Slide - Kyle Beachy [43]
During the third visit that following July, only Marilynne the cardiologist was home. The other three were on various trips of their own. I prepared fresh salmon and lentils from a recipe I'd memorized and we talked of our final year of school and the upcoming presidential election. After dinner the women turned in early, leaving me alone in the TV den of their massive doctor house. I had never seen such thorough photographic record of a family's history. Here were Brandon, Caroline, and preadolescent Audrey floating off some lake dock. Here was Marilynne with children at a formal affair. A thousand smiles passed between family. How could these people have been wrong about me? They were surgeons and ambitious young adults sharing a nature of familial love I had never known. They were not idiots. And this was troubling.
Our parents would finally meet at commencement, a few loaded and awkward moments while Aud and I stood tight-lipped in gowns and dress shoes. Overlapping fields à la those of magnets, the forces here what your boy's problem is and what we find lacking in your girl. Silent. Masked. I wanted to fucking explode.
Nor would she even really look at me in their presence. Because by then Audrey's defection was nearly total, to the surgeons’ theory and consequently to Carmel's heartless ones and zeros. No more forgiveness, no maybe, no benefits of any doubt. This boy does not love our Audrey. Never mind that her parents’ opinion might have created its own eventual outcome, as prophecy so frequently can. Never mind that we were still Potter and Audrey, still two halves of some whole, something, this injured limping organism of our private creation. No longer did or could or would I provide the proof she needed. Never mind that pain itself could be her proof, if she would only step back and look. Look! Never mind any of it. For she was off—off to colorful Europe with binary Carmel, leave this sprawling gray region behind.
It was a noon-ten first pitch against the Cubs and we had the French doors open so we could watch from outside. I sat at the deck table, glazed and getting glazeder in the heat, picking at some nature of crust on my T-shirt. Stuart was in the kitchen, pouring a blender of margarita into pastel plastic cups. There was little mystery how the afternoon would progress. Edsel would appear sometime soon, somehow, then Matt and Becky would show up and maybe Eric and Melissa, other couples with their dogs. Couples in St. Louis usually have dogs and are usually engaged. In the kitchen, Stuart stuck a finger into his ear and jiggled it. Saturday.
At some point the Saturday thing had begun. There were people in the pool, people on all sides of me, people in the kitchen, talk of sports and whine of blender. Now the ogre was throwing horseshoes in the grass. I leaned back in my chair and watched pregame footage of batting practice. The center fielder shagged a lazy pop fly.
“We lose another series to these fucks and I'm gonna fucking barf all over the place.”
This was Eric.
Melissa his fiancée said, “It's the Cubs, honey. Fuck the Cubs.”
It was this rivalry, Cards-Cubs, at once fierce and passive, that most bookmarked our city in the national arena. Chicago's proximity made for near splits at either ballpark, the stands like some insipidly cordial Crip-Blood mixer. Richard had raised me to both despise and pity the Cubs, though it always felt to me that a true rivalry required at least some venom and ire. But people believed in it, and that, finally, was what mattered.
Matt tossed a tennis ball his yellow Lab ignored. Becky turned a glossy page of her women's magazine. A girl I'd never seen before, Kathy visiting from Indianapolis, stared gloomily at the middle of the table. Melissa discussed with Becky the plan to join a new gym. Kathy continued to stare through the table and said she hadn't worked out since she and her boyfriend broke up, a breakup that was apparently behind her visit here.
Becky said, “Because, you