Page 38 - WTP Vol.IX #3

Soccer (continued from preceding page)
from his back; no dread of plunging. For an instant he is whole. It’s as if each blow is administering a shock, an electrical spark that cleanses him entirely. And now he sees, looking back, that that was the nature of the stinging in his hands when Kevin had hurled the ball at him in the driveway! It was a harbinger, that pleasure, of this deeper release from bondage.
~
“Had enough?” Matt asks, a rhetorical smile. Both are sweaty. Heated.
Gathering up the ball, Kevin nods. “Thanks, Dad.” He twirls the ball, grass-stained, as they’re starting to- ward the house.
There will be no hospitalization tonight for Matt: this much they both know. Matt knows as well, however, that nothing is over yet. That nothing is resolved. Al- ready, his symptoms are reclaiming him as they come in through the kitchen. The leaden legs, the heavy arms, the flayed skin. All still there, despite this re- prieve. He’ll have to endure them. Until such time.
Still. What has happened out there in the yard has af- forded him a new lens for viewing, a new understand- ing, some arch wherethrough . . .
Meg enters the kitchen just as Kevin is reaching into the cupboard for some chips. Matt expects she’ll be wear- ing her usual look of disapproval—her “so-you-guys- have-been-out-there-having-a-good-time” look—but in fact she looks startled, her eyebrows elevated. It’s the look she reserves for unmet expectations.
“Dinner?” Matt says, his own eyebrows lifted. He glances at his son, who has rescued the chips.
“I haven’t started any,” she says. “Mn,” Matt murmurs.
“I thought—” There she stops.
Kevin, chips in tow, is already in flight, heading north toward his bedroom. He knows well enough how the scene will play out.
His parents face each other, a space of air between them. How strange it all seems, still! It was out there by the gardens that he loves so in summer that he first learned about it, no scorched grass around.
“I left my briefcase in the car,” Matt says. “I’d better go get it.”
Meg has turned already to take her leave from the 31
kitchen.
~
Darkness has fallen. Matt is careful with his footing as he walks toward the car. This long day of days has been both ruin and triumph.
His initial success, on reaching home this afternoon, had been his reading of his wife: his grasping what it was that in her growing weariness and exasperation with him, whether just or unjust, she was ready to see happen.
He unlocks the car. Before reaching into the backseat to lift out his briefcase, laden as it is with student es- says for the evening, he pauses to breathe in the fresh night air.“I
f you go ahead and
do this, if you allow yourself to do this, where, exactly, will your curiosity have gone?”
The road through heartache is a rocky one, Matt knows, and the blows, the needed blows, will land where they will. His true, fair share (beyond the flaw of his unawareness) is still to be parsed. What he cannot know yet is that the descent into the pit will be steeper and more harrowing than he could possi- bly have imagined, and that the time is going to come when the people helping him—and there will be several—will need to say to him, We are going to get you through this!
And he will need to trust them.
What, for the moment, he can embrace is the essen- tial paradox unfolding here today, as well as the secret it reveals—a son bound in love so deeply to his father that a way must be found for anger to be allowed. And that way, once found . . .
There will be no hospitalization tonight for Matt.
Wertime is the author of Citadel on the Mountain: A Memoir of Father and Son (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), 2001 recipient of the James A. Michener Memorial Prize. Hiis work has appeared in The Hudson Review, The Yale Review, The Georgia Review, Southwest Review, Ploughshares, and other journals. “The Case for Empathy,” his most recent publication, appeared in the September 15, 2020 issue of The American Scholar. He is currently at work on a novel, A Taste of Italy.