Writers & Lovers(30)

Caleb says he was never resentful of all the time my father spent on me. He says before I came along my father was always dragging him to the driving range. He does a good imitation of our father’s face when Caleb once missed the ball seventeen times in a row. It was pure relief when I took his place and excelled. Those were good years, he says. Until my father’s friend Stu recommended an all-boys boarding school in Virginia for Caleb, to bring out the man in him. My mother fought the idea, but Caleb left when I was eight.

I used to think it was my golf that made my parents unhappy, that it was the source of their resentment. My mother said he was hijacking my childhood with his own obsession; my father said she was afraid of my success because it didn’t fit into her proletariat fantasy of raising revolutionaries.

We were in Florida for the Palm Beach Junior Invitational when my mother packed her things and drove away with Javier. I hadn’t played particularly well, but one of my biggest competitors got a stomach flu and the other was spooked by an alligator in the waters of the seventh hole and I’d won. On the plane home my father got me laughing so hard when he held up the safety instructions to his face and imitated the alligator’s eyes rising out of the water. My mother had left on a few lights, so we didn’t get it at first. It wasn’t until we heard the message on our answering machine, the old kind with a miniature cassette tape inside it. My father swiped at her voice and the machine went flying against the wall before she’d finished speaking. The next day I went back to hear the rest but the Play button wouldn’t stay down.

Later my mother said it wasn’t falling in love with Javier that broke them apart. She said that those last few years with him were the easiest, actually. Javi made her happy, and it infected every part of her life, even her marriage. It was when he started to die that it became impossible. She couldn’t share her despair with my father as she had shared her happiness.

There were a few weeks of casseroles and lasagnas in our fridge, men in our living room pouring him drinks. When that ended, he fell apart a little, weeping over the TV dinners I’d heated up. I was in ninth grade then, my first year at the high school where he worked. He taught two math classes and coached, depending on the season, boys’ football, basketball, and baseball. The golf with me was after school sports and on weekends. With my mother gone, he added more practice and tournament hours to my schedule, and we started to visit colleges, too, that year, so I could meet with coaches and play a few rounds with the team. Sometimes I could hear him talking to a coach, telling him the whole story of his wife running away with a dying priest, though Javi was just an agnostic folk singer. But it made my father’s story better. I feared he was ruining my chances with his sob story, but by the fall of sophomore year, I’d been promised a full ride at Duke.

That year some of his varsity players started coming over to the house at night, seniors and juniors who intimidated me. My father gave them beers and they watched sports on TV and from my room I heard the rise and fall of their cheers and groans. At school I would occasionally go down to my father’s office in the basement and do my homework on his couch during a free period, but now they were hanging out there, that posse of them with their deep voices and sardonic jokes. Other times, times I knew he wasn’t teaching or coaching, his office door would be locked, which he’d never done before, no sound within. Sometimes at the golf course after school he was absentminded and lethargic, losing count of my strokes or dragging behind when he used to rush ahead, and I wondered if he was getting high with those boys at school.

A few weeks before my mother came back East, I went down to my father’s office one afternoon when I wasn’t feeling well. I’d gotten out of basketball practice and needed a place to lie down. His door was shut but not locked. It was dim, and I did not turn on the lights. I lay on the couch, sank into the seam. It was too loud to sleep. The girls’ locker room was next door—the varsity was going out and the JV and thirds were coming back in—and there was a lot of yelling and splashing and slamming of metal doors. I assumed my father was already in the gym with his team. There were voices nearby, low laughter. After a few minutes I heard the door of the storage closet behind the couch open. Three boys went straight out the office door, already dressed for practice. My father came out last. He cleared his throat, buckled his belt, and left the room. They all moved quickly. They didn’t see me. I heard them walk down the hallway and push through the heavy door into the gym. I got up and went into the closet. There were pinpricks of light on the far side. Several holes had been drilled in the wall, small openings, each with an excellent view of the girls.

After my mother returned I never spent another night at my father’s house. I showed the athletic director the holes in the wall of the locker room, and that spring my father announced his early retirement. I stopped playing in tournaments, but Duke kept their word and I enrolled there, though I lost the scholarship when I quit the team after the first week. I knew my father wouldn’t help out with the tuition if I wasn’t playing golf, so I got a job at a barbeque restaurant and took out the first of many loans that have created the compounding debt that trails me now. But I never could go back to golf. Just holding a club made me feel ill.





In the mail I receive a Cambridge Pilgrim insurance card. It has a big black Pilgrim hat with a white buckle for its logo. I draw a picture of it and send it to Caleb. He lived in Boston for a few years after college and thought it was funny how much mileage local businesses get out of the Pilgrims, those skinflint killjoys. Below the drawing I write: ‘Soon I’m going to be as healthy as a Pilgrim! Average lifespan: thirty-four years.’