There was something about the catchers. The way they crashed around in their armor, throwing their bodies against the world like they were unbreakable, flashing a secret code between their thighs. You looked at them and understood what they were about. They’d see you looking and look right back, maybe even raise their chins with pride, as if daring you to look harder.
They were the girls who wore their brothers’ flannels to school and knew how to spit, who, when they finally came out, would have to suffer everyone around them rolling their eyes and saying, “Duh.” They were the girls who moved so like boys I could almost forget the soda-pop fizz in my arms and legs wasn’t allowed, indeed almost forgot, sitting there beside them with something bubbling up around the edges of me, as if some other “I” was about to spill out, because they were the girls I’d fall in love with, once I was brave enough to fall in love with girls and not-girls and girls who were actually boys: girls who’d tuck the bottoms of their jeans into the tops of their work boots and swagger around smiling with just one side of their mouths, like whatever was making them happy was a secret no one else deserved to know. Not-girls who changed their own tires, drove their trucks with one hand, the other arm hanging out the window, palm pads tapping on the side of the door. Girls who were actually boys, who’d take my hand and apply intense eye contact and tell me firmly, during a fight, “You’re listening to respond, and I need you to listen to listen.”
But that was later. Back then, I just looked. I looked, longing, wondering what it would be like to be that brave, that sturdy, that solid, wondering what it would be like to take up space and not be sorry. And I thought, for a long time, too long: No, no, that could never be me.
_____
This was me: never been kissed, bagging groceries after school in a bright green polo for five dollars an hour, all clumsy buckling limbs and hysterical tears. Soon to be voted Class Drama Queen, a superlative usually reserved for the theater kids, trying not to cry at the senior dinner lest I prove them all right, all of them beaming at their pieces of paper promising Best Hair, Best Couple, Most Likely to Succeed. My own hair, so dark it was almost black, and dull and dry, too, not quite straight, not quite curly, some kind of not-brown not-black not-right in-between hair my mom’s hairdresser once admitted she’d never seen on anyone else. Straight As except for math, shivering there at the bus stop in my jeans that were always just a little too short. When they came out of the wash I’d stand on the bottoms and pull up, up, toward the wooden rafters of the basement where my sister and I hung our clothes to dry, where my dad leaned an old mattress against the far cement wall, spray-painted with a huge white X so I could practice “hitting my corners.” Up, up, holding hard to both ends, and still my jeans never stretched long enough to cover the knock-off clogs I slid onto my feet when everyone else was wearing real Birkenstocks.
_____
Look at me: the relief pitcher, all speed no grace, an “emotional liability,” one of the coaches once mutters, in a voice he thinks is quiet. Pulled up to varsity at fifteen in case something happens to Alice, the starting pitcher.
And look at Alice: the shining blond star, the coaches’ darling, whose poise is unshakable. Who points her toe when she winds up as if she’s getting ready to do a grand plié, then throws a flawless rise ball no batter could hope to connect with. Who looks so good in all the newspaper clippings I tape carefully into my scrapbook, who’s always belonged here without trying, without caring, or, maybe, even noticing.
_____
Alice led us to the state championship that season. Then she pitched a shut-out. It was the third state championship for the high school that year, after the football team in the fall and the girls’ basketball team in the winter, and even as I use “us” I know I was somehow outside of it, apart. “It was no thanks to my daughter,” I heard my mom tell someone over the phone, in a disgusted sort of way, after, and it might feel the same as when she scrubbed hand soap down my throat—the clean bright sting of it—if I didn’t know that she was right.
* * *
Sometimes I pitch strikes that bruise the catcher’s palm and it feels sublime. Like my whole body is a mouth, opening. Like plugging my hair straightener into the outlet on the bathroom wall, or pushing one of my No. 2 pencils into an electric pencil sharpener, or the first time I started a car—how, when I cranked it and everything shuddered to life, the walls and the windshield and the cushioned seat underneath my thighs, when all of it was roaring just because I rotated the bones in my wrist, I knew, I knew, there was something bigger and it was gonna let me in.
And sometimes the ball flies far overhead or beans batters in the hip, the ankle, the back of the calf as they turn away, and that feels like betrayal. Like holding on dumbly to the doorknob of a door that won’t open. Like when the cool girls threw pencils at my back in the lunchroom, giggling, because they could see my butt crack hanging out of the top of the jeans that didn’t fit me, or when the older boy who rode the bus with me and my sister leered at our chests and bellowed, “it’s a tit bit nipply out there, you’d breast zip up your jackets,” or the morning I woke up with a brown smear in my cotton underwear, the kind my mom was still buying for me in bulk at Kohl’s or Target or Shopko, and I ground my teeth while I buried the stain at the bottom of my plastic trash can, praying to the saints I still prayed to to make it disappear, to let my body stay mine, not-girl body, pitcher-body, don’t make me answer to the verdict of woman, please, I’ll be so good, amen.
But it didn’t disappear. It never would, and meanwhile my body was sprouting a mutiny of soft stuff that stared up doomfully, staring and waiting, and I couldn’t do anything but stare back and I also couldn’t stare back, and not looking at something doesn’t make it go away.
* * *
Those pencils on the floor of the lunchroom were my primary experience with cool girls until I joined the varsity softball team. Then I was surrounded by them—girls who wore layered Hollister shirts to school and held their chunky highlights back with spongy headbands made from pre-wrap, girls who were two whole years older and worldlier than me, seniors like my sister. Girls like Alice and girls like Morgan, the varsity catcher, who’d show up early to catch for me at the dark, empty warehouse they converted into a practice space during the long Wisconsin winters when the dirt fields had yet to thaw, icy rivers trickling like tinsel between the mound and home plate. Morgan would run around the perimeter before I got there, however many times it took to reach three miles, which seemed outrageous to me, then—proof of her superhuman power. Proof that she, like all catchers, was a player of substance.
As a pitcher, you never bat, yourself. Or, if you do, you never run your own bases. Like all pitchers, you have one job to do. You’re supposed to be one thing, and be it well.
The catcher, on the other hand, almost always bats third or fourth in the lineup. One of those up-top spots whose job it is to clean up the lighter, quicker first and second batters with their singles and their bunts. Whose job it is to bring people home.
_____
That’s nice, right? Home should feel safe. Coming home should feel like coming home. But home, then, was the domain of my mom, who was always right and never sorry, who was not an easy woman, who taught me how to be furious. Who quit college to have kids and never forgave us for it, who never forgave my dad for moving us to Ashwaubenon, a no-name bumfuck town nestled into Wisconsin’s armpit that was known for nothing but its high school softball stars. My mom, who ruled our house.
Everything made her mad and mean: when my dad spilled a glass of milk, when my sister wore chopsticks in her hair, when I referred to scents as “flavors.” She called my sister a “lazy stupid slimebucket girl” for spilling ice in the kitchen. She chucked a shoe at my sleeping head because I left it on the wood floor in the hallway, not on the rug in the laundry room, where it belonged. She grounded me for an entire summer because I forgot to clean the bathroom, and in turn I slammed my bedroom door so many times she took it off its hinges, but the worst of all her punishments, by far, was when she’d forbid me to go to practice. She’d make me call each one of my coaches and she’d stand there with her arms folded to make sure I told them, verbatim, “I apologize, I cannot fulfill my commitment to the team because I was disrespectful to my mother.” They’d sigh or grunt and hang up and I wonder, now, what they thought was the source of all the emotional outbursts that happened to me out there on the mound.
_____
It might begin with a faulty drop ball, one that spins too fast off the pads of my fingers and hits the dirt, then bounces its way, merrily and traitorously, toward home. Or it might begin with a fastball I hold on to a little too long, a curve ball that doesn’t respect the calibrations implicit in the flick of my wrist. The other team’s coach can always sense it brewing; I have a reputation. I watch him give his batter the sign for “don’t swing,” standing there just beyond third base with his potbelly straining against his belt and a smirk stretched jowl to jowl, and that’s when it takes over—the swell of doom. Tongue too big for my mouth, sloppy ponytail coming undone, uniform shirt coming untucked from my pants that cinch too tight at the calf, panic fingering its way through the spaces between my ribs, everything coming loose, falling apart, and also clamped so tight around me I can no longer feel my fingernails dug into the beat-up ball, can no longer tell if they’re positioned in the correct pattern on the seams. Standing there on the mound with the whole game in my hands it’s an undertow, the desperation to prove him wrong, him and all of them—his slim batter swaying there, blinking, everyone in the bleachers watching me, watching and waiting, patiently, for me to dissolve in my own shame, blood curdling like milk going bad when I walk her just like they knew I would.
It has to erupt somewhere, somehow: in a burst of snotty gasps and tears, in a fountain of dirt kicked in the direction of the smug coach standing there chomping on his gum like it’s generating power for the scoreboard, in my glove hurled at the chain link fence, once the inning, mercifully, ends, so that the metal rattles and shrieks at the spectators, all of them staring, shaking their heads. My teammates looking, carefully, away, one of the coaches or all of them snapping “Calm down” or “Chill out” or “Get ahold of yourself” in a voice so repulsed I flinch, and back there in the dark of the dugout, grieve: for surrendering so wholly, again; for giving up the one thing that has ever made me feel invincible.
_____
Look at Morgan: clomping around in those shin guards like tortoise shells protecting her knee to cleat, dark eyebrows and square jaw obscured by the catcher’s helmet with the face cage like a shield. Who shares her chewing gum and extra hand warmers for me to keep in the back pocket of my uniform pants, lumpy like coal or tobacco, things I’ve decided are masculine and am therefore careful to know nothing about. Who stops me mid-windup, one practice, to command, “Stand up straight.” Who sticks out her chest so it strains against her sports bra, commiserating, “I know it feels weird, like you’re a ballerina or something. But you’re dipping your shoulders when you let go, and it’s changing the trajectory of the pitch.” Morgan, who chuckles a little, like a ballerina is a ridiculous thing to be.
And look at me: powerful and helpless and both and neither, separate and alien and longing for something, anything, but most of all furious, at nothing and at everything. The cheerful yellow paint on my bedroom walls because my mom won’t let me paint it navy, my whole team studying the ground, the sky, the dirt under their fingernails rather than meet my gaze, as if meeting my gaze might contaminate them with it, the not-right hair, the way warped wet denim smells drooping on the line, the flesh blooming underneath my arms and on the backs of my thighs and every time I start simmering out there I imagine myself erupting into a riot of that soft stuff, a million splatters that look innocent but land greasy and hot like flecks of oil, like little wounds.
* * *
There was something about the other pitchers. How stately they were, like diplomats representing small European countries. The tranquility they seemed to radiate, just by walking around without moving their eyebrows. These were the kind of girls people wrote ballads and magazine profiles about. The kind of girls who sang in the choir at church, shoulders back, spines straight, who cried silently behind closed doors and never talked back to their mothers. They were chill, they had a hold of themselves. You looked at them and pictured leafy salads in gleaming white rooms, dressing on the side. You looked at them and pictured cloth napkins folded neatly over crossed thighs, you looked at them and heard tinkling: utensils against porcelain, ice against glass.
It wasn’t about femininity, exactly, or my utter lack of it. Or, it was, but only because I was fifteen. I still thought gender was about parts. I didn’t know yet that who we are is not about other people but regardless of them, and anyway I misunderstood the assignment. Because of course the other pitchers were just as powerful as the catchers. But their power was in containment, consistency. So that I almost forgot it was power, too.
Easier to reduce it to blond hair. Delicate bones, good manners. Composed, graceful, mainstream pretty: the thing I was supposed to be. This one thing. And I tried. And I kept trying. Failing and flailing, legible as an imposter. Illegible to myself.
_____
If there was a science to it, a rhyme or a reason, I couldn’t learn the rules. Those moments on the mound seemed to drop out of the sky like bird shit and so I was afraid of them the same way I was afraid of her, my mom: the narrowing of her eyes, the clench in her jaw, the snarl in her lips. I might avoid them for a whole week of practices, or even for a game. I might calculate exactly what it’d take to make me worthy of her love, I might even become worthy, for a moment, for a drive home, for the quiet hour after family dinner or the length of two whole episodes of Seinfeld, played back to back before the ten o’clock news. But there was always another tomorrow, another day when I’d have to find a way to protect myself from the arbitrary storm of my own unpredictable moods, and hers. When I’d have to convince her all over again.
Back then I believed she was invincible, indomitable, something like a god. Not because of the breadth of her punishments, but because of the precision of her anger; because she studied our weaknesses, memorized, faithfully, the spots she knew would hurt the most, then struck. Because she was hard and self-contained, something that wanted nothing, and meanwhile I was attached by DNA to the person she saw when she looked at me: someone conniving, unlovable. She hated me back, I thought, and it wasn’t fair—how she had incubated my body inside her own but I didn’t know her at all, had never even seen her cry.
_____
Look at Olivia: the pitcher in the grade below me, a whole year younger but objectively more talented, all the coaches agree and the parents, too, even my own, sitting in the bleachers with their arms crossed against their polos. Sugar-and-spice Olivia, who shows up to school in low-rise flares that hide everything they’re supposed to and leave the rest to the imagination, regulation hottie teen royalty who always has someone’s football jersey to wear. Little Olivia with her artistry and impeccable form, her yielding ribbon of a name, her French braid and her dancer’s style and her perfect bird bones.
And look at me: staring at the mirror for hours as if daring it to say something cruel, searching for whatever it is my mom sees in me, the same thing, maybe, that makes my pitching exist in a vague uncertain somewhere beyond the rules of skill and practice, beyond the blunt facts of my body and any pretense of control I’m supposed to have over it. Look at me practicing in that basement for hours after my family goes to sleep, country music station blaring, three bottles of kiwi-strawberry Propel lined up on my dad’s tool bench, and nobody tells me to turn it down, shut up, chill out, get ahold of yourself, because they’re so pleased I’m practicing, so impressed by my commitment. The thwack of the ball against the mattress padding, startling every time, as if I didn’t hurl it there myself. The way the ball rolls back to me uncertainly, like drool dribbling out of a mouth. My commitment: no use. I never belong to it. It never belongs to me.
_____
Everyone in the stands, looking. Clocking me, seeing every ugly thing. My mom, hair like a natural disaster, frown lines raking her face. My dad, mild-mannered and gray-mustached, who, once a week, between business trips, would rent us a lane at the local batting cages and catch for me, yelling out strikes like a major league umpire. Every other night, me and that mattress, going nowhere. “You’re embarrassing me,” my mom would hiss, whenever I lost it in public. As if she had nothing to do with it.
* * *
The year after we won state, on the day the team rosters were posted on a piece of paper taped to the wall in the hallway outside the field house, I rounded the corner after class and saw Riley standing in front of the bulletin. I grinned and waved because I thought of her as my friend, even if she was only a sports friend, the kind where you joke around at practice but you’ve never seen their basement.
And maybe I only thought that because I was violently lonely, starving for someone to sit with in the lunchroom, to braid my not-right hair with fingers less clumsy than my own. Maybe I only thought that because I didn’t have any non-sports friends—girls who let me sleep over and eat the snacks their moms stocked in their pantries and nod sympathetically while I told them about—what? What did girls talk about, behind closed doors?
Maybe. But even now I think of Riley and I think, fondly, that there’s a reason the pitcher and catcher, together, are called “the battery.” Because on the surface it may seem like a simple give and take, even just by nature of the titles of the positions: the pitcher pitches, the catcher catches whatever they pitch. And of course it is, in its way, a transactional relationship—your catcher has an obligation to acknowledge you, to take action in response to your own actions, to tell you what you’re doing wrong and right and too much and not enough.
But it only works if you trust each other. Which means it’s less give, take; more the conduit along which energy is continually flowing in both directions, and without which the entire game would not be possible. More communication, accountability. You can count on your catcher and you know it. You know she cares; that she has to care is hardly relevant.
_____
Look at Riley: the catcher from my own year, who gave me nicknames and caught for me outside of mandatory practice when, years earlier, we were on the same team in the community league. Who was kind to me, whenever I was out there barely holding it together, who’d turn to the umpire and make a T with her hands, stow her helmet under her arm, shake out her dark curls while jogging out to the mound so she could clap me on the shoulder, look me in the eye, and say, sincerely, firmly, “Shake it off. You got this.”
And look at me: rounding the corner, and grinning, and waving, while Riley turns away. She walks fast in the other direction and disappears behind the doors of the women’s locker room, while I trace my finger down a piece of paper that doesn’t have my name on it.
_____
This was me: the pitcher-body that had made the girl-body bearable, permanently stripped of its pitcher-ness. Some part of me, the solid part, the more-than-this-girl-body part, going with it, getting lost and staying there, going, going, gone. Jaw aching, space between my sternum and my spine aching, pretty much everything else ache, aching, and every ache was a fact and every feeling was a liability, and I felt everything and knew nothing, not names for what I wanted, not even names for the “I”s that were wanting it, all those “I”s clamoring for control, waiting and wanting and potentially lethal.
After Riley left me in the hallway, after I slammed through the doors and found a different bathroom and locked myself in a stall and cried so hard I threw up, after I washed my face at the sink and rubbed it raw with the brown paper towels from the dispenser and walked to the back of the school where the buses lined up, after I made my way home and flung myself onto my bed and howled, and howled, I begged my mom to let me skip school tomorrow.
Before she shook her head no, before she turned and left through the open doorframe, before she abandoned me there to weep until morning, great heaving sobs that left the verdict of my body limp and wrung-out like the rags she used to polish the wood floors, she raised her chin and commanded, “Don’t you dare let them win.”
* * *
You’re fifteen and stuck in the bittersweet of unbelonging and the world’s made up of opposites. Win or lose. Plus or minus. Catcher or pitcher, boy or girl. Hard or soft, yes or no. Good, bad. Big, small. Up, down. Right, left. Them, us. Here, gone. You don’t know there’s something wrong about your home life; it’s the only home you’ve got. You don’t know there is such a thing as queer, let alone how many ways there are to be it. By the time you finish high school you stop wondering why you respond so bodily, so catastrophically, to failure, or why you feel carbonated in the vicinity of Morgan and Riley and everyone else who’s ever caught for you. You’re not thinking about how many ways there are to be human. You’re thinking about how many ways there are to be invisible.
Well, here was one: cut from every team, not even offered the consolation of JV. Rendered abruptly obsolete, replaced, without fanfare, by Olivia. I lay in my bed seething, hating my mom for not being a cuddler, a coddler, for walking away without comforting me, for being nothing like the other moms with their soft voices and their sympathy eyes. I hated her for it and I still hate her for it and I also love her for it, just as viciously, just as ruthlessly, because she understood that I was different and my life would be hard, and that I would have to be harder.
_____
Some things are too big to look in the eye. We find side doors. We sidle. And then suddenly we’re in it: the smear, the bliss. But not at fifteen, or sixteen. Not even at nineteen, or twenty, or twenty-three. At sixteen you don’t want to be hard. And you don’t want to be soft. You want to be you, or, at least, a version of you—whichever one could be seen, and loved anyway.
_____
Look at me bringing home my first string bikini. Look at me tracing my eyes with several layers of the eyeliner I won’t scrub clean for seven years. Look at me posing for prom photos in a poofy silver dress, sparkles dancing all over my bodice, hair hot-curled and piled on top of my head, hands attached like bird claws to my hips, trying to smile but baring my teeth instead, and I almost wish I could find those photos, now, just to remind myself: Look how much a person can change in a year, five years, eighteen. Look how many “I”s you never have to try to be again.
* * *
It matters that whenever you’re out there, on defense, the catcher and the pitcher face each other, head on. That’s unusual, in a team sport—most times you’re all lined up in formation, looking at the same thing or at least headed that way, moving as one unit toward a common goal. Not me, pitching: the rest of my team, out of sight behind me. The catcher, directly in front of me: not a silent X marks the spot, but a living, breathing target.
If I could receive one moment, back then, as a gift, or a clue, it would be about that. It would be Riley, jogging out to the mound to touch my shoulder so I don’t unravel, or Morgan, dropping from a squat to her knees, correcting my bad posture without admonishing me for it, chuckling conspiratorially about how we’ll never be ballerinas. It would be one of those girls, those players of substance, taking care of me, out there—looking me in the eye and making me feel like I mattered.
_____
Those moments, now, I see them: a row of side doors, opening. Me fifteen or sixteen beyond every closed door of my youth, abruptly through to the other side, the other sides, where exposure is not a risk, disaster not a threat but an access point. To the collision of somethings bigger, the “don’t let them win” in me, in us, the hard and the soft and the here and the gone. All my “I”s crouched there, waiting, poised to unfurl with a secret code and pulse of their own, belonging to themselves, each other, all of it, at once: the catcher swagger, the pitcher grace.
