We Are Not Ourselves

The boys took their seats with palpable pride at being envied from above. Batting practice was still going on, and they got their gloves out. Connell never failed to bring his glove to games and wear it for hours in an uncomfortable vigil, despite having never come close to snagging a ball; they were always in the wrong seats. On the lower level, though, having a glove was good planning.

Ed took their orders and went for refreshments. In the absence of his moderating influence, the boys fired fusillades of obscure terms at each other: hot smash, can of corn, high and tight, round the horn, hot corner, filthy stuff, the hook. As she listened to them speak, a meditative calm came over her. She did some of her best thinking at ball games, or while Ed was listening to them on the radio. She’d always understood the basic mechanics of baseball, and Ed had successfully explained a good deal of the more complex aspects to her, but she’d never cracked the code of the priestly solemnity her husband and son greeted the game with, in which old bats and split-leather gloves were revered like relics, as saints’ fingers and spleens had been in earlier centuries. In truth, she was impressed by the range of her son’s knowledge. It was an arrested form of scholarship he was practicing when he allowed his brain to soak up these facts. It was really history men craved when they fixated on the statistics of retired athletes—men who hadn’t been to war, in a nation still young enough to feel dwarfed by the epochal moments of its onetime rivals. The rhetoric of baseball was redolent of antiquity, the hushed tones, the gravitas, the elevation of the pedestrian into the sublime. Connell and Ed would read write-ups of games they’d watched or listened to on the radio, even ones they’d attended. The narrative that surrounded the game seemed as important as the game itself. Ed raved about the descriptive power of some sportswriters, but she never saw what he was talking about; it seemed like boilerplate stuff, dressed up as the chronicle of an epic clash. She focused on the visceral particulars of the stadium experience instead: the smell of boiled meat, nestled under sauerkraut; the thunder of the scoreboard exhorting them to clap; the feel of her son’s hand as he slapped her five.

Ed had been gone a long time. She panned around for his Members Only jacket. After some restless searching she spotted him a section over, leaning into the railing, staring around with his hand over his eyes like a lookout in a crow’s nest. She had his ticket stub in her pocket, so he couldn’t show it to the ushers, one of whom was trying to move him along. She could see Ed growing agitated as he swatted a second usher’s hand from his shoulder. She hated making a spectacle of herself, but any second now the guards would be called, and that would create an even bigger scene. She stood and shouted his name, waving her arms. He finally saw her and broke free of the ushers, who gave no chase, seeing order restored. He made his way down the aisle encumbered by trays; she distributed the quarry to the boys.

He stood in front of his seat. “Where the hell were you?”

She stole a glance around to see who was listening. “I was right here,” she said, trying to urge him toward calm. No one had cocked an ear yet, but she and Ed were on the border of a full-on commotion.

“I couldn’t find you,” he said sharply.

“I realize that, honey. But you’re here now.”

“I was looking all over for you.”

“Ed,” she said. “I’m here. You’re here. Enjoy the game.”

The boys were too caught up in the food to notice Ed. He still hadn’t taken his seat but was standing looking into the crowd as if the answer to what confounded him were projected on the backs of their heads. Farshid listlessly fingered a waxy-looking pretzel. Connell wolfed down a hot dog in two bites and started in on his own pretzel. When she picked up on annoyance behind her, she tugged on Ed’s sleeve and he fell into the seat and began to smooth out his pants with an insistent repetitiveness, as though trying to warm himself or clear crumbs from his lap. He had bought nothing for the two of them to eat.

“Where’s the food for us?”

“I didn’t get us anything.”

She shook her head in disbelief. “What are we going to eat?”

“You didn’t ask for anything.”

“I have to ask to eat now?” She took a piece of Connell’s pretzel.

“Hang on,” he said. A hot dog salesman had entered their section, and Ed flagged him down.

“I feel like you don’t think anymore,” she said when they were settled in with their dogs. “I need you to get with it, Ed.”

“Let’s just enjoy the game,” he said.

A couple of innings later, a Met lifted a high foul ball toward their section. She could feel it gaining on them. As it approached, time seemed to slow; an awful expectancy built. It shifted in the wind, so that it appeared to be headed elsewhere; then it was upon them. People all around reached for it, but it was headed right for Ed. He stabbed at it clumsily and it bounded out of his hand, snagged by a man behind them in the ensuing scrum.

For a moment, Connell appeared stunned. He had been brushed on the neck by the hand of destiny. His body seemed to shiver with contained nervous energy, and he hopped like a bead of oil in a saucepan.

“Wow!” he said, to her, to his father, to Farshid, to anyone who would listen. “Can you believe it?”

The victorious fan stared into empty space with a determined expression as he received the forceful backslaps of his friends. His studied lack of fanfare had the effect of holding the note of his triumph longer.

Ed was miserable. “I’m sorry, buddy,” he said. “I tried to get it for you.”

“No problem, Dad.”

“I’m really sorry.” He looked bereft. “I feel terrible.”

“Maybe if you’d had a glove,” Connell said sweetly, extending his own. Ed turned and asked if the boy could see the ball, which the man handed over more warily than Eileen thought appropriate. Connell held it covetously. She worried that he might ask to keep it, but after a few moments in which he seemed to communicate wordlessly with it, he gave it back, and the man secreted it into his jacket pocket. Something about these talismanic objects, spoils of an ersatz war, reduced men to primal feelings. Connell pounded his glove every time a foul ball was hit in their general direction, no matter how far away it was, and she could think of nothing to say to stop him.





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