She's Got Next

by Melissa King

  She’d made her point, and we began to play. She actually did have a little game, too. After a while, she left, leaving Rolando, me, and a few others.

  He came over to me, quiet for once, his head bent over the basketball he was bouncing two-handed and hard, like he was a little put out.

  “That girl, she sure talks a lot,” he said.

  I suggested she seemed to have no lack of confidence.

  “Yeah, too much confidence.”

  “Whaddya call that?” I asked.

  “Anger,” Rolando said without hesitation.

  My friend Laurie back in Arkansas used to tell me how she couldn’t go to church without about three guys asking her out. It was the biggest pickup situation you ever saw, evidently, because everyone there had this big dream of meeting somebody at church. She would joke that all the single people at her church were “datin’ for Jesus!”

  Well, the same thing can happen with basketball. I met this guy. Let’s call him Peter. I saw him one day, looking at me all intense from the other end of the court. He made sure he got in the game I was in, and then he hung around afterwards and asked if I wanted to go have a drink later. I said I did. He was good-looking and a pretty good player, too.

  Some guys never get past how they met you. For instance, I met a guy at a dog party once. It was a dog party because it was a party that everyone brought their dogs to, and it was supposed to help you mingle and meet other dog owners. It was pretty awkward, trying to make a good impression while struggling to keep the dogs from fighting or inappropriately sniffing the other partygoers, but everyone was doing the best they could.

  I went to the dog party with this girl I worked with who kind of talked me into it. Neither of us actually had a dog, so we took the natural foods office dog, Penny. We knew Penny pretty well because it was everyone’s job to baby-sit her while we worked.

  The bosses fed Penny a supplement called Green Strength, which was made from grass, so the dog threw up a lot. Penny’s green puke really stained the carpet, so when she started heaving by the door, we’d jump up from our chairs and try to hustle her outside. It wasn’t so great of a job, as I’ve previously implied.

  The coworker borrowed a dog to go to the party, that’s how frantic she was to go. I’ve found that single women in their thirties are always latching on to each other to go do cute stuff like that. They’re not exactly friends or anything, but they need someone to go do these supposedly man-meeting things with. If you say no, you feel guilty, because you know they want to go so bad, and they won’t go by themselves. It’s pretty depressing.

  So at the dog party, this guy, Ed, decided he liked me. And he did everything right. He asked me out for a polite date, he introduced me to his friends, always asked me for the next date before he left. He was sweatin’ me, as they say.

  But there was no connection, really. I couldn’t help thinking that the only reason he wanted to go out with me—I mean, the reason it was me and not somebody else—was that he could just imagine telling everybody how we met at a dog party when I didn’t even have a dog. Very That Girl.

  People don’t want to say they met in a bar or on matchmaker.com. There’s always got to be some damn cute story or you don’t have a chance.

  So the guy from the court, Peter, was all over me because he’d met me the way he envisioned meeting the woman—on the basketball court. That’s what he said: “I always wanted to meet a woman on the basketball court.”

  There have been times when I’ve gone months without a date, but I must have had pheromones then, because there was this guy at the Park District gym who kept asking me out, too. He was part of a coed group I played with on Wednesday nights for a while, and he made me mad when he started flirting and trying to be all charming with me, because I’d already heard that stupid dumb-ass say he had a girlfriend. Oh, and guess what: the girlfriend lived in another city. Lucky me!

  The thing about some people is, they’ll ruin every last thing you like if you let them. So you can’t let them. I dodged the guy with the girlfriend, but Peter and I went out for a few weeks. We rode our bikes to the lake, played basketball, sat on park benches kissing. All very romantic.

  He was funny, but he wasn’t the kind of funny where he knew he was funny. One time we were going to ride bikes, and I rode by his house to meet him. He came out of the house carrying a bottle of wine, some plastic cups, a corkscrew, and two bed sheets to sit on. He was carrying all of it in a white plastic garbage bag. That stuff can be kind of endearing, but only if the guy is good-looking.

  When he kissed me, he was always pulling the back of my hair. I had short hair, and his hand slipped when he tried to pull, and I had a hunch that he was wishing I had longer hair so he could really grab on and give it a good yank. I wanted to say hey, what the hellareya doin’, but I didn’t.

  One night he asked me over to his house to watch the Bears game. I was a little late getting there, and when he answered his door, he looked at me kind of sternly and said, “You’re late.” You could tell he didn’t appreciate it.

  Peter had a beer in his hand, and there were two joints sitting on the kitchen counter. He was talking a mile a minute. In fact, I was starting to notice that Peter didn’t let you get a word in edgewise. And if he didn’t think you were listening well enough, he would get right in your face and talk louder.

  So we sat down to watch the game, and he lit up one of the joints. For some reason, I smoked a little. I used to smoke in college, but I hadn’t in a long time. I’d quit because I used to get too paranoid on it. I’m kind of self-conscious generally, and pot just makes it worse.

  So I smoked some, and Peter smoked a lot, and boy, did I get messed up. I found myself wondering whether Peter was really stupid, or just pretended to be as a joke. And I hadn’t really noticed that trait before. I mean, he wasn’t by any means the smartest guy I’d ever run into, but I just thought he was really physical, that he related to the world in a physical way. But now that I was high, there was no getting around the fact that he wasn’t the sharpest stick in the bunch.

  One of my problems has always been that if I think a guy is good-looking, and if he entertains me at all, and if he seems to like me, I can make excuses for him and overlook some pretty bad behavior. A lot of women do that. Decent men without girlfriends must really get sickened by it. I know I would.

  So I was sitting in this chair, really stoned, trying to sit up straight, when Peter sat down beside me in the chair, put his arm around me, and started absentmindedly digging his fingers into my arm, hard. It seemed compulsive. It was like he couldn’t help himself, it felt so good to him. And then, and this is really embarrassing, Peter got up and started gyrating around like a Chippendale dancer, saying, “So, what should I do? . . . Do you want me to dance for you?” I just kept hoping he meant to be cheesy and make me laugh. But I didn’t laugh, because I was afraid he was serious.

  To make things worse, I was having a lot of trouble concentrating because, in addition to trying to sit up straight, I was worried about my face. I didn’t want anyone to see my facial expressions, because I felt like I had no control over my face.

  All I could think of to say was, “Man, I’m stoned.”

  All of a sudden, Peter picked me up and carried me toward an open window. I never like it when guys physically pick you up. I know it’s supposed to be romantic, but I just think it’s embarrassing. It’s too dramatic unless they’re going to laugh and maybe act like you’re so heavy they’re going to throw their back out or something.

  Then I started to worry that Peter might just chuck me out the window if he felt like it. I really did. I squirmed to get down without saying why, and then Peter assured me he wouldn’t throw me out no window.

  It seemed to me that the idea of throwing someone off a second story for no particular reason should have been so preposterous that it wouldn’t have occurred to him, and that’s when I started getting really scared. Peter’s face looked brutish, and when he moved any
where near me, it felt like he was trying to dominate me physically, not just get close. I managed to wriggle free of his King Kong–like grasp, and he tried to pick me up on his back, like we were going to play piggyback. Things were making no sense whatsoever.

  His movements were slow and, I don’t know, just slow, like a dumb animal’s. I got the distinct impression he wanted to hurt me. That even if I had sex with him willingly he would still want to hurt me.

  Peter was lumbering around saying, “Why’re you so afraid of me? Try to have a little confidence why don’tcha . . . I know I can make you feel good,” and other creepy stuff like that. I got the hell out of there, brushing past him, down the stairs, walking at a near trot to my car, sitting down in the driver’s seat and locking the doors, fast. It was only a few minutes’ drive to my house, but it took longer since I got lost three times trying to get there, thinking the whole time that I would truly go mad if I had to maneuver that car one more inch.

  But like I said, I quit smoking pot because it makes me paranoid. And what did I expect, anyway, letting some only-cute guy into my game like that? Nothing good could have come of it.

  These three girls I’d seen before at Wicker Park came running over saying, “There’s that girl again!”

  They looked like the female version of the Fat Albert gang. I asked them if they wanted to shoot around, and the youngest one, who had about twenty-five different-colored barrettes in her hair and jeans at least three sizes too big, took the ball.

  “I can’t do it,” she’d say every time she missed a shot.

  “Yes you can, you just need to practice some. Nobody makes it every time.”

  “Why aren’t you shootin’?” she asked me.

  “I’m all right. Go ahead.”

  I’ve never seen any boy worry about if he was keeping you from playing.

  One girl wouldn’t play at all. We tried to play two-on-two, but she just wouldn’t participate. She kept saying she didn’t know how, and she couldn’t make it, and all that stuff. She stood out on the court, though, right in the middle of everything. We’d pass her the ball, and she’d move out of the way and let it go past her.

  The youngest one’s younger brother came up and tried to play. He was running all over the court, never dribbling, a big grin on his face, saying, “Almost!” every time he shot and missed.

  The girls didn’t play very long, but they didn’t leave either. They hung around the edge of the court, watching. You could see them kind of whispering together and looking at different boys.

  “Where’s you girls’ boyfriends?” I asked them, just to see what they’d say.

  “Twanisha got her a man,” the little one said, pointing to the girl who wouldn’t play.

  “Where’s Twanisha’s boyfriend?”

  “He over there with his boys.”

  “That why you won’t play basketball, Twanisha?”

  She shrugged her shoulders in reply.

  They were doing it already, waiting around for something to happen. I wanted to give Twanisha a little shake and say, “Listen here, young lady, you’re gonna spend your life falling for arrogant men and sitting around a dirty apartment waiting on the phone to ring if you don’t start taking an interest in some things!”

  If I had a daughter, she’d have to learn how to be smart and daring. I don’t know how I’d teach her, because I don’t even really know how myself, but somehow she’d have to know early on that it’s okay to miss some shots, that you can’t let other people always do your shooting for you.

  I started playing with some adults, so I told a bunch of adolescent boys who had walked up they could play with my ball if they took care of it. It didn’t take them long to get a big game going.

  One of the kids defected to play with us. His name was Leon, and he was on my team. He was a foot shorter than the adults, but he could play. He was smart and serious about it. A kid on the other court was mad at Leon for his disloyalty. He was screaming, “Oh yeah, I see how it is! You wanna play over there with them. Man, I hate people like you!”

  He was joined by a fellow glaring malcontent who ran up and said, “Can I play?” really sarcastic to us. There was tension, confused and racial, because most of the adults were white and all of the kids were black, but we were really segregated on the basis of age and size, not color. The two kids couldn’t see this, or didn’t want to.

  Once our ball flew over onto their court, and the loud kid shot it into their hoop like he thought it was their ball from their game, or I should say, my ball. He looked over at us and said, all mock-innocent, “Oh, is that your ball?”

  Leon wouldn’t even look at them, and we got our ball back and kept playing. I kept glancing over at the other side to make sure my ball was there, but as our game was ending I looked up to find all the kids, and my ball, gone.

  I asked Leon, “Hey, do you know those kids who were over there?”

  “Which ones?”

  “Those ones who were playing with my ball over there.”

  “Your ball? What’s it look like?”

  “Orange. Rubber.”

  “Man, I think they took off with it,” Leon said, looking like he was trying to keep from laughing.

  Lewis, another kid about Leon’s size who was playing with us, said, “There they are. Hey, Thomas, you got that girl’s ball?!”

  There was the group, standing in the middle of a larger crowd about a hundred yards away. And there was my ball. I admired Lewis for taking a stand, and I wondered if Leon had known where the ball was.

  “Come on, man, you got that girl’s ball!” Lewis yelled. “Bring it back! Bring it back now!”

  Thomas slung the ball across the playground at us, and I played a few more games, shaking off the heaviness of half-alive girls and boys who try to steal your shit just because you loaned it to them.

  But then there was David, a five-year-old capable of redeeming the entire planet. He came to Wicker Park on Saturdays with his mom, who coached a bunch of girls in the gym.

  I was matched up with David’s mom in a pickup game once. It can be uncomfortable when two women who are used to playing with guys are put on each other. It draws a lot of sudden attention, two novelties taking each other on like that, and it makes me a little less intense. I still play hard, but it’s awkward, wanting to win while feeling a loyalty to my sister-girl on the other team.

  David’s mom was an overall better player than I was, but I was faster and got my share of shots in. She was talking trash, having fun, treating me like any worthy adversary. As usual, I didn’t really talk trash, and pretty soon she stopped, too.

  After the game was over, I shot around, and David came over to talk to me.

  “Where’s your friend?” he asked me.

  “What friend?”

  “Your friend. She wears black shoes, too.”

  David thought he remembered me from somewhere, I guess. So I told him I didn’t know who he meant and asked was he sure it was me he had seen before, and he said yes he was sure.

  I asked him how old he was, and he said five.

  “I play with my mama.”

  “You do? Was she the one who was playing with me a little earlier? She’s pretty good.”

  She came over to shoot around with us.

  “She made me in her stomach,” David informed me. I said really, how ’bout that.

  He whispered something to his mom. “Well, she’s pretty good, too,” his mom said.

  A few months later I was playing two-on-two, and I saw David’s mom again. She gave me a friendly wave and told the four of us who were playing that we could come inside the gym if we wanted to. After my outside game, I went in, and David came running over to me, shouting, “Hi, Melissa!”

  I talked to him for a while and said it looked like his front teeth were growing back from the last time I saw him and asked him what he had been doing. Then he ran around all over the gym with kids his age while his mom and I and a bunch of teens played.

 
; In the middle of the game, David came over and stood on the sidelines, yelling.

  “Maaama! . . . Maaama! . . . Maaaaaaama!”

  His mom, the point guard, picked up her dribble.

  “What?!”

  David hesitated, caught off guard by her attention.

  “Do you want me?” he asked, looking at her expectantly.

  “Do I want you?” she asked, her eyebrows raised, ball on her hip, like she couldn’t believe what she was hearing.

  David just kept looking at her, smiling, his eyes wide open, waiting.

  “Yes,” the mom said, “I want you, but not right this minute.”

  Satisfied, David continued with his running around, and we went on with our game.

  The day after I heard about another women’s open gym at the New City Y in Lincoln Park, I was filling out my paperwork, half-listening to the person behind the desk telling me all about the Y’s many features I’d never use. Now I had a sure bet on Tuesday and Thursday nights, in addition to Mondays at the Park District gym. Life was good.

  The Y was a blue brick building surrounded by huge upscale grocery stores and home decor shops on nearby North Avenue and housing projects across the street. The players there were a combination of good-job-having women and a bunch of girls from the untransitioned part of the neighborhood, and I liked the mix.

  From six to seven, the floor was ours, and a perpetual group of adolescent boys would give up the court because, as they said with no resentment, “It’s woman time.” The boys would watch us make teams, hoping we wouldn’t have enough players and would let some of them play. Sometimes that happened, but usually we had more than ten.

  Kicking those kids off the court felt different than it had at the Park District gym. It was only for an hour, so the boys waited around instead of heading for the street, and the teenage girls who played with us knew the boys. It felt like we were taking turns, not invading something.