My Abandonment(63)

Along the dugout I like to watch the gangly girls, the ones who are fast but not quite coordinated. I can dress young, I can talk to these girls, I lean against the chainlink fence. The parents sit up high in the bleachers to cheer and shout and they think I am a friend or a sister.

There's a girl or two who seem curious, who listen and don't turn away. They pick at their cleats, they pull up their baseball socks to their knees. Lately it's the third baseman, the girl with braces and a sharp face and her brown hair in two thick braids. She's yelling at the batter to swing and the girls in the dugout are chanting about the belly-itcher.

"I played third base," I say with my fingers hooked around the sharp fence. I keep my voice low. "I was the only one who could throw it to first in time," I say. "How are you? Happy? Do you think differently than most people? Do you wonder if there's another way to live? I was a girl like you and I can tell you, I can show you."

These girls are always moving: to warm up, to bat, to field, to cheer the other team, to get in their parents' cars and drive away with their ponytails and baseball caps visible through the windows. I see my third baseman heading home with her father, his hairy arm over her shoulder, his gold watch on his wrist and sometimes I don't know if I'll have another father, another family beyond those I've had. Sometimes people ask about boyfriends or if I will ever have children and perhaps that is possible, children are. When I think of boys or men I think of Father and I don't see anyone like him around.

I do see these girls and still I wonder if any of them would understand, if one would come with me and wander and would sleep on the mattress in the shelter out in the wilderness. I don't know what a girl would think if she were sitting here with me inside my yurt where there's no windows except the round one in the roof full of sky and stars and birds slipping past, here where it takes your eyes a while to adjust. The blue square of fabric with its own birds hangs on the seventh wall and most days it seems like another window even if it is only cloth. Here the flames in the woodstove reflect in the gold letters on my encyclopedias, lined up all around the walls.

The yurt has eight walls so it is a small octagon fourteen feet across and not really a yurt at all since a proper yurt is round. I call it that to remind me of Father and how I lost him, where.

What would a girl think of all my piles of paper and artifacts from all the times, how I have broken it down to organize my story and be able to tell it? All the loose pages of my journal, my homework, pieces of Father's journal. Some piles of paper are shorter and then there's others like the first one, the pages in the forest park when I had more time and a place to write and things I wanted to say. I was happiest then, I am always trying to get back to how I felt then. It's funny how my handwriting has actually gotten worse. My spelling's always been pretty dependable.

Everything in here reminds me of something else. I have broken all the pages into eight piles, one for every wall. They go clockwise: the happy days in the forest park, getting caught and put in the building, living on the farm, living on the streets of the city, escaping down through the snow, losing Father in the cave, Boise, and finally the eighth wall where I am now, where there is not much to say except how I am putting it together and where I am doing this.

"Valor consists in the power of self-recovery," Father writes, even if really he has copied this out of another book. I know now that some of the things he said he took from books, and so much of his writing is copying and writing back at what he copied. The three-named men are his favorites: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. I am reading my way through some of these books now.

Here's another thing he copied out: "The great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude." To this Father writes his own thought: "To be great is to keep sweetness."

Sometimes I add what I think too, like a kind of conversation. Below that I write: "How about the girl who doesn't feel alone when she is alone?"

I remember the conversations as best as I can. If I make up words he says at least they're close or taken from his notebook. I stitch it together and I only add what I have to. If I don't remember something I skip over it and leave it out. There's times like the second part where the police or Miss Jean Bauer could have taken some of my journal but even then I can't remember anything more so I don't worry too much. I take one wall at a time into my backpack and I type it into the computer at the library. I save it on a disk and erase it from the computer. Now I am near the end.

For so long I carried everything I owned around with me from place to place. Now I do have a radio, one that plays cassette tapes. And at the second wall I have the cassette tape that Miss Jean Bauer gave me of the two of us talking. She's explaining the test and then I am telling the stories of the pictures on the cards. It is strange to listen now to my little voice. I can hear how she is nervous even when back then I didn't hear that at all. She is worried about me. I am telling about the strange house in the storm and the people inside or out, the glowing windows, the story that is some of the possibilities that I came to pass through.