Richard Ford - The Sportswriter

After how many years? The narrow, half-squinty, mirthful sparkle I had seen a hundred times over — though only the eyes were visible behind a black silk balaclava worn by a woman modeling a pair of silk underwear from Formosa.

Off in the darkening surround, the sounds of “Scarborough Fair” drifted into the purple hills, and the smell of elm and apple wood floated lushly through my open window, but I couldn’t care less.

I flipped forward and back. And suddenly here was Mindy Levinson on almost every page: with long brown hair and a tentative smile, a Swedish Angora jacket over her shoulder (not looking the least bit Jewish); farther back, standing by a red Vermont barn, wearing a Harris Tweed casual jacket and appearing proud and arrogant; just inside the cover in an Austrian hat, but seeming repentant of some untold misdeed; elsewhere toward the back, ensconced in a comfy New Hampshire kitchen, starting a fire with a brass spark-igniter made in the shape of a duck’s head. And later still, coralling a bunch of munchkin kids all wearing rabbit’s fur puppet hats.

When she was my first college love interest, Mindy and I used to slip off campus, into her parents’ Royal Oak home and boink the daylights out of each other for days on end. It was Mindy who had traveled with me on a tour of Hemingway Country and stayed out on a beach at Walloon Lake while fireflies twinkled. She was the first girl I ever lied to a room clerk because of. Later, of course, she married a slimy land developer named Spencer Karp and settled down in the Detroit suburb of Hazel Park near her parents and had kids before I was even through with school.

But I could not have been more stupefied. Out of a disorderly and not especially welcome present came a friendly, charitable face from the past (not an experience I have that often). Here was Mindy Levinson smiling at me twenty times out of a shiny life I might’ve had if I’d just gone to law school, gotten bored with corporate practice, dropped it all, moved up to New Hampshire, hung out my shingle, and set up my wife in a town-and-country dress shop all her own — a pretty life, prizable and beckoning, apparently without a crumb of alienation or desperate midnight heart’s pounding. A fairy-tale life for real adults.

Where, I wondered, was Mindy? Where was Spencer Karp? Why did she not look Jewish now? What about Detroit?

What I did was immediately pick up the phone, dial the twenty-four-hour toll-free number and talk to a sleepy-sounding older woman whom I directed to the catalog page with the kids in the puppet hats and ordered three. As I was reading off my credit card number, I happened to say that the woman in that picture looked strangely familiar, like my sister from whom I was separated by the adoption agency. Did the company use local women for their models? I asked. “Yes,” came the stoical reply. Did she know who this particular woman might be? There was then a pause. “I don’t know nothin about that kind of thing,” the woman said suspiciously. “Is this all you want to buy?” She sighed with exasperation and lack of sleep. I admitted it was but that I had decided not to buy the puppet hats after all, after which the woman cut me off.

I sat for a while and gazed out my screenless window into the yellow-lit dale of Berkshire College, where the maples and oaks were still in summer leaf, listening to “Scarborough Fair” change to “Michael, Row the Boat Ashore,” and then to “Try to Remember,” trying indeed to remember as much as I could about Mindy and those long-ago days in Ann Arbor, sensing both mystery and coincidence, and considering the small stirring caused by the two brown eyes behind the black balaclava, and the non-Jewish smile in a popcorn sweater.

A certain kind of mystery requires investigation so that a better, more complicated mystery can open up like an exotic flower. Many mysteries are not that easy to wreck and will stand some basic inquiry.

Mine entailed getting up at the crack of dawn the next day and driving the eighty miles over to West Ovid, strolling into the store whose catalog I brought with me, and asking the clerk straight out who this woman in the moleskin ratcatchers was, since she looked like a woman I had gone to college with, and who had married my best friend in the service from whom I’d been separated in a Vietnamese POW camp and did not know the fate of to this very moment.

The cash register woman — a dwarfish, ruby-faced little Hampshirewoman — was only too happy to tell me that the woman in question was Mrs. Mindy Strayhorn, wife of Dr. Pete Strayhorn, whose dental office was down in the middle of town, and that all I had to do was go down there, walk in the office and see if he was my long-lost friend. I was not the first person, she said, to recognize old friends in the catalog, but that most people, when they inquired, turned out to be mistaken.

I could not get out the door fast enough. And not to Doc Stray-horn’s, needless to say. But to the phone booth in front of the Jeep dealership across the road, where I looked up Stray horn on Raffles Road and dialed Mindy without catching a breath or blinking an eye.

“Frank Bascombe?” she said, and I would’ve known her playful voice in a crowded subway car. “My goodness. How in the world did you ever find us here?”

“You’re in the catalog,” I said.

“Oh, well sure.” She laughed in an embarrassed way. “Isn’t that funny. I do it for the clothes discount, but Pete thinks it isn’t quite nice.”

“You really look great.”

“Do I?”

“Darn right. You’re prettier than ever. A whole lot prettier.”

“Well, I had my nose fixed after I married Spencer. He hated my old one. I’m glad you like it.”

“Where is Spencer?”

“Oh, Spencer. I divorced him. He was a crumb, you know.” (I did know.) “I’ve lived here ten years now, Frank. I’m married to a nice man who’s a dentist. We have children with perfect teeth.”

“Great. It sounds like a great life. Plus you do the modeling.”

“Isn’t that a riot? How are you? What’s happened to you in seventeen years? A lot, I’ll bet.”

“Quite a bit,” I said. “I don’t want to talk about that, though.”

“Okay.”

Red and silver streamers were spinning outside down the front of the Jeep dealership’s lot. Two long lines of Cherokees and Apaches sat in the brisk New England sunlight. It soon would be winter, and the mountains at this latitude were already red and yellow higher up. In a day I would have to begin teaching students I already knew I wasn’t going to like, and everything seemed to be starting on a new and perilous course. I knew, though, I wanted to see Mindy Levinson Karp Strayhorn one last time. Many, many things would’ve changed, but if she was who she was, I would still be me.

“Mindy?”

“What?”

“I’d sure like to see you.” I felt myself grinning persuasively at the phone.

“When did you have in mind, Frank?”

“In ten minutes? I’m down the street right now. I was just passing through town.”

“Ten minutes. That’ll be great. It’s pretty easy to find our house. Let me give you directions.”

The rest of it was short but all I’d hoped for (though possibly not what you would think). I drove to her house, a rambling remodeled Moravian farmhouse with a barn, plenty of out-buildings and a pleasant pond that reflected the sky and the geese that swam on it. There was a golden dog and a housekeeper who looked at me suspiciously. Two children who might’ve been ten and eight, and a taller girl who might’ve been seventeen stood at the back end of the hall and smiled at me when their mother and I left. Mindy and I took a drive in my car with the top down toward Sunapee Lake and caught up on things. I told her about X and Ralph and my other children and my writing career and sportswriting and my plans to try teaching for a short while, all of which seemed not to interest her much, but in a pleasant way (I didn’t expect anything different). She told me about Spencer Karp and about her husband and her children and how much she appreciated “just the general mental attitude” of the people up here in the “north country,” and how in her mind the whole nation was changing not so much for the better as for the worse, and nobody could make her go back to Detroit now. At first she was guarded and skittish and talked like a travel agent as we skimmed along the highway, sitting over by the door as if she wasn’t sure I wasn’t some dark destroyer come to wreck her existence with out-of-date memories. After a while, though, when she saw how tame I really was, how enthusiastic, how all I wanted was to be near her life for a couple of hours, unquestioning and intending only to admire all from a distance and not to try and “go in” or to get her in the sack in some shabby motel on the way to Concord (exactly like I used to), then she liked me all over again and laughed and was happy the rest of the time. In fact, she eventually couldn’t help giving me a kiss and a hug every little while, and putting her head on my shoulder once we were far enough from West Ovid that no one she knew would see her. She even told me she didn’t intend to tell Pete about my visit, because that would make it all “the more delicious,” which made me kiss her again and embarrass her.