WANNABE

 BY JOHN SPRECHER

My brother has always had this thing about having to one-up me, I think. My first memory of his gamesmanship, it turns out, is the only mental image of my First Communion that I retain: this three-year-old boy, late to toilet, parading out of our powder room as everyone sat for lunch, holding forth a palmful of solid turd he’d scooped up from the toilet as proud, righteous evidence of his passage to functional little human. My uncle busted a gut. Trent stole the show.

As we grew older, those five years between our births always seemed to be distance that Trent was racing to close, as if he needed to beat me to the finish line of whatever accomplishment or milestone, and if he couldn’t, to somehow redirect the spotlight on him. Not that I resent him for it, too much, anyway, because he generally wasn’t mean or hurtful about it, he was just short and not athletic and very intelligent and highly competitive, while I developed tall and fast to win a lot of trophies, though I could’ve won more had I had his fire. But symmetry comes to each life, I believe, as it eventually came to ours: Trent with his academic scholarship to Purdue, me with my athletic scholarship to play softball at Florida State; Trent with his position today as assistant director of market research for the Chicago Sun-Times, me with my title today as sports columnist for the Tampa Tribune.

So, nonetheless and therefore, it wasn’t without surprise — nor a few of the old, familiar stirrings of jealousy and defensiveness — that Trent, with his phone call this past Christmas, beat me to the proposal of a thirty-fifth wedding anniversary reunion celebration for our parents. Bastard. It was a wonderful idea, particularly making it a surprise for our mother. “But is she ready for something like this?” I wondered. “You know, there’ll be a lot of people that she hasn’t seen since, she’s gonna have to put up with all those questions about her right breast.”

“Dad thought it would be a great idea,” Trent answered. “She’s doing fine, her hair’s growing back, and nine months from now or whenever she’ll be feeling even better. He was really excited, Molly, he wants to do this. Don’t you want to do this for them?”

“Of course I do,” I said, “but it’s not just the questions, you know, it’s the looks. People do look when somebody’s lost a breast, we had the same thing this year with one of our production artists, she’s only thirty-five, you try not to, but there’s something, even I snuck a peak, it’s like you almost can’t help it, what does it look like, is up to snuff? I just don’t want Mom feeling awkward, you know?”

Ten years ago, my parents had unceremoniously feted their twenty-fifth by simply driving the Buick from home in Norwood Park — a monolithic, stucco three-bedroom bungalow built in the twenties by mom’s grandparents — into downtown, splurging for dinner at Morton’s. It was 1988, my sophomore year, and I was partying in the dorms watching the Seminoles beat down number three Clemson. Trent was starting sophomore year at Taft High, Dad had recently been downsized at Motorola and Mom was the breadwinner, albeit not much. She had opened the first Penny’s Loafers earlier that year and people were only beginning to embrace the concept of a premium-priced boutique product, whether it was natural bakery, like my mom Penny’s, or coffee or cookies or whatever. She had always hoped to go to Italy but, to my knowledge, never said a word, never made Roy feel inadequate or a failure, he had enough of those issues after his layoff anyway, as I recall. So this occasion to commemorate thirty-five years was a chance for all of us, in a way, to make good.

I agented our travel arrangements that Monday after Christmas, knowing that while I was booking two round-trip tickets, three of us, God willing, would be journeying. And God was. Chloe Hannah Harrison was born after twenty-one hours of labor at six fifty-four a.m. on Saturday, June 12, seven pounds, thirteen ounces, nineteen and a half inches, Apgars nine point five. The moment they placed her on my chest, I was finally, fully right again.

I had been afraid that something would steal this life from me, as it had the two lives I previously miscarried. It was after my second miscarriage that, first, I started having nightmares. Plus or minus some opaque, peripheral vagaries, I was awakened almost every night for about six weeks by the same awful vision. I seemed to be somewhere in the southwest, my guess would be New Mexico. I was walking along a dusty trail atop a plateau, holding the hand of this faceless boy, probably about eight years old, who wore shorts and a blue t-shirt. I presume he was my son. It was always very hot. We came to a breathtaking gorge spanned by a four-lane, double-yellow-striped bridge, although its only use was pedestrian. There was a guardrail on both sides, though it was incomplete: just two round horizontal metal tubes — one red, one blue, similar to a child’s bedrail — attached to balusters set probably ten feet apart. Each night, we took only a few steps before the boy would somehow free himself of my hand and dash to the ledge. I called his name —

in my dream, he had a name, though I could never remember it when I awoke — but when my boy looked back and tried to stop, his shoes, he was wearing lime green flip flops, skidded on the sand-dusted concrete and he slid, feet first, underneath the rail and off the bridge. I ran after him, screaming, and when I looked down, I saw his flailing body, all arms and legs, falling. That’s when I woke up, every time.

            It was my third session with my first therapist when it was suggested that, perhaps, if I wrote my dream down, or tried working through my feelings on paper, it could be, well, therapeutic. I laughed.

            “You know, I am a writer,” I said.

            “I wasn’t aware,” she said.

            “Yes, I’m a columnist for the Tribune,” I explained.

            “And you write what?” she asked.

            “Sports,” I answered, then analyzed her before speaking again. “You were probably thinking food, weren’t you?” I made a moue. “Or fashion.”

            “Well, I admit sports wouldn’t have been my first guess,” she said. “How long have you been doing this?”

            “At the Trib? Nine years. But I’ve been sports writing since high school.” I smiled. “In fact, I can say I knew I wanted to be a writer since I was ten years old.”

            “How great for you,” she said and began penciling a note. “So many of us don’t know what we want to do with our lives, even when we’re adults. Tell me, did your parents like your writings? Did they show interest in your pursuit when you were a child?”

            The questions irritated me. “Listen, that’s not even — and as far as ‘writing something down’ goes, I want to forget this thing, not memorialize it.” I recall glaring at this person who so quickly assumed she knew how to fix whatever was wrong, believing through indignant tears that I was challenging her, though, in retrospect, I was begging.

“You’ve gotta do better than that,” is what I said.

Unfortunately, she never did and a second therapist never did, either. The nightmare, over time, simply began to visit less frequently, until one rested morning the faceless boy was gone, which made me happy however very sad, too, as I cried a last time for another loss that I had to endure. However, the pain I had been having during intercourse continued for nearly another year.

My OB-GYN suggested it was in my head, therapist number two in my spirit, but no one, once again, suggested a solution. It was only when I drank myself stupid on Patron margaritas and a fat cigar — a cigar, never again! — celebrating the honorable mention my story, on a double-amputee hurdler from Sarasota, received at the Florida Media Group’s annual awards banquet, that I don’t remember pain as part of our intercourse, because I don’t remember anything about having sex with Camren, except that now I mentally gold star that date as Chloe’s conception. Once in a while, when I look into her beautiful face and think about that night, as well as the occasional merlot or chardonnay I enjoyed for five weeks until I came up late, then finally, joyously, blue on the home pregnancy test — I always heard the theme music to the final round of Jeopardy! in my mind waiting these out — I wonder if I’ve done her any harm, if my baby’ll progress normally and healthily, or if somehow my oblivious drinking has gone and made math or French or soccer more difficult for her.

For three horny months, I wondered also of my sudden, prodigious libido. It began soon after my body successfully tiptoed that twelve-week minefield and I allowed myself to believe I might actually keep this baby. Some salvo was released in me — a tension, a guilt, a joy, or D, all of the above — and I hungered sex like never

before, not even those first conflagrant months with Camren when I was as much in lust as in love, every intimacy new and uncharted and tsunamic in my discovery.

From six o’clock on New Year’s Day and halftime of the Rose Bowl, when I kidded Cam he was being sacked, right through the end of March, I had to have him — it? — more. Harder. Longer, speaking here of duration. Deeper, which my best friend Tara, who’s been divorced almost a year, would joke is longer. Him on top. Me on top. Us in the bathroom, standing at the sink, facing the mirror, how erotic that was, watching his fingertips light up and down a swelling me and his rumpled head, kissing my shoulder, tonguing my neck. Early mornings, always, before work, when I had energy, though a lot of evenings, too, a different kind of lovemaking when you’re tired, sometimes better, slower, warmer, more physically poetic. My first proposition — when I smugly reached for the remote and offed the Southern Cal marching band and led him by the hand and pushed him onto our bed and climbed on top of him — Camren was surprised, then confused, then afraid he was going to hurt me. He had been sympathetic of my pain, wherever it emanated from, which is different from understanding it, which I know he didn’t. Most often, during this period, we had resigned to satisfy each other while avoiding penetration, acts that had grown unsatisfying and empty barter for the true love we really did share. So this time, I had to convince Camren that I wasn’t doing it for him, that as selfish as it sounded, I was doing it for me. Once he grasped that, once he saw and heard and felt that I was taking pleasure from our lovemaking again — and it took more than one convincing, which I was only too glad to initiate — something inside of him released, too, and fifteen months of pent passion erupted. We were like rabbits. That’s when I began to worry if all that constant pounding wasn’t somehow going to hurt the baby.

“How can I say this?” my OB-GYN said. “As long as your husband isn’t, well, monstrous, you shouldn’t have to worry.” I’ve always liked Denise Mickels, she’s an excellent physician, just a few years older than me, very good at listening, but I’ve never liked her more than that February afternoon, when she mischievously leaned forward and, somewhat devilishly, added: “Well? Is he?”

My parents came to Florida the last week in June after Chloe was born and, over dinner, at some conversational effluence, I recalled the story. The look on my mother’s prudent face was akin to disbelief, mixed with horror, pinched with choked humor — strikingly similar to the reaction she gave my legendary meatloaf, Trent called it pooploaf, that I prepared for my father’s forty-fifth birthday, if I remember right. Yet just as Daddy had courageously masticated on for his fifteen-year-old chef, never revealing his thoughts on food, so he quietly worked his salad this first night of their visit, withholding any opinion he might have of his now thirty-year-old daughter’s scatological humor. That is, until he set his fork down, crossed his arms, looked over to Camren and deadpanned, as if the reputation of all manhood in our family depended on the right answer: “And Molly said what?”

Later that evening, the dishes loaded, the baby to bed and the men on the lanai, Mom said, “I want to sit down and talk to you.”

By those few words, delivered with unmistakable motherly sobriety, I felt like I was a teenager again, busted — maybe, this time, for my mouth? We sat at the kitchen table. The sun was just beginning to set and dusk was already falling into my home, muting its colors, softening its edges. The only light shone from above the sink, over Mom’s shoulder, which put her tired-looking face in shadow and gave her short hair, it had grown back white, an unearthly or, better, angelic aura. She cupped her hands over mine and smiled sweetly. “Don’t look so worried, honey,” she said. “This isn’t one of those ‘I’m dying’ conversations.”

I sighed. “The way you sounded. You know.”

“My health is good,” she said. “Everything so far looks fine. But I did want to   talk to you about your father.”

            Just like that, my heart leapt to another terminal conclusion. “What’s wrong with Daddy?”

            “Sweetheart, you’re overreacting to everything I’m saying. Your dad is fine, too. But I need your help, because he refuses to listen to me about something that’s very important.”

            I was surprised and curious. “About what?”

            Now it was Mom’s turn to sigh. “I need to talk to him about what to do, if my time should come.” My shoulders slumped. “Don’t look so sad, Molly, I’m not planning to go anywhere soon. This ole gal’s got a lotta livin’ left in her yet. But we all have to go sometime, and this disease — do you know, we don’t have any plots? Your father, death is one topic he’s avoided all our lives, and I, I can’t avoid it anymore.”

            My mom leaned forward again. Her fifty-seven year old fingers, emerging from her shadow, were gray and weathered and almost skeletal. It was only then that I realized how dark the rest of the room was becoming. I felt her touch cold when she returned her hands atop mine. Then, as we sat in silence, I felt her warmth and love. My eyes welled. There she was, and I was missing her already. “What should I do?” I finally whispered.

            With that, I signed on for my second secret assignment on behalf of a parent, and so began the bizarre process of comparative shopping cemeteries. What I learned was: there are a lot of ways to go out, and they all cost you. I learned, too, after I brought it up as an option, that Mom actually believed cremation made it tougher on Jesus to put you back together come Judgment Day — especially if your ashes weren’t urned, but shaken across some river or canyon, or out of an airplane.

“How does she feel about dismembering?” Camren asked during the flight to

Chicago. “You know, real serial killer stuff, all over the place? I’d think that would make it tough on him, too.”

            As excited as I was imagining my mom’s joy at her surprise anniversary, I was dreading my other business of the weekend. “Stop it,” I said. “You shouldn’t mock death, not on an airplane.” I looked down at Chloe, then out my window at probably Indiana. “You never know.”

            I had placed two brochures on my tray table to peruse one last time, but hadn’t yet had the chance — Chloe having fallen asleep in the cradle of my left arm. Camren took them. “These are your final recommendations, so to speak?” he asked.

            “I have absolutely no feeling in this arm,” I complained.

            “Pleasant View,” he read one of the titles and laughed. “How could that be? Think about it. Think about that view, Molly.” He folded his hands funereally across his chest and closed his eyes, then quickly opened them again in bulbous horror, obviously imagining the inside of a casket. “It just can’t be pleasant!”

            “Would you please stop?” I quietly pleaded.

            “And this one. Green Acres. Can they even use that? Greeeeeen acres is the place to be!” he sang.

            I tried not to, but I failed, and I laughed. “They’re the only two who sent me any information,” I said, hoping to redirect my comic genius or, at the very least, shut him up. “I must’ve called a half dozen, they don’t put prices on the web.”

            “Faaarrrm livin’ — livin’? — is the life for me!”

            But that episode proved: you shouldn’t mock death, in an airplane or otherwise. Later that Friday evening, at my brother’s house probably six blocks from our parents, a two-bedroom starter he moved into last month with Belinda, though the wedding isn’t until spring of next year, out on the little front porch, the two of us

seated on uncomfortable, molded white plastic chairs, a biting chill already come to the middle-of-September night, Trent’s lips moved and his voice formed sounds and, somehow, I wasn’t quite sure the first time as Chloe was crying inside the house, I heard the words: “Dad wanted me to tell you. Her cancer is back.” My brother went on to detail, succinctly and detached and quite clinically, the course of her metastasis, into her nodes, and the actions to be taken, which would in fact begin that following week, Tuesday morning.

            “How is she?” I asked.

            “She’s strong,” Trent declared with a quality that I was suddenly, strangely envious of, a confidence — or was it his competitiveness? — that spoke: he had been first, once again, to where I hadn’t. “She has such a strong faith, Molly. She believes that whatever’s gonna happen, the Lord’ll take care of her. She seems more afraid for Dad.” Trent shook his head. “He hasn’t, he isn’t doing real well with this.”

            I closed my eyes. A car with very loud bass drove by. “And when did you guys find out about this?” I finally asked.

            Trent cleared his throat. “Yesterday.”

            I looked at my brother. In that moment, I was as furious at him as I was the cancer, for both had been hard at work, plotting sequences that would profoundly impact me, behind my distant back. “And you didn’t call me? Why?”

            “If you want to be mad at somebody, be mad at me.” Trent put his head down and opened his hands, examining his fingers as if they were covered with oiliness. “I thought it was the right thing to do,” he whispered, “telling you in person.” Then he began to cry, a boyish and uninhibited release. “I’m afraid she’s gonna die this time, Molly.”

            I had been an ass. I put my arm around my baby brother’s shoulder. When I did, he gave himself up to me and clutched my lap. I rested my chin on his head and stroked his short, jelled hair as best I could and, quietly, I cried with him. I did tell him I was sorry, though I only mouthed the words.    

            That same night, after Trent was delivering his surprise to me, my father was delivering his to my mother. I could only imagine her horror at learning that one hundred twelve relatives and friends — certainly a few of whom she couldn’t have liked, because who likes every one of your relatives and friends? — would be waiting in the backbreaking pews of Saint Sebastian come four o’clock tomorrow afternoon, to be followed by dinner and dancing at Constantine’s, the night to be conjugated, spirits and flesh willing, in one of the bridal suites at the Park East.

            When I visited her the next morning at their home, though, there was no horror anywhere — nor, apparently, had there been. “This is far and away the most romantic thing your dad’s ever done for me,” she said. We were sitting on my parents’ bed, and Mom was staring into the floral pattern bedspread she was gently stroking. “Your father was always such a gentle man.” She was clearly somewhere else in that moment. “Right before we were engaged, my roommate was a poet. Jeanne Driscoll. She was studying to be a poet. I think she wound up doing greeting cards” Her voice was soft, barely audible. “She would do poetry readings, and your dad and I would sit in the audience. He had talked about us getting married, but I wasn’t sure he was the guy.” Now she looked up at me. “Well one day, when Jeanne finishes, he gets up. You know your dad, he hates public speaking.” Toward the whiteness of the sheer-draped window, and the past, Mom turned. “And he walks up to the stage. And he stands at the microphone.” She closed her eyes. “You are the ghost of my heart, the spirit of love that haunts me,” she recanted slowly and theatrically. “And no matter where I run, where I hide, you come floating back, your touch of love there, yet beyond my reach.” Her hands, on her lap, she brought to her heart. “I have made the decision. I will flee no more. I love you now, and love you more, and I will always love you. Fill my heart, with your soul, with your love.” She held her hands forth, beckoning to the memory. “Reach out to me.” Mom sighed and opened her eyes to me. “Your father’s words,” she said. “You know, well, no you don’t — your father really wanted to write in college, but his parents.” She shook her head negatively. “I told him yes a week later.” She smiled. “Maybe you’ve got some of his writer in you. It’s why he’s such a fan.”

            “Oh, Mom,” was all I could manage to say.

That afternoon, while helping pick out her dress, I was forced to present my findings on cemeteries. I stumbled badly. Mom gave me the look and chastised, “Molls.” In her slip, she marched to her purse on the dresser, removed her checkbook, scribbled, then placed a powder blue check bearing the name Molly Harrison and the amount five thousand dollars in my hand. “You know what to do,” she said. “Do what I need you to do. Be what I need you to be.” She gave me a hug.

The wedding was beautiful. Dad had gone and rented a black tuxedo. I want to say he looked young and handsome, though in truth he resembled more a balding, overweight maître d’. He was clearly uncomfortable, if not in the tuxedo, then in the private gut punches of the week that had to be sucked up this very public day. Trent stood as his best man, because dad’s first best man, Bill Fischer, was a field doctor who was killed late in the Vietnam War. I will forever remember those two, father and son, standing watch for the procession of the woman who, in far different ways, gave life to both, and the overwhelming sense of peace that radiated from my mother’s face as she so gracefully returned to those same altar steps, life’s departure point thirty-five years ago for the new Mr. and Mrs. Roy Terrington, who today would look forward to a far different future together. In the front row, I wept over the vows. One of my tears fell into Chloe’s right eye.

Constantine’s is one of your typical Chicago Greek family restaurants, and the reception was held in a very large banquet room on the second floor. As the writer in the family, I took it upon myself to compose what I hoped would be the nostalgic and comedic history of Penny and Roy, which I presented following my brother’s toast, over salad. Everyone laughed at the right times and applauded genuinely when it was over. My dad gave me a big hug and told me it was great. My mom squeezed my hand as I returned to my seat, next to her, at the head table. Camren, on my other side, leaned in and whispered that I kicked ass and quick licked my ear lobe.

It was nearing eight-thirty and Camren had just left in a cab with my sleeping Chloe, back to Trent’s house. We had decided earlier, this was my night to celebrate. I would catch a ride with Trent or Belinda, the soberer of the two. I was standing at the bar, my second Patron margarita in my hand. The band my dad had hired was playing some fifties song, I think, I didn’t know the name of. I took a sip and savored the salt burn. When I looked up again, a woman with shoulder length gray hair and a cigarette between her fingers was standing before me, smiling.

“Do you remember me, Molly?”

“Hi,” I said and placed my glass on the bar, to shake her hand.

“I’m Verona Patterson.”

“Mrs. Patterson!” I exclaimed, trying to disguise my touch of inebriation by hugging her. “How are you?”

“I’m happily widowed, dear,” she said. “But never mind that.” She inhaled. “How are you?”

“Great, life is good,” I said. I happened to see past her, to the dance floor, where Penny moved slowly in the arms of Roy. They looked happy. “Life is good,” I repeated.

“I saw your baby at church,” Mrs. Patterson said. “You have a beautiful family.”

“Thank you,” I said. “She just went home with daddy. Bedtime, you know.”

“Scotch on the rocks,” Mrs. Patterson ordered the bartender. “Your mother tells me you’re now a famous writer in Florida. It’s so good to see your mom again after all these years. She’s lost weight. She looks wonderful. I miss those days back in Norwood Park, living next door to your parents. Such a friendly neighborhood we had.”

I laughed. “I wouldn’t say famous, Mrs. Patterson.” I reached back and took up my margarita. “I do write for the Tampa Tribune, and I have won some awards, and I love it, but not famous. You know, I bet you don’t know, but I’ve got you to thank for who I am today.”

“How much, dear?” she asked the bartender. “And how is that?” she asked me.

“You don’t remember? I was about ten years old, I think. I had written a space story, science fiction, you know, Star Wars had come out. I gave it to my parents and they gave it to you, and you told me it was a wonderful story. You told me if I worked hard, you thought I could be a great writer. I was so, I don’t know, so inspired, I guess, that I wrote to authors of some children’s books I liked, and they wrote me back, which was very exciting, too. Then I got a job on a community newspaper when I was sixteen, I majored in journalism and here I am today, with you to thank, really. I’m so glad you’re here. I’ve told others, but I never told you this, you moved, I grew up, you know? Let me say thanks and at least buy you that drink, please.”

A five-dollar bill was already on the bar. “Keep the change,” she told the young man.

“I still have that story to this day.”

Mrs. Patterson sipped Scotch and wiped her lips. She sighed. She seemed to be contemplating her ice cubes. “Molly, I was a schoolteacher,” she said, looking up at me finally. “I have no doubt I encouraged you, as I would any one of my students.” She touched my forearm. “But I’m sorry, dear. To be honest, and if this old broad has learned anything in this lifetime it’s to be honest, I honestly don’t recall a thing about it.” She turned and deliberately exhaled smoke. “But my opinion doesn’t matter, now does it? Look at what you’ve become. Say, if you ever think of it, give a copy of that story to your mom, she has my address, it would be fun to see what this was all about, huh?” She enwrapped me in a big hug. “It’s so good to see you again, dear,” she said a bit too loudly into the same ear my husband had earlier licked.

I got a mouthful of hair. Through her unwieldy gray mane, I saw my mom and dad finish their bridal dance to applause. Mom was on her toes, whispering to Dad, holding his round head with her left hand like he was a baby. It appeared he was crying. I suddenly understood that whatever she was saying to him at this moment in their lives, as it is for each of us in our lives, the actual spoken words might not be what we hear — but rather, what we desperately want or need or hope to hear.

Mrs. Patterson interrupted by taking my arms with her hands. Through a cigarette-draped smile, she spoke something at me and walked away.

I have no idea what.

            And then the band started a new song, and Dad beckoned me to join them on the dance floor, and although we shuffled in a slow-moving circle I was spinning, free falling into an abyss, and I began crying at things lost and to be lost, at promises made and trusts broken, at the beauty of faith and the pain of betrayal, and I wasn’t who I was or was I still? when Mom reached out and gently swiped my cheek with her thumb and told me that she loved me, that it was all gonna be okay, that I’d always be their sweet little Mollypop, and that I always will be.

# # #