She's Got Next

by Melissa King

  She squealed and stomped before turning back to the charges standing all giggly and shy behind her. She indicated to her entourage that they were to form a circle, and they began their own game just off court, where everyone else in the gym, all teenage boys, grown men, and me, couldn’t help seeing them.

  The game had simple rules. The pretty one threw a basketball straight up in the air, as high as she could. The girls clapped once, and the pretty one caught the ball. She threw it up in the air again. They clapped twice. She caught it. They did it again, clapping three times.

  They made it up to six claps before the pretty one dropped the ball. Amid their laughter, they were all, even the non-beauty-burdened friend, exquisite for a moment, knowing they were looked at, or maybe forgetting.

  My brother and I sat, watching. His wife was pregnant at that time with their first child, a girl, and Andy was already getting too busy to play ball very often. But that night I enjoyed sitting with him, watching him watching them, appreciating girlhood for what girlhood is, as one of my connections to basketball began to fray.

  Once, during my depression over Satyr, I was fooling around with this numerology book I had. The book talked about how you wrote your name down and assigned certain numbers to letters, then you added it up a certain way and divided some things into others to see what number you were.

  Number one represented independence, two was the number of security, and three was the number of creativity. The book told about every number one through nine, and how they all had their strengths and weaknesses. Ones were adventurers, twos were good parents, and threes were artists. There was no good and bad, just different, everyone had his own unique contribution to make, and all the numbers had their place in the grand scheme of things.

  Except for the cursed four. Fours didn’t stand a snowball’s chance at ever being happy for five straight minutes in a row. “Melissa” was a four. I added and divided again. Still a four. So was Melissa King, Melissa Ann King, Melissa Ann, King, Missy, and MAK.

  I was going through lots of paper, wadding up and throwing away and starting over. I calculated the numbers for all the names in my immediate family, and it became obvious that I had descended from a long line of malcontents. If a scientist took a microscope and examined our DNA, he would see a bunch of grimmouthed number fours floating around. The best my people could do was hope for a mutation.

  Then I wrote down Satyr’s name, my handwriting all weird and scribbly by then. I did the math. He was a three. Of course he was a brilliant, interesting three. That’s the way it is when somebody dumps you: everywhere you look, you see that there was a damn good reason for it. You would break up with you.

  But second by second, you get over it, and eventually someone better or worse comes around, and finally you’re able to say maybe there was or maybe there wasn’t a damn good reason for it, and maybe that’s just the way it is.

  His name is Bill. We met in a bar. I was there with some of the people from the new good marketing job I had, and he looked over at me from another table and waved, all friendly and quirky-moving and putting himself out there a little. He approached, and we talked, and when we danced, he didn’t feel like a stranger, and at the end of the night, he didn’t get all creepy and try to work his way over to my house, acting like we were on the sinking Titanic or something.

  Bill didn’t keep his answering machine volume turned down, or make a policy of not answering his phone when I was at his house, or ask me out for Wednesday night but not Saturday, or start lots of stories with “a friend of mine” and you know “friend” is a euphemism for former-girlfriend-I-will-sleep-with-again-the-first-chance-I-get. In my thirties, that kind of stuff was beginning to mean quite a lot. It should’ve meant a lot to me at twenty, or thirteen, but it takes some of us longer than others.

  Bill wears glasses and he’s good at math. He doesn’t play basketball. It makes him nervous, so he doesn’t do it. I guess opposites attract.

  One time we were at Wilson Park in Fayetteville. I’ve never been much of a Frisbee thrower, and I like posing for accidental-looking snapshots about as much as I enjoy being carried into bedrooms like Scarlett O’Hara, so there wasn’t much to occupy us.

  Lying on a blanket reading a book was nice, but I was distracted by the sound of a basketball bouncing. Three guys were on the court, shooting around. I had on some reasonable sneakers, and I walked over and asked if they were trying to get a game up. By way of an answer, one of the guys turned his back to me and dribbled off, mumbling something about just shooting around. That sure made me feel like a stupid dumb-ass, in front of my new boyfriend and all, since I’d been telling him how much I played and everything.

  I picked up a ball lying near the other hoop, and Bill and I shot around for a while. As I took some outside shots and he rebounded for me, I discovered my new love interest specialized in Harlem Globetrotter–style behind-the-back passes, and I jumped like a jackrabbit to catch them. After lurching for one particularly bad pass, I suggested he make an effort to land the ball somewhere in my general vicinity.

  “What are you talking about?” he wanted to know. “That’s the only one you’ve really had to jump for.”

  That’s the way it is, for me, having a boyfriend. Half the time, I’m wondering which one of us is crazy.

  After a while, a guy limping around on the sidelines asked Bill and me if one of us wanted to play. I said I did, if they were losing one, and I went over and got myself in the game.

  The dude who’d snubbed me was gone, and a bunch of college guys were playing. They were sort of gorgeous, and polite, and they introduced themselves to me one by one and shook my hand. They were so homogenous-looking it was hard to remember anyone’s name, except there was an Andre in there somewhere.

  We organized ourselves into teams. Bill sat down on a bench and practiced spinning the ball on his finger.

  As we played, I could tell all the college guys had been coached before, because they were setting screens and posting up all over the place. They were perfectly nice guys with perfect teeth and tans and hair and stomachs playing perfect fundamental basketball.

  I went up for a rebound at the same time as one of the guys. We had a lot of momentum going, and we started to fall. He grabbed me by the waist, and we scrambled for a few seconds, trying not to hurt ourselves or each other. It was one of those falls that seem to go on for a long time, the kind that gives you time to fly a few inches above the ground and try to prevent yourself from getting hurt when you finally land.

  I have to say, that combination of waist grabbing, protectiveness, speed, and the right moves while time stood still was darned attractive on a pretty boy. Almost nothing sexy ever happens on the basketball court, but if something sexy is going to happen, it’ll be when your boyfriend is watching, guaranteed.

  When the college guy and I came to a stop, we had nothing but our fingers and toes on the ground. We froze for a second before working ourselves out of a position straight from the Twister game book.

  The ball rolled out of bounds, and the guy ran after it. I hopped up, dusted off my hands, and smiled to show I was okay, then glanced over at Bill on the bench. He grinned and gave me a little wave.

  After the game, the well-kept dudes left, and I sat down on the bench by Bill.

  The next players were a mix of goof-off geeks and fraternity dudes who played basketball the way they might do anything else, dabbling in the game just for something to do. A few of them played well, but their attitudes weren’t particularly ominous.

  Three black guys wandered up, ready to play as a team. They were relaxed, smiling, joking around, and the white team looked suddenly nervous. To make their four, the black guys picked up a spacy-looking white kid standing on the sidelines. “It’s you and the black guys,” one guy said to the spacy kid, so he could remember who was on his team. Everyone laughed a little, and they started to play.

  The white team’s best player was tall and clean-cut, with Greek letters
on his T-shirt. He played serious but under control, and he never got mad or flustered, or even tired, because he didn’t waste his energy trying to steal every pass or running hard on fast breaks when he had no chance of getting down to the other end before the shot. The guy could dunk, and he would sometimes, quietly deflating everyone on the other team when he did it.

  The leader of the black guys had a talent for trash talk the likes of which I’ve never seen before or since. He worked off the white team’s tense faces, his easy confidence more daunting than the good guy’s dunks. He missed a lot of shots, but he acted shocked at every brick, and he kept up a running commentary on everyone’s playing. “He saw the light, and the light looked like some money to him!” he’d yell, or, “That’s illegal, pimp!”

  The players on the white team laughed at all the wild stuff the Trash Talker said, except for the Dunker, who appeared to ignore him. The Talker’s teammates kept slight smiles on their faces and said little.

  From the point guard position, Trash Talker had a good view of all the players, and he began to home in on Dunker, directing his mouth at him in a way that made you almost forget anyone out there except the two of them. Before long, Talker had noticed the one thing Dunker was bad at, and he started going on at Dunker’s man, saying, “Make him put the ball on the ground! He can’t dribble!”

  Talker could have been a politician, with his gifts for assessment and ruthlessness. On the face of it, he was motivating his teammate, but the only person he was really talking to was Dunker, and after a good bit of “he can’t dribble” Dunker changed from doing what he did well—every single thing except dribble—to focusing on what he couldn’t do. He began to bounce the ball randomly out on the wing, slowing the game and tiring all his teammates out as they tried to keep moving and stay open.

  Trash Talker was visibly stimulated by the sight of the weakening Dunker, like some kind of jackal perceiving an antelope’s first stumble.

  “Look! All he’s doing is dribbling around in circles! That’s all he’s doing!” the Talker kept yelling. He sounded hungry, anxious to set someone up and see him fall. It would have seemed impossible a half-hour earlier, but the Dunker began to look awkward and exposed, dribbling around in circles like he was under a spell.

  It took another three or four plays for the Dunker to remember he was the best player out there. He swished a nice outside basket, and then, on defense, he blocked a shot. Talker’s juju was broken, but it had worked long enough for Dunker’s team to get behind, and they lost.

  I looked over at Bill and thought of him punching his answering machine button because it wouldn’t occur to him to do otherwise. Whether it’s love or basketball or most anything, I guess some people play the game, and some people play the game outside the game. Trash talk is everywhere. Some people, like the rawboned dude working the desk at Jones, are cocky and campy with it, like a child doing a trick to get your attention and make friends with you. They’re the best. Or someone can be dishonest and political and reasonable-toned with their “when I say nigger I don’t mean black” trash. Or they can be fake-accidental, using it to hunt, sneaky and waiting for their chance, like my sheepish mugger way back in Chicago, or the Ringleader who didn’t know what the score was. The politicians and the hunters act like they’re calling it like they see it, but they really hope you’ll see it like they call it.

  Sitting on that bench with Bill, it seemed like guilelessness could be the most important thing in the world.

  I’m not big or talented, but I’ve always been quick and had good endurance. My defensive strategy is to wear people out as much as stop them, and I get my share of steals.

  One day I lunged to pick off a pass, and I discovered something strange had happened. Just like that, I’d lost a step. I was a touch slower, but I could still feel that missing first move in the moment it should have been there, shadowy and present and vaguely amputated. You’d think something like that would happen so gradually you wouldn’t notice it. You’d think the player inside wouldn’t fall away in discernible pieces like chunks of a bad tooth.

  When a thirteen-year-old happily hollered “Pass it to the lady!” a couple more chunks fell away.

  A few weeks later, I was watching a WNBA game, and I noticed that one of the players looked older than all the others. I jumped up and got on my computer to find the WNBA website, and I learned the player was thirty-five, just like me. I scanned all the other teams’ information to see if anyone was older than that. No one was.

  Thoughts about looking like someone’s mother diminished the fortitude I needed to get myself in games. I started to become more particular about situations, anxious to avoid any further falling away.

  I’m not sure whether it was coincidence or not, but at the same time I was becoming more preoccupied with Bill the guileless boyfriend, an affable, movie-watching, Scrabble-playing, dinner-eating fixture in my house. Then, one Saturday morning, I asked Bill would he please vacuum while I went to the store for groceries.

  “Vacuum what?” he wanted to know.

  I went to the closet, got my ball, and headed for the Springdale Youth Center, leaving Bill to eat mustard sandwiches and ponder the subterranean meanings of the word vacuum.

  I’d never played at the Youth Center, but I’d heard about games there on the weekends. I felt kind of jittery about going there, because it was a new place and I hadn’t played in a while, but when I arrived, I was relieved to see plenty of older guys and a few casual adolescents forming a ragtag group my fat and happy butt had half a chance of keeping up with.

  We were about to start a game when a guy made a joke about playing shirts and skins, pointing to me and saying, “You’re on skins.” Believe me, I’ve heard that one before, but I laughed a little anyway.

  I was guarding a Hispanic guy carrying thirty extra pounds. He was surprisingly agile, which made me think he hadn’t always been overweight. Like a blind person who could once see, he had the competence of someone with a reference point to a former self.

  On a fast break, he and I stood and watched everyone speed off, giving each other an excuse to loaf.

  “I’m thirty-seven,” he said, “so I’m lucky I can play at all. It’s my knees. They kill me.”

  He patted his big belly to indicate it was to blame. Then he hesitated for a second before seeming to decide I wouldn’t mind if he asked how old I was.

  When I told him I was thirty-five, there was some new respect on his face when he said, “Well, you’re doin’ all right then.”

  When someone’s surprised that you’re as old as you are, are you supposed to be glad, or not? I still haven’t figured that one out.

  I went to the Youth Center again on a weeknight and found a group of postcollege corporate-looking in-shape definitely not ragtag guys. I almost walked back out, and I should have, in my insecure frame of mind and with my out-of-shape body, but I went ahead and played, badly.

  After the game, I was headed for the water fountain when a good-looking guy who had been on my team walked past me, made eye contact, and looked away quickly, which I interpreted as an invitation to go ahead and not come back. Usually people say good game, or at least nod, after you play with them. I’ve been snubbed plenty trying to get in games, but damn, that was a new kind of lonely, being snubbed afterward.

  My brother and the rest of the world were moving on. Pro players my age were dinosaurs. Pass it to the lady. Everywhere I looked, the signs were there. The game was packing its bags, and maybe not today, and maybe not tomorrow, but soon, it would be leaving me behind. It was inevitable, really. Being a gym rat is great and everything, but there’s just no future in it.

  Training Camp

  THE IMAGE of myself as some future crazy dribbling granny wasn’t strictly thrilling, but what was going to take the place of basketball? Toenail painting? Pilates? Pampered Chef parties?

  Maybe I still had enough game to keep going for a few more years. Maybe all I needed was a little extra training. Ma
ybe I wasn’t exactly what you’d call well rounded, but be that as it may, I wasn’t ready to hang up my high-tops.

  I saw an article in a magazine about a basketball camp for adults, and I got their brochure. “Maybe you’re new to the game,” it said, “or maybe you never got a fair chance in high school. Maybe you want to recapture the feeling of clarity and self control in the face of stiff competition, the confidence and presence of mind to know when to shoot and when to pass. Maybe you want to get back to something you haven’t felt in a while. Maybe you want to play forever.”

  The Never Too Late basketball camp was in the maybe business, and I was buying. “It’ll be a little vacation,” I said to my coworkers, hoping to come across as a hip adult adventure type person and not desperate as a middle-aged wife clamoring to get the attention of her husband.

  “Probably gonna be a lot of lesbians there,” one of the coworkers said.

  This nugget of wisdom reminded me of a guy years earlier who had informed me, when I was moving to Chicago, that there were “lots of blacks there.” Out of all the comments someone might have made about Chicago, like “Try not to freeze to death,” “Go Cubs,” or even just “Good luck,” that’s what he said, “lots of blacks.” Then he looked me in the eyes for a few seconds, all intense, dying to hear me say yeah, I hate those bastards.

  I arrived at the Racebrook Lodge in Sheffield, Massachusetts, at the same time as Toni and Helen, who had driven in from Manhattan. Toni was a stocky, talkative girl wearing a baseball cap and knee-length denim shorts. Helen wore big, dark sunglasses and remained silent, opting to express herself through her tie-dyed T-shirt with antelope-like creatures performing a drumming ritual all over it. Helen wasn’t there to play but had come along to meditate by the river, Toni told me.