In These Girls, Hope Is a Muscle

by Madeleine Blais

  The lead for Amherst was small, a point or two, when Jen entered the floor. When she returned to the bench, drained and exhausted, Amherst had extended its margin by six points.

  One fan exclaimed, “This isn’t basketball. This is Horatio at the bridge!”

  There was an immense cheer when she left the floor.

  Realizing that an athletic debt was owed, that her friend Jen had delivered a reprieve and given Jamila another chance to win the game for Amherst, Jamila returned to the floor for the second half. Soon Jamila and Jen and Beth all had four fouls, recalling for some fans the infamous Mad magazine satire in which a game ends with the teams walking from one side of the court to the other.

  With three minutes and fifty-six seconds left, the score was tied.

  A clutch shot by Jonesbones raised Amherst’s prospects by two.

  With Amherst ahead by two and with the thirty-second-shot clock winding down, Jamila, trailed by Beth Kuzmeski, came off a high screen set by Jen. Liz Moulton, the other Hamp guard, dogged Jamila as well.

  Jamila drove to the baseline, attracting a third Blue Devil; she rose up, took about a fourteen-foot jump shot, and drained it for the winning points.

  “Beyond big-time,” said the same fan who had earlier called Jen “Horatio.”

  The next day’s headlines were sweet as sap: ROUND ONE GOES TO AMHERST, FULL HOUSE SEES CANES TOP HAMP.

  On January 20, Amherst beat West Side again, this time 75–44. William Jefferson Clinton was inaugurated as president, and for Jen the best part was Maya Angelou’s poem. Kim and her mother bought Jen a copy of On the Pulse of Morning with its red cover, gold lettering, and paper of heavy vellum. It took Jen one second to find the page with her favorite line:

  History, despite its wrenching pain,

  Cannot be unlived, but if faced

  With courage, need not be lived again.

  Rita took Jen aside in the locker room and told her she had spoken to Mr. Parker and to several Amherst police officers. None of them thought the situation with the guy harassing her was merely a prankish case of boys will be boys. The next step was whether to pursue this in court, to see if he could be prevented legally from making contact with her on the phone or otherwise.

  She tried to tell herself she was absolutely certain he wouldn’t bother her again; that is, she was pretty sure, which is to say, maybe it wouldn’t happen again if she were lucky.

  In the end she decided to go to court.

  She kept thinking about the other girls he had bothered in the past, and she worried that in the future he might bother some other girl: He threatened me, and if I don’t do something to stop him, maybe the next person will get more than threatened. If women allow that kind of behavior, it will never stop.

  Sixteen wins into the season, the Hurricanes traveled to Clifford B. Kibbe gymnasium in Agawam to face the Brownies for the first time this season. There was a long history of being intimidated in their gym. Coach Moyer always told his players that you’ve got to outplay Agawam so convincingly that you take the refs out of it:

  “You have to outplay them by twenty to win by one or two. In basketball, as in any sport, there is a home-court advantage: The more the home court is feared, the harder it is for the interlopers. Sometimes the refs participate, wittingly or unwittingly, in the favoritism: You’ll be tackled while you’re dribbling and called for a walk as the other guy pushes you off the court. It’s called home cookin’. You need to have a road warrior syndrome. You have to fight the crowd, the refs. You can’t mind the boos. Passive teams get chewed to bits on the road. You can win at home with finesse, but you win on the road with heart.”

  Coach Moyer and the coach of the Brownies, Lou Conte, were pals on the coach circuit. They had both coached boys’ teams and girls’ teams, and they agreed on many points. Sometimes before the games in each other’s gyms they stood side by side and shared their similar impressions, a sight that puzzled the Hurricanes. If Agawam was the evil empire, how could the coaches be so friendly? Coach Moyer realized that often the Hurricanes failed to understand that the real villains are the ones from within, those tiny voices that cut you down.

  “The girls are fun to coach,” Coach Conte would say. “Boys are often sometimes there just for the ride. Girls, they tend to appreciate it more.’’

  “They listen,” Coach Moyer would reply. “Boys, you have to tear down their ego. With girls, you just have to build up their confidence.”

  They were in perfect agreement.

  “The thing is,” Coach Conte would say, “a coach isn’t . . .”

  “. . . just a coach,” Coach Moyer would complete the thought.

  Coach Conte would grab the rebound.

  “A coach is a teacher, a life teacher. You’re often the third-most influential person in the child’s life. I tell my kids, ‘At the end of the day you should thank the good Lord for the things you have, you should have done something good for someone else today, and did you kiss your mother and father before you got into bed tonight?’”

  And then the buzzer would sound and the contest begin.

  The two teams played within six points of each other the entire game that night.

  Agawam was crafty.

  The Brownies disdained trying to press or trap Jamila. They double-teamed her. The double-team allowed the biggest of the Brownies, Kim Trudel and Cyndi Stone, to race back and get set up on defense. As soon as the defense was set, Agawam went into a triangle and two. This puts the three big players under the basket in a zone, while the two defenders played Jamila and Jen head to head.

  It took Amherst out of the transition and put the game into a slower-paced, slog-it-out affair.

  Yet, all in all, with only ten seconds to go and trailing by just two points, Amherst had the ball.

  Coach Moyer invoked the old adage: At home play for the tie, on the road go for the win.

  Jamila took a long three-pointer.

  It rimmed out, agonizingly.

  In the end Amherst lost it in the paint. Agawam was a little more rugged, a little more willing to bump and run. Plus they had height, players like Kim Trudel and Cyndi Stone. You can’t teach tall.

  Once again, thought Coach Moyer as the bus bumped its way back to Amherst, bogged down in Agaswamp. In his parking-lot talk, he accentuated the high points of the game:

  “You hung in there. You scrapped for the ball. You didn’t give up . . .”

  Yet, he worried.

  The next day’s headline in the Daily Hampshire Gazette was as plain and stark as the reality:

  AGAWAM HANDS AMHERST FIRST LOSS

  Agawam avenged an earlier girls basketball defeat at the hands of Amherst Regional by handing the Hurricanes their first loss of the season, a 52–50 setback last night in Agawam.

  Amherst goes to 16–1, tied for first place in the Valley Wheel with Northampton, while Agawam is a game back at 15–2.

  The Brownies relied on their strength in the paint, with twin towers Kim Trudel and Cyndi Stone, to wear down the smaller Hurricanes inside. The 6-foot-2 Stone had 18 points and Trudel notched 16, with every hoop coming from down in close.

  “Agawam played a smart physical game. We had trouble keeping them away from the hoop, but that’s their game,” said Amherst coach Ron Moyer.

  Agawam took a 27–23 lead into the locker room in a tightly contested first half. The physical nature of the game played right into Agawam’s strength, and the Brownies were able to keep the tempo of the game in their favor throughout.

  “We tried to bang with them, but in the end they were just a little bit stronger. I thought Kathleen Poe did an especially nice job for us,” Moyer said.

  Jamila Wideman had another spectacular night for the Hurricanes, with 18 points, 9 rebounds, 6 steals, and 5 assists. Emily Shore and Jen Pariseau each had 9 points.

  Coach wonde
red: Will this be like last year? Will it be like it’s been every year for the past five?

  This season he had assembled one of his best overall teams ever, perhaps the best.

  Tonight’s defeat was either the beginning of the unraveling, or it was a wake-up call.

  From now on, it wasn’t just a test of skill. It was a test of who’s hungry.

  The next day in practice he decided that the loss was probably a blessing. It reminded all the girls of their mortality and took the burden off an undefeated season. He looked at Jen running her hardest in practice, concentrating in a way that appeared deeper than any level he had noticed before. He assumed she was remembering last night’s game, thinking about how she’d wanted to take that last shot, could taste it like some kind of ambrosia, but she couldn’t free herself.

  For everyone, the Agawam game brought back all those bad Hamp loss memories.

  But still, as he ran the “take it to the basket” drill, screaming hard at them, he saw there was no backing down. He saw them throwing themselves on the floor for loose balls and slamming into each other in an unladylike fashion. He saw that each of them had made the same decision and that they didn’t have to tell anyone what that decision was because they were showing it on the floor.

  Teenagers who don’t want to discuss something with their parents have a genius for sullen silence. When Jen had come home from Agawam, she’d bypassed her father and her stepmother, who were sitting in the addition they had both designed, an airy square room with windows on three sides, decorated in peaceful blues and browns.

  Bob Pariseau left the game seriously doubting Amherst would win the league. He and John Wideman had had their usual critique session, and they agreed that it didn’t matter how good you were if you choked in the big games. Jen didn’t talk about Agawam that night of the Hurricane loss, or the next day, or the next, but one evening after practice when her father picked her up, as they drove up and up Pelham Road past the tall trees into the gloom of the countryside to their house, she burst out: “Daddy, I’m so frustrated.”

  He remembered what his wife Tracy always said: “When teenagers want to talk, they’ll often choose a car at night. It’s not face to face, it’s a little anonymous, rolling past the countryside. The thing is, when they finally want to open up, you have to be infinitely available. You can’t be tired, you can’t have a headache, you can’t say: ‘Not now, it’s the end of a day.’ It’s like having a two-year-old all over again.’’

  “Jen, to win at sports you have to scrap. There are so many instances of Amherst teams who don’t have the scrappiness to get the big wins.’’

  He spoke in a torrent, there was no pause to the words now, just a quick tumble of sound.

  “I couldn’t get my three-point shot off all night.’’

  “What do you expect? You have a reputation as a three-point shooter. They know that. You need to go to the next step. Put the ball on the floor and dribble around them. Then, either shoot or pass off. Basically, you need to create offense. You were playing miss, assist, miss, assist. You have to shoot ten to fifteen shots a game. You’re a scoring threat. You can’t leave it all up to Jamila.”

  Jen listened. She was as quiet and still as the ancient pines that lined the road; the words reached as deep as the surrounding darkness.

  She nodded; her profile was distinct and jutting even in the shadows.

  The defeat in Agawam was, for whatever reason, Jen’s last nervous game.

  9

  Bombs Bursting

  Usually by February in western Massachusetts, people are shuttered as effectively as their houses. Skin goes gray; it flakes and itches. Barely muttered salutations, grunts more than words, are exchanged with lidded eyes. Women whose greatest vanity is their pride in the lack of it begin to contemplate cosmetic procedures, incisions and surgeries, tucks and lifts. Men plan escapes, the most benign of which involve golf. Colleagues and neighbors who were friendly in the summer, sharing their hippie bedspreads and their tabouli and their tofu scrambler on the lawn at Porter Phelps Huntington House along the banks of the Connecticut River during the Wednesday evening concerts, now ignore each other as they gingerly navigate streets burdened with snow and ice. The intellectual realization that every day at dawn and at dusk there is almost a minute more of light is of little consolation. The college students have been away for a month, but the peace in that is canceled by the rampant bleakness. Nearly everyone begins to suspect they are suffering from a touch of SAD. Adults converse in tattered scraps of sentences that begin “If it snows one more time,” “If the temperature stays below zero one more day,” and “If I slip on the ice on this doorstep ever again . . .” The frightening nature of these utterances is not what they convey, but what they don’t. The completion is left up to the murderous, the bloody, the despairing imagination of the listener. There is so little to do that Hitchcock Nature Center, which runs a Hug a Bug fair in the clement weather (in which you can touch a hissing cockroach and sing songs like “Kumbaya”), suggests that people go on a walk in the snowy woods and be on the lookout for “dirty patches of snow under trees that appear to be moving—yes, moving!” The locomotion is caused by snow fleas, the only consistently wingless insects on the planet.

  But this year was different.

  Slowly, throughout the valley, the season was taking many strange and wondrous turns.

  With the success of the Hurricanes came an unexpected dividend, a strange gaiety as normally housebound seasonal hermits discovered fraternity in the bleachers. At first as the gym in Amherst began to fill, people appeared awkward, uncertain of which fork to use first, shut-ins on a rare outing. But as the phenomenon of the Hurricanes spread through town, and outside of it, so did the bonhomie and the size of the crowds.

  “That was great,” the fans would say at the half. “Last time I watched a girls’ game was like watching paint dry.” Or, “Did you catch Wideman passing the ball to her buddy? That girl’s got shake.”

  A cop was posted at the door of Amherst’s gym, unheard of at a girls’ game.

  “Coach Moyer asked me to come here today and tell you a little bit about what it’s like to be on the Hurricanes.”

  Jen stood in front of about fifty prep leaguers with upturned faces, young girls who wanted to grow up to take her spot on the team. They sat on the floor and looked up.

  Jen’s talk was a mix of her own words and phrases and some classic comments of Coach Moyer’s:

  “Hey, I still lose the ball, I still dribble the ball off my feet. I miss six out of ten shots. Being part of a team is not something you’re born with, not something someone can give to you, not something you find under your pillow with a note from the tooth fairy.

  “You’ve got to be willing to work for it, willing to produce that heart, that little extra desire. There’s no I in team. The difference between chump and champ is U.

  “While everyone else is sleeping late, you’re at the gym in the middle of winter when it’s fifty degrees indoors and the lights aren’t on and you’re in your sweats playing, and you have to figure, that’s the glory. It’s not the headlines, not the fans cheering. It’s seeing your breath. Those are the days to live for because those are the days you know you’re getting better.”

  For some observers, the most unusual phenomenon was the sight of the little kids, girls and boys, besieging the Hurricanes after a game, especially Jen and Jamila, and asking them for their autographs. A girl named Mary Kuhn told Jen after the defeat by Agawam, “You’ll always be winners in Meg’s and I’s eyes.” Mary and her pal Meg informed Jen and Jamila they wished they’d go to U Mass instead of Stanford and Dartmouth, mispronounced “Dark Myth” by the really little kids.

  They’d put out a newspaper called Hurricane with this account by Mary and Meg of Jen’s thousand-point night (the spelling and the grammar are as presented in the original):

  Pariseau
has a big smile to any kid who asks for her Augraph she gives a Great big smile. (I should know I ask!) Pariseau only needed 6 more baskets till her career was 1,000. Pariseau only needed six more points to get bouquets of balloons, flower and tons of cheers, just for Jen. But Jen decided to make the crowd sweat a bit. So Jen passes off to Kristin Marvin who shoots for ? points and she makes it. Then Wideman a all-American Basketball player heading for Stanford steal the Ball from Chicopee and passes to Pariseau who instead of shooting she passes to Emily Shore who gets 2 pointers. The crowd was pleased but a bit restless. I’ve got to concentrate on the game not my goals, I’ll get them sooner or later, Pariseau explained. I have the hole night to get 1,000 points! When the clock timer clicks to 13:44 on the gym wall there was a big sign that said Jenny Watch and six, five, four, two. High school students tore off the number of Baskets she had left to get till reaching 1,000. That’s when Jen only had 1 more basket until she reached 1,000 in her career. (999 Baskets). Then Wideman does a wonderful steal from Chicopee and she passes of to Jen who scores her final points. And when she reached her points the crowd went CRAZY! My friend (Mary Kuhn) and I saved our voice till that moment.

  Older kids wrote long letters filled with preadolescent angst, about life as well as sports. One such letter from a sixth grader at Fort River Elementary School was not much different from dozens and dozens of others to all the Hurricanes from younger kids whose sense of the world, and its possibilities, shifted to a greater sense of optimism in the face of so much success from a group of people who were, if not peers, at least close enough in years to seem approachable. The voice in the letter, the tone and the concerns of the writer, is typical, in some ways, of girls that age, with its combination of gratitude, self-deprecation, eagerness, and altruism. What made it extraordinary to Jen was that in person this girl was “totally shy, and no matter how much I tried to get her to talk she wouldn’t, and then she opened up in the letter and it was the first voice of hers I ever heard. It was strange in a very pleasant way, in that she found a medium she could communicate through. It was almost like a diary, and she found the confidence to send it. I was very glad that she did.”