“No, that wasn’t…. I mean, yes, I liked all of them. Thank you very much.”
“But?”
“Well, I kept meaning to call you, but I never seemed to do it. I guess everything just feels like too much work lately. Like even getting out of bed in the morning is a part-time job.”
“Maybe it would be better to think of it as a hobby.”
“Is that how you think of it?”
“Lately I’ve been trying not to think much at all. Actually, I have another hobby I was just playing around with when you called. Anagrams.”
“Anagrams? Which ones are they?”
“When you mix up the letters in a word to spell something else. Usually I use people’s names.”
This guy was either slightly strange or kind of interesting. Maybe both. “So, give me an example.”
“Okay, pick one — Madonna or Shakespeare.”
It was probably a test of some sort. Maybe you could rate people based on their preferred cultural icons. “Shakespeare, of course.”
“Okay, William Shakespeare comes out: ‘I am a weakish speller.’”
“Cut it out. Does it really?”
“Write down the name, then cross off the letters. It works.”
“This is fun. How about Madonna?”
“Madonna Louise Ciccone. The best one is ‘Occasional nude income.’”
“Oh, that’s great. What about me?”
“Okay, give me a minute. Sarah Hurlihy…. hmm …. that’s a tough one. Umm …. How about this: ‘Hi! Ha ha! Slurry!’ ”
“That’s awful.”
“Okay, I can do better. ‘Hi! A lush Harry’? Or ‘Has hurly hair’?”
“Gee, thanks a lot.”
“Hey, I didn’t name you.”
“That’s true. And I hate my name anyway so I won’t feel insulted. Sarah’s too whispery, not a strong name.”
“I think it’s a beautiful name.”
“Thanks.” I’d never really liked talking on the phone that much, but it was kind of nice tonight. There was only sound. No sight or smell or touch to worry about. I could hang up at any time and be safe at home, all by myself. I curled up on the edge of my bed, waited for John to keep talking.
“What would you rather have for a name?” he asked.
“Well, when I was twelve I wanted to be Heidi. I tried to take it as a Confirmation name, but the nuns wouldn’t let me because it wasn’t the name of a saint.”
“Heidi Hurlihy. Sometimes things happen for the best.”
“And then I wanted to be Juliet. I know, not much better. How ’bout you, did you ever want another name?”
“You don’t think John Anderson is unusual enough?” John’s voice was soft and rich and gently teasing.
“You know,” I said, forgetting to answer his question. “You have a terrific voice, too.”
*
It’s not like it’s really a date, I told myself. It was just a quick cup of coffee at Starbucks on Boylston because I’d happened to mention to John Anderson that I was taking a one-day professional development course in Boston. It turned out John’s office was just down the street from the conference center where the course was being held.
Everything always seemed more sophisticated in Boston. There was something stimulating about getting out of the suburbs, where you could live your entire life in sweatpants. The women I passed looked neat and crisp and were dressed mostly in black, as if stooping to wear color would be far too frivolous for their important lives.
I was early, and I sat at one of the tall stools at the counter by the window, wishing I’d remembered about the black thing when I was getting dressed that morning. My simple purple dress, which had seemed perfectly appropriate at home, now felt too bright, too cheerful, practically circusy. The seat I’d chosen had a great view, but it was the kind of stool I never knew whether to climb all the way up on, or to just sort of angle myself back against casually. I tried both techniques and neither felt right, so I walked across to a table with two shorter, less intimidating chairs.
Nobody looked at me. Almost everyone grabbed coffee to go, and the few people who sat down immediately buried themselves in a newspaper. The woman directly in front of me wore a beautifully cut black suit with shoes that looked as if they would have cost me a month’s salary. She pulled an expensive black leather agenda out of an expensive black leather bag, and examined a page carefully. I wondered what kind of job I’d have to get in order to sit at a Starbucks every morning dressed like that.
I realized that school hadn’t even started yet. I wondered how the kids would do without me. I hoped the substitute would remember everything I’d told her, that she and June would follow the schedule I’d left. Consistency was so important to preschoolers. I hoped June would be able to handle it if one of the kids melted down because I wasn’t there. I hoped everybody missed me.
John Anderson stood at my table, holding two cups of coffee. I hadn’t even noticed him standing in line to get them. “Hi, Sarah. Don’t you look nice.”
“Hi, John. Thanks.” I looked down at my purple dress doubtfully. I looked back up at John. He looked nice, too, kind of casual business with a black leather coat and a gray silk tie that reminded me of old polished silver.
“Milk and sugar?”
“Yeah. No. I mean, milk, no sugar. I’ll get it.”
“Please. Allow me. I’ll be right back.” He put his cup down on the table and walked off with mine. I sneaked another look at him. He looked pretty much like all the other guys in Starbucks. Everybody was well groomed, industrious, more or less good-looking, more or less in shape. As if they all had things to do and places to go and a gym to work out at when they were done.
So why exactly was I here with John Anderson? Was it just that he’d stumbled upon my not-too-personal ad randomly, and left an equally impersonal message in my voice mail box? Was it simply that I happened to call him back? What if he’d left messages for hundreds, maybe thousands, of women, and I was the only one to answer?
John handed me my coffee. “Thanks,” I said. “I can only stay for a minute.”
He made a face, looked down at himself. “What is it, the tie?”
I smiled. “No, the tie’s good.”
“You’re sure? I’ve got five or six others in the car if you don’t like it.”
“What makes you think something’s wrong with you?” I really wanted to know. Maybe then I could figure out why I always thought something was wrong with me.
“That’s a good question. Maybe it’s just a natural first assumption. Then again, it could be all those years of listening to my ex-wife.”
“Uh-oh, here we are again. The tales of woe.”
“Well, we certainly don’t have time for mine this morning.” He smiled and I smiled back. “My bad habits alone could take days. Weeks, even.” He put his elbow on the table and leaned his chin on his fist. He sighed loudly.
“That many, huh?” I shook my head in mock sympathy. “Okay, just give me one.” I took a sip of my coffee and wondered if the people standing in the take-out line thought John and I were a couple.
John looked over both shoulders, then leaned forward and whispered, “You’re probably not going to believe this, but I’ve been accused of being more than a bit of a dork.”
“No. You? Oh, my God, you didn’t wear the Indiana Jones hat around the house, did you?”
“I’m afraid I did. And with white socks, no less.”
I giggled. I couldn’t put my finger on exactly what made it so, but John Anderson was kind of a dork. A nerd. He could drive a nice car, he could get his hair cut on Newbury Street, he could wear a stylishly distressed leather coat. But he was still the guy who sat next to me in advanced math class in high school and wore mechanical pencils in his shirt pocket and had a crush on me. I wouldn’t have wanted anything to do with him back then, partly because if he liked me, there had to be something seriously wrong with him. But also because if he was a nerd and I went out with him, then I’d be a nerd-lover, which was pretty much the same thing as being a nerd, too.
All these years later, I imagined the rules had changed. I couldn’t be sure, but John’s residual nerdiness seemed more endearing than not. For the rest of the day, as I tried to stay focused on “Preschoolers and Emerging Literacy,” my thoughts kept drifting over to John Anderson. I pictured him walking around in the Indiana Jones hat and the white socks. Then I pictured him walking around in the Indiana Jones hat and the white socks and nothing else.
I looked around at the other teachers, by now practically reclining on the padded chairs of the conference room, and wondered if they noticed I was smiling for no apparent reason at all.
Michael and Mother Teresa and I were going for a walk. Borrowing Mother Teresa that time had made Michael think to invite me: “The pooch and I come here a lot. It’s one of our favorite places.”
Always, since we’d grown up and moved out, I talked to Carol and Christine at least once a week. It was different with the boys. Maybe they were more involved with their wives’ families, but it seemed as if Johnny was always traveling and Billy Jr., even though he was only a year older than Carol, acted as if he were from another generation. The last time he’d shown up for Sunday dinner at Dad’s, he’d worn a gray, button- down sweater and talked about retirement. “I’ll be dead and buried before you bring up that subject again, young man,” Dad said. “My best advice to you is not to rush the seasons.”
I was happy to have something to do, happier still to have a chance to hang out with Michael. We walked around to the back of Michael and Phoebe’s Toyota 4Runner, and he opened the back door so Mother Teresa could jump down, THE MARSHBURY MUNICIPAL GOLF COURSE, read a sign at the edge of the parking lot. A smaller sign was tacked below: CLOSED FOR THE SEASON.
Michael put his keys in the pocket of his jeans. We were both wearing sneakers and we set off briskly down a paved road that wound along the side of a fairway. Michael stopped to unhook Mother Teresa’s leash and she galloped ahead. At the edge of a pond, we stepped off the blacktop, tromping across a mixture of beach heather and scrub grass, our sneakers sinking into the sandy soil. “What was this place before it was a golf course?” I asked Michael.
He stopped, plucked a golf ball from the base of a small cedar. “Nice one,” he said, putting it in his pocket, “practically new. Don’t you remember? This was all a big sandpit. We used to sneak in the back way from Edgewater Road, drive right by the No Trespassing signs, go drinking and skinny-dipping right there.” He pointed to the charming, tastefully landscaped pond.
“Oh, my God. This was the pond with the shopping carts and car parts at the bottom? Supposedly you’d get polio if you even touched the water with your baby finger, a new kind of polio the vaccine couldn’t prevent.”
“You didn’t believe that, did you?”
“Of course I did.”
“That’s just what the boys said to get you to make out with them instead of swimming.”
I laughed, even though not a single boy had tried to lure me here in high school. I spotted a ball wedged in the crook of a white birch branch, stood on my tiptoes to retrieve it, handed it to Michael.
“Can’t keep this one. It’s a range ball.” He tossed it toward the fairway. Mother Teresa ran after it.
“What’s a range ball?”
“It means it belongs to the golf course. For use on the driving range. You can tell by the red stripe around it.” Mother Teresa had the range ball in her mouth now. She jerked her head back, threw it up in the air. When it landed, she pounced on it repeatedly, some ancient prey-killing ritual she hadn’t quite evolved beyond. The ball disappeared into her mouth again, and she trotted over to Michael, dropping it at his feet.
“Good girl,” he said. He picked up the ball, put it into his pocket, patted Mother Teresa on the head. “I’ll have to put it back when she’s not looking,” he whispered. We reached another small paved roadway with two signs. One pointed up a hill and said 9th Hole. The other pointed in the opposite direction and read Pebble Beach 3182 miles.
We headed up a hill that was so steep I imagined golf carts somersaulting backward down it. Michael and I stopped talking to concentrate on looking for balls. It was a special kind of awareness, scanning the area with slightly blurred vision so that a golf ball would suddenly seem to jump out from where it rested in a pile of fallen leaves or a thicket of briars. Our pockets were bulging. “This is so much fun,” I said. “It’s like an Easter-egg hunt. What do you do with them, save them to golf with in the spring?”
“I don’t golf. So I keep them in buckets in the garage.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. I just like having them, I guess. Phoebe says it’s a sickness. She told me I have to either get rid of them all or go get some help.” He grinned at me sadly. “Do you think they have a twelve-step program for golf ball collectors?”
“They must. Why does it matter to Phoebe?”
“I think it’s just one more thing for her to dislike about me.”
“Cut it out, Michael. Phoebe’s crazy about you.”
“Yeah, right. I don’t think I’ve done one thing to please her in the last five years.”
“Did you try bringing her here?”
“Of course I did. I thought it would be romantic. She hated it, said I was ignoring her to look for balls.”
We’d reached the top of the hill. A small green took up nearly all of the available space. A tiny post-and- rail fence was the only protection from a sharp drop, though the fence looked as if it would be more apt to catch you by the shins and propel you forward than save you from a fall. The view was breathtaking — most of Marshbury, it seemed, and the ocean stretched endlessly beyond. “Is that Old Smokey?” I asked, pointing to the huge hill we’d sledded on as kids.
“Yeah. Isn’t this the best? If I had to pick one place to stay forever, it’d be right here.”
A couple of guys were standing around what I presumed was the ninth hole. Both wore hooded sweatshirts with the front center pocket bulging with bumpy golf balls. The look was part derelict, part J. Crew. One of the men was holding a rusty putter, or maybe it was a driver, and two golf balls rested within a couple of feet of the hole. Two open cans of Bud waited on the ground nearby.
Michael whispered, “They’re part of one of the world’s last remaining indigenous subcultures. Anthropologists are studying them for clues in the search for the meaning of life.”