Curveball : The Year I Lost My Grip (9780545393119) (10 page)

I don't know what other people like to do to get psyched up for a big party night, but my approach was to have brunch with my grandfather. We had a long-standing Saturday-morning tradition of going to a diner together once in a while, and it had definitely been a while. Plus, there's nothing like checking my favorite person for signs of dementia to get me in the mood to rock and roll. Actually, smacking my head repeatedly with a heavy shovel would have been just about as much fun. But at least with this option, I got hash browns.

He picked me up right on time, and when I got in the car, he seemed to be in a great mood. I told him about my sports shooting progress, the party that night, and our Henri Cartier-Bresson assignment.
“Sounds like this Mr. Marsh really knows his stuff,” Grampa said.

“Yeah, I'm learning a ton in his class,” I said.

“Good. Are you going to shoot at the party tonight?”

“Nah.”

“Why not? You're going to have your camera on you anyway, right? You're going there straight from the meet.”

“But —”

“You could get some great candids there. And people love getting their pictures taken at parties.”

I thought about what I had heard about high school parties. Somehow, I didn't think people would necessarily be overjoyed if some freshman was getting up in their faces and recording their lusty, potentially illegal escapades. Plus, I didn't want to be thinking about a school project at the party — I wanted to concentrate on getting closer with Angelika. Besides, I would probably need to focus some of my energy on keeping AJ from embarrassing me too much. “I'll think about it, OK?” I said.

He nodded, and then we didn't talk anymore until we had gotten to the diner and slid into our favorite booth. I ordered the Big Man Breakfast, which was a gigantic platter of eggs, pancakes, and every variety of greasy meat you can jam onto an oversize plate. Grampa grunted, “Guess your stomach is better,” then put in his order for a bagel with lox and a cup of coffee.

Our food came out pretty quickly, and it all tasted excellent. Everything was going great until a beautiful, blonde-haired, youngish lady came over and got Grampa's attention. “Hey, you're Paul Goldberg, aren't you?”

He looked up from his bagel, nodded, and smiled, but I could tell he didn't know who this woman was.

“I'm Anna McGuire. You were my wedding photographer. Two years ago? At the Lehigh Country Club? You did a fabulous job! We love our photos — we look at them all the time! Anyway, I just wanted to stop by and, uh, say hi.”

Grampa kept smiling and nodding for a beat too long without saying anything. Then, finally, he said,
“It's nice to meet you!” Anna McGuire didn't know what to say to that, so she just kind of stammered and stutter-stepped backward, away from our table and out the door.

This was bad. It was so, so bad. Remember how I mentioned that his number one motto had always been “Get the shot”? Well, his number two motto was “Never, EVER forget a bride's name.” When you've spent forty years as a wedding photographer in one little valley, you meet brides all the time whose weddings you've shot. I mean, this happened to Grampa at least every other time he went out in public. And in my entire life, I had never seen him blank out on a bride. This time, not only had he blanked out on the bride's name — he had pretty much forgotten how to interact completely.

“Gramp,” I said. “Are you all right?”

“Why wouldn't I be?” he asked, taking a huge bite of bagel.

“Well, that lady that just came to the table. You didn't seem to know who she —”

“Peter, what are you talking about? We were just
sitting here having a little conversation about … about … about things. And now you've gotten yourself all in an uproar. Everything's fine. Eat your food.”

“But —”

“It'll get cold.” He looked away from me, and spent the next few minutes elaborately refilling, creaming, and sugaring his coffee. He seemed totally calm, as though he had already forgotten all about his failed conversation with the woman. But I didn't see how that could be possible.

“Hey, Grampa,” I said. “Have you ever forgotten a bride?”

“No,” he said, “never! I've made some big mistakes in my career … like this one time, I forgot to bring extra film for my cameras and had to run out to a drugstore between the ceremony and the reception. I thought the groom's father was going to have a coronary! And another time, I showed up at Our Lady of Mercy when the wedding was supposed to be at Our Lady of
Infinite
Mercy. But I can still remember every single bride I ever shot.”

“Every single one?”

“Sure. Watch this! December 3, 1972: Bethany Winmoor. October 5, 1987: LeeAnn Dalrymple. March 6, 1994: Erin Kopesky.”

“How about Anna McGuire? Did you ever shoot a wedding for someone named Anna McGuire?”

He took a sip of his coffee, then said, “Blonde? Pretty?” I nodded. “Sure, I remember her. My main Nikon was in the shop, and I shot her whole wedding with one of my backups. That was back in … I think it was in … June, maybe? Two, three years ago? I don't know — something like that. Hmm, I wonder how she's doing. Funny that I've never seen her around. Why do you ask?”

The hair stood up on the back of my neck: Grampa had just completely missed several minutes of his life. “Oh, nothing,” I said. “More coffee?”

 

I spent the rest of the afternoon obsessing about Alzheimer's disease, and looking again at all the websites I'd found about it.
Was
my grandfather losing his memory? Deep down, I just freaking knew he had to
be, but that didn't mean I knew what to do about it. One of the sites I found was all about how an elderly person's children are supposed to step in and make the decisions about care. My mom was his only child, and she didn't want to listen to what I'd already said. Plus, Grampa didn't want me to tell her anything more, and besides, Grampa had never let anybody make any decisions about his life.

I remembered this one time, maybe a year after my grandmother's death, Mom had suggested that maybe it was time for Grampa to think about going out on dates with other women. He responded by throwing the only cursing fit I had ever seen from him, kicking our whole family out of his house, and then sitting down to cry at his kitchen table while I watched through the little window in his front door. Mom never brought it up again, and Grampa never went out on any dates.

One thing was for sure: Even if Mom did start to believe, helping Grampa wasn't going to be easy.

Eventually, it was time to leave for the swim meet, so Mom and I got in the car. When we were some
thing like half a mile from home, I realized I had forgotten to bring my best indoor-sports lens, so I asked her to turn around and go back for it. Then, of course, I started arguing with myself for the millionth time:

So, Grampa forgot one bride's face. One bride out of hundreds. Thousands, probably. So what? I just forgot to bring the single most important item for a shoot. Does that make me senile? And Mom forgets the title of every song she's ever heard — it drives Dad and me nuts. But I'm not building a case for shipping her off to a home. Plus, Samantha drove all the way back to college last month without her cell phone. Her cell phone! That's like me forgetting to bring my left arm or something. But I didn't think she was losing it.

On the other hand, none of us had given away our prize possessions because we knew we couldn't use them correctly anymore. I mean, geez, I still had my favorite Stealth baseball bat hanging in its bag in the garage, even though I knew I would never be able to play ball again. That was what made me feel the worst for Grampa: If he had given away his cameras,
he must have known what was going on. What was it like for him, spending most of his time alone, and working frantically to hide the whole problem whenever anybody was around?

By the time I got done agonizing over all of this, Mom had pulled up to the school. I thought about asking her to park and then telling her about Grampa's fall, the spacing-out times he was having — everything. But I was running late because of the lens issue,
and
I was kind of dying to see Angelika,
and
the meet was about to start.

What would Grampa have done in this situation? Would he have made himself late to the meet in order to tell Mom about all this stuff? I heard his voice the way I always did when I was unsure, and it told me what he had always said: “Get the shot. You've gotta get the shot!” Maybe that was just me giving myself permission to do what I wanted to do anyway, but I went with it. I kissed Mom on the cheek, grabbed my camera bag, and jumped out of the car.

Angelika was already set up by the side of the pool. She didn't even look up from her light meter when I
came in, but I think I did get a “hey” out of her.
Wow, this is going to be some rockin' date
, I thought. I knelt down next to her and started taking out my stuff. “OK,” Angelika said, “I have a game plan. I copied the swim team roster, and crossed out all the girls we got shots of last time. Here's a list of who's left.” She looked up and smiled at me then.
Aha,
I thought.
Guess I won't be focusing on Linnie Vaughn this evening.

A few minutes later, Linnie actually came and stood over us. She had already swum a few warm-up laps, and she was soaking wet. “Hi, guys,” she said. “All ready to party later?” Looking up at her, I tried really hard to avoid staring at her body. Which meant I forced myself to look straight up at her face. I couldn't help but notice that her teeth were super-white. I mean, crazy super-white. Like, visible-from-space white. Linnie Vaughn should have been the poster girl for Crest or something. I wondered whether she had ever had braces, because aside from their laserlike gleam, those teeth were also laser-straight. I hoped my staring wasn't as obvious as it felt.

Angelika shifted her tripod a little, so that one of the legs came down on my toe — hard. Oopsie. So
much for the not-obvious-staring thing. “Uh, what can we do for you, Linnie?” I squeaked.

Linnie stepped even closer to me — and she had already been uncomfortably close. Now she was close enough to drip on my feet. “Just make me look beautiful,” she said.

“No worries,” Angelika said brightly. “We're not here to get more pictures of you, Linnie. Pete got so many great ones of you last time that now we can just concentrate on the rest of the team.”

Linnie looked down at my feet, then back at Angelika. “Ooh, sorry,” she said. “I think I just got your boyfriend all wet.” Then she walked away.

The silence that followed was, like, the absolute definition of “awkward.” I tried really hard to wipe the chlorinated droplets off my sneakers unobtrusively while I formatted the memory card in my camera and slipped in a new battery. Deep in the cushioned interior of Grampa's old camera bag, wa-a-ay in the bottom of the spare-battery compartment, I found an unopened container of Tic Tacs. That was typical: Grampa had always stashed breath mints all
over the place. He said there's nothing worse than a wedding photographer with rancid breath.

I figured I could use a burst of minty freshness, so I popped open the pack and slipped a Tic Tac into my mouth. When I finally dared to face Angelika again, I held out the case and said, “Breath mint?”

She just kind of growled as she took one. The swimming started, and I felt like we were sitting in some kind of Chamber of Silence in the middle of the crowded pool deck. She said nothing. I matched her wordless for wordless. Her camera clicked; my camera clicked. It was a long, long meet. The score went back and forth again and again, but I couldn't really bring myself to notice the sporting tension in the middle of all this personal agitation.

The last event of the night was a relay, and Linnie was the final swimmer for our team. Naturally, the winner would take all … but Angelika had told me not to shoot Linnie. This was killing me. All I could think about was Grampa saying,
Get the shot.
And those kids in the lunchroom saying,
You took that picture? Dude. I'm in awe.
Oh, yeah, and Linnie saying,
Make me look beautiful
. I glanced at my partner, who was quietly packing up her gear. She sighed and said, “Go on, Pete — shoot away. We wouldn't want our male readers to be disappointed, would we?”

Linnie won, but it felt like somehow I was losing.

After the meet, Angelika and I went upstairs through the deserted halls of the school. We needed to go to the newspaper office and download our picture files. Things were so tense I couldn't stand it, so I started saying stuff like “Hey, doesn't this remind you of one of those high school murder movies? Ooh … woo …” Which is (A) completely lame, and (B) completely not like me. But Angelika was as good at silence as my grandfather was — and that was about a thousand times better than I could handle.

She finally spoke, and her voice was all business: “Did you get anything good?”

As usual, her quick-transition trick left me struggling to switch gears. “Uh, I th-think so,” I stammered. Once I got going, though, I could feel myself blabbering in a semi-panic. “I went over the checklist you made, and I got everyone we wanted. I mean, every
one we needed. I mean, I don't think we have to go to any more swim meets if the shots, um, look good.”

By this point, we were at the office. This part was a little more comfortable, because it was a routine; it was exactly the same every time we shot a sporting event. Angelika tapped on the space bar of the iMac we used for photo edits, and held out a hand for my memory card. I handed the card over, she slid it into a card reader, and we stood together and watched as the images popped up in neat rows on the monitor.

Angelika made technical comments about the pics: Some needed to be cropped, some were a bit too bright, and a few were a bit blurry. Still, though, as the photos flashed by, most looked pretty darn good, which meant that I had been right about not needing to go to another meet. That was welcome news, because I wasn't sure I'd survive being between Angelika and Linnie Vaughn again.