Balls: A Novel - Couverture souple

It was not by accident that God created the world in the shape of a ball. I came to understand that early. All the men in my life imitated God in this way by making small worlds of their own out of balls. I never knew boys who dreamed of building skyscrapers, or campaigning for justice, or making music, or scalpeling into human flesh to repair hearts. Nothing like that. The boys I knew dreamed of one thing--balls. Getting them across the goal line, pitching them over the plate, sinking them in the hoop, putting them into the hole.

As a girl, when I watched men pass the pigskin, pitch the curveball, perfect the jump shot, I understood that they were playing war. What I didn't understand was that it wasn't just a stupid ball they held in their hands, but the whole world being tossed about from man to man--like a game of keep away.

From me.

--Dixie Gibbs, 1998
Dixie

The first time Mac opened one button on my blouse and touched my breast I thought it was a moment of genius. I think it must have been the way America felt when Columbus discovered it.

Even now, even though we're officially engaged, we still park up by the Vulcan on that road Mac knows, because of that time Rose caught Mac in my room and went crazy--and we weren't even doing anything but lying there talking--I mean crazy like a lunatic who belonged in an insane asylum, which I don't know if I will ever forgive her for or not, and she had on that see-through nightgown too, her nipples bouncing like two polka dots under there. Since then, we don't have any place much to go where we can be alone together. Except Mac's car, which sort of automatically veers up toward the Vulcan now.

"You are so sweet, Dixie Carraway, I could just eat you up," Mac says. It's not an original thing to say. It's whet people say to babies, but he sincerely means it. In the last couple of years Mac has named his top lip Lewis and his bottom lip Clark because he says they are such a hell of a pair of explorers. They are too. He's like a man lip-led. Our mouths have taken over all other aspects of our love, like we are two infants in the world of passion--tasting, biting. I love that word, passion. It makes me think of a vine-ripened tomato on the hottest day of the year that last second before the skin splits open and the pulp oozes out. That fleshy red. All those little seeds.

Mac goes crazy if I suck his finger. You wouldn't think a little thing like sucking a finger could do to a guy what it does to Mac. But I don't just suck it, I really make it interesting, you know. I've developed what you might call technique. I just love what mouths can do--that the place that makes the words is also the place that makes the kisses. I watch him watch me while I suck his finger. For those few minutes it's like I rule the world. I mean if I said, "Mac, go run into that burning building," I think he'd actually consider it.

Before Mac, Daddy was mean to boys who came around me. He was rude. Rose was never rude and it really irritated her for Daddy to be--but too bad. Daddy was always telling boys it was time for them to go home, and no, I could not drive down to the shopping center with them. No, I couldn't go to the late movie. No, I couldn't go to the drive-in. No. No. No. Maybe that's where I developed my appreciation for the power of the word no.

But as soon as Mac came along, Daddy just sort of changed his tune. Sure, Mac could take me to the drive-in. Sure I could drive over to Tuscaloosa with Mac to see a basketball game. If it had to do with Mac, Daddy was in favor of it. I love Daddy and all, but the truth is this has never set right with me.

Since Daddy abandoned his fatherly patrol it has become my job to patrol things. I think I do it as well as any girl I can name who is fully human. Saying no is hard work. It can wear you out. As young as I am I'm already practically exhausted. No. No. No. God, how Mac loves hearing me say that word. Just the word itself seems to transform me into an angel and send me flying around in some heavenly sphere in his mind. Lucky for me no is Mac's favorite word. That's the kind of boy he is.

Dixie's in love with Mac. Mac is in love with football. And football, as every red-blooded Southern man and woman knows, is the most jealous mistress of all....In Nanci Kincaid's stunning new novel, the rise and fall of a big-time college football coach is chronicled by the women in his life: his pretty, easily underestimated wife, his hot-tempered daughter, his God-fearing mother, and an unforgettable cast of players' girlfriends and other men's wives. And while Mac's fortunes are tied to the sport he loves, his women are busy making choices and plans of their own. Until the game on the field, with all its heroic feats, tragic twists, and roaring crowds, is overshadowed by the game played behind closed doors: where a good man risks losing a good woman to the call of her own heart.