Russell Banks - Continental Drift

His daughters wait for his answer. He looks down at Emma beside him. What can she know? “Did we wake you up too, Flowerpot?”

Nervously, Emma opens and closes her hands, squeezing jelly between her fingers.

“How come you said you don’t love Mommy anymore?” Ruthie repeats.

“Well, honey, it’s like … sometimes grownups say things they don’t mean. That’s all. They get a little mad about one thing, and then they act real mad about another. It’s like when we first moved here, some of the kids at school were mean to you, and now they’re your friends. They didn’t mean it.”

“But it’s different. They’re not s’posed to love me. You, you’re s’posed to love Mommy. What did you get mad for?”

Elaine turns away from the stove and waits for his answer.

“You still love Daddy ,” Ruthie says to her mother. It’s an announcement, but it wants confirmation.

“Yes,” Elaine says. “I love Daddy.” She turns back to the stove.

“What did you get mad for?” Ruthie asks him again.

Bob sighs and looks at his wife, as if for guidance, but she’s holding her back to him. “I … I don’t know, honey. I don’t know why I got mad last night. It was late, and I was tired, and worried. In a bad mood, that’s all. Now eat your breakfast and let me read the paper, okay?” He smiles wearily, and the child returns her gaze, brow furrowed, to the cereal box.

He reads the Red Sox box score, notes with pleasure that Yaz went three for four with two doubles and Torrez pitched seven innings and struck out five. “Sonofabitch. Yaz is forty and he’s playing like a kid. I love that sonofabitch.”

“Will you please watch your language!” Elaine says, hands planted on hips. “This is a whole new habit of yours, this swearing all the time.”

“Sorry, sorry, sorry,” he says. He takes another sip of his coffee, and to win back her favor, smacks his lips noisily. “Good coffee.”

“Thanks,” she grunts. “Here’s your eggs.”

He breaks the yolks with the tip of his fork and rubs a piece of toast through them; it’s the way he has eaten eggs all his life. If by accident he were served eggs well-done, he’d try to break the yolks, and failing, he’d react with confusion. They wouldn’t be actual eggs to him. They’d be vegetables or cheese or fish. Eggs run and make a lovely mess that you can clean up with a piece of buttered toast.

“I can’t believe Yaz,” he says, still poring over the paper. “He’s almost ten years older than me, but he’s playing like a kid. If I tried to do what I did as a kid, I’d break my ass.” When Bob was a kid, large and fast and tireless, he was a graceful bear sweeping the puck away from a three-on-one rush to his goal, skating the length of the rink alone, long, graceful, powerful strides, with the puck swirling ahead of him across the blue line, where he ducks to one side and fakes the defenseman, cuts to the other, jerking the puck along as if it were attached to his stick by a piece of string, charging the net, driving the puck with the force of his rush a half foot above the ice over the goalie’s desperate slash, and as he glides past the goal, he watches the puck smack against the net, watches it drop softly to the ice, watches the goalie angrily whack his stick against the ice, and Bob smiles, skates slowly, smoothly, back to his end of the ice, barely out of breath.

“Y’know,” he says to Elaine, “I’m really sorry we didn’t get down here for spring training. I’d have loved to watch the Sox work out, over there at Chain-O’-Lakes Park, over there in Winter Haven. It’s only a couple miles. Now,” he says, lowering his voice, “now they’ve all gone north, it’s all up north. I used to go to Fenway with my dad once in a while when I was a kid. I haven’t been to Fenway in years….”

“We were here in time. You could’ve watched them play.”

“Well, yeah, I know. But we were still getting settled and all.” He looks up from the newspaper and peers out the window above the sink at the flat roof of the trailer next to theirs and the tops of the palm trees and the bright blue sky beyond, and he says, “It’s hard, I sort of didn’t believe they were here. In Florida, I mean. I’ve known it all my life, the Red Sox do spring training in Winter Haven, Florida, and here I am living ten miles away, only I can’t picture it, so I just sit around, like I always did, waiting for them to come home to Fenway and begin the season. Only, when they do begin the season, here I am in Florida. It’s strange. I probably would’ve got Yaz’s autograph. It’s real easy in spring training to get to talk to the players and all. They walk right over to the fence and talk to you.”

“I know,” she says.

Ruthie comes up next to him and says, “Bye, Daddy,” and purses her lips for a kiss.

Instead of kissing her, he stands and says, “Wait a minute. I’ll walk out to the bus stop with you.”

Surprised and pleased, she claps her hands together, then flips one hand for him to hold. Together, they step out the door into the bright sunlight, and holding hands, cross the yard and driveway to the paved lane, where, looking back at his station wagon, he notices once again his New Hampshire number plates and says aloud to himself, “Jesus, I’ve got to get Florida plates before they pick me up for it.”

The car looks peculiar to him. He’s owned it for almost three years and has only got five more payments to mail north to the Catamount Trust, at which point, as he’s said to Elaine many times, he knows the transmission will go. But this morning, as he walks past the car with his daughter and moves down the lane to the highway, he turns and studies the car and wonders why it looks so strange to him, as if it has been cut out of a black-and-white snapshot and pasted onto a color picture of pink hibiscus and bougainvillea, green patches of grass, pale blue mobile home, dark green star-shaped thatch palm behind the trailer, citrus groves beyond the crisp, cloudless blue sky above. He’s walking backwards, barefoot, sucking on his upper lip and no longer holding his daughter’s hand.

“What’re you looking at?” she asks, peering over her shoulder.

“Oh, nothing. The car. The house.”

“We should get a new car.”

“You think so, eh?”

“Yeah. A red one. To go with the new house.” Ruthie skips ahead of him, ponytail flying, and he turns from the car and walks quickly to catch up.

“Yeah!” he calls after her. “A new car to go with a new house to go with a new job! A whole new life!”

She slows and waits for him, and when he catches up, he takes her hand again, and they walk on in silence to where the school bus stops at the side of the highway.

By the time he returns to the kitchen, he’s sweating, and his tee shirt has large wet circles under the arms. The kitchen is empty; he assumes Elaine has taken Emma to the bathroom to wash her face, hands and arms before putting her outside to play. He checks his watch, eight twenty-three, and dropping his weight onto his chair, leans over to finish reading the paper.

“Aw, Jesus,” he says, looking with disgust at the purple smears and globs of jelly on the paper. “Jesus H. Christ,” he murmurs. He stands quickly and grabs the newspaper at the sides, as if to lift it, but then, looking down on it from above, he notices for the first time a photograph in the center of the page opposite the box scores. It’s a wirephoto of a base runner sliding headfirst, sliding into second, Bob thinks, or possibly third, though he knows right off that it’s Carl Yastrzemski, number eight, doing the sliding. It’s Yaz at forty, stretching a long single into a double by running ninety feet full speed and hurling his body against the ground, diving and stretching his arms for the base as he twists his body hard to the right to avoid the tag, spikes, shinbones and knees of the second baseman.