Stephen Dixon - Late Stories

“She applauded you?”

“Not ‘subtle.’ Reserved? Tempered? Is that a word? Little claps. Almost pretending. And ‘subdued’ is what I think I mean.”

“She’s a very nice girl,” the pitcher said.

“Hey, I didn’t say she wasn’t. I was complimenting her on the way she tried to show her congratulations or whatever you want to call it to someone on the other team. She from Philadelphia?”

“She could be. I wouldn’t know.”

“We were told that almost everyone from your camp is supposed to be from Philadelphia.”

“That could be so. I am too. Where are you from?”

“Do you know her name?”

“Sure. Are you asking for it? Because I don’t know if I should give it. It might be wrong to. She might not want it handed out. Ask Sid there — the assistant head counselor — the guy in the white tennis shirt. If he thinks it’s okay, he’ll give it.”

“Nah, I should probably forget it. It might be a nuisance, my asking, and what would be the use?”

“If you say so, pal. She’s a helluva looker, I’ll grant you that. And good game too. Your part, anyhow.”

“Yeah, I had a good day. You, also. The score wasn’t even close, and you got a couple of singles.”

Going back, the camp director sat in the bed of the truck, with a cushion under and behind him. It was windy back there and he said “I have something to say. Can everyone hear me?” They all indicated they could. “I want to be honest. This won’t be nice. It was an experiment, going to another camp to play, one I’m not going to repeat. You played lousy softball today. What’s all you’re practicing get you? You could have beat them. They didn’t have a long-ball hitter and the last three innings their pitcher was throwing twice as many balls as strikes. Except you were swinging at all the bad pitches as if they were strikes. Phil did okay. Three cheers for Phil. But the rest of you? I was expecting a victory. Now what am I going to tell the campers in the mess hall tonight? We lost? We screwed up? We got creamed?”

“We did,” the team’s captain said, “So I guess you have to. We can take it.”

“No, I want them to feel good and prideful about their camp and waiters and want to come back next summer. I’ll put it in words that won’t make it sound as bad as it was. That the opposing team — I won’t even give out its name — had the home-field advantage and a cheering squad of girls to pump it up. I know; I know. I shouldn’t be taking it so hard. Only a game, and so on, but I don’t like to lose. Okay, somebody’s got to. And even the great Babe himself struck out a thousand and one times in between belting Gargantuan home runs.”

He thought of the girl a lot afterwards, at least the first few years. And then once every third month or so, maybe, or even less: twice a year, right up till the time he met his wife. She was the only person this happened to with him. It wasn’t that she was the only girl he ever had a crush on. But for some reason her face and expressions and blond hair and way she wore it and even what she had on that day — the khaki shorts and a maroon T-shirt with her camp’s name on it and leather sandals — stuck in his mind. Well, maybe the same images, once they got there, just repeated themselves over and over. He thinks that’s how it usually goes.

His wife, who was eleven years younger than he, was several months pregnant with their first child when he told her about the girl. He’d kept it to himself that long — they’d been together for close to four years — because he thought she might find it a bit peculiar, his recalling for thirty years a girl he never met or talked or wrote to and who only gave him a couple of weak hand claps for having hit a triple and knocking in two runs and tying the score of an inter-camp softball game. And who didn’t smile at him once and never looked his way again in the less than two hours she sat in the stands, at least so far as he saw. What prompted him to finally mention her was a nine-by-twelve-inch framed photo of his wife in the living room of her parents’ apartment. The photo was taken the summer before she started college, which she did when she was sixteen and a few months. She looked in the photo so much like he remembered the girl looked at around the same age. Long blond hair, shape of her face, round cheeks, sort of almond-shaped eyes. The photo was always there, so lots of the times he saw it he thought of the girl. And one afternoon, as they were walking from her parents’ building to the bus stop on Broadway to get to their apartment uptown, he said “You feel okay?” and she said “Sure, why wouldn’t I?”

“We could take a cab if this is too much of a trudge for you,” and she said “It’s good exercise. And I don’t walk enough, which I should.”

“You know the photograph of you with your first cat that’s always on the side table to the right of your parents’ couch?”

“I look a little dumpy in it, don’t I. At least my skin’s clear, which it wasn’t always then, and Matilda looks so pretty and slim. I’d just brushed her.”

“You look beautiful in it. According to the photographs your folks have around the place, you were a beautiful baby and a beautiful toddler and a beautiful adolescent and teenager and now you’re an exceptionally beautiful woman in every way.”

“What are you getting at?” she said.

“I have to be getting at something? All right; I am. I never told you something. And what I’m about to say is going to be okay. Sometimes when I look at that photo I’m reminded of a very pretty girl I once saw at her summer camp when I was sixteen and she was around the same age. She was very mature looking. Didn’t act like the other girls she was with. Nothing loud or exaggerated about her. Quiet; self-contained, or so it seemed. Maybe she was even older than I. Maybe by a year. I never thought of that before. That sure would have stopped anything from happening, if it had ever come to that. Because I never met her — never even approached her, though I wanted to — but I also never forgot her. She looked like you in that photo. The blond hair. Long and light and combed back. The face; shape of it. Even the eyes.”

“So she also had my color eyes? They’re fairly unusual, though maybe not for a Jewish blond.”

“That’s true. Her camp was Jewish, like mine. But I never got close enough to her to see what color they were. I was talking about their shape. Even her long graceful neck — you know, swan-like, was like yours, and her cheeks. What I’m saying is I have no idea why I never forgot that face and what I described about it and the one glance and little smile she gave me — no, she didn’t smile. Not to me, anyway. She did clap at me — a little clap, twice, very fast, from the bleachers she was sitting in with these other girls while she was watching a softball game between the camper waiters of my camp in New Jersey and hers in Pennsylvania. I’d just hit a triple — a three-base hit — that I could have stretched into a home run if the camp director of my camp, who was coaching at third base, hadn’t stopped me. I guess, being fair-minded, she was saying ‘good show’ or something. But you’re not really interested. And I’m getting the details of that day all mixed up. And why am I telling you it? Maybe telling you is wrong.”

“Why? It’s all right. I like hearing about you when you were young. And telling me this could be you saying she set the standard for the type of woman you were physically attracted to later on.”

“It wasn’t just physical,” he said. “It was her expressions too. She seemed smart and sweet and poised and serene. Like you are today and probably were at her age. Sixteen; seventeen. And I’d think the standard must already have been set if I was that immediately attracted to her, which never happened like that with a girl before. Though you could be right. I’m not saying you’re not. Maybe it did all start with her.”