In These Girls, Hope Is a Muscle Page 7
Rita Powell was not a wealthy person, but she has been known all her life for her intensity. “Even when she was a baby, when she wanted something, nothing got in her way. The first time she learned to use a cup, it was cupcupcup all day long,” said her mother, Anne Teschner.
And this summer she wanted nothing so much as to spend a week at a basketball camp in the eastern part of the state run by a former center for the Boston Celtics that she’d heard about from Jan Klenowski, a point guard on the junior varsity. She wrote away for a brochure and memorized it, not just the words, but also the glossy picture, a shot of the floor of the gym, showing just the feet and the hands of someone dribbling a ball on the shiny hardwood. There were four sets of Puma-clad feet (plus legs) in all, black ones and white ones, and the soft focus made it hard to know for certain whether they belonged to males or females. “Play ball,” it said, “. . . with Dave Cowens and friends at the 20th Annual Dave Cowens Basketball School.” The camp commenced on a Sunday at 1 P.M. and ended the following Saturday with a tournament. Most days followed the same schedule:
7:15 A.M. wake-up
8:00 A.M. breakfast
9:00 A.M. roll call
9:05 A.M. lecture/demonstration
9:35 A.M. calisthenics/stretching
9:50 A.M. practice/drill stations/3 on 3
10:45 A.M. games/free throws
12:00 P.M. lunch
1:15 P.M. roll call
1:20 P.M. lecture/demonstration
2:00 P.M. calisthenics/stretching
2:15 P.M. practice/drill stations/3 on 3
3:00 P.M. games/free throws
4:20 P.M. swimming/free time
5:00 P.M. dinner
6:20 P.M. calisthenics/stretching
6:30 P.M. practice/drill stations/3 on 3
8:30 P.M. canteen opens, movies/free time
9:45 P.M. canteen closes
10:00 P.M. settle down and relax
The only impediment to Rita’s plan was the price: three hundred and ninety-five dollars for a resident camper.
So, right after the loss to Hamp, she set about earning money. From eight until eleven in the morning every Sunday, she could be seen outside Saint Brigid’s Catholic Church with its formal Italianate exterior (named for the saint who’d founded Ireland’s first nunnery), selling the Springfield Union, the Boston Globe, and the New York Times. She arrived as bundled up as her wares. “I wore, oh my God, many clothes. Two pairs of long johns.” Early spring can be just as cold as winter, with the added bonus that the air is often filled with the fine dust that comes from previously frozen mud. Her fingers fumbled over the freezing metal coins. “Oh my God.”
Rita Powell owned the innate good cheer that seems to attach to people who can sing. She had a habit of doodling the air with random bits of music that ranged from children’s songs on an old Sara Pirtle tape to the kinds of complicated music she sings in chorale, including the crazy mélange of pitches and rhythms, the calculated discordance and odd rests of Peter Schickele’s After Spring Sunset. But her baby-sitting job for three little boys five and under who fought all the time managed to dent those high spirits. “They annoyed me, they jumped on me, they would never do anything constructive like go for a walk.” They agreed about nothing except that girls are yucky, an opinion they proffered to Rita with irritating frequency. “Oh my God, the way they fought!”
Rita worked for her uncle who made Birch Hill Country Foods barbecue sauce. She cut up onions, mounds and mounds of them: “Oh my God, many onions.”
Rita was a thrifty sort. She disapproved of how juniors and seniors always spend a fortune renting limousines to go to the prom; when she accepted an invitation to a dance, she did not buy a new dress but instead found a reasonably priced vintage dress that had a strapless peach-colored bodice connected to a drapey black floor-length skirt.
Slowly the money began to accumulate—twenty dollars on Sunday mornings, five dollars an hour with the kids, fifty for a couple of days of onions.
When she finally got to Dave Cowen’s camp, she loved it. Her goal at the camp was to be “just like Jen Pariseau, totally outgoing” and to meet everybody there by the end of the week, which she managed to do. Because she was so busy, she could not find a spare moment to write in the journals she normally kept so faithfully, those dozen or so paper- and clothbound books, with covers that catch her fancy. These are her earthly treasures, and she keeps them in plain view on her bookcase, with full faith that neither of her parents would ever read them. “That would be too violating,” she says, using a favorite word of the Hurricanes that has random (another favorite word) applications, referring to anything from true violations to mere annoyances, like unmatched socks or the wrong flavor cereal. Rita has a tradition of writing the same faintly formal words on the second to the last page of each volume: “As is my custom, I leave this last page blank that my writing may never cease . . .”
In these books she confided about her boyfriends, and her teammates, and her parents—especially if they’d had a fight or they wouldn’t let her do something—and her deepest ambitions, such as how she hopes to be either the “first female president” or a “weird reclusive herbalist.” She did manage to dash off one note to her parents:
Hey Guys!
How you doin’? I’m having a ball! The basketball is excellent! My team—Stanford—is three and one. I’m averaging eight points a game. I am playing low post which is fun! I am also meeting nine million people so I am always busy! One of my best friends here is Megan Cowens—she’s really funny. Last night, this other girl—Tasha—taught all of us to sing Lean on Me in harmony sort of. There’s this kid named Ben who says “In like Flynn” like you, Mom. There’s Monika who’ll be an eighth grader and who’s already six feet tall (she’s on my team). There’s Kristi who wears a bun on top of her head while she plays and talks with me in a made up language. Well, anyhow, if I kept talking about everyone I met I’d be here forever. I got your letter delivered to my room, and I got a letter from Megan Carpenter. Well, guys, I have to shower so I’ll catch you later. Bye.
Love,
Rita.
Lucia Maraniss also had a plan.
All her life Lucia had loved to draw. She possessed a dissecting eye, often studying what it is precisely that makes up an appearance. Coach Moyer, for instance, had spindly legs and thick graying brown hair that flopped over his head in a youthful fringe. She noticed people’s gestures and their tics. Whenever Coach Moyer told a joke, you had to laugh, because there would be a pause when his face flooded with expectation. The bluish gray eyes joined yours; time stopped while he awaited a response. He always looked neat to her, almost as if he were hanging from a coat hanger. It had something to do with the boxy elongated head on top of a torso with a similar configuration. The sense he gave of being wide as well as tall had nothing to do with excess girth; it came from the shoulders and from the lips, which stretched across the bottom of his face in a narrow band, giving him easy access to expressions of distractedness, deep thought, or disapproval. One time, Patri Abad, a girl who used to be on the team but had moved away (dear Patri, kind, talented, beautiful Patri stuck now in Chicago rather than here in Amherst where she belonged) had called him Rectangle Man, but not, of course, to his face.
To his face he was Coach, Coach Moyer, and the Big Guy.
One day Lucia took her art utensils and some paper and some tiny scraps of wallpaper and decided to create what was not so much a letter as a work of art to send to her friend Patri in Chicago. She planned to take the paper and cut it into stampsized squares to create a border around the rectangle of words.
Lucia adored Patri’s family. She had an older brother, Tony, and two younger brothers, Jose and Reggie. Patri’s mother, Ilene, was Puerto Rican, her father was Cuban, and her stepfather (with whom her mother had had Reggie) was black. Lucia’s mother, Gigi Kaeser, who
worked as a preschool teacher and a photographer, was considering asking them to be part of a project that she planned to entitle “(✓) Other: Portraits of Multiracial Families.”
The team needed Patri. It was that simple. Everyone wanted her back in town. She was the one teammate everyone agreed about: She was funny, she was energetic, she defused tensions simply by existing. No matter what she did or said, she made you laugh. In town at the Pub for a meal, she would amuse her dining companions by taking a tomato slice and turning it into a smiley face. Once on a car trip with her teammates Patri had tried to warn the car alongside them that the cap was off their gas tank. She kept twisting her hand back and forth. With everyone laughing, Jen had finally begged her to stop: “The guy thinks you’re telling him to feel up his wife.” So she stopped, and then she and Kathleen Poe, the driver, engaged in another highway trick. Kathleen laid her head down on the driver’s side, pretending to be asleep, while Patri steered.
Patri was light, Patri was harmony, Patri was a riot, Patri was a necessary component to the success of the upcoming season.
Lucia wrote:
Patri,
You should always remember to follow your dreams. Do you remember when we were playing basketball outside at Amherst College, and you told me what you wanted to do in the future? You should definitely open up a five-story nightclub place with different music on every floor, after you become a biologist. Then after that maybe you’ll have a few kids. But after that, you should look me up (I’m going to be a college professor in England) and we’ll take a trip together or something.
Patri, I will always remember you as one of the wisest, most caring and compassionate people I’ve ever met. I’m going to miss you very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very much . . .
♥ always from your buddy: Lucia.
Kim Warner also had a secret strategy.
“Mom, can I borrow the car?”
“Where are you going?”
“Out.”
“Just out?”
“Sort of.”
“Ballpark figure when you’ll get back?”
“Not late.”
‘‘Be careful. I know, everyone says this is Amherst, nothing bad ever happens here, but remember what happened at the mall.”
Sue Warner also worked two nights a week at a department store at the Hadley Mall. It was there in December 1989, in an act of violence that did much to erode the sense of security, even complacency, in the community, that the body of a young woman who had been shopping for the holidays was discovered in her car, stabbed repeatedly, a day after her sorority sisters at the university had reported her missing. For months afterward, female employees of the store where Sue Warner worked would not venture into the parking lot at night except in a group.
“Mom, don’t worry, I’ll be careful.”
Kim took the keys to the 1986 Dodge Lancer, and sliding into the driver’s seat, she thought about the upcoming season.
Kim was going to be a senior in the fall. Most seniors hope that this will be the year, at last, to be a starter, but Kim had no such fantasies.
Her goal was simply to be part of a steady rotation off the bench, to be someone her teammates could count on when they needed fresh oxygen the most. Sometimes even that ambition, as modest as it might seem to some, struck her as impossible. All summer she could not shake the feelings of disappointment that had dogged her after that last game of the 1992 season.
The memory was alive and writhing, a fish that she wished she could just throw back in the river.
She had arrived home that night after the final game, said good night to her mother, and waited for the profound quiet of sleep to seep through the house; then, gliding silently out of bed and down the hall, she went into the bathroom, and with a light touch of her hand she whispered the light on.
She forced herself to gaze in the mirror.
Once again she’d let the team down.
With only thirty seconds to go against Hamp, Coach had given her the signal to join the action.
“Whatever you do, Kim, don’t get called for a foul.”
She had been nursing an ankle injury, and he didn’t want her to get hurt again.
She’d walked out onto the floor, with the big C for Cathedral painted in the middle, and within seconds she was elbowed by the Blue Devils’ Lauren Demski (called “Truck” and “the Brute” and “Space Eater” by the Hurricanes, because of her fearsome style). She fell on the floor, and while she was lying there outstretched and helpless, a crab on its back, the ref called a foul. On Kim.
Later, in the locker room, Kim lied.
“God, Kim, were you hurt?” asked one teammate. “Are you okay?” another inquired.
“I’m fine,” she told them, “nothing happened.” And on the bus ride back to Amherst she’d been grateful to the darkness for camouflaging the discoloration all over the inside of her chin.
But examined in the bright light of her own bathroom, which her mother had decorated with tulip wallpaper and lace curtains, the bruise was more than “nothing”: It was huge and blue and swollen, a relief map of every time she failed to deliver on the court, every time she froze in the paint and missed a shot and disappointed Jen and Jamila and especially Kathleen Poe, the Hurricane she had known the longest, a senior who hoped to be a forward starter. The students in Amherst’s public schools get out early on Wednesdays, and during grade school they’d spent every Wednesday afternoon together. She knew all kinds of stray information about Kathleen’s past, including that she used to be a pickle fanatic, able to eat an entire jar in one sitting.
Coach Moyer had given me a million chances to prove I want to be a part of the team. All he asked was that I not foul. When we were down by twenty he urged us: “Let’s get this within twelve points, not for the fans, but for you guys.”
Kim had looked at herself in the mirror. Her face had character and dignity, with a balanced purity to the features, but was it a face that could mean business?
She’d tightened her lips. All along her style had been to avoid contact, to put up jump shots instead of driving. But now she vowed:
I’m not going to be a passive player forever.
Then late that night she’d thrust the chin upward, as much of a salute as if she’d raised both fists:
NO MORE!
Five feet, ten inches tall with broad shoulders and plenty of upper-arm strength, she looked like a natural.
The youngest child in a family of four, she was brought up by her mother, Sue Warner. As far back as Kim could remember, her mother had worked two jobs. Her full-time job was as a secretary in personnel at the university. Because of budget cuts authorized by the state legislature in Boston, Kim’s mother, like everyone else, had not received a raise in four years. Morale was low, and the feelings of disgruntlement had had a trickle-down effect on the entire Amherst community. In the eighties, real estate and faith in the future had been the drugs of choice in Amherst. It was a time of view, view, view—dream houses sprouting up all over town, with their cedar exteriors and Jenn-Aire stoves and Corian counters. But as the university goes, so goes Amherst; now the university was in a cut-your-losses mentality, and so was the whole town. Parts of the campus were in a state of shocking disrepair: leaking ceilings, walls with holes, exposed sockets, and that most potent sign of institutional depression, broken clocks. One faculty member dubbed it the “University of Dead Lightbulbs,” adding that this was not a reference to the students. Lacking the money for niceties, one department served graduating students and their parents an official precommencement breakfast consisting of Dunkin’ Donuts on paper plates with a Christmas theme. Once in a while, at least at the beginning of all the belt-tightening, veteran staffers put on brave faces and drew a comparison between the school and the land, praising the pruning, talking about how it is possible to over
plant and how an interval of fallowness often precedes the richest crops.
The children in Kim’s family are all exactly two years apart. The oldest two are married, and the Hurricanes often speculated, since Kim had the most serious ongoing relationship with a boy, that she might be the first Hurricane to get married. She was certainly the most domestically inclined. She was the one Coach Moyer would ask to sew patches onto the uniforms, and she brought the best homemade chocolate chip and sugar cookies to practices. She expected to go to one of the state colleges, though not to U Mass, which she thought was too big. After she graduated, she wanted to work with children, to be “someone special” for them, the same way Ms. Bouley at Crocker Farm Elementary School had been there for her when Kim was in kindergarten and she would get to leave her regular class for special time in Ms. Bouley’s Resource Room. It wasn’t because Kim was hyper or disruptive; in fact her problem was the opposite. She was too quiet, steeped in a profound silence, at least in public. Ms. Bouley has always saved a small school photo showing Kim in a jumper with a Winnie the Pooh theme, which Kim gave to her as a gift; in Ms. Bouley’s experience as a teacher, students were glad to give you a photo if you asked, but only a few offered, and those she always saved. Kim had been told that when she was ready to student-teach, she had a classroom waiting.
Kim had taken her first baby-sitting jobs in the fifth grade. When she was fifteen she went to town hall and got a permit to work at Cushman’s General Store in North Amherst for twenty hours a week.
Kim’s father had left the family when she was nine, and she did not see him from fourth through eighth grade.
“One night he happened to be back in Amherst, and he called. I was the one who answered the phone, and I dropped it. My mom picked it up, and he must have asked if he could visit because she said, ‘I don’t know. Let me ask them.’”