The Art of Fielding_ A Novel - Chad Harbach [160]
“You want to have a party?” Schwartz beat lockers, beat his chest, beat anything stupid enough to be near. “Then it’s going to be a goddamn national championship party. That’s the only kind of party anyone in this room is going to. Because we’re not fucking this up. We’re the Westish Harpooners. Do you hear what I’m saying? Do you hear me?”
He sank down on a splintered bench. His shoulders rose and fell as if he were sobbing, but without any tears or noise. He felt pathetic. Always before, his rants and speeches had had an element of performance in them, an element of calculation. But this was pure need. After the season there was nothing. No baseball no football. No meds no apartment no job. No friends no girlfriend. Nothing. And it had to be that way for all of them, down to the last man. They couldn’t just want to win. The other teams wanted to win, and the other teams had more talent. The Harpooners had to feel, like he did, that they would die if they lost.
64
Pella woke into the charcoal hum of predawn. Her hand shot to the alarm clock before it could complete even a single screechy beeeep that might wake Henry. His T-shirt and socks and warm-up pants, which he’d worn every day since she—since they—moved in, lay balled on the rug on his side of the bed. She scooped them up and carried the tiny bundle down to the dank half basement, shoved it into the ancient washing machine, added a half scoop of one of her roommates’ Tide. She brushed her teeth and slipped out the front door, taking her usual detour around Mike’s block. When she clocked in, Hero clicked his tongue at her jokingly: three minutes late.
The students kept dirtying dishes and mugs and glasses and silverware; the cooks kept scalding food to the bottoms of pots; the other dishwashers kept quitting because it was May, the weather was heavenly, and finals were looming. Pella kept picking up shifts. She wasn’t going to classes anymore. You never knew who you’d run into in the lecture halls or out on the quad, and anyway she wanted the money she earned here, in the safety of the noisy, humid kitchen. She missed Professor Eglantine, but she wasn’t going back into oral history class to face all those baseball players. She’d already bought the books for the seminar Professor E was teaching in the fall. By then Mike and Owen would be gone and the rest of them would have half forgotten her. Who knew what’d happen to Henry.
When the breakfast dishes were finished she headed to the VAC, her sweatshirt hood tugged up around her head like a burka. This didn’t keep anyone from seeing her, of course—but it kept her from seeing them. She swam fifteen laps at her slowly improving pace, showered, and headed back for the midday shift.
Toward late afternoon she helped set up the salad bar for dinner. Chef Spirodocus emerged from his tiny office, where he’d been holed up doing paperwork. “Today,” he said, “we make my favorite. Eggs Benedict.”
Their first lessons had been elementary: how to stand in the kitchen without straining your back; how to hold a knife; then how to slice, chop, dice, mince, carve, julienne. Pella had nicks and cuts all up and down her hands—her still-swollen middle finger didn’t help—but her skills were improving day by day. Chef Spirodocus had told her she could graduate to prep cook by fall, which was good, because the dishes were getting boring.
The hollandaise turned out perfectly, creamy and smooth but not too heavy. Pella plated the finished product and shared it out among the dinner shift’s workers, who nodded approvingly. She wanted to take some home for Henry, but she knew he wouldn’t touch anything so rich. He’d barely been eating. Instead she filled an empty plastic tub with soup from the salad bar’s big crock and stuck it in her backpack.