The Way Home Looks Now

by Wendy Wan-Long Shang

  “I would like to thank everyone for coming today,” says Ba. He stands, facing the bleachers, his back to the field. We all turn in his direction, away from Erin and her dad. This is the first time he’s talked to all of us, parents and players. He holds up a clipboard, reading from a piece of paper.

  “I have heard from many of you, expressing your opinion about whether we should keep Erin Nickelson on the team. Some of you have told me that girls should not play baseball, and Erin should not be on this team. I cannot say that I agree with everyone, but that is to be expected.”

  Ba clears his throat and keeps reading. The paper curls around the edges, as if it has been folded and carried around for a long time.

  “I know many people who like the game of baseball very much. They would probably even say that they love the game. Most of these people are boys and men. They like to play the game and read about the game and watch the game, and when they are not doing these things, they like to talk about the game or collect the baseball cards.”

  I cringe a little when Ba says the baseball cards, but a few of the dads laugh and nudge their sons, not to be mean, but because they are the ones Ba is talking about.

  Ba flips the paper over and keeps reading. “The world is changing, though. Women are becoming doctors and lawyers, policemen and truck drivers. And some of them are baseball fans. Some of them enjoy this game as much as anyone here, know as much about the game as any man or boy.”

  Now some of the dads and players look at Erin. Of course, they are thinking that Ba is talking about her, maybe just her. But Ba could have been talking about Mom, too. This time last year, Mom was still telling everyone about the game she saw at the new Three Rivers Stadium.

  “It seems to me,” continues Ba, “that there are many reasons why someone should not play baseball. If they cannot have good grades, for instance, or keep up with their schoolwork. But a good reason is not whether someone is a boy or a girl. As we have seen on our own team, a girl can play just as well as a boy, if not better.”

  “You’re making a big mistake,” growls Mr. Lattimore. He is wearing a dark blue jacket that has LATTIMORE TOWING stitched on the back, and he has big, meaty hands. Ba looks small compared to him, like model trains built on a different scale. Some of the other dads murmur their agreement with Mr. Lattimore.

  Ba holds up a hand. Wait. “I said I had an opinion. And you have been kind enough to listen. But I have decided that this is not my decision to make.” Ba swallows and lowers the clipboard.

  My heart jumps. What is Ba doing?

  “So we’re going to take a vote?” “What is this?” “Is that fair?” The voices of the parents begin to rise and clash with one another. This is exactly what I was afraid would happen. Chaos. Confusion. Anger.

  Ba raises his hand again. “Someone once told me that you have to be the change you wish to see in the world. And as parents, we often want to make these changes for our children. But this time, I think the team needs to make the decision. They need to decide what kind of team they want to be.” Ba draws in a breath.

  Be the change you want to see. The words echo in my head. Oddly familiar but out of place at the same time.

  “All I ask from each player is that this be your decision, not your father’s or mother’s decision. Yours. And I will abide by it.” Ba lowers his head.

  “You want the children to decide?” says one of the parents. “What kind of decision is that?” Some of the players make low, angry sounds. We’re not children.

  “It’s their team,” says Ba simply. “It’s their game.”

  The whole group falls silent. The sun casts long shadows in the dugout, and the shadows move only slightly as all the players trade glances. Some of them, Sean and Rickey and Coop, look at me. Did you know about this?

  No, I want to tell them. He didn’t tell me.

  No one moves.

  Maybe Ba will stand alone.

  Sean is the first one to stand up and walk over to Ba, followed by Doug and Yonder. Rickey glances over at his mother for a second, then makes his way down the bleachers and over to the growing group. Mrs. Torres makes a clucking noise with her tongue, but says nothing. Erin puts her head down and scoots near Ba, her ponytail now swinging down her back. Someone mutters, “That figures.”

  Then the flow of players stops. No one else goes over. We are stuck between two half teams, like a bridge too short to reach the other side. I glance at Ba, wondering if he had considered this possibility.

  And then it hits me. Maybe there is an answer to this.

  It’s as though I’m seeing all the players for the first time again, and I can see everything about everyone: Coop is shifting his weight, the way he does right before a batter takes a swing, and Sean is rubbing his hands together ’cause he’s excited. Even Martin is there, glove in hand, thunking a ball into the pocket.

  Glove.

  Around the bleachers, I see all the players have brought gloves. Even some of the dads. Everyone wants to play. I want to play.

  Then my feet are moving under me, and I am walking toward Ba, because this is the answer. And I know who told Ba about being the change you wish to see in the world, who Ba must have been thinking about when he was talking about people who love baseball.

  All this time he has never said his name, never talked about him directly. But Ba hasn’t forgotten him. He is just remembering him in a different way.

  Nelson.

  I turn and face the remaining players. “C’mon,” I say. “Let’s just play ball.”

  Coop crosses and uncrosses his arms and then walks over quickly, like he’s afraid he’s going to change his mind. I hear someone whisper, “Yes.” I think it might be Sean.

  Bobby and Jimmy look at each other.

  “I was going to pitch this season,” says Jimmy.

  “Was not,” says Bobby.

  “Was too,” says Jimmy. “Am going to.” He sticks his chin up in the air and walks over to us.

  Bobby peeks at his father.

  “She’ll ruin the game,” says Mr. Lattimore. “Mark my words.”

  “We’ve got eight,” whispers Doug. “We just need one more to play.”

  “She hasn’t ruined the game so far,” says Bobby.

  I look at Martin and Bobby. Martin’s parents are not here—he rode his bike to the field. No one is making Martin come. He wants to be here.

  “Think you’re up to pitching two games in a row?” I ask, loud enough for Martin to hear.

  Before Erin can respond, Martin rolls his eyes. “Oh, c’mon,” he says. “They need help, obviously.”

  Martin strides over to the group, like he had always planned it that way. But in a blink, I see him look at my father and nod his head, and my father nods back.

  Bobby is the last one to join us.

  “That’s it?” says Mr. Lattimore. “Just like that, you’re going to keep playing?”

  “Every player had a chance to make their own decision. It looks like the team would like to stay together.” Ba crosses his arms and raises his chin.

  “You’ll regret this.”

  “It is possible,” says Ba. “But right now, I would like to focus on having a practice.”

  The whole team is staring at Mr. Lattimore; he is the intruder now, holding us up. Mr. Lattimore walks away, shaking his head. Other parents are drifting away. It doesn’t matter. Right now they are outside the boundary, outside of where our team begins again.

  JIMMY PICKS UP A GROUNDER FROM BEHIND SECOND and tosses it, underhand, to first. To Erin.

  Erin catches it and throws it back. Hard. “The runner is coming, Jimmy. You have to throw it. Not act like you’re at an egg toss.”

  Jimmy ducks his head. He didn’t have this problem when Coop was playing first, before Erin rotated in. He also spends a lot of time looking over there, even when the play is not there.

  “Are you afraid of hurting me?” Erin demands. When Jimmy shrugs and looks away, not denying her charge, Erin shakes
her head in disbelief. “This is me, remember?”

  “I’m trying,” responds Jimmy. He lifts up his cap and wipes his forehead. “I’m trying.”

  Jimmy’s not trying hard enough, though. After a few more egg tosses and missed outs at first, Erin whips the ball back so hard Jimmy takes his hand out of the glove and shakes it.

  Rickey, on second, covers his mouth with his glove. “You better start making that play, man. You are making her mad.”

  Jimmy shakes his hand out again and doesn’t say anything. And on the next ball that comes to him, he throws the ball to first, hard.

  Our team is working on getting to normal again, which means trying to play the way we always did, while remembering that Erin is a girl, but then remembering that it doesn’t matter that Erin is a girl.

  Like all things in baseball, it takes practice.

  The funny thing is, it’s easier for me when Erin and I are talking. You’d think it would be easier to not think about Erin-the-not-boy at other times, but it’s when we talk baseball that everything seems to go back to normal.

  “How about this one,” says Erin. “Two outs, runners on second and third. Batter knocks it out of the park, but no runs score.”

  “No runs? Not one?” I’m stalling for time.

  “Not one.” Erin crosses her arms and grins.

  “And the batter, he doesn’t do anything stupid like just stand there?”

  Erin shoves me. “The batter could be a he or a she, but no, the batter does not just stand there.”

  I have a feeling that there is an answer to this, but I have to take a stand. “Can’t happen.”

  Erin spreads her hands wide. “Runner on third fails to touch home. Not touching the base means that the runner who was on second touches home first. That creates the third out, negating any additional runs.”

  I nod. She got me. “That’s a good one.” And then, before she gets too full of herself, I think of one. “Do you know who the first commissioner of baseball was?”

  “No-o-o,” says Erin. “Should I?”

  “Kenesaw Mountain Landis,” I say, savoring the sounds of the words.

  “You’re making that up.”

  “If I were going to make up a name, you think I’d make up Kenesaw Mountain Landis?”

  Erin laughs. “Good point.” She looks down. We’re actually standing on top of home plate, talking. “You know, I never noticed this before, but home plate actually looks like a little house.”

  She’s right. Home plate has five sides, shaped the way a little kid would draw a house. From the catcher’s position, though, the house is upside-down.

  “I think that’s just a coincidence,” I say. “They don’t call it home plate because it’s shaped like a house.”

  Erin sighs. “But it’s even better that way, don’t you think? Like it was meant to be that way?” She opens her arms and lets them fall. “It was home before anyone knew it was home. That’s what I love about baseball.”

  Erin may play like a boy, and even talk baseball like a boy, but sometimes she says sappy things like a girl.

  “And it’s called a bat because they used to use real bats to hit the balls,” I say. “You’d hold them by the feet and then get them to extend their wings …”

  Erin shoves me. “But you know what I mean, right?”

  I’m tempted to tease her some more, but I don’t because even if I don’t say it, I feel the same way she does. Part of what I like about baseball is that there are rules, and then there are mysteries and possibilities within the rules. Like getting to first base on a third strike, or a no-man triple play. Or peanuts on radios.

  “Yeah,” I say. “I do.”

  When Ba and I get home from practice, something amazing happens.

  “The strike is over,” Mom tells me when I walk into the living room.

  For a moment, I think I’m going to fall over. Not because the strike is over and the season is going to happen, but because Mom is actually starting a conversation with me. And it’s a conversation about the outside world, the world beyond us and this living room.

  Mom gestures to the TV. “They just announced it.”

  “Wow,” I say, trying to keep things light. “Finally. When do they start?”

  “In a few days. The Pirates are going to play at Shea Stadium.”

  In the Before, we would have been dancing around the living room, I’m sure. But now I am standing and she is sitting, an awkward space between us. I’m almost afraid to come any closer to her, as though I might break some fragile space around her.

  Then I think of Erin. Practice. We’ll practice.

  I sit down on the couch, as close as I dare. “Who do you think they’ll start at pitcher?”

  Mom doesn’t say anything for a moment, and I wonder if I’ve blown it. Then she surprises me.

  “It’s gotta be Dock.” Dock Ellis.

  I close my eyes, taking in the moment. “What about Steve Blass, though?”

  “His ERA last year was pretty good, but Dock’s was a little bit better,” says Mom.

  Laney comes in and sits between us. Part of me is jealous of how easily she slides in next to Mom. “What are you guys talking about?” she asks.

  “The strike is over,” I tell her. “There’s going to be a baseball season.”

  “Who, your team?”

  “No, no. The Pirates. All the teams in the major league went on strike, but now they’re going to play.”

  Laney thinks a moment. “But you. You were never going to not play, right?”

  It takes me a second to parse Laney’s question. “It’s hard for me to not play.”

  Laney giggles. “And it would be hard for Mommy to not watch baseball.”

  I look at Mom, who smiles faintly but doesn’t say anything. I wonder if Laney means the Pirates or my team, and I wonder what my mom thinks she means. But I don’t ask because I just want to let the possibilities be out there.

  WHEN I WALK INTO HISTORY THE NEXT DAY, MS. ROWE calls me over. I can tell she is excited because she is bouncing up and down, and the fringe on the bottom of her shirt bounces with her.

  “Peter,” she says. “Look at this.”

  It’s my paper on an aspect of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s presidency. I actually worked kind of hard on this, to make up for not turning in a draft. For my topic, I picked Roosevelt’s “green light” letter. Nelson had told me about it once, but I researched it some more. I even found a copy of the letter on microfiche at the library.

  At the beginning of World War II, Kenesaw Mountain Landis wrote to Roosevelt, asking if baseball should be suspended because of the war. Roosevelt wrote back the next day, saying that he thought it was best for the country that baseball go on, so that people would have a form of recreation.

  In other words, baseball shouldn’t stop because of the war; because of the war, it was important for baseball to keep going.

  At the top of my paper, she had written A+ and circled it. A note next to my grade said, I knew this was the work you were capable of.

  “I’m so proud of you, Peter,” she gushes. “This is first-rate. I never knew this about Roosevelt before. It’s a great example of how Roosevelt kept up morale during the war.”

  “Thank you,” I mumble.

  “From now on,” she says, “I’m expecting all of your work to be of this quality. Have you started thinking about what you might write about the Korean War?” That is going to be the last war we study in class.

  It only takes me a moment to come up with one. “Did you know that Ted Williams actually led the American League in hitting after serving in the Korean War?”

  Ms. Rowe thinks about it, and then wrinkles her nose. “Maybe your topic should be a little more central to the actual Korean War.”

  “Okay,” I say. And I mean it. “Okay.”

  After dinner, I head over to Folger’s Lot with my glove, hoping to join a game.

  There’s only one other person there, though. Chris. He se
es me before I can walk away.

  “Where is everybody?” he asks me.

  “Beats me.” Then I add, “I know they’re not at a Pirates game. Yet.”

  “Yeah, well, that couldn’t be over fast enough.”

  We both stand there awkwardly, searching for something to say. Just as I wonder if I should make up an excuse to leave, Chris asks, “Wanna throw?”

  We start about fifteen feet apart, gradually moving away from each other as our arms get warmer.

  “Did you hear about Ms. Rowe?” shouts Chris, as he launches the ball toward me.

  “No. What?” I jump up to catch the ball, but it sails over my head. For a minute, I think he’s talking about Ms. Rowe’s chat with me today in class.

  “She’s getting married.”

  I run to get the ball. Chris must know this because his mom substitute teaches at the school. “Oh, okay.” I throw the ball back. No wonder she was in such a great mood today.

  “You haven’t heard the best part.” Chris neatly fields the ball I throw to him. “She’s not changing her name. She’s still going to go by Ms. Rowe.”

  Now I get it. “Gunderson’s head is going to explode.”

  “Boom! Like an atomic bomb. I think her eyes will pop out first,” suggests Chris.

  I can almost see it—the moment Miss Gunderson finds out that Ms. Rowe is still going by Ms. and keeping her maiden name. We’ll probably have pop quizzes for days, maybe a twenty-page paper. “No, the top of her head will pop off first,” I say with the authority of a medical expert. Then I add, “Ms. Rowe’s not so bad.”

  “My mom says we should be grateful people are still getting married, and not just moving in together …” shouts Chris.

  We stay at the field and throw and talk and throw. Chris tells me that he and Melissa kissed behind the Minute Mart after sharing a box of candy Bottle Caps.

  “And?” I ask.

  Chris shrugs. “She tasted like root beer.”

  I decide to tell Chris about Erin. Chris isn’t fazed at all.

  “World’s kind of a messed-up place, you know? There are bigger problems than girls playing baseball.”