by Josh Wilker
R
Relegation
One day back in the first few weeks of Jack’s life Abby and Jack and I were walking past a playground and saw a young couple pushing a baby in a swing. The baby was a few months older than Jack. She leaned forward in the swing and flapped her arms up and down, and great peals of laughter spilled out of her. At that point Jack was too young for a swing. He was so brand new he couldn’t even hold his own head up. Worry was wearing us out. The happy trio at the swing set seemed to be in a whole different league.
“That’ll be us someday,” I said. “Right?”
“I guess,” Abby said.
In the following weeks and months, as late summer turned to fall, fall to winter, I brought it up repeatedly, that image of the baby in a swing, laughing. It was a talisman to hold onto throughout the earliest, most fragile part of Jack’s life, an idealization of some finish line beyond uncertainty. It was a way to imagine the future as some kind of a promotion.
“Remember that baby we saw in that swing?” I asked Abby. It was the morning of the first warm day of spring.
“Oh my fucking god, you and that swing,” Abby said.
Jack and I had gotten up from playing with a truck on the living room floor and were headed outside. We’d finally made it to the first spring of his life. Jack was nine months old, about as old as the baby we’d seen laughing her ass off, so I was hauling him to the playground for the moment I’d been waiting for. But when I got to the playground and jammed him into the swing he just sat there, tense as a cat in a carrier. I gave him a push.
“Whee,” I said.
He started to cry. I pulled him out and perused the rest of the playground, trying to figure out something to do next. There were some other kids tearing around, older kids. One was on a little bike going fast enough to fracture bones on impact, or so it seemed to me. Another had taken command of the highest point in the central multicolored climbing structure and was pelting those below him with acorns or pebbles. The whole operation struck me as outlandishly chaotic, far too dangerous for anyone not encased in a Kevlar bodysuit. The only other baby besides Jack was in one of the other swings. She wasn’t bubbling over with joyous laughter like the swinging baby I’d so romanticized, but her calm in that swing still seemed an impossible dream. She was being pushed one-handed by a man glumly focused on thumb-scrolling his smartphone. As I gazed with longing at this tableau, a kid with snot streaming out of his nose came up to us and tugged on Jack’s leg.
“What his name?” the kid said. “I like him. I see him another time with some lady.”
“He’s Jack,” I said.
“Jack!” The kid went up on his tiptoes to put his snotty face up close to Jack’s face and grabbed at Jack’s hand and jiggled it. “You memba me, Jack?”
The kid’s mouth was hanging open, breaths gusting out inches from Jack’s tiny eyelashes. Jack blinked. The blinking seemed at first to be part of a wincing, but then it was clear that Jack was smiling. The kid with the early stages of some aggressive crippling infection saw this and pressed in closer, his drippy nose approaching Jack’s.
“Okay, okay,” I said. I was moving away from this kid, this playground.
“Where you go?” the kid said. “Hey Jack! Jack!”
I took Jack as far away from the playground as I could while still remaining inside the little park it was part of. I stood in a corner on some brown grass that was starting to rouse itself after the long winter beating. There was a fence and, beyond the fence, an alley with a dumpster.
The normal human tendency is to strive for elevation. This is reflected in American sports on an individual level, in the constantly renewing Alger myth of the aspiring greenhorn advancing to the big leagues, the core brightness of this myth deriving in part from its contrasting mirror image, the failed journeyman descending. Elsewhere in the world this dynamic has a collective manifestation, as in the end-of-season ritual in many foreign soccer leagues in which a few improving teams are lifted from the minor leagues to the top division and, in turn, a few struggling teams are dumped down into obscurity. The former is a symbol of hope, the latter a symbol of humiliation, disgrace. They call it relegation.
The distanced playground continued to whirl with activity, voices squealing and calling. I could feel Jack wriggling in my arms. He wanted. He was wanting. I held him tighter. He got a hand free, the one that the snot-nose kid had touched, and he was bringing it toward his mouth. I grabbed the hand and held it. Jack didn’t like this. He began to cry.
“Fuck,” I said.
Where was my joyous moment with my son in the swing? Where was that elevation? If I couldn’t have that, couldn’t I at least be relieved of the responsibility of trying to make it happen? But no. On an individual level there’s some relief in being demoted, but in a family no descent is solitary. There’s only relegation.
“Already?” Abby said as we were walking back in the door. She never got any time to herself.
“Some kid was fucking bubonic,” I said.
“Can you let go of his hand?”
Abby was reaching to take him away. At this point we were both screaming to be heard over Jack’s crying.
“That’s the hand! The hand! That’s—”
“I got it!” Abby said.
She started to pull him from my arms to her own, and for some reason I held on.
“What are you doing?”
“I want to calm him down!”
“Give him to me!”
“He’s my son too!”
We were all three standing in the open doorway, a tangle of yanking and screams. The horror of fatherhood, of a family. You can’t go down without taking everyone with you.
Remmerswaal, Win
In the back of every Red Sox yearbook I got as a kid the names and small grainy head shots of the hopeful were printed: the prospects, the future stars, stationed in Pawtucket but poised to rise. The first few years I saw those names I believed everyone listed would eventually become one of the famed regulars featured earlier in the yearbook in spectacular color action shots, another Fisk or Tiant or Yaz. But by the time the most memorable of all these names, Win Remmerswaal, appeared in a yearbook, I’d begun to fathom that most prospects tended to just disappear. It was 1980, ’81, puberty draining color from the world, the Red Sox starting to suck.
I never saw Win Remmerswaal pitch and don’t remember noticing him registering in a major league box score, which ended up happening only twenty-two times. But I do remember where he came from, someplace else altogether, what sounded like a shadowy fairy tale realm, a magical obscurity: the Netherlands. And I remember his name. His first name could not have been simpler, a distillation of everything life was supposed to be aiming toward, clean and clear as an ideal: Win. The second name felt more like life as it was revealing itself to be, meandering, complex. It was unpronounceable but impossible to resist trying to pronounce, beckoning, a magic spell if said correctly, everything about it a tangle of knowable and unknowable, remembering and swaying and wailing and All, the opposite of an ideal, the dream-drunk wooze of real: Remmerswaal. Who was he? Where was he? When would he arrive to bring change?
Things change. This is the message of life with a baby. One minute you’re in a miserable doorway tangle of yanking and screams, and then just a little while later you’re verging on hilarity, bliss. On the afternoon of my aborted trip with Jack to the swing set Jack sat on Abby’s lap in a chair by the window. I got off the couch and crawled over to him. Abby saw me coming and wiggled her finger across Jack’s lips, like a toothbrush. Jack knew this game: he said, “ahhhh,” his voice through Abby’s bobbing finger sounded like he was saying “babababa.” I used my own finger and mouth to answer his babbling with my own. I did it and stopped, then he did it and stopped, and back and forth we went. We were having a conversation! At one point he even reached for Abby’s finger
like it was a microphone, like he couldn’t wait to reply. I had trouble keeping up my end of the discussion because I was laughing so hard. Jack was laughing too. All three of us were laughing our asses off. Every day something like this happened. Every day we played. Every day I laughed so hard my face hurt.
“Remmersmell, or whatever his name is,” said Reggie Jackson in 1980, “has the best arm of anyone on [the Red Sox’] staff.” Reggie was right; Win Remmerswaal had talent. He also had will. Before him no European-raised player had ever made it to the major leagues. To get to the major leagues from anywhere, you need talent and will, especially when that anywhere is, in major league baseball terms, a nowhere, a nether land. What Win Remmerswaal had in addition to the talent and will it took to appear out of the Netherlands was an uncommon connection to the thing that precedes talent and will.
He played.
In the minor league obscurity where he lasted the longest, Pawtucket, he became known and loved for his offbeat behavior. He wrote “win” on one shoe and “lose” on the other, and, according to the SABR biography of Remmerswaal by Rory Costello, Chris Kahout, and David Laurilla, “he’d hop off on whichever foot happened that day.” During one road trip his team changed planes in Washington, DC, and he disappeared. He was gone for several days. On his reappearance he gave team owner Ben Mondor a box of cigars and explained, “I realized that I was in the nation’s capital, and that I may never see it again. So I decided to stay for a few days and look around.” While his teammates attempted to narrow their focus only to winning and not losing and maybe some downtime painkilling swigs of beer or religion, Remmerswaal read Sartre, who once opined that “the genuine poet . . . is certain of the total defeat of the human enterprise and arranges to fail in his own life in order to bear witness, by his individual defeat, to human defeat in general.”
He never hooked on with any permanence in the majors, just showing flashes of his talent and playfulness, wowing Reggie Jackson with the former, displaying the latter by ordering pizza during a game from a bullpen phone. He never completely engaged the talent he was blessed with, blithely squandered his chances, meandered onward, out of the game.
It’s not about going up and down, about promotion and relegation. It’s not about misery or bliss. It’s not about that word, Win, in its expectations and imagined solidity. A better word to describe fatherhood would be something more like the funny sounds of a boy and his parents, prelingual, a corroded combination of remembering and surrendering to the whatever of life, all its squalls and swaying and wails: Remmerswaal.
Repetitive Sports Performance Problems (RSPPs)
See Sasser, Mackey
Retreat
I wanted to check one of my encyclopedias for Win Remmerswaal stories, so I sat Jack down on a Fenway Park bedspread on the floor and handed him some toys. At nine months old he still hadn’t crawled. I knew from the parenting books upstairs that this was a little on the late side, but I was trying to focus on the wonders of athletic misfortune rather than on anything real. There wasn’t anything about Win Remmerswaal in the encyclopedia I pulled from the shelf, so I started leafing through the book aimlessly, playfully, no goal in mind, drifting, curious. My son, drawn to the sound of flipping pages, pitched forward onto his stomach. The encyclopedia was on the floor between us. He began writhing and wrenching his little body in such a way that he moved crookedly, haltingly forward, getting one of his pudgy knees involved to make the forward motion into something you could call a crawl. I pulled the book a little farther away. He kept moving toward it. I edged away until I’d made it to the other side of the room. He kept coming, wanting to grab and tear at the pages of my baseball encyclopedia. It seemed like the start of some new unrelenting phase in the face of which I would always be in retreat.
“It reminded me of the end of The Terminator,” I said later to Abby.
“Uh huh,” she said. Jack had fallen asleep while still nursing, and Abby was holding him to her boob and looking at a laptop on the table beside her. She’d lately been joining some online groups of mothers to try to feel less alone. Her face was clouded over by something she was reading on the screen.
“You know how at the end,” I said, making my voice progressively louder, “when the Terminator is just this metal stumpy thing but still keeps coming? That was how Jack—are you even listening?”
Abby turned her angry gaze from the screen to me. I kept pressing.
“I mean here I am trying to tell you about our son’s first fucking time kind of craw—”
Abby started crying.
“What the hell?” I said.
She reached to the laptop and turned the screen so that it faced me. I saw that at the top of the screen, on one of the online mother groups Abby had joined, Abby had posted a photo of herself and Jack. I knew the photo to be a favorite of Abby’s. It had been taken about three months earlier, just a few days after Jack’s trip to the emergency room, and it captured a moment that was a sweet opposite of that ordeal, a healing. She was out in the sunshine at a nearby park, breastfeeding.
I peered in closer at the photo on Abby’s laptop and noticed that a comment thread had ensued below it. I leaned even closer to read it.
On and on it went.
Aw. Nice!
I’m all for nursing and whatever if you have to, but please? You really have to do it in my face?
I agree. GROSS.
It beautiful and natural grow up, yay Abby!!
I saw 1 at Chipotle eating a burrito with her boob all out. Yuck! LOL!
Seriously if you really need to do this cover up or go to bathroom my kids have to see this??!?
How old is he anyway-looks pretty big to be doing this, maybe child abuse?
U peple r morons breastfed is BEST thing Abbie and any 1 can do for baby.
Oh you are saying your a better Mom then me because this? I am the moron? And in public?
I so agree about in public. Maybe we should begin peeing and defacating in public too? To not be morons?
“I feel sick to my stomach,” I said.
“I just wanted to share a happy moment,” Abby said. “That’s what that group is supposed to be for.”
“Let’s move to the fucking Himalayas,” I said.
I envisioned a monastery in the foothills, monotonous chanting from dawn to dusk, gruel for sustenance, towering mountains all around to seal us off from the Internet. A world away from this world. A total retreat.
Riggs, Bobby
And then my wife was famous.
She did not react to the online acrimony by retreating, as I would have. Instead, she fought back. She didn’t focus on the individuals critiquing her breastfeeding picture but on the ideas behind these voices. A mother feeding her baby with herself had somehow become for many unseemly, unnatural, something to either avoid altogether or to engage in with secrecy, as if it were worthy of shame. Abby started a blog and a related Facebook page in hopes of opposing that message. It struck a nerve. Within a few weeks she had several thousand followers. Within months the number would be in the hundreds of thousands and would grow into a whole burgeoning career, albeit one that didn’t generate a whole lot of income. But there were podcast interviews, a television news feature, speaking engagements.
“I just want to tell you how much you mean to me,” one woman told Abby at a parenting conference in Los Angeles as I stood nearby with Jack. Then the woman began to cry. The weeping grateful fan! It was my Big Idea book scenario come to life (see lose), but of course I was on the sidelines of it.
Abby’s new purpose—to help a growing legion of new mothers—was demanding. Whatever time she had away from Jack—namely, the rare instances when he let go of consciousness and slept—she needed to be online. My support for this new demand wavered.
“Hey,” I said on a rare night when Jack had fallen asleep fairly ear
ly. I was sitting on the couch and Abby was in the recliner typing into her laptop. I was lonely, wanting to talk. And there was some extra urgency that night. I had become aware of the general parameters of my wife’s ovulation schedule, and because we were still floating the idea of trying for another baby before we were too old to do it, I thought I might get another rare stab at sex.
“Hey,” I repeated. “Hey!”
Abby finally stopped typing and looked up from her laptop.
“Can we maybe just unhook for one fucking second from Facebook?” I said, imbuing the last word with disgust-italics.
The battle of the sexes is primarily a cold war. Icy stares, the silent treatment. Invisible bonds, invisible borders. You wouldn’t even notice it most of the time. But other times, of course, you feel it cleaving you right down the middle of your body. We went to bed that night angry, wordless. There are always these invisibly charged borders and embargoes and blockades. We’re hesitant to press the big red button for fear of the consequences.
A spectacular exception to this rule occurred in 1973, when a fifty-five-year-old former US Open–winning tennis player, Bobby Riggs, saw an opportunity in his true calling—as a hustler. At that time the Women’s Lib movement was cresting, prompting a widespread rush of awareness of the societal inequality between the sexes. Women clamored not just to be given the same economic opportunities and compensation as men but to seize control of their own gender identity, to topple the idea that the primary role of a woman was as a cheerleading sex object, marginal, passive, servile. Equality was the word most often bandied about. Women wanted to be considered equal to men. Bobby Riggs seized on this notion and mocked it, boasting that even at his age, which was beyond ancient in terms of professional sports, he could beat the top women tennis players. He wanted specifically to play Billie Jean King, who was not only arguably the best women’s tennis player at the time but was one of the most outspoken public figures advocating for women’s equality. When King initially declined Riggs’s challenge, Riggs played another top player on the women’s tour, Margaret Court, and beat her soundly. Riggs’s loud braying about the win—and about the fundamental inequality of women to men—finally drew Billie Jean King into battle. King willingly participated in the circus-like shenanigans surrounding the match (for example, after being carried onto the court, Cleopatra-like, on a covered sedan chair shouldered by muscle men dressed up as Egyptian slaves, she presented Riggs with a pig to symbolize his chauvinism). But she was also clear about setting the stakes of the match. Press reporting on the proceedings described her as “militant.” She said before the match, “At first, when I was becoming aware, I blamed the system, but when I began to analyze it I realized the ‘system’ is men.”