by Rick Wilber
“This is yours,” Arendsen said, holding out the ball. “The homer’s gone, but this was your infield hit. I signed it. Hope that was okay.”
Grace took the ball and turned it in her hand. In blue ink, Arendsen had scrawled, “First hit in the bigs,” and signed her name and the date. Grace felt her cheeks bum. “This is—this is so nice of you.”
“Nah.” Arendsen shrugged. “No problem.”
A camera flashed, and they both looked up. Someone had snapped a picture of the two of them together.
“’ Spose that’ll be on eBay tomorrow, too,” Arendsen said. “Do you think so?” Arendsen grinned. “Oh, yeah. First time we faced each other.”
Grace made herself smile. “Probably the last, Ricky.” Arendsen shook her head. “Nah. You’ll be back, Grade.” She raised an impressive forefinger. “And I’m gonna get you on the splitter next time.”
Grace’s heart lifted. She said, laughing, “We’ll just see about that.”
Ricky Arendsen clapped her on the shoulder, and then turned and left, stopping once or twice to sign autographs. Grace went in for her shower, nodding to the security guys beside the door. Arendsen was right. She’d be back. She’d gotten her hits, made a good throw. If this team wouldn’t have her, she’d get her agent to put her someplace else. She’d face Arendsen again, one way or another. But she was going to watch out for that splitter.
Valerie Sayers is the author of six novels and her stories, essays, and reviews have appeared widely in publications like the New York Times, Washington Post, Zoetrope, Ploughshares, and Prairie Schooner. Her stories have been cited in Best American Short Stories and Best American Essays and she has won the Pushcart Prize for Fiction and received a National Endowment for the Arts literature fellowship. She is a professor of English and department chair at the University of Notre Dame. Here, she tells us of a woman who really knows the game and how to read the man at the plate. She can see what will happen next, almost every time.
How to Read a Man
Valerie Sayers
I REMEMBERED JUST HOW well I could read certain men in October, during the pennant races. I was following both leagues, the Yankees and the Mets, crazy in love with every man on the two rosters. I had a big crush on Bobby Valentine and a bigger one on Joe Torre. My father would have been appalled at me, rooting for two teams, watching baseball like a girl Well, I’d sort it out come Series time: then the Yankees would be the only guys for me. Meanwhile, I had affection to spare.
I watched the first American League game on TV a New York fan all alone in my rented house in Pinckney, South Carolina. I hadn’t watched this much baseball in years: my ex-lover Diego, unlike every other Latin man I knew, hated the game and I’d forgotten how good I was at predicting what a batter would do. I noticed it first with Bermie Williams. I loved Bermie best of all the Yankees, the way he pleated his long body down like a squeezebox at the plate and cast that impassive eye on the pitcher. I’d never for a minute believed he was so sure of himself. He was scared out there, which was why he was good. He was the kind of guy who went all the way, deep down into a slump or out into the stratosphere of home-run heroics, and I’d always known which way it was going with him.
It wasn’t just his face and it wasn’t just his body: I put them together and I got myself a reading that was pretty accurate.
Exactly how accurate I hadn’t realized till now. Diego was snuggling with his new honey somewhere in downtown Manhattan, so I didn’t have to worry about his drifting off on the couch, sighing obnoxiously as the hours passed. At the end of nine innings, the score was tied and I was batting 1,000: I’d called every one of Bernie’s at-bats. It wasn’t some intuitive thing, either. I watched him from the time he came into the on-deck circle, ran a Geiger counter up and down his body, registered everything from the way he breathed through his nose to the precise angle of his shoulders. Ballplayers all have their stares down, but eyelash flutter is pretty well out of their control. Eyelashes were a big factor with Bermie.
I curled up on my rented couch, happy when the game went to extra innings. In the bottom of the tenth, Bermie looked centered: not driven or determined, just focused. He was sealed off from the game, on his own. His eyelashes were perfectly still. “Homer,” I said, and off the ball went, on a trajectory that maybe now was my trajectory, too.
***
For the second game I called in Norm Fein, total Yankee fan, to witness what I could do. I was sleeping with Norm, every once in a while. So far it wasn’t going very well. In August, when I got down to Pinckney and my new job at the university, there was a cocktail party in my honor and Norm Fein, who’d only been divorced a month, was my designated escort. I took one look at him—he was maybe forty, with straight graying blond hair down past his chin and a really creepy habit of throwing it back behind one ear, self-consciously—and I knew instantly that I couldn’t stand him, and that one way or another I’d end up in bed with him. The first thing he said was, “What I like best about your film is how you bypass the pornography of the real and go straight to something so distanced and formal that we totally get it, that you’re commenting on his integrity with the integrity of that unblinking camera.”
Pornography of the real. He got it all out in one breath without even blushing. That was the sort of academic talk that drove me right up the bedroom wall, only then I climbed back down and found myself in bed with the guy. By then, though, he wasn’t so creepy. He liked baseball. He had a sense of humor. He didn’t do that hair-flinging thing so much once he got to know you.
And right now, I had to admit, I needed Norm Fein in my living room watching the playoffs with me. “Look,” I said, “I’ll make the prediction, you write it down.
Keep me honest. I know I can do Bernie, but tonight I want to go for Tino, too. And Paul O’Neill.”
“What about Jeter?”
I always knew whether Derek Jeter was going to hit the ball. He might as well be holding a placard announcing his intentions. “Sure. But I need more time to get some of them. Knoblauch, for instance.”
Norm sat on the old-lady couch that came with the house, making a score-card with a straightedge and a lineup from The New York Times. I grew up fifty miles down the road and I found the house completely familiar—froofy chintz chairs with doilies on the arms, a rubber plant in the corner—but Norm looked itchy every time he walked onto the front porch. He was generally itchy in South Carolina: he was half Italian, half Jewish, and more than once he’d pointed out that Southerners like their Italians in pizza and their Jews in dry goods. Film studies, he said, they could do without entirely. On the phone he was all over me—sometimes he called three times a day—but in person he held back. Just now he sat a million miles away, on the edge of the couch, twitching, ready to flee.
Norm was itchy and I was lonely. I’d moved to New York when I was eighteen, a skinny girl in paint-splattered overalls fleeing a town full of beauty queens. Even then I had a serious love-hate relationship with the small-town South, so I must have been out of my middle-aged mind to come back this close to home, to take this gig all these years later no matter how much they were paying me. I was the distinguished visiting artist in the Theater and Film Department and I felt like a fraud. I’d only made three documentaries in my entire life, and the last one had accidentally, through no fault of my own, been paid a lot of attention at the Modem and then won Sundance. The high point of my artistic career. For years I’d thought of myself as a painter, and then I messed around some with video. Finally I managed to make a documentary about Diego, who would never forgive me for getting more out of the deal than he did. My career was back on track: I got a Guggenheim on my twenty-third try—I’m not kidding—and Diego consoled himself with an N.Y.U. student who was twenty years younger than his own daughter. I’m not kidding about that, either. After I kicked him out I landed this one-semester deal in Pinckney, where some investment banker had endowed an entire brand-new university that was hiring a sexy top-dollar faculty
to match their postmod architecture. The younger painters with their Yale M.F.A.S went around talking about their agendas and the critical types wanted art to fit into their own narrow theories, like a coffin into its grave. You could avoid those people in New York, but here you couldn’t hide.
At least Norm was a familiar guy. “Christ,” he said. “Gotta call my bookie before this baby starts.” He jumped up to call New York from the kitchen phone, and I trailed after to get us both a beer. One bottle would last him the whole game, which was another thing I admired about him. Diego used to put away a half-gallon not watching the game. I was with Diego for ten years, almost. He was a good guy, if baseball or women weren’t involved. We’d moved past the time when we could have had a child and I’d been thinking that probably we’d get old together. We already were getting kind of old. Diego was sixty when he took up with the girl.
I was a month past fifty myself, but I still knew where to get a good haircut and I wasn’t ashamed of my body, though maybe a forty-year-old guy was as far as I’d push it. The body wasn’t good enough for Diego in the end. I was so unnerved by his betrayal that in one week I dyed my hair red and painted my toenails silver and got three more holes punched in my right ear. Thank God I remembered myself before I had my tongue pierced or a post drilled into my skull.
“Two thousand Yanks,” I heard Norm say into the receiver.
“Two thousand?”
He hung up the phone. “Safer than I.B.M.”
“I know they’ll win. It’s just a lot of money.”
He picked up the phone again. “How much you in for?”
I shook my head no. I was used to living on nothing in New York, next to nothing if I actually sold a piece. One of the reasons I’d taken this job was to start a retirement fund like the rest of the world. Hanging out with Norm was a big enough risk for me.
We slurped our beer through the pregame and the first three innings. I predicted Williams, Jeter, O’Neill, and Martinez, so Norm could write it all down. I hadn’t missed one of them, but he wasn’t impressed.
“Look, the odds are with you. Three times out of four they’re not going to hit the ball. And there’s a whole country full of fans thinking they can tell what a guy’s gonna do. Where’d you get the idea you were the one?”
I shrugged. I hadn’t spent enough time with him to trust him with the story of my life. I grew up a Yankee fan in Due East, South Carolina, where Yankees of any stripe got run out of town. I was a shy little girl but I was sure about a couple of things. I knew I could draw what a person looked like, and I knew I was crazy for the Yankees no matter how that affected my already dubious social standing. I sat with my father and my brother to watch every game on network TV, and when my brother pretended he was Tony Kubek, dancing in pinstripes at shortstop, I didn’t know whether it was my brother or Kubek I loved more. I read the standings and the stats, did imitations of Dizzy Dean and Peewee Reese calling the game. My dad drove us all the way from Due East to the Bronx, an eighteen-hour drive to watch three hours of baseball, and the usher found our seats the very instant Elston Howard, my favorite Yankee forever, hit a grand-slam home run. My father squeezed me so tight I couldn’t breathe. I clung to his seersucker suit in Yankee Stadium and had a vision of my poor mother, home in South Carolina, baking pecan pies for the Garden Club.
Forty years later, I still hadn’t joined the Garden Club and I still adored the Yanks. I was on another streak when Tino Martinez came up in the bottom of the fourth. By then Norm was watching me watching the game and, nearsighted as I was, I was leaning into the TV to get my reading. The woman I rented from had a little black-and-white that Norm liked to lament, but it had just the right contrast for what I wanted to see.
With Tino, I was beginning to think it was centered in the jaw. He looked cold at bat, but I’d seen him in interviews, a big softy with an easy grin. Right now his jaw floated, serene. “Extra base hit,” I said, “maybe a triple. Wait. Home run.”
Norm shook his head at my cockiness and Tino listed, fouling one off. “He’s not hitting anything tonight. He’ll be your undoing.” Then we both watched Martinez whack the next high fastball into the upper deck.
Norm whistled low. “Maisie, you know what we could do with this peculiar gift of yours?”
“I have a suspicion you’re talking about betting.”
“No bookie’s gonna touch it, but I could round up my boys. Twenty bucks a shot, can the man hit the ball. You could signal me somehow.”
“Sorry, babe. I’m driving back on Sunday.”
“New York for fall break? You got playoff tickets?”
“No tickets. I just need civilization.”
“You don’t want to drive all that way. You’ll come back exhausted. Stick around, I’ll treat you right.”
“I thought you said everybody took off.”
“They do.” He sounded miserable. “Unless they have child support to cough up. Then they stick around Pinckney for the duration.”
I’d forgotten he had children: I’d never seen them, though they lived in town. Was he hinting for a ride to New York? He sat morose, his lower lip jutting.
“All right,” he said, “if you’re not gonna be here at least tell me what you look for.”
“I look for when they go Zen. When a guy goes deep into his own body.” “Holy shit, the distinguished visiting artist is talking about the zone.”
“Oh hush up. Listen, this throwing problem of Knoblauch’s, where you reckon that’s coming from?” Chuck Knoblauch’s arm had been spastic for weeks now and I almost couldn’t bear to see him on-screen. He looked uttedy confused in the infield, as panicked as Diego looked around the time my film took off.
“Knoblauch, Christ,” said Norm. “I’m sitting on a gold mine.”
“You’re not sitting on anything, honey, but a rented couch.”
In the bottom of the seventh, Knoblauch came to the plate with his face contorted: not a smirk, but close. He always grimaced through his at-bats, but this time he stretched his mouth out a hundred new ways and screwed his left eye tight into its socket. I could read him. I could see what the weeks of being off with his throwing arm had cost him, but I could see how fierce he was feeling, too. His features settled all at once, and so did his shoulders. “Extra base hit,” I said. It was almost anticlimactic when he got die double, and now I was the one who felt a shiver of panic. I could read a stranger on a television screen, but I hadn’t been able to read Diego, not after ten years of our failing side by side, ten years taking turns with adjunct teaching jobs and gallery rounds and all the humiliations of calling yourself an artist.
I stretched my feet out till my silver toenails caught the light. Knoblauch stood naked in front of millions of people who knew the worst about him and still he found the swing. It was the big act that made me crazy for ballplayers. What was wrong with me, that I hadn’t been able to see that Diego was putting on a big act, too?
“Think about the Series, would you?” Norm was practically begging, but he hadn’t moved any closer on the couch.
“I’m a not-for-profit.”
“You’re a goddess,” Norm Fein said, and made me grin, but I couldn’t meet his eye. There we sat, in the big old-fashioned living room of a white frame house in Pinckney, South Carolina, way too close to where my father taught me how to figure a batting average. A real Southern house, a small-town house, the traitor Yankees on the TV, a framed print of Fort Sumter over the mantel. I almost felt like I’d come home, but my father died years ago, my mother just before I kicked Diego out. There wasn’t any family here.
Out of the comer of my eye, I watched Norm move to the farthest edge of the couch, his hair hanging down, his elbows on his jeans. We looked more like a couple of teenagers than we looked like professors. I had to stop being so hard-shelled. I had to crack a little, and not just for the guys on the screen. I probably should have asked Norm if he wanted to hitch a ride to New York.
***
I didn’
t ask him. On Saturday night we watched the Mets, down in the National League three games to zero. By then I was falling hard for them, and I could read most of the hitters. The Mets had a lot of veterans in the line-up, old guys who weren’t going to roll over and play dead just because no team had ever come back to win after losing the first three. In my living room in Pinckney, batter after struggling batter morphed into Diego, staring down a muddy canvas, but somehow they stayed alive and won the game. Norm and I shrieked and toasted them and snuggled all night.
But on Sunday morning I left for New York alone, and I was glad for the solitude. I planned to do the trip in one long sprint, the way my dad drove us to Yankee Stadium, and to let the Mets game carry me up the coast. They needed to nail three more in a row. If they lost this one, it was all over.
The game tied and stretched out to ten innings, company through North Carolina and Virginia. Eleven innings, twelve. I was alone and I was happy. On the Jersey Turnpike I began to think they might really win, and my old station wagon started slipping out of its lane. I was listening to the Mets but I was seeing Diego lying on my purple couch every time I watched a game, bored, mimicking the announcer.
The ballgame was still stalled at 2—2. Every ground ball, every strikeout was an omen. The Mets could pull this off. They were holding steady. Thirteen innings, fourteen. They could hang on and I could hang on. In the top of the fifteenth, the Braves pulled ahead by one and I almost sideswiped a truck. It couldn’t end this way. They’d fought for fifteen innings. They couldn’t lose now.
Only three outs left. The radio spat static. Shawon Dunston, one of the Mets I could read best, stepped into the batter’s box. I pictured him, tall, broad-shouldered, I’m an old man at this game and I don’t give a shit what you think I’m about to do. He dug in, worked the count to 3—2, and I saw two old men digging in, Diego the ghost-batter behind Dunston. If Shawon Dunston could make his move in the bottom of the fifteenth inning . . . Dunston hit his fifth foul ball. He’s been in there seven minutes now, the announcer said, and the static cleared. Eight minutes. That’s gotta begetting close to the record. Dunston fouled for the sixth time and I knew what I had to do: I coaxed him, the way I used to coax Diego through his depressions. “Stay with it, darlin’,” I heard myself say. “You got it. Just a little deeper.” I laughed out loud, alone in my big car, surrounded by big truckers, talking to a big ballplayer. Nine minutes in, Dunston hit the ball. I didn’t breathe till the radio screamed single. I didn’t need to see him on the screen: We walk by faith and not by sight.
