Still more impossibly wonderful, he had secured his mother’s convertible; we smoked the first joint with the top up on the way out of town. Then alongside a spreading cornfield we pulled over and rolled back the top. The smells were green and brown, the corn as high as an elephant’s eye, sun pouring down like honey on this land that was our land. Things were going to be good now. CJ took his shirt off; Vera, beside him, pulled her tube top down to her waist, casually exposing her small, pretty breasts. Less daring, I pulled my granny skirt up over my knees. As usual those days, I was in back with Saint, and on left turns the car rocked me against him. When CJ hit the gas, hot wind whipped my hair; it was hard to take a breath, but God! To feel so wind-rushingly alive! We passed a car pulling a boat, we passed a line of trucks. Vera turned up the radio. Mick Jagger couldn’t get satisfaction, but he didn’t seem to feel that bad about it, and neither did we. We sang at the top of our lungs, screaming at truckers and cute kids in the backs of station wagons until the empty road hummed under our tires, a shiny band dissolving at the horizon into sky. No traffic. No thought, no pain, no relief from pain, no longing or relief from longing. Just the four of us breathing the hot wind and one another’s skin as we raced toward the future, of which we had full control.
Outside Gary, the air turned thick, sour, and oily, but we breathed it in, still exulting. Flowers and shit, all one. Traffic was sparse across the Skyway and up Stony Island, but Lake Shore Drive was crawling, as if the whole world were going to our baseball game. Across from Buckingham Fountain we stopped for so long that CJ put the car in park, stood up on the seat, and sang “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.” He had a nice voice; other people joined in, among them a family of five in the next lane. In Grant Park people were erecting a platform for the Yippies, who were coming to the Democratic convention to speak against the war. Kids carried signs, one of which read ELECT PIGASUS. This was Chicago, the teeming, frothing heart of it all.
The congestion got even worse at Belmont, supposed gateway to Wrigley Field. Exiting took fifteen minutes. After circling for another half hour, CJ paid a boy twenty dollars to park on a slab of concrete behind his family’s apartment building. Out of the car I started to feel a little paranoid. The locals wore shorts, sandals, psychedelic T-shirts. CJ had on expensive cowboy boots. “I fear we are overdressed,” he cried, hip-butting Saint toward a husky young man in a Che Guevara shirt. “Watch it,” CJ said to Saint, “you want to pick another fight?” Saint apologized to Che for his asshole friend, and Che flashed a V for victory. He was cool. No problem. “See?” cried CJ.
CJ was getting crazier by the minute as he herded us through the crowd toward the stadium. He kissed my cheek, he kissed Saint’s. “Up north we’re trouble, here we’re straight as a string. Us boys, at least.” He stopped in his tracks. “Oh my God! Soul mates!”
In the general sweep of bare legs and primary colors were two men in boots and the same long jeans CJ and Saint were wearing. One wore a cowboy hat. CJ opened his arms. “I love you. Be our friends?” They turned. Buttons on their shirts said NIXON’S THE ONE! and DEFEAT = DISHONOR. CJ held up a hand. “We’ll wait for the next incarnation.” Tipping his Cubs cap to them, CJ turned to Vera in her trademark cutoffs and tube top. “Hey, dollface, does your daddy know how you walk around?”
Vera ignored him; he said it louder. I tried to shush him, but it only gave him energy. “What’s the worst they could be thinking?” he said. “What are those hicks doing in the big city?”
“Please,” I said. “I feel like an escaped mental patient.”
“But you look like an Earth Mother.” He pulled me into the shelter of his arm. “I’m a loudmouth, please ignore me. We’re good-guy aliens. We come in peace.”
Our group seemed fragile now, out of place. CJ trying to fit us in, acting as if we already belonged, just made it worse. My granny skirt and embroidered peasant blouse that were a statement in Lourdes seemed phony in Chicago. That farm girl thinks she’s a hippie, I felt people thinking. I dropped back beside Vera and kept my eyes on the ground, trying not to step on anyone’s heels while CJ guided us toward the stadium.
We hadn’t bought tickets ahead of time, and at the Today’s Game window we learned there were no decent seats left, no four together anywhere but upper deck reserve, where you couldn’t see the pitches. CJ, though, was in his glory. “Since when,” he said to the ticket seller, broadening his Midwest accent, “does a fourth-place team sell out, tell me that.”
“Stay home,” the woman replied without heat. Middle-aged, with a rose-colored blemish on her cheek the shape of the state of Indiana, she was in no hurry to serve the next fan. “That’s what I tell you diehards. Go on strike. Keep your money. Make SOB Mr. Wrigley spend some of his.”
CJ nodded sagaciously. “You’ve got a point, ma’am. My pa was a union man. Until he died, but that’s another story. Here’s our immediate problem. My friends and I woke at dawn to get here. We’ve been in the car for four hours. Are you sure, in one of those drawers back there, there aren’t a few really good seats? For hotshots that probably won’t show?” His voice mimicked the woman’s cadences. I was impressed, and even more so when she handed him two pairs of prime seats, upper deck over home plate and field boxes by the Cubs dugout. She waved away the twenty-dollar bill that CJ offered. “You are a magnificent human being,” he said to her.
“You’re a funny young man.”
“I’ve been called worse. But I treat nice people nicely.”
I grinned, liking him.
“They’re all talkers down here,” he explained. “At home, you start a conversation with someone you don’t know, and it’s Hunhh?” He was especially happy about the seating, which separated us into twosomes, girl with girl, boy with boy. He handed Saint one of the field box tickets, gave the two upper deck boxes to Vera and me. He was scanning for an entry gate when Vera asked to see my ticket. Without a pause, as if she’d planned it out beforehand, she handed mine to Saint and Saint’s to me.
I didn’t mind the transfer, but CJ was unhappy. “Girls get the view, boys get to catch foul balls. That’s the American way,” he said. “Come on, be nice!” He held out his hand for the ticket she’d snatched. She put it in her pocket.
“Kay will help you catch your foul balls.”
Saint’s face was blank, as if any seat was fine with him. CJ evil-eyed Vera. “You’re a little Napoleon, aren’t you?”
“And you’re a male chauvinist pig.”
I too wanted to sit with Saint and considered offering that arrangement as a compromise, but Vera crossed her arms, small and dense as a meteorite: This was how it would be. And it was a nice day. Agreeable hours stretched before us. “Okay,” I said to CJ, “let’s catch us some balls.”
12
Vera
Alone with Saint, Vera doesn’t feel like Napoleon. She’s not even sure why she maneuvered the seat switch. What does she want from a guy who declined the pleasures she offered? The image assails her, his dick proclaiming what he couldn’t or wouldn’t put into words. He should be the one appeasing her, trying to accommodate her, while all week he has avoided her, and she’s not a girl who chases guys who reject her. Or is she? Her actions suggest otherwise. And it’s hard even to walk beside him, let alone probe his inscrutable brain. She keeps her bad hand in her pocket, wishing she’d worn a loose shirt. She feels underdressed. Under-somethinged. If someone remarks on her hand or even looks her way, she thinks she might scream.
On the long ramp, as she climbs ahead of Saint, rage supplants her insecurity. That it was she who had to implement the reconciliation, that Saint couldn’t take charge once in a while—it’s what she hates about him. Rounding a bend, she looks back. There he is, gazing up at her, for reasons known only to his Zen mind. She walks faster, elbows out, past clusters of loud-talking fans; no one impedes her. When the ramp ends she selects the entrance with the number corresponding to that on her ticket, sidestepping down the row as if she’s done it a thousand tim
es.
Then she is seated, with the sky overhead and the field spread out below, and her mood shifts again. She has never been here before; the novelty is both soothing and stimulating, the green-painted slats of the seats, the metal chair arms, the smell of beer and old cement. All around her, along with the steady wind, is the relaxed urgency of human voices en masse, thousands of them, a constellation of sound that rises and falls like breathing.
When Saint arrives, to punish his weeklong coldness she focuses harder on her surroundings. They are in the third row on a steep incline. Down below, the green of the playing field is heightened by the white patches of the bases, the soft brown collar around the infield. Over the stands, over the jagged crests of the high-rises, the sky is a tender blue. Between two buildings there’s a hazy bit of lake, a tiny white sail. “These are good seats,” she murmurs, an unwilled appeasement (what’s wrong with her!), but he doesn’t respond. He doesn’t comprehend small talk. Her fingers slide down into her pockets. This is her first visit to a major league ballpark. She tells him so, but nada. Why does he make it so hard? Her gaze crosses the field, travels up the bleachers, the red and blue dabs of fan T-shirts, the enormous scoreboard. It’s definitely nice up here. Her thoughts lighten and drift, as if in response to the wind or weakened gravity. “We don’t have to talk,” she says sarcastically. “Let’s just sit here like we don’t know each other.” From Saint, nothing.
She’s irritated, but with only part of her mind. Another part seems involuntarily to be seeking something. She wiggles her stubbed fingers. Among these strangers, without thinking about it, she has been hiding her bad hand away in her pocket. Now she liberates it; she uses it to scratch her ear. Why not? She has nothing to lose. Daring herself, as she does in school when she feels challenged or simply when the impulse assails her, she raises it over her head and holds it there for the viewing public, all these yo-yos come to watch men swing a stick, who are no more dangerous or important to her than her Lourdes schoolmates: Look! Mock me! I dare you!
Then, while her hand is aloft, before she can return it to the shelter of her lap, there’s a wild cheer. Applause, whistles. Her heart jumps, her hand descends, and she looks at it as if she has never seen it before. Behind her, two boys scream, “Santo! Santo!” Down below, men are running out onto the field. “Number ten, Ron Santo” comes through the loudspeaker and the cheering mounts. Her cheeks burn at the thought of her egotism. She is not central to all the world’s thoughts, for better or worse. Shouldn’t she know that by now?
She raps the back of her hand, not hard, a check to any renewed notions of its self-importance. On her other side, a man her father’s age is telling the woman beside him about his costly divorce. Rows of strangers stretch before and behind her, none of whom are looking at her. They have no opinions about her whatsoever. Is that bad? It doesn’t feel bad. They order beer and hot dogs from the vendors; she passes food down the row and money the other way, unimportant, unobserved. Nothing seems that important. “Be honest with me,” she says to Saint. “Are you wishing I didn’t finagle this?”
After a beat he says, “I’m kind of wishing I knew why you did.”
She gives a short scream. “He talks! That’s amazing.”
He looks at her.
“Don’t quit now.”
“What do you want me to say?”
She wants to scream again; he’s maddening. “Sometimes I haven’t the faintest idea how your mind works.” He doesn’t help her out. “Come on. Would you rather be sitting with CJ? If so, you should have said so.”
“Why would I want to be sitting with CJ?”
She is exhausted. Why is talking so hard? She wants a cigarette but doesn’t want to ask Saint, who fills the whole span of his seat, his leg angled into her space. Inadvertently, slightly, her bare knee touches the fabric of his jeans.
On the field below someone hits a high ball. A cheer starts to swell, then the ball is caught near the wall; the cheer crumples. She closes her eyes and tries to guess what’s happening on the field by the sounds. What the fuck do you want? she says to Saint in her mind, over and over, but she has extended herself enough. She’s a rubber band stretched as far as it can go. More and someone will get hurt.
On the field below, the game is a slow, unfathomable modern dance.
By the time the crowd sings “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” Vera is wishing for the simplicity of the company of Kay and CJ. She wonders if she could find the car, or a bus station—every city has a bus station—not that she has money for a ticket home. Then under cover of the communal noise, Saint puts his head next to hers. “Vera, tell me please, what do you want from me?”
She regards his freckled arm on their shared armrest. “What makes you think I want anything?” she says coolly.
“Why did you bring me up here? To give me shit about that night?”
“What night?” she says.
“You’re still PO’d, aren’t you?”
“ ‘Pee-Ohed’? Is that how they talk in Detroit?”
He starts his zombie hum. She gives the man on her other side a look of scorn that he no doubt deserves for something and leans toward Saint. “I’m sorry. But with you I just feel so fucking…I don’t even know the word.” He’s like a door she’s pounding on that doesn’t sound under her fists. She’s worse than powerless. “Tongue-tied?”
“Is that my fault?” he says. “I don’t think it’s my fault.”
She closes her eyes. “Look. You’re so, I don’t know—heavy on me? I can’t move, around you. Or even think.”
“I don’t know why that should be.”
She shrugs.
“Tell me what to do.”
“There’s nothing to do.”
He watches the game, and she sits breathing the ether over the green of the ballpark. She lets herself float on the rise and fall of crowd pleasure and pain. Boo. Go Cubs. Then, after it seems that the game has gone on for as long as a distant and pointless ritual could possibly go on, the crowd stands and screams as a body, Saint along with them. She stands too, though she can’t see through the wall of people. She leans against Saint. When they sit down she murmurs, “Just be nice to me. That’s all.”
“Vera, you could drive someone crazy.”
“So could you.” She smiles at him with her mouth only.
“I just want things to be more—”
“Fluid?” she says.
“Equal.”
“That is such crap.” She’s shaking, though sweaty and hot. “It is!”
“Some of the things you say,” he says, “are really hurtful.”
“That’s not my intention.”
His gaze remains blank and clear, but his color has changed, less like stone than hard-baked clay. “I don’t think you know your effect on people.”
“That isn’t fair! What people? You don’t know your effect either. You treat me like I’m made of shit.”
He shakes his head, but whether he means no, he doesn’t and never did think she was shit, or oh dear, it’s all so confusing, she doesn’t know and doesn’t feel like asking.
13
Wells Street
Our seats, mine and CJ’s, were low and close to the field. From there the game looked two-dimensional until a ball arced up. Baseball is slow and easy to follow. I could see the pitcher arching back and raising his leg before the throw. CJ had binoculars, and through them I could even see the batter’s hands on the bat. I liked the way the man crouched, waiting, then the ball snapping through the air right into the catcher’s glove like a message understood. It was hot, the sun beat down on my hair and arms, but the players were sweating a lot more. Their shirts got wetter and wetter each time they trotted out of the dugout and back to the field.
My only problem with the game was that one team was winning too easily. The Cubs scored four runs in the first inning, and I liked cheering with the rest of the crowd, but I felt bad for the Atlanta Braves, who were brave, I thought, to keep on playin
g when they were so far behind. Then a Brave scored a run, and I clapped, but people were looking at me. Oops!
“Cubs are blue and white, Braves are gray,” CJ said. “Good guys, bad guys. Don’t you know your colors by now?”
“Oh shut up!” It was my usual clever retort.
Still, Saint and Vera were out of my mind, for once; I was enjoying the day. The Braves caught up; the power balance became more just. And I understood the game. I’d played softball in Evanston, and although I couldn’t throw well, I could catch when the ball came at me, and I could bat. I liked hitting the heavy, thick-skinned ball over everyone’s heads and trotting around the bases.
“CJ,” I said, “this was a good idea.”
I didn’t know the whole story yet, but I wanted to make up for Vera’s little coup. “She doesn’t know what to do if she isn’t in charge of things. It isn’t fair, but it doesn’t hurt to let her rule us sometimes. I hope you don’t feel bad?”
“You’re a wise woman,” he said, as if he didn’t entirely like me for it.
“Is that good or bad?”
He laughed, and the tension that could have buzzed me all afternoon, made me anxious and tired trying to understand it, dissolved in the bright green heat of the afternoon.
—
After the game, we met at the car as planned. A guy on the corner was playing the saxophone, the same song over and over. Saint threw a coin into the instrument case while Vera gazed hard in the opposite direction. They seemed more at odds than ever; they didn’t even know the score of the game (6–5, Cubs) or that it had gone an extra inning and been won by a home run. I tried not to be glad.
Though so much was unresolved, no one wanted to go back yet. We left the car where it was and joined the crowd swirling out from the ballpark, moving with it wherever it had a mind. Down Clark Street, past bars that looked dark and cool in the hot white sunlight. Sweaty, thirsty, we saw a bar with the hospitable name Mother’s and walked in with composed adult faces. But even before he saw our IDs, the door guy rolled his eyeballs. “Anyone here remember Ike Eisenhower? How about Sputnik?” Grooving on his own wittiness, he held CJ’s driver’s license up to the light. “Who you gonna vote for next fall? Hey, did you just get back from Nam?” People were laughing. We ducked out fast.
Once, in Lourdes Page 12