The Science of Herself (12 page)

When everyone had left the house I took a hammer to the athletic cup. I meant to prove the cup wasn't up to much, but I found out otherwise. The blows bounced off it without leaving a mark. To make sure the hammer wasn't defective I tested it on the floor in my room. I left a ding like a crescent in the linoleum inside my closet. I smashed up a bunch of old crayons and put a hole in the bedroom wall behind the bed. I took an apple I hadn't eaten at lunch outside and crushed it like an egg. I was more and more impressed with the cup. I just needed a whole suit of the stuff.

This was all about the same time Boston third baseman Wade Boggs went on national TV and told the world he was addicted to sex.

We had a game Monday against the Royals and, like a nightmare, suddenly, there we were, down by one run, two outs, sixth and final inning, with Bjorn Benson on
first base and me at bat. So far I'd only connected with the ball once and that was a feeble foul. Jeremy came out to the box to give me a little pep talk. “This used to be a good team before you joined,” he said. “But you suck. If you cost us this game you'll pay in ways you can't even imagine, faggot.” He smelled of cigarettes, though no one in my town smoked; it was like a town ordinance. Jeremy spit into the dust beside my cleats. I turned to look at the stands and I saw my mother watching us.

Dusty came and took the bat out of my hand. He went to the umpire, who wasn't Chad. “Ryan batting for Nathan,” he said. He sent me back to the bench. It took Ryan seven pitches to strike out, which is surely four more pitches than it would have taken me.

Our car wasn't working again and Victor had dropped us off, but he couldn't stay for the whole game, so my mom asked Dusty's wife, Linda, a pretty woman who wore lipstick even to the ballpark, for a ride home.

When we got in the car we were all quiet for a while. Dusty finally spoke. “You played a good game, Nathan. You too, Ryan.”

Linda agreed. “It was a good game. Nothing to be ashamed of.”

“Usually you can hit off Alex,” Dusty said to Ryan. “I wonder what happened tonight.”

“He didn't get to bed until late,” Linda suggested. “Were you tired, honey?”

“I don't think Alex was pitching as fast as he usually does. I thought he was tiring. I thought you'd hit off him.”

“That was a lot of pressure, putting him in then,” Linda observed. “But usually he would have gotten a hit. Were you tired, honey?”

“One more pitch, we would have had him, right, Tigers?”

Ryan looked out the window and didn't say much. There was a song on the radio, “Believe It or Not,” and his lips were moving as if he was singing along but I couldn't hear him.

They let us off and we went inside. Like Ryan, my mom had been quiet the whole way home. I went to clean up and then she called me into the kitchen. “Couple of things,” she said. “First of all, you're scared of that boy. The one who fixed our car. Why?”

“Because he's scary?” I offered. “Because he's a huge, mean, cretinous freak who hates me?” I was relieved, but mortified that she knew. I was also surprised. It was too much to feel all at once. I made things worse by starting to cry, loudly, and with my shoulders shaking.

My mom put her arms around me and held me until I stopped. “I love you,” she said. She kissed the top of my head.

“I love you, too.”

“I loved you first.” Her arms tightened on me. “So there's a rumor on the street that you don't want to play baseball anymore.”

I pushed away to look at her face. She stuck out her tongue and crossed her eyes.

“You mean it?” I asked.
“
I can quit?”

“I'll call Dusty tonight and tell him he's short one little Tiger.”

It turned out to be a little more complicated. My mom called Dusty, but Dusty said he needed to see me, said he needed to hear it from me. He'd made representations to Mr. Bertilucci, he reminded us. He didn't want those to have been false representations. He thought we owed it to him to listen to what he had to say. He asked us to come to the house.

My mom agreed. By now we had the car back again. My mother drove and on the way over she warned me about the good cop/bad cop routine she thought Dusty and Linda might be planning to pull. She promised she wouldn't leave me alone with Dusty and she was as good as her word even when Linda tried to entice her outside to show her where the new deck was going to go. Ryan had obviously made himself scarce.

We sat in the living room, which was done country style, white ruffles and blue-and-white checks. Someone, I'm guessing Linda, collected ceramic ducks. She stood at the kitchen door smiling nervously at us. The TV was on in the background, the local news with the affable local anchor. Dusty muted her to talk to me. “You haven't really given the team or yourself a chance,” Dusty said. His face had a ruddy, healthy glow.

“I just don't like baseball.”

“You don't like it because you think you're no good at it. Give yourself time to get better.” He turned to my mother. “You shouldn't let him give up on himself.”

“He's not giving up on himself. He's being himself.”

“He was improving every game,” Linda said.

“He never wanted to play. I made him.”

Dusty leaned forward. “And I remember why you made him. You want that to happen again?”

“That's a separate issue.”

“I don't think so,” Dusty turned to me again. “Don't let yourself become one of the quitters, Nathan. Don't walk out on your team. The values you learn on the playing field, those are the values that make you a success in everything you do later in life.”

“I never played on a team,” my mom observed. “How ever do I manage to get through the day?”

It was a snotty comment. Really, she was the one who started it. Dusty was the one to go for the throat. “I'm sure his father wouldn't want him taught to be a quitter.”

There was a long, slow, loud silence in the room. Then my mom was talking without moving her mouth again. “His father is none of your damn business.”

“Would anyone like a cup of coffee?” Linda asked. Her sandals tapped anxiously as she started into the kitchen, then came back out again. “I made brownies! I hope everyone likes them with nuts!”

Neither my mom nor Dusty showed any sign of hearing her. Neither would take their eyes off the other. “He didn't quit on you, Dusty,” my mom said. “You quit on him.”

“What does that mean?”

“It was his turn to bat.”

“That was okay with me,” I pointed out. “I was really happy with that.”

“That was a team decision,” Dusty said. “That's just what I'm talking about. If you'd ever played on a team you wouldn't be questioning that decision.”

My mother stood, taking me by the hand. “You run your team. Let me raise my kid,” she said. And we left the house and one of us left it hopping mad. “On the planet Zandoor,” she told me, “Little League is just for adults. Dusty wouldn't qualify. Of course it's not like Little League here. You try to design a glove that fits on a Zandoorian.”

The other one of us was so happy he was floating. When we got home Victor, Tamara, and Chad were sitting together on our porch. “I'm not a baseball player anymore,” I told them. I couldn't stop grinning about it.

“Way to go, champ,” Tamara said. She put her arms around me. Her body was much softer than my mom's and her black hair fell over my face so I smelled her coconut shampoo. It was a perfect moment. I remember everything about it.

“What do you think of that?” my mom asked Chad. Through the curtain of Tamara's hair I watched him shrug. “If he doesn't like to play, why should he play?”

They were staring at each other. I thought he was a little young for her, besides being a fat jerk, but no one was asking me. “Saturday night,” she told him, “there's a
Take Back the Night march downtown. Victor, Tamara, and I are going. Do you want to come?”

Chad looked at Victor. “This is a test, isn't it?” he asked.

“You already passed the test,” my mother said.

The next day she spotted Jeremy while she was dropping me at school She waved him over and he actually came. “I'm so glad to see you,” she told him. “I didn't thank you properly for helping with the car the other day. You were great. Where did you learn to do that?”

“My dad,” Jeremy said.

“I'm going to call him up and thank him, too. Tell him what a great kid he has. And you should come to dinner. I owe you that much. Honestly, you'd be doing me a favor. I'm thinking of buying a new car, but I need someone knowledgeable advising me.” She was laying it on so thick the air was hard to breathe.

Jeremy suggested a Mustang convertible, or maybe a Trans Am. He was walking away before she'd turn and see the look I was giving her. “That's wonderful,” I said. “Jeremy Campbell is coming to dinner. That's a dream come true.” I gathered up my homework, slammed the car door, stormed off. Then I came back. “And it won't work,” I told her. “You don't know him like I do.”

“Maybe not,” my mom said. “But it's hard to dislike someone you've been good to, someone who's depending on you. It's an old women's trick. I think it's worth a try.”

Let me just take a moment here to note that it did not work. Jeremy Campbell didn't even show up for the dinner my mom cooked specially for him. He did ease off for a bit until whatever it was about me that provoked him provoked him again. Not a thing worked with Jeremy until Mr. Campbell was laid off and the whole Campbell family finally had to move three states east. The last time I saw him was June of 1991. He was sitting on top of me, pinning my shoulders down with his knees, stuffing dried leaves into my mouth. He had an unhappy look on his face as if he didn't like it any more than I did, and that pissed me off more than anything.

Then he turned his head slightly and a beam of pure light came streaming through his ears, lighting them up, turning them into two bright red fungi at the sides of his head. It helped a little that he looked ridiculous, even though I was the only one in the right position to see. It's the picture I keep in my heart.

So that's the way it really was and don't let my mother tell you differently. Saturday turned out to be the night I won at
The Legend of Zelda.
I was alone in the house at the time. Mom and Tamara were off at their rally, marching down Second Street, carrying signs. The Playboy Bunny logo in a red circle with a red slash across its face. On my computer the theme played and the princess kissed the hero, again and again. These words appeared on the
screen:
You have destroyed Ganon. Peace has returned to the country of Hyrule.

And then the words vanished and were replaced with another message.
Do you wish to play again?

What I wished was that I had
The Adventure of Link.
But before I could get bitter, the phone rang. “This is really embarrassing,” my mom said. “There was a little trouble at the demonstration. We've been arrested.”

“Arrested for what?” I asked.

“Assault. Mayhem. Crimes of a violent nature. None of the charges will stick. We were attacked by a group of nazi frat boys and I did nothing but defend myself. You know me. Only thing is, Dusty is in no mood to cut me any slack. I don't think I'm getting out tonight. What a vindictive bastard he's turned out to be!”

“Are you all right?”

“Oh, yeah. Hardly a scratch.” There was a lot of noise in the background. I could just make out Tamara, she was singing that Merle Haggard song “Mama Tried.” “There's a whole bunch of us here,” my mother said. “It's the crime of the century. I might get my picture in the paper. Anyway, Victor wasn't arrested. You know Victor. So he's on his way to stay with you tonight. I just wanted you to hear from me yourself.”

I didn't like to think of her spending the night in jail, even if it did sound like a slumber party over there. I could already hear Victor's car pulling up out front. I was glad he was staying; I wouldn't have liked to be alone all night. Sometime in the dark I'd have started thinking
about nuns with hooks for hands. Now I could see him through the window and he was carrying a pizza. Good on Victor! “Just as long as you're all right,” I told her.