“We rode as fast as we could, but he kept following us,” Jon said, as though the power of his nine-year-old legs should have been enough to outrun a car.
“We turned down Sheffield instead of Oakmount,” Andy said, naming a street one over. “And we thought maybe he went away, but when we turned onto Oakmount, he was there.”
“He knew exactly where our street was,” Jon whispered.
“And then he started yelling some really nasty things.” Here Andy paused, and Brenda could feel her throat tighten and every nerve in her body tense.
“Did he threaten you?” she asked.
“No.” Andy’s voice grew slightly softer. “He threatened you.”
“He said you shouldn’t be playing baseball,” Jon said, and she could see tears welling up in his eyes.
“He said worse than that.” Andy’s eyes looked a bit red and wet, even though he was almost obsessive about not crying and made fun of Jon whenever he cried. “He said he’d hurt you if you kept playing.”
“You two are not to go out by yourselves. I want you each to have at least two friends with you at all times,” Brenda said. “No biking by yourself, Andy.” It was the first rational thing she could think of to say. No one, but no one was going to terrorize her kids. She knew “terrorize” was a strong word, perhaps too strong, but it was the only word she could think of that accurately conveyed how shaken both boys were. It was the word she used when she phoned Mark Munson and the police.
Brenda had almost forgotten that her mother was due to come over until Adele burst in the front door. She surveyed Brenda, Andy, Jon, and two police officers sitting in the living room and asked who had been arrested.
“Nobody’s been arrested, Mom,” Brenda said. “Some nutcase followed the boys home from camp.”
Adele actually started swaying back and forth, and Brenda thought she might pass out. One of the policemen caught her and helped her sit down while Brenda got a cold compress for her mother’s forehead. Taking momentary care of Adele took Brenda’s mind off of worrying about the boys and transferred her concern to how late she would be getting to the ballpark.
The boys had a decent description of the car and its driver but hadn’t gotten the license number. The police suggested an alarm system for the house, emergency cell phones for the boys, new locks, and promised they would patrol the neighborhood and watch the house. The sergeant who came to the house said he would personally call Progressive Field and ask for additional security, then he asked Brenda for her autograph.
The idea of leaving her family and being in a different place than the boys seemed untenable, so Andy, Jon, and Adele came with her to the ballpark. There were always seats available in the family section.
Brenda didn’t tell anyone on the team about the incident, only Mark and only because he was her manager. Even so, it was obvious that she was incredibly late—she hadn’t been around for warm-ups or batting practice. Showing up this late without a legitimate excuse would typically cost a player a fine. This was one of the times that having a locker room apart from the rest of the team was an advantage, and she hoped that her absence hadn’t been generally noticed.
As a mother, Brenda knew that somewhere, sometime, someone would say something cruel to her child—a bully on the playground or an insult from a queen bee in the lunchroom would hurt her kid’s feelings and there wasn’t any way to prevent it. But this was more insidious than a schoolyard taunt. This was a stranger menacing her kids. The rude messages on the answering machine had been showing up all summer long, and by now she had learned to brush them off. But a stranger following the boys home was something else entirely. It didn’t matter if some crackpot threatened her—she had heard worse. The only thing that mattered was that Andy and Jon were safe and protected.
She managed to get dressed and slipped into the locker room before the team took the field, taking her standard seat alone at one of the small round tables near the door. The other players were shooting the breeze, re-lacing their cleats one more time, and generally trying to stay loose in the few minutes left before the game started. She tried to pretend that she had been in her locker room, but Doug Stone asked her where she had been and if everything was okay. If it had been any other player besides Doug and if he hadn’t asked after her wellbeing, she probably would have lied and claimed to have warmed up on her own and merely been in her locker room. But Doug had been the first player to befriend her and deserved at least a half-truth, if not the entire truth.
“We had some family-related issues,” she replied.
“Is everybody okay?” Doug asked as he took a seat next to her. She could tell he was genuinely concerned.
“Yes. We’re all a little shaken up, but we’re going to be fine.”
He looked puzzled, obviously expecting slightly more detail than that, but accepted her reticence by saying, “If you feel like talking or blowing off some steam, let me know. Hope everything is all right.”
“It will be. Thanks.”
Fortunately, Mark came in at that moment, and his quick pep talk gave her an excuse not to speak. Munson reminded them that they had moved themselves into contention and had a shot at the playoffs if they kept their focus and made each game matter. As she looked around the room, Brenda was reminded that, like it or not, she was part of a team and her fortunes were now intertwined with those of the men in the room with her.
She wished that the rest of the world recognized her role on the team. The Ford Frick protesters showed up outside Progressive Field that night and the next two games that weekend. Brenda didn’t see them, just got an eyeful from the news. It wasn’t clear to her if this was the same group that had shown up in Texas or a different group using the same idea. Regardless of who they were or where they got the idea, they ticked her off.
Just about every player on the team got heckled at one point or another, even at home. Most of the guys just let the comments roll right off their backs. Some, like Dave McGall, the shortstop, would yell back at the fans. Brenda remembered reading about a game a couple years back where he had actually gone into the stands after a group of guys who had been ragging on him mercilessly the entire game. The story went that McGall was actually winning the three-against-one fight when Art Groggins and Greg Landers pulled him off. At the time, Brenda never thought she’d end up working with McGall, whom she considered a head case with a Gold Glove. Now he changed his clothes right down the hall from her. She supposed it was better than playing against him.
She still found hardcore porn in her locker room, and the bastardized Fountain ads were still making an occasional appearance in the clubhouse; she didn’t even want to see what they would do with the ad for the Bam! sports bra. The last game of the home stand, Cipriani and Pasquela outdid themselves, with a photo of (presumably) one of them, shot from the waist down, with his uniform pants down and a full-on erection. It looked like it had been printed off on somebody’s home computer to a piece of regular copy paper and was taped to the mirror in Brenda’s locker room. Brenda was more disgusted than anything else. Her first impulse was to grab the photo and rip it into a million little pieces, but as she reached for it, she stopped. She wasn’t allowed to respond to hecklers or blog rants or newspaper columnists or radio call-in shows or television talking heads who said she shouldn’t be playing. But the front office had never said that she couldn’t respond to her teammates.
Very carefully, she pulled the photo off of the mirror, folded it in half (being careful to fold it picture-side in), and placed it in one of the zippered compartments of her duffel bag. She would find a good use for it.
•◊•
Excerpt from the transcript for Today in Sports with Charlie Bannister, ESPN, August 24:
Charlie: Over the weekend, White Sox lost two out of three to the Royals, while the Tigers were swept by the Twins. Meanwhile, the Indians swept the Mariners. All of this means that the
Indians are tied with the White Sox in the race for second place in the AL Central and Howie Wojinski owes me two beers and the title of Prognosticator in Residence.
Chapter Seventeen
•◊•
The team left for Baltimore right after the Sunday afternoon game. During the shuttling of the team from the bus to the airport to the evening flight to Baltimore, Brenda pondered how ironic it was that some things didn’t change. The previous November, she had missed Jon’s class performing an afternoon Thanksgiving play because she had only been at her job a month and didn’t have any vacation accrued. And now work was keeping her from the boys at an even more crucial time.
The airplane was dark and comparatively quiet. It was just a short flight—not even two hours—but most of the players used it an excuse to catch a cat nap. The team was traveling on a commercial flight, so there were non-baseball types on the plane. Brenda had been too tired to notice if the other passengers stared when she came slouching onto the plane in the middle of twenty-four big league ballplayers. She wondered how many of the people sitting around her had children at home they were already missing.
Luck of the draw had seated her in between Julio Ochoa and Josh Bandkins. Ochoa was asleep, his marionette-like legs sprawling into the aisle. Bandkins had the window seat and was fidgety, fiddling with his smart phone and then with his pillow then shifting in his seat. Sitting in between the two men, Brenda was struck by how large they were, how much more space they filled than other people.
Brenda was too hyped up to sleep, especially on such a short flight. She had pitched a full inning that afternoon and given up a walk, a stolen base, two hits, and two runs. It was one of the worst outings she had had. Earl had told her not to let it get to her, that she had had an off day because her sinker wasn’t breaking properly and that they’d work on it. Brenda knew it was because the entire weekend her mind had been on her kids and not on the game. And the Mariners hitters had her number because she hadn’t done her homework on them. It was a certainty that, by now, every hitter in the American League had studied film of her pitching and knew her limited repertoire of tricks and her many tells. She had hardly had time to look at film of the Orioles’ starting lineup, much less the Rays, both of whom they were facing on the upcoming road trip.
Bandkins glanced over at her. “Not taking a nap either?” he asked.
“Nope. I’ve got a lot on my mind,” she replied.
“Today’s game is history. Shake it off. We won it, so worry about the next one.”
She wasn’t sure if she really wanted to talk, but it was so rare that anyone on the team talked to her that she felt obliged to. “Easier said than done,” she replied with half a smile.
“I remember my rookie year, if I made a mistake, I would replay it in my head a hundred times, and that’s useless because you have to focus on the next pitch and the next playable ball.”
“So shake it off and don’t make the same mistake twice?”
“Yep,” he said, fiddling with his smart phone. “You know this is my eighth season in the majors. The average major league career is only something like four. I think the guys who don’t make it are the ones who play head games with themselves. You can’t worry about whether you struck out in your last at-bat—you have to worry about not striking out in this at-bat. It’s that whole thing about staying in the present moment, like the Buddhists.”
“Are you a Buddhist?” Brenda asked. Religion was one of those topics you weren’t supposed to talk about, even though the ball club had a number of avowedly, sometimes even aggressively Christian players, like Anthony Fleetwood. But it was late and the dimly lit space of their two seats in the otherwise quiet airplane somehow made it seem all right to ask a personal question.
“Dabbled in it. I was raised Presbyterian but haven’t gone in years, even though Anthony seems to think it’s his personal mission to have me born again.”
“Oh good, I thought it was just me.”
Bandkins grinned. “Are you another fallen away Presbyterian?”
“More like an ambivalent Catholic,” she replied. “I love the beauty and ritual of the mass, but there’s a lot in the dogma that doesn’t sit well with me. And as a female, I always felt like a second-class citizen—observing but not actually participating.”
Josh was silent for a moment, his face turned toward hers. Brenda was suddenly very aware of the proximity of their bodies. She could even see the prickly little black hairs coming in on his shaved scalp. “Is that why you’re doing this?” he asked. “I mean, are you playing baseball to make some big feminist statement or something? Why are you here?” He emphasized the word “are” ever so slightly, as though this was a question he had been asking himself for a while.
It seemed like the best answer to another player would include something about loving the game and always wanting to play, but that felt disingenuous. “I need to support my kids,” she said finally. Josh looked at her as though he was waiting for something more, as though that this one basic need wasn’t enough of a reason to disrupt the baseball world. “And I’m too flat-chested to be a stripper,” she added.
Josh snorted back a laugh that was loud enough to wake up Ochoa, who jerked straight up in his seat, saying “Que? Que?”
“Nothing, man,” Josh whispered. “Sorry. Go back to sleep.”
“Sorry, Julio. We’ll be quiet,” Brenda said.
Julio leaned back and shifted a bit in his chair, muttering something in Spanish that sounded drowsily annoyed.
“You’re okay, Haversham,” Josh said. “You just keep throwing the way you’ve been throwing—today excluded—and you’ll be fine.”
“Thanks,” Brenda replied. They talked a bit more, mainly about music players and smart phones (Brenda was thinking of getting Andy a new one for his birthday), and Josh gave her a crash course on the best and worst ballparks.
Monday’s workout was like every other team workout except that they were in a new stadium (to her) and both Bandkins and Teeset said “Hello” to her. That seemed like progress. She took a little walk through the neighborhood and brought Chinese takeout up to her hotel room for dinner, trying to ignore that the rest of her teammates were going out in small groups for dinner or drinks or fun while she holed up alone in her room.
She called home before bedtime. She just needed to hear the boys’ voices. As usual, Jon answered. She could hear his nine-year-old energy through the phone and tried to remember what it was like to be that happy all the time.
“Hi sweetie. How are you?”
“Great! We went to the pool with Grandma today, and then later I went over to Cory’s house and shot off bottle rockets.”
“Bottle rockets?” Brenda bit her tongue.
“Cory’s dad was there.”
“Do you still have all your fingers?”
“Yeah,” Jon laughed. “We’re going shopping for school supplies tomorrow. I need notebooks and stuff and new sneakers and some jeans and a new hoodie.”
“I know that. I left money for Grandma to take you and Andy shopping.”
“She said I can’t get an Ohio State shirt because it’s too expensive and that I can get two plain hoodies for the price of one OSU hoodie.”
“Well, she’s right. You can.”
“But I don’t want a plain one. I want an OSU hoodie. We can afford it now, right?”
Brenda paused. “Whether we can afford it and whether we need it are two different things,” she replied.
“Mo-ommm,” Jon whined. “Come on. Please? It’s just a hoodie.”
“I’ll tell you what. Why don’t Grandma and I give you a set amount of money for school supplies, and you can choose what you need.”
Jon started saying, “Yeah, I like that idea . . .”
“Let me finish,” Brenda added. “You’ll have to stay within your budget. So if you blow the who
le thing on your new sneakers, that’s it. You’re getting a plain hoodie.”
Jon considered this for a moment, then said, “Okay.” He passed her off to Adele, who assured Brenda that everything was fine.
“You always say that,” Brenda said.
“Andy and Jon are alive and kicking and so am I. Everything’s fine. How are you?”
“I miss them.”
“I know,” her mother replied. “They’re all right. But you knew that—a mother always knows if her child is in trouble.”
Brenda didn’t take the bait. She couldn’t. The unwritten rules of the clubhouse dictated that what went on in the locker room or the team bus stayed there. For Brenda to go to Munson or anyone else and complain about being harassed would just set her up to be an even bigger target.
They spoke for a few moments about the boys, about nothing. Andy didn’t feel like talking, “But he sends his love,” Adele added. When they finally hung up, Brenda had never felt so alone.
On Tuesday morning, she went out and bought Andy something called a “Gismo” that Bandkins had recommended. It had loads of memory for music and video, was super-fast, super-hip, and could probably be used to perform open heart surgery in the proper hands. Andy hadn’t actually asked for anything for his birthday. The new catcher’s mitt he got at the beginning of the season was his early birthday gift from Brenda, but a new mp3 player was one of the few things he had actually talked about during the last home stand. At first it felt like a guilt gift, but as she thought about her first born, two things always came to mind: baseball and music. He listened to music constantly. Brenda remembered what it felt like to escape into music she loved. She had discovered The Smiths and The Clash when she was just a little older than Andy. With a father who rarely spoke more than two words at a time and a mother who didn’t understand why her daughter wanted to wear all black when the other girls her age were wearing pastels, she had been sure that no one ever felt as lonely and isolated as she did. Even though she knew part of what Andy wanted to get away from was probably her, music was a safe escape and one she could give him.
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