The Buy Side (2 page)

IT’S SNOWING
. Our blue and gray Cape house, which sits on the edge of a wildlife preserve, is covered with two feet of snow. Through the foggy kitchen window, I can see my forty-four-year-old father shoveling the driveway in the dimming light. He’s in better shape than most men half his age. He looks like a young William Shatner dressed for an L.L. Bean catalog photo shoot. As the heavy flakes fall on him, he methodically digs, scoops, and tosses the snow from his shovel. Never missing a beat, no breaks, no pauses, just dig, scoop, toss. Dig, scoop, toss. His icy breath is a carbon copy of the exhaust spitting from the Green Machine, our ’77 Ford LTD station wagon. The car warms up while he shovels around it. Slowly but surely, my father is carving out a path. Dig, scoop, toss.

I sit at the long wooden kitchen table, eating my cereal. Dig, scoop, eat. Dig, scoop, eat. The wood plank floor and white stucco walls absorb the heat from the woodstove. It’s the warmest part of the house.
I’m wearing my Boston College sweats, a Christmas present from my sister Kristin, a freshman there. She’s in the living room watching television with Debbie, my oldest sister, who is attending the University of Maine. They’re both home from school on winter break. Kelly, the youngest of the Duff girls, is doing her homework across from me. I hold my bowl with both hands and bring it up to my lips. I look at Kelly over the rim. She’s focused on the textbook open in front of her. All of my sisters have my father’s determination and the trademark Duff nose, so small and perfectly shaped that it looks like it belongs in some plastic surgeon’s catalog. Kelly is a junior in high school and the homecoming queen. She’s also a track and field state eight-hundred-meter champion. All of the Duff children have inherited my dad’s athletic ability. I slurp the sweet milk and Cheerios. Kelly looks up from her textbook with mild contempt, which instantly dissolves. She feels bad for me. She knows I don’t want to go with my dad. I smile back at her.

My mother sits at the far end of the kitchen working on her cross stitch, for which she has won magazine contests, and sipping a glass of wine. Her hair is shoulder-length and frosted, and she wears an apron over her golf shirt. “You’d better finish before your father sees you eating cereal for dinner,” she says. I tilt up the bowl and pour the rest of the milk and what’s left of the cereal into my mouth.

“I really don’t want to go,” I say, wiping my lips with the back of my hand. She already knows I don’t. Although there have been times when she successfully advocated for me, on this night my father’s mind is made up. When he gets to this point, it’s like a Supreme Court decision. And not even two feet of snow can stop my dad. Dig, scoop, toss.

My father has decided that I have the potential to be a great high school wrestler. And tonight, despite the snowstorm, despite all my protests, despite the alliances of my sisters and mother, and even though
I’m only in eighth grade, he’s taking me to the high school gym to attend a wrestling practice and, perhaps, show the coach what I can do.

He himself was something of a wrestling superstar. All these years later, people in his hometown, Mt. Lebanon, Pennsylvania, still talk about his exploits on the mat. He was offered no fewer than three college scholarships. None of those schools, however, offered a mechanical engineering degree, on which he had his heart set. So his wrestling dreams were pinned by his career aspirations.

But it wasn’t as if he was trying to recapture high school glory through me—at least, I don’t think he was. Partly, he saw wrestling as a way to make a man out of me. With three older sisters and a doting mom, I needed the burn of the mat and the smell of the locker room, he thought, to toughen me up a bit. But most of all, he didn’t want to repeat the relationship that his father had with him. Though my father was a star wrestler and a record-holding pole-vaulter in high school, my grandfather never once attended any of his events. My father saw wrestling as something we could share, just us Duff guys. There’s only one little problem with my father’s plan: I don’t want to be a wrestler.

I used to want to be a chef. A friend’s mother once snuck us into the White Barn Inn, the fanciest restaurant in Kennebunk. When the chef came out of the kitchen, all of the customers looked at him. I liked the attention and deference he garnered. If not a chef, maybe I’ll become a conman. I always loved those characters in the movies. In sixth grade I tried to blackmail a girl named Kelli. I threatened that if she didn’t leave a dollar in the book
Backboard Magic
on page 13 in the library, I would tell everyone at recess who her boyfriend was. She told the teacher and I got in trouble. But now I think I’d like to attend either UNLV or Cornell for hotel management. I want to run the show. I want to help other people have a great vacation. Plus, it doesn’t seem that difficult. Maybe I just don’t want to be like my father.

For him, there is no shortcut, no easy money. Everything he does is analyzed and planned down to the last detail. He leaves nothing to chance. He knows which gas station has the cheapest fuel in town, he follows the most accurate weatherman on television, and he gets up at two in the morning when daylight saving time occurs to reset every clock in the house. Though we have the same name and unusual bluish-green eyes that sometimes look gray—and, of course, the signature Duff nose—we’re nothing alike. He tries to instill in me a work ethic, discipline, and a rigid schedule, and I resist at every turn. He wants me to be a man. He wants me to be more like him. It’s for that exact reason that I’m sitting at the kitchen table with a huge pit in my stomach.

I hear the door from the garage open and close. I know it’s him. “Car’s out,” he announces to the house. “Let’s go, Turney.” I bow my head and glance at my mom. I want her to see the sadness in my eyes. She forces a sympathetic smile and I know I have to go.

We’re the only car on the road. The flakes hit the windshield like snowballs as we sit in silence. This is brilliant. We’re risking our lives so we can attend a high school wrestling practice. Someone please kill me. Maybe we’ll slide off the road into a ditch and get stuck. I should only be so lucky. Then I see headlights slowly approaching. It’s a black Corvette. It can only be one person. The New York license plate confirms it. As we pass each other at about ten miles per hour, I spot his thick bushy mustache. “That’s Uncle Tucker,” I say.

“He left eight hours ago,” Dad says as we drive right by the Corvette. I guess we aren’t turning around. I love when Uncle Tucker visits. He always teaches me a new card trick. He’s thirty-two years old and makes a ton of money; he goes on exciting trips and vacations. He’s in town to take my two oldest sisters skiing tomorrow. I watch until his brake lights disappear in the blizzard. We approach our first
stop sign and have to start slowing down about a hundred yards in advance so we can be sure to stop. My father takes his eyes off the road to look at me. “You know, when you were an infant you learned how to bridge before you could crawl,” he says.

“I know,” I say. It’s only the nine hundred and fifty-sixth time I’ve heard the story. He breaks into how important it is to bridge when you’re wrestling. He explains to me it’s the only way to avoid being pinned when you’re on your back. He lifts his neck back to show me how it’s done. I know how it’s done. I did it in my crib.

“You raise your shoulders and support your body with your neck,” he says anyway. I turn my head to look at the road. “The coach invited us. We’re just going to observe,” my father says, sensing my displeasure.

The gymnasium floor is covered with a giant blue wrestling mat. I follow my dad over to the one set of bleachers that are pulled out as we try to shake the snow off our hair. I look across the floor. Guys are everywhere, running, stretching—a few are already wrestling. If I hadn’t figured out that I haven’t reached puberty yet, I realize it now. These guys are huge; some even have facial hair. I feel worse than I did before. The pit in my stomach grows. I don’t want to wrestle. My father smiles at the coach when he sees us.

The coach waves to us and makes his way over. He’s in his early forties, short but solidly built. He wears tan pants, a blue shirt with
KENNEBUNK WRESTLING
on the breast, and a whistle around his neck. He sticks out a beefy hand to shake mine and introduces himself as “Coach.” I muster a smile and tell him it’s nice to meet him.

“So you like wrestling?”

Every fiber in my body wants to say no, but I know my dad will kill me if I do. I just nod and say, “I like it okay.” Luckily, the coach turns his attention to my dad. They start swapping wrestling jargon. I hear words like “rip back” and “undercup” and I want to puke. But
there’s a joy in my father’s face that I don’t normally see. He’s a balloon and every bit of wrestling terminology blows him up a little bit more.

The next thing you know, I’m wearing headgear and wrestling shoes. I drew the line at putting on the singlet. My BC sweats will suffice. Someone hands me a mouthpiece. I’m standing off to the side of the mat. Across from me is a freshman named Brian. He’s a year older than I am but I knew him from junior high. I’m surprised he’s on the wrestling team. I never saw him play any sports. He was more the science club type—he was the only one who knew how to use the computer in the school and was always playing Atari or some other video game. I can see he’s scared, and not from the prospect of having to wrestle my menacing five-foot-four, 110 pounds of massive destruction, but from the possibility of losing to a kid in junior high. His teammates start to ride him. They’re already cheering me on before we start. He has everything to lose. His peers will never let him live it down if I beat him. Then Coach blows the whistle.

Though I might have my dad’s wrestling DNA, I have none of his technique. The only thing I know how to do is bridge, which is just fine. I figure if I don’t get pinned, everyone will be happy and we can just get out of here. Brian comes toward me and we lock arms and try to maneuver each other to the ground. I can tell right away that he’s slower than I am. His attention is on proper form and making sure he’s in the right position. While he does that, I slide behind him and grab him by his waist and throw him to the ground. Before Brian realizes it, I have him on his back and Coach is slapping the mat. The small crowd of wrestlers who are watching us let out a unified “Whoa.” It’s over. Thank god—I can go home. But Coach has something else in mind. He wants me to wrestle a sophomore. Now the crowd of onlookers swells to a dozen or more. I pin the sophomore in less time than it took me to pin Brian.

I should have tried to lose. The third time I’m told to wrestle, it’s against a senior named Mark who’s expected to follow in the footsteps of his older brother, a state champ. The crowd has now switched sides. It was okay for an eighth grader to beat a couple of guys who aren’t on the varsity team this year, but it’s not okay for me to beat their captain. He puts his arm on my shoulder and I knock it off. He shoots for my leg, but I pull it away just in time. We lock head-to-head, ear-to-ear, and then both tumble to the ground. I think I might have leverage on him, but we go back and forth for a minute. Now I
know
I have leverage. I can feel his arms getting weak and I’m going to go for it. I grab the arm that’s planted on the ground and attempt to collapse it. I hear him giggle. All of a sudden I feel like I’m rolling down a mountain in one of those cartoons. My body parts are being tangled in a way I haven’t experienced. I’m still in that full pretzel position when I hear the coach slam his hand on the mat to announce my defeat. It takes me a second to untangle my body.

I never did wrestle again. And, true to his word, my father only brought it up one more time, when I was a freshman in high school. I just shook my head no and he knew. Instead, I played football, which my father told me I was too small to play—a comment that only made me try harder. I wanted to be a star on the biggest stage. I wanted to see my name in the headlines in the local paper, which I would eventually get to do. I was voted MVP and all-conference my senior year. My father never missed one of my games. He even told me I had far exceeded his expectations. I only took one thing from his comment: his expectations for me were way too low.

When our station wagon pulls into our snow-covered driveway, right next to my uncle’s Corvette, I jump out and run to go see Tucker. My father grabs the shovel to finish the rest of the driveway. As I reach the house I can already hear the dig, scoop, toss. Dig, scoop, toss.

TEN YEARS
on, same driveway, same amount of snow. The Green Machine has been replaced by a red ’87 Ford Explorer. My father buys a car every decade or 200,000 miles. He also repainted the house, but with the same colors. The last of the U-Haul is packed. I look at the giant lobster on the side of it and the script
America’s Moving Adventure—MAINE
. I glance at my best friend, Jayme, who’s talking to my parents. We’re both five-foot-nine, dark hair, unshaven. Our skin is pasty white from the winter months, and we both wear jeans, baseball hats, and J.Crew jackets. We’ll be perfect roommates. He’s already moved most of his stuff, but he came up to make the drive with me.