In These Girls, Hope Is a Muscle

by Madeleine Blais

  This was going to be fun.

  Again.

  Like in the old days.

  As the press began to shine its eye on the Hurricanes and their progress, Kim, especially, was thrilled at all the newspaper accounts, even when her name was not mentioned. She would carefully clip each notice, insert it in an envelope, and send it with a short note to her father in Florida.

  On December 18 Amherst beat Cathedral, 65–32; on December 21 at Chicopee Comp the Hurricanes won, 60–22. Kim’s correspondence headed south at a similar clip.

  On December 23 Chicopee High played Amherst at home.

  Jen walked on the court during the warm-up in what Kristin always called a “hopped-up” mood. She had the jitters but she was taking the excess drive and turning it into smooth practice shots. Jen always came out for the warm-ups with a slight air of distraction. Her light eyes would sweep the stands, and only when she’d located her father would she—without actually making eye contact—relax.

  The first few minutes of the game were devoted to a series of moves that would appear curious to an outsider. Whenever possible, members of the Hurricanes, led by Jamila’s example, appeared to be avoiding making baskets of their own in order to give the ball to Jen. Four minutes and fifteen seconds into the game, when the score was 11–5, the action stopped completely and an uproar ensued, underscored by the arrival of someone in a fluffy pink gorilla suit and a bouquet of balloons.

  Jen Pariseau, who had entered the season with 944 points, had made her thousandth career point.

  She stood in the center of the court. With her wide smile and square shoulders and forthright gait, she shook her head back and forth. She found her father in the stands and gave him a look of rebuke. An ape! How could he? This was so embarrassing! Even her opponents applauded with good cheer as she accepted a plaque honoring her achievement, which Coach Moyer had ordered two months before that night’s game. How did he know it would happen that night? “Hey, I’m the coach. I can control when a player gets to leave the bench.”

  Jen hugged her teammates, especially Jamila, and thought back to a year ago when Jamila had reached this milestone; how she wished she could turn back time and feel the same goodwill toward Jamila that her friend was now showing her. The score that night was 72–45.

  Jamila and her parents gave Jen a gold chain with the number twenty-two dangling from it, which soon became her favorite piece of jewelry.

  “I hope she doesn’t do what my friend did when he got the gold medal,” said Coach Moyer. “Took it home and got it bronzed . . .”

  Over the Christmas break Kristin decided something was wrong with her game, drastically wrong. The Hurricanes were doing well, but she felt the beginning of the dullness that had sabotaged the team in every other season. A good start followed by a fatal fizzle. As the official supplier of team spirit, if she didn’t feel excited, who would?

  She needed guidance; of the two captains, Jamila was the one she chose to call. Kristin felt closer to Jamila.

  Jen and she often had opposite opinions.

  Sometimes when Kristin had a suggestion for a change, Jen would shrug it off. Or, she would give Kristin her worst put-down: “Go sign a petition.” To Jen, a petition was a painstakingly democratic, indigenously Amherst way of taking forever. Both Kristin and Jen knew that the problem between them was somehow connected to their mutual stubbornness. Each was always so certain her way was the right way. Yet Kristin suspected that deep down Jen recognized everything she did for the team, not just on court, but off it as well, and she was right. Jen was grateful to Kristin “for grabbing the Hoop Phi puppy and running with it.” It was Kristin who organized everyone to wear backwards jeans to school or overalls with baggy shirts or Champion sweatshirts or crazy hats or dress shirts with ties. Before game days it was Kristin who reminded everyone: “Team ritual tomorrow. Wear a dress. Look nice.” When a player groaned about how jeans were so much more comfortable, Kristin remained unrelenting. “You too, Jamila.”

  On the bus rides home following a victory, it was Kristin’s voice that often superseded the others:

  We’re from Amherst,

  Couldn’t be prouder.

  If you can’t hear us,

  We’ll shout a little louder.

  It was hard to curb the panic in her voice as she reported to Jamila: “I don’t feel it.”

  “Feel what?”

  “You know. The fire.”

  Kristin knew what it meant to feel hot. Hey, she dove off the low board when she was fifteen months old, the high board when she was two and a half. She could ride a two-wheeler at age three and a half. She dove off a booster seat at a Taco Villa when she was about four or so, thus the little indentation in the flesh near her eye, that speck of imperfection. Kristin dove. Period. But now, with the season under way and even with those Ws (wins), she felt a dilution of the spirit, a flickering of the flame.

  “Okay,” said Jamila, “let’s go to Boyden,” referring to the all-purpose gym at U Mass.

  “No way. Not there.”

  “Come on, I go there with my dad all the time.”

  “I’m not your dad. This is really embarrassing. Someone could see me and wonder, Why is she out here on this floor?”

  “The more confidence you have in yourself, the better you’re going to play.”

  “Okay . . .”

  And now she turned to her friend Jamila, hoping she could tell her where the adrenaline came from, that special store of energy that kicks your entire being into a kind of animalistic supersensory awareness. How did you do it? How did you find within yourself that kind of passion and cunning?

  Employing that survivalist arrogance that accrues to people who pride themselves on knowing all the good backroads, Kristin got in her brown VW and jigjagged over to Jamila’s in record time. Together they headed off to the gym at U Mass.

  On the way, she realized: Jamila isn’t asking me to be her dad. She’s being her dad to me. Whenever Jamila had a bad game, her father took her to Boyden, where she made two hundred jump shots in a row.

  Kristin already felt better as she walked into the cinderblock extravaganza named for Frank Boyden of Deerfield Academy, the subject of a book called The Headmaster by John McPhee: “He believed in athletics as, among other things, a way of controlling and blending his boys, and required them to participate throughout the school year. This idea was an educational novelty in 1902.”

  The two girls stood close to the basket. Jamila kept feeding the ball to Kristin, and Kristin kept making shots, from the right, from the left, in front, looking, not looking, swinging those arms up over and over, yes! swoosh! yes! swoosh! yes! The hundreds of jump shots she took off stalled feeding passes from Jamila got Kristin back into the rhythm of the game. Hot, sweating, they paused to guzzle some water.

  Spotting a couple of guys, they asked if they wanted to join them.

  This was the Hurricanes’ favorite subterfuge.

  The response was the usual twitching and winking symphony of gestures: Eyes were rolled, impatient glances exchanged, and then, reluctantly, they joined in, not so much out of largesse as to show the girls who’s who.

  And then, the fun began.

  On that gray winter afternoon, within the gray confines of Boyden, Jamila was great, and the greatness was contagious. First the two girls squared off against each other, one on one, and then they took on the guys, and then one girl and one guy against another girl and guy. The play was amicable, but furious.

  Afterward, all of them were soaked with sweat, floating in the light inner air that follows a rigorous workout.

  As Kristin and Jamila prepared to leave, first one of the guys, and then the other, took Kristin aside and asked who Jamila was.

  “Just a friend.”

  “You two home from college on break?”

  “Nope. We go to high school
in town.”

  “Come on.”

  “Really, you can ask anyone. We’re seniors.”

  Jamila just stood to the side, enigmatic as ever. Her teammates agreed that Jamila understood the fine line between being cocky and being sure of yourself, and she danced it with style.

  “Come on, who is she?”

  “I told you,” said Kristin, swinging her hair against her still-damp neck, taking bold strides off the court, tossing the words off behind her back, “she’s my friend.”

  And as the two girls proceeded off the court, the guys stood in the distance still scratching their heads, with dazed expressions, calling out, with a final effort to figure out what had just hit them, in muted pleading voices, an unwitting echo of the reclusive poet in white, “Who are you? Who are you?”

  Hamp at home, Hamp at Hamp, always a vintage event, always guaranteed to draw a crowd from both sides of the river.

  The first meeting between the Hurricanes and the Blue Devils took place at home almost halfway through the regular season.

  The media gave it top billing.

  From the Daily Hampshire Gazette, by Jeff Thomas:

  The big game of the week will be on television and radio, will be covered by a horde of print reporters, will be played in Amherst and undoubtedly will be a sellout.

  UMass men’s basketball? Wrong!

  Try high school girls basketball. Try Northampton at Amherst Regional, 7:30 tonight. Both 8–0. One the Valley Wheel champion and 20–2 last year, the other the Western Mass. champion and state runner-up.

  WHMP-AM will have the game live with George Miller, the voice of the Minutemen. ACTV-10 will be doing the game, to be shown next week on Amherst cable.

  Neither coach wants to bill this game as anything other than a regular-season game, but that story won’t sell.

  “This is the championship of January and the winner gets absolutely nothing,” said Hurricane coach Ron Moyer. “Our goal is to be the best team in March.”

  Last year the Canes were the champions in January and for the rest of the regular season, sweeping the series with the Blue Devils.

  But it was Northampton that reigned in March, beating Amherst in the Westem Mass. semifinals and going on to beat Agawam in the finals for the Westem Mass. crown.

  “You want to win every game you play,” said Northampton coach Tom Parent. “I only think it’s a big game if one of us dominates the other.”

  One cliché used when these two teams meet is that there are no secrets between them, neither will surprise the other on the court. The coaches know each other, have seen each other’s team play and seen films of their opponent. The players know each other and are friendly for the most part.

  So it will come down to talent and tactics. Both teams have more talent than some of the other leagues in Western Mass. The distribution of that talent is what will come into play.

  The Hurricanes are strong in the back court with everybody’s All-American Jamila Wideman and three-point specialist Jenny Pariseau. Their front court isn’t as well established, with Kathleen Poe, Emily Shore, and Kristin Marvin starting and Emily Jones the first off the bench.

  The Blue Devils are strong all over and deep, a dimension Amherst doesn’t have. Beth Kuzmeski, the second best guard in Western Mass., brings the ball up. She’s joined by fellow senior Johanna Clark in the back court. Up front the Devils have long-range sniper Liz Moulton and in-the-paint players Kim Frost and Addie Stiles.

  There’s no good reason why Northampton had become Amherst’s bitter rival except, perhaps, force of habit, which in New England can justify decades of silence or animosity between old-timers. As Jen always put it, “Something happens when we play Hamp. Both teams become brutes.” Amherst’s homecoming float during the preceding fall had featured two Blue Devils in electric chairs.

  Hamp is a perfectly reasonable town, filled with stores where you can get Nicole Miller jackets or Cole Haan shoes, Bauhaus sofas, and real art. The restaurants are plentiful and varied, and between Pearl Street and the Iron Horse, music is too. It is the site of Smith College, which has among its alumnae Sylvia Plath, Gloria Steinem, Julia Child, and Betty Friedan. The images of Barbara Bush, who attended Smith, and Nancy Reagan, who graduated, are shown on the front of a favorite Smith T-shirt; the back says, THERE’S GOT TO BE A BETTER WAY TO GET A SMITHIE TO THE WHITE HOUSE. Another favorite T-shirt, celebrating the school’s centennial: ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF WOMEN ON TOP. Another: BEHIND EVERY GREAT WOMAN IS A GREAT WOMEN’S COLLEGE.

  Although at least half the students at Smith are on scholarships or work/study, the image of pearls and horses persists, partly because pearls are still popular, and if you wish to bring your horse from home, there are stables available on the campus. On Friday afternoons tea is served in the dorm dining rooms; students have carte blanche to invite faculty to join them for meals, for which no fee is charged. In the old days, each dining room had been equipped with a cubby where a student could store her favorite silver or napkin rings. The quad area, which houses most of the dorms, is the scene of a mock riot for several days every fall. In one of those boisterous yet harmless undergraduate rituals, students march to the president’s house on campus demanding Mountain Day now. Mountain Day is a traditional interlude at Smith and at Mount Holyoke, announced by the pealing of chapel bells campus-wide. Classes are canceled unexpectedly so students can enjoy the fall foliage, or, just as likely, go shopping in Boston.

  Northampton is the longtime residence of Calvin Coolidge and the birthplace of the inventor of the graham cracker; it has that rarest of amenities in modern America, a lively and safe downtown, the jewel of which is a grand old theater with box seats and balconies called the Academy of Music, devoted now to movies.

  “Country-music fans gravitate to the Grand Ole Opry, painters dream of Provence and ski bums settle in Aspen,” according to an article in Newsweek. “Lesbians have a mecca, too. It’s Northampton, Mass, a.k.a. Lesbianville, U.S.A. In a profile of the town last year, the National Enquirer claimed that ‘10,000 cuddling, kissing lesbians call it home sweet home.’”

  Sometimes nicknamed “Paradise,” Northampton has a history of being an independent, utopian community, home for a time of former slave Sojourner Truth, a feminist and abolitionist who fought to regain her son Peter after he’d been sold: “Oh my god! I know’d I have him again. Why, I felt so tall within—I felt as if the power of a nation was with me.”

  Amherst had a lot to fear from Hamp this evening.

  Northampton’s Beth Kuzmeski had been playing against Jamila since junior high, and if anyone could shut her down, Beth could. She’d seen Jamila’s behind-the-back move, her dipsy-do on the way to the basket, her pull-up jump shot, and seen them over and over again. In addition, Addie Stiles and Kim Frost of Hamp were top-quality players up front.

  At the end of the junior varsity game, the Hurricanes, entering the gym from room 4 rather than the locker room, saw that fans were being turned away. Jen saw some of Beth’s family in line, and she asked the ticket takers to give them top priority. They were foes on the floor, but in every other context they admired each other.

  Jen could not believe how hot it was inside the gym: “Oh my God,” she told her teammates, “it must be about three hundred degrees Fahrenheit.” Even when she exaggerated, she did so with such conviction that the hyperbole passed for reality. Weeks later, if you asked any Hurricane, they all swore it had been three hundred in that gym and not one degree less.

  The mayor of Northampton and the superintendent of Amherst schools were there, receiving the attention of the local broadcasters, but more significantly so were some of the young girls who were being coached for the first time ever in youth basketball, 140 second through sixth graders on teams with names like Terriers and Wildcats and Cardinals.

  The gym possessed that surge of energy, nearly electrical, that occurs in a crowd in
which people are scrunched up next to one another, mindless of the hard bleachers, cheering.

  In the bleachers, this conversation summed up the mood on the Amherst side:

  “Mommy, what number is Jamila?”

  “Eleven.”

  “What number is Jenny?”

  “Twenty-two.”

  “What does that add up to?”

  ‘‘Thirty-three.’’

  “No. Trouble. For Hamp.”

  But trouble was coming Amherst’s way. Not long into the first half, Jamila picked up her third foul.

  The reaction from the Northampton side was what you’d expect from fans who drift off to sleep dreaming of the opportunity to demolish those Canes.

  The Amherst fans were dispirited.

  The last time the two teams had met was at the play-off game at Cathedral in Springfield almost a year ago.

  Jamila looked stricken.

  This was a rarity for her; in fact the fans often chanted, “Jamila doesn’t foul, Jamila doesn’t foul.”

  Anyone who has ever been counted on by members of a team knows the feeling, knows the emptiness that gnaws at you when you feel as if you have let everybody down.

  You feel guilt, you feel anger, you’re furious at yourself, the refs, the world in general.

  Coach Moyer put her on the bench.

  He nodded at Jen, charging her in effect with playing both their positions at once.

  Coach Moyer called one of his infrequent time-outs.

  It’s not unusual to see a player take over a game at the offensive end of the court, to suddenly explode and make every basket, but what Jen did now was to take over both ends of the court.

  She stole the ball.

  She rebounded missed Northampton shots.

  She played an astonishingly fierce defense on the perimeter, and then she went to the point where Northampton double-teamed her, then triple-teamed her, and still she could not be stopped.

  She was simply everywhere.

  It was really as if for four, five, six interminable minutes she played against Hamp, all five of their players, on her own, with only the most modest assistance from Kristin, Gumby, Kathleen, and Jan Klenowski, subbing for Jamila.