By Ivy Goodman

Featured Art: Stephen Reichert, Untitled, 2011. Oil on canvas, 18″ x 12″. “Cirlce” series.

It was a late season game on a warm Saturday approaching summer but not yet humid, overcast, so that clouds gave shade, and if the rain started, good, then the seemingly interminable might end sooner.

Boys, aged nine and ten, were playing baseball.

The game was real, with real uniforms, equipment, jargon, and rules, but it also seemed as momentous as make-believe. I understood make-believe far better than team sports. Oh, I understood sports, but I didn’t. I couldn’t. Like the color blind or the tone deaf, I was somehow incapable. While other parents followed the game, I stared at the players’ families more than I should have.

In our family, there were three of us, my husband, myself, and our son, and we had moved to the area just months before. Newcomers, we were late to register, and our son was assigned to a team with room for stragglers. We still didn’t know quite where we were, what was this place, who were these people? For me the quandary wasn’t just who in general or in particular, but also that deeper puzzlement I often felt, not who but what. What were people? I’d been staring at them my entire life.

In April, when the season started, wintry practices after school made me glad for my gloves and puffy coat. From the other parents, mostly mothers like me, I learned to bring a folding chair from home just as we all would eventually for the games, played on that same scrubby, bleacherless field. At those early practices, parents sat watching in the wind or stood and paced. Many were already friends. The loud and histrionic quickly made themselves known, the way caricature exposes the essential. Others, over the weeks, became increasingly familiar and sympathetic and yet remained near-strangers. Hello again! Hello! One man’s son, like mine—his older son—was among those whorotated at the bottom of the roster, so that no single boy would bear the stigma of always batting last. Both this man and I were shy, plain, peripheral, I thought, content enough as ourselves, though we might want more distinction for our children. In fact, his son was improving, and I wasn’t sure mine was. I was happy for his son, happy for him, and during the last few practices, I’d understood that he’d needed to stand a little farther from me because they’d both moved on.

My son didn’t belong on the “winningest” team, as that team surely wasn’t. But he wanted to play, and he was there to learn—to learn how to lose, I thought, and perhaps win once or twice, if fate permitted. He and his teammates listened to their coach, a gentle, patient older man, nearly at the players’ height when he knelt down, old enough to have a set of grown children, too, in addition to his ten-year-old, and so he seemed to bring a grandfather’s wisdom to his coaching.

At one astounding game, when my son batted in the winning run and the coach awarded him the game ball, my son was inebriated with joy at a triumph he would remember into adulthood without irony.

My husband remembers the game ball, too. It’s still somewhere in the basement, preserved in its compact green and black cardboard box inside a larger box of childhood souvenirs, though our grown son has long lived elsewhere.

Was that the game ball afternoon? In the haze of time, weeks of games and practices coalesce into a single afternoon, a flickering of images and impressions, and for me, the helpless screaming of another family’s three-year-old child. Sometimes you remember certain things, and you don’t know why. Or you do. You do know why.

Our son was on the bench, smiling bashfully at the comments of boys on either side of him and digging in the dirt with the toe of his baseball cleat. He was far from the anxiety of a turn at plate, and there were no bullies that I knew of on the team. I could glance at him and glance away. He was safe. Although my husband was at work during practice, we were usually together for the weekend games, both of us on lawn chairs with rough frayed webbing that we brought from home. We sat back a bit from the field. The more social parents, and the better players’ parents, sat closer in. But the spirit of the place was friendly, as if we’d gathered outdoors for fireworks or a local band concert.

Off to the side, by themselves, my plain friend, or non-friend, was sitting with his plain wife, whom I’d never seen before at a game. I hadn’t seen their younger preschool son either. He was running back and forth near his parents, waving a paddleball, a little ball attached to a length of elastic that was stapled, on the other end, to a wooden paddle.

Is there something like a synesthesia of personality? Gray, olive green, beige, brownish, khaki: those were the shades my non-friend evoked, and his wife’s aura matched. She was dressed in a pale tee shirt and wrinkled cotton shorts dug out perhaps from the bottom of a drawer on a day when the weather, all of a sudden, was hot. Contradictory though it seemed, he, as a man, was further camouflaged by being slender and she, as a woman, by being motherly and round. He had a plain, uncomplicated face that a child might have crayoned, a few diagonals of brown hair across his forehead, rimless glasses encircling brown eyes, nose blunt, not large but unsubtle. A homely man, some might have said, but his plain wife, with her heart-shaped face, had a latent prettiness about her and the means to be more colorful, more notable, if and when she wanted. That afternoon, until the last moment, she might have thought she was staying home as usual with the younger child so he could have his nap. He was almost ready to give it up and was passing through that willful, cranky transition of needing rest but refusing to lie down. So why not bring him to the game? Yes, let’s! From their folding chairs, both my non-friend and his wife gave off an air of abandonment, a giddy expressiveness in the way they smiled and nodded and touched each other’s arms. Together, they’d escaped—the whining, the laundry, the meals, the chaotic house, silent and gray in their absence but for the scattered neon plastic toys. And yet, while they talked and laughed, they must have also been subliminally aware of the batting order and the scooting movement of boys along the bench. If their son, their older son, had a turn, they would pause and watch intently, as all the parents watched their own sons, even me. But for now, they were out of the house alone together, and if their little boy complied, they might pretend he wasn’t there.

I suppose I sound jealous or maybe envious of the almost pretty wife, of the gleeful couple. But there was nothing between me and my non-friend except that shadowy sexual awareness, ridiculous or perhaps repellant, if articulated, and yet seized on for self-flattery and a tiny spark of pleasure. He was a man, I was a woman, and we might have been friends. We were alike in reticence, I’d thought. But we were not alike.

Our opponents were still on the field. They were a legion I’ve forgotten, cheered by parents who must have sat on their own folding chairs behind third base, the only logical spot for my memory to place them. Just then, straight in front of us, our team star was at bat.

David. Devon. Darren. Yes, Darren. Along with the game ball, my husband and our son also remember the phenomenon of Darren, though I’m probably the only one who remembers his name. He was a handsome boy, taller and bigger than the others, with slightly longer shiny brown hair. Although he and his teammates were about the same age, he was aloof in the way of an older child among those he considered “babies.” Perhaps he was gifted. Very often, he did hit the ball.

His ruddy, athletic, vaguely famous father was the chiropractor who sent promotions in the mail, or so I realized mid-season. His lovely blonde mother was perfectly coifed and groomed, even on those early mornings when other parents, hurrying their children out the door, might still be in pajama bottoms. Darren’s parents were our gracious dignitaries, among the last to arrive, but room was always made for them to squeeze in up front and unfold the clever V-shaped frames of their camp chairs.

If our son were at bat, I also would have watched in suspense, like Darren’s parents, but with far fewer expectations. Didn’t most parents feel as I did? He was not me but mine, of me and apart, under my influence and yet himself, whoever he was, regardless of my desires. He was a child, playing with other children. Their lives were too structured, their houses too far apart, for them to gather on a vacant lot and invent their own games. There were no vacant lots.

Our son was on the bench, grinding the dirt under his shoe. The weary little son of my non-friend staggered nearby, waving a wooden paddle and pursuing an evasive tethered ball that careened in the air on a length of elastic. Darren swung and missed again. When he struck out, he didn’t quite fling his bat but dropped it hard enough to bounce. He used a batting glove and his own special bat that he toted in a zippered bag to practices and games. Perhaps he was thinking, it’s not fair, meaning not just the umpire’s call but the shameful added burden of his parents’ disappointment. They were shouting, “Darren! Darren, where’s your bat? Don’t forget your bat!”

No one said, “Nice try.”

In what I heard as a normal voice, my husband said, “Poor kid. Actually, he’s not that good.”

My own voice was desperate. “Would you please be quiet?”

“What? No one heard me. You think they’re listening?”

“Yes, if they can’t help it.”

Often when he assumed we were tête-à-tête, I was hyperconscious of being in public, in that living theater where audience and performers constantly exchanged roles and people blundered unaware while other people listened and watched. But what did we reveal? Nothing more than the obvious: that life was never altogether nice and happy, deep inside marriage, family, or a person’s skull. In this instance, my husband was subtly defending the innocence of boys’ baseball as an ideal but criticizing an actual child in the process. Everyone could be mean sometimes, which was why I thought we should keep our voices down. Or maybe he was right, and no one heard or cared to listen. He was just being, just living, honest, unselfconscious, irked especially, I knew, by Darren’s silly batting glove. If you were quiet and timid, you could still be singled out for torment. Likewise, praise and persecution blurred when the baseball phenom was only ten years old.

Of course the problem wasn’t Darren. The problem was the fuss and folderol of Darren’s parents and the wearying familiarity, late in the season, of the setting, the behaviors, the personalities, including our own. My husband was admirably selfish with his time on earth, and there he was, bored and confined on a scrubby field for yet another afternoon. But he also spent hours in the backyard, helping our son break in his leather glove, teaching him to catch, throw, and bat, all of which, to me, meant far more than simply preparation for a game.

My husband had grown up happy, playing outside every day on a block filled with children, as he described it. When we wondered whether we should try to have a child, he didn’t have my doubts: How could I subject even a notional child to childhood? Didn’t I already love that child too much?

But at that moment, I wasn’t thinking of our son. I looked at my husband and looked away, and he went back to watching the game. Our familiar tiff settled into tedium and dull discomfort, like the game itself and the afternoon, like our folding chairs, rough beneath our legs, the seat backs held at rigid right angles by metal tubes. Maybe we shared the same dull headache. Or by then had the little boy begun to scream?

He’d been standing by his parents’ chairs, begging and whining while they ignored him. He seemed to want another lesson on how to make his toy work, how to replicate the steady tap-tap-tap, a skill likely beyond him at his age. I couldn’t manage a paddleball before I was eight or nine, but I was never good with balls. The trick, for him, might have been to shorten the elastic. No one thought of that. Soon, his distress was so far gone that he probably forgot what he wanted, and had his father, who was nearer, attended to him, he might have shouted, “No, Mommy!” Instead his father seized the paddleball and the boy screamed.

He was screaming for his toy, screaming at being misunderstood, screaming in exhaustion, on and on, like a siren or a car alarm, while his parents pretended not to see or hear him. They were conjoined in a loving way, smiling at each other. In unison, they might have looked at their watches, looked up, and given the same precise answer, down to the second. It was time—time to extinguish unwanted behavior in their child. They’d read how to do it. Perhaps they did it often, however well or poorly.

The boy resumed running back and forth, or was the scream running, taking its impetus from him, holding him inside it, and accelerating on its own? It would free him only when they both were exhausted. By then, he might not want his paddleball as much. He might feel deprived of something more, more than a toy, something else, something like an idea of himself that had just begun to form.

He didn’t have the advantage of being impish or cute. On first glance that afternoon, I’d thought he looked like his father or maybe his mother because they were the sort of family who looked alike. But right then his eyes were nearly shut, his cheeks and nose compressed, and his screaming open mouth predominant. On his faded jersey, trails of dirt, less noticeable earlier, were wet and dark from tears and snot. If his jersey was a hand-me-down, his twill shorts, cleaner and newer, might be saved to hand down in turn, if the parents dared to conceive a third child, but I hoped not. Maybe they were better with their older son. Maybe.

“That little boy,” I said, and my husband nodded, briefly turning from the game and frowning at the parents. “Yeah,” he said, “they should do something.” If the little boy had been our child, one of us would have picked him up to let him finish crying away from the field, back toward the parked cars. We generally agreed about our child’s welfare. We also would have wanted to spare the other families all that noise. Crying was not like a conversation that people might or might not overhear. Beyond the field, there was space enough to let feelings dissipate. Luckily, we weren’t crammed together like passengers on a plane, where screaming drives people mad until, for intervals at a time, they manage to transcend it. They don’t hear the screaming, and they don’t know the child. “They” in this instance were the boy’s own parents.

From their lawn chairs, they were pretending, it seemed, to fall in love. They were sitting taller, braced for repartee, signaling their cleverness with smiles and lifted eyebrows. In a marriage of ten or twelve years, the use of fantasy in shared arousal was not unusual. They were at a party and they’d just met. Or, they already knew each other, from work, say, but in this context, for the first time, they wanted to screw each other. They were fascinating, scintillating, sexy. They were stars. In their pretend game, the rules were they mustn’t see or hear their child, but they could talk to each other, gesture, and make eyes wildly.

Did they mean to stir up the oedipal in the little boy? And what of my sexuality, mature and glaring? I’ll ask myself again, was I jealous? Anyone might say I was, but in the midst of all that anguish and noise, I didn’t think so. Out of fairness, I made an effort to see the drama of the parents and the little boy separately, to pry them apart, as in the paradigm of parent-child separation. The parents, no, the lively couple, were in love, enthralled, oblivious. They were the joyful inverse of those sad, silent couples you see in restaurants, solemnly chewing. And the little boy? He was a child throwing an ordinary tantrum, a dirty, snotty little child whom, understandably, no one wanted, to his great, comic, negligible fury.

His parents’ goal must have been to teach him not to cry for attention, which they might have achieved more neutrally by looking at the field and following the game. Or if the game bored them, they might have brought along needlework or an old magazine. Instead, they added to the boy’s confusion. While he stood and screamed, perhaps they were further titillated by excluding him. They were cruel. They were sadistic. They were vulgar. Exhibitionists invite, provoke, and need voyeurs. But maybe they didn’t know what they were doing. If he was lenient, their little boy would forgive them when he grew up. He would be able to see them not as parents but as a man and a woman, a loving couple, decent people, apart from him. Didn’t other people like them? So what if they hurt him? One mustn’t take it personally. And yet how can a child not? Better to advise the child: Be invisible. Don’t be a person.

They might have picked him up, soothed him, calmed him, and then, in simple terms, explained the problem. Instead they wanted him to cry alone until he stopped. But what if he didn’t? How long would they let him go on? For the remainder of the game, the remainder of a life, until someone or other died? Or until even they couldn’t stand it anymore? But their tolerance was high. They forced him to wait until they got around to him. Their rationale was whatever they decided, when they felt like it. All right, here. Here. The screaming boy saw the paddleball in his father’s outstretched hand, and the father, pivoting in his chair, merely passed it back, focusing for that moment on the transfer, hand to hand, and not making eye contact with the little boy.

The boy’s cries slowed to hiccoughs in his chest. He stood alone, withdrawn, convalescent, his face puffy from tears. He held the paddle loosely, by its handle. The attached rubber ball dangled in a tuft of weeds. There. He had it back. But did he want it? What did he want? He might have said: for his feelings to go away.

In the fall, our own son signed up for soccer and soon decided he preferred soccer because he loved to run around, and we all would be happier among the soccer families. He would not play baseball again.

At the end of that final game, the game ball game, the coach gathered the team close. His wise head seemed disproportionately large when he was kneeling, larger still because of how he combed his hair, deep brown, probably dyed, and smoothed straight back off his high creased forehead. He held up the boxed game ball. He was the kindest man in the world.

When we drove home late that afternoon, our son sat in the back seat, imagining his face on a baseball card. I thought, please, let life disillusion him ever so slowly. I thought, chicken, rice, green beans, salad, the raw ingredients for dinner.

Memory sets forth layer upon layer of context in an instant.

A little child was screaming.

He was throwing an ordinary tantrum, probably nothing more, regardless of what I thought I saw, what I interpreted, felt, and can’t forget. Sometimes fate directs you, disturbs you, and insists you stare. I couldn’t look away, and I couldn’t help that child, nor, as a three-year-old, could he help himself. Today, he probably remembers none of this. Unless he does.

Not now. Now. Now.

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Ivy Goodman’s short fiction has appeared in Five Points, Orca, Hobart, storySouth, Washington Square, Epoch, Witness, Gettysburg Review, and other U.S. literary magazines and anthologies. Her two published collections of stories are Heart Failure (University of Iowa Press) and A Chapter from Her Upbringing (Carnegie Mellon University Press).

Stephen Reichert (American, b. 1975), Baltimore City, Maryland, is a multidisciplinary artist with recent solo shows at Hancock Solar Gallery, Co_Lab, Baltimore City Hall, and Sotheby’s Roland Park Gallery; a current show at The Fox Building; and group shows at Ellington-White Contemporary, The Peale Museum, American Visionary Art Museum, Arts Fort Worth, University of Maryland, National Art League, Cerulean Arts Gallery, Abington Art Center, Sebastopol Center for the Arts and many others. He is the editor of the poetry magazine Smartish Pace. Reichert is represented by K. Hamill Fine Art & Design.