Poles Apart (25 page)

Then I remembered that I was holding a book contract in my hand. I hit Reply on Sally’s last email and in an impressive display of dignified restraint, I typed:

Sally, you have a DEAL!!!

But I limited the font size to 40-point.

The next morning, as I’d almost come to expect, Shawna was lurking about in the back of my thoughts. But she wasn’t alone. Megan was also there. Great. Like I didn’t already have enough going on in my head. They hung around on different sides of my mind, ignoring one another, but each drawing my attention in turn.

I was doing some research for a new blog post I’d been considering comparing men’s and women’s professional sports. I was going to try to look at a range of measures, including salaries,
TV
time, column inches in sports sections, public popularity, and even team attire (like the uniforms in women’s beach volleyball, which are required to be skimpy – even at the Olympics – versus men’s). I wasn’t sure yet where it was going but it felt like a storyline was starting to emerge. To ensure I could concentrate on the new blog post, I did not check Twitter, email, or the ever-growing balance in my online advertising account. Focus.

Have I mentioned just how consistently beautiful and temperate the weather seems to be in Orlando? I couldn’t remember it raining since I’d arrived. Not once. As I walked from the car into the hospital that afternoon, again, it was warm and sunny. Kenny Jenkins was sitting in his spot with a tabletop of sorts balanced across the arms of his wheelchair and secured by Velcro straps. A checkerboard was set up. Only an opponent was missing.

“Hi, Kenny,” I said as I approached. “Do you want a quick game?”

“Thanks, but no thanks. Your dad is coming to play so I can hand him his Ford-loving ass on a scorched Pinto hubcap,” he replied. “Inside car joke. Before your time.”

“Kenny, please. I grew up in a Ford family. I’m well aware of the explosive history of the Pinto.” I pointed to the checkerboard. “But, beware. My dad’s actually pretty good at checkers. Watch out for the Catalonian-Abramowicz Modified opening. He leans on it a bit too much, in my mind.”

Kenny stared at me with an unusual expression – he furrowed just one of his eyebrows. As I left him and walked along the Blue path, I tried to furrow just one brow. It’s hard. I couldn’t do it. I could elevate one eyebrow. But when furrowing, both of mine only worked in lockstep. I wondered if Kenny’s ability was another consequence of his stroke.

I found Dad resting and reading on one of the outside benches. Wait. I’m pretty sure I just said “reading.” I’d seen my
father resting often enough – quite often. But I could not recall ever seeing him reading. When he leafs through his magazine collection – cars or carnal – the prose is clearly secondary. I don’t count it as reading.

“Are you actually reading that book or just airing out the pages?” I asked.

He looked up, closed the book, and shoved it under his right leg.

“Have you ever heard of knocking?”

I sat down beside him on the bench.

“Hi, Dad,” I started over. “So what were you reading?”

“Nothing.”

“Come on. I love that you were reading. What book?”

He sighed and then, without looking at me, reached under his leg and handed me Beverley’s autobiography.

“Nice, Dad. Nice,” I said. “So, what do you think?”

“Hell, I don’t know. I guess it’s kind of neat to read a book by someone I know. I can sort of hear her voice reading it to me, even though I’m the one doing the reading.”

“But what about what she’s saying in the book? Do you like what you’re reading? Do you agree with her?”

“I don’t friggin’ know! I’m just trying to understand who the hell she is and what the hell she wants with me!”

“Dad, maybe she just wants you to start thinking of her, and maybe even thinking of women in general, a little differently. You know?”

“Yeah, well, it’s too early to say for sure. I just started and I’m kind of a slow reader.”

“Have you laughed yet?” I asked him.

“Coupla times. She does have a mouth on her, that’s for sure.”

“But are you thinking about what you’re reading? Or are you just scanning the words and missing the story, or worse, the point?”

“Jesus, I don’t know. I’m just reading one page after the other, like you’re supposed to. That’s all,” he said. “I can’t figure it all out, but what’s strange is, I keep thinking of your mom. It’s weird.”

“Actually, Dad, that doesn’t strike me as strange at all. In fact, I bet Beverley would be pleased to hear you say that.”

“Well, that ain’t happening anytime soon. She doesn’t even know I have a copy.”

“Oh. Where did you get it?”

“There’s this little mom-and-pop company I sometimes deal with when I feel like buying stuff. They call themselves Amazon, I think it is. You should check them out, sometime. Anyway, Yolanda helped me order it on the computer at the nurses’ station.”

“Nice,” I said. “So, you want to walk for a bit?”

“No. But I guess we’d better. But we don’t have much time,” he said, consulting his watch. “I’m going to knock Kenny Chevy around the checkerboard before his afternoon nap.”

He lifted himself up off the bench, grabbed his cane, and headed off down the path. I followed, carrying
The Funny One
, by Beverley Tanner. My father was walking quite well. The limp
was still quite pronounced. But he seemed to have absorbed it into his gait so that it almost took on a feeling of normalcy. He seemed in complete control of his limbs, even if there was a dip-and-roll vibe to every step. He settled on a bench closer to where his opponent waited.

I pushed Kenny’s wheelchair and checkerboard over to Dad. I left them just as they started arguing about who would play red, and whether the F-150 or the Silverado was the better pickup. They resolved the former, but I think the latter was left as a stalemate. Apparently, there was an endless supply of intractable Ford versus Chevy questions to resolve, or rather, to debate, at full volume, replete with automotive invective.

I walked back into the building.

“Thanks for helping my dad satisfy his newfound interests in books – or rather, book,” I said to Yolanda in the corridor.

“Honey, I was happy to help, after I recovered from the shock of it all,” she replied. “Is he enjoying it?”

“It’s kind of hard to tell. But at least he’s actually reading it,” I said. “Did you know that you had one of the great feminist pioneers in the house?”

“I knew it the minute I laid eyes on her – even before I saw her chart. But that was a few years ago now. She and Angela Davis were heroes of mine back in the day. I love having Bev around. We’ve had some good chats. But since she’s taken on Project Billy Kane, I don’t see as much of her.”

“There’s a name for it?”

“Oh, just among the staff.”

“I haven’t seen Beverley today. Is she around?”

“They bumped her physio to this afternoon. Liz is working on her now.”

“She seems to walk very well. I didn’t know she had regular physio.”

“She walks so well
because
she has regular physio. It’s just part of our all-inclusive spa service,” Yolanda said, sounding briefly like a radio ad.

I spent a couple of hours that afternoon monitoring and managing the EofE social media feeds to keep the masses engaged. There was continued growth on all fronts –Twitter followers, visits, and
RSS
subscriptions to the blog, comments left on the blog, emails to the Gmail account. I replied to a sampling of the blog comments and emails. There was another email from Candace along with invitations from several other major network talk shows, including
Oprah
and
Ellen
. By this stage, I was unfazed by it all, though quietly thrilled. I politely but firmly declined all invitations.

On a whim, I Googled “Eve of Equality” and refined the search to “News.” I was a little taken aback by how many newspapers and radio stations were interested in identifying the author of the blog. Beyond the talk show invitations, I hadn’t appreciated that I was the subject of considerable speculation in the mainstream
media. A sampling of headlines from various daily newspapers around the country:

These were not small publications. We’re talking the
Detroit Free Press
, the
Los Angeles Times
, the
Chicago Tribune
, the
Washington Post
, and several others. This was a little unnerving. I quickly reviewed my arsenal of anonymity measures and satisfied myself that it would be very difficult for even the most enterprising reporter or accomplished computer hacker to discover Eve’s true identity. Still, it was disquieting, though somewhat offset by the online advertising revenue amassing in my account. Breathe.

Rather than continuing my work on the new sports blog post, I spent a couple of hours trying to assemble the existing posts in some kind of order with a semi-logical narrative flow for the book. I was on a deadline, after all. I started by writing a preface to the collection of mini-essays, outlining the goals of the blog and of the book. Then I tried to write introductions to each post that placed them in a broader and less time-dependent context, so they would still make sense if read three years from now (which I hoped they would be). That wasn’t easy, but it felt like I was
making some headway. I also considered where the narrative strand would logically take me next. I came up with several more post ideas to sustain the blog (and the book, for that matter). As usual, I’d need to do some research, but I felt as if I now had some semblance of a path before me.

I found that time just slipped away when I was writing. The nut beneath my feet was not yet “alive,” for it was only 8:30, early in the evening but still, the words seemed to be flowing. But it wouldn’t be long before I’d start to feel the warmth and vibrations on the soles of my feet. That’s when the writing, for some strange reason, seemed to come most easily.

I got up and took a quick peek out the front window of my apartment. The nightly protest was taking shape. There were not nearly as many protestors as there’d been earlier. But a small, stalwart contingent, many of whom I recognized from earlier assemblies, was gathered. The leather-jacketed young agitators were nowhere to be seen. As well, there appeared to be no counter-protest from
XY
. I wondered if Megan Cook had advised her client that nothing was to be gained by televised clashes in front of the club. Sound advice. I went back to my laptop.

A few minutes later, outside my kitchen door, there arose such a clatter, I sprang from my chair to see what was the matter. (I couldn’t resist.) Someone was climbing up my fire escape in a very big hurry. When the footsteps stopped at my door, the urgent knocking started.

“Everett, are you in there?”

It sounded like Shawna, but I wasn’t certain.

“Coming,” I shouted, and swung the door open.

It wasn’t Wonder Woman or Marie Antoinette, just Shawna. Man, she was tall. She was not made up at all, or anywhere near ready for her stint downstairs, which, by my watch, started very soon. She was huffing and puffing.

“Thank goodness, you’re here,” she said stepping by me into the kitchen and looking around. She dropped a big blue canvas bag on the floor. “Hey, nice place you have.”

It is perhaps a measure of how much Shawna had been on my mind that it wasn’t until she was standing in my apartment that I noticed the very little person she held in her arms.

“Shawna! Hi, um, welcome. Ah, is everything okay?” I stammered, shifting my gaze from her beautiful face to that of the child resting in the crook of her right arm. She was one of the cutest little girls I think I’d ever seen. With hair the same rich auburn as her mother’s, she wore denim overalls, a red striped shirt, and perfect little blue running shoes. A pint-sized plastic Wonder Woman backpack was slung over her tiny shoulders. She looked at me, expressionless.