In the seventies I joined a community softball league, put together by a bunch of hippies longing for baseball but determined to be counterculture about it. It was softball sprinkled with a little dope dust, but it was also my first time playing with a real ball, a ball with a life of its own. We played hard and often—dozens of us on eighteen teams, with a season running from April through October. The rules prohibited strikeouts and required each team to field at least four women at all times. We had no umpires—or more precisely, we were our own umpires. Most of the players worked in small nonprofits and collectives; long committee meetings were the rule of the day for all of us. Deciding who was safe and who was out by consensus-based discussion had a certain diabolical logic.
My team, the Wild Turkeys, was routinely at the bottom of the league. Coach Ken let anyone play, so we were heavy with beginners, many of them women. I watch the serious girl jocks in the gym today with a pang of sharp envy; mine was the last generation of American women who grew up largely not playing organized sports. Most of the men, counterculture identities notwithstanding, had played plenty of sports over the years. It was not just my first time on a team—it was my first time playing real sports with—and against—men.
The pitchers were required to help the hitter hit, a rule intended to compensate for the wildly varying levels of skill, and also to make the game more interesting—more fun. I loved the no-strikeout rule, because when I started playing softball, I wanted to get a hit more than anything. I was an average beginner, earnest and a bit erratic, but competitive enough to become a serviceable player after a few seasons. All I wanted was a hit and any kind of hit would do—that marvelous sting of bat on ball, the solid glee of watching it fly away, feeling it fly away, as though I were flying, too.
For a few seasons, I pitched for the Wild Turkeys. At least once a game I got cracked in the shin or had to throw myself to the ground to duck from a drive. Some of the men—ponytailed, beer-drinking hippies like the rest, but much more serious about sports—played community ball because it was the only game in town. They missed strikeouts, big time. They missed the umpires. And they groused, not very quietly, about the female quota. These serious men stalked to the plate with the heaviest bat slung on their shoulder, settled into a stance, gave me the evil eye, watched my slow, soft lob come in, swung with all their might—and popped up. They were easy outs, bopping nice soft ones into the shortstop’s lap, easy smacks into the glove of the grinning woman confined to center field. The strongest men, the hardest hitters, popped out inning after inning because they only wanted home runs. The women, still learning to play and happy to get any hit, made their bases on dribbling grounders to the infield. They brought each other home, laughing with the strange new calls we’d learned, the good hustle and hey batter and slide! “Lucky swing,” the men would mutter.
One day, I figured something out: I was a better player than they were.
AFTER FOUR YEARS, a back injury, and a move to a new city, I didn’t play ball in any form for years. I juggled children, jobs, and writing, and had no hands left to juggle balls. Eventually I was lifting weights again, hiking, riding my bike. I learned to dive. But Lord, I missed softball. I knew I really wasn’t good enough for the city leagues, and I thought my back was probably past the twisting and sliding of a good game … Still, I wanted that team thing, that gospel call-and-response. I wanted to be playing ball.
I started going to the Wednesday night co-ed volleyball game at the YMCA. Right away, I was back to the well-oiled muscles, damp skin, the sped-up mind of play, this time with volleyball’s own soft mantras: “Side-out, side-out!” “Back! Over!” It was a bigger ball, a smaller field, but the same fluid motion until I would lose myself in the metaphysical presence of the ball, the place where the ball might be. Falling asleep after hours of play, I watched myself watch the ball, kneeling, screaming, spreading my arms wide in an iconic plea for help. After playing for a while, I came to know in the moment of placing my body to meet the ball if I would hit it well or poorly, if I would get the sharp tang of a spike or watch it float haplessly over the net. I was back again to the long reaches, the slides—the treacherous ball, the beloved ball.
The YMCA had a lot of regulars: a guy who lifted a ton of weight for an hour before coming up to the court, a short man who carefully combed his few hairs over his pate before stepping out. There were a few women, some very good players; there were a few good men, and a vast abundance, a cornucopia, a veritable feast of pop-fly boys.
I was learning the game; I made dramatic, egregious errors sometimes. Like most of the women, I took the blame when I screwed up and was quick to apologize. It is partly that old conditioned response, the Pavlovian drool of shame women develop around sports. But I also knew when I’d made a mistake and felt the need to admit it. In contrast, in surprise, I watched the men flail about after an error, watched them swear, stomp, pound the posts, kick the ball—the offending ball—as though they’d been cheated. The joyful tumble of tackle-pile-on seemed far away from this tawdry, mean court. They didn’t love the ball the way I did—they seemed in fact to hate it. They wanted the ball, but more the way one wants revenge than cake. They had ball envy—the slicing hunger for the soft, round phallus in your hands. Your hands, and no one else’s.
It didn’t take me long to figure out that I was a better player than most of them. I wasn’t a powerful player, not at all flashy, just what I’ve come to realize is called a utility player. I made my passes, and if my spikes were rather more like gentle taps than slams, at least they were over the net.
This wasn’t the big leagues, but it was a long way from New Games. A man flies up for a hard spike and slams the ball straight into the net, so that it springs right back into his face with a sharp whack. A guy in the back court rushes forward, trying to steal the set from the woman there. She is too quick for him, and spikes the ball. But the other team is quick, too, and returns the spike, right into our back court, right where the hotshot is supposed to be, and isn’t. He’s still in the frontcourt, out of his zone, yelling at the woman: “You handed it to them, dammit. You handed it to them!”
One night when several men in a row on both teams served hard out of court, and the serve shifted in side-outs back and forth, back and forth with no volleys, I yelled, “It’s the boys’ night out!” No one got the joke except the woman setting for the other team, who smiled and rolled her eyes to heaven.
My husband used to play basketball with a bunch of other white-collar guys. One night he hobbled home, barely walking, and told me he’d hurt his ankle early in the game. None of the other players, including the two physicians, checked on him until the game was over. He sat on the bench in pain until it ended and someone was willing to drive him home. “Of course,” he explained, “if they hadn’t been playing, it would have been different.”
I began to wonder if men were just more appropriately involved than I, just more real sportsmen. Did I misunderstand? Was the vague metaphor of sport as war not metaphor at all? Sometimes I would forget the score and have to ask for it when it was my turn to serve. If a man grew overwrought, I’d say, “It’s only a game,” and they would stare at me as though I’d surrendered to the enemy just as victory was sure.
It was years before I thought to feel sorry for these guys. The men with whom I’d played softball would rather stomp off the field in disgust than pull the ball down a little and find the gaping holes in our ragged field. They didn’t seem to know how good an ordinary base hit felt. The mad spikers didn’t seem to know how fine was a lofting set, how right a high assisting pass. They never whooped with relief or joy, shouting with delight for bringing someone else on home.
One man at the Y was the champion ball-stealer—my ball, any woman’s ball. He was a bad player, aggressive but without finesse, and he would loudly point out where each woman should stand and tell us to rotate when the serve changed, as though we had never played before.
During one game we played side by si
de, and with each play he would shift toward me a few feet, too close, harshly whispering instructions under his breath and distracting me.
When I served, that girlish underhand the men disdain, it was low and sleek over the net and we had a point.
He rolled his eyes.
He set to me in the frontcourt because he had no choice. I tapped it over into the opposition’s backcourt, someone bobbled it, and we had the point.
“Well, great!” I said, for something to say.
“It would have been out if they hadn’t gone for it.”
What could I say? I didn’t hiss or sigh. I didn’t tell him to back off, I didn’t smile and agree. I just looked at him. My daughter stood on the sidelines, cheering us on, cheering everyone on equally with no concern for the score.
What could I say? Finally, toward the end of play, he raced up from the backcourt behind a woman in spike position, reached over her shoulder to steal her hit, and slammed her to the ground. She slid across the wooden floor on her elbows and landed in a heap. I was the only person on the team to move, to ask if she was all right. The offender wouldn’t even look at her. But worse, far worse—she wouldn’t look at him. She didn’t say anything at all. She just brushed herself off and took her place again.
Joanna Russ famously said years ago that men aren’t pigs—they’re fools. And they are surely fools for balls. The fleshy ball is a bullet, a spear, a knife of the patriarchy, and the team a tribe grimly fighting for the cave. They hunt; we gather. I sometimes wondered what happened when there were no women there. Did they circle the gymnasium, pissing in every corner?
I played a little softball this summer for the first time in years—six of us at a picnic playing pick-up. I was the only woman, playing with five nice guys I’ve known for a long time, and I walked onto the field with a shiver of delight. I was pretty bad at it. I hadn’t thrown a softball for a long time. But we were all pretty bad and no one was in a hurry about anything. I swung and flubbed and swung again and finally got a hit, and lumbering through the dust to first base, I remembered that it is best to be tackled. Best to be under the familiar weight of all the rest of the players than make it to home base all alone.
I STOPPED PLAYING at the YMCA. I joined a women’s game at an old community center on Monday evenings. The gym is tiny; the volleyball net stretches from wall to wall and there is barely room behind the line to serve. On hot nights there is no breeze, no air; we prop the door open and the ball shoots out now and then, disappearing into weeds. But the slapping, thwacking sounds of the game, shoes squeaking, ball thudding, is the same, it’s universal, like a repeated dream, and the music is all iconic female chant: “Mine!” “Back!” “Good set!” “Good hustle!” “Nice try.” We slap hands, slap shoulders. Often we cry: “Help!” We say help to mean the ball is too far away, help to say we can’t reach it, help to say we can’t do it alone. We say help, the way women do in need, and in love.
In that tiny gym, we are always banging into each other—everyone lunging for the ball, racing for it, longing for the ball, just so we can pass it along again as soon as it touches our hands.
Everyone except Julie, small and tidy and quick. She plays like a man. She’s always trying to steal the ball from the rest of us. She wants those big cojones all to herself.
Seattle Review, 2007
I had to quit softball when I hurt my back, and I finally quit volleyball after two dislocated thumbs and a rotator cuff injury. I still miss softball acutely and think often of those hot, loud nights in the little gym, setting and dreaming of the spike. I don’t miss co-ed pickup games.
Chemo World
SEVERAL YEARS AGO, I BEGAN WORKING ON A SMALL oncology unit at Providence Portland Medical Center in Portland, Oregon. The unit, known as 5-K, is shaped like a T and can hold twenty patients at a time. Its small size, the closely knit team, the long relationships with returning patients, felt exactly right. Nurses who come to 5-K usually stay a long time. The work is complex, challenging, intimate. To do it well requires me to be at my best. There is, too, the vague pleasure of feeling competent in a place where most people can’t imagine working. The world of cancer is a world unto itself. Double doors at each end shut out the rest of the hospital in a kind of quarantine—keeping germs out but also keeping the cancer in.
So many people in my circle of family and friends have had cancer that not to be one of them feels strange at times. On 5-K, this circle has expanded to include many strangers. Sometimes it seems as if everyone has cancer, that having cancer is normal, and we’re all just used to it. I know a lot of healthy survivors, but often the magnitude of the disease asserts itself. My mother’s early death from breast cancer raises my risk of the disease significantly, so I have a mammogram every year. Last year, the technician took my films and left me in my drafty gown. She came back a few minutes later and said I needed to go down the hall for an ultrasound as well. She couldn’t explain why; I’m sure she didn’t really know. The ultrasound technician would only tell me there was a “shadow,” and then she left with her own set of pictures. I waited in the dim, cramped room; I waited in a quivering fear that had a life of its own. When the young physician arrived, I almost tackled him.
“Look,” I said. “Look, I work on 5-K. You tell me what the hell is going on, right now.”
“Oh, we’re not thinking a malignancy,” he said, surprised. I wanted to hit him. I wanted to yell: You tell me that first.
CANCER IS A catchword for a group of diseases defined by the cell in which they originate. Different cancers have different courses, prognoses, and treatments; they are different diseases. Some are fast and some are slow, some are relatively easy to treat and others almost impossible. They all involve abnormal cells without a useful function, cells that are not orderly and are not controlled by the normal mechanisms that manage cell growth. Tumors can double in size in two to three months. By the time of diagnosis, many have metastasized to new sites. The cancer is loose, it has broken free, and the second-generation tumors are often genetically evolved, with new properties. With each move, the cells become more primitive, evolving into a kind of ur-cell. There are cancers called “unknown primary”—the cells are so plain their origin can’t be identified. These are cells as psychopaths: twisted, clever, self-destructive, taking victims down along the way.
The number of cells involved is difficult to grasp. By the time cancer is detected, many millions of abnormal cells are present, and they are usually dividing rapidly. Treatment is a matter of killing as many of these abnormal cells as possible, as fast as possible, without killing the patient in the bargain. Most oncologists are reluctant to use the word cure, and tend to speak of cancer as a chronic disease. The goal of treatment is remission, a state in which the cancer can’t be detected. Remission doesn’t mean there is no cancer in the body. Animal studies suggest that millions of cancer cells remain hidden in the person considered “cancer free.”
The immune surveillance theory of cancer holds that in a way we all do have cancer, that a healthy immune system fights off rogue cells as they appear. (New research indicates that cancer in turn can shut off crucial parts of the immune system, actively dismantling what might attack it.) A person’s immune system may be able to eliminate those remaining cells one by one, the way one fights a cold, and the remission will be durable. As with other chronic diseases, in theory cancer patients could simply continue to take anticancer drugs their entire lives—if the drugs were not so toxic.
5-K IS ON the same floor as the Robert W. Franz Cancer Research Center, and at any given time almost every cancer treatment is represented there.1 Patients are receiving various kinds of immunotherapy and chemotherapy, having radiation treatments, and recovering from surgery. There is often at least one person having a stem-cell transplant. Others are there because of the kinds of problems that tend to accompany cancer and its treatments, like infections. 5-K is a regional center for peripheral stem-cell transplants and one of only a few dozen centers f
or high-dose Interleukin-2 (IL-2) therapy in the United States.2
Many people with cancer never stay in a hospital, receiving all their treatments as outpatients. People stay on a unit like 5-K because of their general health or the seriousness of their treatment.
IL-2, a cellular protein, is currently the only curative treatment for patients with metastatic malignant melanoma and kidney cancer.
When I first started in the unit, I was told by more than one nurse, “If you can work on 5-K, you can work anywhere.” As a population, 5-K patients are sicker than most in the hospital, skirting the edge of instability and crisis repeatedly. They may stay for weeks at a time and return again and again over a period of years. Quite a few die there. Assignments on the three daily nursing shifts are doled out partly according to the level of care each patient requires and partly on the level of training of the nurses. My training as a 5-K floor nurse took more than a year and will never stop; it includes special instruction in chemotherapy, transplants, immunotherapy, and cardiac monitoring, and studying for my national certification as an oncology nurse.
In the time I’ve worked there, we’ve had a wedding, a number of birthday parties, some anniversaries, many deaths, many emergencies, several resuscitations, the occasional family fight. There is no cancer demographic, no particular population: this is everyone, from everywhere. This is the musician who hauls her IV pole down five flights so she can play the grand piano. This is the young man covered in tattoos who was turned away from two emergency rooms for lack of money before he came to Providence and was diagnosed with leukemia. This is the young Mexican father who has no papers and has been treated without cost for years. This is the ice-skating instructor who had been a Sweetheart of Sigma Chi, the avid hiker who can no longer walk, the lawyer who likes to have whole pizzas delivered to his room from the joint down the street. They range in age from eighteen into the nineties, are all races, many nationalities, all degrees of wealth and lack of it.
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