“This will cool you off,” he said, though that was not quite the effect it was having. “Don’t dry them.” He dragged one soapy finger over the creases behind my elbows, then pushed me forward until I was wet up to my forearms. “Let it run until you feel cold,” he said, standing just behind me. I shivered and he turned the water off. One damp hand rested momentarily on the back of my neck before he moved away to sit at the table. Picking up my drink, I joined him there.
“You should tell them at the hearing,” I said.
He shook his head, picking at the label on his root beer. Everyone else in Florida drank root beer from a can. I couldn’t decide if that made Ben old fashioned, or fashionable. Probably neither.
“What good would that do? It’s an event that no longer holds any real relevance. You know what I want, Casey? I want that job because I’ve been a damn fine coach for seventeen years. I want it because I helped that team win championships. I want it because I worked for it.”
“Maybe they’ll see that,” I said. “Maybe that’s why they’re having the hearing in the first place.”
“Maybe,” he said, but he had already discounted this option. “The truth is I never had that job because I was good. I had the job because Billy wanted me there.”
“But you were good,” I pointed out. “I even heard him say so, on occasion.”
Ben smiled and shrugged, a bit embarrassed by the praise. “He was a good baseball coach, and I was one of his students.”
The thing about Ben, however, and I think my father knew this too, was that he came to us with some part of himself already completed. There were areas of Ben that remained unteachable. I tried to remember something about his mother, but couldn’t come up with anything beyond this fragile, quiet woman who looked at Ben the way a small child stares at an older sibling’s forbidden toy. She was, I think, afraid to hope. Perhaps that was a good thing.
“I’m not sure he was such a great teacher,” I said, “when it came to everything else.”
Leaning back on two legs of his chair, Ben gestured with the near-empty bottle. “You turned out ok.” The bottle made a wide, sweeping motion that encompassed me and the chair and the hall. We were all ok.
“You think?” I said, grinning miserably.
“Sure,” he said. “I like you.”
And he did. Most of us say this to people we don’t know, people we’re afraid to examine too closely. Ben was never afraid of me. I couldn’t explain why this was, except that we recognized each other, long ago. It was like passing someone on the freeway you’d been following for miles. You might not know their name, but you were familiar with their journey.
“Nearly a year after my mother died,” I told him, “I was sitting in the kitchen one afternoon, writing a paper for school. I don’t even remember what the paper was about. The radio was playing softly in the other room, and suddenly, I had this thought. Completely out of the blue: my mother used to dance. That was it, and then I could see her, moving with my sister around the kitchen to The Who. They had been making something, maybe a cake, and my mother was wearing a dark red sweater and jeans and she was dancing, wildly, her hair flashing around her face like a gypsy. ‘Baba O’Reily’, the song was, and you know that Irish bit at the end? That was what she danced to, with Lee clapping and laughing, and God, she was so vital and alive. I think I’d forgotten she could be that way. The memory actually shocked me, like touching electricity. It was so beautiful, it hurt.”
“You don’t want to forget who you believed your father to be,” he said quietly. “Before you knew.”
When I looked up, his face was bruised and darkened by the shadows of the old porch outside the window. The day had nearly ended, and my father was gone. I shook my head.
“I want to see him completely. I want the parts to fit together.”
He was quiet for a long moment, eyes down on the half-destroyed label of his bottle of root beer. The kitchen was painted with sunset; rich purple shadows, the momentary glitter of gold highlights on the stainless steel. “There used to be this kid who played for FSU named Aaron Gershwitz,” Ben began. “Little Jewish kid with something to prove, I don’t know why. I mean, it’s Tampa.” Ben spread his hands on the table, fingertips bending slightly. “He was preaching to the converted, if you know what I mean.”
I smiled and he caught it, continued. “Anyway, he used to crowd the plate. He’d hunch over it like he was trying to protect it. It drove our pitchers crazy, since if you let him get away with it, your strike zone was suddenly about the size of a paperback. They used to brush him back, over and over. Up he’d come and then back he’d jump as the ball practically singed the buttons off his shirt. Drove Billy crazy.
“Well, come the final game of the regular season and we’re only up by half a game. The team right behind us had already won that day and we knew this was it, do or die. It’s a tie game, and they’ve got a runner on second and third. Big kid named Evan Klein is up on the mound. He was a good kid, good control. We all watch as Gershwitz comes up to bat and Billy calls a time out. Goes up, talks to Klein and then comes back to the bench.
“I ask him what he’d said and he tells me he’d made sure Klein wasn’t thinking of trying to brush him back. If he walked him, we’d have the bases loaded and the middle of the order coming up. ‘Just throw the goddamned ball,’ Billy recounts to me. ‘That’s what I told him. You know where the strike zone is, so use it. Let the ump do his job.’
“So up steps Gershwitz and he’s practically standing on the base. Klein looks over at the bench and throws the pitch. Inside, the ump says. Now, from where I was sitting, it looked sweet, right over the edge of the plate. So Gershwitz steps in again and Klein winds up. And sure enough, another tight fastball, right over the plate and the ump calls it inside. Now, I can tell Klein’s pissed. He doesn’t want to walk this guy, he doesn’t want to pitch to him, he just wants to get an out and get us the hell out of the inning. So he winds up again and whack, hits Gershwitz right in the ribs. Walks him. Billy’s irate, screaming from the dugout. At any rate, we get lucky. The next guy goes down easily on four pitches. Klein comes back to the bench expecting to get his ass chewed out and Billy doesn’t disappoint.
“’I told you not to try to brush him back,’ Billy shouts. Klein doesn’t say a word. ‘That’s fifty extra laps for you tomorrow, Klein,’ Billy says. Now this pisses Klein off. Just the day before, another of our pitchers had brushed Gershwitz back off the plate three times and Billy had only made him run an extra twenty-five. ‘What the fuck for?’ Klein says. Billy looks him up and down and sniffs. ‘Twenty-five for brushing him back when I told you not to.’
“’And the other fucking twenty-five?’ Klein shouts. Billy looks him in the eye and the whole dugout is silent. You could hear the crickets in the outfield. ‘Those are for missing,’ he says.”
I snorted and Ben grinned. “That’s a great story,” I said.
“I know,” Ben agreed. “And it’s quintessentially your father. He wasn’t angry if you took the initiative, but he’d kill you for dropping the ball.”
We were silent, then Ben stood and gestured to the fridge with his bottle. “Another one?”
I nodded and watched him as he stood for a moment in front of the open door, sighing in the cool air.
“I’ve got to get a new air-conditioner,” he said and set both of the bottles on the countertop. An old metal bottle opener was under the sink and Ben flicked off the cap of his bottle and tossed it into the sink.
I should have gone home. Lee and Jake were there, crying together, or however it was they shared their grief. Instead I stood and stepped up behind Ben, hugging him tightly around the waist. He hesitated, then set his drink down, sliding his hands down my arms from the elbows to interlace his hands with mine.
“I’m glad you haven’t fixed your air-conditioner,” I said, my cheek pressed against the damp fabric of his back. “I’m tired of everything being perfectly controlled.” Then I slid my
hands free from his and moved them to his waist. When I pulled his shirt over his head, he lifted his arms like a child. It wasn’t until I pressed my mouth against the bones at the base of his skull that I got the reaction I was, until then, unknowingly hoping for. Ben gasped and grasped the countertop.
His skin was smoother than I expected, dappled dull gold and sepia in the waning light. When I reached the base of his spine, his breath was fast and thick, as if he had been running. Turning slowly, he let me kiss from the tight skin of his navel to the already-damp places in the hollow of his throat before he gripped my arms and stilled me, bending to kiss me. I was astonished to find the interior of his mouth cool and sweet from his drink.
This was not how it was with Mark. I’d forgotten, or perhaps I never knew in the first place, what it was like to want it so badly your body forgot itself. Ben wrestled my hair free from its combs and clutched it as if he was afraid of being swept off the floor of his kitchen into the approaching night. I wasn’t sure what was keeping me there, either.
He found a chair and pulled me down onto his lap. My skirt slid roughly up my thighs as I straddled him, a sweet friction, resting around my hips. Beneath me his body was lean and hard with a suddenly familiar muscularity. He pressed up against me and I returned the pressure. We moved together for a moment, teasing one another. This was what it would feel like, when it happened. Ben stopped suddenly, hands on my face, his breath tickling my nose as he tried to gather his control.
“Bedroom,” was all he managed to get out.
It took us several minutes to find it. Ben kept pushing me back against doors or walls that I found didn’t lead to soft pillows and cool sheets. I was trying to keep him focused on our goal, but it was impossible to ignore his mouth on my neck, on the space just above the clasp of my bra. And his hands were everywhere.
Then when we did find his bed and stripped off what remained of our clothing, I was distracted by his long, bare feet. All of him was bare before me, and I couldn’t help but slide down his body to touch his toes, and stroke his insoles. He was panting when I started, but purring when I moved up his legs, squeezing his calves, the strong muscles of his thighs. I’d never wanted to touch someone everywhere before. It was a novel thing, to be that immersed in sensation, to feel the invisible connection of his desire, of his pleasure washing over me as I explored his skin. I wanted to know what it felt like when I did that, and that... and how about that?
Everywhere he kissed me he left trails of cool air behind him.
After, Ben collapsed beside me, his arm over his eyes as if he was devastated, and perhaps he was. I was unable to move, disheveled and blissful, as if I’d spent the day at the beach, swimming in the surf. Propping himself up on one arm beside me, he brushed the hair back from my cheek. He opened his mouth and then closed it again. I wanted him to say something, I wanted to say something, but neither of us was willing to try something new.
“Can I stay?” I asked at last. He nodded and pulled me close to him, wrapping one strong arm around my waist. It was no coincidence that we were not facing one another. Neither of us was ready to discuss all the possibilities that were suddenly waving their bright flags in front of us, competing with our caution. Ben stroked the bare skin of my stomach, letting his fingers follow the curve of my hip to settle there. I drifted in and out until dawn cast new light into the room. In that time of half-awareness, Ben’s hands sought out mine. I turned to him at last and we began again.
The All-American Girls Baseball League
1990
The last time I spent any length of time alone with my father, he was flying out to the West coast for a coaching conference and decided to kill two birds with one stone, so to speak, by also visiting me. That was exactly how he put it, when he called to notify me two weeks before his arrival. While I tried to be overjoyed that I was, at last, going to get a visit, it annoyed me that he felt he still needed another excuse to get on the plane.
Of course, my father had picked a miserable time to come. In addition to the fact that I had just violently pried myself out of a relationship so ridiculous and damaging I couldn’t look back on it even five years later without wincing, I had been teaching at the college for just a few months and couldn’t yet afford a nice place. He said nothing as we pulled into the moldering complex, not even commenting on the meaningless Indian name, Tama Qua – the sort that kind of place always seemed to end up with. It wasn’t until we were past the Seventies brown glass of the entryway that he let loose.
“You would think that damn publishing house would have paid you something for that book,” he said as I led him into my studio apartment. To be truthful, it wasn’t that bad. The carpet was clean and though technically the view in the winter consisted mostly of the airport, in the spring the trees filled out and my balcony looked out on a wall of swaying shades of green.
“They did,” I explained. “I used it to buy the car.”
“The car,” he said. “Isn’t this area supposed to have great public transportation? What the hell do you need a car for?”
“I don’t.” Hanging my coat over the back of one of the chairs of my dinette set, I watched as he sank into my old sofa like a man sitting in a large yellow cloud. “I just wanted one. A big, fast car with tons of power that eats gas and contributes to the gradual destruction of the planet.”
“Don’t be so melodramatic. I was just asking.” He eyed my TV for a moment. “Does that thing get cable?”
“Sure Dad,” I said grimly. “I’m living in a shit-heap, but I’ve got cable.”
“Thought so,” he answered, flicking it on and thumbing through to ESPN. It was extraordinary how quickly he found it in the mass of local cable stations, as if he could sense baseball happening, somewhere. “Sox are going to get creamed. You keep up?”
Shrugging, I set my purse down next to his suitcase and settled on the arm of the couch to watch with him. “Sometimes.”
“You’re lying,” he said. “You’re still hooked. Lee marries one and doesn’t have a damn clue what the hell he does, and you… well, at least you watch.”
“So Dad,” I said. “I thought we could go to Pike Place Market if you want.”
He grunted as the pitcher threw a ball, just outside and a bit too high. “Why would I want to go there? What have they got, fruit, right?”
“Yeah, and vegetables.”
“I can get vegetables at home. I want to do something here I can’t do at home. Oh,” he shouted suddenly. “Goddamn it! You don’t pitch to him like that, you stupid fuck. Jesus. These kids haven’t got the control, you know? I mean, doesn’t anybody work with them once they hit the majors, or do they just let them ride around in first class sipping martinis and talking about how many classic cars they can park in their damn garage?”
I watched the ball drift silently over the far wall.
“Let’s go to the mountains,” I said, “and hike.”
“Fine, good,” he said, leaning back and settling in. “I like that idea.”
“You wanna beer, dad?”
“Huh?” he grunted and seemed to suddenly see me perched there, regarding him like a little brown bird. “Yeah, that’d be great, Case.”
I popped open two beers, which was just about the entire contents of my fridge, despite my repeated vows to eat “healthy”, and handed him one.
“So,” I said, “who do you like?”
“Mmm...” He leaned back and gestured to the TV with his beer. “The Reds are good this year. They could make it. We'll have to see how they do against Drabek and whether Bonds and Bonilla can be contained.”
I nodded and let him talk about baseball for a few minutes, comforted by the familiar analysis. I wondered in that moment if he ever knew how badly I had wanted to play for him.
“Now,” he said at last. “You’re being very quiet over there. What aren’t you telling me?”
“Dad,” I began, unsure how to disappoint him, though I’d done it so many times before. �
�Chris and I aren’t going to get married.”
He was silent, letting that sink in, I supposed. Adding it to his list.
“Why not?” he said, and his voice sounded cautious.
“He just...” I trailed off. We had flown out to visit my family the year before, when Chris had proposed. And what a miserable trip it had been, as he whined his way through my childhood. “I guess I just decided I’d had enough of the yelling and the indecision.”
For a moment, I thought he might be angry, but then he laughed, slapping his knee and spilling a bit of the beer.
“Well, it’s about fucking time!” he said and my look of complete surprise only seemed to make him laugh harder. “Jesus, Case, that boy was such a goddamned loser. I can’t tell you how thrilled Lee will be when you tell her.”
“Really?” I squeaked. “You don’t mind?”
“Mind?” He was serious suddenly. “Why would I mind? You’re a grown woman. Even if I’d liked him, you didn’t have to marry him to please me.”
“But...” I began and he stopped me with a hand on my leg.
“You don’t both have to marry baseball players.”
And there it was, out in the open. “That wasn’t why...”
“Yes it was,” he said firmly. “Don’t be stupid. No one in their right mind would put up with that asshole for even half a second if it weren’t for his contract. Casey...” He leaned over and tapped my knee. “He plays for the Mariners, for God’s sake. It’s not like he’s any good.”
I laughed then, feeling infinitely relieved and somehow slightly disappointed at the same time. “If you knew, all that time... why the hell didn’t you guys say anything?”
He looked at me, his face shrewd. “Would it have made you leave him any sooner?”
“No,” I admitted.
Casey's Home Page 19