9

Tie Goes to the Runner
by Debbie McCann

Tie goes to the runner, in baseball, anyway. Remember? All those hot summer nights on our old block, with parents on the porches and no reason to call us in until way past the slow-falling dark. The whole neighborhood played, teenagers high-fiving little kids and hardly ever any fights. Everything tempered under that blunt wet generous heat. Even the rough tar-and-gravel road softened, giving a little under our bare feet.

We both know it’s over at the very same moment. A tie. So whose ending will it be?

We met playing baseball. You were the new kid, wearing an old glove of your dad’s that was way too big on the wrong hand. We were nine. Our birthdays were a week apart and we both got long plastic rainbow streamers for the handles of our bikes. That summer, I taught you how to pop wheelies and how to skid through the hard-packed dirt gullies behind the houses on your side of the street, and my brother taught us both to throw. You sucked one lip up under the other and the ball flew out straight and hard. You still do that, when you’re concentrating. I taught you how to make a real fist. You got your period first, the only time you got to be the expert. You were always more of a girl.

We were best friends, lab partners, roommates, and then the rest. Everything. And now we are standing on opposite sides of an open apartment door, me on the porch, you on the carpet. You sigh. I am not breathing.

I want the old rules, giving the win to the one who runs her heart out, pounding hard towards the goal so singlemindedly she has to overrun it sometimes. That’s a rule too–they let you overrun it. That shows you how hard it is to get there.

I can’t even count all the things I suddenly long for about those days, before we knew what lay before us. Baseball. Nights that came on so gently it was hard to tell when they’d fully arrived, that dense heat blurring all the edges. The smell of tar on the soles of our feet when even the street wasn’t solid for sure. Back then, just trying hard counted as success. They graded us on it. “But you got an ‘A’ for Effort,” my mom used to say when report cards came home. “And that’s what counts.”

It used to count. I used to be able to salvage any situation on will, on the strength of pure desperate charm. Make anything right by making you laugh.

But here we are with our toes nudged up against the same conclusion. Tie goes to the runner. I’m looking right at you, hurling my whole self at you. When you look down I know it will be like blinds yanked shut and you’ll be gone.

I look. You look away. You win.

Debbie McCann is a writer, performer, and social worker who lives, works, and writes in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is the author of the short story collection A House in Order (Blinking Yellow Books, 1994).

Photo by Robert McCann.