Recycled

Recycled

By Lauren McNulty

Acacia had the type of body where if she walked in someplace, you knew not to mess with her. She had always been curvy and muscular, she told me. That’s the way she had come out, and that’s the way she had stayed. Her arms and legs were slender, but she could still hit a baseball farther than most people. She hated being called “Babe.”

Acacia was never bothered by her size. She had spent enough time in numerous bullpens and outfields, to know that some guys did like girls with big asses. She would overhear some teammates lustfully describe how there was more to grab, or she’d hear other teammates moan about girls so skinny they thought they could break them in two. Acacia thought it was funny how most girls tried harder than they needed to. All she did was paint her nails in the offseason, and she hooked up with about as many guys as I did. She never went for pedicures with me after a while, though, and I was sad about that, but I understood. Eventually, it just got too tedious for her to have to explain her banged-up feet to the appalled beautician. There were calluses all over her toes, because she had to wear men’s cleats (they didn’t sell metal cleats in women’s sizes then).

But we were good roommates. We stuck around each college summer after school and got an apartment and summer jobs together. Once a week, while attempting to knit, we’d watch sci-fi movies that no one else would watch with us. I could manage a scarf, but Acacia would usually end the night howling with laughter, holding up what looked like a lopsided, frayed rag. She had a secret fantasy about knitting a joke pair of batting gloves.

I understood about the baseball thing, too. I myself had played Little League until I was twelve before I got really into singing. The summer before our last year of college, I finally got a chorister job at a local church. That was how I ended up watching Acacia’s third season with the Arroyos, the college summer team she was playing for at the time. I’d work on Sunday mornings, and afterward, I would drop by a local deli for a sandwich, sometimes a soda. Then I’d walk by the baseball field on the way home, and if the Arroyos had a home game, I would stop by to see Acacia play.

Because it was a college summer team, most guys would play for the Arroyos for about three years, if that, before moving on, either to other teams or to something else post-graduation. Players tended to get kind of crazy in their third year on the team. Acacia had seen this kind of thing her first couple of years—guys in their third year throwing bats more often or not worrying about what they said to other players. Perhaps that’s why things got so heinous that season.

They didn’t exactly treat her well on that team. She had always come home with stories of how they’d call her names right to her face or how they’d throw at her in batting practice, but treatment of Acacia reached a pitch that summer.

It was June, and the corner deli where I’d stop made the best egg salad sandwiches. I wouldn’t open the bag’s rolled top until I’d sat down in the bleachers behind the first base dugout at the field. Every week, Acacia’s games had always started by the time I got there, and as I finally removed my sandwich from the bag, I would scan the field to see if I could find her. I could see across the field to the Arroyos’ dugout on the third base side, and if I didn’t see her in the field, I’d look for her there.

Maybe it was because I hadn’t been to a whole lot of Acacia’s games before then, but when I first sat in the stands that summer, I was instantly struck by how distant her teammates were from her. Looking into her dugout, I noticed that she was at one edge of the bench while everyone else was crowded down at the other end. I paused while taking a bite. The dugout wasn’t that big, but there was still a good five feet of space between her and the next guy, and when her teammates walked by, they didn’t even look at her. It looked like she was throwing a perfect game or something, and they didn’t want to bother her, but I knew Acacia wasn’t pitching that day. And every now and then, I saw a couple guys from the other end of the bench sneak a look at her and then chuckle to themselves. I could hear it across the field.

I asked her about it later.

“It seems like they’re sitting so far away from you. Do they always do that?”

Acacia looked up from dropping her baseball bag on the kitchen floor and raised her eyebrows.

“Honestly Effie? Yeah. At first I thought it was because I was putting my stuff near the end of the dugout where the manager sits, but one week I put everything at the other end, and they just all sat down by the manager.”

“Have you ever tried putting your stuff in the middle of the bench?”

Acacia’s eyebrows lifted even higher.

“No,” she said, “And I don’t see how it would help.”

“Try it,” I pushed, “They might be forced to sit next to you.”

So the next week, Acacia plopped her bag right in the center of the bench in the dugout. And sure enough, when I got to the mostly empty bleachers with my sandwich after work, there was five feet of space on either side of her, and all the guys on her team were crammed at the ends of the dugouts.

I cocked my head as I looked across the field. I couldn’t believe she was right.

That night, in our kitchen, she said, “Yeah, and if possible, it was even worse. Effie, it was like they were laughing at me for trying. But when they walked from one end of the dugout to the other, it was like I wasn’t even there. I’m not going to do that again.”

“But you got three hits today!” I exclaimed incredulously.

“They don’t really care about that,” she said. “If I get three hits, they’re mad at me, because they didn’t get three hits. If I don’t get any hits, they tell me I suck.”

“Has it always been this way?”

“Oh sure. They’re just more…vocal about it this year.”

The next week, Acacia’s stuff was back at the end of the dugout. I chewed my sandwich slowly as I looked across the field, the egg salad sticking to the roof of my mouth. Acacia made five catches in the outfield that day, two of them rather spectacular, and not one of her teammates high-fived her as she ran in after any of the innings she did them in.

By July, it was even worse. The other teams in the league must have found out or realized that it was Acacia’s third season, too, and they began heckling her even more than what she usually experienced.

There were still the regular comments of “Hey bitch,” “gorgeous,” or “cutie,” but now they were accompanied by things like, “I wouldn’t grow an ass that big just to hit that good,” or “Man, you’d need your whole fist to fuck her.”

Her teammates never defended her. When the other team heckled her, they laughed, and when Acacia got thrown at, they laughed even harder and imitated it. In early August, I still saw them imitating one time when Acacia had been hit by a pitch, and it had happened all the way back in June. Acacia got hit a lot, but I knew it was that particular time, because it had been really bad. She got knocked down, her helmet flew off, and I stayed up all night with her holding ice to her triceps, because she couldn’t move her arm.

But the most horrendous thing I saw that summer didn’t happen until mid-August. The Arroyos were playing a team called the Pines, with whom they never really got along. Each game against them was marked by some incident, whether it was a bench clearing, brushback pitches, or just especially vicious shouting.

I got to the field a few innings in, and soon after, one of the Arroyos was thrown out of the game for intentionally spiking the Pines’ second baseman. The umpire loudly told Acacia’s teammate in no uncertain terms that what he’d just done was completely unacceptable. It was also very disgusting and very bloody; they had to call time out while they bandaged the guy from the Pines on the field. Personally, I couldn’t figure out how he could keep playing.

I suppose the fact that Acacia was pitching escalated the situation. And she was doing really well. Usually, the heckling from the Pines would be very bad, and that was just with her in the outfield, but in three years, Acacia had never pitched against them before. She had been dreading it ever since she found out she was getting that start, and the comments and noise level from the Pines against her that day were off the charts. I wondered how they could focus on the game when all their time was spent abusing her.

I thought it was amazing how well she was pitching with all of that going on around her. And the umpire had been squeezing the strike zone all day. Not just hers, the Pines’ pitcher was having a rough time, too.

But Acacia only gave up one walk, and the walk was what started the incident. The guy she walked had been yelling things at her all game and laughing at her. He was very pleased with himself and was laughing as he ran down to first after ball four. Acacia did not react to the close call that could easily have been called a strike. I certainly thought it should have been. She walked back up to the rubber as if nothing had happened. Acacia’s manager called, “Let’s get two!” and Acacia delivered.

The ground ball that the next batter hit pulled the Arroyos’ first baseman off the line towards second base. He fielded it cleanly, a nice backhand, and threw to second. Acacia was big, but she could move, and she got over to first in time to get the throw coming back for the second out. The second baseman was bumping the shortstop on the butt with his glove, the runners were jogging back to the dugout, and Acacia was walking from first back to the mound. She had her head down and was rubbing the ball in her hand as if checking it for scuffs.

I don’t think she ever saw it coming. No one did. But as he jogged back to the dugout, the runner who’d been out at second crossed paths with Acacia, and he sped up and rammed right into her. She tumbled and rolled onto the ground hard, and the runner just kept going right past her.

I wasn’t really sure what I’d seen at first. Her teammates certainly didn’t react, and the Pines didn’t really make any noise except some light snickering. But my confusion seemed to flush off me as I saw how slowly she started to get up, and I found myself shaking in my seat. I looked to the umpire, expecting to see some big display again as he threw the runner out of the game, but he just stood there, mouth parted a little, dust settling on his thick, black shoes.

The Arroyos’ manager, however, was livid. He stood almost outside the dugout and yelled at the umpire, saying that he was playing favorites, and why had the Arroyos had a player thrown out when the Pines didn’t. The umpire said in a calm but loud voice that he hadn’t seen the play—he’d been dusting off the plate—and maintained his composure as the Arroyos’ manager continued to yell at him that he was favoring the Pines. Once the Pines figured out that they would see no repercussions from this, the shouting at Acacia became unbearable. Even the Arroyos were laughing, because she’d looked so funny going down.

My sandwich seemed to curdle in my hand. I set it on the paper bag next to me and gripped the wooden seats of the bleachers. There was a half-second where I wanted to run onto the field, and my muscles tensed and then went limp. I sat there, impotent in my anger as I watched Acacia slowly roll to her feet and walk up to the rubber on the pitcher’s mound. She didn’t bother to dust herself off. Even though she was the one on the mound, I felt that I had never been so exposed, sitting alone and unmoving in the bleachers.

That evening, she stood in the kitchen, her bag on the floor as she stared vaguely in the direction of the hanging measuring cups.

“You know what they said to me after? My teammates?” she asked me, gripping and releasing the wood back of a chair. “They said I should have kept my head up. That I could have avoided it if I hadn’t dropped my eyes.”

I was sitting at the table, hands flat on the grainy surface, breathing out slowly.

“What?”

“I was looking at the baseball,” she said, her forehead twisting as she tried to remember. “Why was I looking at the baseball?”

“It doesn’t matter,” I said.

“I must have been doing it for some reason, Effie. Maybe there was a scuff mark or something.”

She kept going around in circles with her words until she finally looked around and let go of the chair as if just realizing where she was.

“I have to go to bed. We have practice tomorrow.”

“What, you’re going back?”

Acacia finished the season and our last year in school, and the following fall after graduation, she got a job and went home. I didn’t hear from her much; I got a mangled bunch of partially knitted yarn for Christmas that year, and that was it.

After Acacia moved out, it was weird not having baseball around in some way. In fact, a couple years later, I started volunteering for the local Little League, drawing on whatever I had learned up to age twelve and helping to coach a team in the spring. Sometimes a girl ballplayer would come through with Acacia’s arm or her laugh or her swing, and it would be like seeing a long-lost sister. I even coached a girl once who had Acacia’s intensity and the defiant eyes she must have had at that age.

I tried to look out for my players, even though I knew there wasn’t much I could do for them after a certain point. I’d continue going to their games, even when they were older, and I was no longer coaching them. I’d spend a Sunday afternoon in the stands at the Little League fields, eating my egg salad sandwich. I would watch the girl ballplayers especially and wait for the heckling to begin.

Lauren McNulty has coached baseball (hardball) at the high school level for over 10 years.  This is her third publication in The Twin Bill.  

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