In These Girls, Hope Is a Muscle

by Madeleine Blais

  Had his mood been different, he might have, as the bus swerved off the highway into the brightly lit side streets and pulled up in front of the arena with its monolithic grayness, felt jittery.

  But instead he felt contentment. It was a honor to be here, all six foot six of him, that former little kid who grew up in a house with only one rule (“What’s the matter? Are your parents against bowling?”) and no real space of his own dedicated in adulthood to a pursuit filled with rules, a game in which space itself is the ultimate quarry, under, over, on, beneath, and above, all of it, every invisible inch.

  When the bus finally pulled in front of the Centrum and it was time to leap off, the expressions on the faces of the girls were tight and determined. The words from the movie they had just seen resonated: “Someone will walk out of here the champion, and someone will just walk out.” To the world, they were a bunch of teenage girls; inside their heads, they were commandos. To the world, they had pretty names: Patri, Kristin, Jen, Kathleen, Kim, Jamila, Sophie, Jade, Emily J., Emily S., Jan, Lucia, Carrie, Rita, Jessi, Julie. But as far as they were concerned, they were the codes that encapsulated their rare and superb skills, their specialty plays, their personal styles. They were Cloudy and Snowplow and Jonesbones and Gumby and Grace and Skippy. They were Em squared. They were warriors.

  In the arena their parents nodded at one another, touched a back, squeezed a hand. Judging from their expressions, both distracted and attentive at the same time, they all appeared to be caught in the past as much as in the present, as if running old family movies in their heads, scraps of footage from the days long gone: Jamila, in the lights of the preemie ward, Jen telling her grade school teacher she did everything herself, thank you, Kathleen, in her one renegade moment ringing the sacred bells at Hampshire, Kim, steeped in quiet in Ms. Bouley’s Resource Room, shyly handing her a photo of herself, Kristin learning the Constitution and visiting her birthrights on her parents and stepparents, Patri (“I’m not a nun”) pacing outside that apartment in Chicago, praying for a return to Amherst, Emily “Gumby” Shore driving home from the hospital with her father, for whom the memory of the illness fades away but never completely, Emily “Jonesbones” Jones hoping to be a doctor like her father, little Rita (“cupcupcup all day long”), Jade, whose mother didn’t want her to be the second black in a school system with 527 children, Sophie, her mother haunted by two separate sounds, bookends to an era, the tires of the truck screeching and then years later the ballet teacher informing her daughter, “You’re too tall and your head is too big,” and Lucia, whose father wanted her to play the piano, who loved to listen to her as she became Beethoven or Debussy or Chopin, became, in his opinion, “complicated, and that’s the case of anyone’s child who plays the piano.”

  Complicated: the case of anyone’s child who plays.

  Complicated: anyone’s child.

  The girls crowded into a locker room. Solemnly, with very little commotion, they dressed in their capacious uniforms. They slapped hands and stood tall. Meanwhile, the stadium was redolent of hot dogs, popcorn, sweat, and anticipation, one side of the bleachers filled with their people and the other side with the fans from Haverhill. You could hear their fight song:

  1, We are the Hillies

  2, A little bit louder

  3, I still can’t hear you

  4, More, more, more, more, more

  The girls walked out wordlessly. They looked up.

  You have to live in a small town for a while before you can read a crowd, especially in New England, where reticence and fences are deep in the soil. But if you’ve been in a town like Amherst for a while, you can go to an out-of-town game, even to one in as imposing and cavernous a facility as the Centrum, and you can feel this sudden lurch of well-being that comes from the soothing familiarity of faces that are as much a part of your landscape as falling leaves, as forsythia in season, as rhubarb in June. You scan the rows, and for better, sometimes for worse, you know who’s who. You know whose parents don’t talk to whom else and you know why. You know who has troubles that never get discussed.

  You see the lawyer that represented your folks or one of their friends in a land dispute or a custody case. You see the realtor who tried to sell a house next to the landfill to the new kids in town. You see the doctor who was no help for your asthma and the one who was. You see the teacher who declared your brother a complete mystery and the teacher who always stops to ask what your remarkable brother is up to now. You know which man is the beloved elementary-school principal, now retired. You recognize the plump-cheeked ladies from the cafeteria who specialize in homemade cinnamon buns for sixty-five cents. You see your family and you see the fathers and mothers and stepfathers and stepmothers of your teammates. You know whose brother flew in from Chicago for the game, whose stepgrandparents came from Minnesota.

  But what is most important about all this is how mute it is. The communality is something that is understood, as tacit as the progression of the summer to the fall to winter to spring, and just as comforting.

  Usually there is a buzz of cheering at the start of a game, but this time the Amherst crowd was nearly silent as the referee tossed the ball.

  The Haverhill center tapped the ball backward to her point guard on the left side of the court, who drove through the lane, uncontested, past Jen. Easy layup. Amherst blinked first. Two­nothing. In the Haverhill stands, the crowd cheered. It was the only pure cheer they got.

  Within a few seconds, the score was 6–4 Amherst, and something remarkable took place. The Hurricanes entered into a zone where all of them were all-Americans. It’s a kind of controlled frenzy that can overtake a group of athletes under only the most elusive of circumstances. It’s not certain what triggered it, perhaps it was Jamila’s gentle three-pointer from the wing, or more likely, when Jen drove the baseline and she swooped beneath the basket like a bird of prey, then released the ball back over her head, placing it like an egg against the backboard and through the hoop. It might have been ten seconds later when Jamila stole the ball, pushing it down court in a three-on-one break, made a no-look pass to Jen, who just as quickly fired the ball across the lane to Kathleen for an uncontested layup. Whatever it is that started it, there was nothing Haverhill could do to stop it, and time-outs repeatedly called for by their frustrated coach only fueled Amherst’s frenzy further.

  Jen was amazed:

  It was a struggle to get up to the tempo in the first couple of minutes. We were playing even. But then as soon as we got in our rhythm, we stayed on that level. Coach always says basketball is a game of shifting momentum. It’s like a car speeding up a hill and braking on the way down. You rev it up, you slow it down. But with us, right now, we hit cruise control and it is well above the speed limit. Everyone on the court is playing as close to their best every moment. It is unconscious, but it’s not like sinking. Look: There’s Jamila with four steals in a row, and the whole team just looking as if we won’t try to catch up with her, thank you, because we just know she’ll get there first. And the passing, from Jamila to me, me whipping it across the key to Kathleen, and Kathleen making the bucket. Everyone is in the right spot. Everything is clicking.

  Two plays during the first half sealed it for Jen.

  They both involved Kathleen.

  Jen looked at her teammates and realized that often she measured the Hurricanes’ success by how well Kathleen played in the forward position. When she started off well, the team played well.

  Jen was coming down the court at a fast break and knew Kathleen was on her right and without looking passed the ball backward. Usually passes like that get kicked out of bounds or missed because the receiver doesn’t expect them to come, but Kathleen knew it was coming. She caught it, perfectly, and laid it in.

  The other great moment that demonstrated to Jen Kathleen’s evolution was when she stepped out, got the ball to the foul line, and without a moment’s hesitation, not a
flicker of a second thought, went up and shot.

  Nothing but net.

  That basket summed it up.

  Right before the half, when all the starters were on the bench, they got to cheer for the subs, for Jan, for Jade, and for Sophie, who all got to the foul line and scored.

  Even Kristin, never an inside power, made a layup from beneath the basket for which she felt entitled to indulge in that now-nearly-universal expression of the well-served gloat, a slashing pumping gesture with her right arm.

  When Patri entered the game, ensuring that Amherst had sounded all its cymbals, she couldn’t resist a quick skip across the floor. The crowd responded with a chant:

  “Patri! Patri! Patri!”

  The Hurricanes could not be stopped. They made basket after basket after basket, in, in, and in again.

  The sportscasters were stunned.

  The disparity between the performances of the two teams was not supposed to happen. The Hillies and the Hurricanes had been groomed, carefully, each at their own end of the state, to meet as equals. If anyone had been favored as Goliath, it was surely Haverhill.

  On and on and on it went, this streak, this fabulous finish to a remarkable season: a 37–0 run.

  No one could remember anything like it, at this level in the competition, at this point in the season, at a state championship.

  The halftime score was 51–6. The effect was surreal.

  An astonished Amherst could hardly even cheer. One Amherst fan shouted: “Where’s Dr. Kevorkian?” Another made the very un-Amherst comment: “They should bring on the Haverhill boys for the second half.”

  Among the spectators was Kathleen’s father, Donald Poe, who saw how her defense, along with that of Kristin and Gumby and Jonesbones, kept Haverhill’s score so low.

  When his son, Chris, was an infant, he had tried to teach him to say “ball” as his first word, until he was told that b is a hard sound for a baby. He’d expected a son to be an athlete, but when Kathleen came along, he had no such expectation. Yet whenever they went into the yard and she pitched a ball to him, it took only five minutes before his hand hurt. She threw a heavy ball.

  To him, what was important was not that Amherst had this great lead, but that the spirit of girls’ sports endured. Next year, it wouldn’t have to be Amherst; it might be West Side in Springfield. Its junior varsity was undefeated. When he’d been a student at W. T. Woodson High School in Fairfax, Virginia, the girls were not allowed to use the boys’ gym, which was fancy and varnished with the logo in the middle of the floor; the girls had a little back gym, without any bleachers. Now, after a game, whenever he saw the little kids asking his daughter for autographs, he was glad to see the girls, pleased that they had models. But he was just as pleased to see the boys asking; to him their respect for the girls’ team was just as important.

  For Jen, as she trooped with her team back to the locker room, the game was over at halftime.

  The second half was just a technicality.

  Coach Moyer and Trish Lea exchanged glances on the way into the locker room for the halftime talks.

  Coach Moyer, Mr. Joke, Mr. Pun, Mr. Emcee, was speechless.

  Everything went right.

  All season he’d kept a piece of chalk in his pocket to throw up in the air at the wall when things went wrong or if he wished to make a strong statement.

  This was probably the only coach trick he had not used all season.

  What do you say to a group of kids who were playing beyond their best, as individuals and as a team?

  He took the chalk, and with a smile, tossed it into the shower area.

  Jamila and Jen also exchanged puzzled looks: What do we do? The team is so pumped; what can you say?

  Jen thought fast.

  Usually at halftime one of them would say, “If we’re up by ten, we have to play like we’re down by ten. You can’t let up because if you let up, you let the other team back in.”

  But that night she realized they couldn’t say: “Let’s pretend we’re down by forty-five.”

  That wasn’t what Jen believed her team needed to hear.

  So Jen said, “Basically we have a comfortable lead now, and I don’t think the question is whether we’re going to win or not. We played an incredible first half, and we are right now where we should be. We’ve proven to everybody out here that we’re good athletes and that we’re a great team. Now let’s go out and show the crowd that we’re good sports and finish the game with class.”

  During the break, in the stands, Fran Deats, Kathleen’s mother, turned to Bernadette Jones and asked, “Have you stopped being nervous yet?”

  “I don’t know,” she laughed. “The roof could fall down.”

  John and Judy Wideman and all the other parents, groping their way to the concession stand for a soft drink, could not move more than two feet without being swamped by people filled with congratulations, more of the usual hugs and high fives.

  Everyone tried to be seemly; too garish a display might be indelicate until the final moment of the contest had been played out.

  When the final seconds were running down on the clock, all the starters were on the bench, and they grabbed each other’s hands and they all sat on the edge of their seats and then when the clock ran out they raised their hands as if they were a single unit and they ran out onto the floor.

  The final score was 74–36.

  After they’d received the trophies and collapsed in one huge hysterical teenage heap, they all stood up. First they sang “Happy Birthday” to Kristin Marvin, who turned eighteen that day. Then they extended their arms toward their parents, teachers, brothers, sisters, even to some of those 140 little girls whose parents allowed them a school night of unprecedented lateness, and in one final act as a team, these girls shouted, in the perfect unison that served them so well on the court, “Thank you!”

  One among them made a move away from the group to where parents and fans were being blocked off by Centrum functionaries in their gray blazers with the C on the breast pockets. No one from the stands was allowed to walk on the floor; it hadn’t occurred to the officials that someone from the floor might wish to join the stands. You could see her mouthing something: “Dad. Dad.”

  Taking advantage of the goodwilled confusion and her own flexibility, Jen Pariseau swung herself up over the barricades. She hesitated for a moment, as if to get her bearings, and then pushed forward, faster and faster, not frantic, but almost. Blinded in part by the crowd that kept blocking her path, she lunged upward until she reached the level at which her father stood, and finding him at last, she fell into his arms. And while many in the crowd of Amherst fans saw the tall man with his curly hair, with his eyes pressed shut, being hugged by the girl with the dark ponytail, only Tracy Osbahr, standing next to them, caught her stepdaughter’s exact words, and so later when Bob Pariseau asked, “What did Jenny say? . . . Exactly?” as if he couldn’t remember, his wife would tell him: “We did it, Daddy. We did it. I love you.”

  But for now, back in the locker room, Kristin Marvin sucked on orange slices and sloshed water on her face. She then stood on a back bench, raised her right fist, turned to her comrades, and shouted. “Holy shit! We’re the fucking champions!” And then she lost it, not in the prim sense of dropping a needle on a carpet, but in a grand historic explosive way, heaving herself into the waiting arms of one teammate after another as they all sobbed and convulsed.

  There was one injury. Someone’s elbow had caught Emily Shore on the face during the game, and a tooth had penetrated her cheek, leaving a jagged hole.

  Emily Jones’s father, with his tall sloping frame and mild­mannered expression, stood in the corridor outside the locker room performing a quick consult.

  “I’m going to butterfly-bandage it for the time being, but I think it needs a stitch or two. You can’t put it off till the morning beca
use after four or five hours the wound will start to close up.”

  “Where should we go?” asked Sally Shore, standing at her daughter’s side.

  “Probably Holyoke,” said the doctor. In that way that hospitals and medical centers triage themselves, it was known that if you got stabbed or shot (or elbowed, if you’re a basketball player), you’d go to Holyoke Hospital.

  “If there’s a scar, it won’t be much of anything,” he added.

  “It doesn’t bother me if there’s a scar,” said Emily, who looked as if she might actually welcome the badge in it.

  Emily’s mother sighed, “Well, at least it’s for a good cause.”

  Inside the locker room, the Hurricanes were refusing to leave. Coach Moyer kept knocking on the door, trying to roust the stragglers. Finally, he announced he was coming in, and what greeted him was a roomful of girls who returned his level gaze with eyes that were rheumy and red as they sputtered, “Last . . . final . . . never again.”

  He looked at them as directly as he ever had in all those moments of coaching when they’d needed a solid unforgiving gaze, and he said: “You’re wrong. This isn’t the last. There will be more basketball.” His tone was conversational, almost adult to adult.

  “But . . . ,” they started to say.

  “I promise you. There will be lots more basketball.”

  Still they regarded him with disbelief. They couldn’t decipher his real message, at least not at that moment. They couldn’t fathom how the word basketball might have more than one meaning.