Step-Ball-Change: A Novel Read online

  I WAS BORN Carolina Margaret Woods, called Caroline, named by my father for the wondrous joy that was University of North Carolina basketball. I realized at a very early age that I was lucky he had not named me Tar Heel. My sister came two years after me (she would later revise this to four) and was named Henrietta by my father. He believed that large families were unseemly, the product of poverty, carelessness, or Catholicism. When he committed to having two children, it never occurred to him that one of those children might not be a boy, so he christened my sister with a version of his own name and then started calling her Henry. My mother rectified this through the Southern tradition of nicknames and called her second daughter Taffy (Taffy: see childhood photos, Taffy’s hair gleaming yellow-white with the individual strands resembling nothing so much as spun sugar). For a while everyone thought that Henrietta would grow up with a multiple personality disorder, what with a father calling her Henry, a mother calling her Taffy, and a sister who called her by her name. But it was no contest. My mother prevailed. She put a lace canopy over Taffy’s little bed and bought her a flock of pink dresses and did everything in her power to make her feel as little like a Henry as possible. And it would have been fine if the story had ended there, with me being Caroline and my sister being Taffy, but once my sister mastered language, she seemed to feel self-conscious being the only member of the family to be living under an assumed name. As soon as she was old enough to screw up my life, she began calling me Minnie, not because there was any connection to my name or my appearance, but because she had a crush on a certain cartoon mouse.

  “It’s sweet,” my mother said. “It’s her pet name for you.”

  “I’m not her pet,” I said.

  “Minnie, Minnie, Minnie,” my sister said.

  “Make her stop,” I said.

  “I like it,” my mother said, and scooped up Taffy in her arms. “Minnie. Sister Minnie.”

  And so my mother began to call me Minnie to make Taffy feel better about her own treacly name. When Taffy started school she was quick to tell the other children that my real name was Minnie, and that Caroline was just something I had made up for myself. Boys especially liked to call me Minnie. They liked to shout it from cars as I was walking home from school.

  BUT THAT WAS a long time ago. It was ridiculous for me to have such petty thoughts now. Neddy was leaving my sister, and on the phone in the other room, my daughter was explaining the details of her engagement.

  When I came back to the kitchen, Tom brightened up. “Kay,” he said, “your mother is back. Do you want to tell her this? She’s off the phone.”

  Tom handed me the phone and I slumped down in my chair. My dinner had gone rubbery, I could tell just by looking at it. It had acquired a shine.

  “What’s wrong with Taffy?” Kay said.

  There was no point in telling her the truth either, not at this exact moment. “Nothing. She’s just coming to visit.”

  “Visit us? Why would Taffy visit us?”

  It was good to hear her voice sound so clear. She could always cry on her mother’s shoulder, but she was more likely to pull herself together for her father. They were both public defenders, after all, and when they were together they liked to act like a couple of tough guys, rhapsodizing over drug busts in which no one had been read their Miranda rights. “Let’s not talk about Taffy. Tell me what happened.”

  “We’re going to come over,” Kay said. “I wanted to just come over and tell you but I couldn’t wait. I haven’t stopped crying since Trey asked me. I told him I needed to come home and get fixed up a little. We’re going over to tell his parents and then we’re coming by to see you and Dad.”

  “And you’re happy,” I said.

  “Oh, Mom, the happiest.” Her voice was dreamy and distracted, as if all the crying had made her drunk.

  After I hung up the phone, Tom and I just sat there for a while, staring at our plates. “What happened to Taffy?” he said finally. “She wouldn’t tell me.”

  “Neddy left her.”

  Tom slid his fingers up under his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “I suppose that handwriting was on the wall.”

  I figured I might as well get it all out in the open. I was always of the belief that it was kinder to rip off a Band-Aid all at once. “She’s coming here.”

  “For how long?”

  “I didn’t think I could ask.”

  He nodded slowly. I called it his courtroom nod. It gave the illusion that he was really thinking things over, but I could tell at this point his mind was completely blank.

  “Should I put dinner in the microwave? Do you want to try to eat something before the kids get here?”

  “No,” Tom said sadly. “I think we’re finished with all that.”

  chapter two

  “WHY DIDN’T YOU WARN ME ABOUT THIS?” TOM SAID, picking the vestiges of our abandoned dinner up off the table.

  “I didn’t know.”

  “You know everything about Kay.”

  “You’re the one who works with her. Why didn’t you know?”

  “She talks to me about police procedure. She doesn’t talk to me about dating.”

  Tom was right. This was my jurisdiction, and what I felt was a sense of personal failure. How was it possible that I hadn’t seen this coming? Kay and I were close. We cooked, we shopped, we confided all. Sure, she had talked about Trey, she liked him fine, but if she loved him enough to marry him, I would have known it, wouldn’t I? Of course, my own mother hadn’t known that I was getting married, but my greatest reason for having children was that I wanted to be closer to them than I was to my mother.

  If I asked Kay how it was possible that I hadn’t suspected that Trey would propose, she would tell me the story of my own wedding. It was the stuff of legend in this family, the fairy tale the children requested at bedtime three to one over Billy Goat Gruff. I was twenty years old, a junior at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, studying English literature and dance. Tom was twenty-three and in his second year of law school at Duke. We had dated for three months and then there was an argument. I can’t remember what the argument was about.

  “You’ve got to remember what the fight was about,” Charlie would say, and settle into his flannel sheets.

  “I don’t remember,” I would say.

  “Probably something to do with her mother not wanting her to marry a Catholic,” Tom would say.

  “Get back to the story,” Henry would say.

  A couple of doors were slammed, Tom stormed out, that was that. On the following Friday night I had made a date with a boy named Skip who ran track. I was looking for my shoes under the bed when the house proctor came up and knocked on my door a full hour early. I was thinking it would be Skip, that he had gotten the time wrong, but when I got down to the lobby, it was Tom who was waiting for me.

  “We should get married,” he said.

  Kay, decked out in footy pajamas, would squirm in my lap. She loved this part. It was her favorite line.

  “I have a date in an hour!” all the children would scream in unison.

  “I have a date in an hour,” I said.

  Tom sat down on one of the sofas that lined the guest area of the girls’ dormitory and looked at his watch. “I guess I could wait.”

  I sat down beside him and together we puzzled out what was to be done about my dinner with Skip. That conversation was as close as I ever came to making wedding plans. Finally we called upstairs and asked my roommate if she would go on the date in my place, and since she had liked Skip herself, she was happy to help out.

  “I feel sorry for Skip,” Kay would say. “He wanted to marry you, too.”

  “Skip didn’t want to marry me. He wanted to eat a pizza with me. Once you get older you’ll see the difference.”

  I changed into my lightest-colored dress, something pale pink that I had bought on sale for twelve dollars the summer before, and we went to see the judge Tom clerked for. Because it was not yet six o’clock and
the court registrar was still in the office, he was able to marry us that night.

  “And that was the whole thing,” Henry would say.

  “That was it,” Tom would say.

  “And then you were married,” Charlie would say, and with the comfort of his own legitimate birth wrapped around him like a blanket, he would fall asleep.

  I don’t know what to say about this course of events other than we were, in our youth, capable of a kind of reckless certainty that probably wouldn’t be possible now. When he said he thought we should get married, I wanted to snap my fingers and say, Yes! I was thinking the same thing. In truth, I hadn’t been thinking about it at all, but when the suggestion was made, it seemed perfectly right and so off we went, holding hands, talking about the studying there was to be done over the weekend.

  My mother could not stop crying.

  My mother could not stop crying and yet, five years later when Taffy married Neddy in the Christ Episcopal Church with a dozen rose-pink bridesmaids and a twenty-piece orchestra and a sit-down dinner for 328 people, my mother took me back to the kitchen of the hotel, lit a cigarette, looked me dead in the eye, and said only, Thank you. I did not have to ask her what she was talking about.

  After that we finished school from the enviable location of married student housing. Tom got a job pushing papers at a big firm downtown and I taught ballet and tap to six-year-olds in pink tights. I was the unimaginably ancient age of twenty-eight when Henry was born and had weathered seven years of family harassment for not reproducing more quickly. “It’s all that dancing,” my mother said. “That’s what keeps you from getting pregnant. I never should have let you have those dancing lessons.” My mother genuinely regretted not foreseeing my reproductive future.

  But I kept dancing through my pregnancy, through all four of my pregnancies. The first three were each two years apart and I wore bulky sweaters over my leotards, but when George showed up five years later, I said the hell with it. I owned my own studio by then, McSwan’s, named for my husband, Tom McSwain, who had shown his good faith in me by taking out a bank loan in his name after I was turned down. Not that Tom was exactly raking it in. He had left corporate law by then and was working in the public defender’s office, hoping for a chance to defend the innocent poor. He actually said those exact words to me the day he found out that he got the job.

  My point is that we stumbled into marriage, into parenthood, into life. Twenty no longer seems old enough to me to drive a car, and yet that’s how old I was when I was married. As I waited for Kay to come over with Trey, I kept thinking, She’s just a girl, she’s too young for this. But when I was her age I had been married for ten years and had two children.

  “Should I put a tie on?” Tom said.

  I looked at my watch. “It’s almost eight now and we don’t know how long they’ll be at his parents’. It seems awfully late to be wearing a tie around the house.”

  “There’s something about that guy. He looks like he probably wears a tie to bed.”

  I walked around the living room, nervously straightening up. “I’m happy for her. It’s a wonderful thing, right? Kay wants to get married.”

  “She wants to get married?”

  “Well, she’s talked about it. All her friends got married. After she and Everett broke up she said she thought she’d missed her chance.”

  “Everett was an idiot.”

  I beat my fist into a sofa pillow to plump it up and was ashamed to see the exhalation of dust that rose in the lamplight. “You’ll get no argument from me there. Personally, I always thought she’d marry Jack in the end.”

  Tom stopped rearranging magazines and looked up at me in disbelief. “Jack from the District Attorney’s office Jack?”

  “You know they’re friends.”

  “I know they went to law school together. The man is a D.A.”

  “Stop it, Tom. Jack is around here all the time. If Kay wants to move, Jack carries the boxes. If Kay needs an article for a case, Jack goes to the library for her.”

  “That means he’s a sucker, not a boyfriend.”

  “Well, it doesn’t matter. She’s marrying Trey.”

  “So it’s fine, if it’s what she wants. Trey’s a good guy.”

  “Right. Good.”

  “We married off Henry and Charlie. We know the drill. Now Kay’s getting married.”

  But when he said it my knees felt weak. Kay was getting married. I rolled into the sofa. Tom rolled in beside me and I put my head on his shoulder. “It’s different,” I whispered.

  Tom kissed the top of my head, the universal symbol of agreement. A daughter was different. Kay was different. The Bennetts, the Bennetts were very different. We didn’t say anything else for fear of talking ourselves into something or out of something before we had all the facts. We simply sat and waited. When I was young and used to dance in shows, I would feel a great wave of catatonia sweep over me as I stood behind the heavy velvet curtain waiting for my cue. Other dancers were hopping up and down, flexing their feet, stretching out tendons, but nervousness coursed through my veins like Halcion. While I waited to show just how happy I was for Kay’s engagement, a dark wave came over me and sucked me down to sleep.

  I am a genius when it comes to sleep. I am the freestyle champion. This time I took Tom with me, and when we opened our eyes, Kay and Trey were there, looking at us like a piece of puzzling installation art titled Your Parents Are Asleep on the Sofa.

  “We made plenty of noise coming in,” Kay said.

  “Not quite enough, it seems.” Tom tried to gently dislodge my head from the curve of his neck.

  “We shouldn’t have come so late,” Trey said. He was wearing a beautiful pale gray suit and his tie was perfectly knotted, the top button of his collar still snugly fastened beneath it. He leaned over to shake Tom’s hand. “It took longer than we thought at my parents’.”

  “They wanted to call everybody,” Kay said.

  “It’s a lot of people,” Trey said.

  I shook my head, hoping to promote the flow of blood and oxygen to my brain. I remembered to fix my face in the position of joy. I stood up and hugged Trey. He was boyish and handsome, with dark hair and green eyes. For the first time I noticed that he and Kay looked something alike, that they had the same sort of coloring, a similar slim build. They would be the kind of couple where people would say to them, The two of you look like brother and sister, a circumstance reinforced by the rhyming names. The bright light thrown off from Trey’s teeth helped to pull me from my torpor. Next I reached for my daughter, my beautiful girl. I held my arms open to her in a gesture of love and unconditional acceptance, but to me she extended her hand. I squinted. There was nothing to say. I think the ring cost more than our house.

  Tom, seeing me stumble, made a very minor attempt to pick up the slack.

  “My,” he said.

  “Isn’t it beautiful? Isn’t it just the most beautiful ring?” As she said it, huge, puddling tears welled up in her eyes. If carat, cut, and clarity equaled love, then she was perhaps the most loved woman in all of Raleigh.

  I hugged my girl, pressed my face into her hair. Kay was never good at ballet, but I was glad now that I had forced her through a few years of lessons. She would need them if only for balance. “Beautiful,” I said.

  Because my formal engagement lasted under forty-five minutes, I never had an engagement ring. We had to borrow money from Tom’s parents to buy our wedding rings after the event had already taken place. It cost forty-seven dollars for the pair and we’ve gotten our money’s worth out of them. Years ago there had been talk of our backtracking and buying me a diamond, but in the end I knew I wasn’t the diamond type. I could only see car insurance and braces and college tuition sitting on my hand.

  “Well,” said Tom. “This is really something.”

  “Trey picked me up from work. He asked me in the parking garage. We weren’t even in the car.”

  “I don’t know what I was thinking,” T
rey said, his voice a lull of easy charm. “I had just picked the ring up and I had it in my pocket. I was going to ask Kay over the weekend. I had it all planned, first brunch, then the waiter would bring the box over on a plate for dessert.”

  “But then he couldn’t wait.”

  “It just popped out of my mouth, Will you marry me?”

  “Right there in the parking garage.”

  Not that it wasn’t a good story, but we were clearly getting the second performance of the night. I imagine when they told it to his parents they must have played out every gasp and sigh. Now it seemed a little too polished, a little too quick, the Reader’s Digest Condensed Marriage Proposal.

  “She said yes right away,” Trey said.

  “As soon as I could stop crying,” Kay said. Kay leaned into Trey’s shoulder, wrapped the non-engagement-ring hand around his arm.

  “Do you know when this is going to happen?” I asked, but I thought that sounded a little severe. I wasn’t talking about a tornado, after all. “Have you thought about a date?”

  Trey smiled at me with what almost looked like love. “We’re going to try for six months. Mother will have to call the church and the club and see what the bookings are. She says we need at least a year to do it right, but we really want to try to do it in six months.”

  “The church and the club?” Tom asked.

  “Mrs. Bennett thinks I should just take off from work now. She says even with her working on it full time, she’s going to need both of us to plan the wedding.”

  “You’re taking a leave of absence to plan your wedding?” Tom said.

  “Oh, Daddy.” Kay let go of Trey’s arm and went to stand by her father. “I’m not going to leave work. I’m only telling you what Mrs. Bennett said. Besides, she was probably kidding.”

  “I don’t think she was kidding,” Trey said with a huge smile.

  “Which church and club?” I asked.

  “There’s going to be so much time to go over all of that,” Kay said brightly. “We shouldn’t even think about the wedding tonight. Tonight is just about the engagement.”