Tools of Ignorance by Sienna Zeilinger
"In reality it was nothing that abstract. We were simply all falling in love, and it was a pain in the ass. * It happened slowly, first, then all at once, just like the movies promised."
I’m a sucker for a good baseball story. The narrative of the sport, the way it can be used to show and tell so much about character, relationships, the passage of time… For twenty years, I devoted every April on Hobart to baseball stories & essays & poems & more, and as I’ve gotten older and have less time and energy to keep up as I had in my teens and twenties, this annual tradition kept my love for the sport pure and strong, and always gave April a little extra joy.
Incredibly excited to keep a version of that tradition alive this week with this fun, sweet, captivating, beautiful story from Sienna Zeilinger. A nostalgic, reminiscing story about the season this team of girls, one-by-one, became overtaken by an odd and mysterious love. The whole story is wonderful and then, no matter how many times I read it, the ending knocks me out again, anew. So excited to get to feature and share it this beautiful, sunny April morning!
—Aaron Burch
When we reminisce about that season, now, at weddings and baby showers and congrats-on-your-divorce brunches, we tend to agree that it all came on rather suddenly. Sometime in May, someone says. It was May, right? There was something in the air. Sticks, who we thought would get a scholarship for her cache of formidable off-speed pitches and instead quietly earned one for women in STEM, actually did some digging in Ohio State’s meteorological archives a few years back and reminded us of the cold front that passed through in late April, the snow day that canceled our game against Winslow South. Which would technically count as something in the air. But that didn’t make sense: since when has a spring chill signaled passion or tenderness, or anything but a brutal two hours for your throwing hand?
In reality it was nothing that abstract. We were simply all falling in love, and it was a pain in the ass.
*
It happened slowly, first, then all at once, just like the movies promised. The initial one to fall was Tall Shannon, at the Glenbrook game, who set up for the throw on a sharp grounder to third and then bent down to the ground as soon as Katie Three released. The ball sailed a yard above Tall Shannon’s bowed head. After the Glenbrook runner took her extra base, we convened at first.
“Have any of you guys seen quartz?” asked Tall Shannon. “I think this is quartz.”
“It’s gravel,” said Zwolski, “and you just fucked up Sticks’ perfect game.”
“It’s the second inning—no offense, Sticks,” said Katie Two, and Sticks shrugged.
“I’m just besotted with you,” said Tall Shannon to the rock, whatever it was.
*
That spring Sticks started every game, even though we were sophomores. Sticks’ parents were separated. Her mom called her Honey and Sweetie and other charming belittlements. Her dad called her Sticks, and so we did too, for her long legs that had to be gently popped back into her hip sockets whenever she made a tough slide. We were all committed to overlooking this, since it would have been a red flag for recruiters. The recruiters’ attention was gold. All the area high schools shared a field complex, so the DI colleges would send one guy to the same place and have him scout everyone at once. Four games, eight teams, something like a hundred girls. We didn’t exactly have a compelling record. We had to howl like ghouls to get the guy in the mustard-yellow Kent State polo to mosey over to Field 4 in time to see Sticks deliver her frankly rude curveball past a batter or two. Until playoffs, that is, when all eyes would be on one game at a time, when everyone would see what I got to see. I remember thinking, even before everything happened, that I was the luckiest one out there: as catcher, I had the best seat in the house for every pitch.
At shortstop we had Zwolski, a senior, who’d already committed to Toledo for field hockey in the fall even though she was the best bunter in Northeast Ohio. Katie Two played second base and Katie Three played third—there was no Katie One. Tall Shannon played first, obviously. Katie Two was Zwolski’s sister, and therefore also technically a Zwolski, but Zwolski was older and had dibs. The outfielders, who we called the O Squad, mostly just nodded in monolithic assent whenever I waved them over or deep. We didn’t talk to them much. In my defense, with my helmet and mask on and hundreds of feet between us, I could barely hear them out there.
Our coaching staff consisted entirely of Jerry D., who chain-smoked through our pregame pep talk and the reading of the lineup so as to be able to get through the two hours between the white lines, which in high school ball was a tobacco-free zone. Jerry D. loved smoking almost as much as he loved his wife Cheryl, who we’d never met but who we knew had gotten permission to take a leave of absence from the public library for the whole offseason to help Jerry D. recuperate from open heart surgery.
“That’s right, open heart surgery! Do you think that caused it?” Katie Two asked at one of our early reunions, everyone home for the holidays and having a catch.
We shook our heads. The timing was wrong. Cheryl had returned to the circulation desk, and Jerry D. had long since devoured all the contents of the convalescent gift bags our mothers had assembled, by the time things started to go haywire on the field.
Katie Two played second base and Katie Three played third—there was no Katie One. Tall Shannon played first, obviously. Katie Two was Zwolski’s sister, and therefore also technically a Zwolski, but Zwolski was older and had dibs.
A couple games after Tall Shannon discovered nature’s transcendent beauty, Katie Three burst into prayer during her usual inane “hey batter batter” chatter. It was unnerving at first. We didn’t think she blinked. We called a time-out to feel her forehead and ask her what day it was and who was President. Everything checked out, though admittedly she was sweatier than usual.
“You guys, it’s all good,” said Katie Three. “It’s just the warmth of divine love.”
And honestly, at first, it worked for us. Greenview would have a runner on first and the batter would square up to bunt her over to second, and then here’d come Katie Three charging down the baseline shrieking the Our Father, and the batter would be too freaked out to do anything but stand still. Sticks could toss her most reliable changeup right down the middle and I could still pop up and nail the runner stealing second, the poor girl under instructions to play it like a hit-and-run—instructions, Zwolski quipped, that were by then nearly as antiquated as the Bible itself.
*
The interleague game away against Pinehaven started out strong, with Tall Shannon spewing incredible intel about every infield divot and slick patch of grass as soon as we reached the dugout. We almost had to forfeit, though, when the O Squad kept putting their hands in each other’s back pockets between batters.
I called a team meeting after that one. I was used to calling pitches, seeing the path out of a tricky inning and making the tiny decisions that would lead us to safety. “Think hard,” I said. “Consider your heartstrings. Do they feel particularly tugged these days? Can you identify the direction?” This love thing, whatever we were going to call it, was helping our game—but it was also unpredictable, a little wild. We could figure out how to play this, I said, but to do that I needed to know what was going on.
We went around in a circle to account for everyone. Katie Three evangelized for an unbroken minute, so that was easy. Tall Shannon exalted a dandelion. The O Squad was still groping at each other; we murmured words of admiration and skipped over them. Zwolski and Katie Two spoke in unison of their undying sisterhood, all of a sudden. We looked at Jerry D., up in the bleachers with our parents, evidently the caboose of a massage train. Who knew what that was about, but in the meantime, at least he was out of the way.
Sticks looked right at me.
“What about you, Sticks?” asked Tall Shannon.
Sticks said, “Um,” and blushed.
In that moment I figured it out: Sticks and I were the only two unaffected. And I saw what would happen if either of us said something: how she’d have to bear the team’s attention on her for something much more vulnerable than a weird hip, how her reliable changeup would wobble under the scrutiny, how we’d never make it beyond the first round of the playoffs, how she’d lose the chance at a scholarship.
“Sticks loves the weather,” I blurted. “She told me.”
Sticks’ face broke, and I could see her scramble to put it back together. I grinned as widely as I could, trying to beam a silent promise right into her: it was just the two of us, and I’d cover for her forever.
“That’s right,” said Sticks. “I love the weather. Any weather. Clouds, partial clouds.”
Everyone turned to me.
“I just love this team so much,” I said.
For a while, we tried to suss out the mechanics. We performed experiments. We noted that Tall Shannon cared a bit less about the squirrels and the birds and the grass and the flowers the farther away we drove her from the field complex, six of us crammed into Katie Three’s lavender VW Bug. We tried blindfolds; two thirds of the O Squad staggered into a wasp’s nest in the far corner of the dugout and swelled up in alarming—although refreshingly un-hickey-like—ways. When we wore earplugs, Jerry D. just yelled at us louder. We brought magnets and sage candles, which did nothing except weigh down our bat bags. Zwolski showed up in 3D glasses once, pilfered from the movie theater where she worked on the weekends, but she said she didn’t see anything unusual, aside from Tall Shannon tenderly scooping up all the sunflower seeds we’d spat, and anyway the rest of us saw that too.
Privately I wondered if my catcher’s pads impaired the swell of feeling somehow, if they acted as a force field of some kind, like whenever I’d shrug off a foul tip to the shin guard that sounded worse than it was and Jerry D. would call out, “Them’s the tools of ignorance!” But I knew that couldn’t be it. I wasn’t clomping out to the on-deck circle with all my gear on when we were up to bat.
I’d never been in love before, and so I didn’t miss it. Sometimes, though, when I was alone with my thoughts, catching the three allotted warm-up pitches before the start of an inning, I did feel miffed that I wasn’t getting spiritually or emotionally tapped to be part of this thing my teammates had. But the mental clarity also made it easier. Easier to look out between the slats of my face mask and see the blur of that preternatural throwing arm as Sticks completed her windmill and released at her hip, to catch her dimples flash when the ball smacked my mitt with a sound she appreciated, to remember that the grid of my mask made it so that she was the only one who could read my lips when I whispered, hell yeah. My teammates were prone to erratic bursts of ability and insight as a result of their newfound attention, but I had the sharpness to remember that it was a privilege to play my best game in the hopes that the world would have the chance to see her too. To crouch down in the same place each afternoon and watch the same picture of power and grace over and over again.
*
At the game against Cedar Hill, Jerry D. was handing out packs of Marlboros willy-nilly to our parents between innings. It had been loosies through the fence during warm-ups—things were escalating. Meanwhile, we kept almost getting tagged out at third because Jerry D., who was supposed to be our base coach, was busy complimenting our moms in the stands until they beamed and did that little “oh pshaw” thing with their hands.
The week before the district qualifier, we started going over our steal signs in an abandoned classroom during lunch as a preventative measure. We were concerned the rush of oxycontin might impede our ability to focus on the basepaths if it struck at the wrong time. It might not be oxycontin, we conceded. We kept saying oxycontin when we meant oxytocin. We talked about testing our blood mid-game. We kept meaning to borrow a graduated cylinder or something. Sticks clapped a hand to her eyes; we knew it embarrassed her, how few of us had paid attention in bio or chem.
The classroom we used was an English classroom, and probably that was how Mrs. Pratt heard about what was going on. Poor Mrs. Pratt, who had most of us sophomores in American Lit (Sticks was in A.P.)—she tried to treat it as a learning experience. She assigned Whitman and Thoreau and arranged to have us bussed to the same farm where the science classes sometimes went to study the soil. The field trip got us out of classes for a whole day. The cool girls on the lacrosse team deigned us worthy to be spoken to and added us to their group text.
“Some of literature’s brightest beacons found love in a field,” said Mrs. Pratt, strutting around in her hiking boots as we sprawled in the grass and wrote dumb little sensory observations in our notebooks. The trip was wonderful, actually; we were forty miles away from where my teammates’ passions sparked and flared, and I could relax. Out here I was the same as they were.
In the barn, we read our disappointing poems aloud and Mrs. Pratt gave us compliment sandwiches we didn’t deserve. When it was Tall Shannon’s turn, we watched Mrs. Pratt perk up. But Tall Shannon’s poem was just as shitty, the love for the natural world reduced to the same clichés we’d been employing all afternoon.
“But if you just look at this blade of grass,” said Mrs. Pratt.
“Not the same,” said Tall Shannon.
We were concerned the rush of oxycontin might impede our ability to focus on the basepaths if it struck at the wrong time. It might not be oxycontin, we conceded. We kept saying oxycontin when we meant oxytocin.
It was different for Zwolski and Katie Two, the sisters. Their love was the silent type. It was before, too, in that we guessed they cared about each other even though they didn’t go around saying so. But now the silence burned with a creepy intensity, as if their jerseys were emblazoned with a family crest. They started trading clothes, braiding each other’s hair.
Then they got to the point where they could communicate without speaking, which was great for them, I guess, but when the ball went straight up the middle the rest of us would have our own private heart attacks when nobody called for it, even though things worked out at the last second every time.
At some point it became clear to me that I might have been the only one having my own private heart attack. Not just about who was covering second. About everything, all of it. Whether we were only winning because of the love thing; whether it would leave us as suddenly as it arrived; whether I’d ever get to see what it felt like, even for just a second; whether, if I did, Sticks would be crushed by the weight of being the only one left behind.
And then, after the qualifying game—after Stoneridge’s tying runner caught sight of the O Squad making out with itself on her way to third and tripped over Katie Three’s rosary beads, after Katie Three made the tag, after we all rushed the mound—Sticks threw her arms around me and planted a kiss on my forehead.
There was a silence, and then the O Squad whooped.
“Fuck the weather!” Zwolski yelled.
Tall Shannon presented a fist and Sticks bumped it, blushing like when she nailed a new pitch she’d been working on for weeks.
“Playoffs on three!” I cried, and the team cheered.
*
The day before the first playoff game, a storm flooded the field complex. In the school gym Jerry D. delivered the news: we’d be practicing inside today, here in the gym.
“What I’d give to see Sticks in a lightning storm,” Zwolski said as we warmed up.
“Well, the old Sticks,” said Tall Shannon.
“I used to love lightning,” Sticks said.
Katie Three tossed her an easy fly. “And now?”
Sticks stammered, bobbled the catch. Zwolski raised her eyebrows.
“No, it’s fine,” Katie Two said, and punched her sister in the arm. “See? It doesn’t work when we’re not on the field.”
It was true; we were all back to our old selves in the gym. Returned to his familiar gruffness, Jerry D. interrupted pitching practice by placing a pack of Marlboros in the center of home plate.
He pointed. “That’s my last pack.”
I handed it up, staying in my crouch.
“No, no. Keep it there.” He dropped it back on home. “Just make sure it gets back to me at the end of practice.”
Sticks was working on her fastball, which tended to drop, which meant I was working on slamming my knees to the ground and blocking whatever awful bounce came my way. Sticks gulped.
“Or replace it,” Jerry D. said.
“Jerry D., I can’t buy cigarettes,” I said.
“What? Your mom’s not here.”
“No, I mean, I’m 15.”
“Guess you’d better catch, then,” said Jerry D.
Four pitches later the pack was crushed and Jerry D. was rolling his eyes and fishing out a ten because I only had three dollars in my bat bag. Sticks and I sprinted together in the rain to the 7-Eleven on Euclid Ave., where they never carded, and bought a Gatorade with the change. Outside, we lingered under the overhang, waiting for a break in the downpour. I shivered. Sticks took off her sweatshirt and handed it to me.
“That’s cute,” I said, “rolling with it even now.”
Sticks eyed me carefully, then shook out her ponytail, ran her fingers through her hair. “You still don’t feel it? Really?”
“I mean, I do love the team. It just doesn’t feel…” I shrugged. “It’s not like what you guys have, where you get to the field and something magic or whatever happens inside.”
“Mine’s not like that,” Sticks said. “It’s not magic, it’s realer, it’s—”
“No, listen,” I said. “I decided. I don’t want to know what it’s like.”
“But—”
“Sticks, I’m the last one,” I said. My voice wavered, and I took a breath, more surprised than embarrassed: I didn’t think I cared. “I need to hold it down, okay?”
Sticks nodded, twisted her hair back into her ponytail. I watched her, and then I looked away. Stupid to say anything, stupid to risk throwing her off. I had to treat this like a tough batter. Call a new pitch. Reset the tone.
“It’d be nice if your whole weather deal were real, right about now,” I said, “if you could forecast or something.”
Sticks studied the sky, and I studied her face. I couldn’t read her like I could from home plate, couldn’t tell what she was feeling.
At the wedding for two thirds of the O Squad last year, over mushroom tartlets, we all discussed that season again, how the rules of the world had been illegible to us. I thought about it differently, I said. I thought we’d been illegible to ourselves. So high school, we decided, either way. We laughed and laughed.
It kept pouring. Sticks said, “I think this is the best it will be.”
I barked out a laugh, and she bumped my hip once with her own. And then she was jogging away.
On the way to the first playoff game, against Eastlake, those of us carpooling with Katie Three were quiet. We pretended we were in the zone, but we knew it was also nerves. And in my case, at least, there was a bit of terror, not knowing how things were going to go with Sticks now, what would happen if her heart kicked into overdrive.
At the same time, I thought, this might be a pretty great time to feel something. If that something could maybe be a sixth sense for what the pitcher was about to throw when we were up to bat, for example. Did that count as love? I had no idea.
Zwolski and Katie Two loved their sisterhood. Tall Shannon loved the earth. Katie Three loved God, and Jerry D. loved being loved. The O Squad loved the way it felt to smash their bodies together in the back of the equipment closet. And Sticks loved me. I didn’t have time to wonder anymore why everyone else got sweet nothings and I got, well, nothing. The way I saw it, my whole job was to make sure nothing distracted Sticks, nothing messed with her game. And I’d just lost the other half of my reliable battery.
Sticks wasn’t at the field complex when we showed up. She wasn’t there for pre-game practice, either. She wasn’t there when the Ohio State scout took a seat in the bleachers, resplendent in his scarlet and gray, and the crowd whispered respectfully. She wasn’t there for Jerry D.’s pep talk, which under the circumstances was more of a seethe.
Sticks’ parents weren’t there either, which was strange, as they had each been separately adjusting their shifts so they could make our games for the last three years. They always sat in their own golf chairs: one on the first base side, one on the third, the picture of amicable separation.
With four minutes left in the pre-game grace period, Sticks burst through the thornbushes in deep right field on a child’s tricycle, tearing a rut through the grass as she hurtled toward us. She apologized as we scrambled for the bandaids.
“My parents fucking reconciled at the last game,” she wheezed. Her dad had moved back in yesterday, swept her mom up into an impromptu road trip, promised to be home before the game. Sticks didn’t have her license yet and knew we’d already be at the park. Had we seriously not gotten any of her calls? We cursed the awful cell service at the field complex. She’d waited as long as she could. It was a shame, we agreed. It was only the divorced parents who could reliably follow a schedule.
“Does this mean it’s spreading beyond the field?” Zwolski asked.
Katie Two put a hand on her shoulder.
“Yeah, no, you’re right, we’ll figure it out later,” Zwolski said.
“Thank God you’re here,” Katie Three said to Sticks. “Thank you, God,” she said to the sky.
We were lucky—today was the umpire who loved peace and calm above all else. “Whenever you’re ready,” he called to us. “But no worries, not a shred of a single worry at all.”
In the dugout, Sticks tied her cleats and I strapped on my shin protectors. “I’m so glad you made it,” I said to Sticks. “I don’t know what we would have done without you.”
“I’ve been thinking the same thing,” Sticks said.
I looked up from my gear. She was staring at me with a gaze as intense as her fastball—I couldn’t hold it. I dropped my eyes. “Just… try to tamp it down, okay? Kick it aside and let’s go play.”
Sticks’ voice got soft. “Is that what you’ve been doing?”
“I don’t know,” I said, and meant it.
Jerry D. appeared on the other side of the chain link and clapped his hands. “Let’s go! Ohio State’s here!”
The first two warm-up throws cruised over my head. “Relax, you’re okay,” I pleaded. The next rocketed into the ump’s left shoe, leaving him barely perturbed. “Just like any other game, just breathe, you’re good.”
The ump called play ball, and Sticks jogged over to me and kneeled down on home plate. She put her hand where I figured my heart was, over my chest protector.
“What are you—”
Sticks moved my ungloved palm to her own heart and covered my hand with one of hers and held it there for a moment.
“Wait,” I said.
“Oh,” I said.
And then all I remember is a rush inside, something bursting. A flood, a dam. Sticks’ hair in the sun, her bird laugh. I tried to stand, but my shin guards dug into the tops of my thighs. Hips like fireworks. My heart pounded and I tried to loosen my chest protector, but it was cinched taut. I could feel something in my gear, or something in my body, lock itself down tight, so that even if I wanted to get my glove up in front of my face for a target, I couldn’t. I couldn’t move at all, couldn’t speak. I squatted, frozen, my arms at my sides, even after Sticks went back to the mound and released the first pitch of the game, a fastball that smashed into my face mask and took me right out of the waking world into yet another place too bright for me to understand.
Every time we’re at one of these reunions, we eventually find ourselves here, at this part of the story. And every time, I bow out. I give myself over to the light in their faces. I let the others tell me again what happened afterward, how after I was carted off, something changed in the air again. How Tall Shannon chased a butterfly right off the field, how Jerry D. gave a cigarette to a small child in Eastlake’s bleachers, how the whole O Squad started straight-up fucking in deep left and was summarily ejected in the name of decency. And Zwolski and Katie Two trapped Eastlake’s runner in what looked like a very meaningful bear hug at second, and Katie Three led the crowd in prayer, and the ump instituted a mandatory forfeiture on our behalf for our generally unpeaceful conduct, ending our season.
At this point, someone always jumps in to say that it was then that Sticks, through tears, hurled one last retributive fastball at the fence where I was supposed to be. And if their face clouds over at that moment, I say, no, please, tell me, what was it like?
They tell me it was perfect. They say it was as if the only thing holding her back from accessing full power was that mass of protective gear staring back at her all season. The Ohio State scout clocked it at 64 miles per hour, and it was announced to the crowd, and everyone cheered, and strangers looked at each other with astonishment and wondered what was next for this kid. I’m told it was beautiful, everything I missed.
STORY:
Sienna Zeilinger lives in Philadelphia and is originally from Cleveland, Ohio. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The Cincinnati Review, CutBank, HAD, Real Life, Passages North, and elsewhere. You can find her on Twitter @SiennaZeilinger or at siennazwrites.com.
*
ART:
Aaron Burch is an artist, writer, teacher, and editor, including of this site .
Next Tuesday, we’ll feature a bonus interview with Sienna about this story!