In These Girls, Hope Is a Muscle Page 3

  Her strong hands, muscled from all the years of piano practice, lighted at last upon a small journal, which she opened to a blank page.

  In tiny, perfectly rendered capital letters, she recorded her feelings about the evening:

  TODAY I REALIZED HOW MUCH I LOVE BASKETBALL. WE LOST THE WESTERN MASS SEMIFINALS TO HAMP. THE GAME WAS A BLUR. ALL I REMEMBER WAS HOW WE WERE IN A CONSTANT STRUGGLE TO COME BACK. WE STARTED OFF WELL, BUT AFTER THE REFS GAVE HAMP A BOOST, THEY RAN WITH THE BALL. NO ONE PLAYED EXCEPTIONALLY WELL BESIDES JAMILA, WHO WAS THE HIGH SCORER WITH THIRTY POINTS. JENNY WASN’T HAVING A GOOD NIGHT AND THE FORWARDS COULDN’T GET THE BALL TO SINK EITHER. I FELT AS IF EVERYTHING THAT THE TEAM HAD WORKED FOR SO LONG JUST LEFT OUR GRASP.

  IT’S NOT FAIR. IT’S NOT FAIR. THE TEAM HAS SOME OF THE FINEST ATHLETES IN THE WORLD, NOT TO MENTION THE MOST FUNNY, SMART, BEAUTIFUL, INCREDIBLY AWESOME PEOPLE EVER TO WALK THE EARTH. JUST SEEING ANYONE ON THE TEAM MAKES MY DAY. JAMILA HAS GOT TO BE THE SWEETEST PERSON. SHE IS FUNNY, BEAUTIFUL, AMAZINGLY ATHLETIC, AND TO TOP THAT OFF SHE IS NICE TO EVERYONE. JENNY IS THE ONE PERSON WHO I RESPECT AND LOVE THE MOST. SHE SEEMS TO KNOW EVERYTHING AND WHENEVER SHE SPEAKS TO ME I’M SPEECHLESS BECAUSE I LOOK UP TO HER SO MUCH. I LOVE IT WHEN SHE SLAPS MY HAND, OR HUGS ME. IT MAKES ME FEEL LIKE I’M WORTH SOMETHING.

  And then she wrote, in what could only be interpreted as pure boosterism, given the facts of the night:

  NORTHAMPTON IS NOT A TEAM LIKE AMHERST. AMHERST IS A TEAM OF UNSELFISH, INCREDIBLY TALENTED, TEAM PLAYERS WHO LOVE THEIR TEAMMATES. NORTHAMPTON IS A BUNCH OF GOOD BASKETBALL PLAYERS PUT TOGETHER WHO DO NOT FEEL OR LOOK LIKE A TEAM. KUZMESKI, DEMSKI, FROST, STILES—THEY’RE ALL GOOD, BUT THEY DON’T DESERVE TO HAVE WON. ON THE BUS ON THE WAY HOME EVERYONE WAS SHOCKED AND MISERABLE.

  A couple of miles away, on a tree-lined side street in a suburban development, Jamila could not sleep either.

  She had been a member of the girls’ varsity basketball team since seventh grade, and this was the second year in a row that they had won the Valley Wheel league title and gone to the Western Mass tournament, only to lose in the semifinals.

  In five years Jamila had never missed a game.

  In five years she’d never missed a practice.

  Tonight’s defeat was unacceptable.

  She tossed in her bed: Even before the game, she’d had a bad feeling. The Hurricanes came out flat, without any fire. They were waiting to see what was going to happen. They worried about reacting, not acting. Hamp came out excited and ready. They put their famous press on, and after six steals it was obvious they’d won the game. The Hurricanes had everything, on paper. Good players, good seeding in the tournament, no injuries. Everything was there, except for what really mattered. There wasn’t the trust in each other, the confidence in themselves, the sense of team that makes you play beyond your individual abilities.

  If it is possible, mentally and physically, to be more yourself on a certain occasion than on another, to be yourself squared, then that is one way to interpret Jamila’s performance during that game against Northampton that clinched the 1992 season; as her father, John Edgar Wideman, once wrote in Philadelphia Fire, “Leg and heart and mind and breath working hard together. You forget everything you know and play.” Shooting, he maintained, is all in the mind:

  You must believe the ball’s going in. Confidence and the amen wrist flick of the follow-through. You reach for the sky, launch the ball so it rotates off your fingertips and let it fall through the rim. When you hold on too long, when you don’t relax and extend your arm and let nature take its course, you shoot short. Because you don’t believe. Because you’re trying too hard to maintain control, you choke the ball and it comes up short.

  Jamila was one to keep her own counsel, but it was obvious to anyone who saw her play, the fury and the heroism, that, as is true of every great athlete, the game was more than just a game.

  Next year she would be a senior: her last chance to go the distance as a member of the Hurricanes.

  In her neighborhood, built during the eighties in boom times, each dwelling was different, so that a Cape might be next door to a contemporary with a stucco exterior next to a Dutch Colonial with a gambrel roof alongside a neo-Victorian. The one feature that unites many of the houses, the common “quote,” as architects like to call characteristics that are shared or echoed, are the basketball hoops found in driveway after driveway, as American as a flagpole, and like one in their tall rectitude.

  Her father, who had played college ball at the University of Pennsylvania in the early sixties (including one season against Bill Bradley of Princeton) and who could still be observed, in pickup games at local parks like Mill River, holding his own with men half his age, promised that the next day they would be at their hoop, working on shooting drills.

  Jen Pariseau also lay awake, in her room with the sloping ceiling in the house she shared with her older brother, her father, and her stepmother in the town of Pelham, just east of Amherst.

  Her head rested on a pillow, behind which was her “strong women” wall, filled with taped-up magazine images of women whom she admired.

  She was racked by the thought that basketball was no longer fun. She felt shunned by the spotlight. We weren’t the Amherst Hurricanes; we were “Jamila’s team.”

  She used to love it. She had joined the team in the eighth grade, a year after Jamila. But now; now, she had to wonder. Jen admitted to herself she’d been angry a lot of the preceding season. Coach acted as if the only person on the team was Jamila. So did the media, for that matter. It was as if in the eyes of the world they were Jamila’s team, not the Amherst Hurricanes. It made her angry. It frustrated her. It wasn’t right. There had to be room for both at the top.

  She missed the old inseparability between herself and Jamila, grieved the loss of the way it used to be, that easiness that comes from spending every weekend, all weekend together. Now their exchanges as they passed in the hallways at school were brusque, a quick hi-hi. Some of the disenchantment went beyond basketball, belonged to that universal sixteen-year-old trading in and testing of loyalties and friendship. Jen perhaps felt a special vulnerability. Her parents had split up when she was only two. Maybe that was the problem, maybe change, even the natural evolution of a friendship, its ebb and flow, could easily be confused with loss.

  But what if next season was more of the same?

  What if it was just more averted glances, more coded talk, more snubs?

  Unlike Lucia, Jen could be clear-eyed about Hamp that night.

  The Blue Devils knew what they wanted and they didn’t choke.

  The Blue Devils had shown themselves under pressure as capable of that smooth interlocking series of quick-lived gestures that occurs when teammates sense not only where another player is but also where she will be, one second, two seconds, three seconds from now, and then they pass the ball in a confident motion, garnering basket after basket after basket. The dance, the arc, the swoosh.

  Northampton would go on to the state tournament.

  And the Amherst girls?

  The Amherst girls could stay home and they could do whatever there is to do in a town whose official seal is a book and a plow.

  Amherst is a college town, home to Amherst College, the University of Massachusetts, and Hampshire College, with the usual self-absorbed loftiness that makes such places as maddening as they are charming and livable. The communities surrounding Amherst range from the hard and nasty inner-city poverty of Holyoke, the empty factories in Chicopee, and the blue-collar solidity of Agawam to the cornfields and strawberry patches in Whately and Hatfield and Hadley and the shoppers’ mecca that is Northampton. They tend to look on Amherst with eye-rolling puzzlement and occasional contempt as the town that fell to earth.

  When the chamber of commerce sponsored a contest for town motto, Coach Moyer submitted several that he still thinks should have won—“A Volv
o in every garage,” “Where adolescence lasts forever,” and his personal favorite, “Amherst: Where sexuality is an option and reality is an alternative.” Townspeople often refer to Amherst, fondly, as “Never-never land.” The chamber of commerce ended up choosing as its motto “There’s no place like downtown Amherst.” Downtown consists mostly of pizza joints, Chinese restaurants, ice-cream parlors, bookstores, and not much else. It has the world’s slowest deli. The businesses that don’t begin with the word Pioneer often end with the word Valley. It’s hard to find a needle and thread, but if you wish, you can go to the Global Trader and purchase for four dollars a dish towel with a rain-forest theme.

  Amherst is an achingly democratic sort of place in which tryouts for Little League, with their inevitable rejections, have caused people to suggest that more teams should be created so that no one is left out. There are always some parents who sit on the bleachers reading their well-thumbed copies of William James’s Essays in Pragmatism or rereading Trollope, who look up just in time to greet their child’s good catch or hard drive to the center with an airy cry of “Deft!” rather than “Way to go!”

  Coach Moyer finds it ironic that the same people who disparage athletic competition, sometimes wrinkling their noses as if the very word had an off odor, were sufficiently driven to get 800s on their Graduate Record Exams. They use words like deobscurantize when they mean make clear, and at parent-teacher meetings for kindergarten-age children they ask if their youngster will be taught not just how to spell, but also the history of spelling.

  “In Amherst,” says Coach Moyer, “people are so sophisticated that when one first grader said to the other, ‘Guess what, I found a condom on the patio,’ her friend wanted to know, ‘What’s a patio?’”

  Coach Moyer has proposed some politically correct trash talk just for those who seek to avoid the rough language of the fray:

  “I’m going to meet you outside the game and refuse to mediate.”

  “You ignore your inner child.”

  “And so’s your co-parent.”

  Every year in August the Rotary Club hosts a Teddy Bear Rally on the town common: 190 booths featuring bears as well as bear furniture, bear clothes, bear books, and other bear sundries.

  The church Moyer’s wife attends uses an “inclusive language” hymnal, invented in Amherst, which replaces patriarchal references to Our Father with the word creator and which tones down imagery with a male bias, employing small subtle shifts, such as “Onward, Christian Stalwarts.”

  It’s the last place in America where you can find people who still think politically correct is a compliment. The program notes for the high school spring musical, Kiss Me, Kate, pointed out politely that The Taming of the Shrew, on which it is based, was “well, Shakespearean in its attitude toward the sexes.”

  Political action is approved, even among the very young.

  A few years ago a second-grade class at Fort River School mounted a successful campaign to get the state’s Turnpike Authority to abolish the symbol that had lined the road that goes from Stockbridge to Boston since its opening in 1957, a pilgrim’s hat with an arrow shot through it. These days it’s just a plain old pilgrim’s hat. Jen Pariseau has a theory about how Amherst got to be so PC: “It all goes back to this guy Jeffrey Amherst.”

  The man from whom the town took its name in 1759 was commander in chief and field marshal of the English armies.

  “Some people say he was a womanizer and a drunk. The one thing we know for sure is that he tried to wipe out the Indians by giving them blankets infected with smallpox. Ever since, we’ve been trying to make up for him.”

  In the sixties Amherst College managed to lose all its Jeffrey Amherst dinner plates, with their frieze showing the white military officer from England in an eternal rout of the Indians. But it has yet to lose its fight song, a somewhat airbrushed version of the life of Lord Jeff, “a soldier of the king.” After touchdowns at football games and at the parties afterward you can hear it being sung, in a low register filled with, often, inebriated conviction, a tribute to an old order in which boys were boys, men were men, and girls didn’t go to Amherst College. Women entered Amherst College for the first time as transfer students in 1975 and as freshmen in 1976, a fact that used to merit a sentence in the catalogue but is no longer considered newsworthy.

  Oh, Lord Jeffrey Amherst was the man who gave his name

  To our college on the hill;

  And the story of his loyalty and bravery and fame

  Abides here among us still—

  Abides here among us still.

  You may talk about your Johnnies and your Elis and the rest,

  For they are names that time can never dim,

  But give us our only Jeffrey, he’s the noblest and the best,

  To the end we will stand fast for him.

  The town is, for the most part, smoke free, nuclear free, and eager to free Tibet. Ponchos with those little projectiles of fleece have never gone out of style. Birkenstocks (called Birkies), clogs, capes, Doc Marten’s, woven tops, and tie-dyed anything are all still the rage. With the exception of Cambridge, Massachusetts, Amherst is probably the only place in the United States where men can wear berets and not get beaten up. The common nickname for the area is the Happy Valley. In good weather, freeze-dried hippies, men and women in their forties and fifties, clinging to their long hair and their beards the way World War II marines used to cling to crew cuts, line the sidewalks with their wares: multicolored candles shaped like pyramids, tin earrings, colorful beads, incense.

  The biggest product is invisible. Not widgets or beams or fenders, it is process itself: The two most common jobs are teacher and therapist. People worry constantly about “sending the wrong message,” and many conversations are launched with elaborate, back-bending polite disclaimers: “Not that I’m saying you don’t have a right to your opinion, but . . .”

  The college kids stroll down the main drag, South Pleasant Street, with an air of entitlement: souls afloat in the ocean of knowledge. Some professors call them “time vampires,” and as proof they offer anecdotes that, even if they aren’t true, have the truth of folklore: “So this student came to my office and asked if he could enroll in two classes that met at the same time on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday from nine to ten, and when I said, ‘Sure, if you could be in two places at once,’ the kid smiled and said, ‘Great.’”

  The therapist’s version of the same phenomenon has the patient being told that her hour is up, only to respond: “Oh, I can stay. I don’t have to be anywhere until eleven-thirty.”

  Dogs are often named after writers or abstract ideals: Dickens, Chaucer, Harmony. An oboe player who graduated from Hampshire College had a dog named Doggerel. Dogs in Amherst have their own drinking fountain on the town common, a granite basin attached to a fountain for humans, installed by the Women’s Christian Temperance Union to encourage people to drink water rather than liquor.

  Children have the usual names, but also names like Trillium, Zephyr, Sage, Morningstar, Jett, Orpheus, and Willow.

  Amherst has the international distinction of being the only town in the world that makes an organized effort to save spotted salamanders. On Henry Street special tunnels, similar to airport runway drains and about six inches in diameter, guarantee a safe escort for these homely creatures who consist mostly of wide mouths and slithering torsos. On one spring night a year, when the atmospheric conditions are just right, a light rain combined with a temperature well above freezing, they leave the hillsides and migrate to the lowest vernal pool they can find to claim a mate. When the rain stops, they go back uphill to a life of abstinence and, of course, all those young ’uns. There’s a new band in town called Salamander Crossing; heavy metal it’s not.

  Two miles from the center of town is Bread & Circus, the self-proclaimed world’s largest health food store. Old-fashioned molasses and sun-dried cranber
ries coexist happily: Fannie Farmer meets the New Age. Food-dazed shoppers proceed down the aisles in a trance, beguiled by blue cheese aged in a cave in Iowa or the Cabrales from Spain wrapped in sycamore leaves, by turkeys raised in a free-roaming, hormone-free environment and twenty-two different kinds of granola. One time a child wearing a Burger King crown was accosted by a customer: “Poor thing, she has meat on her breath.” The store, nicknamed Bread & Checkbook, has the air of a sacred temple, and even the most harried cashiers have a smiley, pristine look. Like the rest of the Amherst area, with its widespread faith in the efficacy of language, Bread & Circus is filled with signs hailing the “organic special of the week” as well as what’s wheat-free and salt-free and fat-free, but not, of course, truly free.

  Notices flutter from telephone poles and crowd bulletin boards, announcing Scottish country dance groups and lessons in Zen Shiatsu massage, support groups such as “Writes of Passage” (specializing in techniques that “gather and deepen the relationship to the inner child”), the need for a host family to take in a Bosnian Teen Refugee, or counseling by therapists with names like “Singingtree.” In one of those cross-references so common in a small town, Singingtree is the mother of one of the Hurricanes. Her real name is Sally Hardman Shore. Her daughter is the Emily whose nickname is Gumby, and she calls herself Singingtree on those occasions when she is conducting a “vision quest.”