In These Girls, Hope Is a Muscle

by Madeleine Blais

  The biggest challenge has been losing her mother to cancer.

  “My mom passed away. I can talk about what I’ve learned, changes in perspective or location since I was in high school . . .but the real change? My mom passed away. And that changes everything. She was one of the loves of my life.’’

  Emily Jones (“Jonesbones”) graduated from Princeton and UMass Medical School, followed by a fellowship in Sports Medicine. She got married in the fall of 2006 to a man who was then the chief of staff for Congressman Paul Hodes of New Hampshire.

  “In terms of sports,” she says, “I went on to row for Princeton during college and, right after college, I ran marathons and did some triathlons to get my sports fix. As part of my sports medicine fellowship, we helped care for athletes from the high school to the professional level. The high school that I helped out in Northern Virginia had their girls’ basketball team go to the state finals this year. Unfortunately, they lost. But the excitement it brought out for the girls’ team and girls’ athletics was very reminiscent. Northern Virginia was much more of a suburb and not a community like Amherst. So they definitely didn’t have the wonderful town support that we had. Growing up in Amherst was wonderful.” She always wished she could move back.

  The desire to move back intensified after her father died of a heart attack in January of 2015. Her husband now works as an energy consultant and can live anywhere. So, in the summer of 2015, they found a house only a few doors down from where her mother lives. They have three children, Ruth, born in 2011, Daniel, in 2013, and Aaron, in 2016. Emily is now in charge of Student Health Services at Amherst College.

  “I am proud to come back and be a doctor. And being known as his daughter, I aspire to be the kind of person and physician he was. It brings me closer to him to be back here.”

  “Recently, Ruth asked why are there always boys on the TV playing basketball, and my husband said it’s time to convert those old videocassettes into DVDs and show them to her. She is playing in a kindergarten league that goes from K-2, with plenty of boys and girls. That wasn’t the case growing up here. I didn’t start until the fifth or sixth grade.”

  Nowadays, exercise is on the fly. On the day when we recently spoke, she said, “I got up at four-thirty to go on my treadmill for three-quarters of an hour before everyone else got up.”

  Kristin Marvin (the Hurricane who covered the walls of her girlhood bedroom with Absolut ads, because they were “you know, like, effective”) was the first player I met. She was the one who came to our house to babysit when the regular sitter had to cancel. She was all enthusiasm with an expression as open as a tree in a breeze. Coach Moyer worried about her the most: what if she flaked during her senior year and started to party before the basketball season was over? He called her in for a pep talk.

  “Don’t worry, coach,” she said in November. “All my friends know I can’t have fun again until March.”

  He worried.

  At one point, I heard that Kristin had gone to UMass for a couple of years and then dropped out. She ended up in California working for a cruise line in the entertainment division.

  “Well,” said Coach Moyer, “at least she got paid to party.”

  That was true—but only as far as it went.

  Kristin’s version:

  “I did get paid to party, but not much. About six hundred a month.”

  At UMass, she studied pre-med, but decided against a career as a doctor. It was too much emphasis on managed care, with doctors turning their offices into “in and out factories”. She transferred to Mills, a woman’s college in California. She started out working for an online agency for pharmaceuticals.

  Kristin eventually started her own Internet business specializing in parent and physician education, with a focus on serious conditions.

  Before she sold it, her company did seven million dollar’s worth of business a year and she had over thirty employees. She is married, with three daughters, Ellie, nine, Abigail, seven, and Maisie, two and a half. Her husband, a psychiatric nurse, is a stay-at-home dad. She works as a vice president in a different version of the same business now.

  Her memory of growing up in Amherst:

  “My husband used to tease me that I went to school with nothing but white kids and I tell him we were very multiracial: with Vietnamese refugees, kids from India, China. Because of the university, we were culturally rich and not just as an ethnic thing. You grow up with a broad view, such an open mind about what’s normal. My friends had gay parents, divorced parents, even,” pause, “straight ones.”

  She would like to set the record straight about her reputation as a bad girl: “Compared to some of my peers, I was pretty rebellious, in the context of a peer group of really good kids. But I would like to point out that I graduated in the top twenty-five of my class, with a 3.6 GPA.”

  Jamila Wideman, All-American, subject while in high school of the headline “Schools Are Lining Up For Wideman”, graduated from Stanford with a double-major in Political Science and Afro-American Studies. Her sports resume:

  “Four years on basketball team. Three Final Four appearances. Then, five seasons in WNBA (Los Angeles Sparks (3 1/2 seasons), Cleveland Rockers (1/2 season), and Portland Fire (1 year)). During offseason of 1999-2000 played a full season (winter) in Israel for Elitzur Ramle, winning the championship. After that, NYU School of Law. Focus on criminal justice issues and death penalty defense specifically, followed by a Two-Year Fellowship at the Equal Justice Initiative of Alabama (small non-profit firm in Montgomery, Alabama specializing in death penalty defense) and one season playing professional basketball in Ibiza, Spain (retired after this).”

  Her name sometime still gets mangled. Once she was introduced by a sports announcer as “Himalaya Weiderman.”

  She now lives in New York City and works as Staff Attorney at The Legal Aid Society in the Brooklyn Neighborhood Office, where she represents low-income tenants who are facing eviction from private and public housing.

  “I believe that the most significant estimation of any society or community is how it treats its poor, its dispossessed, its powerless people. These are the people I work on behalf of. I represent them in various tribunals in an effort to secure what I think is a basic human right—access to adequate and safe shelter.”

  She and her wife have a one-year-old daughter named Teya.

  I once asked Jamila, looking back on that championship season, what stands out now that might not have seemed so significant back in the day?

  “I did not realize how rare it would be to share a common goal with a group of people and to have forged a collective will capable of achieving it. The old image of a hand and five fingers collapsing into a fist comes to mind. The spirit of that team is absolutely unique in my experience. It was literally a manifestation of the idea, ‘If you can dream it, you can be it.’ A corny phrase, for sure, but I still hold a child’s faith in that notion, and much of it comes from having had it actually happen in 1993. Another phrase comes to mind that I think captures the spirit of the ARHS team that has only become more and more meaningful as years have passed. It is a snippet of a poem by Derek Walcott that says, ‘ . . . time creeps over the patients who are too long patient.’ I keep this quote in my head every day to remind myself of how to meet the world. It is reminiscent, I think, of a quote I know was very dear to me in high school that came from Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, to ‘live with your head in the lion’s mouth.’ I still dream big dreams. I still think everything is possible. I still think that investing in something with all that you have puts you at risk of experiencing tremendous devastating pain, but also creates the potential for limitless and overwhelming joy. Whichever is the result, I think I am convinced that it is the depth of feeling that is actually glorious, and I am grateful to have had an experience way back, when in high school with the basketball team, that allowed me to learn this.”

&nb
sp; Jen Pariseau, who grew up in Pelham and who had the best summation for why Amherst became so politically correct (“It all goes back to this guy Jeffrey Amherst. Some people say he was a womanizer and a drunk. The one thing we know for sure is that he tried to wipe out the Indians by giving them blankets infected with smallpox. Ever since, we’ve been trying to make up for him.”) played basketball at Dartmouth. Jen found that the biggest difference between high school and college sports was the time commitment and the toll on the body.

  “It could take from five to seven hours of your day, depending on what time of the season and whether or not you needed pre- and post-practice time in the training room. Add in the travel and missed classes (which I didn’t suffer from as much because the Ivy league structures their schedule to minimize this) and it really started to feel more like a job than anything else. I sadly admit that I regret that I played all four years and, while basketball teaches you a ton, so does a good college education and I really feel like I missed out on a lot of the experiences at Dartmouth. I would add here, especially since I still have old teammates (one who sits next to me at work) who are still good friends, that the experience of being on a team is really a strong and valuable bond. So my stance on this has softened a bit.”

  Jen has pursued a career in finance. At work, she finds her interest in sports and other topics that guys like to discuss has made her colleagues “more comfortable with me, which was good, since 97.9% of the people I interact with at work are men.”

  Her time as an athlete also “carried over in most of the ways that people would suspect: confidence, positive aggressiveness, sense of teamwork, thick skin, ability to think quick on your feet, etc. There was also the added ease when I came out that aided in the removal of any sexual tension and increased how relatable we are to each other (as conveyed through my joke from years earlier). I think also it gives you a structure in your life that involves goals—improving, strengthening, etc—that drive you to be better at your job.”

  The joke from years earlier: When Jen first came out to the guys at work, one of them said, “You dig girls?”

  “Yes.”

  “Cool. We do too!”

  Her dad Bob and stepmom Tracy have remained close friends with Ron. The more time goes by, the more Jen has come to appreciate the brilliance of his coaching: “Teenage girls are psychotic. Ron somehow knew how to manage that. How a guy from Philly can pull that shit off is a miracle. He knew when to be funny and light and knew when to push us. He did an amazing job managing that line where a teenage girl goes from being encouraged and pushed to being disheartened and insecure. As we know, it is so easy to silence and scare even the smartest, most talented young girls. And he always understood that it was about building up self-esteem but doing it in a way that didn’t make you feel like he was ‘coaching to girls’. He was coaching athletes and made you feel understood without feeling patronized. I really only felt intimidated by him when he told a bad joke then stared at you laughing until you relented and laughed back . . . for an uncomfortably long period of time.” Pause. “And I still fear that!”

  She still misses Betsy Moyer:

  “I often describe Betsy’s daughter Courtney as my oldest friend and the first person I remember knowing. Something similar can be said of Betsy as she was in my life since the beginning of childhood memories. For most of my childhood, I saw her almost every day and her infectious enthusiasm for life and warm openness to people were qualities I remember the most. Our relationship was constructed somewhere in the middle of friend and parent, where the age gap and my respect for her made her more of a mentor. But the closeness we shared made us very good friends. We didn’t have the burden of the mother-daughter dynamic that can sometimes infuse teenage years with conflict, and I could often turn to her when I struggled with my own parents. When I met my wife and we had known each other for a while, I found myself reflecting on Betsy to her and saying how sad I was that they would never know each other because she was such an amazing woman. My wife’s response is the best way to describe how I remember her: ‘I’ve met most people in your life and can see the qualities that you draw from each influential person. And where there are these traits you have that aren’t obviously from anyone I have met, I assume that is Betsy.’ I take comfort in knowing that through the pain of missing her, I had enough time to learn from her and carry her with me in the ways I view and treat the world.”

  Jen said that thanks to social media she can see updates on former teammates such as Emily Shore, Patri Abad, Kristin Marvin, Kathleen Poe (and her dad!) and even some rivals like Beth Kuzmezki. “The person I keep in closest touch with now is Jamila. We were actually out of touch for a while with college and our own post-college experiences and then we randomly ran into each other one day in the East Village and have been in great touch ever since . . . which feels really good because she is one of those friends that you can really grow with and develop on your own but still be relevant as friends because you had such a good foundation. Sometimes friends grow apart for understandable reasons, depending on when you met them in life. It’s nice to see that the reasons we got along so well in high school are not only still there but are evolving and growing. I think we actually live closer on a distance basis (she is in Brooklyn as well) than we did growing up.”

  Jen married in 2011, at City Hall, the week after gay marriage became legal in New York City. “I am the luckiest person in the universe in that I managed to find the best Texan alive. She is that rare person that can be gentle but very firm . . . understanding but not overly tolerant of things she shouldn’t be. She is patient and funny and adorable and really someone you wake up each day with and grow a little bit strong and a little bit better together with. She doesn’t like puns . . . so that took some adjustment but she is well worth it! We were married on 8/1/11 after two years of engagement and a failure to sit down long enough to plan a wedding. We actually married a week after it was legalized to be a part of celebrating that amazing moment in our history. The camaraderie amongst gay couples and our straight allies was incredibly powerful and, for the first time in my life, I really, really understood the importance (especially to those who had systemically been denied it) of marriage and wanted to be married.”

  Together they have two children, Oliver, age four, and Elodie, born in January 2017.

  “Having a daughter born the week before Trump was inaugurated has been a deeply conflicting thing. Here I thought we would be welcoming in our first female president and, in one of the cruelest 180’s in the history of politics, we instead ushered in a hyper-privileged, deeply misogynistic man-baby who has never had to deal with the consequences of any of his bad behaviors anywhere in life. It was always important to Amanda and me to raise deeply aware and thoughtful children, but now it becomes critical. We need girls who are fierce and boys who are empathetic. And for our kids, they are going to be aware of their privilege in a way that they acknowledge it, don’t take it for granted, and use it to really make everyone better.”

  Today, she lives in Brooklyn where the children on the playground have names like Wolf and Fox and Ocean and where you can buy artisanal pickles for nine dollars a jar—something her dad the town engineer has trouble wrapping his mind around.

  “I know I live in a bubble and was raised in a town that gets chided for its liberalism, but the stuff I have learned is essential to growing and living in a multicultural world.”

  Amherst is still filled with high self-regard. With its plethora of bumper stickers and opinions, it remains a strong taste. Even the trash trucks have erudition and attitude. Emblazoned on the back of one, these words: I recycle, therefore I am.

  Outside of Amherst, people like to say that the town consists of 32 square miles of wishful thinking surrounded by reality.

  Where else does the police log report that three bicycles have been arranged precariously high up in a tree? Upon investigation, the display turned ou
t to be an installation by some art students—illustrating a principle of composition known only to them.

  The crosswalk signal in the center of town makes chirping sounds instead of an ugly buzz.

  Street vendors sell soy votive candles and a weekly farmer’s market boasts up to thirty kinds of apples. The local movie theater, when it opened, featured vegetable-dyed M&M substitutes and to this day you can shake nutritional yeast on your popcorn.

  The pepper spray used by the police is alleged to be organic.

  The trustees at Amherst College have voted to no longer use the name Jeffrey Amherst as their school mascot. Several options are being considered including “Fighting Poets.”

  Has Amherst changed?

  In a word: no.

  Chance played a big role in this story being told. An old friend had just taken over the job as editor of the New York Times Magazine. I sent him a note of congratulations, and he responded by asking if I would like to write a profile of the next attorney general of the United States. He said President Bill Clinton was determined to appoint the first woman ever to this post, but as it turned out, the process would take months. Two of the candidates, Zoe Baird and Kimba Woods, lost out when it was discovered that they were breaking the law by paying nannies under the table to watch their children. Janet Reno, about whom Gene Miller, a Miami Herald investigative reporter, said, “I can personally testify there had never been a maid anywhere near her house,” finally got the nod. But by then so much time had passed that the editor asked if I had anything to pitch. So I told him about the Lady Hurricanes, who, true to their name, were taking the town of Amherst, where I lived, by storm.