Cohen doesn’t remember with any precision the first time he held a baseball, the first time he stared, mesmerized, at the pattern of 108 red stitches holding together two strips of worn white horsehide. Because of those seams, the ball did not roll smoothly across the linoleum kitchen floor; rather, it lurched and leaned this way, that way, like someone trying to find their balance on a moving platform. He crawled after it, pushed it ahead, and watched it bobble along. He lifted it, tried to put it in his mouth, slobbered on it. For him, the baseball was part of being.
At three or four years of age, Cohen tried to catch the hardball as his father tossed it into his waiting arms. Calvin did not believe in starting with a Wiffle ball or a tennis ball—no, it was a real, standard-sized hardball from the very beginning. He tossed it to Cohen carefully, gingerly, the way you might throw an egg.
“Hold your arms out,” Calvin said softly, stretching Cohen’s arms taut, pushing them together, and tossing the ball so that it balanced between his milky elbows. It was less a matter of Cohen catching than it was of Calvin throwing the ball accurately into his surprised limbs, but with each catch, Cohen grew to love the game more, this game of catch, this game that connected him with his father. When he caught the ball, his normally serious father smiled. That was all the reason he needed to love the game.
At the age of five, Cohen had his first glove, and he grew used to the rough inside edges against his fingers, the way it grew softer with time, the sound of the ball nestling into the webbed pocket, sometimes with a smack, sometimes with an oomph, sometimes like a punch in the gut. He threw the ball well by that age, and he felt like something special, hurling that orb through space.
“Good throw!” his father always said, sometimes pretending the force of the throw had stung his hand. “Yow!” he would cry.
“Nice catch!” Calvin shouted with each snag, or “Well, good try” with every drop. But the drops came few and far between by the time Cohen was six. The two of them would stand in the front yard of their home in the country, tossing the ball back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. It was like a conversation without words, except for his father’s “Good throw!” and “Yow!” and “Nice catch!” and “Well, good try.” It was how they connected, this ball circling, spinning through the air, a small world traveling back and forth at gentle speeds, the leather sound of a catch, the light grunt that came after a hard throw.
His father had taught him how to turn his glove: palm up to catch the ball if it arrived at stomach height or lower, and palm forward if the ball came in at chest height or higher. There was always the arc of the ball, the speed of its approach, the background of the large oak trees or a passing car or the great blue sky. Sometimes he peeked up at the house windows and saw his mother staring down at them, arms crossed, before looking quickly away.
He had his first baseball practice the spring after he turned nine. It took place on the ball diamond at the bottom of the hill behind the VFW. In those days, ballfields were not as immaculately kept—fathers mowed the outfield on their days off only after the grass was long enough to lose a ball in, and they dragged the dirt smooth around the infield with a section of chain-link fence weighed down with a handful of bricks pulled behind an old riding mower. In those days, a few weeds peeked through, and when he and his father walked quietly up to the third-base line, the infield was already filled with other eight- and nine-year-olds playing catch. Most of the throws were short or long or hit kids on the head or the leg or the chest. There were a few precious catches. For the most part, it was chaos.
Cohen stood there on that first day of practice in clean jeans and a white T-shirt and a red Philadelphia Phillies hat, staring into what seemed to be a cloud of electrons bouncing off each other—some kind of childlike attempt at creation, with random things colliding and erupting and amalgamating. He felt very much an outsider. There he stood, so still, so out of place, removed from that joyful, chaotic cloud of newness.
“Hey,” the only girl on the field shouted. “Wanna throw?”
Cohen gawked at her for a moment, the one who had said those precious words. He looked up at his father anxiously, and his father nodded.
“Go on,” he said. “Go ahead.”
Cohen walked hesitantly onto the dirt field, his new baseball cleats rubbing on his heels, the static of those wild electrons alive all around him. The girl who had asked him to throw wore jeans torn at the knee and regular old tennis shoes, and her shirt was nearly washed through, but she walked around the field like she had been created for that diamond-shaped space.
The two of them threw the grass-stained baseball back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, finding a rhythm. At first Cohen had been uncertain about throwing with a girl, but he soon realized she was as good as him—no, she was better. The fields stretched out behind her on the other side of the tracks, and the sky was bigger than anything that had ever been. The air filled with the sound of baseballs hitting the chain-link fence or skidding across the hard dirt or making muffled trails into the grassy outfield. But with Cohen and his new friend, it was all thwop, thwop, thwop as the ball settled into each of their gloves. Back and forth without a drop, without a miss.
“I’m Ava,” the girl called over to him as he threw the ball.
Cohen caught the information like a line drive and smiled. “I’m Cohen,” he shouted. He threw the ball back, and for two nine-year-olds, the exchange of names was exhilarating, like finding a piece of fool’s gold in the driveway.
His first baseball practice might have faded from his memory if it hadn’t been for the sound of the train, the blast of its whistle, the deep rumble of its approach. But he looked at the tracks just as Ava threw the ball, and she realized what was happening and shouted, “Cohen!” He looked back in time to raise his glove, palm up, but the ball was too high so it skimmed like a skipping rock and collided with Cohen’s nose.
Stars.
The beginning of the universe.
The inside of an atom, spinning.
Arcs of light and the rush of the train and he was on his back, on the dirt, opening his eyes to the blue sky and oozing liquid drip drip dripping from his nose. He sat up, and kneeling beside him was his father and his new coach and his new friend, Ava. The blood dripped rhythmically down his upper lip, and he leaned forward and it dripped onto his white T-shirt in long streaks and onto his jeans, leaving small almost-black spots in the blue denim. He put his head back to keep from getting more on his clothes, imagining his mother’s wrath, but it ran down the sides of his cheeks and trickled the smooth length of his neck. He could taste it in his throat, a slippery metallic kind of choking. He coughed.
“Spit it out. Go ahead,” his father said, and Cohen heard embarrassment there in his flat voice, and a hint of shame that his son couldn’t catch a ball thrown by a girl.
His coach led him through the arc of children staring, all baseballs suddenly motionless, horrified at this unforeseen outcome. He led Cohen through the dust rising in that early summer dusk, all the way to the bench, where he sat down and put his head back and held an old rag to his nose until the bleeding stopped. His father washed his face with water from the team thermos. It was cold, ice cold like melted snow, and he drank some too, to get the rest of the blood cleared from his mouth and the back of his throat.
Cohen locked eyes with Ava, and Ava squinted back and shrugged an apology. Cohen gave her a thumbs-up, which it turns out, in nine-year-old lingo, is the foundation of a friendship.