Richard Ford - The Sportswriter

Vicki made all her own choices: pastel poof-drapes, sunburst mirror, bright area rugs with abstract designs, loveseat with a horse-and-buggy print, a maple mini-dining room suite, a China-black enamel coffee table, all brown appliances and a whopper Sony. All Wade Arcenault had to do was write a big check and set his little girl’s life back on track after the bad events with husband Everett.

Each time I’m inside, all is precisely as it was the time before, as if riveted in place and clean as newsprint: a fresh Nurse magazine, a soap opera archive and TV Guide shingling the piecrust table. A shiny saxophone on its stand unused since high school band days. The guest bathroom spotless. Dishes washed and put away. Everything reliable as the newly-wed suite in the Holiday Inn.

My own house represents other aims, with its comfortable, overstuffed entities, full magazine racks, faded orientals, creaky sills and the general residue of mid-life eclecticism — artifacts of a prior life and goals (many unmet), yet evidence that does not announce a life’s real quality any more eloquently than a new Barca Lounger or a Kitchen Magician, no matter what you’ve heard. In fact, I have become a committed no-muss, no-fuss fellow. And the idea appeals to me of starting life over in such a new and genial place with an instant infusion of colorful, fresh and impersonal furnishings. I might’ve done the same if it hadn’t been for Paul and Clarissa, and if I hadn’t believed I wasn’t so much starting a new life as raising the ante on an old one. And if I hadn’t felt our house was still a sound investment. All of which has worked out well, and most nights I drift off to sleep (wherever I am — a St. Louis, an Atlanta, a Milwaukee or even a Pheasant Meadow) convinced I have come away, as they say, with the best of both worlds — the very thing we all crave.

Vicki has dowsed her cigarette and begun pinching at her sausage curls in the visor mirror. “Doesn’t it seem strange to you we’d be takin a trip together?” She squinches up her nose, first at her own face then at mine, as if she didn’t expect to hear a word she could believe.

“This is what grownups do — go on trips together, stay in hotels, have wonderful times.”

“Rilly?”

“Really.”

“Well. I guess.” She takes a bobby pin out of her blouse cuff and puts it in her mouth. “It just never seemed like anything I’d be doin. Everett and me went to Galveston sometimes. I been to Mexico, but just to cross over.” She removes the pin and buries it deep in her black hair. “What are you, anyway, by the way?”

“I’m a sportswriter.”

“Yes, I know that. I read things you wrote.” (This is news to me! What things?) “I mean, are you Libra or the Twins. You said your birthday wasn’t but less than a month from now. I want to figure you out.”

“I’m the Taurus.”

“What does that one mean?” She watches me keenly now out the side of her eye while she finishes with her hair.

“I’m pretty intelligent. I’m not cynical, but I’m intuitive about people, and that might make me seem cynical.” All this comes straight from Mrs. Miller, my palmist. It is part of her service to give information like this if I ask her for it, in addition to speculating on the future. I try to see her at least every two weeks. “I’m also pretty generous.”

“I’ll admit that, at least you been that with me. I wonder if that stuff’ll make your dreams come true. I don’t know much about it. I guess I could learn more.”

“What dreams of yours have come true?”

She folds her arms under her breasts like a high school girlfriend and stares straight ahead for miles. It is possible to think of her as being sixteen and chaste instead of thirty and divorced; as never having witnessed a single bad or unhappy thing, despite the fact she attends death and mayhem nearly every day. “Well, look,” she says, staring up the Turnpike. “Did you know I always wanted to go to Detroit?” She pronounces Detroit so as to rhyme with knee-joint.

“No.”

“Well then all right. I did though. I almost fell over when you asked me.” She puts her chin down as though deep in serious thought and makes a little clucking sound with her tongue. “If you’d asked me to go to Washington, D.C., or Chicago, Illinois, or Timbuktu, I probably would’ve said no. But when I was a little girl my Daddy used to always say, ‘Detroit makes, the world takes.’ And that was just such a puzzle to me I figured I had to see it. It seemed so unusual, you know, to me. And romantic. He’d gone up there to work after the Korean War, and when he came back he had a picture postcard of a great big tire stood up on its tread. And that’s what I wanted to see, but I never got to. I got married instead on the way to no place special. Then I met you.”

She smiles up at me sweetly and puts her hand inside my thigh in a way she hasn’t quite done before, and I have to keep from swerving and causing a big pile-up. We are just now passing Exit 9, New Brunswick, and I take a secret look over along the line of glass booths, only two of which are lighted OPEN and have cars pulling through. Indistinct, gray figures lean out and lean back, give directions, make change, point toward surface roads for weary travelers. What could be more fortuitous or enticing than to pass the toll booth where the toll-taker’s only daughter is with you and creeping up on your big-boy with tender, skillful fingers?

“Do you like my name?” She keeps her hand close up on my leg, her built-on fingernails doing a little audible skip-dance.

“I think it’s great.”

“Is that right?” She squinches her nose again. “I never liked it, but thanks. I don’t mind Arcenault. I like that. But Vicki sounds like a name you’d see on a bracelet at Walgreen’s.” She glances at me, then back toward the wide estuary and wetlands of the Raritan, stretching like wheat to the tip of Staten Island and the Amboys. “Looks like someplace the world died out there, doesn’t it?”

“I like it out there,” I say. “Sometimes you can imagine you’re in Egypt. Sometimes you can even see the World Trade Center.”

She gives my leg a friendly pinch and turns me loose to sit up straight. “Egypt, huh? You probably would like that. You’re in from the nut department, too. Tell me what that little boy of yours died of?”

“Reye’s.”

She shakes her head as though mystified. “Boy-shoot. What’d you do when he died?”

This is a question I’m not interested in exploring, though I know she wouldn’t ask if she weren’t concerned about me and felt some good could come out of it. She is as much a literalist in these matters as I am, and much more savvy about men than I am about women.

“We were both sitting beside his bed. It was early in the morning. Before light. We may have been asleep, really. But a nurse camé in and said, ‘I’m sorry, Mr. Bascombe, Ralph has expired.’ We both just sat there a few minutes, stunned, though we knew it was going to happen. And then she cried a while and I did, too. And then I went home and cooked up some bacon and toast, and ended up watching television. I had a tape of great NBA championships, and I watched that until it got light.”

“Death’ll make you nutty, won’t it?” Vicki rests her head on the seat back, pulls her feet up, and hugs her shiny black knees. Far ahead I see a plane — a great jet — floating earthward where I know Newark airport to be; it is a promising sign. “You know what we did when my Mama died?” She glances up, as if to see if I’m still here.

“No.”

“We all went out and ate Polynesian. It wasn’t a big surprise or anything, either. She had everything you can have and I was working right in Texas Shriners and knew everything from talking to the doctors, which I don’t think is really that good. Everett and Daddy, Cade and me, though, went out to the Garland Mall in the middle of the hot afternoon and ate poo-poo pork. We just wanted to eat. I think you want to eat when someone dies. Then we just went and spent money. I bought a gold add-a-bead necklace I didn’t need. Daddy bought a three-piece suit at Dillards’ and a new wristwatch. Cade bought something. And Everett bought a new-used red Corvette he probably still owns, I guess. He did have it.” She extends her lower lip over the other one and focuses down beetle-browed on the visible memory of Everett’s Corvette, which stands out now more than death. Her nature is to put her faith in objects more than essences. And in most ways that makes her the perfect companion.