In These Girls, Hope Is a Muscle

by Madeleine Blais

  Kim remembered saying she wanted to see him. But when he arrived, her oldest sister had felt differently.

  “Sherri’s room was in the basement. She wouldn’t come up. My dad thought Pam was Sherri, and he thought I was Pam. It was a tough situation. My own dad didn’t even know me. Then, he sat us down and talked to us. I sat on the couch between my brother and my mother, and my brother had his arm around me, and I had my head on my mom’s shoulder. He tried to explain.”

  Kim had grown up in South Amherst in a small well-cared-for starter house that ended up a finish house as well, in a neighborhood with streets whose names embody a tweedy longing for what appears to be a British-flavored town-and-country ideal: Squire Lane, Atwater Circle, Brookside Court, Greenwich and Longmeadow and Farmington. When she was little, the neighborhood was all families, but lately people had moved away, and some of the houses were being rented to students. Sometimes she wished her mother, whose hobbies were crafts and changing the wallpaper and the window treatments in their small house, would move to a nice safe compact condo.

  Kim always appreciated how hard her mother worked, and over the years she and the other children in the family had planned surprises for her. They’d schemed to give her a VCR, a microwave, a brass headboard for her bed, and a piece of jewelry known as a mother’s ring, a gold band set with the birthstones of all four children. One time they’d really surprised her with four new tires.

  Kim pulled out of the driveway of their ranch house and headed up Route 116 to Crocker Farm, where she had been an elementary school student along with numerous other Hurricanes, including Kathleen Poe, Emily Shore, and Rita Powell.

  Wearing a T-shirt, shorts, and her game sneakers, she pulled into the dark parking lot and backed the car up so that the headlights would throw the greatest light possible on the hoops she had used as a child.

  She got out of the car and gave the empty courts and fields a sweeping look. Good: She was alone.

  She walked onto the court and dribbled in a fashion that might seem aimless to an outsider; but in fact she was glancing at parts of the pavement, imagining:

  This is where Jen will throw me the ball, here is where Jamila will pull up and dish it off, here is where Kathleen might miss a shot, and this is where I have to be for the rebound.

  She moved carefully, methodically, trying not to stress either of her ankles. Surgery was inevitable, but she wanted to make it through the 1992–93 season first. She inched her way closer to the basket:

  Eight feet is too far away; shoot from eight and Coach will put me back on the bench just like he did in that last game against Hamp. Six feet. That’s better. Right side off the backboard, through the chain-metal net. Left side, rattle it through. Over and over, spin right, dribble, jump. Drop step, pivot, shoot.

  Applauded only by the mosquitoes and the crickets, she would take the ball and pound it on the asphalt and set up and shoot. Despite the noise from the bugs and the drone of traffic on Route 116, she heard nothing except the thud of the ball and the pulsing inside her chest, the steady beat of pride and exhaustion, the old brag of the athlete’s heart.

  For Kathleen Poe, it was torture waiting for the season to officially start. Sometimes to blunt the anxiety, she went running.

  Nothing suited her more than to slip on her running shoes and set forth from her mother’s ranch house with the big picture window in the living room and to run from South Amherst up to U Mass, to the football stadium where she did stairs and sprints in a routine she had cooked up on her own. “Endorphin home brew,” someone had called it.

  Senior year would be fun, but it would also be emotional; everything was the Last Time for this, Last Time for that. She spent a lot of time thinking about where she would apply to college. Duke, probably; her parents had both gone there, but in recent years no one from Amherst had gotten in. Haverford and Williams sounded small and inviting. She would apply to Dartmouth as a reach, Bucknell as her safety school.

  She had lived in only two places besides Amherst: Ithaca, where she’d been born while her father was a graduate student in social science, and Canterbury, England, where the family had spent a sabbatical semester when she was eight.

  “Culturally, England wasn’t so different from here except that at school the children wore uniforms, and boys and girls always lined up separately. In gym I remember how my classmates were impressed by my flexibility and how they could not believe I wanted to climb the rope. The only thing I hated were the butcher shops. They were so violating. It’s not like here where everything is in packages and covered with cellophane.”

  When she’d made the connection between the hunks of flesh hanging from the ceiling and the polite chop on her plate dressed with parsley in a piece of fluted paper, she decided that she could not abide the thought of eating meat ever again.

  Her father often teased her about the decision. “You’re the only vegetarian I know who doesn’t eat vegetables.”

  It grated on her that his attitude would not change when, as a professor at Hampshire College, he taught a course called Attitude Change.

  This was one subject guaranteed to bring out the fight in her. “Dad, that’s an old joke. Besides, the only two vegetables you cook I don’t like: tomatoes and avocados.”

  “Now, Kathleen.”

  “At least I don’t sneak those candy bars.”

  “Not anymore,” he’d say, patting his belly. “I’m watching it.”

  Kathleen had progressed through school with nothing but accolades. Her report cards over and over reflected a child who’d been a pleasure to teach. She was “enthusiastic,” “helpful,” “consistently cheerful,” “positive,” “cooperative,” “industrious,” an “avid reader,” an “absolute delight,” and “a joy!”

  Shortly after the family’s return from England, her parents had separated; her father then sent a note to the school that read:

  “Please allow my daughter Kathleen to take bus 2 to Hampshire College on Wednesdays and alternate Fridays as she is living with me on the Hampshire campus part-time.”

  The Hampshire College campus in the southernmost part of town is instantly recognizable as different, partly because of the proud nakedness of the buildings where few walls are covered with the traditional ivy. The first class had been admitted in 1970. The “mods,” or apartments where the students live, are named Enfield, Greenwich, Prescott, and Dana after the lost towns of the Quabbin. The students refer to the school as Camp Hamp, and it prides itself on being a place where “it’s okay to go outside the lines.” No one gets upset if classes begin a few minutes late and then extend beyond the allotted time; students design their own curriculum, and classes are just another resource, like the library or the public lectures in the valley. There are no grades, just evaluations at the end of a course. Hampshire has no football team; the popular sports are kayaking and the martial arts. Until recently you could have pets in your room, and there were dogs, cats, bugs, and snakes. In recent years a major social event has been a Halloween dance where everyone goes in drag called the Drag Ball. Its most prominent graduates are in film and include people like Ken Burns, the creator of the PBS series on the Civil War. The only time bells are rung on campus is in honor of the one sacred moment at Hampshire, when a student completes the major project required for graduation. In the eighties a student did his on Frisbees, calling them “Flying Disc Entertainment.” When Kathleen and her brother had visited the campus as kids, their favorite mischief was to sneak up the ramp to where the bell is housed and ring it just for fun.

  “It was like really cool to do.”

  At U Mass she would enter the arena and look up at the stands, those stacks of seats against the sky. The emptiness was exhilarating; without the music and the fans and the thud of bodies, it was as if it all belonged to her.

  First she would run up and down a bunch of stairs one step at a time, and even as she pur
sued her training for the upcoming season, her thoughts were as always drawn back in time to the ooze of that memory:

  Humiliated, again. Nobody knew what was inside of us, and we had just lost our second-to-last chance to prove ourselves. Like Coach said at halftime: “The only people who believe that we can win this game are in this locker room right now.”

  Then she’d skip a step, taking two at a time, bounding upward:

  To leave the floor with regrets is disheartening. To leave the floor with regrets and no more opportunities to do better is absolutely unbearable. This indignant feeling of lost time rose in my throat as I looked at Brenda, who had no more chances to show her stuff, to prove those obnoxious fans wrong.

  Finally triples, huge lumbering movements, awkward greedy lunges just like the giant steps doled out in the children’s game of Mother, May I?:

  I was left wanting to throw myself in front of the doors, to refuse to let the crowd leave. I just wanted to make them go inside and sit down for ten more minutes; the game was lost, but I wanted some pride back. No, really, we can play the game. Boy, can we play it. Let us put our skills where our mouths are. We’re ready for the test. We WANT the test. But the test comes once a year and only for a few years. And we just blew it, again.

  Sometimes Kathleen would feel so pumped from the stairs, she would decide to forgo the sprints and challenge herself even more, with a long swing up North Pleasant all the way to Cushman Village, a wink of a place with a railroad crossing and the small general store where Kim used to work (that had the best homemade shepherd’s pies back when it was in business), across the railroad tracks on Pine Street, and then down Henry Street over the place in the road where those world-renowned tunnels escort the salamanders for their wild night of lizard love.

  Kathleen traveled over hills, past farms, past fields. When she finally raised her eyes she was amazed at the way the miles added up.

  Her placid expression fled, replaced by a toothy grin suffused with triumph.

  Her body felt hard and lean; her mind was filled finally with but one thought: Oh my goodness, look how far I got.

  Rita with her onions, Lucia with her letter to Patri, Kim at night in the parking lot of her old school, Kathleen up and down those steps: cupcupcup all summer long.

  4

  Feel the Fire

  Fall arrived in Amherst in early September, when the air took on a discernible chill. Labor Day is generally regarded as the beginning of the new year because the passage of time is dictated by the colleges, and that’s when approximately thirty thousand students showed up at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst College, and Hampshire College, as well as several thousand more at the all-women’s colleges of Mount Holyoke in South Hadley and Smith in Northampton. Like the surrounding towns, each school is idiosyncratic, catering to a different clientele. At Amherst College, small, private, pricey, and supremely self-confident, the joke is that when the professor walks in and says, “Good morning,” the students answer, “Prove it.” At Mount Holyoke, considered more sheltered and conservative, when the professor says, “Good morning,” the students take it down. At Smith, considered somehow more tony, the presumed response is social: “Good morning to you, and perhaps you’d like a croissant and some cappuccino.” At experimental Hampshire, founded in 1970, there is no response because no one bothers to show up for class. And at the University of Massachusetts, huge, unpampered, urban, with its high­rise dorms and the world’s tallest red-brick library, the students want to know, “Will that be on the final?”

  The students returned as always to farm stands weighed down, at long last, with a plethora of corn and ripe tomatoes. Up on Flat Hills Road, a farmer set out extra cukes and corn and squash on a wobbly table with a hand-lettered sign: FREE. The roadside stands operated on their usual honor system, with a price list protected from the wind by a tin can containing the day’s receipts.

  At least one moving van got stuck in an underpass because a youthful driver assumed that the words “low clearance” didn’t apply to him. The kids took over the aisles at the Stop & Shop, depleting the shelves of expensive single-serving novelty ice cream and of chips and of ramen noodles, and bellowed out, in voices as strident as the loudspeaker, “Where’s the friggin’ Cheez-Its?”

  “You might expect, the first weekend after they get back, to find the town hopping, but it doesn’t really get bad until the third weekend,” said Captain Charlie Scherpa of the police department. “The first two weekends after they come back, they still think they’re going to be on the dean’s list.”

  Year-round residents—accustomed in the summer to a green and dreamy interlude, sunsets all to themselves, quiet unclogged roads, and nearly empty restaurants—railed about the inconveniences caused by the fall onslaught of students.

  “Guess what I just saw. The three most disconcerting words in the English language.”

  “What’s that?”

  “A sign in front of the bank, WELCOME BACK STUDENTS.”

  “Yo, Kristin. Can we talk?”

  On a sunny fall day tinged with a hint of hay and embers, Coach Moyer was standing in the crowded corridor at Amherst Regional High School, a building of such deep institutional blandness that some might wonder if perhaps it had wandered from the U Mass campus to its current site off Triangle Street.

  In the corridors boys in backwards baseball caps and girls with mini–jewelry stores in their earlobes swirled about in that crippling confusion that somehow, a minute later, ended up miraculously with everyone in the right class. A tall girl with the tiniest scar near her right eye returned his greeting.

  “Sure, Coach. When?”

  “Anytime. Just drop by. Now?”

  “Sure.”

  “How was your summer?”

  “It was okay.” No basketball camp for Kristin, no Cape Cod, no Maine, no Clovis, New Mexico. What can you say about a summer at McDonald’s but “okay”?

  Kristin Marvin hated her job at McDonald’s, but it meant money, money meant gasoline, gasoline meant freedom.

  She had a long résumé when it came to classic teenage jobs. She’d worked in town in Amherst at the CVS, where “most of the customers, at least the young ones, come in to buy two things: condoms and something to make it look as if they don’t want just condoms.” She had also been a market researcher at the mall: “You know, those annoying people with clipboards who ask all those questions.” At McDonald’s she had the exalted title of crew trainer, and she worked every possible shift, from early morning to late night. She did birthday parties (“the pits”), she did drive-through, she was a cashier and a clean-up person. She scrubbed the sundae machine, she mopped, she swept, she wiped down tables, and she restocked from the basement, all the while, and this was the ignominious part, wearing “ugly gray polyester bell-bottom pants too short for my legs, a fifty-fifty T-shirt, no jewelry or anything like that, and a wretched tall hat with a flat brim.’’

  Coach Moyer always called her his city kid, which she considered “pretty funny if you think about it.” Of all the Hurricanes, including Jen in Pelham, she lived the farthest out, in Shutesbury, a town filled with dirt roads, one little school, and no stores, just a bar for hunters and over-the-hill softball players that’s called the Shutesbury Athletic Club. Kristin was the only Hurricane with her own car; a vehicle was the birthright of any kid old enough to have a license in Shutesbury, just as in Amherst a Volvo is in effect a voter registration card. Hers was an old brown VW Rabbit that her stepfather had found for her: “He’s really good at cars.” Yet for some reason her car ate alternators the way some cars drink oil; part of the rite of having Kristin baby-sit was picking her up at the local Mobil or helping her jump-start her car.

  Kristin was well suited to the wildness of Shutesbury and lamented its recent discovery by young professionals whom she called “cruppies”: “That’s short for crunchy, as in granola, and yuppies, yo
u know, those young families who live in big wood and glass houses. They don’t want to live in Amherst and deal with the students. They have culture on the walls, you know, posters from Africa, and they drive Toyota station wagons, and they have one or two children named Zach or Emma, and they are very into the New England thing, blah, blah, blah . . .” Kristin had a way of sometimes abandoning sentences in the middle if for some reason the thought had lost her interest. It wasn’t a sign of ditsiness but rather one of impatience.

  Kristin’s father and her mother were high school sweethearts who early in their marriage had cultivated a mutual devotion to the Montessori system of schooling. They’d split up when she was two, and her father had remarried soon afterward to a woman with a five-year-old daughter. Later they’d had two more children together. During most of Kristin’s childhood, David Marvin was a bus or a plane ride away: “I have no memory of living with him.’’

  Kristin’s mother, Wheezie (short for Marie Louise), was the daughter of the writer Clay Blair.

  Kristin felt she had led a “hippie childhood,” an interpretation that was somewhat annoying to her mother: “We were, shall we say, financially disadvantaged for part of the time, and I did take her to a Grateful Dead concert when she was about four and danced with her on my hip, and for about a year I didn’t shave my legs, but we weren’t hippies.”

  “Well,” said Kristin, “we didn’t have a TV until halfway through my childhood when I was eight or nine, and even then it was a little black-and-white, which is pretty unusual for someone of my generation.” She remembered a childhood in which she “grew up not knowing what was going to happen next, where we’d be living, who with. I hated not knowing. That’s why I like medicine. It’s filled with answers.” She’d had a reputation as a child for being self-sufficient. She hadn’t minded playing alone for hours and daydreaming or reading quietly. For five years after the divorce, she and her mother had lived in Maryland, but they’d moved back to Amherst when her mother got tired of a commute that included thirty-five stoplights.