baseball.
“But I’m a girl,” she added grimly as we reached Willie’s lemon-ice stand. “I might wind up just bein’ a coach. Two, Willie.”
A fat, benevolent-looking man with a wide bald head scooped ice into white cups, shaping it into smooth mounds with the back of the scoop. He gave them to me while Mel fished out her quarter.
Willie gave back a nickel. “I ain’t seen you before.”
“This is the kid who’s living with Vic whose father ran away,” Mel explained. I was tired of giving my version of the story so I didn’t.
“Pleased to meet you,” Willie said. “I knew your father, he was okay.”
“He’s not dead,” I snapped, sinking my teeth into the ice. It wasn’t like anything I’d ever tasted before — soft and tart, with no stiffness to bite through.
Sucking our ices, we returned to Connie’s stoop. “Willie’s okay,” Mel said, “but he was a bastard not to give us these free, you just movin’ here and everything.”
Then she mapped out the territory of Shepherd Avenue for me.
A block beyond the lemon-ice stand was a deli owned by Rudy Rothstein, Grace’s husband.
“Vic calls her ‘Aunt Grace’ even though you ain’t related, on account of Grace always goes to the store for your grandmother,” Mel informed me. “She don’t get around too good, your grandmother.”
Mel lived half a block from us. In between us lived an old lady we only saw when she swept her porch, and a family with a new baby. The other families she didn’t really know.
On the opposite side of the street the only people I knew so far were Louisa, the retarded girl, and Johnny Gallo. A huge part of the block was a sewing machine factory, which went all the way to Atlantic Avenue. Mel showed me a rectangular box chalked onto the brick side of that building, with a large white “X” that connected its corners.
“Our strike zone,” she explained. “Vic taught me to play stickball here. I’ll teach you.”
“I’m not allowed to play baseball.”
Mel cocked her head as if I’d just spoken in Arabic. “Whaddya mean, you’re not allowed?”
I swallowed. “My mother told me not to.”
It was the truth. Two years earlier my father, sensing something weird about the way I was growing up, signed me up in the local Little League even though I’d never even held a bat in my hands. On my first and only time at bat a spider-limbed boy named Phil McElhenny let fly with a wild pitch that conked me on the head. Luckily I was wearing a gigantic plastic helmet with earlaps that reached below my cheeks, so when I fell to my ass it was more from shock than injury.
But my mother didn’t know that. She ran onto the field in hysterics, tore off the helmet, probed my skull for dents, and screamed over her shoulder at Phil. She weighed maybe a hundred pounds, but she carried me off that field in front of all those jeering kids and their parents, loaded me into the Comet, and ran red lights on the way to the family doctor, who informed her that not only would I live but that if I wanted to, I could go back and finish the game.
“Over my dead body,” my mother said, and it was piano lessons and a new doctor for me from then on.
“Your mother told ya not to?” Mel said, but not maliciously. “How come?”
“I got hit in the head once, that’s how come.”
Mel scratched her head. “But your mother’s dead. Do ya hafta obey people when they die?”
“I don’t know.” God, I felt alone. “Your parents are dead,” I countered. “Do you still obey them?”
Mel shrugged. “They never told me not to do nothing.” She smiled, scratching her nose. Suddenly I didn’t feel so alone. “Well if ya don’t play ball what do you do?”
I had to think it over. “I like to walk.”
She laughed. “Listen, nobody around here walks. Look, I’ll teach you stickball, it’s easy. It ain’t like baseball. The ball’s soft. Ya won’t be disobeyin’ your mother. Come on.”
She pointed. “If you hit a ball across the street it’s a home run, except if you hit one now you lose the damn ball.”
She walked me across the street to show me why. Mounds of dirt surrounded a deep, ugly hole that was to be the foundation of a fast-food hamburger joint.
We went to the lip of the hole. There was a puddle of dark water at the bottom of it, and a couple of pink Spaldeens floated on its surface like bobbing apples.
“Damn this thing,” Mel crooned, spitting into the hole. I envied the way she could do that — a clean, round ball of spit smacked the water like a coin. I tried but managed only a sloppy spray.
“Let’s get outta here,” Mel said. “The workers’ll get back from lunch soon; they’ll scream at us.”
From down the street a shrill voice called her name.
“Get in here! You were sick last night!”
She rolled her eyes. “I’m supposed to be in bed. I sneaked out.”
“Oh.”
She reddened. “I … wanted to meet you.”
“Oh.”
“Well, I better go.”
“Thanks for the lemon ice,” I said, but she was already tearing up the block.
* * *
Vic was remarkably patient that afternoon.
“The trouble is you’re lookin’ at me but you ain’t lookin’ at the ball,” he said, twirling it on his long fingers. “Keep your eye on this baby.”
I nodded and toed the rough sidewalk with the tip of my sneaker. The stickball bat, a sawed-off broomstick handle wrapped with black tape, seemed like a big toothpick. I’d missed ten straight pitches. If I’d been in Roslyn I could have fled to the safety of my room, but this was Brooklyn.
“It’s impossible,” I whined.
“No, it isn’t.”
“The bat’s too skinny.”
“It don’t matter how skinny the bat is because you’re hittin’ the ball with the middle of it, Joey.”
I didn’t understand that but I let it ride.
“Keep lookin’ at the ball,” he said. “Ted Williams says you should see the ball even when you’re hittin’ it.”
“Who’s Ted Williams?” I asked, but Vic had gone into his windup and lobbed the ball in. Behind him Mel, who’d sneaked out of her house, braced herself in anticipation of a hit. I swung and missed. Eleven pitches.
