Storytelling

Storytelling

By Lauren McNulty

By the time Hayli started playing at the field at the bottom of the hill, she had almost stopped believing in magic. She still left acorns absentmindedly in the cherub statue’s dish behind her grandfather’s house, and she still craned her neck every time she drove by a baseball field to see if there was a game going on. She had stopped believing in glory, though. Baseball was not coming for her, not going to take her away.

The public field was used by the semi-pro baseball players in town and had been carved out of the side of the hill, with the hillside itself almost being the backstop. There were trees past the outfield, so there was no view beyond the field, but it was neither isolated from the rest of the town nor otherworldly. As far as baseball fields go, it was one of the least magical she’d ever seen. 

When they weren’t playing, most of Hayli’s teammates were wrestling with part-time jobs. Abe worked at a factory down by the tracks driving a forklift. Cal worked the night shift at a grocery store. Barny drove delivery. They were fortunate to make enough income to afford their own apartments, albeit with a couple roommates. Hayli often wondered if they wanted other jobs to come along, like she did. Fresh out of college, she had discovered that all the opportunities that were supposed to be there weren’t.

Sometimes it seemed like her grandfather was the only one who understood. He let her use his spare bedroom and introduced her to his old friend, Paul, who needed another outfielder for the semi-pro baseball team he managed. 

Hayli’s team, the Essemer Blakes, had once been very good. So was the league they played in. In fact, the most common story on the team was how they would make the championships back in the old days, every odd year or so. Then they’d have the opportunity to travel to the state capitol two hours away for the championship game. Except the championship game was always scheduled for a Thursday. No one could get off work on a Thursday to make the game, so they’d have to forfeit. Ten years ago, it had been impossible for guys to get time off. Now the Blakes couldn’t even win enough games to get there in the first place.

Baseball had been Hayli’s life, but she’d known for a while it probably wasn’t going to be her work. She was eleven the first time someone asked her when she was going to grow up and quit. Now she didn’t have to fight to play anymore, but it was clear that this was the end of the road. She played baseball to keep herself sane. 

Hayli wanted many times to ask her teammates why they all still did it—coming out for practices, using weekends to travel for games—but she never did. She would have only asked in the hope that by explaining themselves, they’d be able to explain her, too.

Attempting to find a job was hard enough. Hayli had been looking for a decent job for a couple years. She finally found something part-time at Essemer’s local hardware store. Even though it wasn’t enough to make rent on an apartment and move out, Hayli supposed she was very lucky in many ways. She worked full days three days a week for fifteen dollars an hour, a rate that she had fought hard for. Most of her friends were only making $11.75 or something. 

Despite having the luck to find a job, Hayli felt luckiest when she made the Blakes. Her teammates told her she’d love playing in the league, and she did. It had been a very long time since she had played baseball with guys that didn’t harass her, hit on her, or just outright ignore her. They were not gentlemen in any traditional sense of the word, as their morning-after stories continually proved, but they were decent human beings. Abe would bring her glove to her in the outfield if she made the last out of an inning. Cal didn’t skip her when he passed around seeds. Barny always asked her how business at the store was doing. 

They always defended her if she got thrown at, which was becoming rare anyway. In high school, she’d often get hit once a game, but now she only got hit once every couple seasons. When it did happen, Abe would yell, “Hey! That’s a lady,” even if the ball just came inside. She would respond, “Hardly,” and even the catcher would laugh.

Hayli kept applying for full-time work. She hardly ever heard back except for the sentence: “Due to the overwhelming number of applications, you will only hear back if we want to schedule an interview.” She could recite it at will and typically did so at moments in baseball practices when someone reached into a bucket to find it empty of baseballs. 

“Don’t,” Barny said the fifth time she did this. “Baseball is my escape.” 

If Hayli did get an interview, she’d schedule it for when she had the day off. One of her many waitressing interviews ended with the head waiter saying they’d get back to her after interviewing sixty more applicants. He stood up to shake her hand. “Some people who have applied even have master’s degrees,” he said sheepishly. The tension seemed to leave Hayli’s hand, still held in his.

Their neighbor, Tara, was one of the older people around who didn’t understand. Hayli would cringe every time her grandfather had Tara over for coffee. Tara still insisted that Hayli call her Ms. Sacco (“I’ve known you since you were pulling your red wagon down the street”) and figured that the reason Hayli couldn’t find a full-time job was that she wasn’t trying hard enough. 

“You must be too negative when you go to these interviews,” Tara said one evening, leaning back in her chair. Hayli had just popped her head outside after coming home from practice. 

“Yeah,” Hayli said as her grandfather shook his head at her, “I don’t think that’s it.” 

“It must be,” Tara continued. “You have to be bright, perky, and cheerful when you go to these things. You’re too cynical, you can’t go in expecting failure.”

At her grandfather’s look, Hayli bit back her “not cynical, just realistic” response. 

But she did allow herself to hope before her next interview instead of just viewing it as another exercise followed by a consoling cup of hot chocolate when she came home. This particular job as a handyman (which Hayli thought she was particularly qualified for) was twenty-three miles away. She practiced her smile the whole drive there and was rewarded when she sat down with the boss who told her they’d just cut the hours for the job. Hayli quickly did the new math in her head and realized that it would cost more gas money to get to the job than she would gain in pay. She didn’t have the spirit to stand up again, so she did the interview anyway.

Driving to another interview, she’d looked for parking for forty-five minutes, only to be told at the interview that they weren’t even hiring. “We just want to have people on file for when we are,” the receptionist said, and Hayli wished she could make her face into a fist. When she got back to her car, she realized her windows were not soundproof when she startled a dog walker and his daughter. 

At the Blakes’ next game, Paul could see dejection in her rounded shoulders when she arrived in the dugout. He asked how she was. Hayli slowly pulled her glove out of her bag. She didn’t know what to say. She felt that somewhere along the line, someone had lied to her about how the world was going to be. Maybe everyone on the Blakes had been lied to at some point. Or maybe some things had been true and weren’t anymore. Or were still true for other people and not for them. Hayli remembered all those coaches growing up, getting her teammates excited about “getting to the next level.” That baseball was somehow a ticket or a magic key, like a college diploma.

Hayli still left acorns and small rocks at her grandfather’s cherub statue, out of a dreadful longing.

Paul must have said something to Hayli’s grandfather. When his next government check came, he splurged and bought the nice hot chocolate mix. 

But then—some news. Hayli got an interview for a technical writer position at a consulting company in the town next to Essemer. She had applied never expecting to hear back. Straight out of college, Hayli had called every restaurant in the area, and only one was hiring for waitresses. Now she had an interview for a job that would pay her enough to rent her own place. When scheduling the interview over the phone, Hayli asked for a time on one of her days off, and they gave her a slot for the next day. 

She was ecstatic. She called Paul and told him she might actually be able to pay team dues that month. She was so excited she went out to the grocery store to get things to make a nice dinner for herself and her grandfather. 

It was when she got back and started putting things into the refrigerator that her boss called. He told her he needed her to fill in for someone the next day. 

“Jerry, I can’t do it. It’s my day off, I’ve got something going on,” Hayli said as she cradled the phone on her shoulder and slid pork ribs onto a shelf in the fridge. 

“Hayli, when I gave you this job, you negotiated me to $15 an hour. The trade-off was you would work overtime whenever I needed you. I need you tomorrow.” 

“But I’ve already scheduled things, it’s my day off,” Hayli said, her hand starting to shake as she gripped the handle of the milk carton. 

“Get out of them. Besides, it’s not for the whole day.”

“It isn’t?”

“It’s for an hour less than the whole day.” Jerry’s voice seemed to scratch Hayli through the phone. 

“Why is it for an hour less?” Hayli asked, dropping a bag of spaghetti on the counter. 

“Threshold for health benefits is four full days. Company policy.” 

“Can’t someone else fill in?”

“No, they’ve already reached their maximum hours for the week.”

When she was silent, Jerry asked, “Hayli, how long did it take you to get this job?”

So, after the marinara sauce went in the cupboard, Hayli called the consulting company and asked if she could change her interview time. 

The voice on the phone was adamant. “I’m sorry,” the lady said. “We received over a hundred applications. We’re just putting people in wherever we can fit them. There’s no room to move you. Do you want to drop out of the process?” 

Hayli said she’d call them back. 

She stood in her grandfather’s kitchen staring at the orangish wood of the cupboards and knew there was no way she was going to get the job. People with Master’s degrees were applying to be waitresses. Her competition this time would be out of reach. Unbidden, she heard Tara’s voice, telling her that she just needed to keep trying, be perky.

She left the food where she’d set it down on the counter and walked out of the house into the dark. 

The field where the Blakes played was no mystery to Hayli at night. She often left things behind and she’d have to go back to get them after the sun had gone down. When Hayli was playing baseball, she worked to keep her mind clear. But as soon as the game was over, she’d forget her water bottle, because she was worrying over whether she had enough gas to get home. Or she’d forget her sweatshirt, because she was worrying over how to pay for the week’s groceries. She’d have to go back hours later, carrying a flashlight and crossing her fingers that whatever she’d left behind was still there. 

That night, Hayli went there to think. 

The sprinklers were on with the water ghostlike as it sprayed over the darkened field. Hayli stood on the edge of the field for a moment before taking the plunge and walking through the sprinklers. 

The summer night was already cold and the fine mist soon made her clothes damp. With her arms dripping from the spray, she stopped in right center field. When she looked around, she was standing in fog. Hayli wondered why every time she imagined success lately, it felt like she was breaking. 

Hayli remembered a game from the prior week. Barny had got caught off first base. As he skittered back and forth between advancing to second and trying to be safe again at first, all of the Blakes had groaned and seemed to collapse together against the front wall of the dugout. 

“No chance,” Cal had muttered, and Abe had said, “He should have just stayed where he was,” before spitting in the dirt. 

A week later, Hayli still felt exhausted just thinking about it, and she just wanted to lie down in the wet grass. But she was afraid she’d get sick, and she couldn’t afford the doctor, a luxury like steak. She left. 

Hayli went to work the next day, tossing a small stick into the cherub’s dish before she left. She restocked screws and nails. At practice that afternoon, Paul patted her shoulder gently and gave her a wink.

He had them drill diving back into first base. Hayli found she was angry and relieved each time she was still safe at first. 

Lauren McNulty‘s fiction has been featured once before in The Twin Bill.  She has a bachelor’s in English, a master’s in Kinesiology, and has coached baseball (hardball) at the high school level for 10 years.  

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