Bat and the Waiting Game

by Elana K. Arnold

  Suddenly, despite the beauty and excitement of Israel’s amazing backyard, Bat wished desperately that he were home.

  “Hey,” Israel said. “Are you okay?”

  Bat felt himself bouncing on the balls of his feet, and he knew his eyes were full of tears. He still clutched the chocolate bar in his hand.

  “Sort of not really,” he said.

  Israel scratched his head. “Come on,” he said, taking the chocolate bar from Bat and setting it on the table. “I’ll introduce you to my mom.”

  But instead of leading Bat into the house, Israel walked through the garden to the shed. As they crossed the yard, Bat took deep calming breaths and wiped his eyes. The shed door was open, and as he got closer Bat saw that it wasn’t just a place to store shovels and rakes.

  “Hey, Mom,” said Israel.

  “You’re home!” came a voice from inside the shed. “Is your friend with you?”

  “Yep,” said Israel. “Bat, come say hi to my mom.”

  Bat peered into the shed. Israel’s mom was in there, surrounded by shelves full of bowls and cups and plates and pots, some glazed in bright colors, others the flat gray of unfinished clay.

  She was sitting behind a potter’s wheel, a lump of wet clay in her hands. Splatters of clay decorated her arms and her overalls.

  “Hi, Bat,” she said. “I’m Cora.”

  “Hello,” said Bat. “What are you doing?”

  “I’m making a bowl,” Cora said. “Do you want to try?”

  Bat shook his head. “I don’t like slimy things,” he said. “Or sticky things.” He looked around at all the shelves and all the things upon them. “Did you make all this stuff?”

  “Most of it,” Cora said. “Over there is Israel’s work.”

  The shelf she pointed to was filled with lumps of clay that looked a lot like the lump of clay Israel had made for Bat, which Bat had right then tucked into the pocket of his vest.

  “Mom’s stuff is better than mine,” Israel said. “She’s a professional artist. I’m just starting out.”

  Bat looked back and forth between the pottery Cora had made and the awkward lumps Israel had made. “Yes,” he said. “Your mom’s stuff is way better.”

  Israel crossed his arms across his chest.

  Bat felt his stomach rumble and said, “I think I’m ready for that snack now.”

  CHAPTER 10

  Missing Connections

  Mom’s perfectly average station wagon felt decidedly less than average that evening when she collected Bat from Israel’s house.

  “So, how was it?” Mom asked, putting the car in reverse to back down the driveway.

  “Mom,” Bat said, “have you ever thought about getting a truck?”

  “A truck?” Mom said. She shifted into drive and stepped on the gas.

  “Yes,” said Bat. “A big one.”

  “Actually,” Mom said, “the first car I bought, when I was eighteen years old, was a truck.”

  “Really? Was it like Tom’s truck?”

  “Tom?” asked Mom, glancing over at Bat.

  “Israel’s dad,” said Bat.

  “Ah. I didn’t realize you were on a first-name basis.”

  “It’s no big deal,” Bat said. “Tom is cool.”

  Mom laughed. “Careful, or you might make me jealous! You’ve never called me cool. Anyway,” she said, “did you have a good time with Israel?”

  “Mm-hmm,” said Bat. Then he realized that he hadn’t yet asked about Thor. “Oh!” he said. “Is Thor okay? Did you remember to give him his four-o’clock feeding?”

  “Of course I did,” Mom said. She flicked on her turn signal and made a right onto their street, Plum Lane. “Thor is great. He’s in the back.”

  “You put Thor in the trunk?” Bat’s voice went high and squeaky with indignation.

  “He’s just fine,” Mom said, and she pulled into their driveway, put the car in park, and turned the key.

  Bat unlatched his seat belt, threw open his car door, and ran around to the back of the car. He clicked open the rear door and pushed it up. “Ooh,” he said.

  There was Thor’s travel carrier, a secondhand cat kennel, but there was something else back there, too—a plastic gate, or fence, or something.

  “It’s a doggy pen,” Mom said. “Someone donated it to the clinic today, and I thought we could use it for Thor. What do you think? Want to help me set it up?”

  This pen, Bat thought, was even cooler than Tom’s truck.

  They got the sections of the pen—four plastic sides, it turned out, to form a square—into the house. Mom tried to set the two pieces she was carrying down in the living room, but Bat carried his two sections all the way down the hallway and into his bedroom, where he intended to build it. Then he immediately started trying to figure out how to connect them together.

  “We can do it later, Bat,” Mom said, standing in the doorway of his room. “After dinner and bath time.”

  “I want to do it now,” Bat said, all his concentration on hooking the pieces together. He could see, though, that something was missing. The two plastic panels just wouldn’t latch together. “Are there any more parts?” he asked.

  “I don’t think so,” Mom said, and she came into Bat’s room to see what the problem was. “Oh. There must be connecting rods that slip into the edges here to hold the sections together. I don’t know, Bat. Maybe they’re at the clinic and I just didn’t see them.”

  “We have to go back to the clinic and find them,” Bat said.

  “Not tonight, honey. It’s getting late. We’re all done being out in the world for the day.”

  “We have to build the pen for Thor!” Bat felt the anxious knot tightening in his chest the way it sometimes did. He knew he should walk away from the problem and take deep calming breaths, but he didn’t want to walk away from the problem and take deep calming breaths. He wanted to fix the problem.

  “Bat,” said Mom, “you’ve had a long day, haven’t you?” She knelt down beside him and took his hands in hers. She squeezed his hands and released, her signal to him that she was going to try to help him calm down. If he didn’t want the help, Bat knew he could take a step away, but he stayed still. His mom moved her hands to his wrists and squeezed and released, and then she worked her way up his arms, squeezing his forearms and his elbows and his biceps and his shoulders, and then working her way back down to his hands. “Baby,” she said, and it was this word that pushed Bat over the edge.

  He wasn’t a baby. He wasn’t anywhere close to being a baby. Thor was a baby, and Bat was his caretaker, and right now he wanted to take care of Thor by building this playpen, and if that meant going back to the clinic even though it was closed for the day, then that is what they should do, and Bat didn’t understand why Mom couldn’t see how important this was and how right he was and just DO WHAT HE WANTED HER TO DO.

  “Bat, honey, shhh,” Mom said, and that’s when Bat heard the sound he was making. He hadn’t even noticed that he’d started making the sound, the high-pitched whine that seemed to come out of him when he was the most upset, when he had “reached the end of his rope,” as Mom called it.

  But even though he hated making the noise, it felt good to make it, too, just as it felt good to bounce on the soles of his feet. Mom’s hands were still squeezing Bat’s arms, and then she put her arms around him, pulling him close, and she held him just like that, in a nice tight hug, and Bat wanted at the same time to pull away from her and to never be let go.

  She held him until he stopped needing to make high-pitched whining sounds, until he stopped needing to bounce on the soles of his feet, until the knot in his chest began to relax and unwind.

  Then she said very softly, “Come on, Bat. Let me run a bath for you.”

  And Bat let her lead him away from the pen.

  CHAPTER 11

  Bananafish

  After bath time, Bat pulled on his pajamas and went into the kitchen, where he found Mom and Janie together at the tab
le, having breakfast for dinner, which they sometimes did when there hadn’t been time to fix a bigger meal.

  Janie was having fried eggs, and Mom was spooning out two platefuls of scrambled—one for Bat and one for herself. Bat did not like runny eggs. He didn’t even like it when other people ate runny eggs, because then he had to witness it. But Janie liked to dip buttered toast into the little pool of yellow yolk, and she was Bat’s sister, so sometimes witnessing such a thing was unavoidable.

  The bath had helped Bat to feel calmer. Still warm from sitting in the steaming water, he drifted to his seat at the table and decided that Janie’s disgusting eggs were something he could overlook tonight.

  “We have a week and a half to memorize our lines,” Janie said to Mom, diving the edge of her triangle-cut toast into the yolk stream. “By the Tuesday after next, the director wants the whole rehearsal to run without any scripts.”

  Bat piled a forkful of scrambled egg onto his toast. “How do you guys know where to stand and stuff?” he asked.

  “That’s called blocking,” Janie said enthusiastically. “We have to write it all down in our scripts—when to come on stage, and which side we come in from, and where we go, and when we sit down or stand up or whatever.”

  “That sounds like a lot to remember,” Bat said.

  “Oh, it is,” Janie said. “But that’s all right. I’m good at it. You probably would be good at that part too, Bat. You’re good at remembering things.”

  Bat finished his scrambled eggs and imagined himself on stage, surrounded by other kids, acting out the words from a script. He didn’t really know how it all worked, so the things he imagined were fuzzy and vague. But they still made him feel nervous. “I could probably memorize the stuff,” he said, “but I wouldn’t want to be on stage. With all those people watching.”

  “I love it,” Janie said. “I was born for the spotlight.”

  A bright light shining right on him, while rows of people sat and stared. That sounded like some kind of punishment to Bat.

  “There’s room in a theater for the performers and the audience,” Mom said. “A show isn’t a show without both. Bat and I will be your audience. Won’t we, Bat?”

  Bat nodded. “Yes,” he said.

  “But tonight,” Mom said, clearing away the plates and stacking them in the sink, “what do the two of you say to a game of Bananafish?”

  They both said yes to Bananafish, which was a game Janie had made up when Bat was little. Well, Bat had thought that she had made it up. When he was older, he found out that the game she called Bananafish was the game most everyone else called War. The only difference was that instead of saying “War!” when two people flipped over matching cards, you were supposed to call out “Bananafish!”

  You could play with two or three or even four players, which was perfect for their family. Janie shuffled the cards and dealt them into three equal stacks while Bat loaded the dishwasher and Mom heated up some milk and cocoa in the red saucepan, pouring it into three mugs when it was just the right temperature. They settled into companionable silence and began flipping over cards, whoever had the highest card taking all three.

  After four rounds, the first match turned up—Janie and Bat each flipped over a seven. “Bananafish!” they yelled, and then dealt three cards face down, waited a moment, and then flipped a fourth card face up.

  Janie’s was a six. Bat’s was a queen.

  “Bananafish!” he called again, this time in triumph.

  “Good one, Bat,” Janie said nicely, and he smiled.

  “Thanks,” he said. And then, even though he knew the answer, he asked, “Janie, why did you call this game Bananafish?” He liked to hear the story every time they played.

  “Because when you were little, it was hard to get you to play new games with me. You only liked to do the things you already knew how to do. And I begged and begged for you to let me teach you how to play War, but you always said no. And then one day I asked you if you wanted to learn how to play a new game called Banana-fish, because ‘banana’ and ‘fish’ were two of your favorite words.”

  “Even though I didn’t like banana-flavored yogurt,” Bat added happily.

  “And you said yes to playing Bananafish, even though it was the exact same game you’d been saying no to playing, only with a different name.”

  “It’s important to know your audience,” Mom said. All three of them flipped over another card. Mom’s jack was higher than Janie’s nine and Bat’s four, so she took all three.

  Bat didn’t remember the day that Janie taught him Bananafish. But he thought Janie had been pretty smart for getting him to play her game after all. “Since I wanted to play after you named the game Bananafish,” he said, “maybe I didn’t want to play because it was called War. That’s a word I don’t like.”

  “I agree,” Mom said.

  “That makes three,” Janie said. “Bananafish are definitely better than War.”

  Bananafish are better than War. And being together, cozy in their kitchen, was better than being apart.

  CHAPTER 12

  A Perfect Night

  Friday after school, Bat climbed into Dad’s little sports car, sliding over to behind the driver’s seat since there was no seat belt in the middle. Dad was whistling, something Bat liked and something that sort of amazed him. No matter how he tried, Bat couldn’t arrange his lips into a proper whistling position.

  “How was your week, sport?” Dad asked as he pulled out of the school parking lot.

  “It was okay,” said Bat. “Not great.” Thursday’s after-school visit to Israel’s house, when Bat had hoped they would research possible vegetables for their skunk garden project, had instead been spent sitting on the couch while Israel played his new video game and practically ignored him.

  And though they had finally gotten the pen built, and though Mom had agreed to let Bat keep it in his room, Bat felt terribly irritated about the fact that this was an Every-Other Weekend. Even worse, this would be his first Every-Other Weekend without Janie, because she had rehearsal today and tomorrow and a sleepover with a castmate on Saturday night.

  “I’ve got a surprise for you,” Dad said.

  “Is it that you’ve decided to let Thor spend the weekend with me at your apartment?” Bat said, hopeful.

  “No,” said Dad. “It’s baseball tickets!”

  Bat slumped in his seat, defeated. Baseball tickets. It was like his dad was trying to punish him for something.

  There was almost nothing good about a baseball game, but Bat could nearly make a game out of listing all the things that were bad about one:

  1.The lines. Lines to park the car, lines to get through the entry gate, lines to use the bathroom, lines to buy snacks and drinks, lines to get to your seats. Bat hated waiting in lines. He hated it so much.

  2.The crowds. Even when you weren’t waiting in a line, you were still surrounded by people. Too many bodies squished together into too small a space. The smell of the bodies. People said skunks smell bad! That wasn’t even true. Skunks only smelled bad when they sprayed. Some of the people at a baseball game seemed to smell all the time.

  3.The lights. All those bright-white fluorescent bulbs, flooding the field in their artificial glare, making Bat’s eyes feel twitchy.

  4.The noise. Oh, the noise. People shouting at the peanut guy. People laughing loudly to each other and calling out to their friends. The announcer over the loudspeaker, booming out information that seemed to Bat to be totally unnecessary. The music. The crowds bursting into cheers when a batter scored a run.

  Bat loved his dad. He really did. But when his dad made him do something like this, like coming to a baseball game, something he really didn’t want to do, Bat wondered if his dad understood him.

  Because if his dad really understood him, then he would understand that an event like a baseball game was just about the worst way that Bat could imagine spending a Saturday night.

  “We’ve got good seats, sport!”
Dad said, dragging Bat down the aisle and pushing enthusiastically through the crowd. “Excuse us! Pardon us!” he said.

  The seats didn’t look good to Bat. They were too close to the field, which meant that there was a higher chance that a stray baseball could hit him in the face.

  “What do you think?” Dad asked after they were settled onto the uncomfortable blue plastic fold-down chairs.

  “Can we go home?” Bat asked.

  “Don’t be silly,” Dad said. “They’re just taking batting practice. The game hasn’t even started yet!”

  Bat didn’t want the game to start. He wanted the game to be canceled. But, in all the years Dad had been making Bat go to baseball games, only one of them had been canceled, and that was on account of rain.

  Bat looked up into the cloudless, clear sky. The horizon was melting into pink and orange as the sun slipped away for the night. It was a beautiful, perfect evening. Bat sighed and shook his head. It was going to be a long night.

  CHAPTER 13

  Seventh-Inning Stretch

  By the seventh-inning stretch, Bat’s whole body felt twitchy from sitting. Dad loved the seventh-inning stretch. He called it “a fun tradition.”

  Bat thought of the seventh-inning stretch as the earliest possible opportunity to get Dad to leave a baseball game. If the score wasn’t close, sometimes Bat could convince Dad to head home after everyone finished singing “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.”

  The seventh-inning stretch happened after one team had had its turn at bat but before the other team came out to hit. All the players left the field, and everyone in the stands got on their feet. The big screens lit up with the lyrics to the song, and the organ music began, playing loudly through the PA system. Then a little animated baseball bounced along over the words just in case anyone didn’t know how the song went.

  Dad dropped his arm across Bat’s shoulders and began to sway back and forth to the tune, swaying Bat along with him.