Nanci Kincaid grew up in Tallahassee, Florida.
She earned a BA from Athens State College in 1987,
an MFA in Fiction from the University of Alabama in 1991.
She's the author of two novels: Crossing Blood
in 1992, about which Henry Louis Gates said, finally,
a southern novel that a Black person can love and believe.
Crossing Blood signals the arrival
of a major talent among American novelists.
And Balls in 1998, a life story set in the college football
culture of the South.
A topic about which Ms. Kincaid has had ample opportunity
for research as both her ex and her present husband
are college football coaches.
Her short story collection Pretending the Bed
is a Raft earned critical acclaim.
Kirkus Review, notoriously tight fisted in handing out laurels,
called the story dazzling, exquisite,
and Kincaid a vigorous talent.
Her work has appeared in many distinguished journals
including the Oxford American, Missouri Review, and Ontario
Review.
Among her honors she received a fellowship
from the National Endowment for the Arts
and the coveted Bunting Fellowship
from Radcliffe College.
This semester she's teaching in our creative writing
program for which we are immensely grateful.
I was fascinated to learn that while Kincaid was enjoying
the artistic and intellectual luxury of her Bunting
Fellowship, she became friends with Carol
Gilligan, the renowned Harvard psychologist who
has done groundbreaking work on the moral development of women,
published in a book I'm sure many of you know:
In a Different Voice.
That affinity strikes me as a significant detail
in Kincaid's biography as is of course her propensity
to team up with coaches.
It is easy to say that Balls is a novel about football,
but also it is a story about football
as a microcosm for our culture's dominant values.
It's the story of women finding their own honest voices
in such a culture.
And it is the story of one woman's hard won
self-definition in a male world.
Please welcome Nanci Kincaid.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.
Can you hear me all right?
Should I adjust?
How is that?
Is it better?
OK.
Whoops.
All right.
Well, thank you all for coming tonight.
This is sort of a thrill for me because I've
given I think two readings in Tucson
and usually only my blood relatives come.
So this is a real pleasure to read
to people that don't know me.
And I want to say a special thanks
to my students who are here tonight,
especially after class today, which
was a long, grueling class and it makes for a long day.
I'm really smart enough to know that a fiction writer should
always read something funny, work in progress,
and sometimes it's really a mistake
to do because in the past I've read
from a work in progress only then to go home and throw it
away.
It's going to all depend on how you guys are
breathing while I'm reading.
And this is part of what I'm thinking
of as a trilogy of novellas, which I will call Three
Wives, which sounds like Dick should have written,
but nonetheless.
[CHUCKLES] Just teasing.
But it's Three Wives.
The first story, the first novella is titled For a Little
Light Reading Try the Sperm Catalog.
And it's a woman who's getting a divorce and has two children.
Her husband has left her for a younger, more
interesting woman.
Meanwhile, her best friend, who's never been married,
decides that she wants a child.
So she sends off--
these women, all my women live in Alabama.
I don't know, they can't help it.
So they send off to California for a sperm catalog
because they don't want to mix with relatives, right?
And they get this sperm catalog and it's
about reading about men as in the way
that they're summarized.
One woman in particular, she almost
has every man in the book memorized.
And how after a while the men who only have numbers,
they don't have names.
The men in the sperm catalog become more real to them
than the men in their lives.
And this story, which even though I
told my students to title everything no matter what.
The story I'm going to read from tonight is untitled.
And I won't give you much feedback about it
except that it takes place in Butler County, Alabama.
A fictional county, I hope, that has no town in it.
It's one of those kind of counties
where you go across the line to the neighboring county's mall,
you know that kind of county.
Where people build houses when they first get married
and the rest of their lives they spend
finishing them, adding on.
That's just a kind of happy rural southern setting,
I guess you could say.
I also want to say a little thanks to my mother--
[AUDIO OUT] from my mother in my fiction.
And I'm not always conscious of it at first.
And I never have-- had her read anything
before I went ahead with it.
And she always pretends she does not recognize herself at all.
And I think she really doesn't.
Although there are six kids in the family
and all the rest of them really recognize them.
But in this story I have borrowed one of her boyfriends
who was a guy named Happy Cat.
Happy Cat she met at the Elks Club,
where she was a great card player, and he was a mail man.
And in the summer when she had off from school
she would get in his mail truck which
is absolutely against the law, which was quite a thrill,
and go on his mail route with him.
So I borrowed Happy Cat and I don't know
how long I'm going to read.
I hope I'll read far enough to introduce you to Happy Cat.
But don't mistake being of the character here for my mother.
She's got a lot of kids but that's the only similarity.
There is always kind of a logistical thing here.
"Lord, Eddie had gotten tired of watching his mother,
[? Bena ?] sit in the yard in a folding chair
with all the mismatched laces unraveling.
Just sit there with a cup of coffee in her hand
and contemplate the sorry shape of her life.
Her head bowed low in something that
looked like defeat or prayer, since the two can
look the same from a distance.
But Eddie had a pretty good idea that no prayer was going on
out there.
He figured it was more like an endless question and answer
session with a God she had once believed in
and tried to make all of them believe in,
a long, long time ago before everything got so messed up
and she got so tired.
It was just in the last year when
things should be back to normal that [? Bena ?] had begun
to sit alone in the yard drinking her morning coffee
and waiting for the sun to come up before going off
to work over at the school administration
building, a filling out government forms.
She waited for the sunrise, the way
a person waits for a big disappointment,
and then is not surprised when it comes,
because it proves the ongoingness of disappointment,
like one thing in this world you can count on.
The rest of them had more or less bounced back, you know.
The flat way a ball with not much air in it bounces.
But still, they had stopped looking behind them
and started looking ahead into that magic place everybody was
always talking about.
The future, where everything was not only possible, but likely.
Hadn't his mother spent the last decade trying to make sure
they all believed in that, the future?
The future was her God, wasn't it?
And now here she was giving up.
When she got home from work in the evening
she microwaved a cup of leftover morning coffee
and sat right there again in that same damn chair,
this time turned to face the sunset.
Sometimes she sat there until after dark,
until Eddie, her youngest son called out to her.
What are you doing out there, mama?
Are we going to have any supper or what?
[? Bena ?] would rise like a zombie,
and come inside, and bang around in the kitchen
until she had produced plates of eggs and toast,
or spaghetti, or a couple of chicken pot pie.
Gone were the days when [? Bena ?] used
to clip recipes out of the Sunday paper
and try out weird but delicious casseroles on the family
as if they were a bunch of Guinea pigs.
She had the pig part right, Eddie thought.
He could not remember a time when he wasn't hungry.
With five kids in the family and him the youngest,
Eddie had learned to grab and gobble.
"Slow down Eddie," his mother used to say.
"We got plenty son."
But he had never been sure of that.
Now, [? Bena ?] cooked exactly the same way a person
fell asleep.
She just got in position and let herself go
and before she knew what was happening
she had supper on the table.
It was both totally predictable and also a little like magic.
They sat down.
Eddie asked to sing song Grace he had memorized
as a child, the only real poem he knew by heart,
and they ate whatever food [? Bena ?]
had caused to appear before them.
Eddie had plans to go off to college in the fall.
He had surprised everybody and gotten a track scholarship.
Up until then, [? Bena ?] had thought
Eddie was more or less lazy.
She knew he liked to run but she didn't
think of running as something good to do with your life.
In fact, it bothered her seeing Eddie run so much like he was
trying to get away from something but couldn't.
[? Bena ?] knew he counted the days
until he could leave home and move into a tiny 8
by 8 dorm room with some strange boy he didn't know,
perhaps the long distance runner, one
of those real skinny boys from some exotic land,
and start at last to be really truly happy for a change.
[? Bena ?] wondered when exactly happiness
had started to be something that happened far away from home,
something you had to leave home to go get.
And how had all [? Bena's ?] his children managed to figure that
out when [? Bena ?] hadn't.
"Too much thinking is not good for a person, mama."
Eddie said.
"I'm not exactly thinking out there son,"
[? Bena ?] told him.
"I'm meditating.
They say you should sit quiet and meditate to start your day
out and to finish it up."
"Who says that?"
"All the people on the talk shows.
All the health books.
They say it's good coping strategy."
"So How's it going then, mama.
How are your coping?"
"My mind just wanders over the same stuff
when I meditate as it does when I think.
It feels like I've got a broken record going around
in my head."
"I think you need to forget about meditating
and take up a hobby, mama.
It's good to keep busy.
"I wish I had a dime for every hobby
I've taken up over the years.
Remember when I used to make those Christmas decorations out
of egg shells?"
"Heck, yes.
You used to make me and Joe suck the egg out first."
"You were supposed to blow," [? Bena ?] said, "Not suck."
"Yeah.
Well, now you tell me."
"They sure were pretty, weren't they?
All those sequins and the little deer I used to glue inside.
You remember that?"
"I thought you were going to kill me and Joe when
we fell under the Christmas tree and crushed those ornaments.
I never seen you go so crazy.
First you were screaming then you were crying.
"Y'all shouldn't have been roughhousing in the living
room.
It might be funny now but at the time
it almost broke my heart to see you
knock that tree over like that.
I'd worked so hard on that tree, staying up late at night
after all your kids were asleep, trying
to make everything just right.
Do you know?
The perfect Christmas.
It was the first Christmas after your daddy died.
I guess I was a little crazy then."
Eddie didn't like to talk about his daddy dying.
He hardly ever even thought about it anymore.
And if it weren't for the pictures
his mother saved in the photo album
he would have already forgotten what his daddy looked like.
It seemed like a long time ago that his daddy had
tried to ruin all their lives.
Maybe his sisters still liked to discuss the matter,
but he didn't.
"I still say you need a hobby, mama."
Eddie said.
"Lord knows I need more than a hobby, son."
"Like what?"
"I don't know exactly.
Some good reasons or something."
"Well, I can't help you there," Eddie said.
"I'm fresh out."
He stood up and rinsed his dishes
and put them in the dishwasher and kissed
[? Bena ?] on the cheek.
"I'm out of here for a while," he said.
"Going to Anna Kaye's."
[?
Anna Kaye ?] was Eddie's girlfriend.
She was the kind of girl who was so cheerful
that it was a wonder nobody had killed her yet.
[CHUCKLES]
But if anybody ever did kill her it
wouldn't be Eddie, that was for sure.
He loved [?
Anna Kaye's ?] cheerful way.
He wished everybody would take a lesson from [?
Anna Kaye's ?] positive attitude because then,
to his way of thinking, this would be a better world.
He had made a personal decision never to voluntarily
become involved with a woman who was not cheerful.
His mother and sisters had almost
run him crazy with some heartache
and bouts of moral outrage.
He liked simpler women better.
He liked [?
Anna Kaye, ?] who as far as he could tell woke up happy,
and went to bed happy, and experienced nothing
but happiness in between.
He was real lucky to find a girl like that.
When [? Bena's ?] husband, Bobby,
had been killed 10 years ago, it had put [? Bena's ?] life
on a path that she had not chosen
and didn't know how to get off of.
Looking back, it seemed [? Bena's ?] life
had more or less belonged to her right
up to the minute Bobby [INAUDIBLE]
died and took it away.
With Bobby in the grave [? Bena's ?] life
had quickly become about doing what Bobby wasn't there to do.
Like keep the lawn mowed.
Keep the car running.
Pay off the mortgage and raise his kids
right so that they would all turn
out decent, reasonably athletic, and honest, which she had done.
Not a criminal among them.
They were serious children now, maybe that was true.
When [? Bena ?] looked back she thought probably
they hadn't laughed enough or ever
found the pleasure of pure out and out silliness.
But on the other hand, not a one of them was mean.
It was years ago now but sometimes
it still seemed like yesterday, the news, which is
how they talked about it still.
The night we got the news.
When he told mama the news.
When the news hit school, et cetera.
For [? Bena ?] and all her kids, the news
would always be something that happened 10 years ago.
Not something they tuned into nightly on TV,
or read about in the newspaper.
That stuff is just a bunch of current events most of which
barely had a thing to do with any of them.
But the news was and always would be personal.
[? Bena, ?] honey, there's been an accident.
It's Bob, killed and rollover.
And [? Bena, ?] now, not alone.
There was a woman.
The news had come at once like that,
packaged in sentence fragments.
And even after all these years, [? Bena ?]
had never really sorted it all out and made any sense of it.
She had been at home with the kids
that night, the five of them.
Eddie, the baby, was just 8.
And Sissy, the oldest, was a senior in high school.
The TV was on and every radio and stereo in the house
was blaring out some competing noise.
[? Bena ?] was grading papers at the kitchen table.
She had the kind of mind that could cut right
through the distractions of life and stay focused on her tasks.
She was a sixth grade teacher then.
A good one.
That was before she found out they would pay her better money
to fill out government forms than they
would have to teach the children anything about the government.
That was back when [? Bena ?] still
believed that certain things were worth doing.
And then there came the knock at the door
that changed everything, in the police
car with its flashing light parked in the yard
making Elvis howl like all get out.
As if he knew exactly what had happened by instinct.
And all five of her golden children,
wide eyed, and frozen at the news that Bobby Eckert,
their daddy, was killed.
Two afternoons earlier Bobby had told me
that he was going to a meeting in Montgomery.
His company was trying to get a bid
in on paper supplies for Maxwell, the Air Force base.
He said it would take him a day or two and kissed Bena
good bye.
And she had let him go off [INAUDIBLE]..
The police said his car went off the embankment up
on that twisty part of Highway 82.
They said it just looked like he forgot to take the curve.
Like maybe he thought for a minute his car was an airplane
and that it would just lift off and sail him through the air.
Like he was a pilot.
Like he could take wing and fly.
There were no skid marks, the policeman said.
No signs of braking.
Car rolled over six or eight times.
Booby was killed instantly.
They found the woman in a ravine with her skull mostly crushed.
She was still breathing.
They took her to Jackson Hospital
and called all of her next of kin.
I'm sorry miss Eckert, the policeman
kept saying to [? Bena. ?] I'm real sorry, ma'am.
The day after the accident, the newspaper
ran the pictures of Bobby and the woman
together side by side, like a pair.
Accident takes local man's life, the paper said.
Woman in critical condition.
[? Bena's ?] daughter, Ellie, had brought the newspaper
into [? Bena's ?] bedroom to show it to her.
Mama she said, "You want to see what the woman looked like?"
[? Bena ?] sat up in bed and studied
the picture of the woman.
Her name was Lorraine Mayfield.
She was only 28.
[? Bena ?] had never laid eyes on her before.
Her hair was dark and curly and [? Bena ?]
remembered thinking she probably dyed
it to get it so dark looking.
[? Bena ?] searched her face and decided
that she might be foreign or something,
Mexican maybe or Puerto Rican.
A stranger just passing through on her way someplace else.
It was clear she was not someone who belonged in
[? Bena's ?] or Bobby's life.
"She's not as pretty as you mama," Ellie said.
"Pretty is as pretty does," [? Bena ?] said.
"I bet she's not as nice as you either."
"There's more important things than being
pretty or nice, Ellie.
You remember that, OK?"
"Yes, ma'am."
Ellie said.
"Like what?"
"I don't know for sure right this minute," [? Bena ?] said.
"You are going have to ask me later, OK."
"Like being alive," Ellie said.
"It's more important to be alive, right?"
Bobby's funeral was well attended
because nearly everybody loved Bobby Eckert.
His children were all well scrubbed and good
looking and behaved in a way that would
make any father, even a dead one, proud.
His wife [? Bena ?] was composed and gracious.
Anybody that pitied her was wasting time, at least that's
what she liked to tell herself.
[? Bena ?] had entered the church
with her two sons and three daughters
flanking her like fierce skinned blue eyed soldiers.
And she had felt real strong in the midst of them.
What Bobby Eckert had needed with Lorraine Mayfield,
[? Bena ?] might never know.
But she was not going to let her children become
ashamed of their father.
She was going to insist that they look beyond the obvious.
That's what she had always tried to do herself.
It rained when Bobby was laid in the ground.
Black umbrellas surrounded the grave like so many gnats
clustered on a wound.
It was muddy, and messy, and the coffin
slipped, and sank while the men tried to steer it into place.
Amen, people kept saying.
[? Bena ?] watched it all like she
was a person in the audience at a really sad movie.
That night her son Joe said, "Daddy ruined
everything, didn't he mama?"
"No, son," Bena said.
"He changed everything but we're not
going to let everything be ruined."
It was two weeks after Bobby had been
buried that [? Bena ?] got the phone call from Lorraine
Mayfield's mother.
"Ms. Eckert," she said.
"Please forgive me for intruding on your terrible grief."
[? Bena ?] had been too stunned to speak.
"I'm calling to ask you something," Mrs. Mayfield said.
"It's very hard for me and I hope you will forgive me."
"What is it," Bena asked.
"It's Lorraine," Mrs. Mayfield said.
"She's not doing good.
The doctors say it's only a matter of time until, you know,
everything shuts down.
She needs the last rites.
Her brain, you know, is--" "I'm sorry," Bena said.
"So what I'm wondering is, I was thinking if you might--
I would like Lorraine to die in peace, you know.
Do you think you might be able to forgive her.
I didn't raise Lorraine to be off with somebody's husband.
I know in her heart she's so sorry.
It's just that if you could forgive her then maybe
she could go, you know, die.
I think she's lingering until she gets the forgiveness."
"What do you want me to do?"
[? Bena ?] asked.
"Can you come to the hospital?"
She sounded to [? Bena ?] like the woman must
be Catholic or something.
All that talk about forgiveness and last rites.
[? Bena ?] was a Baptist.
She knew nothing about all the rigmarole the Catholics put
their dying loved ones through.
She had no idea what they expected from her.
Forgiveness, Lorraine's mother had said.
[? Bena ?] drove to Montgomery without telling anyone
where she was going.
She could not have said, why she was doing this exactly
except that she had been asked to.
For the most part, when she could,
[? Bena ?] tried to do what people asked to do.
Mrs. Mayfield, Lorraine's mother,
didn't look any older than [? Bena. ?]
She looked like she could just as easily have
been the woman in Bobby's car.
A woman, maybe like her daughter,
so compelling that Bobby would be
unable to keep his eyes off her and on the road.
"Thank you for coming," she whispered.
[INAUDIBLE] "I'll show you where she is."
Miss Mayfield took [? Bena's ?] hand
and let her down the intensive care hallway
into a cold well-lit room with a roll
up bed and the middle of it a bandaged,
wired Lorraine Mayfield lay in the bed looking
as small as a child.
"She can hear you," Ms. Mayfield said.
"The doctors will tell you she can't but she can."
Ms. Mayfield leaned over the bed and whispered,
"Lorraine, honey, Bobby's wife is here to see you.
It's OK.
She's not mad."
Then she kissed the bandaged head
and stepped away from the bed.
"I'll give you a few minutes alone," she said.
"I'll wait."
For an instant, [? Bena ?] didn't
want to be left alone with this small dying woman.
She stared at the swollen face of a person
she did not know at all.
Lorraine's eyes were sealed closed
and her face was purple and distorted.
It occurred to [? Bena ?] that the dark, curly hair
in the newspaper pictures had been shaved
so that the doctors could try to stitch her head together
in some hopeless gesture that only they understood.
[? Bena ?] pulled the tall hospital stool to the bedside
and sat on it.
She touched Lorraine's hand but it was dry as paper.
"This is really strange isn't it, [INAUDIBLE]..
Your mama called me," She said.
For a minute, [? Bena ?] just sat and stared
at the tiny figure in the bed.
She could be one of Bena's daughters.
Sissy maybe.
Sissy was a child with the wild streak too, wasn't she?
She tried to imagine Bobby in a car with this woman
but she couldn't think of it.
What they would say to each other.
Where they might be going.
What Lorraine had been wearing or planning.
It was all dark and impossible.
"OK," Bena took a deep breath.
"[INAUDIBLE] you go.
Your mother says you can hear me.
I don't know how you knew Bobby, how long or how well, but look,
Bobby was a real easy guy to love.
You should have seen his funeral, everybody came.
Practically the whole town.
So you shouldn't feel too bad because you're lucky too,
I think."
Even as she spoke [? Bena ?] wondered if she meant a word
she was saying.
Words just came to her like she'd been rehearsing
for this day all her life.
She would have laid hands on and healed Lorraine Mayfield,
if she could have.
She would have commanded her to rise from her bed
and go forth and sin no more.
It was odd how connected she felt
to this woman, the one whose hand
she kept instinctively touching.
Later, she would accuse herself of simply
being curious to see what the woman looked like.
The woman who had been [INAUDIBLE]..
The woman who dead or alive had altered Bena's life forever.
Some of the teachers at school had told [? Bena ?]
that lots of times a dead loved one will appear in the night
and have a last word with you, or maybe in Bobby's case,
try to explain things and beg for forgiveness.
They said, "You'll think you're dreaming but you won't be."
One of the teachers mothers had appeared in a white nightgown
at the foot of her bed and touched her foot.
And the other's son had waked her
up just to say he loved her.
He had shot himself in the face with his father's gun
but wanted her to know it was not her fault. Lord,
[? Bena ?] hoped this was true.
She was ready to believe it because she
needed a last word with Bobby.
To know for sure that his sin had not
backfired so bad that he had completely lost his salvation.
[? Bena ?] herself had witnessed his being saved.
He had walked the aisle for Christ
and the preacher shook his hand and patted him
on the back, and everything.
There was no doubt at the time that it was for real.
Some people said they could see a change in him.
Now, [? Bena ?] went to bed at night in a state of waiting,
praying that Bobby's spirit would come to her.
Just once.
She would say, "Bobby, is heaven real?"
She would say.
"Look what you've done."
Some nights she fell asleep imagining Bobby and Lorraine
both appearing together sitting on the edge of her bed, holding
hands, their wings fluttering like a couple of lovesick
angels.
It wasn't until Bena got the call from Mrs. Mayfield
less than a month later saying that Lorraine had died
without ever opening her eyes.
That a merciful God had taken her home at last.
That Bena began to comprehend death [INAUDIBLE]..
It was only then, when she knew that Lorraine
was buried more than 60 miles from where Bobby was buried,
that she finally stopped looking for Bobby to come up
the drive at the end of the day, blowing
his horn like a public service announcement,
or a warning to any children who had a talking to coming
that he was home.
Now, when [? Bena ?] looked back at her marriage
she couldn't remember a single time
when she hadn't been glad to see Bobby ever come home.
He would sling his briefcase on the dining room table
and walked across the room in his wilted white
short sleeved shirt.
Loosening his necktie along the way,
give her a little automatic kiss on the cheek
and say, "how's the queen doing?"
That was what he had called Bena, the queen.
Then he would head for the bedroom
and change into shorts and a t-shirt.
And if it was summer he might mow the grass
or if it was winter he might break the pine straw
into mounds and cushion the flower beds with it.
Or throw the ball with Bobby and Tommy until one of them
got frustrated and started to cry.
Or watch Sissy practice her baton twirling,
figure eight after endless figure eight.
Or talk Leslie into letting the turtle she caught go.
Convincing her that life in a cardboard box
was not worth living no matter how loved one was.
And if Leslie could not be convinced,
then it was Bobby who dug the turtle's grave
and put the dogwood blooms on it.
Bobby might fill up all the bird feeders with sunflower seeds
or pour kerosene on the fire ant beds, dotting the yard,
or spray the deck with water repellent to prevent
rot, or put sand on the oil spills
blighting the carport floor.
Bobby was always doing something,
with Elvis trailing him every step he took.
Bobby claimed he had gotten Elvis for the kids,
but Elvis had never belonged to anybody but Bobby.
It was Bobby who picked him out of the litter
and it was Bobby who named him.
[? Bena ?] had protested.
"Elvis," she said, "No way.
Naming a dog War Eagle, or Roll Tide, or something corny,
and cliche like that."
But Bobby had insisted saying, "Look, how black his fur is.
It's so black it's blue.
Like Elvis's shoe Polished hair."
Bobby had always loved the story about Elvis
putting black shoe polish on his hair for dramatic effect
and then getting rained on big time, and all that black
just washing down his face, and staining his clothes,
and everybody laughing at him, and thinking he was real weird.
It was stories like that made Bobby love Elvis Presley.
He loved him as much as any girl ever did, maybe more.
Sort of embarrassed [? Bena ?] too,
having a husband that worshiped Elvis like that.
She wished Bobby would get more current.
Sometimes on Sunday nights Bobby put Elvis's gospel music
on the stereo and played it full blast
and when the kids came and gawk at him in horror saying,
"Daddy, stop it."
He would smile and say, "The Catholics, now they
may have the Pope with that crown on his head
but us Baptists, we got Elvis.
We got the King."
[LAUGHTER]
He would actually get tears in his eyes
when Elvis sang Amazing Grace.
Like that was the one song in the world that
made Bobby believe in the Holy Spirit for real.
[? Bena ?] had asked the preacher
to play Elvis's Amazing Grace at Bobby's funeral too, which
he did.
After which, she could never stand to listen to it again.
Bobby was ordinarily not the kind of man
who let himself get bored.
Although on rare nights he might just sit in the den
and watch the news like he was in a trance
waiting for [? Bena ?] to get supper on the table.
Bobby had been a casserole man too.
Chicken casserole was his favorite.
The one with the spaghetti noodles, cheddar cheese,
and almonds.
Most men are meat and potatoes guys,
but Bobby was different that way.
He liked everything all mixed together from the beginning.
[LAUGHTER]
After supper sometimes, Bobby would
sit-in the yard with Elvis under his chair and smoke a cigar.
The cigar stinked, [INAUDIBLE] he liked to say.
But it did not keep the children away.
When the children were little they
practiced their head stands, back bends in the grass
where he sat saying, "Watch this daddy."
And Bobby watched them tirelessly, his cigar
smoke settling like a gray cloud around the kids.
Sometimes he'd send the children to the kitchen saying, "Go tell
the queen to come out here.
Tell her there's a handsome traveling salesman out here
who's craving her company."
Minutes later the children would run back and say,
"Daddy, mama's coming as soon as she finishes
cleaning up the kitchen."
But sometimes it took longer than [? Bena ?] expected
and Bobby would come inside before she
could make her way outside.
And she regretted that now.
[? Bena ?] had relived their early life
from a million different angles since Bobby died.
She remembered him the same way you remember a magic trick.
All the pleasure [INAUDIBLE].
It used to be when Bobby had walked through the door
at the end of the day, Elvis panting at his heels,
Bena's life had made perfect sense.
The meatloaf she was slapping into shape made sense.
The laundry she would rotate from washer to dryer
to dresser drawers all evening long made sense.
The children arguing, and telling on each other, and all
their lamentations, and denials made sense.
Talking made sense.
Her menstrual cramps made sense.
The toilet whose handle had to be jiggled just right
to stop its whining made sense.
Even her students, who try as she might,
she could not quite reach.
Who would leave her class still unable
to read a standard paragraph and make any sense of it.
Even they made a sweeter gentler standard.
Bobby had had a way of putting students into everything.
That had been his gift to [? Bena. ?] Marriage to Bobby
had kept [INAUDIBLE].
For the first few months after Bobby was killed in the car
accident, Happy Cat [? Mikhail, ?] their mailman,
had walked up the long drive and delivered the mail
to [? Bena ?] by hand so that she wouldn't have to make her
way down to the mailbox just to get a fistful of overdue bills,
and rhyming sympathy cards.
"Anything I can do to help out," he asked her nearly every day
in the beginning of [INAUDIBLE].
Later, he got bolder and said, "You'll
get over this [? Bena. ?] It might not seem like it now,
but time is [INAUDIBLE]."
"I haven't noticed time healing Sue Cpx," Bena said.
Sue Cox was Happy Cat's wife.
It was as hateful a thing as [? Bena ?] had ever
said to anybody who was trying to be nice to her.
Happy Cat had just stood and looked at her
like she had slept in space.
Afterwards, he stopped hand delivering her mail.
Just stuffed it in the mailbox the way
he was required by law to do.
Sometimes [? Bena ?] wouldn't take
in the mail for weeks at a time just
because she couldn't stand to.
She thought people should not be allowed to intrude on her life
simply by licking a $0.30 stamp.
Depending on the feel of the mail
she might just dump a whole handful of it
straight in the trash and never so much as glance
at the return addresses or [INAUDIBLE]..
All summer long she did this.
It was good when school started up again
and she was forced back to work.
For some reason, it seemed easier to make the transition
from wife to widow while she was at school where
it was part of her job to be mature and appropriately
[INAUDIBLE].
But at home she remained a wife for the longest time.
A wife with no husband, but with five children
to concentrate on, which she did.
She watched her children for signs of lingering sadness,
or loneliness, or anger, or any of the other sorts of things
that were natural byproducts of grief,
or normal rites of passage of adolescence.
It seemed to her that every one of them
took at least one turn to do something crazy
that might get them killed or mess up their lives forever.
[? Bena ?] hadn't been around [INAUDIBLE]..
No move of theirs went undetected or un-addressed.
Not until [? Bena ?] was sure they
had weathered the worst of it.
By the time she was sure the children were
going to survive and go on to thrive, a couple of years
had passed.
And they had started teasing her about needing
to go out on a date.
[? Bena ?] didn't think about Happy Cat
for a couple of years.
She sometimes saw him go by in his US mail van
but she didn't wave or honk her horn in recognition the way
she once would have when Bobby was alive.
Bobby and Happy Cat had been friends in high school.
Happy cat had been a big time athlete
and [? Bena ?] supposed it was only one who
was required to wear his postal uniform that he had finally
given up wearing his leather jacket.
He had played college ball until he hurt his knee.
As far as she could tell he had been
one of those boys who was cursed with the great expectations
of others, including Bobby.
Bobby who had never been an athlete
was an admirer of Happy Cat and had never
stopped being disappointed for the way his career had
failed to materialize.
Tough break, [INAUDIBLE].
He was one of the [INAUDIBLE].
The one notable thing Happy Cat had done was marrying Sue Cox.
She was a year younger than [? Bena ?]
and had been the girl that other girls assumed
all the boys wanted to marry.
She was rich for one thing.
That might have been enough by itself.
But she was beautiful too and there was nobody anywhere
who would ever say differently.
Even now in middle age [INAUDIBLE] Fletcher it was
[INAUDIBLE].
As a girl she had always been free
spirited in a way that had set her apart
from most of the other girls who had more or less set
their sights on going to heaven and hooking up
with Jesus in the afterlife.
Obviously, this had not been part
of [INAUDIBLE] It wasn't just the drinking and the partying
that she did better than everybody else.
But it was her bold, unladylike style
that made her so universally appealing to almost everyone.
Like getting arrested for suggestive dancing
on the roof of Happy Cat's car the night of the junior prom,
and spending the night in jail for disturbing the peace
and public drunkenness.
Or like cutting her hair short when everybody else's hair was
long, and she was drunk, and somebody dared her to do.
Even with her head half skin and her dark hair
and little butchered tucks, she was still beautiful.
Everybody knew that Mr. [INAUDIBLE],, the math teacher,
used to take Sue Cox out to lunch during his planning
hour on school days and simply write her a pass to get back
in class after [INAUDIBLE].
There were rumors that they really
didn't go to lunch at all but to this apartment which
had mirrors on the ceiling.
In her purse she carried a whole book of passes [INAUDIBLE]
just in case a need ever arose.
She was good about giving anyone who needed a one time pass.
Nobody's ever saying that she was stingy.
In those days, Sue Cox's drinking
had seemed rebellious, full of [INAUDIBLE]..
Something she would look back on some day and be happy about.
While most of the other girls will be full of regret
over how careful they had been.
How worried about their imaginary reputation and what
people [INAUDIBLE].
Even in high school, [? Bena ?] had understood
the sorts of regrets that would come later
about having played it too safe and then to exclude.
She knew those regrets lie in wait for her.
But even so, she had been unable to set herself
free the way Sue Cox had done.
She both admired and hated Sue Cox.
[INAUDIBLE] It was the kind of hatred
good girls feel for the wild girls
who get away with what good girls are
secretly afraid to try.
It is an early form of jealousy.
When jealousy is the poison of choice
so many girls [INAUDIBLE].
That Sue Cox would choose to marry Happy Cat
didn't surprise anybody.
That he married her was even less of a surprise.
The surprises had come later when Happy Cat ended up
without the pro-career everyone was counting on
and instead became a civil servant just
like any ordinary federal postal employee earning his government
check.
And Sue Cox had discovered for herself and revealed to all.
That she was not after all just a bold and beautiful party girl
who is simply sowing the wild oats to which she felt entitled
and with which she thrilled everyone around her.
But she was instead a relentless and chronic drunk referred to
by those who loved her as an alcoholic who suffered
an insufferable disease.
Booze had kept Sue Cox from holding a job,
or having any babies, or after three DUIs, driving a car.
There was debate about whether or not the accident was really
Sue Cox's fault but there was no debate about the fact
that it left the other driver so mangled
that her left leg had had to be amputated
in order to get her out of the smoldering car.
The only reason that Sue Cox didn't go to jail
was because the woman with the amputated leg
had had a higher blood alcohol level than Sue Cox,
and she had been the one who sped through a stop sign
and smashed headfirst into the rear end of Sue Cox's car.
Afterwards there was not much glamour left
in Sue Cox's drunken escapades.
The thrill was gone.
Besides, drinking was the old fashioned way to lose your mind
and forget what you needed to forget.
Now, they had slick new designer drugs to do that for you.
Drugs with catchy little names that you
could buy from behind the Texaco station
from boys in sunglasses who lived in the housing project,
and whose baggy pants were falling off their behinds.
Or you could buy from that lawyer up at the courthouse.
People said there were [AUDIO OUT] out
of the hospital.
Part of Sue Cox's drunk driving sentence was public service.
She had to speak to the kids at the high school
about the evils of alcohol.
She had titled her talk It's Not Cool to be a Fool.
They put an article in the newspaper
with a picture of Sue Cox talking to students.
It looked like she was a preacher behind the pulpit
but everybody knew better.
People began to find Sue Cox borderline
pitiful instead of interesting.
Now her life was a series of trips
to rehab where she would dry out and explore
the depths of her heart and history
in search of some reason why or some evidence
of an indestructible soul from which she could draw strength
in the future.
After which, she would be sent home to slowly forget all
that she had on Earth.
In a matter of months as a matter of course,
she would begin to self-medicate again:
just one beer at a ballgame.
Just one sip of champagne at a wedding.
Just one shot of vodka to get her going in the morning.
It was generally agreed that life
had been cruel to Happy Cat and Sue Cox, first,
by blessing them so singularly, making them the envy of all.
And then by allowing those same blessings to sour on them
and become curses.
Now, they were reduced to living lessons for the young people
in the County.
Their lives provided perfect examples
of why it is better to study than to be popular.
As adults, they cause most of their average friends
to feel very lucky in comparison.
But nobody ever really thought badly
of either Happy Cat or Sue Cox.
It was like they were living examples
that life might actually be fair after all.
So when the doorbell rang late one afternoon,
too late for mail delivery.
[? Bena ?] was not expecting to see Happy Cat McHale standing
there smiling.
"Hey."
[APPLAUSE]
Thanks.