Boys

The tall grass of the thicket brushes my barren legs. My backpack trails behind me, parting the grass in some way my pastor would akin to the Red Sea, and I sink slowly to the ground, minding my pleated skirt as my eyes point towards those imposing statues of light that dot my left side. The school maintenance man – balding and fat, with a greasy, pinstriped shirt and beady eyes – throws up the switch, bathing the field of painted lines and polished goal posts in brightness as I watch, enthralled. They stretch up towards the sky and I trace them for a moment as I settle into the smell of hot rubber and earth, wondering who ever thought to erect such things. Such things that soar into the sky like birds, and yet remain bolted to the ground - cold, solid, there.

It seems to me that such things would be contradictory in and of themselves, but I suppose not. I suppose many things are burdened, yet choose to imitate another in some odd, twisted, sad attempt at verisimilitude in order to feel a bit of peace. I suppose this is natural – this feeling of solitude, of longing, of complete irrelevance, all packaged in a simple, convincing box.

Looking out further, beyond the towers, I note the small crowd clustered around a tentative swell in the earth. I watch as they climb the side of the grassy place and approach the crest, spreading blankets and passing bits of food amongst themselves as they reach it. My brother, one of six, sits beside his girlfriend, her back pressed against his chest as they hold out his cell phone, presumably taking a picture. I watch as she leans in, pressing her cherry lips to his cheek - leaving a dark stain after the camera catches. Their timbre drifts across to me and I pull my knees to my chest, allowing my tapered chin to meet their knobbiness.

Watching their exchanges, my eyes droop lower, fanning across the high grass, drifting across the sun soaked earth. The wind whistles through the stalks that slightly conceal my body from the scene around me. Boys - all burly young boys, with tight hamstrings and defined jaws - hold their arms stiff by their sides as they stride after their prospective coach, who stalks out from beneath their stadium bleachers. A few, I note with a small, restrained smile, can’t help but glance back, taking in their imposing form.

Rising above the gridiron with a stately air one would not assume such things could present, the bleachers are both a stoic witness and a roaring cheer - sturdy solidarity reassuring under sneaker-clad feet. It’s quite easy, I find, to be struck by their grandeur in the warm, 5 o’clock light. Refractions meet my eyes as I gaze and I can almost feel their swell of pride, of nerves, swooping in my own stomach as the players form a rough line.

Breath fanning gently across my shins as I sigh, I find myself spreading the grass further apart with the toes of my sneakers - inclining forward in a half attempt at gathering what the coach is saying. He stands at the forty five yard line, arms crossed over his blue nylon chest, pacing from the thirty to the fifty. Scowl etched onto his face like stone, the man is known for his brutal seasons. The boys keep coming back.

My father never got himself a football player. His time on the field for himself had set off something in him that desired one the way others might desire a winning lottery ticket or an expensive car. And yet, throughout all the years, he’d only acquired two hunters, one genius, three runners, and me.

When I was young - just passed my seventh birthday, rounding the plate towards eighth - I used to steal away to our shed at night, nicking the padlock the way I’d seen my brothers go about it, and trail my finger along the dusty, splintered shelves until I found exactly - exactly - what I had been looking for. Tired and more than a bit old, my father’s football sat, only slightly compressed against the flat of the wood. The stitches were pulled in odd, out of the way places and my young - so young - fingers traced over the sweat-blackened laces with a reverence I had no words for yet.

The wheat field behind our modest home was my own personal field. It was my gridiron solely for passes caught by kernels and dodges avoiding stalks. The plays enacted on my father’s distant television games came alive that night when I trudged into the wheat field, ball underhand, pajamas rucked up to keep the mud off.

I was free during those nights - fireflies following my footsteps in the wading flora and warm, heady air floating up to me as I whittled the dark away running, playing under an endless sky. I was free to run, free to fly, free to tumble through rough plant, a worn, leather ball clutched to my chest.

A whistle - shrill, hard, somehow sweet - sounds in the flat plain of the field. I glance up from where my eyes had fallen to the toes of my shoes, finding Coach’s rough figure against the sinking sun of this early September day. Standing before such a line of young men - all tense, all strong, all boys in my vision - the man looks no less like some army general, some man sent to organize the chaos and fit it together again just the same.

My father – one day after a failed fishing trip that I, nor my mother, were invited to – told me that I was conceived on a bottle red wine and some almost-spoilt imported cheese that had been festering since my Aunt Dorothy’s vacation to the Riviera. I remember not grasping the concept until much later, after which I proceeded to contemplate it for a long while.

I’d never been intended – that much had been quite clear from the very beginning. In my younger years, it had seemed to me that my father simply preferred to ignore my consciousness altogether. Polaroid photographs and family portraits never placed my father alongside his only daughter. Pages read under the light of stick-on glow stickers had never captured his voice and his knife never strayed to my plate, the meat there finding its end in my mother’s shaky grip. Each passing year and another tally was added next to my scrawled ‘Jacqueline’ on our aged refrigerator as my father sat with the paper, sipping his blackened coffee under the harsh light of our kitchen lamp.

I love my father the way every daughter can only love her father – purely, simply, and without preamble. I want to spend an afternoon hidden among the reeds and conifers as line after line finds its prey - and my father sits, content, and tells me about his childhood and we can bring that fresh catch home for my mother to make up for dinner. I want to make my father beam with pride, reaching over the mitten-warmed fingers and half full styrofoam cups of hot cocoa, to yell across the cheering row, That’s it - right there! That’s my girl! I want his fingers to curl around the back of my head as he holds me to his chest and whispers in my ear, You were exactly what they needed tonight. You were exactly what I needed.

I stand. The grass around me protests, clinging to my legs, pulling at the skin there but I pay no mind, inclining to Coach’s yell across the battlefield.

“Last call for tryouts, boys!”

I carry myself to the edge of the grass. The reeds shift, slide, eliciting their own whistles in my wake as I climb closer to the rim. My father’s voice, booming, resounds in my eardrum as the edge of the field grows closer, the grass falling further to my back.

I never once heard a woman say something intelligent. Making my life harder - that’s all you’re interested in.

You’re a girl, Jacqueline. Put your brother’s toys away.

Your mother needs help tonight. Stay home and do what she says, you hear?

Eloise, why would I spend good money on an extra ticket? Girls and baseball just don’t mix. God knows she’d probably sit there bored anyway.

I wanted my boy. I wanted my football player.

I meet the trim of the red rubber track, Red Sea still parting.