Me, Mop, and the Moondance Kid

  “That would be fine,” Mrs. Williams said.

  Mr. Williams smiled and I figured that's what he wanted us to call him. That was cool, too, because I didn't want to go around calling him Mr. Williams all the time.

  My new mom was pretty, but my new dad was just okay-looking. He didn't have too much hair on the top of his head, but he had a lot on the sides. He told us that being bald ran in his family. He was kind of fat too.

  He always liked to tell these corny jokes. One joke he told was about how a boy orange and a girl orange were hanging from a tree. The girl orange was ripe and fell off the tree. The boy orange wasn't ripe, but he fell right behind her. The girl orange asked the boy orange how come he fell off the tree.

  “You know what the boy orange said?” Dad asked.

  “What?” Moondance asked.

  “He said, ‘Because you are so a-peeling,’ “ Dad said.

  “Oh.” That's what Moondance said.

  “That's a joke.” Dad nodded his head up and down. Then he said it again, talking real slow so we wouldn't miss anything. “Because-you-are-so-a-peeling!”

  “Oh,” Moondance said again.

  “Don't you think that's funny?” Dad looked at me.

  “Yeah” was the only thing I could think of saying.

  I don't know where he gets his jokes, but he has a new one every day. You know who laughs at them? Mom. It's like her job or something. She has this little nervous laugh and she always laughs even before he finishes telling the joke. Maybe it is her job.

  Mop got to go to the supermarket with us a week before our first game. Mop gets to come over to our house a lot. That's because the nuns keep talking about how all the kids from the Academy are family forever. Sometimes Mop stays over the weekend and sometimes she just stays for supper and Dad drives her back to the Academy. I don't like that. Going back to the Academy is a little sad. Not a lot, because the Academy is all right, but it's not like having your own home and your own parents and everything.

  So Mop was going to have dinner with us on a Saturday and we were out shopping. Mom could cook just about everything that counted. I don't know if she could cook broccoli, but broccoli didn't count. We were going to have spaghetti and meatballs. Moondance loved spaghetti and meatballs. Me too.

  “Did you know that Marco Polo got spaghetti from China?” Mop asks Mom.

  “Yes, I did,” Mom said. (Oops, forgot to tell you that Mom is a schoolteacher and knows just about everything. Dad works in an office.)

  “Did you know that when he was in China, he rode on a camel?” Mop asked.

  “No, I didn't,” Mom said.

  Mop gave me a look with her head leaning back, the way she always does when she thinks she's being real smart. Then, when Mom went into another aisle to look for Oregano, Mop asked how come she didn't know that Marco Polo rode on a camel when he was in China.

  “Don't you worry about it,” I said. “Whoever adopts you probably won't even know what spaghetti is.”

  “If they know enough to adopt me, it means they know a lot,” Mop said.

  I was just about ready to tell Mop that anybody who adopted her probably didn't even know what a meatball was, when guess who comes down the aisle pushing a whole cart full of cat food? Mrs. Kennedy.

  “Hi, guys!” she said. Her teeth are so straight across, you could put a ruler right on them and it would touch all the way. “Are you shopping alone?”

  “No,” Moondance said. “My mom is shopping with us.”

  Just then Mom comes up with a box of cereal, the kind that's supposed to be good for you but that tastes like you're eating wood.

  “I'm the assistant coach of their Little League team,” Mrs. Kennedy tells Mom.

  “I'm Mrs. Williams,” Mom said.

  “TJ. looks just like you,” Mrs. Kennedy said.

  “Thank you,” Mom said. She's still holding the cereal in her hand and I don't know why she don't just put it in the cart.

  “We're looking forward to doing well this year,” Mrs. Kennedy said. “If everybody works hard.”

  “We're going to work so hard, it'll knock your socks off!” Mop said. “You just wait and see.”

  “I hope so,” Mrs. Kennedy said. “The Elks haven't won more than one game per season in the last four years!”

  “Some teams just seem to have a lot of bad luck,” Mom said.

  “Bad luck my foot!” Mrs. Kennedy said. “Joe Treas-ter's the main reason if you ask me.”

  “Joe Treaster?” Mom finally put the cereal in the cart.

  “He gets all the good players,” Mrs. Kennedy said. “I think he scouts them right from the nursery. What poor Jim and the Elks get are the leftovers.”

  “I ain't no leftover!” Mop said.

  “Mrs. Kennedy didn't mean that you were, Mop,” Mom said.

  “No, I didn't … really I didn't.” Mrs. Kennedy put her hand out toward Mop and then pulled it back. “I'm sure you're going to do quite well, Mop.”

  “Maybe even quite great!” Mop said.

  “You're really different, aren't you?” Mrs. Kennedy shook her head. “Look, I have to run. We have guests for dinner. I hope I'll be seeing you at the games. Mrs…. Williams, was it?”

  I could have sworn Mrs. Kennedy had left even before Mom answered. I turned toward Mop and saw that she had this mean look on her face. Her bottom lip was up over her top on one side and her eyes were squinched.

  “She better watch out who she's calling a leftover!” she said.

  ur first game was with the Lions. There are only seven teams in the league and all of them have names of animals or birds. There are the Eagles, the Lions, the Pumas, the Bears, the Hawks, the Colts, and us, the Elks.

  “Hey, Jim.” Brian was lacing up his sneakers. “We gonna win today?”

  “I hope so,” Jim said. “You listen to me and play like I tell you and we should win.”

  “We can't beat the Lions,” Chrissie said. “We can't beat anybody!”

  “Not with a stupid girl like you playing,” Brian said.

  Chrissie has this weird little smile she gives everybody. She gave it to Brian with her eyes crossed.

  “Okay, let's have an infield practice,” Jim called out. “Everybody in the infield¡ Everybody!”

  Brian was a pretty good hitter and he hit the ball to the rest of us in infield practice. I stood near third base and Mop was near me.

  “Hey, T.J.,” she called, “tell me if I do anything wrong.”

  “Yeah.”

  The first ball that came to Mop went right between her legs. Mop gave me a look and a shrug.

  “That could happen to anybody,” she said.

  Brian hit another ball to her and it hopped over her glove.

  “What am I doing wrong?” she asked me.

  “You gotta be smooth,” I said.

  Brian kept hitting the ball on the ground and most of the time we missed it. The Lions started showing up and I was getting pretty nervous. It was my first year of Little League ball, which wasn't too bad. But Mom had said that Dad played real baseball. I mean he played for a real major league team once. Honest. She said that if I was good enough, he could probably get me a tryout for a major league team when I got older. And I was pretty good already.

  Mop missed everything that came to her and Brian called her a turkey and Jim made him stop.

  “We play,” Jim said, “as a team. Is that understood?”

  Everybody said yeah and then we sat down and watched the Lions warm up.

  “Hey, T.J., are you real good?” Mike asked.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “How good?”

  “One time a major league scout came and saw me play and wanted to know who I was,” I said.

  “Did not!”

  “It wasn't a big thing,” I said. “Soon as he saw I was just a kid he wasn't interested anymore.”

  “Oh.”

  Jim had me playing third base, which I liked. He put Mop in the outfield along with Chriss
ie and Moondance. Usually they put the young kids in the outfield.

  Let me tell you who the whole team was.

  Jim Kennedy, he's the coach. He's okay.

  Then there's Brian, he's strong-looking with red hair and freckles.

  Next there's Evans. He's mostly skinny. Also, he's left-handed. Maybe most of the time he's left-handed. It depends on whether he remembers to bring his glove or not. If he doesn't, then he plays with whatever glove he finds. I think he's not too sure which he is.

  Joey DeLea is the smallest guy on the team. He's about four foot tall and he's always getting into a fight.

  Jennifer Lee is chunky. She looks smart, mainly because she wears glasses, but she always says stupid things.

  Then there's Chrissie Testor. She's kind of nice-looking, but mostly she doesn't want to get hit by the ball. Sometimes when the ball comes to her, she closes her eyes.

  Then there's Frank Law. He never says anything, and he looks a little mean.

  Then there's Lo Vinh. His first name is Xieng. We call him Lo Vinh. He's Vietnamese and a pretty nice kid. He can't catch, but he's a pretty nice kid just the same.

  Mike Nieto is funny. He announces everything he does. If a ball comes to him, he makes believe he's a television announcer and says things like “… there's a hard smash to Mike. He's up with it, makes a long throw to first base … In time!”

  Even if he misses the ball, he says that.

  Then there's Mop and Moondance and last of all there's me. I guess I'm the star of the team.

  Last there's Maria Kennedy, the coach's wife. She's a little like him, except a lot tougher. Maybe not even tougher, maybe just when she tells you to do something, you know she means it. And you know something else? Mop can't even talk to her or come near her without getting nervous.

  Maria is cool. She wants us to call her by her first name. She's tall for a girl. Even for a woman. She's taller than my Mom and she always talks a little funny. Not funny weird but funny sort of ha-ha. Not really ha-ha but sort of ha-ha. You want a for-instance? For instance, when I first joined the team and Jim told me to go speak to Maria about getting a uniform, right? So I go over to her and ask her can I have a uniform. You know what she says?

  “Would you like one made of cotton or would you like one made of cotton candy?”

  “You can't make a uniform out of cotton candy,” I said.

  “Then I guess you're stuck with plain, ordinary old cotton,” she said.

  She even looked sad when she said it, as if maybe you could make a uniform out of cotton candy. A uniform made out of cotton candy would really be stupid, especially if it rained.

  The Lions had a really fast pitcher and he struck out our first three batters, Joey, Frank, and Mop. When Mop struck out, she got mad and threw her helmet down and Brian told Jim. That's one of the rules, you can't throw anything if you're mad.

  “If you throw anything down on the ground, you're on the bench!” Jim said. “And if you throw anything up, you'd better catch it before it hits the ground.”

  Jim gave Mop one more chance because it was her first game.

  The first Lion walked. Joey was pitching and he kept giving the umpire dirty looks. Then the next Lion hit a ground ball right to me. You know what happened? The ball must have hit something, because it didn't bounce up. It went right under my glove. Swoosh¡ Just like that.

  You know what I think? I think that sometimes worms crawl around under the ground and make it soft so the ball doesn't bounce right. The Lion got to second base.

  Two more Lions got good hits and then they had two runs. The next guy struck out and the next hit a pop-up to Brian. Brian always caught pop-ups.

  It must have been catching, because the next guy hit a pop-up toward me.

  “There's a long fly ball to T.J.,” I could hear Mike announcing. “He's under it … he's under it … and … it's off his glove!”

  I think the wind must have got it or something. Because it was headed straight for my glove and then it missed it. I don't know how it could do that.

  Somebody was yelling for me to throw the ball to first base. I picked it up and saw that the guy who had hit the ball was just starting to run.

  Did I tell you about my elbow? I think there's something funny in it, because sometimes when I throw a ball I throw it straight but then it curves away from who I was throwing it to. Maybe I should have been a pitcher.

  We lost the game, 18 to 5. The only Elks who got any hits were Brian and Frank, Brian got four hits. One ball almost went over the fence.

  I didn't get a hit mostly because of Jim's angles. Jim believes in playing everything by the right angle. So he figures out on a slide rule which angle you should hit at. He told us all to hit down on the ball at a thirty-degree angle.

  “That way you won't pop the ball up and they'll have to throw you out at first base,” he said.

  I didn't think that was such a good idea. It might have worked for Joey because he was small, or it might have worked for Mike because he was tall. But it couldn't work for everybody, right? I know it didn't work for me.

  “You stink!” That was what Mop said after the game.

  Can you imagine her saying that to me, the star of the team?

  “So, how did you like our first game?” Maria asked, as she gathered up the equipment.

  “It was okay,” I said.

  “What did you think, Mop?”

  “It was okay,” Mop answered.

  “I think we could all use a little more practice,” Maria said. “Tomorrow at three-thirty, okay?”

  One good thing about playing Little League baseball that nobody talks about is that you get to talk to grownups like they're regular people. At least most of us can. Mop is kind of afraid to talk to Maria. She keeps thinking she's going to say something wrong.

  “You gotta talk to her,” I said. “She's the assistant coach.”

  “It's the way she looks at me all the time,” Mop said, “You know what I mean? Sometimes when I'm not even near her I look over at her and she's looking right at me!”

  “That's ‘cause you're on the team,” Moondance said. “That's what coaches do.”

  “She's sizing me up,” Mop said. “One time I was watching television and this announcer comes on and they were looking at the ball players. They look at one guy and the announcer says he looks like a hitter. That's what she's doing. She wants to know if I look like a hitter or something.”

  “She can see if you're a hitter during the games,” I said. “She don't have to look at you when you're just standing around.”

  “I don't know how she expects me to hit when she keeps looking at me that way.”

  That was true. When somebody looks at you a lot, it's hard to do what you're doing. It's like their eyeballs are making you move in slow motion or something.

  “Jim don't look at you that way,” I said.

  “She's checking me out for her husband,” Mop said. “He's still trying to make up his mind if he wants to adopt me or not. It's like the Yankees. When they want to see somebody, they send a scout to check them out.”

  “So what you gonna do?”

  “If I could talk to her, I think I could get her on my side,” Mop said. “You know, maybe get her to tell me what she's looking for and stuff.”

  “So talk to her,” I said.

  “I would if she'd only stop looking at me.”

  When me and Moondance got home we found it was Family Discussion Day. We're the only family I know who have names for different days. We have House Day, that's when we clean the house. We have Church Day, which is Sunday, and that's cool. We have Family Activity Day when we all have to do something together, and we have Family Discussion Day. The only day I really like is House Day, because after we clean the house we usually have pizza and sometimes we go out bowling. It's like we give ourselves an award.

  Moondance likes Family Discussion Day because of the rules. I think Mom made up the rules. Anyway, they go like this: Everybody ge
ts to talk for five minutes at the beginning of the conversation without being interrupted. I hate that. Dad, he can talk forever. Mom can talk a long time too. Moondance talks and even though he's not talking about what everybody else is talking about, we all have to listen. He loves that. One time we were talking about peace in the world and he started talking about comic books because he had one that had something in it about peace in the world. Mostly it was about Spider-Man, though, and Moondance told us all about how Spider-Man wanted peace. But first he had to tell us about how he got to be Spider-Man, which I knew already so I wasn't interested.

  Today we started talking about health and good nutrition. Mom started off talking about how important it was to eat a good, well-balanced diet. She talked about different food groups. Then it was Moondance's turn.

  “I like to eat different food groups,” he said. “Mostly groups of peas and groups of carrots.”

  “Thai's not what your mother means when she says food groups,” Dad says.

  Then Mom gave him a look and he gave her a look back. He wasn't supposed to interrupt Moondance. Those were the rules for the first part of the conversation. Moondance noticed the looks and he kept on talking about different groups he liked to eat.

  “Groups of rice, and groups of string beans, and groups of spaghettis,” Moondance went on.

  Dad was getting mad, but it wasn't his turn yet.

  It was my turn next, and I asked if I could talk about something I had heard at the Academy and Mom said yes.

  “You can talk about anything you want at Family Discussions,” she said. “Even if it doesn't exactly fit our topic.”

  She gave Dad a look.

  “Well, this kid who used to be at the Academy said that he thought the best food was junk food. He said that kids ate junk food and then adults got them to eat regular food and not so much junk food.

  “Adults say that you should eat regular food that's good for you, but it's mostly adults who get sick all the time. That's what this kid said. He said old people hardly ever eat junk food and they get real sick. So maybe junk food is better for you than other food. That's all I have to say.”

  “The reason that adults get sick more than kids is that they're older,” Dad said. “It doesn't make any difference what you eat. When you get older your body doesn't respond as well as it does when you're very young.”