Heft - By Liz Moore Page 0,30

first freshman to do this in five years. That spring we won state, which we also did last year. Baseball is the best and most important thing to me. Sports in general are the one thing I have ever been very good at, excellent at, even, which I don’t feel shy about saying because I am good at nothing else. But I can boast about this without much fear of comeuppance. I can throw and catch balls. I can run faster than most people. I can swing bats and launch my body like a missile toward the bodies of other players and I can knock them down. I can jump. I can tense my muscles and swallow the blows that come in my direction from elbows and shoulders and hips. I can puke and keep going. This is my talent. It glows inside me like a secret jewel.

My mother began going downhill when I was a sophomore which was also around the time that I started to really love school.

She had had her ups and downs. Always. It was what we called them, together. Outside the house she was normal. She cared what people thought of her and she saved all her madness for me. I would come home and find her flat on her back with sadness, or up and acting like a maniac. Happier than happy. She would have cleaned the house and she would have baked. She would say Have some! Or she would clutch me in her arms—this was when I was very little, too little to know that nobody else’s mother was doing this—and hold me so long that my joints got stiff. She would rest her chin on my head and sometimes she would cry. I was afraid to move or breathe.

When I was little she would date sometimes. Never anything that lasted. Always boys she grew up with in Yonkers who turned into men that had never left. I tried to imagine what they were like when they were my age and I came up with the worst boys I knew. The boys I hated when I was younger, the boys I brawled with. When her dates came by the house I would never even look at them.

Besides these men and her work she had few connections to the outside world. She had few friends and now she has none. She liked some of the checkout clerks at the grocery store and would make conversation with them when she saw them, asking after their families. She liked Frank at the corner store. And for years, for as long as I can remember, she has had a pen pal named Arthur Opp, which was a name that I loved and would say to myself in a singsongy way, and whenever a letter from Arthur Opp would arrive I would tease her about it and she would snatch the letter from my hands and go into her bedroom to read it. Who is it? I would say, and she would say it was her secret admirer. Or a prince, or a king. The king of England, she said once. He even sent her little gifts once or twice, candy, chocolate. He sent her flowers when my grandparents died. When I pressed her for the truth she would say he was an old friend, but she never let me read what he had sent.

She didn’t drink the way she does now until a few years ago. The drinking came very slowly and a little at a time until one day I realized that she never never stops drinking. She drinks from the time she wakes up until the time she passes out. Most days. Most of every day.

I stopped liking her.

When she worked at Pells—when she was still OK enough to work—my Pells friends knew that she was my mother but we never acknowledged it, never once. She was a secretary at the school and they saw her and said hello to her but there was never any talk about it, never once. I spent more and more time with them. On weekends I was rarely home. I slept in their warm comfortable houses and on weeknights I stayed out late at practice and then took the train home, feeling very adult, taking the train from Pells Landing to Yonkers and then the bus to my home.

One day I went into her office to tell her that my practice had been canceled and she wasn’t there.