Wiffle Baby

By Cynthia Litts

The crowd gathers into the red pulsing light of the large gymnasium of Taft Junior High for annual Talent Night, containing some young and some old, but mostly the in-between, those unwilling parents and aunts, with a sprinkling of complete strangers who show up for this sort of thing even though they know no one participating.

Flanking the two double doors are rows of sixth grade girls and boys who hand out photocopied programs. There are so many of these children, that the girl furthest into the left hand door to the gym has no one to give programs to and scrunches her face with frustration. As that happens, her blond ponytail moves four inches further up the back of her head.

Inside the gym are sections of unfolded folding chairs; people are trying to decide where the least troublesome area would be to sit. If they sit in the front and need to leave early because of crying children or bladder problems, they will cause everyone to look at them and laugh. If they sit in the back, their children will be unable to find them after the event and they won't get home until late, causing everyone to look at them and laugh. They want to watch their children perform, really, they do, why else would they be there?, they just also want to beat the rush out the door. So everyone tends toward the middle, where they can get the worst of both worlds. They ponder their dilemma in silence, sometimes seating themselves at one place, getting comfortable by removing purses from shoulders, crossing their legs, then moving to another chair and repeating the process. Like a square dance, everyone sits and moves, sits and moves, twirling in a dizzying mass and ends up right where they started, clapping and bowing to whoever's on their right. Women with smaller children, the younger brothers and sisters of the performers, sit at the aisle seats, some parents leave their strollers, baby on board, in the aisle and wait nervously for their young to start crying, though they know it will not happen until the program starts. That's how it always goes.

Since the Talent Night encompasses all grades K through 12, the school district has decided to start with the younger children this year and work up to the high school kids, since last year the second graders fell asleep before they could perform Hamlet's monologue. Of course, since it had taken the whole class to memorize the lines, each kid with a line of its own, and they were supposed to stand in heart formation as they spoke them, not one of them understanding that this was death poetry they were to speak, it was probably for the best the audience had been spared. This year parents sat as a seven-year-old in mud-colored pigtails tried to play the Barney theme song on a harmonica, a fourth-grade boy chanted limericks (alas, they weren't dirty ones), and a sixth-grade girl, the one with the magic upward-creeping ponytail sang "Wing Beneath My Wings." She was tone deaf. The pre-teens who belonged to the junior high hosting Talent Night were apparently talentless this year, for they were noticeably absent.

The first high schooler to perform is a girl with straight dark hair. The program says she will juggle and she does. She starts with a vase and a folded folding chair, looking like an amateur with merely the two objects. But then a person standing next to her but off-stage (obviously her boyfriend because for some reason, maybe the grin on his face or the leather dog-collar around the neck just pegs him as a juggler-boyfriend), tosses in the infant boy.

The infant boy sits curled securely in a clear, beach-ball sized wiffle ball. She deals with the addition with a bit of strain, the chair and the vase are both fairly light, though admittedly the chair must be awkward to handle. But the baby does have some weight to him, so every time she catches the wiffle ball, her arm lunges down before she's able to hoist it and the wiffle-baby back up into the air. The wiffle-baby sits silent, naked, his puffy face pressed against the plastic ball, his lower lip sticking out of an oblong hole. He spins in the air, showing a bare bottom one time up, then his face, then his knees and legs, then the back of his head, a tendril of black hair wisping out a hole.

The audience sits in silent awe, for the juggler is very obviously talented. Then her boyfriend tosses her another wiffle-ball-encased juggling toy, then another, then another. The people who risked sitting in the front section are able to see a free-standing pyramid of filled wiffle-balls standing as tall as the boyfriend next to it. They watch him remove the balls, one by one, shrinking the pyramid until it's completely gone. The girl's tossed aside the vase and the folded folding chair and now has a flowing ring of 17 wiffle-babies circling her torso and upturned face and moving halfway to the high gymnasium ceiling. Her arms are moving gracefully, like she's treading water.

The moment of the audience's sheer wonder would be ruined by sound. The children in the audience stop fussing, the second-graders who were sleeping awaken but think they are dreaming and so fall asleep again, and the mothers sit motionless while tears of joy from the wondrous sight run down their cheeks and drop in unison on the cold tile floor. Fathers look at the mothers funny. High school kids who were there simply to cheer this talented juggler on couldn't open their mouths to speak. She hadn't said anything to them about babies.

Then one of the mothers, the very youngest, looking more like the high school kids than like the other mothers, notices one of the wiffle-babies has raven black hair, like her baby does. His hair had grown in very early and few infants have such dark heads so early on. Hmphf, she says to herself and looks to the stroller next to her.

She is surprisingly un-surprised to find the stroller empty. In the split second before rushing up front to steal her baby back from the claws of evil, she tries to remember when he could have been kidnapped. It must have been when she was searching the gym, during that space of time when the program should have started but hadn't yet and the crowd was filled with gabbers who had no one but strangers to gab to. She was looking for Mr. Right for, though she had one kid in second grade besides the baby who lay awake beside her, she was as yet unmarried. The baby had been waiting for the program to start too, so he could start crying.

She had searched the crowd for Wealth, preferably old, decrepit Wealth with heart problems. She did this whenever she found herself within a crowd of people. Unfortunately, Wealth and herself didn't seem to keep the same hangouts. But tonight, she found him, Wealth himself, sitting in the front row, but as far off to the side as possible so any emergency exits on his part would be barely noticed. He wore a badly attached toupee and an expensive looking suit. Her kind of man. She couldn't see his face, but even the toupee was a gray one. He sat all by himself, no relatives. He didn't seem to be anyone's grampa. Pedophile, she thought. He had potential. Vague thoughts of blackmail and Wealth not being able to get it up for her crossed her mind and she smiled. Perfect, she thought. After the show, she would trap Wealth by the door and show off her children to him, much to his delight, and in a purely innocent way of course, and Wealth would offer to take her to dinner, and because Wealth likes children, would have her bring the brats too, so she wouldn't have to pay for a sitter and would get the whole fam a free meal to boot.

But now, as memories of Mr. Right fade away, she runs to her baby, only it's more like hobbling really, not because she's hurt, but because of all those damn strollers and those second-graders falling asleep in middle of the aisle like stupid runny-nosed puppies (hers is in there somewhere), she can't do a full stride, it's like three-dimensional hop-scotch on ice, since the floor tiles had been freshly waxed for the event.

But she slices her way through the crowd to the juggling girl on the makeshift plywood stage. The girl doesn't seem to notice her, her eyes are glazed with concentration and her smile pasted on as she turns to her boyfriend, who steps onto the platform from the side and takes the first wiffle-baby the girl throws to him, then tosses it back as she tosses him another. Soon they are juggling the wiffle-babies between them in a crazy figure-8 pattern.

The youngest mother is on the platform then, in between the flying wiffle-babies, trying to find hers. She spots him easily, lock of black hair obvious against the rest of the pinkness of baby flesh, but then he's past her and in the boyfriend's hands before she could reach out and take him. By now some of the other mothers have recognized their young and are at the front of the stage, screaming like teenage concertgoers. The MC, a high school senior wearing a slightly oversized rented tux and bleached hair, comes up from back-stage and grabs the mike, "Well, ladies and gents, that was the amazing Christy who's just finishing her juggling act now. Please give her a hand!"

A sparse automatic applause starts as the youngest mother takes her wiffle-baby out of the airborne stream of infants. The rhythm of the juggle skews and the girl and boyfriend start dropping the other wiffle-babies onto the floor with cracks of the plastic wiffles followed by little squish sounds. The other babies are hurt, lying quivering in their now-open wiffle balls, like chicks in cracked eggshells. They start to cry in unison. The youngest mother looks down at her wiffle-baby as the other mothers climb the stage and search for their babies. The youngest mother had taken the wrong one; this one has dark hair, yes, but it was short and fine, more like fuzz than her son's hair. She searches the wiffle ruins for her baby, pushing aside the other women. She can't find him.

"Is your baby all right?"

She turns and sees Wealth looking at her, concern deepening the trenches of wrinkles that cover his entire face and hide his eyes in deep wells of flesh. She looks down at the wiffle-baby that is not hers. But it is close enough, she figures. "Yes, he seems to be fine." Then she smiles at Wealth as the mothers walk off stage, carrying their infants away, still partially cocooned in their wiffles. The jugglers have disappeared. Only one mother is still searching for hers amongst the bits of clear, broken plastic as the MC announces, "and for our next act..." as a magician in a dark cloak and his assistant push a sloshing vat of water from behind the curtain to center stage.