The Last Romantics(14)
“Joe—ooooh—” I held up my arms and wiggled my fingers. “Look, I’m a ghost Joe! Look!”
I moved toward him with arms outstretched. On my brother’s face, I saw an immediate deflation and a flicker of shame.
“Yeah, a ghost,” Joe said gruffly, and laughed. “Got you, didn’t I?”
The slam of a car door startled us both. There were voices outside in the driveway, then footsteps at the front door. Joe grabbed my hand, and together we ran down the stairs and out the back. We were breathless and scared, both of us laughing as we made it through the side gate and across our old neighbors’ lawns and eventually home to the gray house.
I never told anyone about this episode, although later I came to see it as a marker of the end of the Pause. Certain things had become unsustainable. Certain pressures threatened to explode. Renee’s responsibilities, Caroline’s nightmares, Joe and his . . . I didn’t know what to call it. His lack. The way he had everything and nothing. The way he smiled and flicked back his cowlick and said everything that everyone wanted to hear, and yet it seemed that his manner began outside himself, externally, with the wishes of others who wanted something from him. Coach Marty, Noni, the team, his friends, his teachers, the girls. Even us, his sisters.
What did Joe want for himself? I never knew. It was only years later, after the accident, that I realized I had never thought to ask.
*
After the episode with Renee, it was ironic that a man in a car at last brought us salvation. The Pause ended because a man in a car slowed and stopped.
It was Renee, of course, who saw to it that Joe attended every baseball practice and every game. This was Joe’s fourth year of Little League. His progress in the sport was a rare orchid that we tended with careful watering, pruning, reverence. “Tell your mother Joe is doing great,” Coach Marty would say to Renee. “Tell her he’s one in a million.”
Twice weekly the four of us walked from home to the Bexley playing field. The route consisted of one mile of calm, tree-lined residential streets followed by one and a half miles of flat, fast Route 9, a four-lane highway running through empty fields of tall, yellowed grass and splintered old fences, the occasional neglected house, and one you-pump gas station. There was no sidewalk, so we walked in the breakdown lane or in the grass. Surely we looked curious to passing cars: Renee striding forward with her solid, sure-footed step; Joe pristine in his baseball gear, bat slung over a shoulder; me with curly hair crazy in the wind, skipping beside Joe to keep up; Caroline wearing a long skirt, singing to herself, lagging behind. The trip took over an hour.
One morning a car slowed beside us. A man leaned over to peer through the open passenger window. It was Coach Marty.
“What are you kids doing?” he asked. “Joe Skinner, is that you?”
“We’re on our way to practice,” Renee answered, still walking. “I’m taking Joe to the field.”
Coach Marty’s car inched along beside us as he considered this answer. He looked at me chewing a wad of bubble gum too big for my mouth, and then he pulled to the side of the road just ahead.
“I’ll take you,” he said. “Get in.”
Renee hesitated. Later we would come to know Marty Roach very well, but on that morning he was only Joe’s coach, the funny man with the dark mustache whom we glimpsed from afar on the field.
“We’re good at walking,” Renee said carefully. “We do it every week.”
It was a cold spring day, and the wind whistled along the road and the grassy fields and reached through our thin coats. We were all shivering, hands in pockets. Caroline’s long hair whipped around her face.
“Please, Renee,” said Caroline. “Let’s go with him.” There were dark half-moons beneath her eyes. Her tolerance for this life had reached its limits.
Renee looked at the road, she looked at Joe, who nodded, and then she said to Marty, “Okay.”
Marty’s car smelled of mint and tobacco, not cigarettes but the ripe, woody scent of pulp tobacco, and it seemed to me a cozy place, like a room with a fireplace in the days before Christmas. Years later I would date a much older man who smoked a pipe—pure affect, we didn’t date for long—but the first time he took the pipe out and lit it, I returned again to the back of that car. Coach Marty’s huge, meaty hands on the wheel, the back of his head a white dome striped with the dark brown of his comb-over. Gray vinyl seats, a pull-down armrest in the center that he pushed up to accommodate us, releasing a grainy silt that he wiped away with the back of his hand onto the floor of the car.
“There you go,” he said, and the four of us packed thigh to thigh into the back seat.
Some say there are no secrets in small towns, but I believe this to be false. There were people in Bexley who knew about Noni—I’m sure of it—but they kept the matter to themselves. Noni was a secret; Noni was something no one discussed. Back then there was no “reply all” or neighborhood message board. You had to pick up the phone and hope that the person to whom you wished to speak would answer. You had to walk out your front door and start up your car and drive to the Skinners’ new house and knock on the front door and hope that Antonia Skinner would not send you immediately away, as she did to Mrs. Lipton when she tried to drop off a tin of cookies that first Christmas.
The Skinner children went to school. We were fed. It was a difficult time—of course it was, everyone understood that. No one wanted to intrude. We were left alone.