In These Girls, Hope Is a Muscle Read online

  Bumper stickers abound. They can be categorized with the same checklist used by birders.

  Common; large number seen every year:

  QUESTION AUTHORITY

  I BELIEVE HER

  LIVE SIMPLY SO THAT OTHERS MAY SIMPLY LIVE

  NUCLEAR ARMS ARE NOT FOR HUGGING

  Uncommon; occurs in limited numbers and is not certain to be seen:

  IT’S A CHILD, NOT A CHOICE

  MY KID CAN BEAT UP YOUR HONOR STUDENT

  Rare; as many as four reports per year, but sometimes not reported for several consecutive years:

  DON’T BLAME ME: I VOTED FOR BUSH

  Accidental; extremely rare, occurrence unpredictable:

  THEY CAN TAKE MY GUN AWAY WHEN THEY PRY MY DEAD COLD FINGERS OFF OF IT

  GOAT ROPERS NEED LOVE TOO

  Banners often stretch across South Pleasant Street at the town common, including the vintage SPAY OR NEUTER YOUR PET, PREVENT ABANDONMENT AND SUFFERING and ABORTION: KEEP IT LEGAL, SAFE AND FUNDED.

  Some classic headlines from the Amherst Bulletin:

  WELL-DRESSED MAN ROBS AMHERST BANK

  DOES AMHERST HAVE TOO MANY COMMITTEES?

  FED BY SOME, FEARED BY OTHERS, A THOUSAND FERAL CATS ROAM AMHERST

  In almost any other community the photo caption “Hidden Harvest” would indicate marijuana or some other contraband; in Amherst it means potatoes.

  The police report in the Bulletin documents domestic violence and creepy phone calls and break-ins. Someone called in once about a cow on the loose on Northeast Street; another call reported a raccoon “behaving strangely in the median strip.” It turned out to be dead. On Friday and Saturday nights license plates are stolen on a lark with some frequency. Fights are reported, usually just as the bars are beginning to close, outside and inside Antonio’s Pizza or the Pub or Delano’s or Twisters Tavern. Drunken college kids are often discovered passed out in someone’s yard. Once on a summer night a lovelorn young man was found banging his head against a tree. The paper reported, “Fortunately there was no damage to the perpetrator or to the tree.” Sometimes there are brawls late at night with two hundred kids watching and cheering; in one case, the two kids in the fight not only slugged each other but also bit each other’s nose and chest. Illegal bars, in private apartments and spilling out into yards and sidewalks and even roads, often blossom with seeming spontaneity in the good weather, catering to a clientele that reaches into the thousands. One such gathering, called the Hobart Hoedown because it was held on Hobart Lane, was videotaped by the police and then shown, with favorable results, at a town meeting in which the agenda included a request for more officers.

  Debate is constant. The concerns can be global and unanswerable: “Whither activism in El Salvador?” or local and also unanswerable: “Which has better Chinese food, Panda East or Am Chi?” On almost any weekday when the colleges are in session, one can choose among lectures with titles like “Studies of the Distortion of the Director Field in Nematic Solutions of a Rodlike Polymer” or “Optimality and Grounded Phonology: Vowel Harmony in Yoruba Dialects” or “Developmental Changes in Inter-Limb Coordination: Transition to Hands-to-Knee Crawling.” Even topics whose frank popularity cannot be ignored get to have Latin in their titles: “Saint Elvis: Graceland as Locus Sanctus.”

  Recently, a tongue-in-cheek application to live in Amherst circulated throughout the town; you could check off, for example, your favorite beverage (ginseng rush, jug wine, goat’s milk) and recreation (pouring sand into loggers’ fuel tanks, strapping yourself to deer, meditating).

  Other questions:

  Is it OK to wear Birkenstocks without socks?

  ( ) True ( ) False

  When you watch people eating meat, can you hear the screams of the source animal echoing in your head?

  Do you tie your ponytail with leather thongs, rubber bands, recycled twine, or twine made from celery fibers grown in your own garden?

  How many letters have you written to the editor in the past month? ( ) 2–9 ( ) 10–19 ( ) 20–39 ( ) 40–59 ( ) >60

  Your current house is lit with:

  ( ) Oil lamps ( ) Candles ( ) Fireflies

  Despite the external exuberance created by the students, there’s a wariness toward outsiders; as Frost observed, “Good fences make good neighbors.” It takes a long time to feel accepted. The third wife of a professor in the English department at Amherst College, who used to be a singer in Los Angeles, says, “After eight years, the town starts to grow on you.”

  Most residents tend to keep to themselves. In the winter, people really do become hermits. No one comes to your door with false offers of friendship. In fact no one comes to your door, except, oddly enough—given that such intrusions are a form of pollution—environmental activists wanting money and an audience. The spiels are always so earnest; typically, the young person at your door might urge the boycott of whale watches because the noise from the boats disturbs the animals in their natural habitat, concluding with a rousing cheer of “Win one for the Flipper!”

  The seasons in New England give a focus to time the way a tent with bright stripes focuses a garden party.

  Spring that year after the loss to Hamp was no real comfort, a traitorous time with its trick of warm days followed by record-making blizzards, the end of winter in name only. The wind was like glass—sharp, transparent, deadly.

  Then April, brown and quiet.

  The snow melted, and pussy willows grew in the woods.

  If you were desperate for an outing, you could have donned your raincoat and grabbed your flashlight and helped out at the annual salamander crossing.

  In May, Hawthorne’s vegetable stand up on East Pleasant reopened, as did the farmers’ market on the common, with their sparse and hopeful midspring offerings of houseplants and seedlings and early greens.

  A sign sprung up outside one house:

  PERENNIALS

  HERBS

  EVERLASTING

  The smell of manure in the fields was overruled by the lilacs, and scraggly yellow blossoms appeared on twiggy bushes.

  By the third weekend in May the hibernation of the previous winter seemed to have been a hallucination.

  The annual police auction was held, supervised by Captain Charlie Scherpa, looking sharp with his blue uniform, gray hair, and large imperious nose as he directed the bids. The goods sold at this annual event are precisely the crop of detritus one would expect in a college town: a cassette holder and tapes, work gloves, a pair of Tecnico women’s hiking boots, a diamondlike stud earring, Cross pen and case, 4 CDs, Notre Dame sweatshirt, Seiko men’s watch, men’s wedding band, lawn ornament, black backpack, beanbag chair, Technics turntable, baseball hat, K-2 skis, and bikes—lots of bikes, men’s and women’s, by Univega, Columbia, Huffy, Peugeot, Schwinn, Ross, Raleigh, Shelby, Vista, Sears, and Fuji, in varying states of repair and disrepair, in purple and red and blue and brown and green and black and yellow and orange and chrome. One time, back when he was eight, a towhead named Thor Wilcox stood by shyly, and Captain Scherpa made sure he was the only person allowed to make a bid on a decent bike, which he ended up getting for two dollars. Implicit in the tableau of this auction is a genuine longing for a different, older, vanished America—marred, ever so faintly, by a trace of self-consciousness and self-congratulation, a sense of having out-Rockwelled Rockwell.

  That same May weekend, the town fair arrived, and the children truly thawed out from the winter, experiencing a foot­loose freedom they hadn’t enjoyed since Halloween. The fair is a rinky-dink event beloved by the citizens because its very tackiness throws into relief Amherst’s superior grace, with rides whose menace is all in the name: the Scrambler and the Satellite and Wipe-Out. As always, Thursday was daredevil night, Friday afternoon was for little kids, and Friday evening was shaving-cream night, a junior high ritual that persists even t
hough none of the merchants in town have sold any shaving cream to underage kids for several weeks. The purpose is to cover one’s victims with the sticky lather.

  A middle-aged woman with long candidly gray straight hair and glasses, someone who would never honk in traffic or neglect to recycle her cans and bottles, whose single excess is to belong to more than one book group, sighed and asked another, “Do you remember the time the bride came to the fair?”

  It must have been a half-dozen years ago that a bride and groom wandered away from their wedding at the Lord Jeff Hotel across the street and bought tickets for the Ferris wheel. The fair­goers, including even the most impatient little children, had stepped back and let them go to the head of the line. In the distance you could hear the commotion from the Senior Splash, all those squeals of the high school girls, in bathing suits sometimes covered by T-shirts, as people paid to immerse them in water, and you could smell the flour sizzling in oil from the fried-dough booth run by the Mormons in their only public fund-raiser all year. The couple in their finery had mounted the air in set increments as the other riders were ushered off so that the bride and groom were at last alone, those nameless two, and the operator, with his tattoo and his pot belly and his scowl, hardly the type to encourage whimsy, cranked up the machine and allowed them to go round and round and round, while on the ground a crowd of admirers stood, clapping each time the cart reached the top and then plunged downward.

  The Jones Library posted a sign inviting the public to join in on a walk—a “light-hearted springtime excursion”—to Emily Dickinson’s grave, held every year on the Saturday nearest the fifteenth of May, the day on which the poet died in 1886. Everyone is encouraged to bring a flower to place on her grave and a Dickinson poem to read.

  In late May all the graduations took place, a gushing wave of parties and anguished good-byes. As always, the town girded for the students’ departure, sad and glad to see them leave, showing the odd mix of ingratiation and contempt found in most tourist economies.

  It is the worst time of year for the police: midnight crowds throng the center of town, each collective entity so massive that human gridlock occurs. One year, newspapers as far away as Boston were filled with dire stories about traffic on Route 9 and the impossibility of finding lodgings all the way from Greenfield, near the Vermont border, to Hartford, across the state line in Connecticut.

  In May 1992 there weren’t any demonstrations, but often there are. The police face the pressure of providing special escorts for celebrity speakers and celebrity parents. Captain Scherpa has provided security for Geraldine Ferraro and Johnny Carson. One time he guarded Hubert Humphrey at breakfast, who asked the officer to join him. He’s done a couple of favors for Coretta King, and he is a favorite of the Dalai Lama, who appreciates the Karmic rightness of the officer’s last name: In Tibet the same name, spelled Sherpa, denotes a skilled mountain climber: ‘‘He thinks I’m some kind of monk.” The offspring of Winnie Mandela, Princess Grace, Bob Dylan, Linda Ellerbee, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and Richard Nixon have been enrolled at the various colleges at various times. Just when the townspeople finally acknowledged that they had been won over by the students, charmed if not by their music then by their vitality, they disappeared, leaving in their wake a strange emptiness.

  It was as if they’d never really existed, and Amherst was left to itself.

  By Memorial Day Amherst could be mistaken for almost any small town, almost anywhere. A parade was held in which Scouts and Legionnaires marched from the center of town to Memorial Pool at the high school and assembled on the now-green grass for a ceremony with all the classic ingredients of patriotic music, windy speeches, and a gunfire salute. For years the spectacle has been enhanced by a teacher from Wildwood Elementary School, slim and brown-haired, dressed in red, white, and blue with a flag pin on her blazer, who escorts her first-grade class on a day when school is not even in session so that they can lend their thin, childish presence to the tribute to the war dead.

  As usual, the Friday evening following Memorial Day saw the spring dinner at the South Congregational Church on the South Amherst Common. For more than half a century the menu has not varied: steamed asparagus grown locally in Hadley (considered by gourmands the best in the world), chicken salad, pickles, rolls, chips, and shortcake with berries. In June, the same newspapers that couldn’t get enough of hypothermia the previous winter now couldn’t get enough of rhubarb. Using sympathy-ploy headlines, calling it “The Cinderella of the Garden,” papers urged their readers to delight in this potassium-rich fibrous stalk, to cook it with sugar and ginger and dried figs and apricots and to turn it into soup and chutney and tarts. At the solstice, the evenings lasted until almost nine at night. The children gathered at Mill River or Kiwanis Park or Ziomek Field. The yelps of the college students as they departed from town with their diplomas were replaced by the sounds of summer in a small town: mowers going, hammers pounding, bikes zooming, balls against bats, whoops, cheers, and boos—and, of course, this being Amherst, occasional outbursts of ‘‘Deft!’’

  Teenagers headed to Silver Bridge up in Leverett and leapt off into the deep part, challenging themselves to miss the hard flat wet rocks that could kill them, or they went to Puffer’s Pond, where the shadowed surface could hide a swimmer beneath its depths and had a menace easy to ignore amid the squeals of small children and the towels spread out like faded postage stamps in one of Lucia’s albums. Sometimes up in North Amherst on a certain country road the most unearthly sound could be heard emanating from an otherwise-plain house: the mournful sighs, the rousing fillips, and the heavy-lidded schmoozing of Archie Schepp, jazz man, practicing the sax.

  It was a slow season for growing that summer, but even in a year with perfect conditions the local corn is never ready on the Fourth, although everyone is sure it used to be. Many days were damp and sullen, and as a result the corn was especially late and the tomatoes came in tough and tasteless. In summer 1992 in the Pioneer Valley, the hours moved forward at a measured sluggish pace. Time was fat like a cow basking in the sun.

  2

  Late Night When the Phone Rang

  Jen and Jamila, who had already been selected as co-captains of the Hurricanes for the upcoming season, passed through the months of June and July and August in an uneasy truce, mostly apart from each other except for an Amateur Athletic Union event in Clovis, New Mexico. Although they felt emotionally distant from each other, they were cordial, and their team did well. During the final three years that Jen and Jamila were members of the Central Mass Cougars, an all-star team composed of high school players, the team finished fourth, second, and again second in the nation.

  They returned home from AAU that year excited, filled with harrowing stories about how they had survived tornadoes and lightning and hail. The most overtly negative moment in the ten days did not involve the two friends, but rather Jamila’s father, who, in search of a margarita to celebrate the team’s triumph, went to a place called Kelley’s; the guy collecting the cover charge, consulting with a partner, told the tall black novelist (a former Rhodes scholar who had played basketball while at Oxford, the winner of two PEN/Faulkner awards and a MacArthur fellowship) that he would not be served unless he removed his hat with the X in front.

  Kelley’s suddenly had a dress code.

  In an article he later wrote about the incident in McCall’s magazine, John Wideman said he’d thought of teasing them out of their stand with a show of humor: “‘Hey, Spike Lee. That hat you gave me on the set of the Malcolm movie in Cairo ain’t legal in Clovis.’” He thought of giving them a quick history lesson: “You probably don’t know much about Malcolm. The incredible metamorphoses of his thinking, his soul. By the time he was assassinated he wasn’t a racist, didn’t advocate violence. He was trying to make sense of America’s history, free himself, free us from the crippling legacy of race hatred and oppression.’’

  The writer was pulled back from a con
frontation by the image of the girls’ faces: “Girls of all colors, sizes, shapes, gritty kids bonding through hard clean competition.’’ He passed on Kelley’s.

  When Jamila, the youngest of three children, was born in Denver in 1975, the doctors did not think she would live. Judy Wideman’s pregnancy was compromised by a condition called placenta previa, which had necessitated a premature birth for Jamila by cesarean section, later described as a “long and bloody” ordeal by Jamila’s father in Brothers and Keepers (a nonfiction meditation about his brother who is serving a life sentence for a murder committed during an armed robbery).

  Her father wrote about how Jamila had been kept alive in the preemie ward, a room “full of tiny, naked, wrinkled infants, each enclosed in a glass cage. Festooned with tubes and needles, they looked less like babies than some ancient, shrunken little men and women, prisoners gathered for some bizarre reason to die together under the sizzling lights.’’

  [Jamila’s] arms and legs were thinner than my thinnest finger. . . . Each time she received an injection or had her veins probed for an I.V., Jamila would holler as if she’d received the final insult, as if after all the willpower she’d expended enduring the pain and discomfort of birth, no one had anything better to do than jab her one more time. What made her cries even harder to bear was their tininess. In my mind her cries rocked the foundations of the universe. . . . In fact, the high-pitched squeaks were barely audible a few feet from her glass cage. You could see them better than hear them because the effort of producing each cry wracked her body.

  Eventually she would grow into a slender five feet, six inches and 130 pounds. She had distinctive curly eyelashes, framing eyes that appeared to look inward and outward with the same clear vision. On the court, the bones on her narrow sculpted face functioned like a flag, demanding to be heeded. Her father has written that her name means “beautiful” in Arabic: “Not so much outer good looks as inner peace, harmony. At least that’s what I’ve been told. Neither Judy nor I knew the significance of the name when we chose it. We just liked the sound. It turns out to fit perfectly.”