Marley

I played cricket once. A very long time ago. When John hadn't been born and we still lived in Salisbury, in the duplex. The one time I held a cricket bat in my hands, I was not twenty, and my face was still round. I was still a boy. Although the years might be nearing forty since I felt that solid wood in the padding of my fingers, I remember if it just now I were sitting with the lemon-aid in my fingers and counting scores.

I remember that day it had been raining, non stop, drowning the peonies and keeping Marley from hanging her washing, pacing the floors and knotting her fingers, and in place baking carrot muffins and smoking too much. Oh Marley. If there was one weakness in that woman it was the cigarette. She smoked a pack a day, and more when it rained. She smoked through her entire pregnancy, and twice in delivery.

When it finally stopped raining, the house had that pungent smell of burnt tobacco, mixed with the sugar of baking, and somewhere, Marley's stress. Everything about Marley had a smell. Spice and sweat, and something oddly enticing. Even now, sitting back, that smell makes the corners of my lips twist.

The sun had drifted above the fog, and finally the sounds of life had begun to drift back into our adjoining lives with the neighbors, who were, as I remember it, compulsively scared of weather, anything but sun. Standing by the wall and avoiding Marley's scampering, I could hear the dog pissing on the wood stain, and the TV being switched back on, to the British soaps.

It was all good again. I remember thinking how beautiful Marley was when she was busy, features sown into one expression of utter determination, moving non-stop, as if inflicted with an illness that prevented her from stillness. In fact, the only real time Marley was ever still was when we fucked. Contrary to what one might believe, it was really only when my cock had found her that she settled, stayed so utterly and entirely so that I worried my exuberance had killed her.

Those days, though, she always came back to life, nuzzled me, begged for an ass fuck, which I always obliged to, although disliked. Ass fucks were Marley's sex preference. Mine was how John was born, simple, done within ten minutes.

That day, I remember sitting on the window seat that held the cutlery and watching the sun begin to make a weedy battle with the cloud cover, small rays of

almost dazzling silver touching down upon an empty street, save for the hippies coming from their tents and probing their signs again in the moist ground.

I could see Marley in the reflection of the window, dripping with condensation, a hamper of work clothes under her arm, loose skirt around her thighs, face erect. I watched for a while, and was returned the gesture. "We should fuck," I said, breaking the small silence. "We haven't had a good fuck in a week." That wasn't true. Our fucks were always good then. Even when they weren't, they were. The intention was always good. "Your always thinking of sex, Charles. Haven't you ever played cricket?" That was Marley, always with the random references to change the subject. They worked though. " We don't play cricket in Ontario." Marley dropped the washing, nearly missing her own feet. "You mean to tell me you've never played in your life?'

"Never. Not once." Marley picked up the basket again, shook her head slightly and retreated back into the kitchen.

"Do women even play cricket?" I asked, hoping to annoy her somehow, to once again feel that physical sweat and sweet smell of spice in my groins.

"Where I come from."

"Aah," I heard myself say quietly, the words barely suppressing above my tongue, "where you come from." Marley was always talking about Whales in that subtle tone, a hint of great pride hidden beneath her need to please. Her need to allow me to be the man, to wallow in my own pride, and yet, still, that love of her birth place, palaces of wealth of poverty washed into the laundry of her childhood, painting her with the wine scented pride. The pride that was Marley.

"Get your things," I heard her say from the patio, beyond the clipping of the old Roebuck washing machine, "I'll take you to the field. We'll practice."

The way she said those words "we'll practice," makes me smile even now, to think about how just two words contained all the faith in the world, "we'll practice" like time was really our's, like we might play again sometime, like I had all the time to improve.

"Marley," I said, riddling my voice with intentional skepticism. "We don't own any equipment." I heard her slam the lid of the roebuck, skipping into the room, skirt flying. "So we rent."

"They do that?" I said standing up and grabbing her by the waste so that our faces met and I could smell her breath, sweet and colorless. For the first time since the rain had begun, her face broke into a wide smile and she pushed me away, laughing. "Of coarse they do Charles, how else do all the bum faces like you learn?"

Cringing I remember clearly, more clearly perhaps than anything else, what I said next. "Will it cost us?" Money had always been a subject I tread carefully on with Marley. Her father had owned things, land, homes, investments. Elliot Fields had been a smart man, from the few years I had known him through the stories Marley told late at night, high on her tobacco and those middle of the night swings of depression.

Marley, however, had been unlucky enough to be born the only sibling of an older brother. Naturally, as Marley put it, everything went to Henry. We could never depend on inheritance, not from me and my dead mother, not from Marley and her traditionalist father.

I could hear the silence drop between us like some invisible brick, something I had placed with responsibility to move it. "It won't cost us Charles," she said at last, the lightness lessened in her voice. Sensing an attitude change I allowed guilt to twist my stomach into some metaphoric knot. "Forgive me," I said, cherishing that ability of immediate patch up I did not yet know I possessed. "I am a bum. I ought to practice."

Following her into the kitchen, I embraced her again, like some matrimonial game of tag, and held her waste, brushing her bare hips with my finger tips and feeling the shiver pass through her.

I suppose John might have been conceived that night, under the benches of the stadium in the moonlight, unconventional sex in the shadows of cricket hoops.

It was not cricket exactly. More so, I chased Marley with the bat, while she tore up the field screaming hysterically. In those days we enjoyed such things as annoying the old folks putting and clicking tongues, enjoyed not joining in and sipping lemon-aid on the benches and counting others scores, while I begged for sex and she scoffed. In the end, I always won. I remember Marley smoked three ciggarettes in the field and laughed at my stupid jokes. Oh Marley.