In These Girls, Hope Is a Muscle

by Madeleine Blais

  As a black man, Wideman knows only too well the shallow triumph of token progress. He had told Kathleen’s father, “This is just one team in one season.” It alone cannot change the discrimination against girls and their bodies throughout history. But here in these girls, hope is a muscle.

  “Here’s to the senior girls,” he said, looking at them.

  They hoisted their ritual glasses of water.

  “This is,” he said, “as good as it gets.”

  The seniors were children of the mid-seventies. They were born in 1975, a year distinguished by leisure suits fashioned from pastel doubleknits for men and skintight jeans accessorized with high narrow boots for women.

  “Mandy,” “You Are So Beautiful,” and “Breaking Up Is Hard to Do” were the popular songs. Gunsmoke was televised for the last time. A Chorus Line opened on Broadway; Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run was released.

  One of those year-end list-oriented volumes available at the library noted that Ragtime was a bestseller, Anne Sexton’s Awful Rowing Toward God was published, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest won an Oscar for the best film.

  Mood rings, pet rocks, and skateboards were popular. The words fireperson and chairperson were introduced into usage. Individuals were permitted to buy gold for the first time since 1933, and word processors were manufactured. Tampons were advertised on television.

  Harvard University changed its five–two admissions policy to equal admissions for both genders. A black woman named Joanne Little was declared not guilty of stabbing with an ice pick a white prison guard who had tried to rape her.

  An obscure Georgia governor named Jimmy Carter was running for president.

  In sports, Catfish Hunter signed a $2.85 million contract with the Yankees, Cincinnati beat Boston in the World Series before a record TV audience of 75.9 million viewers, and Jack Nicklaus won the Masters. The New York Cosmos soccer team signed Brazilian star Pele to a $1 million contract. Philadelphia won the Stanley Cup, and Arthur Ashe won Wimbledon. Pittsburgh defeated Minnesota in the Superbowl. In horse racing an unbeaten three-year-old Ruffian broke an ankle and had to be destroyed.

  Golden State beat Washington in the NBA championship, UCLA was the college winner, Foolish Pleasure won the Kentucky Derby, and Muhammad Ali beat Joe Frazier in the Thrilla in Manila.

  Chris Evert won the women’s U.S. Tennis Open. The first women’s Kodak all-American basketball team was named, and the first women’s collegiate basketball game was played at Madison Square Garden, Queens versus Immaculata.

  They grew up watching Love Boat and Fantasy Island. The movies they liked were E.T., Tootsie, Endless Love, Flashdance, Foul Play, The Jerk, and Rocky. They read Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret; Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing; The Phantom Tollbooth; Freaky Friday; and Beverly Cleary’s Ramona books. Their toys included Legos, Star Wars figures, Atari, Rubik’s Cube, Snoopy Sno-Cone Machines, Donny and Marie dolls, and Silly Putty. When they were growing up, their trademark expressions were:

  “Book it” (for running fast)

  “In your face”

  “Wicked”

  “Massive”

  “Awesome”

  “Gag me with a spoon”

  “Bogus”

  “Tubular”

  “Grody”

  The seniors were in nursery school when their global consciousness was first stirred by the hostage crisis in Iran: The captivity dates and simple addition were conflated in their minds. Despite their good educations, they still thought of Pearl Harbor as the day, in Gumby’s words, “some big military thing happened.” To them president meant either Ronald Reagan or George Bush. When they were really little, someone tried to shoot President Reagan, and way before they were born he played a dying football player in a movie that people liked to make fun of. In high school whenever one of their teachers, Joe Jacobs (who taught Bible as Literature), found them intellectually deficient, he would say, “Oh, sorry, I forgot. You’re children of the Reagan era.”

  When they were in the sixth grade they saw Christa McAuliffe and the space shuttle Challenger explode, over and over and over.

  They were sophomores during the Gulf War. It was vivid to them in part because of a sign that the man who owns the bike shop across from Emily Dickinson’s house put on his window:

  NOT MY SON.

  NOT FOR OIL.

  NOT FOR BUSH.

  NOT FOR KUWAIT.

  They were sickened when a former student, one of those gentle souls who come to the Valley to study and then never leave, set himself on fire on the common as a protest against the war. For several weeks afterward, people who knew him and people who had only heard of him placed flowers in the charred circle where he had died and held a round-the-clock vigil. Sometimes on Pleasant Street cars would roar by, with someone, always anonymous in a shadowed vehicle, shouting an actual obscenity or shouting what was, under the circumstances, functionally just as harsh—“Get a life!”—punctuated by a guffaw and the squeal of tires.

  They were juniors in high school during the riots in Los Angeles. Jamila’s father was one of the people recruited by the networks to make talking sense of an event in which, among other acts, people not only shot one another but also looted stores for hot dogs and paper towels. At the time Jamila wrote:

  I am lost in the night

  Unseen until the fires are lighted

  There were tragedies in Amherst. Farmers are sometimes killed in the backfire during field burnings. Every year a few students overdose or have bizarre accidents, such as plunging to their death while “elevator-surfing,” a late-night, generally debauched dorm activity in which kids jump from one elevator roof to another, sometimes missing. The Hurricanes knew kids who had dropped out of school and were living on the streets; sometimes they hung out in the courtyard between the Unitarian Church and Bart’s Ice Cream—rollerblading, smoking, and engaged in endless games of hacky sack, in which a small beanbag is kicked in the air. The setting was more fetching, but the emptiness was as real as on an urban street corner. Kristin remembered the boy who had killed his stepfather because of beatings so severe that the walls of their apartment had shaken enough for neighbors to make formal complaints. Since 1989, they had heard from their parents how important it was to be careful after “what happened at the mall,” referring to the murder of the U Mass psychology major on that winter night. In Amherst, the particularity of each tragedy made each one especially real, and lamentable. Amherst was not a place awash in loss, like so many of the cities in America, not a place in which the sacrifice of humans seemed a necessary propitiation, a cruel toll exacted in exchange for a more exciting place to live, in some awful way, part of what made those places exciting.

  To look at the seniors, they all appeared lit from within. One would assume their lives have been, so far, seamless journeys. But most of them had a before and after. Their lives, like the map of Massachusetts in which the center had been seized to create the Quabbin Reservoir, had been punched in the middle.

  Jen was the most outspoken about the trauma of divorce and its aftermath.

  She observed that “in a lot of cases, kids whose parents get divorced are forced to grow up earlier. When your parents don’t get along, you have to be a mediator. There’s this delicate balance about what you can say and how you can act. This whole awareness has to be developed. It’s tough. The things that gnaw at you are the everyday things, little situations that other people take for granted, like when a game is over, which parent do you hug first? It can add a lot of stress to a childhood, a lot of pain and avoidable worry. Some kids don’t make it out of it. They don’t have the strength and the heart, and they let the situation consume them. In a strange distorted way it can help. What you lack in the nurturing department you learn to provide yourself. But you can go overboard and build a shell up around yourself and become callous. You’re always look
ing for normalcy, for something consistent, that strength that doesn’t leave, that family you hope is there and is not there. That one constant.”

  There were other sadnesses not openly discussed, even among the closest of friends.

  “Most of us,” said Jen, “do not come from a Dan Quayle type of family.”

  Yet, whatever doses of disruption they’d been dealt, an opposite force followed them onto the court.

  “Ladies, it’s showtime.”

  Coach Moyer never could resist the built-in excitement of a packed gym, all of it, even the row of hecklers from Hamp whose very insults seemed tailor-made to pump the Hurricanes to even greater feats.

  Feiker Gymnasium. February 19. Friday night. Hamp at Hamp.

  The local press fanned the ardor of the crowds with stories like Marty Dobrow’s HAMP-AMHERST TO PACK GYM TONIGHT in the Daily Hampshire Gazette:

  Here we go again.

  It’s Showdown II at Feiker Gym tonight between the Northampton and Amherst Regional girls basketball teams (7:30, WHMP AM). When they met for the first time last month—a matchup of undefeated powers—the Hurricanes posted a frenetic 45–40 victory on their home court.

  Since then both teams have lost at Agawam, setting the stage for tonight’s regular-season finale that—depending on your viewpoint—means everything, or hardly anything.

  An Amherst win would give the Canes a 19–1 record, the championship of the Valley Wheel for the second consecutive year, and the No. 1 seed in the Western Mass. tournament.

  A victory by Hamp would forge a three-way tie for the league title (with Agawam). The three 18–2 squads would then get their WM seeding with the flip of a coin.

  “You always want to win what you can,” said Hamp coach Tom Parent. “We want to win this one.”

  Amherst coach Ron Moyer added, “We have a piece of the rock. The worst we can do is be tri-champs.”

  Neither coach was willing to admit it, but the conclusion was clear: the Valley Wheel title, though desirable, was not the ultimate goal. Both teams have their hopes pinned to larger booty, a Western Mass. crown at least, and perhaps a state title.

  Moyer well knows that the top seed is not necessarily a blessing.

  “Last year we were the No. 1 seed,” he recalled. “We won the league, and went to the tournament, and we didn’t do anything (losing in the semifinals to a Blue Devil squad the Canes already had beaten twice). Hamp came in with five losses, they were the fourth seed, and they won the whole banana.”

  Regardless of its eventual meaning, this game has had as much hoop hype as any local contest in a long time. A brisk pre-sale of tickets has all but guaranteed a jam-packed gym tonight. Hamp athletic director Jeff Boudway said there will be tickets available at the door, but he advises fans to get there early to make sure they get a seat.

  Hamp certainly has a few things working in its favor tonight. The Blue Devils are undefeated and unchallenged on their home court. Standout guard Liz Moulton has recuperated from the ankle injury that took her out of action in the opening minutes of the first Amherst game.

  Still, Hamp is mightily concerned about another ankle, the one Beth Kuzmeski sprained in Monday’s loss at Agawam. Kuzmeski, headed to UMass on a full ride in the fall, was on crutches for part of the week and only practiced at half-speed yesterday, according to Parent.

  “We really haven’t had her 100 percent all year, and we don’t now,” Parent said. “But she’s still probably the best shooter around. She’s a real key for us.”

  Parent says that an important factor for Hamp is applying constant defensive pressure.

  “We need to make them work very hard to score,” he said. “Jamila (Wideman) is going to get hers, and Jen (Pariseau) is going to get hers, but the harder we can make them work, the more we can take the other kids out of the game.”

  Parent also hopes that his team will respond in a more relaxed fashion to the intense atmosphere surrounding the game this time around.

  “Getting through all the hype and the crowd, and just playing basketball is important,” he said. “The first game was 100 miles per hour, and no one could be in control of anything. We like to go quick, but we only want to go as fast as we can.”

  On the other side, Moyer has his players primed for the game. The Amherst coach knows that his glittering back court of Wideman (headed for defending national champ Stanford on a full ride) and Pariseau (bound for Dartmouth) will not be enough to carry the team. Hamp can defend as well as anyone with tenacious guards Johanna Clark and Betsy Gonski. Amherst will also need strong inside play on both ends of the court.

  “We’re not 100 percent there,” he admits. “And frankly, if we don’t get there, we’re probably not going to win the whole thing.”

  Still, the front court has made great strides since the beginning of the year. Kathleen Poe (termed “our silent assassin” by Moyer) has become a powerful inside scoring force in recent games. Junior Emily Shore and the center platoon of Kristin Marvin and Emily Jones have also picked up their play considerably. Jones, battling the flu, is questionable for tonight.

  Moyer says he likes the mental toughness of his team.

  “We’re going to go right at Hamp,” he promises.

  In terms of the Blue Devil personnel, Moyer says that he is particularly concerned about containing Moulton and Addie Stiles.

  “You expect Beth Kuzmeski to hurt you, and you expect Kim Frost to do her thing,” he said. “But those are two key players. If you see those kids having a big game, you figure they’re going to win, no matter what else we do.”

  “Let’s go, Devils; let’s go, Hamp.”

  That night, once again, as in Amherst, hundreds of fans were turned away at the door but the ones lucky enough to be inside displayed their gratitude with chants scribbling the air like graffiti.

  The Hurricanes poured out onto the court for their warm-ups.

  Jamila Wideman carried her boom box and placed it on the floor near the Hurricanes’ warm-up hoop. This large noisy contrivance was an integral ritual for her team.

  They loved “When Doves Cry” by Prince and “What’s on Your Mind” by Eric B. and Rakim and “360 Degrees” by Gran Pubba. Prince’s “Seven” used to spook them out: What seven special things were doomed to disappear? They liked “Hip Hop Hooray” by Naughty by Nature for its beat; they liked “You Can’t Play with My Yo Yo” by Yo Yo for its sass.

  For the frank fun of it, the plain old pelvic appeal, they liked lyrics from Wreckx-N-Effect:

  I like the way you comb your hair

  I like the stylish clothes you wear

  It’s just the little things you do

  That make me want to get with you.

  When they wanted to feel down or sad, they listened to Boyz II Men’s “End of the Road” and “It’s So Hard to Say Good-bye to Yesterday.”

  There was one song that in the right mood could send them rocketing, Mary J. Blige’s “Real Love”:

  We are lovers through and through

  And though we’ve made it through the storm

  I really want to put you on

  I’ve been searching for someone to satisfy my every need

  Won’t you be my inspiration

  Give the real love that I need

  Chorus:

  Real love

  I’m searching for a real love

  Someone to set my heart free

  Real love

  Meanwhile, in a show of support that was historic, at least for Amherst, the all-girl cheerleading squad, led by Sarah Gagnon, a small dark-haired senior headed to Skidmore in the fall, leant their voices and their gymnastics to the excitement. For some of the mothers of the Hurricanes, who remembered when to be a cheerleader was the only way to feel connected to a sport and physical beauty was the first criterion, the moment was a vindication. A circle ha
d been closed. It was as if the Hurricanes colluding with the cheerleaders and the cheerleaders colluding with the Hurricanes were sending a message of reconciliation.

  Taunts always exist on the floor, trash talk between the players baiting each other with disparaging references to the opposing team’s style of play. Among the girls in the Valley Wheel League it was not uncommon under pressure to refer to opponents with muttered slings and arrows. Had Coach Moyer heard certain street terms, he would have benched his athlete. He believed there was language and there was language, and the second kind could get you into trouble.

  On this evening a small group of teenaged boys started a scornful chant, directed at Jen and Jamila: “You’re overrated. You’re overrated.” To the younger players they shouted, “Useless!”

  They also tried to demoralize the Hurricanes with comments about the defects they perceived in their appearances.

  They made fun of Jade’s hair extensions; they shouted “Weight Watchers!” at Kim’s broad shoulders, “Acne!” at Jen.

  They lampooned Emily’s size-fourteen shoes and called them “skis.”

  They snickered and they jabbed each other in the ribs, muttering about each girl and her body.

  There were two elements to the victory that night.

  First, the junior varsity played a legitimately exciting game.

  Amherst, down 5 with just a minute left in overtime, ended up with a 46–44 win.

  Jan Klenowski, who garnered a team-high 11 points that night, tied the game on a long jumper.

  And then Rita Powell scored the winning deuce on an offensive rebound at the buzzer. A basket at the buzzer! It’s the candy in the box you thought was empty, the wad of cash you forgot about, the extra hour when daylight saving time changes in the fall. For Rita, the basket was all that and more, it was her first-class ticket to the varsity in the postseason. She had achieved her personal milestone.