In These Girls, Hope Is a Muscle

by Madeleine Blais

  January 31, 1993

  Dear Jen,

  Thank you so much for coming to our practice. It wasn’t really a practice, but I don’t know what else to call it. I was surprised you came, because you must have a ton of homework. You are really good at basketball and I don’t care what anybody else says, I think you’re every bit as good as Jamila.

  I forgot to ask you this at our (sort of) practice, but aren’t you scared of going to college? That probably sounds dumb, but I would be scared to death, I mean, leaving all my friends and going somewhere I’ve never been before.

  I feel like I know you really well, now. I mean, I’m not embarrassed to talk to you anymore. You’re kind of like the big sister I’ve always wanted. I wish we could do something really special together, not like basketball practice, something special. I don’t know.

  I’ll be at your game next Saturday. We’re playing the Panthers, I think. I hope you can ref. See you on Saturday.

  Your friend,

  Jenny Hurwitz

  The postscript that followed was longer than the letter:

  P.S. This is going to be long because I just got your letter and I have a lot to say. First of all, thanks for writing. I didn’t really expect you to, but I’m glad you did.

  Ann and I have had some rough spots, but we’ve figured out how to avoid them. One thing is not to see so much of each other—last year we were together at least six times a week. The other thing is not to get in on anybody else’s arguments. We used to do that but it just got us mad.

  We’ve never been mad at each other. We’ve never been mad at each other for more than an hour I don’t think.

  I’m so glad you remembered softball camp. I do too and I got so mad at myself for getting sick (that’s why I was only there for one day).

  I really really want you to meet Ann. She’s like you in the way that she has no trouble speaking in public. Sometimes, though, I think she does get a little nervous, and tries to hide it by acting really relaxed and sort of goofy. Actually, I have a lot of friends who really want to meet you. I tell them you’re really special and they should go to one of your games.

  Ann is really special. In fact, the only thing I can’t talk to her about is boys. I don’t really know why, I just can’t. You’re right, I should try to become friends with boys, but they’re so hard to talk to. There is one boy who lives across the street from me who I can talk to. His name is Spencer. He doesn’t act weird when I talk to him and sometimes I actually feel he tries too hard to get me to notice him. He’s pretty popular in school—one girl even said she would pay him twenty dollars to go out with him—so he pretends not to notice me in school when I see him. He’s nice out of school though.

  Like I said before, you are like the big sister I’ve always wanted, and I will write or talk to you if I have any questions, problems, or just need to talk. If you ever need to talk you can write or call me. Also, like I said before, I’d love to do something with you if you’re ever free. I’m free most of the time on weekends and on Wednesday afternoons. I’m so sorry this is so long, and I really had no intention of writing this much. See you soon.

  —Jenny

  It was letters like these that lifted Jen, more than anything else, more than the victory over Hamp at home, the rapprochement with Jamila, the mentoring of her younger teammates, and even her father’s eager coaching from the sidelines. They were like one of those principles of physics she learned about in Mr. Camp’s class; they had a locomotive urgency. They made her boat float.

  It was the last home game of the regular season, an otherwise chilly February afternoon when Jamila spoke to the team privately about what the Hurricanes had meant to her. She had written out her comments and she read them with a depth of passion she usually reserved for the action on the floor:

  “With all of the media buzzing around in the last few days and Mr. Moyer trying to convince us that it was not distracting I came to realize something. A number of the reporters asked me to explain Hoop Phi. I simply could not. There is no explanation, at least not one that can be put into words. Hoop Phi is the thing that people search for in their lives. It is the thing that we have found to which we belong, contribute and love. I am no longer searching for my ‘Real Love.’ When I began the process of looking at colleges and teams I had a very unrealistic approach. I found that I began searching for a team like ours. The more I looked the more I began to realize that what I have experienced in this winter season is unique and simply unrepeatable (if that is a word). What I remember most is not the wins or the losses (except for Hamp) but it is the bus rides, team cheers, locker-room antics and of course Friendly’s. The weirdest thing about being a senior is that you realize things don’t last forever and at the same time they do. The games will stop, the practices will end but what will remain? Two words will remain—Hoop Phi.”

  In addition to team tributes like this one and team dinners at Jamila’s house, there were team scrunchies (cloth-covered elastic bands for ponytails), team necklaces with their names and nicknames on little beads, team rings (plastic but fanciful, bought for ten cents apiece by Patri), little bottles of team lotion (from Kim), and there was also team pressure:

  “Please, Lucia, you have to.”

  Lucia’s eyes widened, her lip curled slightly, she looked away.

  “But, Lucia, this is for the seniors.”

  “It’s too embarrassing . . . in front of so many people . . . What if I make a mistake.”

  “Pu-leeeze, Lucia. It will pump us up.’’

  Lucia had a classic look; the hoop earrings she favored furthered the sense of a face that was round and inviting and opulent. On three separate occasions people had voluntarily informed her that she reminded them of Mona Lisa. She gave an impression that no matter what else she was doing and/or what was happening around her, she was, on some level, quietly, deep down, taking notes.

  She surveyed the faces of her teammates, the eagerness in Patri’s and Rita’s, the sudden seriousness of Jen’s and Jamila’s, the sweet placidity in Kim’s and Kathleen’s expressions, the drive in Kristin’s, all fourth gear or nothing. A couple of the other girls had their hands folded, church-style, as if to beseech her.

  Jamila’s private call to Hoop Phi required a public showing.

  Lucia’s teammates had created the functional equivalent of a pressure offense to see if she would sing the national anthem before this last home game of the regular season. Here she was, not especially patriotic, and they were leaning on her to sing a government song.

  Jen said, “I’d do it myself, but with my voice. . . . Hey, if you want, I’ll sing a Beatles song: ‘All the lonely people, where do they all come from?’ The reason we want you to do it is then people will actually stay and watch us play.”

  “Oh, okay, I guess so.”

  Lucia had a natural vibrato, which created in her listeners their own inner tremor. Slowly the fear of singing diminished as the fear of disappointing any of her teammates loomed larger.

  Lucia cleared her throat and bit down on her lower lip. She wanted to look like a musician she’d once read about who sang in such a way that all expression left her face and entered her voice. She tried to give herself over to the experience, fully, silently invoking one of her favorite lines in all of literature, the last sentence of Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon: “If you surrender to the air you can ride it.”

  At first, Lucia’s parents had both been taken aback by her pursuit of sports, not so much the passion itself as its object. But lately, whenever she went to a game, Gigi Kaeser enjoyed looking at her daughter and her teammates with her photographer’s eye, appreciating the ease in their motion, the cadence of it: “Just think what it must be like to go through puberty and have your body on your side.”

  As Lucia stood in one corner, facing the flag, her father slipped into the gym at the opposite corner, next to where John W
ideman stood. Lucia’s father, Jim Maraniss, is a classically absentminded professor, capable of translating Antonio Benítez-Rojo’s novel Sea of Lentils but not necessarily of remembering his wallet at the same time. Once the previous year he’d arrived at a game for which there’d been a nominal charge with empty pockets. Coach Moyer had motioned him in: “Come on in, Jim, we need all the bodies we can get.”

  In what Lucia considered one of the most embarrassing pieces of writing in the history of prose, he’d submitted an article to the Daily Hampshire Gazette.

  It was all about his wonderment at watching her play basketball or practice her pitching in softball: “To me, she was the virgin goddess Atalante, her arm held out with Venus’ golden apple in her palm displayed to all the rivals who would fall before her.”

  He wrote that his daughter’s talents surprised him: “I teeter forth heartbreakingly on tinker-toy legs. My wife, Virginia, whose subtle and commanding grace cannot be dealt with appropriately here, was never, in our youth, an athlete. She was a shrine to the athletic world, as I recall.”

  It bothered him, he wrote, that Lucia did not want him to attend her games. She gave him explicit orders. If he did, he should please sidle in silently and to be sure to protect her from the knowledge of his presence.

  With his red hair, which gave the appearance of a hat donned without thought, shambling gait, and glasses, he seemed not just removed from the world of sport, but sometimes removed from the world entirely. His favorite item of clothing was a leather jacket he’d ordered from a catalogue that said BEATLES. WORLD TOUR. 1964. When asked, he always said yes, he had been on it. On occasion people who did not know better thought perhaps he was a boarder in his own house.

  In his marriage, Lucia’s mother, Gigi, did everything—the lawn, the cars, the driveway in winter, the books—in exchange for his cooking the evening meal. She marveled at his inefficiency. “He shops as if he lives in Europe. He goes to Bread & Circus every day.”

  “And,” she added, “he never makes enough for leftovers.”

  A professor of Romance languages at Amherst College, he enjoyed the benefaction of that institution, Amherst’s secret country club if there is one. As a member of the faculty, he and his family got to live in a rambling house that used to be an inn for a rent of only six hundred dollars a month. It was an even better deal before the federal government started to count discounts on faculty housing as income. On his campus he was sometimes known as “Nighttrain.” Most people thought it was for his habit of whistling ditties so that people were used to hearing him before they actually saw him. In fact, the name was generated during a faculty intramural football game in the mid-seventies in which Lucia’s father intercepted a pass with a grace so thoroughly opposite his normal capacities that he was nick­named after Dick “Nighttrain” Lane, a defensive back for the Detroit Lions. On his campus Professor Maraniss was celebrated for his intellect and his wit, and no one there required him to have all that and a wallet too. When it had come time to put a hoop in his driveway, he’d dug the hole with a trowel, much to the amazement of a neighbor who taught classics and so was herself not attuned to modernity in its more tawdry manifestations, but even she had heard of a posthole digger.

  He loved his daughter’s name. “Any pronunciation is okay, really. Loo-sha. Loo-chee-a. Loo-see-a. They’re all beautiful.” Lucia is named after a great-great-aunt. The name comes from the Spanish word for light, and it is used in the Spanish expression for giving birth, dar a luz, “to give to the light.” As she sang, he contemplated her features: classical, generous, and evenly spaced. He always thought she had a lush quattrocentro appearance. She’d started drawing recognizable scribbles before the age of two and had begun her study of the piano when she was four, often sitting at the piano in the dining room, filling the house with her music. When she was nine, she’d decided she wanted to play Für Elise, which she had heard on a McDonald’s commercial. She put a lot of space in it, a lot of rubato. As she grew older, she became adept at Mozart’s D Minor Piano Concerto and Debussy’s Suite Bergamasque. She would do the first section, more difficult and beautiful than what he thought of as the less entrancing Clair de Lune section.

  When he got a CD of Beethoven’s Appassionata, Lucia had learned it and played it with rumble and with joy. To him, “No matter how unsophisticated children are, they become Beethoven or Debussy or Chopin when they play. They become complicated, and that’s the case of anyone’s child who plays the piano. They do all this stuff without any big fuss. They don’t act like Franz Liszt.”

  And now that she was older, his Lucia, who had once loved the mathematical purity of sound, embraced instead the purity of moving through space. It made him feel disoriented, light­headed, discombobulated, that this child, when he wasn’t looking, had changed, had metamorphosed into a jock.

  “And the rockets red glare . . .”

  She was straining to reach the high notes; for her they are always the hardest.

  “The bombs bursting in air . . .”

  Her father contemplated the mystique of what it meant to be on this team, to kick butt week after week, the feeling of belonging. It must be, he thought, a really powerful drug.

  She neither veered into a screech nor faded into an echo.

  She had climbed the mountain. The song would be over soon. It would be easy from now on; everything would be easy.

  “Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there . . .”

  With the final syllables reverberating in the air of the gym, John Wideman turned to Jim Maraniss and said something that, when she heard it later, taxed Lucia’s patience. It was a nice thing to say; it’s just that so much of what grown-ups of that generation say sounds so old-fashioned, as if the very observations are wearing peace symbols and bell-bottoms.

  “She sounds,” said the one man to the other, “a lot like Joan Baez.”

  Later the team celebrated the victory (57–44) with a food fight in the locker room, and after cleaning the frosting from their faces, the seniors took John Wideman up on his offer for a late lunch to celebrate the end of the regular season. While waiting for the pizza, the girls complained about Amherst and how little there is to do in a town favored by grown-ups as a place to bring up children for precisely that reason.

  “It’s not that there’s absolutely nothing to do,” the seniors said in what amounted to a chorus.

  “Yeah. You can hike on the Robert Frost trail.”

  “Or bike on the new bike path. The pavement is made from—guess what?—glass recycled from our community!”

  “You can go to the mall.”

  “Which one? Live or dead?”

  The Hampshire Mall, known as the live mall, is right next to the Mountain Farms Mall, known as the dead mall. The live mall has a video arcade, a food court, and a roller rink, and is anchored by Kmart and J. C. Penney. The dead mall is a ghostly structure, gray and looming. It has a rug store called the Rug Store, the Warehouse Depot, Dave’s Soda, and Pet Food City, and on Sundays Jackson’s flea market, in which merchants sell out-of-season gift wrap, World’s Fair souvenir spoons, and Desert Storm sweatshirts and memorabilia. These are not the glitzy upscale malls of extremely affluent communities; they are the stripped-down version, the mall equivalents of cars without air-conditioning and with only two doors. There’s not a Gap or Banana Republic at either one, no floors with fancy inlay or Italian tiled walls or magnificent fountains.

  “There’s nothing to do except go to the mall, and once you get there, there’s still nothing to do.”

  “We could tip cows.”

  “Tip cows?”

  “You know how they sleep standing up. We could go and knock them over.”

  Patri looked chagrined. “Do you really know anyone who’s done that?”

  It was Kristin who found the perfect way to sum up the peculiar, almost consoling, lack of outward drama in A
mherst.

  She recounted a dream of the night before.

  “In my dream, my mom and I, we went to Stop & Shop, and while we were there, we went down, you know, all our usual aisles in the regular order, picking out all the things we usually buy, and after that we got in line to check out.”

  “That’s it?” asked the other girls.

  Jamila’s father thought maybe the dream had another dimension, and so he tried a gentle psychoanalytic probe. Layers, he often reflected, were an indigenous New England phenomenon. People wear them; they respect them. Perhaps this dream had some undiscovered thickness. He had a quicksilver face, his expression changing in a flicker from stormy to melancholy to soft and forgiving. Now it was contemplative.

  “Did you run into any unusual people?”

  “No.”

  “How about money? Did you run out of money or anything?”

  “No.”

  “Kristin,” said her teammates, “that’s so sad.”

  Kathleen, who was in the top 10 academically in her class of 250, told Jamila’s father that she had tried reading a collection of his short stories, “the one called Jungle Fever.”

  “I’m not Spike Lee. It was just Fever.”

  “Mr. Wideman, I tried reading it,” said Jen Pariseau, also in the top 10 academically. “I found the shortest story I could, and you know what? I think I understood it. I can’t guarantee it, but I think I did.”

  He looked at his guests at the table, a blur of happy faces and ponytails. Their teasing was a joy. Girls’ basketball is not boys’ basketball being played by girls. It’s a whole new game. There’s no dunking. They can’t jump as high. They can’t play above the rim. But they can play with every bit as much style. And there’s that added purity, that sense of excellence for its own sake. It’s not a career option for girls; after college the game is over, so there is none of the desperate jockeying for professional favor.