“You sleep too much,” she says. It’s Sunday morning and she’s woken me up—indirectly yet purposely—by her rustling as she opens the curtains and straightens up my room. It occurs to me that this may be the perfect word to describe my mother. A rustler. She rustles through life. I am sure that her criticism is well-intentioned, but how does she know how much sleep I need? Lions in Africa are unconscious for more than eighty percent of their lives. As far as I know, no one chides them for it, or rustles them awake when they’re sound asleep on a Sunday morning.
“Lions sleep twenty hours a day,” I say.
“Well, you’re not a lion,” she says. I should have seen this response coming—the blunt assertion of reality that is inarguable yet also somehow misses the point—but I’ve just woken up and am still groggy.
“I was having a dream,” I tell her. This is not unusual, and I suppose could constitute Exhibit C in the case for my love of sleep. I have wonderful, linear, storylike dreams—the kinds of dreams you don’t want to wake up from. This one was a good one, too, though I don’t get into it with my mom. In the dream, we were all at the breakfast table—me and my family, also the shade and the other monsters. My mother was pouring the shade a cup of coffee and chatting with it about the weather. I was telling a joke, and everybody laughed, my father most of all. In fact, he couldn’t stop, his face getting redder and his eyes tearing up until, finally, a Cheerio popped right out of his nose and into the shade’s coffee.
“You can’t spend your life dreaming,” says my mom.
“When else am I going to get the chance?” I ask.
“Never mind,” she says, not one for long arguments or shaped logic. She opens the last of the curtains.
The day is cold and gray and not made for baseball. Anticipating a time when my father and I will be able to play outside, I decide to start practicing in the only way available. I grab my mitt, rummage a tennis ball out of the hallway closet, and head down to the basement. Long, naked fluorescent bulbs shine down from a ceiling that would seem low if I weren’t ten years old and somewhat small for my age. The floor and walls are of unfinished cement, perfect for my purpose. I push aside cardboard boxes, old lawn chairs, and other debris to clear a narrow lane from one end of the basement to the other. On the far wall I draw a rectangle in white chalk, hoping it approximates the strike zone of a typical twelve-year-old. Then I start to pitch.
The house is quiet in winter. The basement is dead silent but for the rhythmic thud and pop of the tennis ball as it rebounds against the cement wall and back to my glove. I find it soothing, enjoying it so much that I’m immediately concerned when, on the third day of my practice, I hear my father coming down the steps. I’m certain he’ll tell me to stop, that the noise is driving him and my mom crazy. Instead, to my surprise, he presents me with a rubber ball the size and shape of a baseball, complete with raised grooves to imitate the lacing. Better than a tennis ball, he says. More like the real thing. I ask him about my form and mechanics, hoping he’ll share some tips with me. He watches a few pitches, then nods.
“Looks good to me,” he says, before heading back upstairs. There is a small, empty silence after he leaves, and I can’t help thinking that more words might have filled it, but I shrug it off and turn back to the wall.
Days pass. Maybe weeks. I’m not sure, but by the time winter begins to recede, I can put that rubber ball anywhere I want in that strike zone. I am so anxious to play catch with my father that, at the first hint of thaw, I grab a shovel and set out to clear the lawn of snow. This is harder than it sounds. Shovels are made for scraping over asphalt, not clawing at the earth. Even after I’ve broken through the hard upper crust of ice, the front edge of the shovel keeps catching on the grass. It takes me all afternoon to clear a single strip that is just long and wide enough for two people to have a proper catch. When my arms begin to shake from exhaustion, I concede that it will have to be enough, and am vindicated when the sun comes out the next day, drying the strip of grass until it seems a touch of spring in the frozen heart of winter.
By the time my father gets home I’m already outside, mitt and baseball at the ready. Before he is even out of the car, I am chatting away about what I want to show him, and the questions I have for him—like, what’s a two-seamer, and how do you throw a curveball, and how quickly can he lose his briefcase and find his glove. He withdraws into the house, then emerges again a few minutes later. He has indeed left his briefcase inside, but instead of his glove he’s carrying a long, flat cardboard box. It’s the pitchback. We never did set it up before the cold arrived. My father takes it out of the box and has it assembled in short order—a taut vertical net inside a metal frame.
“Look at that, would you?” he says. “Give it a try.”
There is that small silence again. My father seems quite impressed with the pitchback, though he’s already moving back toward the front steps. He doesn’t seem to understand that I asked him to play catch with me, not set up some contraption so that I could be here without him, by myself. I turn toward the pitchback and throw, but my heart’s not in it, and the toss is feeble, nothing like the flamethrowers I was hurling in the basement. Still, the ball strikes the center of the net and springs back to me like it’s on a string, and that seems good enough for my father.
“Even better than the basement wall,” he says, before disappearing into the house.
The door barely closes before it opens again, spitting out Dean. He bounds into the long strip of grass. He has his glove on, and opens it toward me expectantly.
“My turn,” he says.
“I haven’t even used it yet. And I was the one who shoveled all the snow.”
“Fine. How much longer are you going to be?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “Do you want to have a catch?”
“A catch? Why? This thing is so cool! If you don’t want to use it—”
“No,” I cut him off. “I’m using it.” My face burns. I feel the urge to either cry or punch Dean in the face or both. Instead, I once again turn toward the pitchback. I heave the ball with all of the might my body has managed to garner in its ten years. But I’ve lost all focus now, and I miss badly. The ball sails over the top and across the yard before burying itself in the snow. Dean laughs all the way back into the house.
“Nice pitch, ace!” he calls over his shoulder.
So, for the rest of the winter and into spring, it’s me and the pitchback, with the basement wall occasionally pinch-hitting during heavy rainstorms. Unlike the wall, the pitchback allows you to work on your catching as well as your throwing. If you throw the ball toward the top of the netting, it comes back as a grounder, and if you throw toward the bottom, it comes back as a pop-up. This is how Dean uses it. He plays shortstop for his team, so he cares more about hitting and fielding than pitching. But I stay focused on the center, where a cord is weaved through the netting in the shape of a rectangle. This is my strike zone, and I pound the corners with pitch after pitch until I could do it blindfolded.
It is not a matter of determination. I am not out to prove my prowess to my father—or to Dean, for that matter. Rather, despite an initial sense of bitterness toward the pitchback as a poor substitute for flesh and blood, I eventually become as enthralled with it as I was with the basement wall, my spirit eased by the melodic flow of the repeated toss and return. Dean likes to say that sport is combat. He says that for thousands of years people have killed each other in war, and that we’ve evolved to need this conflict. Sport, he says, is a modern, bloodless substitute. This is big thinking for Dean, and he may even be right, but as the days and weeks go by, and my pitching becomes more and more fluid, I begin to think of sport not as combat but as dance—the beauty of the body in motion, where the mind quiets to the point of vanishing.