Extra Innings by Doris Grumbach Read Free Book Online Page A

Joseph Girzone, and Andrew Greeley, and William Buckley mysteries, and two old Daily Missals.
    In cardboard boxes, under piles of toys and games, there were many paperbacks of good children’s books by Robert McCloskey (a master of the genre who lived nearby on Deer Isle), Margaret Wise Brown, Ruth Krauss, Barbara Cooney, Maurice Sendak, Katherine Paterson, and others. They all showed the usual signs of hard wear: nicks, crayon scratches, hot-chocolate spots, and what I took to be saltwater marks. There was an old Hoyle, the great authority on games, Collier’s encyclopedia for children, and a few choice books on sailing, birds, gardening, and the seashore.
    At once the shape of this family’s life appeared to me. I thought I knew them. I asked the young-looking, bearded father why they were leaving.
    Regret flooded his voice. ‘I’ve been transferred. To San Antonio, can you believe it?’ He looked over at the autumn remains of his vegetable garden and out to the scarlet hillock where his blueberries were, and at the two great balsam firs that framed the entrance to his driveway.
    â€˜We all hate to leave,’ he said. He was wearing a red baseball cap and a plaid L.L. Bean flannel shirt. He stared at the FOR SALE sign mounted on the road at the edge of his property. A little girl carrying a large, healthy-looking fern asked him:
    â€˜Dad, if I sell this, can I keep the money?’
    â€˜Sure.’
    â€˜How much is it?’ I asked her.
    â€˜Um. How much is it, Dad?’
    â€˜What do you think?’ he asked her.
    â€˜Ten cents?’
    â€˜Oh, more than that,’ I said. I, who often bargain for what I buy at yard sales, was seduced by the father’s anguish at leaving the state and the little girl’s charm. I gave her a dollar. Her blue eyes widened with surprise and delight.
    Sybil paid the father for the boxes of books she selected and carried them to the van. I carried the fern. As we drove away I caught sight of a woman’s solemn face at a window. We now had some remnants of the past life of a family in the back of our car, residue of the contentment that appears to have characterized the Maine life of this family.
    More householders’ signs of approaching winter: We stretch the three long hoses to dry out before coiling them and retiring them to the cellar to rest for the winter beside the inner tube, screens, and my granddaughter’s baby pool. We empty the flower boxes on the deck and cover the bushes and perennials with pine branches, all to the end of closing out our fine, free outdoor life and retiring, of necessity, to the closed-in, restrictive indoors.
    As a sign that I accept the inevitability of the move, I sit in the living room watching the light die over the Cove through the window, and listen to a 1959 Hamburg concert of Maria Callas singing ‘Una voce poca fa’ from The Barber of Seville . Her recorded voice is expressive, dramatic, but somewhat harsh and sharp, ‘Italianate,’ I always think. Like the air out there on the deck and blowing through Sybil’s rock garden, it has an absence of summer softness, a crusty edginess.
    In a few weeks, DEAN (Down East AIDS Network) will sponsor a walk in Ellsworth to raise money for its activities. Sybil volunteers to get donations of food for the workers and the walkers, and I offer to contact ministers and priests in the area to ask for their support.
    We are both persons who hate to ask for anything, but this Saturday I accompany her on her rounds, sitting in the car in cowardly fashion while she goes into pizza places, supermarkets, and small grocery stores, her heart in her mouth, she says. But still she goes, and mirabile , she is not turned down by anyone, except by the owner of Merrill & Hinckley, the prosperous grocery in Blue Hill, who can only offer to sell her, at cost, what she might need. She is pleased that, with the uniform generosity of other merchants and