The Punch

By Robin Herman

My first baseball mitt was the color of butterscotch and just as smooth, and I liked to bury my face in it for the scent of the new leather.  It was a present from my father. I was 10, and it was love at first sight, first touch, first smell with that mitt. I oiled it the way my father instructed, and for the next few days drove my fist over and over into the webbing to make a nice pocket. Then finally I was ready.

The boys on the block used to have a baseball game after school up at “the big circle” as we called it; a cul de sac of modest proportions in a suburban neighborhood of split level houses on Long Island. All the kids on the block were nearly the same age, the crest of the baby boomers, so there were plenty of kids to play with, and all the boys were congregating at the big circle for baseball.

And now I had a mitt.

I ran up the block and saw the street game in progress. But the teams were thin, and there was a hole in “left field.” The pitcher was a boy named John Games (really) who was a bit of a tough. He caught sight of me as I ran up, and I blurted out to him “Can I play?”

He gave me a brusque “no,” turned away and continued pitching.

“But I have a mitt!” I said hopefully, waving my butterscotch treasure.

You can’t play, he said.

“But you need someone in the outfield,” I persisted.

“You can’t play,” he said again.

“Why not”? I asked

“Because you’re a girl,” came the inevitable answer.

“But I have a mitt!” I protested plaintively, as though that should have been the great equalizer.

And now John Games was mad.

You can’t play, he said more sharply.

Can too, I said.

He started walking towards me.

Can not.

Can too.

Can not.

Now he was really close, eyes glittering, his fist clenched at his side. I noticed it in a peripheral, instinctive way so that, at the same moment I realized he was going to hit me, I reflexively reached out with my right hand and punched him in the nose.

He yowled as blood spurted from one nostril, turned and ran home, taking the baseball…and the game…with him.

I stood there stunned, embarrassed and ashamed as everyone scattered. I had hit somebody. And worse, I’d ruined the game. With my stomach in turmoil, I walked back to my own split level house. A few minutes later the phone rang and my mother answered, listened and then hung up. That was John Games’ mother, she said. What happened?

Now I was in trouble. It felt like I had done the wrong thing; I must have done the wrong thing, but for the life of me, I couldn’t think of what would have been the right thing to do.

I had a mitt, you see. I had a mitt.

I don’t remember what my mother said or did, but I know I was not punished. And I remember that somehow John Games found his way back to speaking with me, and that later in the fall he spent hours teaching me how to throw a football in a beautiful spiral pass, and that by the spring he was taking me down to the neighborhood stream to teach me how to kiss.

He disappeared from the neighborhood a couple years later. Someone said his family had moved to Michigan. Just a few years ago, I thought of him fondly and with gratitude when I was teaching my son how to throw a spiral pass. We were living in Paris at the time, and my son and I drew a gawking crowd on the Champ de Mars as we tossed the ball back and forth…mine soaring in a beautiful arc, his wobbling and then eventually finding that satisfying spin. American football was a rarity to see in a French park, and even more of a rarity -- maybe never seen -- was a woman, in blue jeans, throwing a spiral pass.