State

by Melissa Isaacson

  Any of our guards was capable of breaking the press alone. But if Barb or Connie were caught in a trap, Earl loved the idea that Tina, a lefty, could go strong on the dribble up the left side of the court. Karen could rebound, but she wasn’t a ball handler. And Tina possessed a scrappiness that, although annoying to those of us who had to practice against her bobbing head and flailing elbows, was effective, especially in our defense.

  Tina was still adjusting to Earl’s yelling, as we all were, and she privately fretted that Karen and Judy didn’t like her because the two were friends, both seniors, and all three were competing for the same starting spot. But rather than talking to any of us about it, she often poured her heart out to her guidance counselor, Walt Cocking, whom everyone called “Doc.”

  Every day, she popped in for at least one visit, chatting about everything from basketball to boys to our off-court chatter. She thought nothing of sharing this information with him. It felt like privileged communication—like doctor-patient or lawyer-client. He was a good listener, always dispensing wise advice, and Tina wasn’t the only one on the team who talked to Doc. Little did she know that Earl and Cocking had an unspoken agreement. Whatever Tina told Doc, Doc would tell Earl—our coach’s own private pipeline into our locker room, which none of us, including Tina, ever knew about. If, for example, we emerged from our inner sanctum with a new nickname for someone based on confidential, potentially embarrassing information, Earl knew exactly what we were talking about. Or if he didn’t, he would a day later after consulting with Doc.

  Great.

  Not that we were necessarily opposed to exposing embarrassing information. Humiliating each other, which had long been a favorite pastime of healthy teenage boys, had now inched its way across the gym to the girls’ side. Almost nothing was out of bounds if it meant getting a laugh, which became clear the day I whispered to my supposedly good friend Peggy that I wanted a nickname.

  Everyone else seemed to have one—Peggy was “Japes” and Karen was “Wik.” Connie had even bestowed one on a freshman, as she had begun calling Becky “Rookie” or “Rook.” And I wanted one. I even offered a few suggestions like “Eyes” for Isaacson. But no sooner had the words come out of my mouth than I knew it was a big mistake. Peggy’s face lit up as if I had just told her that I saw Coach Earl in a dress, and I knew what was coming next.

  “Hey, you guys!” she screamed, and I knew that shushing her or even socking her would not be an effective deterrent at this point. “Missy just asked for a nickname. And she even made some up.”

  As I slinked away, I realized that nothing was sacred in the gym. Once we started playing with the boys, we were bound to pick up some of their bad habits.

  We still scrimmaged with the odd group that Earl gathered up from guys who hung around the gym. But now we had graduated to playing against the freshman boys, an actual organized team of players who had some real talent for the game. Granted, most of them were smaller than and not as strong as most of the senior gym rats we loved and were used to playing, but the freshmen ran their plays and their defenses against us and had the advantage of having practiced and played together. We looked at it as a real test.

  So, apparently, did their coach.

  The young coach of Niles West’s freshman A team had something of an ego and was not quite sure what to make of these games. Officially, we did not keep score, but the coaches knew exactly who was winning—and usually it was us. This did not sit particularly well with the boys’ coach, who did not think girls of any age should beat his boys. Whenever we would get the better of them, he’d grumble to his players, “They’re just a bunch of good shooters and passers,” as if that was supposed to make them feel better.

  The boys desperately wanted to win and gave us their best, but they also shook their heads respectfully when, time after time, Connie or Peggy or Barb would spring off a pick and drain a 15-footer. And by the end of the season, the freshman boys would be among our most loyal fans.

  All we had to do now was stay healthy, emotionally and physically.

  Despite the fact that we now had our own athletic trainer, Tulla Terpinas, Connie’s ankle problems were not getting any better, and it seemed every other day, one of us would hit the court clutching an ankle. On this day, it was my turn.

  It was a half-court scrimmage early in our practice, and after going up for a shot, I came down on the foot of Tina, who, with an expression of utter innocence, acted as if she had established perfect defensive position. In my view, she had moved right up under me so that I had no place to land and my ankle nothing else to do but roll. And as she stood there, her arms straight up in the air as if I had committed an offensive foul, I was filled with anger. And pain. I collapsed on the court, making a scene the likes of which I’m pretty sure no had ever witnessed before.

  Granted, it hurt, and I was scared as I clutched my ankle, which I was sure had snapped in at least two places. But a gamer I was not. I liked to think I was. And in many situations, I took nasty tumbles on the court only to bounce up and continue playing. But this time, I rolled around and immediately began spewing a string of obscenities worthy of a longshoreman. “Goddamn son of a—,” I screamed, words spilling forth that I myself had never said before, and soon I was vaguely aware that no one was comforting me, afraid, I’m sure, that like Linda Blair in The Exorcist, my head might soon start spinning.

  I stopped squirming long enough to see Coach Earl walking over to me very slowly, probably intending to see if I was OK, but he was so overwhelmed by my language that he chose instead to react much like you would when slapping a person in shock.

  “Hey!” he yelled. “Come on, that’s enough.”

  So much for Mrs. Mulder’s nurturing.

  By that time, I was sure Coach Earl simply did not like me. I blamed a personality clash on my dwindling playing time—I was now entering games in the second quarter and making a few appearances in the second half but never in crunch time and almost always without any starters on the court. “Even if you put Connie on the floor with the bottom four players on the team, she would struggle,” I half rationalized, half whined to Peggy. “It’s not a fair judge of my talent.”

  I wondered if my absence from camp the summer before had hurt my standing. I also wondered if Becky had an in because of her father. I wondered a lot of things, some rational, some not. And most I only discussed with Peg. It was the kind of petty stuff you only tell a good friend, and I poured forth, as both of us had convinced ourselves that our new coach was not only insensitive to us but also maybe even prejudiced.

  “I heard that some of the boys from Lincolnwood who played for Earl said he treated them worse than the other guys because they were Jewish,” I whispered to her one day.

  This was not the first time a Jewish kid from Lincolnwood had ever quietly leveled that charge against a teacher at Niles West. To some of us, anti-Semitism was a vague accusation you could toss around without having any real proof, and it was often suspected, even without an outright charge. Peggy thought this Earl theory was very interesting.

  She would routinely make comments about Jewish people being cheap, driving Cadillacs, and having big noses, and I let this slide in the interest of humor. If, for example, while riding on the team bus she spotted a group of Hasidic Jews walking down the street in long coats and beards, she would invariably yell out, “Hey, Missy, do you know them?” and I would laugh along, the only Jew on the team that season and not the least bit offended.

  In my heart, I knew Peggy did not mean harm. And in my heart, I knew Gene Earl was not anti-Semitic. But one day, we took it a little too far.

  It was right around the holidays, and after a couple of spirited rounds of Christmas bus songs, which I happily joined in on, I started singing “Dreidel, Dreidel, Dreidel,” one of the few Hanukkah songs I knew. We were all having a great time until Coach Earl, apparently annoyed at the noise level on the bus when we were supposed to at least be pretending to concentrate on the game at han
d, stood up and yelled at us to shut up. Only it sure seemed like he yelled at me to shut up since I was the only one singing at the time.

  Being at the very back of the bus afforded Peggy and me some anonymity, and so Peg took advantage of this opportunity by pretending to cough while yelling out, “Jew hater,” through cupped hands.

  I’ll never know if Coach Earl heard us. I can only say that after a brief moment of satisfaction that Peggy had actually said what I had been thinking, I felt instant remorse. And I never made that accusation again.

  CHAPTER 19

  Let It Snow

  BECKY SCHNELL WAS NOT THE TYPE OF KID to try to draw attention to herself. If anything, Peg and I used to joke, we weren’t even sure she could talk her freshman year. Nevertheless, she was somehow thrust into the spotlight, whether it was having her name in the paper, developing a close friendship with Connie, or getting knocked out cold while naked in the locker room.

  In her defense, this was not something she had planned, at least not the naked part. And probably not the concussion part either. But there she was, after walking just a little too fast coming out of the showers, sprawled unconscious on the floor of the Evanston High School girls’ locker room.

  It was our third straight appearance at the Evanston holiday tournament, and we had just wrapped up our third consecutive title with a 78–46 victory over Fremd. Coach Earl was in the coaches’ hospitality room when he was alerted that one of his players had had an accident, and he was not about to let the little matter of a girls’ locker room stop him from attending to one of us in need.

  “Cover up ’cause I’m comin’ in!” he bellowed, putting that booming voice to good use.

  “Stay out. Stay out. I’m fine!” screamed Becky, who was coming to and surprising us with a decibel level we had never heard from her before.

  Fortunately, Coach Earl only got a few steps in the door when common sense prevailed. But he did make Becky tell her parents what had happened, and a trip to the emergency room revealed that she had suffered a minor concussion.

  Otherwise, the tournament was a rousing success.

  We had taken apart Resurrection in a first-round game, 81–43, and defeated Regina the next day, 58–36, to send us into the title game. Regina did not represent our finest moment. In fact, after taking his starting lineup out in the fourth quarter of what seemed a sure victory, Coach Earl put all five back on the floor and had us go into a stall with three minutes to go in the game. We ended up scoring just one field goal in the fourth quarter and missing seven free throws, but we still won by 22, a sign that we could still dominate on an off-night and that Earl had absolutely no faith whatsoever in his bench. As the season wore on and wore down the confidence of most of his subs, this fact was not lost on us.

  But Coach Earl already had his sights firmly set on the big picture. And after a surprisingly easy victory in the tournament final against a Fremd team that none of us had forgotten had annihilated us in our season opener two years before, our coach approached the referees. They were two brothers who he knew were from the downstate Galesburg area, and he had a feeling they might be able to quell a niggling concern.

  “So, how do we stack up against the other teams you’ve seen in the state this year?” he asked, trying to sound casual.

  “You can play with ’em,” one of the brothers said, and that was enough to make Earl feel at least a little better about his 6–0 team.

  After the tournament, we still had a week of Christmas vacation left and our coach was content to take off that Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, but obviously he did not know us very well yet. We wanted to practice. With very few exceptions, we always wanted to practice. And if he expected applause after his announcement on the bus that he’d see us on Thursday, he was quickly set straight.

  “Coach, you must not want to win bad enough if you don’t want to practice,” Connie lectured him.

  When he showed up in the gym that Monday, he found half of his team was sniffling and sneezing and the other half coughing, and again encouraged us to go home or at least take it easy. No one moved. “Do what you want to do,” he said, taking a seat in the bleachers and opening up a newspaper. Half of us got up a three-on-three, while the others shot at the side baskets as Earl simply shook his head. Some things, he realized, were not worth arguing about.

  It had begun snowing over the weekend, not exactly breaking news for Chicago in January, except that it did not stop. Soon it had a name, the Blizzard of ’79—very original—and while our classmates looked forward to winter vacation being extended, all it meant to our team was a little more inconvenience getting to the gym and for me, further delay in taking my driver’s test and getting my license. To Coach Earl, it meant four hours in his car for the 12-mile drive from his home in Elk Grove for still another practice we insisted we had to have.

  But this was nothing new to us. Almost every winter, there were at least one or two snow days, and we still managed to practice. That most cars in Chicago were buried entirely did not dawn on those of us with garages and parents who were easily badgered into driving us to the gym.

  My father took great pride in his driving abilities, particularly in bad weather. And he never said no to a request from one of his children to be driven someplace, particularly to school. On one of these snowy excursions to Niles West for practice, Peggy, who had slept at my house the night before, ended up in our car and our car ended up, after an unfortunate turn, on a snow-covered set of railroad tracks, to which my dad seemed oblivious.

  “Um, Dad, what are you doing?” I asked him as he stopped at the railroad crossing, put on his right blinker, and turned onto the tracks. Though death, for all we knew, could have been as close as the next speeding train, Peggy laughed so hard in the back seat that she nearly hyperventilated. I laughed at first too, out of sheer nervousness and the absurdity of it all, but not for long and not because I was afraid of getting killed.

  “Shut up, Peg,” I yelled at my good friend as she continued howling.

  It just wasn’t funny. Not anymore. I thought back to several weeks earlier, before winter break, when we were playing at Hoffman Estates. The school is in the far western suburbs, 24 miles from our house and a 40-minute drive on a good day. But this was not a good day. I wasn’t overly worried when my parents weren’t there by warm-ups or even tipoff, but I was nervous when they hadn’t arrived by halftime. Then, in the fourth quarter, I saw my mom, red-faced and unmistakably annoyed, rushing into the gym, a dozen steps ahead of my sheepish-looking father.

  I didn’t mention it to my teammates during or even after the game. But the second I walked through the door that night, I demanded to know why they were so late.

  “We were in Iowa,” my mom said, shooting an angry look at my father.

  Accustomed to my mom’s sense of humor and her penchant for sarcasm and exaggeration, I would have laughed. But I saw their faces and knew right away she wasn’t kidding. Apparently, they had gotten lost and continued west on the interstate, and though I doubted they actually made it all the way to Iowa, which was a four-hour trip, I imagined they had been well on their way. My dad shook his head and headed upstairs, and after that, either my sister, brother, or sister-in-law drove them to games more often while I silently noted that my parents were getting worse.

  My father, now bewildered by both the bumpy road and the lunatic in his back seat, turned off the tracks and somehow made it to Niles West. But I was more than a little worried about him, and I opted not to share the latest adventure with my mother.

  The Blizzard of ’79 was actually a seemingly nonstop series of snowstorms that blanketed the Chicago area with 88 inches of snow from December 31, 1978, until February 28, 1979. But the worst of it was the more than 20 inches of new stuff dumped on the city between Friday night, January 12, and 2 a.m. Sunday, January 14. It brought back memories of the Chicago Blizzard of ’67 (you’d think they’d come up with a new name this time around) when, as a kindergartner, I was allowed
outside to play in the backyard one day during the storm, only to become buried up to my nose. My brothers, taking a break from jumping off our roof to yank me out by my arms, pulled me right out of my boots, which were not retrieved until the spring thaw.

  This time, my teammates and I were actually careful not to do anything teenage stupid, like flinging ourselves off our roofs. Peggy had other things to think about during our time off, like how she had none. Peg did office work at the Julia Molloy Education Center for children with multiple disabilities and often jogged the five miles to and from Niles West in the snow to accommodate work and practice. But she never complained. Her boss would clip articles that had Peggy’s name or photo and tape them on the walls of her office, beaming like a pseudo aunt while Peg ate it up.

  By the time the Maine West game rolled around, we could barely contain ourselves. It was a home game, and blaming the snow for the almost nonexistent crowd, we unleashed a month’s worth of pent-up energy in the 72–30 victory.

  The other reason for the lopsided score was one thing Coach Earl picked up on as he watched the Maine West coach handle his team that night. It was nothing any of us would ever have noticed, but Coach Earl, who always paid a little more attention to the rare male coach he ran up against, spotted it immediately. The man was thoroughly disinterested, even disgusted, Earl determined, as if he had been given the job as punishment. And for someone who once wondered himself how much passion he would have for coaching girls, our coach was offended. How dare this guy demean his girls and the game by acting as if he did not want to be there, Earl thought to himself. He would not forget either the man or his attitude as we brazenly ran up the score against our ill-prepared opponent.

  We would close out the month at home against Maine South, the second of what would eventually be four meetings against our conference rivals, and we were determined to finally assert our dominance after beating them by only two points last time.