emily felt herself brightening. She looked up, and the street lamp that had been broken forever on their corner seemed to have been fixed. She was too embarrassed to tell Eli that she’d called 311 about it, so she kept her happiness to herself. She loved calling 311.

“Nice of me?” Eli asked. He unlocked their door and they went inside.

“I mean, we could both see it. They’ll be okay—they’re just emotionally tender right now because having a kid is freaking them out. They’re cool.”

“Cool,” Eli said. “I’m not sure that’s a word I’d use to describe them. Arch?”

“Sure! Arch is the right word,” Emily said. “Nicely done.” She kissed him. He smiled at her and looked confused, like a dog, she thought, who was not sure why he was being praised. Now they both stood just inside the door, still in their coats. Their house smelled of them, she thought, of olives and radiator heat and wool coats and bicycle inner tubes. Eli checked his phone and Emily began to open their bills. Soon after they’d married, she had discovered that Eli never dealt with his own bills, and so she’d taken on the financial-management aspect of their marriage. She opened a letter from the Fresh Air Fund and thought again of children. She was beginning to feel their lack.

“We should give a bicycle to a Fresh Air Fund kid,” Emily said, to herself.

Eli looked up from his phone. He said, “Emily, I’m actually not that optimistic about Billy and Ida. Compared to us? Aren’t we kind of … better than they are? Even though I gave us this awful bump. I mean, I’m not forgetting that. But aren’t you sort of thinking that we’re more in sync than they are?”

Was she thinking that? She hadn’t been. But she loved that he was musing about them versus another couple. She was suddenly angry with herself for being pragmatic, thinking about their mail when her husband was dwelling on their marriage, on the value of their bond.

“Yes,” she said. “I love that you’re chewing over the night. I get what you mean about them, too.”

“I’m exhausted but I’m glad you took us out,” Eli said. He dropped his coat on the floor and wandered toward the back of the dark apartment.

Eli was always quick to fall asleep. And so Emily slipped out of bed as soon as she heard his even breathing. She had to see the contest on the Internet. It was real. She couldn’t quite believe it, and read through the copy several times. It had been going on for two full weeks. She was amazed she’d missed it. She never paid enough attention to pop culture. It wasn’t that she didn’t care. No, she thought. That was a lie. She didn’t care. She read tech columns and the business section of the
Times
. She looked at arts coverage rarely, always dutifully, and only because she was scanning for new documentary films or design symposiums, which she usually knew about anyway. And because of that, she’d almost missed the contest.

Could she enter? She would. In the morning. Just as a funny thing, another cathartic moment that spoke to the ongoing fix for her marriage. She found her bag by the front door and got out the edition she’d bought at the end of summer when the trouble started. The one she’d talked about with her sister was still on their coffee table. And there was another copy in the bedroom. Given how incredibly nonobservant Eli was of things around the house, she wondered when he would ever notice. Really, did she have to throw the book at him? She curled up with a blanket in the red suede chair.

This edition began with “Stolen Bases.”

“Stolen Bases,” from
Marriage Is a Canoe
, a new foreword to the third edition, first published in serialized version for six consecutive Sundays in July and August 1982 in
Parade
magazine

Another inspiration for this book came from a game of stolen bases that we played on a late afternoon in mid-August of that summer.

My Pop and I had taken over the baseball field in Robertson’s private park, in town.

Pop was teaching me and a few other children to steal bases. He had made a game of it, with scoring. We weren’t any good and there was loads of bunting and it was hard work, staying or running like mad and always having to pay attention. The afternoon turned to dusk and it was evening before we really noticed. And then it was nearly eight and one of the kids who lived nearby was called home by his mother. The five or six other kids we’d gathered thanked us and ran off to their own houses, where they’d apologize for being so late and then enjoy their franks-and-beans suppers.

I rounded up the heavy bases, made of sand encased in thick rubber and canvas, and dragged them to the supply shed at the side of the field. Pop swept the dirt in the running paths back into place. And then we heard a call, and when we looked up, we saw there was a boy still out there in center field, a small boy called Johnny who had helped Pop field balls because he was too shy to run bases.

“We’re all tucked away here for the night,” Pop said. “Thanks for your help, young man. We’re all set!”

“It’s Johnny.” The boy came closer to us.

“Yes, Johnny. I know.” Pop slapped his hands clean on the sides of his khakis. He had a gift of giving the person he was talking to time to settle themselves so they might say what they cared to say without being rushed. But this boy, Johnny, he just stared at me and Pop.

“You’re standing there like you’ve got something to tell us, Johnny. Like there’s a thing and you want to say it and you’re looking for your cue. Well, here’s your cue.”

Johnny did just what I’d have done—what any of us would do. He kicked a rock.

“Want us to walk you home, Johnny? Evening shadows bother you?”

“No, sir. It’s not that. I don’t want to go home.”

“We can walk you home.”

“It’s my parents. I don’t want to see them.”

“Yes. That happens sometimes and it’s okay. We’ve all got to work together to make our homes a good place.”

“I don’t like being there…” Johnny wandered off and stood on the foul-ball line, a couple of yards past third base.

“We’re going to help out a bit,” Pop whispered to me. And then, louder, he said, “Let’s all walk over to your place together and see about it, Johnny.”

Johnny walked toward us like he was in a trance.

He lived just four blocks from the field, on a wide-lane street that trucks used to come into town called Thayer Avenue. His house was a green Cape Anne with more than one broken shutter and a garden that could have benefited from two or three hours of weed picking.

We hadn’t talked the whole way there and we didn’t when we arrived. Instead, Pop gestured for Johnny and me to stay on the curb and he walked up the steps to the porch and knocked on the door.

“Yes?” It was a woman’s voice, a little tremulous.

“It’s Hank Latham. I’m here with your boy Johnny and my grandson, Peter.”

The screen door swung open and Johnny’s mom came out. Johnny’s father was behind her. They were not beautiful people, though the woman had streaked blond hair. The man had a clean white shirt on. The woman was small and the man was large in stature, but the woman somehow took up more space in my head. It may have had to do with how her hair made her hazel-colored eyes shine bright, like brass buttons on a camel-hair coat.

My Pop said, “First things first. I’ve got no right to come to your house, no right to intrude, so if you ask me to leave, I’ll leave straightaway.”

“That’s awfully grave,” Johnny’s father said. “What’s the trouble?”

“I’ll come in for a moment,” Pop said. “My boy Peter will stay outside with Johnny. They’ll play catch there in the street, by the streetlight. There’s not much traffic and they’ll be safe.”

He turned and nodded at us and went inside. The screen door banged shut behind him.

Johnny and I stood together. All of a sudden it was dark out, dark as if it were after midnight and I was waking only to go pee before drifting back to bed.

“I’m going to eavesdrop,” I said.

“Okay,” Johnny said. “But how are we going to make the sound of catch?”

I looked at him. He was hunched over and he reminded me of a character from
The Little Rascals
, in his tin-colored T-shirt and dirty jeans. I’d gained some weight since I’d arrived in June and I’d begun to stand up straighter. I said, “They won’t be listening for us.”

That was something I’d learned for sure in my own home, during the hard spring that came before that wonderful summer.

We dropped to all fours and crept up the stairs to take positions on either side of Johnny’s front door. The porch was cool and quiet in that dark night, though I could see some chairs scattered about behind Johnny, knocked up against one another and pointing every which way. You could tell no one had sat out there for some time.

“Thank you,” my Pop said. I imagine he’d been asked to take a seat. Then there were a full five seconds of quiet. And I could only hear Johnny’s breathing. I saw where he’d placed his glove under his knee, a move I found more delicate than I expected from him.

“Sir—”

“Call me Hank.”

I looked at Johnny and he had his eyes closed and was humming.

“Nothing? How about a glass of water?”

“All right,” Pop said. “You’ve got a boy who doesn’t want to come home at night. I’m sorry to be forward about it. But something is the matter.”

“What’s that to you?” the father asked.

“I’ll leave if that’s what you’d like me to do.”

“Johnny came to you about our problems?” It was the wife talking now.

“He did.”

“That’s bad,” the wife said.

“He ought to know better,” the father said, roughly.

But the wife must have cut him off. She said, “Maybe we should thank him. Here’s a chance to talk and I’m going to take it. We ought to have it out. I will tell you what’s the matter. My husband here, he tells me everything I do is wrong. Not just one thing or another, either. Every single goddamned thing! How I cook peas to the way I make beds to the style I like for my hair, to—the way I sneeze! Can you imagine? Can you imagine the life I’m having to live here with this man? And now you—you come in my home, uninvited, and you say—well—what have you got to say about it?”

There was a silence. I dared not look at Johnny.

“Is that fair, what Annie said?” my Pop asked. “May I call you Annie? And you’re John Senior, aren’t you?” We heard the sound of Johnny’s father quietly shifting, twisting around.

“Yes. It’s fair. I’m not happy.”

There was a stirring across from me and I looked up to watch Johnny do just what I would have done, what I had done only weeks earlier in my bedroom back home in Manhattan, which was to shove his glove into his mouth and bite down hard on the leather, taste the oil and salt and dirt. I knew he would chew and rip at the catgut twine that held everything together, just like I had. The taste of a baseball glove was like yesterday’s roast beef or three-day-old brisket. But you couldn’t eat it. You could only bite down and taste the oil seeping out.

“How serious is it?” Pop asked. “Is he violent with you?”

“It gets close. John, you’re not happy. Are you going to stay?” Annie asked.

“Yes,” John Senior said. “I don’t want to leave.”

“You threaten to leave all the time. You threaten me.”

“It’s words. I’m ashamed of them.”

“You can’t take all the blame,” Annie said, and I could hear the shudder in her voice.

“That’s all right if he does,” my Pop said. “It sounds like he knows he’s in the wrong. He can shoulder it for tonight, maybe for the summer. For as long as it takes. He looks able to do that.”

“Hank is right. I can. Annie, when I’m critical of you, when I tell you you ought to do things different, well, you can just send me right out of the house.”

“Easy for you two to say! But in the moment it’s not so easy.”

“At least it’s on the table,” Pop said.

“There is that,” Annie said.

“You two love your boy. I know there’s a girl upstairs sleeping. And I can see you’ve got another on the way.”

Johnny’s dad made an
ahem
noise.

“Listen, you know where me and my wife, Bess, live. How about if you all come to our house on Sunday after lunch. We’ve got an extra canoe and you and your children can go out for a paddle and we’ll take our grandson in the other canoe. In the evening, we’ll have fried chicken. We can set up a table for the children and one for us adults. And we four can talk and you can maybe bring a little lightness and gaiety into the lives of a couple of old folks.”

“You’re not old,” Annie said.

“We don’t mind being old. You won’t either, but that’s not a concern for a long time to come.”

We could hear a shifting, of the three of them getting up from their chairs. Without saying a word, both of us scrambled up and raced to the edge of their front yard and somehow we knew to lie there in the grass, our gloves thrown down at our sides, as if we’d gotten tired of playing catch and had decided to stare at the stars. Though the night sky was cloudy and there were none to see.

“Come on now, Peter,” Pop said. “Let’s go home. And you, Johnny, I believe we’ll be seeing you at our house this Sunday.”

“Yes, sir.”

Johnny ran up and into his house without saying goodbye to me. We made our way down the street.

“Doesn’t look like there’s much of a moon tonight. Bess will be waiting. Maybe with some cobbler if we’re lucky. Sometimes, you know, you get to have what you want and you get to be what you want to be.”

“Always?” I asked.

Pop grew quiet as he pondered the question. We were walking along a town road, as opposed to the country road we lived on, which was farther out and down the hill from where we were. Those houses by the water were our world and we were away from there.

“I said sometimes. Not always.”

Bang
went his hand on my head and then he gripped my shoulder and then down, roughly grabbing up my hand and holding it in his own cool, callused one as we crossed the road and made our way home, just ten minutes farther along. We walked carefully, since those massive steel Pontiacs and Fords kept on rumbling by us in ones and twos on that moonless night.