the WAVEs from the base, they played a team from the government
offices and one from the port authority. Vi was amazed at how seri-
ously most people took it, as seriously as they took their jobs. The
Stingers (her team) had uniforms, baggy and gray but uniforms, and
Dad wouldn’t allow you to play in a game if you weren’t suited up—
sometimes Vi heading for a game straight from her rooming house had
to wear hers on the trolley out to the field, and back again sweaty and
bedraggled and feeling foolish. The whole of downtown was no larger
than a ranch, but getting around in it took forever, trolleys and buses
and on feet weary from a day’s work. It was hard, and the game the
women played was played more fiercely than Vi had ever played it, no
kindness in it, no forgiveness for errors, no encouragement yelled out
by the other team just to be nice. She loved it that way. It was great to
learn you could weld, learn you could drive a crane a hundred feet over
the shop floor, or run a drill press as big as a double bed, but playing
real ball was even better. Vi thought so.
She’d never really had a coach before, but she could tell Dad was
hardest on the players he thought were the best; they were all playing
just for fun, supposedly, but Dad played to win as if it weren’t. He caught
Vi out for being lackadaisical, for letting runners steal bases because she
didn’t check, for smiling, for giving away her pitch in the way she stood,
the way she composed her face—he said she looked one way when she
threw a fastball and a different way for a curve. She didn’t believe him,
or didn’t believe it could matter, and laughed, but his face was stony.
“Softball’s a game of thinking,” he said. “You gotta think, Vi.
Because the ball goes so slow, and can’t go far. They say baseball’s a
game of thinking too, but then along comes Ruth or Williams and it
turns out it’s a game of muscle after all. But softball’s a thinking game
all the time. And the pitcher’s the player that’s thinking the game.”
“I think.”
“You think too much. When you think. I can read you like a book.”
He made her pitch to him, hitting pitch after pitch, lightly laying
them out behind her, to right field, left field. The harder she tried the
easier it seemed for him to do it.
94 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
“Come on, girl. Fool me. Trip me up, take me out. What are you
waiting for?”
Dad could make her want to cry, but he could also make her refuse
to cry: she looked back at him, her eyes slits like his, gum clenched in
her jaw. Her arm ached. She threw as hard as she could until at last she
decided she hated him so much she didn’t care what he thought of her,
stared fiercely at him and wound up and threw a lazy slider that he
whiffed. The catcher missed it too.
“Practice over,” Dad said calmly.
Night had fallen suddenly. She, the stolid little catcher, and Dad were
the last players left. Vi was faced with a walk to the trolley and a long
ride back to the mansion. Dad put them both in his Dodge coupe.
“It’s out of your way,” Vi said.
“You don’t know what’s out of my way.”
He drove the old car top down, shifting with a sort of beautiful cau-
tion to save both transmission and rubber: they went on without speak-
ing, though Dad once looked over to Vi, conscious that she was
watching him, and smiled. He dropped off the catcher at her house on
the hill and took Vi down toward the harbor, though even Vi could tell
the other order would have been quicker.
“I’ve got to send you home,” she said at the door of her place. “House
rules.” At which he slowly nodded, knowing from the way she put it
(she knew he knew) that she wouldn’t if she didn’t have to; and halfway
down the block he turned the Dodge around and came back, and she
was still standing there on the doorstep just as though she’d known he’d
do that, though really she hadn’t, had simply stopped in midspace await-
ing something—the same thoughtless mindless not-expectant awaiting
(she’d think later) as before a kiss. They went up the stairs and she left
him in the alcove and knocked at her own door. Sis answered, she was
just dressing to go out because tonight the picture changed at the Fox,
and Vi said Okay and waved her good-bye, at which Sis closed the door
slowly and in some puzzlement. Vi took Dad’s hand and together they
went up to that ballroom on the third floor, the parquet and the spooky
peeling gold wallpaper illuminated by the streetlights coming on. Vi
wound the gramophone and put on whatever record was on the top of
the pile, just the right one of course, because by now it was evident that
this was one of those times when nothing could go wrong, even things
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 95
going wrong would be funny and sweet and right. It didn’t surprise her
that Dad was one of those men who can dance as well as they play ball,
or swim, or drive a car. After a while they knew that Sis had gone to the
movies and they went downstairs.
They left the lights off but this room too was lit by the streetlights,
the city never dark, not the way home had been. She wept a little, and
wouldn’t say why; Dad thought he knew why but he was wrong. It was
the dark V of his throat and his burned forearms in the dimness, the
long white body and its stain or smudge of black hair from breastbone
down to where his penis rose: reminding her of someone else, back
where she came from, and all that had happened between them there,
which seemed now not only far away but long ago.
“So he taught you more than ball,” Prosper said to Vi in Ponca City.
“He didn’t teach me how to play ball. I knew.”
“Well I mean.”
“Yes.”
“And he was the first man you’d been with?”
“No,” Vi said. “No, actually, Prosper, he wasn’t.”
“Ah well then who—”
“Never mind,” Vi explained.
It was practice the day of a game with the Bomberettes from the air-
craft plant, and—Vi afterward couldn’t actually remember the sequence
of events, and had to believe Dad when he told her how it happened—
the second baseman, trying to catch a runner headed for the plate,
beaned Vi square in the back of the head.
The second baseman was being comforted—she felt terrible—when
Vi came around. Dad had brought her a Coke bottle full of water from
the bubbler at the edge of the field. While she sipped, he felt within her
heavy hair for the bump beginning to grow. “She’s okay,” he said. “Just
give her room.”
They all stood around.
“All right,” Dad said, that way he had, it made you jump: they went
back to the field.
“You’re okay,” he said to Vi. “You can pitch today.”
It took Vi a while to respond. “Oh?”
96 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
“Sure.”
“And what if I’d rather stay in bed with a bottle of aspirin.”
“No no,” said Dad. “We need you. We need to win this one.”
“And why so.” She had a hard time hearing herself speak.
“Well,” he said after some thought, “one reason, there’s a lot of
money riding on tonight.”
She thought he’d said “a lot of muddy riding” and tried to make sense
of that, an image from the ranch forming in her mind. “What?” she said.
“A lot of money,” he said. “We’re doped to win. The smart bettors
have been watching you. I mean you particularly. The book is still