She's Got Next

by Melissa King

  A loudmouth white kid was on the other team. He had a military haircut, small, squinty eyes, and freckles, and he was guarding our ball hog, a short, stocky black guy. Pale and dark, tall and short, thin and fat, young and old—the only thing these two had in common were a couple of extra-large mouths.

  Ball Hog kept telling the Kid he looked like a vegetarian. “You’d better go eat something, that’s what you better do. Go have a carrot,” he’d say.

  Being called a vegetarian is not the most debilitating insult I’ve ever heard on a basketball court. And the worst part was, the Kid wasn’t even abnormally skinny, just your garden-variety basketball lanky. Ball Hog was breaking one of the unstated rules of talking trash: if you’re going to dis someone for what he looks like or what he’s wearing instead of his playing, you better be right on target with it. If you’re going to take the focus off the game, you better be saying what everyone’s already thinking, that’s how right you better be. Otherwise, you just look cheap.

  The Kid made some stellar passes, and Ball Hog said, “We know you can pass, but can you shoot?” Only someone demented by ballhoggedness would say such a thing. Ball Hog’s rap was just off, along with his game.

  After a few more trips up and down the court, it was obvious that Ball Hog was way out past the buoys. The Kid was pretty good, a foot taller, younger, and in better shape, with fresh legs to boot. Ball Hog began to talk less, and the Kid began to talk more.

  JJ filled the silences that inevitably followed Ball Hog’s failures and the Kid’s tirades with, “Come on, guys, let’s D up and win this.” Our team was losing because of Ball Hog, but we followed JJ’s example of solidarity.

  The more deflated Ball Hog got, the more aggressive and full of himself the Kid became. Once, after they ran the ball down and scored on us yet again, the Kid yelled, “What are you doing down at the other end waiting on a pass for? Why aren’t you down here with your team playing defense? You know, de-fense?”

  Ball Hog had in fact been loafing on our end and waiting on a down-court pass, as usual, but the ball had gone out of bounds, making it obvious that everyone else on our team was already back on defense. He walked toward us, keeping a steady gaze on the Kid, who had gotten into a hard-core defensive position, his knees bent, his arms and hands looking like they were ready to make a steal, rocking on his feet a little.

  “De-fense! You know, de-fense?!”

  The Kid was gleeful, trying to turn us against Ball Hog by saying we were working harder than he was, which we were. But we stayed quiet as Ball Hog took his punishment and the Kid worked himself into a frenzy.

  “What are you doing down there? Waiting on the Kentucky Fried Chicken truck to come around? Why don’t you just let your team run while you sit on your butt and eat yourself a big, juicy piece of—”

  And that was it. Ball Hog had had enough, and in a flash he was in the Kid’s face. Actually, Ball Hog’s face was in the Kid’s neck, but that didn’t matter, because it was on, now. “Look,” Ball Hog said, sounding lethally in control in the wake of the Kid’s shrieking, “you don’t know me.”

  It was code for “Don’t get too familiar, white boy.” Ball Hog had chosen to interpret the chicken comment as a race thing, but as for myself, I wasn’t so sure. I mean, Ball Hog had been saying all the skinny vegetarian stuff, so maybe the Kid just thought he’d talk about meat and make fun of Ball Hog for being on the chubby side. Ball Hog himself might not have believed the comment was racist. He could have just been using it as an excuse to get the attention off his playing and scare the Kid into shutting up. Or maybe the Kid really was bringing race into it. I don’t pretend to have the answer.

  The thing is, on the court, you do know people, because you’ve all played the same game. Even if you’ve never seen someone before, usually you know his type after a few trips up and down, or even before the game starts. JJ and the teacher dude were like fathers, the kind too few people have, the wise and cautious kind. Ball Hog was an always-drunk uncle everyone puts up with.

  The Kid looked down into Ball Hog’s face, not saying a word, his tiny eyes nothing more than slits. He was scared, and he wasn’t sayin’ shit. Then he started stammerin’ around, mumbling something about “What? I don’t know what you mean. What are you talking about?”

  JJ said, “Come on, guys, let’s get it, let’s win this.”

  The rest of the game was played quietly, and we lost, and I walked away thinking about how, as wrong as Ball Hog was about some things, JJ had stuck with him. JJ wouldn’t leave Ball Hog out there hanging by himself, even though he didn’t like the way he played, even though you might say Ball Hog deserved abandonment. That’s because we were on the same team, and to me, that felt like family, no matter where I was.

  Home Court

  I WAS REVIEWING a contract with the ponytail boss. He’d just finished telling me how he was a better harmonica player than Junior Wells when I felt an explosive, snorting laugh welling up in my chest. I excused myself and went to the bathroom.

  After a minute or two, the sound of a fist banging on the bathroom door was inevitably followed by the lady boss’s shrill voice.

  “Melissa! You have a phone call! Are you going to be a while, or are you just taking a pee?”

  “Just a minute, please, can you take a message?” is what I hollered back through the door, leaving my coworkers, who were all within earshot, to draw their conclusions about what was taking me so long.

  It was a day much like any other.

  I kept working and haunting my favorite courts, and then it was winter, and I found myself standing on an El stop platform waiting for the Blue Line. The temperature was a balmy zero degrees Fahrenheit, but the negative-seventeen wind chill factor made it a little brisk outside. We’d awakened to what would be the first onslaught of the largest snowstorm that year. The trains were running late, and as I waited and waited and more and more people crowded the platform, I began to suspect the trains weren’t running at all.

  We hung on, second by second, desperate as landed fishes. Those of us with any remaining fortitude ran back and forth from the platform to the ticket booth, demanding the CTA worker call and find out where the goddamned Blue Line was.

  FROSTBITE.

  FROSTBITE.

  FROSTBITE.

  The word flashed on and off in my head like an electronic scoreboard ad, and I noticed that I was crying as I hid my face in the faux fur collar of my warmest coat.

  Just have to dress for it, my ass.

  It was around then that a friend introduced me to a friend of a friend, a guy who lived in Arkansas, and we began a frenzied exchange of e-mails. When I asked him if he played basketball, he said sure, he would run the hoops. What we had in common was nearly nothing, but a generous reality dose had lowered the Sterno on the buffet of urbanely sophisticated Chicago men. After four years away, Arkansas was shrouded in the warm, friendly glow of fantasy.

  All I really knew about the friend of a friend was that he had a good voice on the telephone and a good vocabulary in his daily e-mails, and he came recommended, but I enthusiastically included him in the glow.

  I visited a time or two. We said all the stuff you say about love and building a future. In the early springtime, I decided I would move back home, because the winters were getting to me. That’s what I told myself and everyone else, and it was the truth, but not really the whole truth. It’s easy to find a reason for something you want to do anyway.

  Our “relationship” survived the harsh light of physical proximity for one and one-half weeks, until he said he loved me but he wasn’t “in love” with me, and what he really wanted to be, he guessed, was a satyr.

  A satyr. That’s what he said.

  When a guy starts to talk that double talk, you have to lose him, sure as if he tries to throw you out a window. You just can’t put yourself through it unless you want to be stuck singing “I Will Survive” and trying to mean it.

  We were in Satyr’s apartment, and
just before the love but not in love he was carrying me, and you know I hate that, but I let him do it, because I didn’t want to give him a complex. But God, it’s awkward when men think they’re supposed to haul you around all over the place, and you have to watch out and make sure they don’t crack your head on any door facings and ruin their big cinematic moment.

  By the time Satyr finally got me in the bedroom and gave me a tepid heave-ho onto the bed, he was huffing and puffing like a freight train, which would have still been okay if we could’ve laughed or something. But we didn’t.

  Then he started kissing me all passionately, then telling how he loved but wasn’t in love, and then kissing me some more and making his face look all sensuous, but by then I didn’t believe his words or his face or his carrying or anything. I didn’t even believe myself when I said whatever it was that I said to him.

  The whole episode was pretty jolting, after one and a half weeks, as you might assume.

  In the middle of all the chaos, Satyr looked at my arms. I was wearing a sleeveless shirt.

  “You have nice arms,” he said. “They’re like the opposite of the night sky.”

  What he was referring to was that I have freckles. It was a freckle rap.

  “What?” I responded, blinking a little like a sleepy frog caught in the beam of a gigger’s flashlight.

  He pointed to one particular freckle and said, “I want to go there.”

  Then it was back to the love but not in love.

  He had a stifled grin on his face, like he was nervous but still enjoying himself. Then he’d get very somber and dramatic and stare off into space and be very reflective and concerned, like I was somebody’s leg that had to come off, what a shame.

  It was some bullshit, and I had to leave, right then. But I can tell you I was getting pretty tired of having to beat it out of some man’s apartment and drive home all shaky.

  Back home, with my living room full of moving boxes and the need to go out there and live the good life staring me down, I got a little depressed over the whole satyr fiasco. No surprise there, but then I just kept on being kind of depressed, too depressed to go out and find a new good job, look up a friend, or even play basketball.

  I was pretty sure I was clinical and needed help getting back to my usual state of low-grade pissed-off, which, if highly imperfect, was a lot more interesting than my new hobby of lying prone on the floor and staring at the ceiling. Thinking back on all my romantic exploits, I wasn’t too high on myself. After a while, it just occurs to you, Maybe it’s me. It was most disturbing to think I was actively involved in finding the confluence of inanities that seemed to stalk me.

  Wanda Mason, LSW, was listed in the yellow pages, and from my first appointment with her, I had her pegged as seriously Christian, because, being in Arkansas, there was a real good chance of it. Also, she had the Serenity Prayer and a number of other religious sentiments cross-stitched and framed in her office.

  Wanda asked me some questions and had me do some personality tests, and at the end of our first hour, she suggested I spend the next week reading Women Who Love Too Much, which she loaned to me.

  The book’s pink cover pictured a very reflective-looking woman and her big, feathered hair. A single long-stemmed rose was designed into the words of the title, seventies-style. The photography was soft-focus, and everything was pastel, in the manner of feminine deodorant spray packaging.

  The pages were yellowed and coming loose at the spine. A collection of different handwritings filled the margins. Clearly Wanda had loaned this thing out a time or two.

  I spent the next day reading dozens of case studies of women who loved too much.

  Tammy was a well-dressed and attractive forty-year-old college professor with expressive hazel eyes and a Ph.D. in anthropology. She had been dating her boyfriend, an unemployed screenwriter with a drinking problem, for two years, during which time he’d had affairs with three different women, including her sister.

  The margins had men’s names handwritten and underlined four times with an angry face, or “that’s me” written small, with a sad face. I got depressed all over again with that book and its crazy writings. It was like looking up from reading a newspaper to discover you’ve been riding the emotional little bus for a very long time.

  “In session,” Wanda’s favorite move was the surprise question. When she was ready to make me have a breakthrough, she would suddenly blurt, “Are you ready to be different? Are you sincerely ready to change?” I knew she was trying to get my buy-in or commitment or something, and that was probably part of therapy, but when she asked me, I would just nod a little. I couldn’t bring myself to say, “Yes! I’m ready!” like I knew she wanted me to. It was the same feeling I got from the socially expected high-five. I mean, I can high-five when I feel like it, but I can’t do it just because I’m supposed to. I guess I’m not that enthusiastic sometimes. But I didn’t blame her for trying. You have to fake it, a little bit, just to get started.

  So, instead of acting like everything was going to be okay, which Wanda had made as easy as saying yes, I started rambling on about Satyr, my favorite topic of discussion. In the middle of one of my many statements beginning with “I just don’t understand why he—” Wanda interrupted with another question.

  “Do you feel like your biological clock is ticking?”

  I think she was a little bored.

  I wasn’t worried about any clocks. Instead, Wanda’s question made me think about this little boy, Xavier, who I saw one time in the Chicago Sun-Times. The paper advertised a baby for adoption on Wednesdays in a little space called “A Family for Me.” On Tuesdays and Fridays it was pets from the animal shelter, on Mondays it was chess moves, and on Thursday it was needlepoint techniques.

  I cut out Xavier’s ad and kept it for a while. I can still remember it. “Meet Xavier,” it said. “It looks like this sweetie pie has discovered his toes, and he is waiting for you to discover all of him! Xavier, three, loves for you to talk to him. Others say, Xavier is becoming a regular little socialite who enjoys playing with others in their playpen. What you can do: You can spend lots of time with him!”

  Xavier just looked mostly confused to me, at least in that one picture of him I had. One day I threw the ad away, but then I just kept remembering his face, and I got the ad back out of the trash. I wasn’t going to save Xavier, but somehow it seemed better if I didn’t forget him either.

  This was around the same time that women using fertility treatments to put things in God’s hands were having six or seven kids at once and getting their pictures plastered all over the covers of magazines. Entire towns were dropping everything to change all those corporate-sponsored diapers, while Xavier sat by himself confused and lonely and got his picture taken to run in the newspaper with the stray dogs and cats.

  Those litter families would be on the cover of Good Housekeeping again on the kids’ birthday. You could always tell who the littlest one had been when they were born, because he would be wearing thick glasses or a hearing aid or have cerebral palsy or something, and the article would say what a great job he did using his walker to keep up with his brothers and sisters. Usually, they put a big present or some other prop in front of him, or had him being pulled in a wagon.

  I just thought someone should be thinking about Xavier instead of a biological clock, that’s all.

  And then I kept thinking about David and his mom, the ones back in Wicker Park. I could never forget that one small moment when David’s mom picked up her dribble and looked at him, and he smiled and looked back. You could see his eyes widen and his body rise up a little bit, like he knew something good was about to happen. He actually seemed to grow a little taller when his mom looked at him.

  I wasn’t sure I could be that way, that I could be a part of creating a life so good like that. So having a baby was the last thing on my mind, with little kids like Xavier sitting there already born and everything, and considering that my romantic relationships were
characterized by embarrassment and brevity. But something told me Wanda wouldn’t interpret my reflections on Xavier or David as a sign of robust mental health, so I didn’t get into all that.

  I just said no, I wasn’t sure I wanted to have children.

  Wanda scanned her shelves, looking at me with a sidelong glance that said, I’m not sure they wrote a book for this one.

  She changed the subject.

  “What makes you happy?” she was dying to know, and I thought about playing basketball until it gets dark. Back home in the driveway, we’d rig up a big lightbulb on the side of the house, hanging it by a nail and using an extension cord to plug it in, so we could keep playing. Or that time in Chicago, when they called me Little Larry Bird, and I was still hitting when it got too dark to see the ball coming anymore. Or nights at Venice Beach, the sun disappearing into the ocean, people leaving for the day with their surfboards and fishing poles, stopping for a moment longer to watch people playing for a moment longer.

  Maybe happiness is having something you don’t want to leave when you have to. I went home, pulled out a moving box, and started looking for my ball.

  TO STRENGTHEN FAMILY, FOSTER COMMUNITY, AND GLORIFY GOD. It’s painted twice—once in English and once in Spanish—on the glass doors going into the Jones Center in Springdale, a town where newspaper classified sections are loaded with eviscerator, catcher, and de-beaker career opportunities. The more closely a chicken factory job resembles a medieval torture process, the better it pays, so people hustle to get on at the plants. Someone told me once that the factories don’t let anyone work too long in the killing rooms, because they’re afraid it will warp somebody’s brains after a while, maybe make him go off the deep end and do something to cause the chicken company to get sued. I don’t know for sure that’s true; it’s just what somebody said. But it wouldn’t surprise me a bit.

  The Center was a gift to the community from Harvey and Bernice Jones, an ancient, childless couple who made their millions in trucking, not chickens. It has a pool, basketball courts, an indoor track, a weight room, and an ice skating rink. There’s a chapel that doubles as a movie theater, and about a million paintings of Harvey and Bernice hanging around. There’s also a life-size bronze statue of the two of them set up all by itself with a velvet rope around it. He’s wearing overalls and an engineer’s cap, and she’s in a dowdy dress and sensible shoes, just like regular folks.