Richard Ford - The Sportswriter

“So how do you feel now?” Like a lawyer, she touches her chin with her index finger.

“Better. A lot better. This made a lot of difference.” I smile hopefully at my Humdinger.

“It used to be medicine, I guess.” She throws her hip to one side and holds onto the window glass with her fingertips. “Do you think it’s bad if I don’t have any of my plans set yet?” She squints at me, trying to guess my real answer in case I decide to lie.

“Not one bit,” I say. “You’ll have plans. And they won’t be long in coming, either. You’ll see.” I blink at her uncertainly. “Your life’ll change fifty ways before you’re twenty-five.”

“Cause I’m gettin older, okay? I don’t wanna piss away my whole life.” She drums her fingernails on the window glass, then leaves off. I can’t help thinking of Herb Wallagher’s dream of death and hatred. Everybody has the most perfect right to be happy, but sometimes there’s nothing you can do to help yourself.

“You won’t,” I say. “It’s all ahead of you.” I give her a big encouraging grin, though I don’t think it can do the trick for either of us.

“Yeah, okay.” She smiles for the first time, a shy-girl’s smile of politeness and misgiving. “I gotta go.” She glances over at the Ground Zero, where a yellow Corvette has slid in under the awning, its red blinker blinking.

“Can I give you a ride?”

“Naa, I can walk.”

“Thanks a million.” She looks at the phone booth where the shopping cart is resting against the frame, and the receiver has fallen off its hook. It’s a bleak-looking place. I would hate to make a phone call from it now.

“Did you ever like write about skiing?” she says, and shakes her head at me as if she knows my answer before I say it. The breeze blows up dust and sprinkles our faces with it.

“No. I don’t even know how to ski.”

“Me neither,” she says and smiles again, then sighs. “So. Okay. Have a nice day. What’s your name, what’d you say it was?” She is already leaving.

“Frank.” For some reason I do not say my last name.

“Frank,” she says.

As I watch her walk out into the lot toward the Ground Zero, her hands fishing in her pocket for a new cigarette, shoulders hunched against a cold breeze that isn’t blowing, her hopes for a nice day, I could guess, are as good as mine, both of us out in the wind, expectant, available for an improvement. And my hopes are that a little luck will come both our ways. Life is not always ascendant.

It is the bottom of the day, the deep well of shadows and springy half-light when late afternoon becomes early evening and we all want to sit down in a leather chair by an open window, have a drink near someone we love or like, read the sports and possibly doze for a while, then wake before the day is gone all the way, walk our cool yards and hear the birds chirp in the trees their sweet eventide songs. It is for such dewy interludes that our suburbs were built. And entered cautiously, they can serve us well no matter what our stations in life, no matter we have the aforementioned liberty or don’t. At times I can long so for that simple measure of day and place — when, say, I’m alone in misty Spokane or chilly Boston — that an unreasonable tear nearly comes to my eye. It is a pastoral kind of longing, of course, but we can all have it.

Things seem to move faster now.

I buzz through Freehold, turn east at the trotter track, then wrangle toward Route 1, past Pheasant Run & Meadow. A Good Life Is Affordable Here, reads the other side of the sign.

On the Trenton station the announcer has a sports quiz going to which I do not know one answer, though I take educated guesses. Whose record did Babe Ruth break when he hit sixty in 1921? Harry Heilmann is my guess, though the answer was, “His own.” Who was the MVP in the Junior Circuit in ’41? George Kell, the Newport Flash, is my choice. Phil Rizutto, the Glendale Spaghetti, is the answer. In most ways I am content not to know such information, and to think of sportswriting not as a real profession but more as an agreeable frame of mind, a way of going about things rather than things you exactly do or know. A reasonable guess is a source of pleasure, since it makes me feel like one of the crowd rather than a human FORTRAN spitting our stats and reducing sports to unsavory accountancy. When sports stops being a matter for speculation, even idle, aimless, misinformed speculation, something’s gone haywire — no matter what Mutt Greene thinks — and it’ll be time to get out of the business and for the cliometricians and computer whizzes from Price Waterhouse to take over the show.

At the intersection of Routes 1 and 533, I head south toward Mrs. Miller’s. I would like the consultation I missed on Thursday, possibly even a full reading. If, for instance, Mrs. Miller were to tell me I was risking a severe emotional breakdown if I identified Walter in the morgue and would possibly never see my children as long as I lived, I’d start thinking about Alaska king crab and a night of HBO in a Philadelphia-area Travel-Lodge, and a new look at things in the morning. Why sneer in the face of unhappy prophecy?

Unfortunately, however, Mrs. Miller’s little brick-and-asphalt ranchette looks locked up tighter than Dick’s hatband. No dusty Buicks sit in the drive. No sign of the usual snarling Doberman in the fenced-in back. The Millers (what could their name really be?) are gone for the holiday, and I have now missed consultations two times running — not a good sign in itself.

I pull into the drive and sit as I did three nights ago, staring at an opening in the heavy drawdrapes as if I could will someone to be there. I give my horn an “accidental” toot. I’d be happy to see the opening widen, a door inched back behind the dusty metal screen, as it did the last time. A nice niece would do. I’d pay ten bucks to make small talk with a dark-skinned female in-law. She wouldn’t need divining powers. I’d still come away better.

But that is not to be. Cars beat the highway behind me, and no niece comes to signal. No door cracks. The future, at least my part in it, remains unassured, and I will need to take extra care of myself. I pull back out onto Route 1 toward home, just missing a big honking tractor-trailer headed south, and my jaw still throbbing from Vicki’s knuckle sandwich, now two hours old.

I take the front way into Haddam, curling up King George Road and Bank Street, along the north lawns of the Institute and through the Square. Though once in the village limits I am at a loss for what to do first, and am struck by an unfriendliness of the town, the smallish way it offers no clue for how to go about things — no priority established, no monumental structures to determine a true middle, no Main Street to organize things. And I see again it can be a sad town, a silent, nothing-happening, keep-to-yourself Sunday town — the library closed and green-shaded. Frenchy’s abandoned. The Coffee Spot empty (Sunday Times scattered from the breakfast crowd). The Institute lies remote and tree-shadowed, a remaining family from the morning services, standing on the Square with their son. It is unexpectedly a foreign place, as strange as Moline or Oslo, its usual informal welcomeness reefed in as if some terror was about, a crusty death’s smell, a different bouquet from the swimming pool odor I trust.

I park in my drive and go in to put on new clothes. Hoving Road is somnolent, as blue-shaded and leaden as a Bonnard. The Deffeyes’ sprinkler hisses, and up a few houses the Justice has set a badminton net onto his long lawn. An old Ford Woody sits in his drive. Somewhere near abouts I hear the sounds of light chatter-talk and glasses clinking in our cozy local backyard fashion — an Easter Egg hunt finished, the children asleep, the sound of a single swimmer diving in. But this is the day’s extent. A private stay-home with the family till past dark. Wreaths are off all doors. The world once more a place we know well.