When I was twelve years old, before I knew girls were not allowed to play professional baseball, I would take a tennis ball, throw it hard against the half-finished brick barbeque my Papa had built, to practice catching the ball in my mitt.  To simulate a high fly, I would hit the bottom of the small footpath curb which made the ball pop up for an outfield catch.  I would hit the V of the brick footpath to get a fast rolling ball through the grass on its way to my mitt at my “first base.”  This was best practiced after Papa had mowed the grass and that sweet smell lingered in the air. I could throw the tennis ball against the wall for hours.  I was incredibly efficient at catching.  I would have played catch with my cousin, Kath- but she spent her hours watching The Three Stooges.  Anytime I took a break to use the bathroom or I went to my room to get another tennis ball because one had popped over the fence, The Three Stooges were in yet another idiotic spat.  Their smacks, grunts, and endless arguing was too much like real life at my house, and echoed in the hallways of my grandparents Victorian home.  

            Once in a while we would get a neighborhood game together, me with a bunch of boys more or less my age and size.  Jose, Joachim, Jessie, and the freckled Irish brothers from across the street were the regulars; we were short a guy, though, which meant that I had to either find one more kid or play both outfield positions. Smaller yards made this possible but in my yard, the preferred one for games, we needed the extra kid.  When it was my yard and if I couldn’t find another boy, we’d go up to my cousin’s room and plead with her to come outside.

“We just need someone to stand there,” we would whine and bargain with hard candy and bubble gum.

Desperate, we would offer in trade Hot Tamales, her favorite candy but ours too.  Sometimes we begged my grandmother for help, and she always did. Grandmother would tell her,

“Get outside; you need some fresh air. Sitting in front of the TV that long is not good for you.”

My cousin would stand in our cement outfield looking around at the flower pots or peeping through a hole in the fence, her skirt askew and a squint in her eye. When a ball would eventually go to her, she would field it in Lucy-like fashion and act as if the ball were an affront from Charlie Brown.  Needless to say, it did not take long before the other team would remember our team’s weakness and exploit it as often as they could hitting to her.  It did no good to yell, “It’s coming right to you, Kath!”  If we yelled too much, she would throw the ill-fitting mitt to the ground or at one of us, march back upstairs to her room and her beloved The Three Stooges or even worse, I Dream of Jeannie.

            One day after school, tired from throwing the tennis ball against the wall for two hours, I went upstairs to the kitchen for a drink of water. My grandmother was reading the newspaper. She was in a floral house dress, apron and flat shoes with her reddish hair tied up.  She had tomatoes and onions simmering on the stove and a good smelling meet in the oven, and the plates were already on the table in anticipation of family dinner. Her expression was pursed in purpose and she was snapping the folds as she turned each page.  I quickly went back to the yard knowing that soon she would call me to dinner.  No amount of porch light would help me in my night game and allow me to stay outside. I was back at it for about twenty minutes when my grandmother came downstairs to the in-law apartment where my mother and I lived in a single room (the other rooms were still being built out).

            That was how it was when I was twelve years old, Victorian houses were always under repair.  All my friends’ houses were in various states of renovation: copper pipes finally getting replaced, electrical systems in repair after catching fire in a switch, knocking out walls, or the lowering of an 18 ft. ceiling.  My family had reacted to our Victorian by modernizing—off came the bay windows in the front of the house.  This blasphemous act of lopping off bay windows must have made us seem bizarre to our neighbors rather than modern.  Our lovely Victorian was rendered a white square box with a wrought iron fence in front- ugly and pointless.

            My mother worked on our in-law apartment when she got home from work and with occasional help from her brothers and father, all construction contractors.  Their help was careless by the time they got to us. Often making Mom curse as she tried to repair their shoddy work, with me as the unwilling carpenter’s assistant.  The one completed room in which we lived was to eventually be a living room.  The room consisted of a bed at one end of the elongated room, a couch facing a TV, an electric fireplace mounted to the bricks from the real fireplace upstairs. The windows that were street level and shuttered. According to my mother, the electric fireplace was quite the modern item. A switch operated a rotating light behind fake logs, while hot air blew from the grate beneath.  The dust on the logs took away from its illusion.

            In another, unfinished room, we stored our clothes, my toys, which I had long outgrown and a desk where I sometimes did my homework.  The rest of the downstairs level served as storage for leftover building materials of my uncles and Papa—mostly boxes of tile, half bags of cement and lumber.  There were boxed appliances too, purchased way before they were needed as if their purchase would hasten the build out.

            That evening, my grandmother came back into the yard to tell me my mother wanted to see me.  I did not like having conversations with my Mom, even if I had done nothing wrong, I always felt like the same tone was used with me, good or bad.  Mom was more like a mean older sister than a mother. I avoided her as much as possible.  I rarely used the little desk in the flat, preferring to do my homework at my grandmother’s dining room table to avoid my mother when she came home from work. When I heard her key in the back gate, I would hide in the yard. She would walk with purpose across the back of the yard, men’s khaki’s, short-sleeved starched shirt looking as starched as it had in the morning, and once she was inside the flat, I would resume my baseball throwing. 

“Why?” I whined trying to beg off to continue playing outside.

“It’ll only take a minute,” assured my grandmother.

            Tucking the tennis ball into the mitt and then under my arm, I slowly walked down the two steps into the in-law flat, dragging my tennis shoe feet and putting a finger to my skinned knee.  I could hear my mother’s clinking at the pipes in the bathroom that was under construction.  On the dirt floor were tools and pipes. The sink was filled with grime and there sat my mother, perched on the toilet as a work chair and holding the toilet tank innards. 

“Don’t come in, stay at the doorway,” she admonished. “Your grandmother doesn’t want dirt from your shoes in her kitchen.”

 I said nothing and complied, leaning against the unfinished door jamb.  After several minutes, I prompted my mother.

“So, why do you want to see me?”

            My mother continued to fiddle with the toilet innards, looking up at me every now and then. 

“Your grandmother thinks it would be best if I told you about this instead of you accidentally finding out at school.”

  I raised an eyebrow, having no clue what she was talking about.  

“Your grandmother was reading the newspaper and in the section with births and divorces, discovered Richard is divorcing me.”

  I let this sink in, trying to think how divorce might change things. My parents had been separated since I was two years old. He was my adopted father, I saw him at least once a month, but, really, he was a stranger to me.  I waited for my mother to continue but she did not. Thinking I should wait to be dismissed, I stood there.  Finally she said, as if it were somehow my fault and now she was mad,

“Well that’s it; you can go DO whatever it is you DO.”

 I went back outside and began again, throwing the ball with my usual purpose.  

            After that night, my mother transformed into someone else.  She listened to the turned up record player much like the two men who lived together next door who also listened to Barbra Streisand.  She played the soundtrack from Funny Girl over and over again.  She would particularly turn up the song,, My Man. When she put it on, I would try my best to behave as if nothing were odd while re-reading the same page in my book over and over.  Although I was only twelve yrs. old, I felt I had some understanding of love and I was perplexed that my mother was actually showing some regret or sadness at this divorce.  My adopted parents had been separated forever as far as I was concerned, what was the big deal now?  I didn’t get it.  My mother rarely talked about this man except to say what time he would pick me up for church or a day of fishing.  When he would call, my mother almost instantly would hand the phone to me spitting out, ‘It’s your father,’ emphasis on the word ‘father.’

            A weird transformation came over my mother in the next six months or so; suddenly, she was on a diet.  She would come home later than usual on Friday and Saturday evenings.  When my grandmother and Aunt did their girly Saturday afternoons—painting fingernails, dying each other’s hair, talking about my Aunt’s latest date, surprisingly, my mother would now join them.  Once, when my mother was having her nails painted by my grandmother and I stopped mid-floor in the kitchen, I got a gruff, ‘What are you looking at?’ from her.  It was as if I had caught my older brother doing ‘girl things’ and he was embarrassed.  I began, more than usual, to hurry outside to play with the neighbor boys before I was yelled at or assigned housework.  One evening, I was flipping through some teen magazine at the dinner table when my mother came home. Her hair had a perm, and I stared as she walked across the kitchen.  My grandmother caught my eye.

“Doesn’t your mother look nice?” she prompted, but I was just so surprised to see this new femininity my mother portrayed like a fresh ill-fitting outfit.  As my cousin and I gave each other a look and snickered, my grandmother said in a stern tone,

“You know it would not kill you to start acting more like a lady, instead of looking like one of the neighbor boys.”  My grandmother dropped my dinner plate just a little harder on the table in front of me.

            I was still just trying to piece it all together, thinking my mother’s sudden attempts at girlyness were a direct result of her divorce.  When I talked to my cousin about it, she said (without taking her eyes off the TV set),

“Don’t you get it, stupid?  She’s doing what my Mom does; she’s going out on dates with men.” 

Her mother had been divorced a lot longer than mine so my cousin would know, I guessed.  I had always looked at my mother as a creature like me, a person living in no man’s land, someplace between men and women, needing neither.  We neither looked like girly girls nor did we exactly look like boys. We liked what boys did and we dressed like them too.  While other kids’ Moms were setting the table, my Mom was building a table—I thought she preferred this too, like me.  She wore her men’s work khaki pants and shirts, claiming they were roomier and had bigger pockets.  I continued to think she secretly preferred them, like me.

            At our next yard game, I listened to the usual taunts the boys yelled at each other—‘you throw like a girl’ being the most popular one.  I watched how the guys threw the ball, and I knew I threw just as far and for sure just as accurately as they did so what did that really mean.  Maybe I really was a being that was neither boy nor girl, I knew the word tomboy.  Did girls embarrass boys but tomboys were okay to play baseball as long as they were great players?  I never let up in that game, hitting a double and later a homer, at one point as I was rounding the bases I saw my grandmother on the upstairs porch hanging out the washing.  She stopped a minute and tucked some stray hair into her headscarf, and watched us below, but when she saw me looking at her as I touched home plate, she picked up her basket and was on to her next chore.

            One night, I heard the front door open and, presumably, my mother walked down the long hallway to the kitchen where my grandmother was sewing.  I was with Papa watching Wild Kingdom.  Eventually, I wandered into the kitchen.  When my mother saw me, she abruptly got up.  She put her pumps back on and smoothed her skirt down and went out the back door to our in-law flat departing with a “Don’t stay up too late,” to me.  I looked at my grandmother for an explanation at the abruptness and, although she looked up at me, she just continued sewing.  Finally I asked my grandmother where my Mom had been.

“Oh, on a date with a guy she really likes. But he told her he’s homosexual.  I told her to keep doing what she’s doing and he’ll change his mind.” 

I had no idea what she was talking about and I translated this to she liked a boy and he did not like her back.

            Meanwhile, my mothers’ Barbra Streisand listening grew especially on weekends when she worked more on our in-law apartment.  I spent even more time upstairs or in the yard, though I did find the intense adult emotions seeping into my consciousness, filed in wait for a reference point.  One Saturday, when my uncles were helping tile the bathroom with Mom, one of my uncles said,

“Turn that record down; only faggots listen to her that loud.” 

My other uncle laughed and Mom turned her resulting anger toward me.

 “You heard them!  Go turn down the record player!”

I was sitting in the living room leafing through magazines that had come in my mother’s mail, the cover of a magazine caught my eye, Gays in America: homosexuals rise up and a picture of two young men gazing into each other’s eyes.  There was that word, so I read the magazine article, piecing together that Gay meant homosexual. Still, I didn’t get what it really meant.  Later, at dinner with my family, I asked Mom,

What’s a homosexual?”

  Papa slowly got up and went to retrieve his pipe from his jacket in the hallway, as per his custom, and went outside on the porch to smoke.  My grandmother looked expectantly at my mother, who pretended not to hear me.  Finally, my mother lit a cigarette and looked at me.

“You know my friends Sal and Trini, and my friends Larry and Jim?” 

These were men I had known since I was very small, I nodded. 

“They are homosexuals.”

 I looked at my grandmother with puzzlement.

“You know… two men who love each other,” said my grandmother.

  I shrugged and wondered to myself why a magazine would need every article to be about two men that loved each other if that’s all it was.  Still, the two men on the cover of the magazine looked at each other in a certain way, a way I could not put my finger on.

            I told my best friend at school about my parents divorcing.  

“Don’t tell the Sisters,” she said.

I knew that for us Catholics divorce was wrong and not done.   I only knew one other kid at school whose parents were divorced.  I remember other kids asking her about the divorce and she had said something about her parents burning in hell for this but not her, a summation that had made me flinch.  I thought about this now that my parents faced divorce.  I could not relate to this Catholic God because if there really is a God, doesn’t He have more important things to do than worry about my stupid parents and how they ought to burn in hell?  We collected money for the pagan babies and UNICEF, and heard about starving children in China—surely all that trouble of hungry kids took God’s attention more than condemning parents to hell. In the end, when I was twelve years old, I left the sadness that was my mothers’ divorce to her and tried my best to avoid the firing line of her wrath.  My grandmother did her best to deflect the anger and always hugged me and loved on me.  Somehow, my mother figured out that the Gay guy she liked was never going to like her back no matter what she did to her hair.  It was not long after this that one of the neighbor boys told me a big fat lie, that no matter how good of a baseball player I was, I would never be allowed to play in the majors because I was a girl.  Turned out it was not a lie- and the truth hurt.

By  Rope Wolf

Litro Magazine

baseball coming of age family girlhood memory