Ways to Dodge a Baseball

            by Liza Veale

 

I am singing Simon and Garfunkle with passion and I am taking myself very seriously. I am singing while ripping fistfuls of grass out of the earth and piling them on my legs as I sit, spread eagle, in mud. There is a baseball glove perched on my head and my sneakered feet rock in timing with “The Sound of Silence.” My legs are almost completely buried in unearthed grass, except for my feet, which appear to be waving goodbye to a body they are no longer attached to.

Then a baseball is launched into my world, thoroughly uninvited, and my dad is yelling from the pitchers mound.

“LIZAAAA!!!! Get off the ground! You’re shagging balls!”

I scowl and watch the grass rain down as I get to my feet and take the glove from my head. I pretend I am a metal detector, or baseball detector, I guess, as I gather all of the balls my brother has hit into left field. I beep louder and more maniacally the closer I get to a ball and whisper-beep when they are all hidden by weeds.

“HUSTLE SMIZZ!!” This is what they call me, or smizzes.

Next I am bent over home plate and my dad is lobbing baseballs in my direction.

 The bat flops like a disobliging puppy headed for liberation. My six year old arms buckle under the weight, but I am so fierce. After my 7th strike I grind my feet into the dirt and clench my jaw and swallow to subdue the frustration boiling in my tummy. ”There you go, Lize! That was a nice looking swing. Just keep your eye on the ball.” He says as he waves it around like a hypnotist, training my vision to zone in.
“Ready!” He warns and the ball is slicing through the air and I do watch it. I watch it so hard I can see it connect with my bat and rocket over my dad’s head. It makes the most beautiful sound. My bat clinks to the ground and I wonder how the hell I made that happen.
_____________

“Hold up, YOU are trying out?” This is Kemper. He’s one of those goofy kids that passes for cool because you can’t not smile when he does. They call him Kemp.

“Yeah, I am.” I wish I could say this was said with an indignant sense of challenge in my voice. But really I was combing the damp infield dirt with my cleats and asking myself the same question. By age 11 four of the five girls that had made a team every year at Little League tryouts had surrendered their baseball careers to softball or dance or the flute or puberty. Andie said softball made much more sense, “The game is so much more fun without all that testosterone,” she informed me wisely, “and we make up
cheers and there are team slumber parties!”

I never played on a team with Kelsey but she hung in there until fifth grade when she surprised us all and got boobs. It’s easy to be one of the only girls when the distinction between genders is but a vague and budding recognition.

I guess the fathers of those girls weren’t as into at as my own.

“Eh it’s just you and McKenzie now, huh?” Kemp is gesturing at a large and ferocious young girl throwing a ball against a wall and scooping it up. The wall is only several feet away and the ball is really just rolling into her glove but she’s huffing and grunting and jumping around like this is final conditioning for the World Series. Her hat falls off and she curses and spits and looks around to see if anyone has noticed this act of rugged abandon. Just me and McKenzie. Great.
___________________

 

If you were writing a book about my family, you would dedicate several chapters to baseball. If you were writing a book about my brother and my dad, you’d be writing an entire book about baseball. My brother is one of two sophomores to make the Berkeley High varsity team and my dad is mocking him, patting his head in congratulations. My brother sneers and shrugs him off the way all adolescents deny affection but I know that they are both thrilled.

This shared ambition fuels their bond. My dad pitches to my brother at Bushrod Park when he’s not at practice and they never run out of Baseball conversation for filling car ride and breakfast table silences. My brother believed in baseball with inhibition only someone who’s never had their first failure can.

Spencer was incredulous upon discovering he was playing with real live 18 year olds and was no long the best on the team. One mistake spawned anxieties, spawned many mistakes. Apprehension bred and the sport was irreversibly soured.

Midway through the season my brother has lost the game for Berkeley and we’re all walking home in the April mist.

“So what do you think man, what happened out there?” This is my dad’s post-game spiel.

“I dono.”

“Huh?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well I mean, just lost your focus? What, that line drive took you by surprise?”

“I don’t know.”

“Hey, we all make mistakes, just gotta…“ He shrugs his shoulders. “This game is about redemption.”

“Whatever.”

Then there is only the sound of our footsteps and the rain and everyone disappointing each other. Some how sports become a metaphor for everything.

            I am scared of two things: baseball becoming for my dad and me what it is for my dad and my brother; But more: If I save us from this, what will we have to fill silences with?

_________________

 

“Lil Rob, man, this female over here boutta snatch yo position,” It’s seventh grade now and I am playing with men. Well eighth graders, but some how they have all gotten mustaches and muscles over the off season and we are definitely different genders now. I’ve discovered that there is absolutely no way to make baseball pants look cute and the whole pony-tail-through-the-hat look does not suit me. This is Kemp talking. Although we met at tryouts when I was eleven, this is the first time we’ve been on the same team. It’s the first day of practice and we’re taking ground balls and I am on fiiyaaa.

Lil Rob sucks his teeth.

“Man I’m not sweatin her, shit, I’m a grown ass man.” We all laugh at this. Lil Rob is good but he’s about 5 foot 3 with read hair and freckles. Hence the “Lil.”

“Rob, Liza is more of a grown ass man than you are.” They all laugh at this. I throw the ball at Kemp’s back and he shrieks like a little girl.

“Ha! I guess she’s more of a grown ass man than you too.”

 

_________________

 

 

I never really mastered the art of eating sunflower seeds. You pop the seed in and your tongue starts positioning it vertically between your back molars, herding it frantically like those yappy little sheep dogs. Then you have to bite down at precisely the right angle as to snap it in two pieces and avoid splintering the entire thing, in which case you better just spit it all out and start over. Then you’ve got to disengage the seed from its armor, about which the little seed is not happy. Finally you have to stow your earnings in some corner of your mouth and spit out everything else, resulting, usually, in loosing everything you’ve worked for with the force, or ending up with a reluctant dangler spit in your effort to preserve the fruits of your labor. And what are those fruits? A crappy, tasteless flower reproductive organ.

Presently, I am sitting in the dugout watching my team fight a valiant battle against The Somethings and have resigned myself to sucking off the salt and spitting out the whole thing. I watch as my team mate, Julian, takes one strike and another and then another and wordlessly curses, his face absorbing and muting his frustration. He walks into the dugout and my instinct is to go to him, to hug him. This poor kid weighted by the disappointment of the team.

“What the fuck was that? He got you with the same exact pitch three times in a row!”

Apparently these instincts are not shared by everyone.

 “Man…” Julian sits and tightens his jaw. He stares out blankly at the game, not allowing himself to be provoked.

“I mean, that’s the type of shit you can’t let happen right now! Use your head. That pitcher just punked you, dude.” I avoid looking at Julian’s face; it’s all just too tense.

This type of confrontation happens most games but I cannot shake the prickly feeling riddling my stomach. How are these boys so cruel to each other?

 I’m grateful for the way they know to sidestep my mistakes. When I walk back from the dug out having screwed up in some crucial way, they stand back to let me pass and direct their attention to the next batter. “I KNOW I MESSED UP! I KNOW YOU GUYS ARE FRUSTRATED! I WILL DO BETTER NEXT TIME!” I want to say. The way they hold their tongues and avoid eye contact because they think I’m too fragile- or, I am too fragile- it’s isolating in the worst way. If maybe we could just acknowledge it, hold it in our hands a little and leave it behind, I wouldn’t have to have it all my own as yet another reminder of why I need to not take my eye off the ball.

And yet. It’s times like this, with Julian’s breath visible in the cold air and everyone else hoping that much more they don’t slip up, that I can’t imagine bearing it any other way.

______________________

 

My brother and I are lying on my bed room floor with our knees up conducting electricity with the plush rug and the bottoms of our feet. He’s throwing a baseball up and catching it; he could do this forever.           

“So are you going to try to get a scholarship for baseball?” I’m asking.

“I don’t think I could. Not with my record this year.” I’ve been able to piece together that baseball has become some sort of battle of self discovery for my brother. Maturity revealed the distress with which the sport became infested. It is the most unlikely of oppressors: team sports, a way to make friends, be active, a little competition.

“I don’t know if I’m going to play in college, Lize.” I guess this shouldn’t have been news to me. The way my brother and my dad invested their faith in baseball, the way they depended upon it, how could they not have ended up disappointed? My brother becomes a World Series-winning, Hall-of-Famer?

“Lize, here’s the thing. This is important.”

“Ok.”

“If you don’t like it, if you don’t look forward to playing, then stop.”

“I know.”

“But do you? I mean seriously Lize. Dad doesn’t want you to play because you think he expects you to, or because he likes watching or because you want to impress him. He doesn’t want that.”

 I wonder: if my brother had figured this out a couple years ago, would the game have gone unspoiled? Would it still be face planting into freshly cut grass- sliding into home with eyes shut- taking a fast ball with the most perfect spot on the bat, this. Nothing more than this.

______________________

 

            The season is winding down, thank god. It’s becoming impossible to make the throw from 3^rd to 1^st fast enough with my 14 year old, wimpy girl arms. But mostly, my heart’s just not in it.

I would imagine sports seem absolutely absurd to the non-athlete. Why does any one care who wins, really? Why does everyone become a ? I believe in setting time aside for one’s self, for solitude. But there is an undeniable electricity in camaraderie. Team work, banding together for a common goal, all that bullshit. The corniness dilutes it but it’s still beautiful.

             The problem is that it translates inversely. We were playing to qualify for some division placement or another; it’s funny how you let yourself forget. It was the bottom of the ninth inning with two outs, and we were loosing. On some level of consciousness I was keeping tabs on the game, but mainly I was staring at the blue spot on my knee where I had spilled Gatorade. The wetness saturated the cloth and was starting to mingle with my skin; the wind blew and turned it all to ice. I was probably planning what I would do with all the extra time I’d have now that the season would be over- that is, if we lost, which, I was sure, we would. I was thinking maybe of building something in my garage, with wood and nails. A dollhouse maybe, or-

            “Liza you know you’re on deck right?” Derrick is nudging me, I’m the only one sitting down. Well, apparently we’ve rallied.

            “Wha? Ok, wait where are my…” I start fumbling around for my batting gloves and a helmet. I grab my bat and am whisked out of the den of a dugout and into the biting expanse. Then I made a mistake. I glance back at my teammates who are huddled around, gripping the chain link fence, looks of pleading desperation grace all of their faces. Shit. Fuck. I thought this was over.

            My body takes its cues and assumes a batter’s stance. Jesus my knuckles are cold. So is my knee. Apparently the pitcher has already thrown two pitches, I have one strike. Shit. I grind my feet into the dirt, clench my jaw and swallow. A ball is coming at me. Oh that’s definitely a strike. I should swing at that. Liza swing at that. I half heartedly jab at the ball, several centuries too late. Smooth.

            “Let’s go Liza!”

            “You got this Liza!” Thanks boys. I appreciate your reassurance, it just spills with confidence. The next pitch is perfect and straight and actually kind of gentle, even welcoming. I know this because I admired it traveling towards me. I admired it all the way into the catcher’s glove.  

            For the last time, the boys step aside to let me pass. My coach is talking from somewhere far away,

“Alright guys, that was a tough game. You guys did well. Great season…” Between the sound of my glove’s Velcro and the other team’s cheering I hear,

“Goddamn, just fucking swing. At least swing.” Then I am watching the dirt beneath my feet become gravel, then pavement, then the stairs to my house. My dad has been talking to his own feet. He’s saying something about encouragement. That’s all. Just encouragement. And maybe you never felt like this but. You know, Spencer. Anyway. You shouldn’t, or you shouldn’t have, or- it’s not important. Is all. Do you know what I mean Lize? Forget it. If it’s not fun, forget it.