A Yankees Fan in the Floating World

A YANKEES FAN IN THE FLOATING WOKLD/Melanie Hammer WHILE I WASAWAY at college, my parents bought and sold a couple of houses and changed their address three times, covering a distance of several hundred miles. By the time I graduated and moved back in with them, they were living on the twenty-ninth floor of a highrise in midtown Manhattan. They'd taken a two-bedroom apartment, partly because of the significant expense involved if they went for something larger, but also as if they knew in advance that once the children went off to college none of them would ever come back to stay long. Both of my brothers had a couple of years to go at school, so there was maneuvering room. We staked out territory, my father occupying my parents' bedroom, my mother the living room, I the spare bedroom. I had majored in English, but it turned out to be even more useful that I had excelled at typing in junior high. I landed a job as an editorial assistant at a university press and set about the business of becoming a grown-up. My two bosses treated me as if I were bright enough, one in particular reminding me that she had started off as an editorial assistant herself. They acquired books, and I typed their correspondence with a variety of authors. They had interesting jobs, but I liked it better over in copyediting, a warren where women in glasses poUshed text like old silver, working in the intricacies of language until they brought it to a shine. There was a woman I liked particularly, with silvery blond hair and silvery blue eyes. She lived quietly by herself on Long Island and commuted to work every day on the train. In my head, I filed her away as someone I might grow up to be much later. Meanwhile, I wasn't staying. I took a paycheck every two weeks and put most of it away. For the moment I didn't want to be much of anything , and couldn't imagine that I ever would. In April I took my first sick day to go to Opening Day at Yankee Stadium. During two years of remodeling, the Yankees had shared Shea Stadium with the Mets, but now they were coming back to the Bronx. I left the apartment a little after nine. The game was a sellout, but bleacher tickets were going on sale at eleven. The 4 train runs underground up the East Side of Manhattan and into the Bronx, but at Yankee Stadium it rises out of the tunnel onto elevated tracks. That morning we burst into sunshine, and I could look 118 · The Missouri Review into the stadium and see the differences. The view-blocking pillars were gone, and the blue of the seats was brighter. I stood on the platform for a moment, as people swirled around me, and waited while the train pulled out and I got another view of the stadium. I could see that the old façade had been pulled down, painted white, and made into trim in the outfield. I'd been away a long time. The grass stretched out unblemished in front of the bleachers. The fences had been pulled in; the monuments, which had been a center fielder's nightmare, were back behind the fence. Despite the changes, however, there was more the same than different: the green grass mowed into a grid of interlocking rectangles, the foul Unes and batters' boxés lined bright white against the dirt, the large, clean diamond laid out on the ground. For the first time, I felt like Td come home from school. Looking at the mostly unfamUiar names on the scorecard, I found out that the new young second baseman, WUUe Randolph, was three months shy of his twenty-second birthday. I was three weeks older. I sat in the bleachers, watching batting practice, watching Randolph, number 30. AU my Ufe, I'd been used to thinking ofballplayers as grownups, myself as a kid, but that afternoon in Yankee Stadium, I realized that I was catching up to them. They'd solved the mystery, it...