Yesterday once more

 Yesterday once more  

Molly wasn’t sure he knew how to play golf, “though,” he said, “I think I knew how once.”

     “It’s like reading,” I said. “It’ll come back to you. Drink your soda.”

The soda seemed to be working. Molly discovered he did know how to play golf; and he played calmly and well, though he refused to use the metal woods: the driver looked like a balloon, he said; how could you hit a golf ball with a club like that – it might explode. I tried to show him, but he became sufficiently agitated, I didn’t use my metal woods either. This gave him a tremendous advantage, as he could hit his 3-iron well over 200 yards, and I couldn’t hit mine in the air.

     But he had no interest in competition, only in moving his own ball from place to place. He paid no attention to what I was doing, so after the third hole, I quit doing and just drove him. He finished the nine a couple over par.

When we came back to the club house, we found his other sister, there to pick him up. She had the fierce look of an old maid school teacher from a hundred years ago, and when she said, “Get in the car,” he did. Their meeting had to me a sense of a ritual: the priest raised the wafer, Hoc est enim corpus, and I tried to look solemn, sitting on an imminent fart. As they drove away, I let it out.

     The pro, Ed, called me over. He was heading home early, he said; I should follow him. I could spend the night and head back in the morning. I wasn’t sure back was where I would be heading, but I didn’t say that.

Green beans, meat loaf & mashed
potatoes through a glass darkly.

Ed lived in a modest ranch house with a wife and a dog. One’s name was Elise the other’s Lisa. I was fuzzing out by this time and couldn’t get straight which was which, so I called them both Lise.

     One of the Lises fixed supper, more meat loaf with mashed potatoes and beans boiled a foot past within an inch of their life.

Sometime after supper Molly’s other brother-in-law came by. He’d made arrangements for me to drop the Blazer back at the BP in Sh—ston. Bedlam was willing, he said, to take me back and lose any paperwork that said I’d been missing – he’d arranged that, too. He had a nose like a knife; if you touched it, I thought, you could cut yourself. He was clearly someone that liked to arrange things.

     “The world needs people like that,” Roz would say. I’m not so sure. It’s not – in my experience - that anything anyone arranges stays that way.

As soon as he left, I took some of my sinus medicine and went to bed. The walls of my room were pink; the air smelled waxy; I began to feel I was in someone’s ear.

to be continued

12.28.16