Richard Ford - The Sportswriter

Pheasant Run to the left is a theme-organized housing development where all the streets are culs-de-sac with “Hedgerow Place” and “The Thistles” painted onto fake Andrew Wyeth barnboard signs. All the plantings are young, but fancy cars already sit in the driveways. Vicki and I drove through once like tourists, admiring the farm-shingled and old-brick homesteads with price tags bigger than I paid for my three-story in town fourteen years ago. Vicki’s father and stepmother live in the same sort of place down in Barnegat Pines, and I have a feeling she would like nothing better than for herself and some prospective hubby to move right in.

Pheasant Meadow sits at the other lower end of the stubble field — a boxy, unscenic complex of low brown-shake buildings overlooking a shallow man-made mud pond, a yellow bulldozer, and some other apartments already half-built. In the ideal plan of things, these are for the younger people just starting in the world and on the way up — secretaries, car salesmen, nurses, who will someday live to buy the complete houses over in Pheasant Run on resale. Starter people, I call them.

Vicki’s aqua Dart sits out front in slot 31, still with black and white Texas plates, and shining with polish. The last hiss of rain squall thrums off north into the Brunswicks as I pull in beside her, and the air is thick with a silvery, chemical smell. But before I can get out, and to my surprise, I see Vicki in the front seat of her car, nearly hidden by its big head rest. I roll down the passenger window and she sits peeking out at me from the driver’s seat, her black hair orchestrated Loretta Lynn style, two thick swags taken toward the back of her head and ears, then straight down in sausage curls to her shoulders.

Across in the new units two hardhats sit grinning on unfinished Level Two. It’s clear they’ve been having a good time over something before I got here.

“I figured you probably wouldn’t show up,” Vicki says out her open window, as tentative as a school girl. “I was sitting up there waiting on the phone to ring for you to give me the bad news, and so I just came down here and listened to some tapes I like to hear when I’m sad.” She smiles out at me, a sweet-natured, chancy smile. “You’re not going to be hot at me are you?”

“If you don’t get over here in about two seconds I am,” I say.

“I knew it,” she says, running her window up quick and grabbing her bag, bouncing out of her Dart and into my life in a twinkling. “I told myself, I said, self, if you go out there he’ll come, and sure enough.”

All fears are put instantly to rest, leaving the two hardhats shaking their heads. I wouldn’t mind, as I back out, blinking my lights and wishing them just half the fun I’m expecting. But they’d probably get the wrong idea. As we back up, though, I give them a grin and we wheel out of Pheasant Meadow down the access road toward Route 33 and the NJTP, Vicki cleaving to me, squeezing my arm and sighing like a new cheerleader.

“Why’d you think I wouldn’t show up?” I say, as we weave through rain-drenched Hightstown, and I am thinking how glad I am to own a car with an old-fashioned bench seat.

“Oh it’s just old silly-milly. Seemed like too good a thing to happen, I guess.” Vicki is wearing black slacks that fit her tight but not too, a white, frilly-dressy blouse-and-scarf combination, a blue Ultrasuede jacket straight from Dallas and shoes with clear plastic heels. These are her dressy travel clothes, along with her nylon Le Sac weekender tossed in the back and her little black clutch where she keeps her diaphragm. She is a girl for every modern occasion, and I find I can be interested in the smallest particulars of her life. She stares out as the upright Federalist buildings of Hightstown slide past. “Plus. I had a patient kick out on me last night just right when I was talking to him, asking him questions about how he felt and everything, I wasn’t even s’posed to be workin, but a gal got sick. He was this colored man. And he was C-liver terminal, already way into uremia when he admitted, which is not that bad cause it usually starts ’em dreamin about their pasts and off their current problem.” (A tiny sigh of relief as to her whereabouts last night. I had called and found no one there, and my worst fears were loosed.) “Only you don’t really get that used to death, which is why I came down to ER from ONC. We’re supposed to be used to it and all, but I’m just not. I’d lot rather see a guy busted up and bleeding than some guy dying inside. I guess that was why I started worrying. I knew you went to the cemetery this morning.”

“That all went fine, though,” I say, and in most ways it did.

Vicki takes a Merit Light out of her little purse and lights up. She is not the kind of girl who smokes, but likes to smoke when she’s nervous. I reach a hand across her plump thighs and pull her closer to me, leg-side to leg-side. She lowers her window a crack and blows smoke that way. “When’s your birthday, anyway?”

“Next week.”

“Okay, that’s what you’re supposed to say. Now when is it really?”

“That’s the truth. I’m going to be thirty-nine.” I snake a glance down to see if there’s adverse reaction to this news. We have not discussed my age in the eight weeks I’ve known her. I assume she thinks I’m younger.

“You are not. Liar.”

“I’m afraid it’s true,” I say, and try to smile.

“Well, maybe I’ll make you a present of an eight-track, and tape you all my favorites. How’d you like that?” There is no more reaction to this news about my age. There are women I know who care about men’s ages, and women who don’t. X didn’t, and I have always counted that as a sign of good sense. Though where Vicki is concerned — her possible reasons for not caring are probably related to a bad first marriage and a wish to hook up with someone at least kind — it is another in a burgeoning number of happy surprises. Maybe we’ll get married in Detroit, fly back and move out to Pheasant Run, and live happily like the rest of our fellow Americans. What would be wrong with that?

“I’d like that fine,” I say.

“You weren’t mad at me for bein out in the car like a tart?”

“You’re too pretty to be mad at.”

“That’s about what them dimwits thought, too.”

We approach the Turnpike, take our ticket and start north, above the flat, featureless bedrenched Jersey flatlands — a landscape perfect for easy golf courses, valve plants and flea markets.

The reason Vicki is worried that I would be mad at not getting to come to her door is because she knows I love the tribal ritual of picking her up for our dates, even if I’m hoping to spend the night. Usually I am formal and bring a gift, something I quit doing long ago when X and I went on outings. Though it’s true that X and I lived together, and such things are easy to forget. But with Vicki, I usually bring something down from New York, where she has only been once and claims she can’t abide. For her part, she is always almost ready and pretends I hurry her, runs to the bedroom with straight pins in her mouth, or holding her hair up in back, needing to stitch a hem or iron a pleat. We are throwbacks in this, straight out of an earlier era, but I like this nervous and over-produced manner of things between us. We seem to know what each other wants without really knowing each other, which was a dilemma between X and me at the end. We didn’t seem to be tending the same ways. Though it may simply be that at my age I’m satisfied with less and with things less complicated.

Whatever the reason, I’m always happy when I am invited to spend the night or just an hour waiting in the pristine and nursey neatness of Vicki’s little 1-BR condo, on which her dad holds the note, and which the two of them furnished in a one-day whirlwind trip to the Miracle Furniture Mile in Paramus.