He didn’t mind losing. (One reason he was not good at any sport was that, in fact, he preferred losing. Like waiting, losing gave him the pleasurable sense that somebody else had to worry.) He particularly loved a certain shot that even Susan could get right only about half the time. When a ball intervened between the cue and object balls, she would raise the back of the stick and punch down on the side of the cue. The ball would spurt sideways, spinning, and would describe an arc around the intervening ball.
Sometimes his father came out of his study to watch. Sometimes he even played. It was the only time he and Susan got along. He played better than Mark, but not as well as his daughter. Mark—fourteen, fifteen, sixteen—had become dimly aware that his father was depressed, maybe had been depressed for years. Mark could count on two fingers the times he’d seen his father happy. The first had been after a snowstorm. His father hated snowstorms. He hated clearing the driveway, he hated ice on the paths, he hated the chance of a power outage, he hated making a fire in the fireplace when there was an outage because it heated the house unevenly. When Susan had lived at home, he hated the runaround she gave him when he asked her to help shovel. But on this one day, for some inexplicable reason, after the shoveling was finished, he made a snowball and threw it at Mark. Mark, nonplussed, threw one back. Susan joined in and peppered the old man up and down his long winter coat with snowballs until he begged for a ceasefire. She granted it, and when she turned around he snuck up behind her and dropped a chunk of plowdrift over her head. He laughed so hard he wheezed.
The second time happened at pool. Dad and Susan were playing Rotation, and it was usually a case of watching Susan run the table, but Dad had a couple of good early turns, and then Susan flubbed two shots in a row, and suddenly he found the zone, he sank the eight, the nine, the ten, and now he was on the downward slope picking up speed as the table cleared, and the next three shots were not that hard, and he really lucked out on a bank shot for number fourteen, and Susan called him Minnesota Fats, and the last was a straight shot down the whole table, and he banged it home. The part that Mark couldn’t believe, but would always remember, was the utterly uncharacteristic (although if he did it, didn’t that mean it was some buried part of his character?) silly dance that his father broke into, pointing to various corners of the room as he jived over to his workbench, picked up a stick of chalk, and scribbled the final score on the basement wall:
Susan—4
me—116
Tuesday, February 16, 2016
Baltimore in the dark. The bus is late, throbbing into the station at 6:18. She has two minutes for the transfer, makes it in one. People everywhere, in chairs, in lines, on the new bus. No matter where you go, what rise you top, what cape you round.
She grabs one of the last empty pairs of seats, sits at the window with her knapsack on her lap, watches the subsequent boarders. Eyes slide over her without a snag. Coats find overhead compartments, asses find cushions. The bus pulls out of the station with four empty seats, one of them next to her. On the bus out of New York there were three empty seats, one of them next to her. Twenty-seven pairs of seats on a Greyhound bus, therefore random odds of this happening to her on the two buses so far are three twenty-sevenths times four twenty-sevenths, or about 1 in 61. Couples prevent seat selection from being truly random, but she can’t determine couples with any confidence, so fuck that, fuck them.
She places her knapsack on the seat next to her. Pulls out her notebook.
Her greasy hair? Her thick glasses? Her bomber jacket, her black lipstick, her scarlet pants, her shitkickers, her jug ears, her fat lips, her horse teeth?
She gazes out the window. Her manner, her gaze, her affect, her smell? Maybe people can tell she hates having anyone sit next to her. Even the single women shy away.
Broad lazy river of taillights drifting with the bus, inexhaustible torrent of headlights rushing against. High-rises with brilliant windows in their thousands. Higher, blinking winglights of jampacked planes. Seven and a half billion chimps, rubbing noses, dominating, submitting. Since yesterday, another 220,000. This one has never belonged. She opens her notebook, writes, Here is a Miss who here is amiss.
Sunday was Valentine’s Day. She always thought it was the stupidest of all the holidays, and that’s saying something. Glancing through the steamed-up windows of full restaurants as she walked home, flowers on tables, couples leaning into each other, I love you, meaning, You must remain exactly this way for me, otherwise I’ll hate you. Yet she wondered, this past Sunday, every minute of the day, where Alex was, what they were thinking, who they might be talking to, who they might be talking about.
She’s not blind, she’s known all her life that people look at her funny. Why doesn’t she speak up? Why doesn’t she smile? Why doesn’t she wash her hair? Why doesn’t she stand up straight? Why doesn’t she ask me how I’m doing?
Their ignorant second-guessing: I recognize her type. I know what she needs.
Don’t understand me too quickly, somebody said. (She googles it: some writer named Gide.) How about,
