Asymmetry - Lisa Halliday Page 0,28
when they lost again, nineteen to eight, he switched off the television and tossed her the phone. “You’d better call her.”
“Hi, Nana. It’s Alice. . . . I know. . . . I know. . . . It’s terrible. . . . I’m sorry. . . . No, I watched it at a friend’s house actually. . . . No, no one you know. . . . Mm-hmm. . . . Oh really? . . . That’s weird. . . . Was Doreen with him? . . . Yeah, he’s a Shriner, too. . . . Okay. . . . I should go. . . . I should go now, Nana. . . . I love you too. . . . Okay. . . . Good night. . . . Good night.”
“What’d she say?”
“That Francona’s in a coma.”
“That’s good. What else?”
“That she ran into my father’s brother at the supermarket and he said I gave a nice trilogy at my grandfather’s funeral. I think he meant a eulogy.”
The following afternoon he left a message on her voice mail asking if she wouldn’t mind stopping in Duane Reade on the way over and picking up one jar of folic acid, one Mylanta cherry flavor with calcium, and ten bottles of Purell, two-ounce size. When she arrived, he was pacing the rug in his socks, hands on his back, grimacing. Alice handed him the bag.
Peering into it: “Hmm.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing darling. It’s not your fault. Never mind.”
At midnight, bottom of the ninth, the Yankees were up by one and Boston fans stood in the bleachers and prayed. Feebly, someone raised a sign that read 4 MORE GAMES. Alice watched from between her fingers while Ezra got up and began to do his one hundred things.
“The party’s over . . .”
Millar walked. The Sox replaced him with Roberts, who stole second. Then Bill Mueller hit a single straight down the middle and Roberts rounded third and slid home.
“Yesss!”
Holding his toothbrush, Ezra came out of the bathroom and sat down.
The score stayed the same for the next two innings. Alice watched from the floor, a knuckle between her teeth; then Big Papi hit a two-run homer and in an instant she was on her feet, making a running jump onto the bed. “We did it! We won! The Red Sox won! We won we won we won we won we WON!”
“You did darling. Fair and square.”
“Now the party’s over!”
For Game Five she arrived wearing one of her Searle skirts and a cap with a B on it. Ezra intercepted her in the communal hallway and looked both ways before yanking her out of the elevator by the arm. “Are you crazy? In this town?” The television was already on and an industrious desk clearing appeared to be in progress: after handing her her drink and the delivery menu for Pig Heaven he resumed licking envelopes, tearing up faxes, tossing old magazines into the wastepaper basket and stepping over miniature ziggurats of foreign editions accumulated on the floor, whistling as he went.
“Hey Mealy,” he said, looking up from a bank statement. “Have I ever told you my Glow-Worm story?”
Alice put a check mark next to Pork Soong. “Nope.”
“In the 1950s there was a popular song called ‘Glow Worm,’ recorded by the Mills Brothers. And in the early sixties, when I was at Altoona teaching creative writing”—he shook his head—“I advised one of my students that he needed more detail in his fiction. It’s detail, I explained, that brings fiction to life. He’d written a short story whose first sentence read: ‘Danny came into the room whistling.’ Then we had this little chat and he went home to revise it and when he came back the following week the first sentence read: ‘Danny came into the room whistling “Glow Worm.”’ That was the only thing new in the entire story.”
Alice giggled.
“Easiest white girl to laugh there ever was, Mary-Alice.”
“What happened to him?”
“Who.”
“Your student!”
“He won the Nobel Prize.”
“Come on.”
“He played for the Washington Senators for a while, actually. Back when there were only eight teams to a league.”
“There were only eight teams to a league?”
“Oh, Mary-Alice, this is hopeless! There were eight teams to a league beginning in the Mesozoic Era all the way up to 1961, when they introduced the expansion teams, who got all the guys the other teams didn’t want, like Hobie Landrith and Choo-Choo Coleman—Choo-Choo Coleman! How’d you like that for a name?—and the Mets were so inept that Casey Stengel, the old Yankees