In These Girls, Hope Is a Muscle Read online

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Kathleen! This is it. From now on, Kathleen stays home.”

  Her eyes popped.

  “Hey, Mr. Moyer, just kidding, right?” said Kristin. “Just kidding” was another of those trademark expressions of the Hurricanes.

  “No, not just kidding. I mean it. I’m getting another player.”

  The other Hurricanes stopped mid-dribble to eavesdrop.

  Coach Moyer did not back off.

  “The person I want here instead is . . .”

  The horror on her teammates’ faces was unmistakable. What was he trying to do? Give it up in the preseason? Everyone knew Kathleen was golden, she was great. Coach Moyer was the one who always called her key. No Kathleen?

  “. . . is . . . the new Hurricane is . . . is named Skippy.” Actually, this was a genteel theft. He got the idea from Doonesbury, the comic strip, in which George Bush had been pictured as possessing an evil twin by that name. He gave Kathleen an even look. “Okay, Skippy, put on your game face.”

  She looked startled at first.

  “Let’s see Skippy take the ball to the basket.”

  She moved toward the hoop tentatively. Was Coach for real? Then she smiled, ever so crookedly. Something about the strategy, the theater in it, the relief of pretending to be someone else, slowly sank in. It felt right, it felt okay. After that, the hesitancy that had so often hobbled Kathleen even during practice disappeared.

  She grabbed the ball.

  She stormed forward, her face a seamless mask of concentration.

  She bashed the ball in.

  “Skippy, I like that mean look. If there’s a pick there, knock it over. Let’s stay in that frame of mind. Hold that.”

  This is great, he thought: I can yell at Skippy.

  But the question was still there. This was, after all, just a dress rehearsal. What would Kathleen be like when faced with the real thing?

  For now, he was beguiled by his own ingenuity.

  “Roses are red,” he said, “violets are blue. I’m schizophrenic, and so am I. Don’t forget, Kathleen. In this gym, you’re Skippy.”

  “I won’t forget, Coach Moyer.”

  “Actually, forgetting isn’t always so bad. There are advantages to Alzheimer’s. You make new friends every day. People let you hide your own Easter eggs . . .”

  Practices ended at 5 P.M.

  November turned into December; bulky sweaters and raw chapped hands gave way to gloves and parkas. As the Hurricanes hurried to the idling cars driven by parents who often coordinated pickup with the end of their work day, the darkness was thick, almost molecular. The air possessed a bitter dampness. There had already been discrete particles of snow and even light dustings. In Amherst the first real storm holds a special terror for college administrators. For years they have tried to break a dangerous tradition in which kids from U Mass leave their campus, with its disjointed urban mishmash, and march across into town, past the common and Hastings where Hurricane Kim Warner worked and Bonducci’s coffee shop where Hurricane Kathleen Poe’s father, Don, could often be seen sipping coffee in the front booth (Bob Pariseau, Jen’s dad, believed he lived there) toward the Amherst college campus, with its tasteful preppy bricks, accumulating wads of snow as they go so that, in an attack that has been billed as class warfare, students from both places pelt one another with snowballs, a few of which are sometimes filled with rocks. This year the campuses were spared.

  The first Friday of Advent was marked by the Lighting of the Merry Maple on the town common, the last gasp of community-wide warmth and cheer before the ritualistic hibernation, the mass retreat into caves and holes. The same papers that rediscovered seasonal affective disorder each year with such fanfare trotted out the boilerplate about hypothermia and what to do when your toes experience tingling, then pain, then numbness.

  Coach Moyer embraced the cold.

  Summer was finally over.

  7

  Smiles on the Floor

  For high school students on a team, even on one as determined as the Hurricanes appeared to be, there was still a whole lot of life, and drama, being conducted off the court as well. Adolescence is a time when what to do with your life and a newly discovered blemish can both bear down with seemingly equal pressure, when pimple = apocalypse. Basketball was important, but so were fights with one’s parents, fights between one’s parents, driver’s permits, driver’s licenses, boys who asked you out, boys who didn’t, money and the lack of it, decisions about sex, drugs, and alcohol.

  Who would get the awards at graduation? Jen thought she had a good shot at winning the tool chest awarded to Mr. or Ms. Consumer Auto for excellent work in a course with that title.

  Was it true that Julius Lester had been chosen as this year’s graduation speaker? Amherst Regional High School always aimed high in that department; Jamila’s father had given the speech in the past, and the wish list compiled by the seniors always showed a sense of sophistication and connection. For instance, somebody’s grandfather had been Elie Wiesel’s personal physician and that seemed like a reasonable “in” to get the Nobel Laureate to speak.

  The party after commencement was also discussed at length.

  How many friends from outside the school could you take to the all-night graduation party at the football field at Amherst College, where you had to bring your bedrolls and your backpacks ahead of time so that “security” (meaning Coach Moyer and Coach Thomas and other parents and teachers who volunteered) could frisk them for contraband? Was the party as fun as everyone said?

  Would the prom be held at some place swank or at a place with only one floor and a drab name like the Quality Inn? Everyone prayed it wouldn’t be on a boat in Boston; last year’s seniors had chosen that option, and the night turned out to be both wet and freezing. If the Hurricanes attended the prom, should they buy a dress or have one made by seamstress Sara Weeks, who could intuit from looking at a girl whether she should go with green satin or black crêpe, whether the skirt should be puffed or slinky, if the hem should be long or short, or somehow both.

  Would they wear heels as a concession to fashion?

  And if they did, would they be able to walk?

  “The whole college thing” weighed on all of the seniors except Jamila (because of her early decision to go to Stanford).

  In most towns the size of Amherst, high school is the pulse, the glue, the last fine time. But in a college town, higher education provides the ultimate romance, the smithy where noble ideas are forged. In this context, high school is in danger of being a footnote within a footnote. Unless the high school elbows its way into public consciousness, it is easy to dismiss, not unlike the tiny print known as agate used by newspapers for the scores of faraway games.

  Amherst Regional High School occupies a spacious grassy setting within walking distance of the center of town—twenty-one acres of wetlands, parking lots, and a flat one-story brick edifice.

  There are thirty-two foreign languages spoken in the homes of the students, with Spanish, Khmer, and Chinese as the leading three.

  Twenty percent of the students are on free or reduced-fee lunches.

  Classes are offered in the usual subjects, but there is also a Child Study program, Auto Shop, Drafting, Advance-Placement Calculus, Physics, Survival Living (the final is a three-day solo in the wilderness), Bible as Literature, Women and Literature, African-American Literature, Latin, Chinese, Classical Greek, German, and Russian, in addition to Spanish and French, The Holocaust, Death and Dying, and The American West. The education that occurs inside the building varies from basic to standard to advanced, although in recent times the system of tracking has been under attack by the NAACP as racist. It was one of the first schools in the country to adopt a policy against sexual harassment, including an antileering clause that prohibited students from staring in an invasive or menacing way.
It is not an ordinary high school, if in fact such a place exists.

  Soon it was confirmed. The commencement speaker would be Julius Lester.

  The school would graduate two hundred and five seniors in its class of 1993. Eighty-nine percent would go on to two- or four-year colleges.

  The essay Patri wrote as part of her college application was about her brother Reggie:

  As I watch my three-year-old brother grab the spoon out of my mother’s hand while she struggles to feed him and say, “I can do it myself, I’m a big boy now,” my heart is intoxicated with tremendous pride and delight. He wasn’t always the happy, mischievous buck-a-roo he is now. From the day Reggie was born, he was forced to live in the cold, sterile environment of a hospital’s intensive care unit. While confined to the limiting barriers of an incubator, he was deprived of the “normal” form of loving which a newborn deserves. . . .

  Reggie was born three and a half months premature. During the first few months the only connection between him and our loving touch was a small window on the incubator about four inches in diameter. None of his vital bones or organs were strong enough to be handled frequently. We were in and out of the hospital daily, something with which I was not comfortable. As time passed, I adjusted to the setting. . . .

  At first I would compare Reggie to the other children, convincing myself that he was doing better than they were in order to keep my hopes up. There is one particular instance that I wish I could have dealt with differently. I walked into the hospital’s playroom where there were many children. A small child about two years old came running towards me and grabbed onto my leg; he was looking for affection from me. When I took a closer look he had a tube coming out of a hole made in his neck and when he breathed he made a loud wheezing noise. Due to my unawareness at the time, he really scared me. I tried to hide my fear from him, but it was too late because he had already noticed my immediate response. Children are good perceivers of emotion. He had a look of rejection on his face as he walked away.

  One of the biggest problems in curing a patient seems to me when they lose hope, but it’s difficult for a child to keep up hope when parents stop visiting and nurses stop treating them as humans, seeing them as just another patient. To me Reggie was not just another patient, nor another number on some doctor’s chart, and every child out there is someone’s son or someone’s daughter. Seeing all this firsthand has made me realize how important it is that each and every one be treated that way and has increased my desire to become a pediatrician. Today Reggie is as healthy as any other three year old, thanks to the care he received during his first few months. I know I’ll see a little bit of him in every child I care for and I know I’ll do whatever I can for each one, never giving up and never losing hope.

  Jen, with her grade point average of 3.733, was the only other Hurricane besides Jamila being recruited by Division 1 schools. Her advisor at the high school, Carlene Riccelli, wrote a recommendation calling her “an ambassador of goodwill. She will make a difference on your campus. . . . Beneath Jen’s easygoing and amicable exterior is an intense drive. As her dad once told me, ‘Jen has managed to do everything but sing.’ That undoubtedly will be next.” Her terrible voice, eager but tuneless, was a team joke.

  She had been recruited by a host of good schools, including Princeton and Holy Cross and Rutgers. West Point really wanted her, and although she turned the school down, it was not without some misgivings on the part of the people who knew Jen and her leadership style. One time, a former marine who had served in Vietnam, observing how she got her teammates to hop to and restore to cleanliness a house they’d been enjoying, volunteered that she would make an ace leader of a platoon. People kept fantasizing wholescale upheaval in the military-industrial complex if Jen got anywhere within, as Coach Moyer put it, “shooting range, so to speak.”

  In the end Dartmouth won out, partly due to the strength of the women’s basketball team but also the heightened New Englandness of its campus only two hours away. It also had a strong engineering department, although she sometimes considered majoring in the humanities. She loved to read, especially works that, as her stepmother put it, appealed to her “ethical style,” books by women and minorities taught by her favorite teachers at the high school, Ms. Booth and Ms. Saulsberry. Jen kept this secret ambition to herself because she did not want to disappoint her father, who believed that a degree in engineering would guarantee her reasonable employment all her life. Dartmouth required a peer evaluation as part of the application process, and Jen asked Jamila if she would be willing to write one.

  Jamila had no problem finding words to describe her friend. She wrote to Dartmouth about the time they had all been in Florida for her father’s speech and how afterward Jen had gone up to a table where Tracy Kidder was signing copies of Among Schoolchildren, a portrait of a fifth-grade classroom in Holyoke in which deprivation was the norm. What had always struck Jamila about the way Jen approached Tracy Kidder was how she didn’t ask him for his autograph. Instead, skinny and thirteen, she’d said, “Tell me what happened to Clarence,” referring to a child in the book who was in the greatest danger.

  Jamila wrote that she admired her values, her way of sifting through to the important stuff.

  When Jamila thought of Jen, she realized that, more than anyone else she’d met, they would be friends forever.

  The phone call during the summer had worked the change they both longed for.

  For Jamila, “There was a clear understanding that from that point on we were working together. I didn’t need her to be me. I needed her to be herself.”

  Something was troubling Rita.

  Jen could see that she was distracted, less likely to smile or to break into one of her funny songs. They were almost three years apart in age and that can be, for teenagers, a gap of geological magnitude, a rift in the landscape of time akin to a canyon. Rita was still slightly embarrassed about the time when she had turned fourteen and her mother had totally violated the big kid/little kid hierarchy and invited Jen and Jamila to her birthday party as a surprise. Jen remembered Rita as “totally stressed. Totally mortified. She knew us as basketball players, not as friends. When you’re younger, you always have this fear older kids think you’re dorky, so Jamila and I just kept saying ‘This is great!’ every minute.”

  Jen had gotten to know Rita better since the summer. Upon Jen’s return from Clovis, Rita had given her a copy of a poem she had written. Jen loved to read and reread it.

  Some people’s feet never leave the ground.

  Some of us soar.

  Some people’s eyes are on the crowd.

  Some of us never notice.

  Some people’s minds are on the competition.

  Some of us don’t care.

  Some people put their body into it.

  Some of us put our heart and soul.

  Usually Rita was easy to get through to.

  All you had to do was joke about how she might not be the first female president, but she’d surely be the first female president in space.

  “Don’t worry,” Rita would reply. “I’m all over that.”

  Or, they might recite together word-for-word Judy Tenuta’s comedy routine they both loved:

  “I was baby-sitting my brother Boscoe and my mom came home from work early and she said, ‘Hey, Judy, what was Boscoe’s severed arm doing on the table?’ Um. Bad paper cut.

  “So I was baby-sitting the Clapp twins and I had to put them to bed. For their own good. And they said, ‘Oh, no, Judy, don’t turn off the lights. There are monsters in the dark.’ And I said, Oh, no, those are just your clothes trying to murder you.

  “Have you ever been walking down the street and seen someone from your past that you don’t want to talk to so you try to rearrange your DNA but they notice you anyway and they say, ‘Judy, were you going to walk past me without saying hi?’ And I said, Um, no, Mom.” />
  But lately nothing cracked the façade of deep, troubled thought. Finally, one afternoon, in the locker room, Jen asked if they could talk.

  “Oh, Jen, it’s just that this kid, this boy, well, he keeps bothering me. Really, it’s no big deal.”

  Rita breathed deeply.

  “Have you talked to your mother about it?” Jen asked.

  Jen liked Rita’s mother. Rita had included a quote from her in the blank book she’d given to Jen: “Everyone’s pain is real.” Anne Teschner told them stories about when she’d played softball in high school. She always shuddered at the memory of her team’s uniforms, scanty in the cold weather, scanty whenever you slid into base.

  “My mother? I can’t talk to her. She’s from Worcester.” Rita used her mother’s pronunciation: “Wuz-tuh,” as it is called by natives, truncating the syllables, making the very name of their town a taunt.

  “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “You have to know Worcester.” Rita was thinking about how the city in central Massachusetts is a neighborhoodish place where scores often are settled with quick informality.

  “Okay, you can’t tell her. Can you tell me? I don’t mean to badger you, but it hurts me to see you so hurt.”

  Rita took a deep breath. “It’s probably nothing.”

  “Can you tell me more about probably nothing?”

  “I don’t even really know him. See, at first he called me on the phone and he said he liked me, but he wouldn’t identify himself. He said if I knew who it was, I wouldn’t talk to him, he was such a bad kid. I kept saying, ‘Who is this?’ and he’d say, ‘No one.’ And then after a bunch of calls one day, he called again and asked why I wasn’t at practice that day. I was in the middle of practicing for cross-country, and there was no way anyone would know if I was in practice or not unless he was watching me. I asked him not to call, but he kept calling and then he started leaving notes, and they really embarrassed me. You know, ‘I worship you’ notes. So when he called again, I said, ‘Look, this is really making me uncomfortable.’ And then one day in class this kid walked in and gave me a rose, and it was him. I had never met him. His name didn’t mean anything to me. I told him to leave me alone, but then he had one of his friends threaten my boyfriend, and then he paid a friend of mine for information about me. And in the hallway at school, all his friends keep pointing at me, blocking my way. One day I was walking with my boyfriend and we both started laughing at something, I don’t know what, and he saw us and he thought we were laughing at him, and he started calling my best friend every night and said, ‘She’s going to pay for this.’ And he said he had a Smith & Wesson and he was going to blow my brains out, and it’s pretty known at the high school that he has access to guns. And I don’t know what I should do. I mean, is this okay?”