#personal foul

No photos for you today, I do apologise - that’s because today was mainly a travel day; after an uncomfortably early start we caught a coach back to the airport and then a short flight to Nagoya, with Toyota being the next venue we will be working at. I sat next to the producer on the flight, who’s an Aussie chap named Greg; he’d irked me a little the other day because apparently I’d sat in his seat on the coach and he pulled rank, but we chatted for virtually the whole flight and he expunged his previous offence. I told him I was the timekeeper, which led to him introducing me to the two guys in front us as ‘the donger’ - due to the loud gong that sounds at the end of every half of rugby! I have to say, I’ve had better nicknames.

We took another coach (then short taxi) at the other end to the hotel; I’ve picked up the ‘habit’ of sleeping on most of our coach journeys, and though I would have preferred to stay awake and take in the scenery, I’ve struggled for sleep in recent nights and I was too tired to fight it. This habit has not gone unnoticed by my colleagues, and Charl has started calling me ‘Sleeping Beauty’ - again, better nicknames...

We made it to our hotel, which is easily the best one we’ve had (the standard has not been high). After a quick sojourn to 7-Eleven, I had a few hours to myself and we then all met up for dinner along with Brad - an Aussie colleague who is based here for the tournament. We found a nearby restaurant and all tucked in to various local dishes. I had fried rice with what I believe to be bits of pork and possibly crab mixed in, and also shared some pork dumplings with Charl. Everyone was suitably satisfied with their choices, and we promptly headed back to the hotel; I watched the last half hour of England v USA, which was plenty of time to see a load more tries and a US red card.

The smell of fresh popcorn, the sound of the crowd double clapping to the organ playing the Mexican Hat Dance surrounded me as Bill and I rushed through the hallways of Boston Garden. Arm in arm we followed our companions for the evening, Harry and Marge. Harry stopped short, then pushed four Celtics tickets under the nose of an usher in a red blazer who pointed with each arm in two opposite directions. “Two in the first balcony, overlooking center court.  The other two, Stadium. Back row.”

            “Damn!” Bill hissed in my ear. Not only had we missed the start of the game, but now we’d have to split up.

            “Joan and I will take the balcony,” Marge announced as she put  her gloved palm out to Harry for him to surrender the tickets.

            “Maybe we can switch seats at half-time,” Harry said through his pipe as he handed over the prized seats. “Let's all meet by the souvenir stand.”

            Marge ignored his suggestion as she hooked my free elbow with her arm and pulled me away from Bill whose mouth tightened. “At half-time.” he yelled to me as the space between us widened.

            That afternoon, when Bill called me at my office to announce Marge and Harry's invitation, I asked, “Even after the Cape? Do you really like them enough to spend an evening with them?”

            “I like the Celtics enough,” he’d answered.

            In exchange for the free tickets we thought taking them to dinner was only decent. But the cozy Italian restaurant they suggested, “just up the road,” turned out to be overcrowded, expensive and on an obscure dead end street in a town forty minutes outside of Boston.

            Marge released my arm when we got to the top of stairway. I followed her through a narrow walkway to section 61. She tackled the steep descent to our seats fearlessly, but I stopped, looked down onto the court, imagined myself slipping on the top step and catapulting over the edge onto the fans below. Tortellini rumbled inside stomach.  I positioned my body sideways and delicately made my way, keeping my eye focused on Marge’s strawberry blonde curls. The last time Bill and I saw her and Harry, six months ago, her hair hung shoulder length, brown and sleek. Bill and I, captive for a weekend in their Cape Cod vacation house, had become twelve-year-olds, back at summer camp, over-programmed by two serious counselors. They planned every moment including a 7 a.m. coffee reveille and morning run. Until that disaster, Bill and I had only seen Marge and Harry off and on over the last couple of years. We met at Symphony, when the couple who usually sat next to us had given Marge and Harry their tickets for an evening. Having mutual friends, kids around the same age, two professional working wives and both husbands in the medical profession had provided the mistaken impression that we had enough in common to sustain a pleasant weekend.

              I made my way to our seats, probably the best in the house since the video cameramen were following the game from a balcony hanging just below ours. I could see the whole court and all the elongated players. This was my very first Celtics game. In my purse, I carried Xerox copies I made that afternoon of an article on basketball from the 1978 World Book Encyclopedia we bought when the girls were in grammar school. At least now I knew the game had four quarters of twelve minutes each. I pulled out the pages from my bag, started to read the rules about the referees. The article had them dressed in black and white jerseys; but at this game they wore gray T shirts with whistles around their necks.            

            “Twenty dollars each to switch seats with our husbands,” Marge said to two women sitting next to me. She stretched her arm across my lap and stuck two twenties in their faces. Their expressions twisted into lines of confusion. They spoke to each other in Greek, then looked back at me as though I could translate.

            “So our husbands can sit with us,” Marge shouted at them above the noise of the crowd, the squeaking sneakers, a buzzer sounding. They leaned past me and shook their heads “No,” turned away and watched the game.

            Marge is a television producer. She buys and sells airtime and talent; is used to getting what she wants. She shoved the money into her coat pocket. A whistle blew.

            One of the referees held out his hands straight in front of him, shoulder height with his palms facing up. “Pushing,” I decoded from homemade basketball map.

            Marge settled back into her seat, smoothed out the wrinkles in her skirt, folded her coat on her lap. She had already dropped the $4 program onto the floor.

            “How’s Jody?” I asked to make daughter conversation.

            “I'm tired of giving and giving,” Marge said. “It’s about time she reciprocates, don't you think?”

            Thrilled if my girls keep up their rooms or do their laundry when they’re home from college, I asked, “What's the problem?”

            I’ve learned from Bill, the therapist in the family, to answer questions with questions before I put my foot in my mouth. It helps when I'm meeting with clients for my interior design business.

            “The least she could do is give me a little Chanukah present. But I don't want to seem desperate about it, just drop a hint—something like now it's time for her to think of other people.”

            “I know what you mean,” I said.

            “You stink!” someone behind me shouted at the court. The buzzer sounded again. The scoreboard showed Celtics behind. I looked for another referee to catch his signal but everyone went off the court.

            “What’s happening?” I asked the man behind me.

            “End of the first quarter.”

            I turned back to Marge and made the mistake of asking her how her work was going. She went into elaborate detail about her network’s public awareness campaign in conjunction with a depression study; how seven out of ten people are seriously depressed at least once in their lives. I had trouble concentrating on her the sound of her voice which became part of the surrounding noise. Suddenly the word “rhubarb” popped into my head. As an off-stage actor doing a crowd scene in community theater, I was taught to say “rhubarb” over and over again. Now in the midst of a thousand rhubarbs, I smelled hot-dogs. Someone walked down to our row selling blue and pink cotton candies off a pole that looked like a coat rack. The organ played the Mexican Hat Dance again. I remember my last visit to Boston Garden, ten years earlier with Bill and the girls for the Ice Capades. They were still an age when I had some control over what they thought was fun.

             One of the Greek women opened a Tupperware container of baklava. My teeth began to sweat and taste salty—something that happens when I crave sugar. I felt trapped with Marge. I thought about all the times Bill had given in to the girls, listened to them for hours excusing their lack of involvement in the day-to-day tasks of running a house. Just last week Denise had friends over and left the dishes in the sink and ate the lobster salad I was planning for a dinner party. Maybe Marge was right about something.

            Without thinking, I said, “Don't give Jody a gift this year. Let her ask you about it when she doesn’t get anything.”

            Marge looked at me with her face in a question mark. She was somewhere else. Had forgotten the conversation of a moment ago as though it were a passing scene from a train.

             I didn't want to be there. I wanted to walk to the Middle Eastern restaurant around the corner and eat three pieces of Baklava. Undo all the good I did myself sweating in a step aerobics class at the Harvard Club this morning.

            The buzzer sounded again. I tried to follow the action, look for the score——so many clocks, scoreboards with flashing numbers, I couldn’t tell one from the other. Three minutes left to the second quarter. Rotating advertisements surrounding the edges of the court where all the photographers sat made me dizzy again. IBM. Fleet Bank. Dunkin Donuts.

            “Maybe Bill can give me some pointers,” Marge said never responding to my comment about Jody. As though what was happening on the court and what I had just said to her was “rhubarb” in her ears.

            I decided to find something sweet to eat. “Watch my coat will you, Marge?” then whispered, “I need to find the bathroom.”

            “Be sure not to sit on the seat,” she said, loud enough to cause heads to turn. “You never know around here.”

            I slithered back up the steep cement stairs, once more reduced by her loud voice to the embarrassed camper, now wanting to be a snake, whose imperfect hospital corners have been made an example of to the whole bunk. Who needs this abuse? I asked myself as I fumed inside at her and Harry for not telling us the “extra tickets” were in another part of the arena, at myself for suggesting we take them to dinner, at Rob for not insisting we sit together. I pictured a voodoo doll of Marge and stuck pins in it. Shaved its hair off. Sneaked into her house, pulled off her stick-on nails in her sleep. I imagined us opposing players on the basketball court so I could trip her. So I could watch a referee make the sign of “Personal Foul” and take my punishment with pleasure.           

            I entered the surrounding corridors under flickering florescent bulbs, saw cigarettes flattened on the linoleum floor. The half time buzzer sounded and people poured out of all of the doors racing to snack bars and rest rooms, lighting up cigarettes. I noticed the mix of balding college professors in tweedy jackets and ties together with suburban couch potatoes in sweatshirts and baseball hats.

            I waited in line at the snack bar for a hot dog even though I wasn’t hungry. Everyone moved quickly past me. While squirting on mustard and relish, I saw more beer bellies than I'd ever seen in one place. As I made my way through the crowd towards the souvenir counter, I wondered whether Marge had a point about our kids and felt suddenly jealous of her demanding nature. Bill walked up beside me. He sipped a beer and his belly looked bigger than it did this morning.

            “Cheap shit!” he said. “I’m gonna kill him! The guy asked me for $70 bucks for the lousy tickets the minute we sat down.”

            “I don't believe it! What suckers we are,” I said.

            “And we paid for dinner at that god awful place——a fancy front for a Papa Gino's. Now we're out over a hundred and fifty bucks, the Celtics are losing, and I can hardly see a thing from the worst seats in the house. A bunch of thirteen-year -olds from the Burlington Recreation Center in our row. Who knows where Harry got those tickets in the first place.”

            “If the spoiled brat, Marge would just shut up for a minute I might figure out something about the game.” I whined. “As it is, I can’t follow a hell of a lot. This is so depressing, Bill. Do we have to stay to the end?”

            “We drove them in our car, remember?”

            “Never again,” I said as I saw Harry light up his pipe and walk towards us. By now, I knew Marge would never appear to take her turn in the rafters and I refused to smile at him as I walked away.

            “Meet us at the parking lot,” Bill yelled to me as he walked towards Harry. “Once the crowd lets out, we'll never be able to find each other inside here again.”

            I wove in and out of the people, bought myself an ice cream, looked at my watch and realized the last twelve-minute quarter took over thirty minutes. Another hour to go. As I descended to our row, I noticed Marge lean over the balcony and give one of her cards to the video operators. 

            Marge had thrown her coat across both of our seats. As I took my place and moved her coat back to her seat, I slipped my hand in her pocket and took out both twenty dollar bills and shoved them into my purse.

              “Work with you at the network?” I asked when she finally sat down.

            “No, but I want him for my depression program.” she said, “get him behind a two way mirror.” She picked up her coat, folded it over her lap, took out a small spiral pad of paper and a pen from her purse and asked, “Can I try out some questions on you for my study?”

            “Don't think I can concentrate with all this activity going on.” I had given up trying to understand the referee signals. The best part was watching the ball sail through the net, that quiet moment in the middle of all the rhubarb when time stops. Perfection. Then the score changes.

            “Just answer yes or no without thinking,” Marge said. “Do you ever experience a change of appetite?”

            “Yes. I mean, no. Marge, do we have to do this now?”

            I considered returning the money: imagined putting it in a Chanuka card and signing it “Love, Jody.”

            “Have you ever suffered from diminished interest or pleasure in activities?” she asked.

            “What kind of activities?” I answered with a question. I couldn't decide which I wanted to do more: keep the money for the joy of retaliation or put it back because I couldn’t stand the idea of having stolen something.

            “That’s not part of the question. Just activities,” she said. She explained this is part of a hospital study. “It's their questions,” she said, then went on to ask me about poor sleep, restlessness, or feeling slowed down, feeling tired, experiencing poor concentration, feeling down on myself. I decide to answer “yes” to everything including yes to myself about keeping the money.

            The crowd went crazy when the Celtics finally tied the score.

            “Keep it up!” someone shouted from a few rows behind me. Voices got louder. I no longer had the patience for Marge and her questions. I no longer had the patience for evenings like this. No longer had the patience for Bill’s passive smoldering but polite anger. I wondered if we would ever find some activity we both like that didn't feel like a chore to either of us.

             The crowd groaned collectively when the Celtics lost, But with my hand proudly clutching my purse, I floated victoriously through the sea of green jackets decorated with Celtic leprechauns on the bodies of disappointed Bostonians.

            As we reached the street, Marge said, “Joan, you have all the symptoms of a depressed person.”

            “Your questions are depressing, Marge,” I said, as I dropped my encyclopedia article into the nearest trash barrel.

                        Bill fumed silently behind the wheel. Harry's pipe hissed while he sat on the opposite end of the back seat away from Marge and stared out the window. As we pulled out of the parking lot, the pocket of fresh winter air in our car rapidly filled with Marge's perfume and Harry's tobacco. Emboldened by my impulsive theft, I turned to Harry in the back seat and said  “Oh Harry, we forgot to get forty dollars for your half of the dinner. Don't worry about the tab for parking the car, Bill and I'll take care of that.”

            Bill shot me a look of disbelief mixed with embarrassment. He never would have asked.

            “You and Bill drank most of the wine,” Marge said, “So our part is only thirty-five dollars.”

            “Let's not split hairs, Marge.” Harry said, “Give them forty bucks, will you. I'm low on cash.”

            “Stop the car, Bill!” Marge shouted. “I lost money from my coat pocket.”

            Rob pulled over to the break down lane. He turned off the motor and turned on the indoor car light while we all searched through the car for the two missing twenty-dollar bills.

            “You must have lost it in the crowd,” I said. “You never know around there.”

            “Forget it.” said Harry. “Just chalk it up to another one of your lost keys, wallets, notebooks. That's so like you, Marge.”

            Bill started the engine.

            “You would say that wouldn't you, Harry, just rub it in.” Marge said when we were back on the road.

            “Do you ever feel down on yourself, Marge?” I asked.

            “Why do you ask?” she said.

            “That’s one of the questions you asked me earlier,” I said.

            “Marge's doing research for a public awareness campaign about depression,” I told Bill. “They’ve developed a list of questions and that’s one of them.”

            “Depression can't be diagnosed by answering a few questions.” Bill spoke with a condescending, but caring tone. I knew he was trying to make up for my brazen attempt to get even.

            “But how else will people know they need help? This helps them diagnose themselves.” Marge said.

            “My point, precisely, Marge,” Bill said. “Everyone has symptoms of depression at one time or another. It’s part of being human. Most of the time it's not clinical. You could be doing more harm than good. Have a lot of normal people walking around on Prozac, Thorazine, Lithium.”

            “So,” I persisted, “do you ever feel down on yourself, Marge?”

            “I’ve been on Valium for years, ever since Harry gave up his practice and went on the road lecturing. Actually, ever since Jody went away to private school.”

            I suddenly felt bad about stealing the money.

            “Can we please change the subject,” Harry said as he handed me four tens. “I need a consult on your decorating my new office. When can you look at it?”

            “Aren't you sweet, Harry, but I make a point of not doing business with friends,” I told him, knowing the word “friends” would never be applied to them again. “There’s no accounting for personal taste.”

            “Don't you like our taste?” Marge whined.

            “This is between Nancy and me, Marge, butt out,” Harry said.

            By now we were in front of their house. I had my purse open. I was putting my hand inside and waited for the hand to extract Marge’s money but it wouldn’t. Instead, I added in Harry’s forty dollars.

            “I think Joan’s had it for the night, folks.” Bill said. He sent a thin smile, lips pursed, to them in the back seat, then patted me on the head.

            “Speak for yourself, please,” I said, feeling a spot of rage at Bill sizzling out of the top of my head where he had just touched me.

             “Maybe this is just a losing night for Boston,” Bill said to the air.

            “That depends on who you're rooting for.” I said, not knowing anymore who or what I was rooting for or what I even meant by those words. Once more in the dark I opened my purse and crumpled one of the twenty dollar bills in my fist.

            In a flash Harry was out and at his front door before Marge started to move herself across the seat. As she did so I let go of the money, waited a second, then said, “Look, Marge! On the floor.”

            She turned around and quickly scooped it into her hand.

            A second later, all that remained of the two of them was the pungent cherry aroma of Harry’s tobacco, a cloud of her perfume and the secret twenty dollar bill—a personal foul with a winning score.