Me too. While the other girls were making important future prom plans and discussing the dual meaning of rounding the bases, I was staring through the holes of the chain-link fence at the boys’ Little League games, obsessed with one thought only—that I wanted to be out there too, wearing those cool caps with the block L for Lincolnwood on them and sitting in a real dugout just like the Cubs and White Sox, except that the Cubs and Sox had, well, an actual dugout and our boys had a splintery wooden bench.
I stared at their rubber cleats and was so consumed with jealousy that it was all I could do to even stand there for very long, so sure was I that I could compete. And so I would trudge back home, forced to be content chasing after my older brothers or playing catch in the backyard with my younger neighbor Anthony, who, fortunately for him, did not rub it in that I was a girl as I burned fastballs at him.
By the fall of 1975, we were all running out of patience. For girls like me and Connie, high school came with the promise of being on a real, competitive team. Basketball tryouts were not until February, but I had no intention of waiting six months to begin my high school athletic career. So what if I had never played volleyball, had no tennis skills, and was more of a bobber than a swimmer? Those were the fall sports. And that was where it had to begin.
Connie went straight from the cheerleading disaster to volleyball tryouts. I tried out too, figuring I had a reasonable chance of making the team. I mean, how tough could it be? Bumping and spiking? Physically, I could certainly manage both. But I was rattled by the volleyball coach, Miss Kay, who walked by just as I tried to serve, the ball dribbling off the heel of my hand and onto the floor as she paused to make a notation on her clipboard. More like a big scratch.
Serving was not kind to me that fall. I tried out for the tennis team with no real knowledge of or ability in that sport either, other than a handful of lessons when I was 10, but I still thought I had a pretty good shot. That is, until I served. After the third ball rocketed over the fence and out onto the soccer field on Day 1 of tryouts, I decided that I probably wouldn’t show up for Day 2.
As Connie happily bumped and spiked away, better than most of the upperclassmen, I moved on to swimming, persuading Bari to try out with me. It’s not that I necessarily liked swimming or, again, had any real ability. I was thinking, given my skill at doing flips on my parents’ bed, that maybe I would try out for diving. More than anything, I was compelled to make a team. Any team.
As freshmen, we had yet to take swimming in gym class. Perhaps if we had, it would have deterred us, for as we walked into the locker room and Miss Swift handed each of us a stretched-out, faded, purplish thing we could only assume was a bathing suit, we began to rethink the whole swim team thing. We were then instructed that we had to shower, and Bari and I traded frantic looks.
At Lincoln Hall, our junior high school, the girls never took showers in the gym locker room. To our recollection, no girl actually ever undressed in the gym locker room. We either ran into the nearest toilet stall to do it, or we devised a routine in which we would remove sleeves and legs of clothing while putting on our gym suits, all without any actual skin ever being exposed. And now this woman was staring at us and demanding that we get naked. I figured this must be how it felt when you went to prison, but somehow Bari and I got into our suits and made it out onto the deck, where we were immediately dizzied by the stench of chemicals strong enough to sanitize every pool in the greater Chicagoland area. On the bus ride home, I watched Bari’s hair frizz, growing bigger at every passing stop until we wordlessly concluded there was absolutely no way we were going back for the second day of tryouts.
Meanwhile, Connie made the varsity volleyball team and fell in with older kids like Shirley Cohen, a sophomore. I already knew Shirley. When I was 12 and Shirley 13, Lincolnwood started a girls’ softball league, which had roughly one kid per team who knew how to both throw and catch, not coincidently the same girl who would also hit a home run literally every time she was up to bat. The rest of the girls pretty much lived in fear of a ball ever coming near them.
I was the kid hitting the home runs. So was Shirley, who hit her home runs much harder and much farther and was playing for a coach—the novel idea was that only moms were allowed to coach in those first years of the league—who deduced early on that Shirley was her secret weapon. Forget the fact that when Shirley came to bat, the third baseman started crying and even the men along the outfield foul lines moved back and took their hands out of their pockets. No, the mom coaching Shirley’s team had the brilliant inspiration one day that if she batted Shirley, say, fourth in the lineup and then again in the eighth spot, maybe no one would notice.
Shirley did what she was told. But the coach of my team, no dummy herself, quickly noticed her third baseman whimpering sooner than usual and pointed out this discrepancy both to the umpire and to Shirley’s coach. Those who had never before seen two mothers going jaw-to-jaw on a baseball field were treated to a once-in-a-lifetime experience.
But no question, Shirley, who had become Niles West’s first female four-sport varsity athlete the previous year, was special, and she admired Connie from the start. If the volleyball coach told the team to jog around the gym, Connie would sprint. When they practiced spiking, Connie tried to jump higher and spike harder each time. And more importantly to Shirley, Connie was a winner. The two had a fierce competitiveness and mercilessly teased each other if one of them choked in a big moment in practice or in a pickup game. But there was never laughter when the choke came during a real game in a crucial situation.
Shirley rarely choked. And neither did Connie. And so they bonded.
I also took note of freshmen like Karen Wikstrom and Judy Becker, and sophomore Diana Hintz, all volleyball players I knew were going to try out for basketball and who all surely saw the winter of 1975 pass more quickly than I did.
As I trudged through November and December and into the nation’s bicentennial, counting the days until basketball tryouts, it was with little notice given to the outside world. Kids were sneaking off to midnight showings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and the Bee Gees suddenly had this new sound with “Jive Talkin’.”
While most kids around school favored the Eagles, Wings, Fleetwood Mac, Billy Joel, David Bowie, and Peter Frampton, I leaned more toward “Mandy” by Barry Manilow and “Sister Golden Hair” by America, but I kept this mostly to myself. I wore a mood ring, which never changed from black, and I disdained Pet Rocks and all those who owned one.
In the fall, a new show called Saturday Night Live premiered, giving the kid with no other plans on Saturday night a respectable excuse to stay home without feeling like too much of a loser. And in my house, there was always The Mary Tyler Moore Show, my mother’s and my favorite, though again this was not something I shouted from the rooftops.
While the rest of the world, or at least our country, was busy worrying about the national debt, which had just risen to $595 billion, and talking about a figure skater named Dorothy Hamill as the Winter Olympics got underway, I was far more concerned about Bill Veeck buying the White Sox.
As basketball tryouts drew closer, I attended a few of the boys’ basketball games, but I wanted to be out there and could hardly sit still, realizing this was the moment I had been waiting for since Miss Tatz’s kindergarten class, when Eddie Rice did a headstand to much fanfare during show-and-tell while I was unable to prove that I could do one too.
It wasn’t that I didn’t know how to do a headstand. My brothers had taught me when I was two, and it was among my favorite pastimes at home. But girls were not allowed to wear pants to school in the Chicago suburbs until 1970—still four years away at that point—and try as I might, I could not figure out a way to perform a headstand without the entire kindergarten class seeing my underpants. I tried to do it real fast, thinking I could somehow beat gravity. But in the end, Eddie Rice was the hero and I, along with all the other girls, was somehow inferior.
I could not have known f
or sure, but somehow, I had the feeling Arlene Mulder would change all that.
CHAPTER 3
Grovers and Wooders and Billy Schnurr
CONNIE THOUGHT I WAS RICH.
This never occurred to me as I went to Ned Singer’s sporting goods store in downtown Skokie and picked out two pairs of boys’ gym shorts—one red and one navy, both with white piping—two six-packs of tube socks with red, blue, and green stripes, and a pair of boys’ red canvas Converse gym shoes. I had yet to make a team, but I had big plans, so with little else to do for the few weeks until basketball tryouts, shopping seemed to be a logical first step.
“Those shorts are too wide,” my mother announced a little too loudly, and offered the same evaluation when I tried on the shoes. There was no such thing as girls’ basketball shoes at Ned Singer’s, but I was perfectly happy getting the boys’ basketball shoe of choice. The Chuck Taylors were practically wide enough to fit both of my feet next to each other. Fortunately, the tube socks, at full extension, could reach the tops of my thighs, and I wore two of them on each foot, so there was plenty of extra material to fill out the sides of the shoes, ensuring that they would stay on as I ran.
While I was picking out my new gear for basketball, Connie did the same for volleyball, rifling through her brothers’ and sisters’ hand-me-down shorts and cutoffs, and her old junior high gym shoes and socks, though she also collected discarded pop bottles for deposit and started a shoe fund.
I may have been spoiled. And my father owned his own business and wore a suit and tie to the office. We also had a cleaning woman, and my mother didn’t work. But rich? No way. We lived in a four-bedroom bi-level on St. Louis Avenue, not exactly the other side of the tracks but definitely in one of the more modest neighborhoods on the east side of Lincolnwood. The far west side of Lincolnwood was known for its newest section, dubbed “The Towers,” where the actual rich people lived in newly constructed homes of white brick and big double doors, Cadillacs in the garages and spectacular Christmas decorations up and down the streets.
It was where we went on Christmas Eve to look at the big houses and glorious lights after ordering in Chinese and going to the movies like all the other Jewish people we knew.
But all of us in Lincolnwood were rich as far as Connie and the other Grovers were concerned. That’s what we called the Morton Grove kids. We were Wooders, a term of either endearment or resentment, depending on the occasion.
In 1975, Niles West—located in Skokie and sandwiched between the North Side of Chicago and the fast-growing and more affluent North Shore suburbs—had an enrollment of approximately 2,000 students, freshman to senior. The student body primarily comprised kids from Lincolnwood, a predominantly white-collar suburb with a large Jewish population, and kids from Morton Grove, a largely blue-collar suburb of a mostly gentile persuasion.
In the 1975–76 Niles West yearbook, there was not one black student, and the Asian and Latino faces were few.
Like most high schools since the dawn of time, Niles West was divided and subdivided into groups and subgroups—Grovers and Wooders, yes, but also jocks and drama jocks, burnouts and band geeks, cheerleaders and the others who made up the majority of the student body but whose very meaningful high school careers went largely unnoticed by those of us obsessed with our own extracurricular activities.
To me, the disparities in our high school cliques were far more significant and conspicuous than any economic differences. Oh sure, the wealthier girls dressed a little better, maybe, and some of the Lincolnwood kids had new cars, Trans Ams drawing the most envy. But the majority of girls at Niles West could manage at least one pair of designer jeans, and the boys all wore faded Levi’s and T-shirts, so what difference did it make?
On the most fundamental level, we were all self-conscious teenagers united by our varying degrees of oily skin and differentiated by our allegiances to either Bonne Bell Ten-O-Six, Noxzema, or both, the common goal being to dry out your skin to the point of near-peeling with Ten-O-Six, followed by the cleansing and slightly rehydrating properties of Noxzema. What you were left with was essentially the same two or three zits you had before—if you were lucky—but at least they were exceptionally clean and fresh-smelling.
The objective for most of us was not to stand out but simply to blend in.
What we did not know was what went on beyond the superficial teenage angst, behind the closed doors of our friends’ and classmates’ homes. But maybe it was safer that way. Our parents were “Mr.” and “Mrs.” to our friends, and as friendly as we ever became with each other’s families, we knew them only so well. Divorces were still shocking and most often delayed “until the kids were out of school.” And the rest was simply not our business. What’s more, you did not really want to know what went on in other people’s homes any more than you wanted to be noticed yourself.
By the time I was 11, my house was sad and mostly empty, the dimly lit den a reminder of how lonely I felt after my sister, Susie, got married and my brothers, Barry and Richard, left for college. My dad was 40 when I was born, and it was as if I could feel my parents getting older, the mood more tense, my mom in more pain.
When she was 19, my mother took a train from Chicago to California to spend the summer with her sister and her family in San Jose. And it was there, while on a double date with two naval officers and hiking in the nearby Diablo Range foothills, that she lost her footing and, according to newspaper reports, rolled down an embankment before falling 20 feet straight down. Lying broken and semiconscious for an hour and a half before medics could get to her, my mother sustained internal injuries; lacerated her eye; broke her back, pelvis, right hip, and right shoulder; and crushed her right elbow.
She would never talk in any detail about the accident but carried with her an understandable fear of heights (the opening scene of The Sound of Music sent her running from the room) and the recollection that when her mother finally made it from Chicago to California to see her in the hospital, she stood at the door of the room and wrung her hands, proclaiming, “Oy, who’s going to marry you now?”
After nearly a year’s stay in the hospital, my mother left, miraculously upright but with a fragile and disfigured right arm, which underwent more than a dozen operations over the next 30 years.
From my earliest memories, my father always stationed himself protectively on my mother’s right side in public in order to shield her from contact. But she still cooked and baked, sewed and needlepointed, walked miles in the absence of a driver’s license, and rarely complained to us about an arm a good six inches shorter than the other in its slightly bent position.
Still, we all knew she rarely slept and was in chronic pain, and my dad doled out prescription painkillers to her judiciously, hiding the little pink and gray capsules in a shoebox inside the ductwork of our laundry room. It was often a source of conflict, and to her youngest kid, the medication didn’t seem to work.
My dad was struggling as well.
During the winter of my eighth-grade year, he was snow-blowing the driveway when we heard the scream. He had reached in to dislodge a stick without unplugging the machine and ended up losing parts of three fingers on his right hand.
Just as bad, however, was the damage it seemed to do to his psyche.
My father was always meticulous about his nails, clipping and filing them and even getting the occasional manicure, as some businessmen who spent their days shaking hands did. But after a man at his barbershop recoiled at the sight of his missing and misshapen fingers a few months after the accident, my dad hid his hand in his pocket, worried he would get the same reaction from everyone he met.
As upset as he was over that and the loss of function in his hand, however, he was seemingly more despondent and embarrassed that the injury was essentially self-inflicted, that because he was familiar with heavy machinery from his scrap-iron business, it should never have happened. And he sat on the couch in the months afterward, TV turned off, cursing himself for allowing it.
“Stupid,” he would say, staring at his hand. “So stupid.”
What I knew for sure was that most nights after dinner, my parents went off to opposite corners of the house, my dad retreating to the darkened den to watch one television while my mother holed up in their bedroom watching her own 12-inch set as I traded places between the two or stayed in my room.
I told myself everyone’s parents argued as mine did, sometimes bitter fights that seemed to arise from nothing in particular, their yelling seeping under my bedroom door while I turned up the volume on the little orange TV set I got for my 12th birthday.
“You never know what goes on in other people’s houses,” my mom would often say, having me believe that no matter what was going on in ours, there was always something potentially much worse happening next door or across the street.
Their frustration was something I did not fully understand, but as I began high school, we were all looking for something, I think. For me, it was an outlet for my physical energy, a place where I truly belonged. For my mother and father, maybe it was just a spark they needed, something to latch on to that would unite them again.
What I do know is that in those next few years, the lights in our house came back on.
It would be hard to describe Connie’s house as a three-bedroom or a four-bedroom primarily because at any given time, her father was knocking down another wall and reconfiguring it to somehow get a little extra space for his family of 13.
Connie’s dad, Bob, worked for Illinois Bell, and her mom, Shirley, did part-time office work for a medical supplies company. But it was rare that Bob Erickson ever held down less than two jobs at one time. Once, in a family trivia contest, one of the questions was: “Name the four jobs Dad had in 1961.”
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