Throw Like a Woman

by Susan Petrone

  The Today in Sports theme played and Brenda felt an odd sort of lift when Charlie Bannister’s round face appeared on the television screen and he started talking. “Good evening, America, I’m Charlie Bannister and you’re watching Today in Sports,” he began. “And tonight I’m here to tell you why baseball is superior to all other sports. Why? Because every baseball game is the opportunity to see something you’ve never seen before, and tonight was no exception. Now basketball has a triple double, and hockey has a hat trick, and horse racing has the Triple Crown, and football has, well, field goals. And touchbacks. Baseball has the triple play, which you might see once or twice a season. Baseball also has the double play. If one team turns three double plays in one game, you might call that a triple double. And if both teams turn three double plays, you might call that a sextuple double. And if you throw a triple play into the mix, well then you might just call it historic, and that is exactly what happened in today’s meeting of the St. Louis Cardinals and the Pittsburgh Pirates.”

  “He does have a way with words,” she said to the TV. Charlie didn’t mention SignBrenda.com or women in baseball, but he still had some good turns of phrase. As Brenda sipped a room service glass of red wine, she reflected that her evening had still turned out okay. “Sorry, George,” she murmured, “maybe next time.”

  The New York trip was a welcome twenty-four-hour vacation, then it was back to the usual churn of kids, work, laundry, cooking, cleaning, repeat, with occasional pauses to sleep. The Thursday night games had become the highlight of the week if only because the novelty had worn off for Jon and Adele and most of her friends, so they didn’t attend games too often, and Andy didn’t want to go in the first place. The long drive out to the west side and back was one of the few times Brenda could just drive along listening to some of her old favorite bands—The Smiths, The Clash—without having the boys complain.

  Just after the Fourth of July weekend, David called her at work. Brenda hadn’t talked to him for about a week and a half and was, frankly, not sure how often one did speak to one’s agent.

  “How’s your arm?” David asked.

  “It’s fine,” Brenda replied, hunching over the phone in a feeble attempt to prevent the rest of the cube farm from overhearing her side of the conversation. Ever since the ensuing publicity from the Fountain contract, people at work had been speculating as to when she would quit. They laughed when she told them that she needed the health care benefits for her family and that after taxes and the agent’s cut, the endorsement contract would pay off her mortgage and that was pretty much it. Derek had confessed that there was actually a Brenda Quit Pool, in which most of the office had placed bets as to the date and time she would resign.

  “Fine?” David asked. “It should be spectacular.”

  “Why?” Brenda noticed that the omnipresent sound of fingers hitting keyboards that normally permeated the office had stopped. She was being listened to. “Listen, I need to get back to work.”

  “Brenda, I want you to do something for me,” David said in that voice that involuntarily made Brenda think of silk sheets, even though she didn’t find him the least bit attractive. “I want you to go into your boss’s office, and I want you to tell him that you quit.”

  “I don’t think that would be wise,” Brenda said, feeling painfully aware of the dozen or so co-workers who were listening to her end of the conversation. She could hear several voices in Derek’s cube, which was right next to hers, whispering to each other to be quiet and that they couldn’t hear. It looked like the cubicle wall was moving, as though several people were pressed up against it in order to hear better and not be seen. “Hold on a minute, please,” she said.

  Brenda put the receiver on her desk and quickly pushed her office chair back. The chair stopped rolling just beyond the thin metal and carpet wall separating her and Derek’s cubicles. She saw Derek and her friend Rachel sitting hunched over on the desk (it was apparently Derek’s shoulder that had been hitting the wall), one person in Derek’s chair, and two others sitting on the floor.

  “Could I just have a private conversation, please?” Brenda asked.

  “Sorry, Brenda,” Derek said and climbed down from the desk. “Come on, guys.”

  “Thank you.” Brenda rolled her chair back into her cubicle and picked up the phone. “Sorry for the interruption,” she said.

  “I don’t mind. Now, are you there?”

  “Yes. Could we get to the point, please?”

  “You have a tryout with the Indians next Monday.”

  Brenda gave a little gasp and dropped the receiver. She had fantasized once or twice about such a thing happening, less because she wanted to be the first woman to play major league baseball and more because she liked the idea of a woman—not necessarily her, just any woman—breaking a few conventions and rubbing sexism in the noses of the old boys’ network. But those were just fantasies—daydreams of a woman who would be content to vote for female candidates and raise two sons who respected women. Being the groundbreaker herself wasn’t an integral part of the fantasy, yet here was David putting it on a plate for her to take.

  She picked up the receiver and asked: “Are you serious?”

  “As serious as a heart attack in a prostitute’s bed.”

  The allusion to infidelity and sleaze made her suddenly think of Ed and his cavalier attitude toward monogamy and commitment and made her fingers involuntarily grip a non-existent baseball.

  “What time on Monday?” she asked.

  •◊•

  Excerpt from the transcript for Today in Sports with Charlie Bannister, ESPN, July 12:

  Charlie: It’s hard to believe we’re heading into the All-Star break—I’m still trying to figure what happened to April. At the halfway mark, in the American League West, it’s all Mariners, all the time. The A’s are so far back, they may have already been mathematically eliminated. It seems like the Red Sox and the Yankees have alternating custody of the AL East. Despite what everybody else says about this year being Boston’s turn, believe me when I tell you the Yanks will end up on top, but the Sox will get the first wildcard spot in the playoffs. The American League divisional races only get interesting in the AL Central, where the White Sox and the Tigers have been doing a do-si-do between first and second place like a couple of square dancers. Unless some sort of miracle happens in the AL Central basement, my mid-season prediction is the Tigers take the divisional title and the White Sox take second wildcard spot.

  Chapter Seven

  •◊•

  The weekend before the tryout was rough. Ed had been scheduled to pick the boys up at ten on Saturday and was late. Brenda was out in the front yard weeding the flower bed and hoping that the boys wouldn’t wander from the back yard to the front while she was muttering under her breath about Ed. Their bungalow didn’t have much of a yard in terms of space—the front was maybe forty by forty—but Brenda considered it her personal mission to make sure as much of it as possible was covered in flowers. Back before Ed moved out, she had had a small vegetable patch in the back and occasionally slipped in a few tomato and squash plants here and there in the front. She loved feeding her children vegetables she had grown. When the boys were smaller, they had enjoyed helping in the garden, getting just as big a kick out of growing and eating their own food as Brenda did. Now, between working and solo parenting, even this little pleasure had fallen by the wayside.

  There wasn’t any noise coming from the back yard, but Brenda left the boys alone. Andy and Jon hadn’t said anything all morning. They hadn’t fought or argued either, just drifted from the living room to the front porch to the backyard, as though they needed to be in the right place at the right time in order to make their father appear.

  The boys were still in the backyard when Ed pulled into the driveway. Brenda was on her hands and knees, pulling weeds with her back to the street, but she heard Ed’s car. It was a sport
y little retro number made to resemble one of the muscle cars of the 1950s. When their old Civic died a few years back with over 250,000 miles on it, Ed had said he thought he deserved to drive a decent car for once in his life. They had decided on another Civic, but then Ed changed his mind. It was shortly after he had turned forty, and Brenda always attributed the car to a midlife crisis. It was a black coupe with a back seat barely large enough to accommodate two small children, much less two growing boys, groceries, or anything a father might need. It was about five grand more than they had decided to spend, but that hadn’t seemed to matter, either then or now. She remembered the first time he pulled that car into the drive. He’d gotten out with a wide grin and said, “Check it out.” The boys had originally gone crazy for the car. Although she’d been concerned about the cost, she hadn’t really thought about it until Ed said he couldn’t take the boys to baseball practice or to friends’ houses or doctor’s appointments or anywhere else because the car was too small. Brenda always marked the purchase of Ed’s car as their marriage’s point of no return—the moment when he seemingly decided that it’d be a lot more fun to be single again than to live with the family he had started.

  “Just like Ed to start something and not finish it,” Brenda muttered every time she saw the half-tiled bathroom upstairs, the shoddily repaired garage door, and every other partially completed project around the house. When she heard Ed’s car purr into the driveway, she felt her hand grip the trowel a little harder.

  She stood up and faced Ed’s car. Its metallic paint job reflected the mid-July sun back into her eyes. Ed unfolded his tall frame from the stupidly small car and stood looking at her, keeping the vehicle between them.

  “Hi, Brenda,” he said cheerily, as though there weren’t thirty feet, fifteen years of marriage, and ten months of separation between them.

  “You’re awfully late.”

  “I had some errands to run and lost track of time.” He still sounded too happy, his voice trailing up and down like the bouncing ball in an old sing-along cartoon. It was the same lilting cadence that he had always greeted her with after a night of particularly vigorous love making.

  “You didn’t even call the boys to tell them you’d be late.”

  Ed rested his arms on the roof of the car. “They’re boys. They don’t care.”

  “They’re your sons, and they do care.” Brenda was now squeezing the trowel so tightly that she felt as though she could crush the solid wood handle and turn it to sawdust.

  A slight motion out of the corner of her right eye caught her attention, and she turned to see Andy and Jon standing by the chain-link gate that separated the fenced-in backyard from the driveway and the front yard. The gate was open but they didn’t cross its invisible line, just stood standing in the backyard, a Frisbee in Andy’s hand and wary looks on both their faces.

  “Hey guys,” she called. “Your dad’s here.” She tried to make her voice sound as light and cheery as Ed’s, but she was too nervous, tired, frustrated, and disappointed to sound like anything but a frazzled single mom who hadn’t had sex in over a year.

  “Sorry I’m a little late,” Ed said. “What do you two feel like doing today?”

  Andy shrugged his shoulders, while Jon simply said, “I don’t know.”

  “Well, we’ll think of something. Wanna go play baseball in the park?”

  “I’m sick of baseball,” Andy said. Brenda could see in his face that he’d made an on-the-spot decision. “I don’t want to go today.”

  “I want to go,” Jon said. “Andy, we have to go.”

  “Come on, Andy,” Ed said, walking over to the gate. “Let’s go play ball.”

  “Yeah, let’s go. I want to play baseball,” Jon said.

  “Well, I don’t, and I’m not going today.”

  “Mom, tell Andy he has to go.”

  “We don’t have to play baseball. We’ll do something else, right?” Ed glanced over at Brenda for backup, the way they had sometimes done when the boys were younger and being obstinate.

  “This is between you and the boys.” As much as she looked forward to having a day to herself every other Saturday, there was no way she was going to force one of the boys to spend time with Ed if he didn’t want to. Brenda tried to convince herself that she was backing Andy’s decision because she wanted to support him, not because she wanted to hurt Ed.

  “That’s not fair!” Jon snapped. “It’s our day with Dad. Andy has to go. Mom!” He practically screamed the last word, as though it were a command to Brenda to fix everything that was wrong. Brenda knew she couldn’t fix a damn thing, that day or any day.

  “Jon, even if Andy doesn’t go, you can still spend the day with your father.”

  “If Andy doesn’t go, I’m not going.”

  “Wait a minute . . .” Ed said. “Brenda!” He looked at her as though it was her fault that the boys didn’t want to spend the day with him.

  “Jon, if you want to go, then you should go. Andy doesn’t want to go. It’s okay that you want different things today.”

  Andy looked down at his younger brother with the closest thing to a smile she had seen on his face in weeks and mumbled something to his brother that Brenda couldn’t hear. Jon nodded and went to get his baseball glove, bat, and ball. And that was it. Ed and Jon went off for the day, leaving Andy and Brenda standing in the front yard. The entire time Ed was at the house, Brenda could feel every nerve standing on end. It was all she could do to not launch the trowel into the unblemished side of his car.

  After Ed and Jon and pulled out of the driveway, Andy muttered, “He didn’t even call to say he’d be late.”

  “He probably just lost track of time,” Brenda said. She had vowed to herself long ago not to be one of those women who badmouthed their exes to their children, no matter how difficult this was.

  Andy turned to face her. “Are you blind? He does this all the time. I know three different kids whose parents are divorced and they spend the entire weekend at their dads’ houses. They have their own rooms and stuff there and everything. Dad never does that. He doesn’t even have a room for us. We’ve never slept over. He doesn’t want us there.”

  “I’m sorry, sweetie.” She reached out to touch his shoulder, but he pulled away.

  “I’m going to go ride my bike,” he said and headed for the back yard.

  Brenda resisted the urge to follow him and waited until he re-emerged in the front yard with his mountain bike before asking what time he’d be home. She was happy he had at least thought to grab his bike helmet. Somehow that seemed like a small parenting victory.

  “I don’t know,” he muttered, kicking at one of the pedals and watching it spin.

  “Do you want any lunch before you leave?”

  “No. Can I go now?”

  “I have to go to the grocery store today, but that’s it. If you come home when I’m out, I’ll leave the extra key under the big rock by the back door. If you go to a friend’s house, just give me a call so I know where you are.”

  “Okaaay . . .” he sighed without looking at her. “Can I go now?

  “Yes. Please be home or call by four, okay?” she said to his back as he headed down the driveway.

  She thought she heard him said something like “All right” in response. She figured this was about the most she was going to get from him. It was actually the longest conversation they had had since the first video aired on Charlie Bannister’s show.

  This thought brought with it a reminder that she had a tryout with the Cleveland Indians in less than forty-eight hours. She had been so consumed with the boys and Ed that she hadn’t even thought about it. She wondered if she should spend the entire day gardening or if it might make her arm sore.

  David had said just to do whatever she normally did but not to do anything too strenuous. Sometimes it seemed like everything was strenuous. Being bo
th father and mother to the boys and lugging around groceries and piles of laundry and cleaning gutters and fixing faucets and taking out garbage and mowing the lawn and doing all the other piles of work that she and Ed had formerly split seemed strenuous, not so much on her body as on her spirit. It seemed like the only time she found time to herself was on Thursday nights. Even more than the peace and quiet of the drive out, she liked being on the pitcher’s mound, where she was in charge of the clock and could be completely alone with her thoughts. The mound meant solitude.

  Brenda spent a couple hours doing yard work, washing the kitchen floor, cleaning the bathrooms, running a few loads of laundry, and generally trying to catch up on all the tasks that seemed to elude her during the week. Adele and David had both suggested she use some of the money from the endorsement contract to hire a cleaning service and a landscaper to take care of these things, but that seemed like a waste. There was no guarantee that she’d get any other endorsements or that she would get a contract.

  Around two o’clock, she was having Nervous Breakdown Number 142 about the impending tryout when the phone rang. It was the manager of the CVS drugstore at the corner of Mayfield and Richmond Roads saying that her son had been caught shoplifting baseball cards.

  In a fog of shock and fear, she drove the mile and a half to the drugstore, sat with the manager, an undercover security guard, and Andy in a small office at the back of the store while they showed her video of Andy snaking along the candy aisle and furtively shoving a few packs of baseball cards into the pocket of his cargo shorts.

  Andy didn’t say a word in the store—he didn’t protest his innocence, didn’t claim that he was planning to pay for the baseball cards, didn’t apologize, in fact, didn’t show any emotion at all. The store manager was kind enough not to file charges with the police. Andy was released into his mother’s custody with a lifetime ban on entering that particular drugstore. Brenda thanked the manager profusely, managed to get a robotic “thank you” out of Andy, and got out of the store as fast as possible.