In These Girls, Hope Is a Muscle Read online

  She stood out from the rest of her teammates as the most experimental and the most independent. She thought it was “sort of funny” when someone joked that in the yearbook under her name, instead of saying “Most likely to succeed,” it should say “Most likely to.”

  Kristin lived with her stepfather and mother, who worked as a computer consultant in the department of engineering at the university, in a low-key, behind-the-scenes job that helped set the stage for the more public activities.

  Kristin’s stepfather had been previously married to Kristin’s stepmother, and the marital realignment resulted in a circumstance in which their daughter from that first union was now Kristin’s double stepsister.

  The house was in a perpetual state of construction; her step­father, Dale Houle, earned his living as a contractor, and an unsung occupational hazard of his line of work is that your house gets worked on last. He was fond of saying the problem is always one of time and money: Either you have the time and no money, or you have the money and no time. As a result, the stairs had makeshift treads and no risers, the flooring had yet to be installed in the living room, and the siding was missing from the front of the house, so it was covered with flaps of Tyvek house wrap to protect the plywood from the elements. A wood-burning stove in the dining area was the sole source of heat, and Kristin used to like to curl up with her textbooks next to it to do her homework. She told her friends to come to the side door: “The front door will eventually be usable,” but for now there was a mattress propped up against it.

  Her friends were often surprised to learn that she kept her room as organized as she did. “It may look cluttered, but everything has its place.’’ Her walls were covered with an assortment of Absolut ads, which she liked because they were so “you know, like, effective.’’ Her shelves contained a Coca-Cola bottle filled with the dried petals from the roses her father had given her on her birthday and a troll doll dressed in a surgeon’s outfit. At first she’d wanted to be a lawyer. “Ever since she learned the Constitution in the eighth grade, we were dead,” said her mother. But once she’d started getting 98s in biology, she gravitated toward medicine. At fifteen she’d volunteered at a local hospital and had the opportunity to witness an operation: Part of a woman’s infected colon had been removed. All those glistening innards! Not only did medicine strike her as fascinating, but its air of certainty was also deeply pleasing. She wanted when she grew up not to marry somebody who was rich but to be “somebody rich.” Like Jen (rule eight: NEVER GIVE ALL OF YOURSELF TO ANYONE), she believed you should never count on anybody but yourself.

  She had delicate light skin that was quick to flush under the exertion of a fierce game. Sometimes her teammates called her “Bad News” and “Graceless” (“Grace” for short), misinterpreting her tenacity as clumsiness. They also called her “Jolly” and “Jolly Green.” Kristin was five feet, ten and a half inches; of all the Hurricanes, only Jonesbones (five-eleven) was taller.

  On the court she saw herself as a tiger or a gorilla, all stealth and snarl and strength. She had, when pressured, a style that could be just as fearsome as those Blue Devils, and if someone had called her “Truck” or “Brute,” she would have said, “Hey, great.”

  She knew she would never be as good as the other senior starters, Jen and Jamila and Kathleen Poe, the forward who could barely scrape herself off the floor at Cathedral High School during that last game of the 1992 season.

  She would never get their minutes and she would never get their points.

  Her job was to make her friends look good.

  She didn’t have an ego problem; it was fine by her to set the stage for their more glamorous moments.

  Her concern was mostly how to be more like Jamila, not so much in her skills as in her spirit. Where do you find it, that peculiar supply of adrenaline and cunning, that makes you keep going, going, going?

  Sometimes as she stood in McDonald’s during her eighteenth summer, dressed in that painfully ill-fitting uniform with the ludicrous hat, surprised by how eager she was for fall and for basketball and even for Coach Moyer’s jokes, she felt like screaming at the French fries as she immersed them in their wire basket in a vat of hot oil, or at the fish fillets as they crisped up, or at those all-beef patties spitting grease on the grill, and most of all at herself: “Feel it! Feel the fire!”

  Coach Moyer folded his arms in front of him. His office, which faced an alley, had one big window and an array of coaching mementos. He had a habit of writing his name in big block letters on objects such as the phone book, a holdover from his childhood when his mother struggled to supply him with one of everything but made it clear that lost or misplaced items would not be replaced. He also had a habit of reflexive generosity on a modest scale, like an ancient maiden aunt dispensing mints or a nickel. You couldn’t show up in his guidance office without being shown a press clipping touting the success of a former Amherst athlete or told about a new bumper sticker (“Did you see the one that says COMPOST HAPPENS?”)

  “How’s senior year so far?”

  “Great.”

  “Grades from last semester?”

  “They’re up there.”

  “What colleges are you thinking about?”

  “I’m applying to the premed program at Holy Cross.”

  “What are your goals this season?”

  “I am really looking forward to playing this year.”

  “I see you as my starting center.” His plan was to start with Kristin, to have her sprint off the line and push the other center off the block. He wanted to keep her in for the first five minutes of every game, let her set the tone, and then when she needed a break, he’d sub with a younger kid like Jonesbones, whom he thought of as Mother Teresa with a hard drive to the basket. “We need your toughness and determination. I’m going to need you at every practice. You know, it’s a big commitment. I understand you had a pretty social summer. I hope you’re not partying a lot.”

  “Mr. Moyer, I’m not going to, like, mislead you or anything. When the season’s not happening, I’m going to go out with my friends. But during the season, I’m, like, totally psyched. All my social friends understand that basketball comes first. The ones who really like to party drop me off at tryouts in November and they say, ‘See you in March.’”

  “I’m glad to hear it. Let’s make this a great year.”

  “No problem, Mr. Moyer. I’m not going to neg out on you.”

  Fall that year did neg out. Many of the leaves were slow to peak, and then, whipped by the wind, they died before their time. The cold settled in mean and early. The Christmas tree farms, with their weathered signs that said BLUE SPRUCE, WHITE SPRUCE, SCOTCH PINE were open for tagging. Provident shoppers chose their trees early to get the ideal fatness and height; otherwise, you had to wait in line in the cold down at Atkins Farm & Fruit Bowl in deep South Amherst or at the Boy Scouts’ stand in the center of town.

  In October the leaves rusted, they rustled, and they fell. The rusting caused the usual alarm, especially among newcomers to the area who called Bob Pariseau, director of water resources, to complain about the color of the water from the tap. In that strong low voice of his, made oddly stronger and more commanding because of its hesitancy, he patiently explained that the leaves steeped like tea in the reservoir: “There’s nothing to worry about. It happens every fall; it won’t hurt you. A new filtration system will probably clear up the problem in the future.’’

  On Halloween the children dressed as witches and skeletons, although one boy threw on a sheet and went as the ghost of the Boston Red Sox. Some college students stole pumpkins off the residential porches of stately old houses on Lincoln Avenue only to return them, several days later, carved and leering. Most homeowners thought it was funny, the first time.

  The papers published the first of what is always an onslaught of features about seasonal affective disorder (SAD) syndrome, warn
ing about what happens to sunlight-energized people when they are deprived of it: lethargy, depression, even suicide. By the end of the month the trees were bare except for the oaks, the last to turn, still red in a gray and brown world.

  “Welcome, hi, come on in.” The Big Guy stood outside the door to the guidance office, welcoming the press, looking like a bouncer with a heart of gold.

  It was a big day.

  Jamila was about to announce that after much consideration, with the University of Connecticut running a close second, she had decided to go to Stanford, where she had been offered a full scholarship. The Stanford Cardinal were the defending Division 1 champions.

  Coach Moyer was expansive, proprietary.

  The presence of the media transformed the drab anteroom outside his office—where kids often studied, or pretended to, or looked at college catalogues and dreamed of futures with dormitories and no curfews—into a jostling mecca. Standing at least one if not two heads above most of the gathering, Coach Moyer rallied to the cake and carnival. For the press, too, it was a happy moment: High School Athlete Makes Good.

  Photographers jockeyed for the perfect angle for their pictures, and the pencil press scribbled Jamila’s quotes and their own impressions on narrow pads of paper: confident, composed, joyful, just like on the court.

  Coach Moyer joked about how the real announcement today was that Jamila had decided to ‘‘forgo her first year of college to stay for a record seventh year at Amherst.”

  Her teammates looked on, applauding their friend, peering at the cameras.

  Jen joined the appreciative reaction when Jamila said: “The truth is I couldn’t bear the thought of never wearing the Hurricane colors of maroon and white after this year, so the closest match I could find was cardinal and white.”

  And when Jamila thanked a number of people for their support, especially her “best friend, Jen,” the wide grin on Jen’s face was a cover for even deeper feelings. From Jen’s point of view, the verbal nod, buried in the hot lights and the whir of the cameras, lost to most people amid the outpouring of congratulations, was like one of those random chimneys in the woods. It showed that something sturdy had endured the onslaught. She felt fortified.

  Coach Moyer, with his jocular style (“If people from Poland are called Poles, what do you call people from Holland?”) and ranging frame, long-legged and short-waisted in the classic manner of male basketball players, had come to Western Massachusetts within weeks of his graduation from Lafayette College in Pennsylvania, moving to the hometown of his bride, Betsy Rodgers, a graduate of Amherst High (class of 1965) and of U Mass. As time went on, he had developed the domesticated swagger of a small-town mayor. Abroad in Amherst, at Rafters (the sports bar near the university) or at dinner in town or at the Hampshire Fitness Club during his off season, he was expected to respond to greetings with the latest local sports information about who was playing, at which school or gym, and when: “Boys. Chicopee Comp. Tuesday night.” “Girls. At Feiker at Hamp. Thursday.”

  His first job in the valley was as a stockboy in 1972 at the old Zayre’s, where Stop & Shop is now. After he’d been on the job a couple of weeks and made a little over a hundred dollars, he and his wife got in their VW bug and drove to Philadelphia, where he made good on a debt to his old high school coach.

  “Hey, I wasn’t expecting to see this again,” Harry Silcox had said, touched that the kid remembered.

  “It’s yours,” Moyer had replied, “and you deserve to get it back. Thanks.”

  Coach Silcox had talked Ron Moyer out of going to Temple, where he had signed a letter of intent. Although Silcox was himself a Temple grad, and it would have been a plum to send a kid along to his school, Silcox thought it was too close to home, too close to the possibility of peer trouble, and through a series of magic phone calls, he’d been able to get Moyer accepted at Lafayette on a full scholarship. The only hitch was the one-hundred-dollar damage deposit required of all incoming freshmen; it was that fee that Ron Moyer returned to his old mentor.

  The life Ron Moyer had created for himself in the valley could not have been much more different from the one he’d left behind. The broad outlines of the story he shared readily: youngest of four children, single mom, saved by a coach. It could be inferred that his mother had been an unusually strong person and that perhaps his delight in coaching the girls at Amherst was connected to the wish to make them strong in her mode.

  But whenever he was caught in one of those contemplative moods that sprang up like the first cold clamp of frost, he readily acknowledged a more complicated, less sanguine version of the past. His mother had been dealt a bad hand. She was, in the fifties, that most dicey of beings, a woman alone without any reasonable means of support, well before the days of peppy phrases like “single mom” and “alternative parenting styles” to describe circumstances that are anything but peppy or stylish.

  What strength she had came from wielding her weakness like a weapon.

  He could easily summon the house where he’d grown up, and he recalled the strange dispossessed feeling of living in a building in which every room, even the garage, was rented out. He could see Edna (when had he stopped referring to her as “Mother”?)—large, looming, with that lost look in her eyes, counting the rent. This was her only income, and since she never reported it, she was always certain the government was about to arrest her at any minute. Some of the tenants were short-timers, but others stayed on for years, like poor Mrs. Helen McClosky, an alcoholic who appeared to have no family and whom he called “Aunt Helen.” Ron had been given a space in the basement, roped off by a curtain, next to the furnace, as his room.

  He had been a save-the-marriage baby who did save it until he was about three, when his father left, in the company of another woman, for Florida, sunshine, and golf, bequeathing Edna the baby, a ten-year-old daughter, and two teenaged sons—and the row house, about which Ron Moyer always had one question: “Who owns the middle wall?”

  Edna had nursed the fantasy that her husband would return. She’d never taken the names Mr. and Mrs. James R. Moyer off the mailbox. She called all the boys Jim, not just the oldest son, whose name really was Jim. Bill was Jim-Bill; Ron, Jim-Ron. When he got to be a teenager he sometimes called her “Jim-Mom,” and he introduced his sister as Jim-Marion. Edna did not seem to mind. He was known as the humorist in the family. It had started inadvertently when he was seven; he and his mother were taking the train to the welfare department, and he saw a sign advertising suburban lots for sale. “Lots of what?” he had asked because he really didn’t get it, but after that his wit was never questioned.

  His mother had lived her life in fear that one day a big car or truck was going to come and possess the house.

  You couldn’t blame her for not knowing how to manage. Her own mother had died when she was in the eighth grade, and she’d been forced to leave school in the ninth to take care of her father, who committed suicide when she was fifteen. She married when she was eighteen. James Moyer Sr. came from a big family—eleven siblings, mostly no-counts, gamblers, two-bit crooks, even prostitutes. Ron’s brother Bill remembered once going to one of those sideshows held beneath the old Steele Pier at Atlantic City and paying money to see the Frozen Lady, a skinny dark-haired woman with blue lips wearing just a bikini beneath a slab of ice, only to be overtaken by a sudden jolt of recognition. Cousin June!

  Edna had two passions: the gravelly voice of Arthur Godfrey on the radio and bingo, which she played at least once a week. She died at the age of seventy-five after suffering a heart attack in the middle of a phone call about bingo. On the way to her death there had been many illnesses, some real, some imagined, all disabling. She was hospitalized for catatonia and other psychological disorders. One time she became distraught because she was sure that the blood in her body was circulating in the wrong direction.

  There had been one magazine in the house, Reader’s Diges
t. As a boy, Coach Moyer took the It Pays to Enrich Your Word Power section seriously and increased his by reading it, sprinkling his current conversations with oddly erudite words, like erudite. There had been a couple of show books by Ellery Queen and also a set of encyclopedias.

  His mother wore too much makeup; she did everything in excess. Her iced tea contained more sugar than liquid. Like many people for whom time proceeds forward without many other high points, the holidays swelled up with meaning. All year long whenever she’d had any discretionary income, she invested in cans of pumpkin for the making of her famous pumpkin pie. “I am famous,” she would tell people in her one moment of unimpeded imperiousness, “for my pumpkin pie.” There’d been a cupboard in the kitchen that she would quietly stock all year long with supplies intended only for Thanksgiving and Christmas, days at last worth marking and heralding and celebrating.

  There were few visitors to the house, mostly bill collectors and Jehovah’s Witnesses who sat in the living room for hours reading passages from the Bible and the Watchtower pamphlets. It was a two-way street: She was as grateful for their company as they were for an audience. “Now let’s go over some of the Scriptures that prove Judgment Day is upon us,” the sincere visitor would say, and Edna, perched on a chair in her parlor, would lean over eagerly and say, “But first may I sweeten your tea?”

  There’d been only one rule in his house when he was growing up: You can do whatever you want as long as the police don’t bring you home. When the children were grown and on their own, she explained, “I just always assumed that eventually you would get tired and have to come home.” When he was in high school there was a place where you could bowl all night for five dollars. He was always surprised when he asked his pals to join him, and they’d say they had to ask their parents. “What’s the matter? Are they against bowling?”

  James Moyer had been sporadic at best about sending the required twelve dollars a week for the support of his youngest son. Ron Moyer remembered the hand-wringing scenes, the waiting for the checks, and the silence that had surrounded the mailing of the letters she sometimes sent, to no avail, to the Metro Justice Building in Dade County, Florida, asking that someone locate her husband, who she knew for a fact was living somewhere in Miami in a trailer.