In These Girls, Hope Is a Muscle Page 14
Jen just stared.
“He probably doesn’t really mean anything,” the younger girl continued.
“I’m probably overreacting . . .”
Jen waited.
All those peer ed classes, that high-minded talk about selfesteem that seemed right now so hopelessly hypothetical.
In class, if someone presented a story like Rita’s, your reaction would have a clear crusading purity:
Oh, go kick him in the nuts. Tell him to go screw himself. But when your dear pal is practically in tears talking about how bad she feels and she’s trying to convince herself that it’s not serious but she’s hurt and she’s scared and she’s worried about the kid who’s harassing her because for some weird reason she’s concerned about his feelings even though he isn’t concerned about hers, it’s hard to know what to say, but finally, you say what you think is right.
Rita told Jen the boy’s name; she recognized it from similar incidents with other girls.
“This,” said Jen, “is not okay. He can’t do that. What are you afraid of?”
“I don’t like to see someone get in trouble.”
“He got himself in trouble. You didn’t put him there. Besides, maybe deep down he doesn’t like what he’s doing either.”
“What if his friends bug me in the hallway, call me names, or won’t let me get by?”
“Didn’t you tell me they’re already doing that? I’m sure that if you speak to the dean of students, he’ll help. I’m not going to push you because this is your decision, but if you want, I’ll tell Mr. Parker you need to talk to him.”
Rita’s face reflected a mixture of relief and sadness. She looked down at her long fingers.
She nodded. Yes, please tell Mr. Parker about it. Please tell him she needed to talk to him.
Given the pressures of their lives—pressures invisible to outsiders blinded by the peak foliage of youth, the ease, the grace, the beauty of adolescence—some of the Hurricanes found going into the locker room after a day of classes and donning those sneakers the perfect refuge. It was comforting, all those routines and all that drill; even Coach Moyer’s trademark patter, which everyone practically knew by heart, had a way of blurring the edges of a bad day.
“Respect your uniforms,” he would say, with an air of fresh discovery, as if he’d never said it before. “The only time they hit the floor is when you are in them.
“When I say practice is from ten to twelve, I mean be ready to walk on the floor at ten. Don’t waltz in at ten after ten.
“It’s a game. I want to see some smiles on the floor. I don’t want to see a lot of stick people; when elbows go straight, knees go straight, your weight’s all on the back of the heels. Relax and play the game with your legs.
“One of the major elements of this is enthusiasm. Nothing great ever happened without enthusiasm. Basketball is a loose and confident sport. The team that gets loose first usually wins.
“If the other team beats you, go up to them, head up high, and congratulate them.
“If you’re one of those really nice people, find a little compartment, take that nice person, that Kathleen, and put it aside for a while. You can take it out when you’re baby-sitting or selling Girl Scout cookies.
“Basketball is an opportunity to improve your character, a laboratory for life. You’re putting people in an artificial situation and turning them loose.
“Sports is the toy store of life. Run around. Try everything on.
“I want you to love the game. Can’t play it so good anymore, but I love it.
“The most important statistic is total points. If you end up with one more point, it’s a great game. Jamila, what’s the second most important statistic?”
“Shots taken?”
“Just wanted to see if you were listening. After having you hear the same stories and the same jokes for six years, it’ll be good when you leave so I can get into the Amherst spirit and recycle.”
“You already have the Amherst spirit,” said Jen.
“Are you saying I get my jokes from the landfill?”
“No, just dump them.”
“Did I ever tell you about that great game my college team played against Moravian?”
Had he ever told them? Breathes there a human being within a hundred-mile radius of Amherst whom he hadn’t told? A thousand miles? The world over?
“We went into four overtimes, and I played every minute of all four overtimes, so I was dead. We should have killed them. Finally, our coach calls a time-out, six seconds left, and he tells Mike Miller to shoot and that way we’d win the game. Then he takes me aside and tells me to win it by tapping in the miss. I did. At the buzzer.”
Sometimes during practice Coach Moyer said they all had to make ten free throws and after that they could have a drink of water.
“Hey, this is nothing. When I was in college and playing ball for Lafayette, my coach made us make fifty free shots in a row, and he would count the last ten personally. I got so I could do it in . . .”
“Twenty minutes,” responded the Hurricanes under their breath. There were certain Coach Moyer stories they had memorized, and this was one.
“Maybe you’ll get lucky and you’ll beat my record someday. You know what I call luck?”
They all did, and they could all recite it along with him:
“Luck is when preparation meets opportunity.”
Then he repeated the saying and added, “Coaches always say things twice. Coaches always say things twice.”
“Doh!” said Jen. She was widely acknowledged at Amherst Regional High School as the best imitator of Homer Simpson as he expressed his famous expletive.
Occasionally, one team member would turn to another for coaching, as when Kim said to Jen, “I need help.”
“What’s the matter, Kim?”
“I’ll never get ten free shots.”
“Kim, remember that story we all read when we were little kids about the Little Engine That Could?”
“Sure,” said Kim, “that and Winnie the Pooh were my two favorites.” The ball went in the basket.
“So,” said Jen, “how does it go?”
Another basket.
“You know, there’s a little train that’s trying to get over the mountain to deliver all those toys.”
Three and four.
“Right. Remember what the Little Engine kept saying?”
“Sure, I remember.”
Five.
“You do? The exact words?”
Six, seven, eight.
“I’m pretty sure I do.”
Nine.
“What were they?”
Ten: success, water.
“I think I can. I think I can.”
“Okay,” bellowed Coach, “everyone can fluid up now. Good work, everybody. Hey, did you hear the one about the two psychologists who met on the street. The first one says, ‘You’re fine. How am I?’”
Jamila had heard about a team of college women who referred to themselves as “Hoop Phi.” Something about the expression, with its two strong syllables, insistent as a drumbeat, insinuated itself into her consciousness, and try as she might to put it aside, it became in her mind the perfect slogan for this year’s team, better than the one Coach Moyer was trying to inveigle them into using, something about “a fist and a flag.”
He would raise his hand and wave his fingers. “When they’re all going in different directions, they’re not very powerful, but curl them up into a fist and they’re that much more powerful. Only teams that get that close actually win a flag.”
Whenever he introduced the phrase, which was fairly often, the girls looked down and around but not at him. Something about it failed to inspire. Jen, for one, couldn’t make herself thrill to it, any more than she could to the way Jamila tried to line up eve
ryone behind “Hoop Phi.” Jamila would shout “Hoop” hopefully, and Jen would keep on dribbling. But one day at the end of practice a couple of her teammates softly responded. Some say it was Kristin, some say it was Jade, others remember both at once, but the Hurricanes all agree. That first feathered “Phi” was the beginning of something that built and built, becoming, in the end, loud and unmistakable, and soon it became the rallying cry for all of them, including Jen, during the tap drill that ended every practice. The players would line up and tap the ball off the backboard, while in the air alternating cries of “Hoop” and “Phi.”
Jen and Jamila were not the first females in Amherst to be known simply by their first names.
That honor goes of course to Emily Dickinson. As the poet Archibald MacLeish once said, “Most of us are half in love with this dead girl we call by her first name.”
All year long, pilgrims came from around the world to visit the poet’s home, including on one occasion a Viet vet, who said he wanted to thank “the little gal who helped me get through Nam.” Toting guitars and other instruments, they go to her grave to recite her poems and sometimes even sing them, intoning her words, “. . . that thing with feathers” or “Presentiment—is . . . ,” often kneeling in the grass as they gaze at the fenced-in stone with this simple legend:
“Called back.”
From April to October, twice a week, it is possible to arrange for a tour of the Federal-style Dickinson homestead on Main Street, with the expansive side yard and the trees in front like bars. Children under twelve are admitted free. “They are our special visitors,” explained one tour guide, who then checked herself as if this might be offensive. “Of course we believe everyone is special.”
There’s not a child in Amherst who hasn’t on the way to Fenton’s for sneakers or Bruno’s for a sub driven by the place where Dickinson selected her own soul for society, then shut the door of her second-floor bedroom, which looked out on a row of tall soldierly hemlocks.
During her lifetime only seven of her 1,775 poems saw the light of print.
“Publication,” she once wrote, “—is theAuction/Of the Mind . . .”
With that attitude, what would she consider basketball was of the body?
Not by nature a team player, she tended in her work to celebrate solitude:
How happy is the little Stone
That rambles in the Road alone
Her notion of sociability was to wave down passing schoolchildren and to lower from her bedroom window a little basket on a string containing gingerbread or raisins. Her custom was to wear nothing but white, a color that in her day was a symbol of renunciation and mourning. The dress that she wore during the last ten years of her life is preserved on a dummy in a glass case in her room. There is occasional talk about a Dickinson scholar, said to be a dignified sort of person, who keeps importuning the trustees of the homestead to let him try on Emily’s dress and wear it to a reading, but thus far the diminutive garment, with its narrow shoulders and small patch pocket (where it is surmised she used to tuck incipient poems on precious scraps of paper), has remained on display, safe and prim, headless as a cucumber.
Despite all the pilgrims who come to Amherst, Dickinson is somewhat out of fashion in certain circles, partly because, as a poet, she did not inhabit her body in the way we demand today.
Jen was the most vocal about her trouble understanding Dickinson’s elliptical style.
There’s a famous photo of the poet, plain-faced and solemn, which has been issued as a postcard. Whenever she saw the card, Jen would announce to anyone within earshot, employing one of the famous accents, lowering her voice, crushing the syllables, using a tone of fake elation: “Doesn’t she look like such an exciting woman? I bet that book on the table next to her is entitled: ‘If you are confusing enough, people will think you are brilliant.’ I know she read it many times.’’
Coach Moyer himself often wondered, How can it be poetry when it doesn’t even rhyme? although he wondered less when someone replied that it was for the same reason that a basketball game with low scores can be exciting. It was, he thought, a conundrum at least worth contemplating.
Teachers who faced resistance to the poet sometimes drummed up enthusiasm for the poet’s work by pointing out her distaste for normal punctuation, how she preferred dashes to commas and how she was such a rule breaker, she didn’t even give her poems titles. There was a U Mass professor who got a big response whenever he shared his discovery that one of her poems may well be about being bitten on the behind by a spider. Dubbed the ‘‘outhouse poem,’’ it describes someone
Alone and in a Circumstance
Reluctant to be told
A Spider on my reticence
Assiduously crawled
In his lectures the professor told his students the telltale clue is in the use of the word “assiduously”: “A-S-S. Get it?”
One local mother set the poet’s most famous work to rap with this intro:
It’s no Felony
To worship Emily
Write—Write—Baby.
Followed by:
I’m Nobody! Who are you?
Are you—Nobody—Too?
Then there’s pair of us?
Don’t tell! they’d advertise—you know!
How dreary—to be—Somebody!
How public—like a Frog—
To tell one’s name—the livelong June
To the admiring Bog!
There’s no blood in her poetry, no mastectomies, no babies, no beatings, no tongues touching. It would be difficult to imagine her writing about her grandfather, who helped found Amherst College because Harvard was a little too lenient with its boys, or about her father, who was somewhat autocratic and distant, in the haranguing manner of, say, Sylvia Plath, exclaiming, “Daddy, daddy, you bastard.”
Yet, if a place belongs as much to the dead as to the living, the influence of Dickinson is profound. She was bound by the limits of her era. She barely left the house, and yet she became in the view of her supporters perhaps the greatest practitioner of a certain kind of metaphysical, nature-based poetry in the world.
“Would Emily Dickinson be a potential Hurricane if she were alive today?” Coach Moyer once asked himself rhetorically. “She certainly has the right first name to be a Hurricane. Physically, she resembles Carrie Tharp—small, dark, frail. She amassed a career total of seventeen hundred poems, even if a lot of them were from close range. She mostly wore white, which indicates she’d probably only be interested in playing the home games. I’d probably play her as a guard, but not a point guard, because she’s not a great face-to-face communicator. She had a great fear of being rejected, so she’d probably only shoot threes from long range while wide open. It’s a historical fact she went to Mount Holyoke, so the most we could expect of her at the collegiate level is Division Three.”
8
Tip-Off
The first game of a season is always a time of testing. You’re never certain how good you are until you finally hit the floor against another team. A game in which your team is favored to win is freighted with special intensity.
The pendulum does not swing equally.
Victory is expected.
Loss is a disaster.
“Okay, tonight expect the usual Chuck and Chase from West Side,” said Coach Moyer on December 15 as the Hurricanes gathered in room 4 at the high school before heading off to West Springfield for their first game of the season. “Chuck and Chase” was his expression for a team without much in the way of coherent strategy.
“Did any of you happen to see what the Springfield Union wrote?” He held a news clip up for all to see. “They picked Northampton to be this season’s regional champ.”
Coach Moyer could see it was working. He liked to stir them up before a game, let them taste a little indignation. Nothing served the purp
ose better than a newspaper article that underestimated their abilities.
“You’re kidding, right?” said Jen.
“No,” he replied. “They wrote, ‘Most local experts consider Amherst for a likely third or fourth spot, after Hamp and Agawam and possibly Longmeadow.’”
The Hurricanes were unanimous:
“Well, they’re wrong.”
The bus ride home was buoyant and loud.
Amherst had won their first game, 59–42, and what was most encouraging was the performance of the forwards, Kathleen and Kristin and Gumby and Jonesbones, their steadfast tilling of the fields so someone else could claim the bloom. The singing was so loud that even Jen’s awkward cacophony was easily drowned out.
Jen made a point of asking Rita if she had spoken to Mr. Parker.
Rita said, “Not yet.’’
Jen told her it was her decision, and she could not make it for her. “I will not walk behind you holding you up. I won’t walk in front of you and pull you along. But I’ll be right beside you every step of the way.’’
It was a boost starting out the season with this kind of sendoff: Jamila had 17 points, Jen had 11, and so did Emily Shore. Kristin led with 7 rebounds.
As the bus swayed back to Amherst, weightless and merry for the moment, Jen allowed herself the delicious thought: