She's Got Next

by Melissa King

  I went to my room and emptied my bag of gym shorts and socks and T-shirts into a dresser drawer. It was too early to go to the initial camp meeting in the dining room, but as soon as I sat down on the edge of one of the beds to wait, I felt a sudden dread of an imminent unpacking stranger. So I got the hell out of lodge and hiked to the waterfall that was promised at the top of the stream running along the Racebrook grounds. When I made it back to the dining room, thirteen women had gathered around a farm table. At least thirty years of age separated the youngest from the oldest. I was somewhere in the middle.

  The owner and coach of Never Too Late, Steve, was a short, extremely fit, clean-cut white guy in his late forties. He opened our meeting by asking us to go around the table telling what our name was, where we were from, and what we did for a living. The other coach, Leslie, a thirtyish black woman employed only for the women’s camp, added she’d like to hear about our favorite basketball memory.

  One by one, we admitted things about being grown adult women who couldn’t help it, we just loved to play basketball. We listened to each other’s stories about trying to get in with the guys, not being passed the ball, hovering on sidelines. We laughed generously when someone made a joke, nodding and commiserating at every revealed vulnerability, like we were making our public confessions at a twelve-step program.

  During the forty-five minutes it took us to make it around the table, Steve looked at his watch a number of times, but he seemed hesitant to interrupt.

  “This is pretty different than the men’s camp,” Steve said with a chuckle when we finally finished sharing. He started mumbling and shrugging oafishly, imitating the male campers’ spartan self-introduction. “Urrr, hi, yeah, I’m Jim from Brooklyn. I’m in banking. When do we scrimmage?”

  He looked at the woman sitting next to him as if to turn the floor over to her. Everyone laughed at the caricature, except Toni, who squinted at Steve like she was drawing a conclusion about him.

  Steve wrapped up the meeting and then took off jogging the mile or so over to the high school gym where we’d be playing. By the time we campers figured out who was going with whom and giggled our way into various cars and drove over, Steve was waiting on us.

  He promptly got down to business, asking us to form two lines for a continuous drill that had us start at half-court, dribble up to the lane, then take two steps and shoot a lay-up. As our right foot hit the edge of the lane, we were supposed to make sure the ball bounced while our left foot was down, then take one more step and lay it up. Steve had Leslie demonstrate, and she made it look as though nothing could be easier.

  And nothing could have been easier, but when it was my turn, I started thinking about where every step and bounce was supposed to happen, and I kept getting all tangled up. I’d take off dribbling from half-court, get to the edge of the lane, stutter-step trying to coordinate my feet and the ball, pick up my dribble, commit a serious traveling violation, and then throw the ball in the general direction of the hoop.

  It was like I’d never held a basketball in my hands, and with a whole weekend of high-quality basketball instruction in front of me, I felt a low-level panic that only got worse when Leslie or Steve started giving me pointers. Thinking about how to do something I did all the time, I couldn’t do it. Most of the other campers weren’t faring any better.

  Okay, here it is: I was a high school benchwarmer. There’s more. Every team I was on sucked.

  The only playing time I got was in the fourth quarter when we were at least twenty points behind. During games, I kept one desperate eye on the score clock, hoping we’d win, but that if we were going to lose, we’d lose big, so I could get in. I got the second version of my wish most every game with about five minutes left, when Coach would look at the clock, heave that dejected sigh all the benchwarmers had been waiting for, and wave us angrily into the game. We’d tear off our warm-up jerseys and scramble over each other to go crouch en masse at the scorekeeper’s bench, watching precious seconds disappear until a foul was called or someone went out of bounds. Then the ref would point at us, and we were in, giddy stowaways on a ship headed straight for Loserville.

  Some of us remembered the plays from practice, but most of us didn’t. Either way it didn’t matter, because we all shot every time we got our hands on the ball in frantic attempts to make U-turns in our heretofore sad athletic journeys. Unlike practice, a game had witnesses. If we could only score, or make a steal, or block a shot, maybe Coach would have to play us next time when the crowd chanted our names and the parents initiated letter-writing campaigns.

  But the U-turns never happened. There were probably some very good reasons we weren’t getting more playing time than we were, and besides, it’s hard to make a real name for yourself in three minutes of pandemonium.

  My fiasco of a high school basketball career started in eighth grade, with Coach Danner. He was new that year, and the first time we ever saw him, he introduced himself to all of us trying out for the team by saying that most people thought he looked like Burt Reynolds. Except for being a little chubby, Coach actually did look like Burt Reynolds, because he had black hair, a thick mustache, chest hairs poking out from the collar of his polo shirt, and white teeth sparkling against a perpetual tan.

  Coach Danner promptly chose a pet, a preacher’s daughter named Kimmy Jamison who resembled a younger and happier version of Coach’s wife. Kimmy was as plump and short and creamy-skinned as a baby, and she was going to be Coach’s star. The problem was where to put her. At five-foot-two, she obviously wasn’t a post player. She also wasn’t quick or a good ball handler or authoritative on the floor, so she wasn’t point guard material either. She could usually catch a pass, though, and Coach talked a lot about what a beautiful shot she had, so he made her one of his starting forwards.

  I was five-foot-five and ninety-five pounds, and commonly referred to as a “beanpole.” Unlike Kimmy, I did not belong draped and lounging on a velvet couch. I was freckled and all braces and legs.

  All the girls on the team clamored to get near Coach, but the starters had propriety over him during walks back and forth between the school and gym, or on bus trips, or in the bleachers while the boys played their games. They rushed by the rest of us to get to him, and we benchwarmers knew it wasn’t our place to do anything other than let them go by.

  There was a song we used to sing to Coach when he came down to our dressing room just before we were ready to go out for a game.

  We love you, Coach,

  Oh yes, we do.

  We love you, Coach,

  It’s true.

  When you’re not with us,

  We’re blue!

  Oh Coach Danner, we love you!

  I swear, we really did sing that piece of crap to him, clapping our hands real peppy the whole time. Mostly we sang the song when we felt guilty because we were losing so much and he seemed depressed.

  Unlike the more athletic players with short hair and muscular legs, Kimmy never had to work to get Coach’s attention. He just found his way to her. During practice, Coach would sometimes take Kimmy aside to talk to her while the rest of us ran drills. Once, I looked over to the side of the court to see him lying down on his side, his head propped up on his arm, like Burt’s Playgirl centerfold pose. He gazed up at Kimmy, who was seated Indian-style on the floor, all good posture and charm. This went on until the whole team was furious, every single one of us a sweaty woman scorned.

  One day we were scrimmaging, the A team against the B team, as usual. I blocked two of Kimmy’s shots, and Coach Danner stopped practice and told her to throw the basketball at my face next time, and that would put a stop to me blocking her shots. He looked at me when he said it to her.

  Kimmy never hit me with the ball, though. You just don’t hit a girl wearing braces in the face with a basketball at point-blank range unless you’re a mean person, which she wasn’t.

  Coach and Kimmy made me think about those couples you see in public sometimes, the man all un
likable and bitching at some powerless clerk or waitress, the woman with a sad, vacant look on her face. She knows he’s a good person, way underneath, but she can’t understand the things he does sometimes.

  We were paired off running hundred-yard dashes one day in the off-season, and I was racing Kimmy. She wasn’t very fast, and I beat her every time. Coach was getting mad, and he told the team we would have to stay out there and keep running until Kimmy won a race. That was just fine with me; I would’ve dropped dead of a heart attack before I let her win. It was personal, not between me and Kimmy, but between me and Coach. So I just kept running harder, and Kimmy ran harder, too, moving her short legs as fast as she could, like a pampered horse confused about why she was being pushed so hard all of a sudden.

  In a foot race, long-legged and pissed-off beats plump and obedient every time. Coach finally gave up and told us to go in. He might have been more hardheaded about it, but it was pretty stupid of him to say we would stay until Kimmy won. Our practice was scheduled for one hour during the school day, and he really couldn’t keep the entire basketball team outside all afternoon to act out his dramas while we missed social studies class.

  Eventually, Coach Danner started flirting with a married secretary at the school. She was the one who took the lunch money from everybody in the cafeteria, and she had gleaming white teeth, too. I can still remember how they used to grin at each other, Coach Danner ducking his head and looking at the floor in his impression of boyish charm, her looking up at his face from her chair and her money tray. They were pretty obvious about it.

  Then one day Coach was gone, didn’t even finish out the school year. Kimmy quit the team and became a cheerleader.

  That was Kimmy. As for me, after Coach Danner left, we got a new coach, but I still never started at basketball, still never got in unless our still very bad teams were at least twenty points behind. The new coach got me focused on running track, and I was good at that, but even though I liked getting my name in the paper and collecting the trophies, the act of running itself didn’t mean that much to me.

  Now, on the other side of a couple of decades, I like to hope that a transformation happened. I like to hope that gangly awkwardness has morphed into something that doesn’t give me away as such an easy touch, that I can walk through cesspools like Coach Danner’s with some wading boots on. I think the truth is sometimes I do, and sometimes I collect more trash than the garbage man.

  There’s a dream I’ve been having off and on for a few years now. I’m running the two-mile, my strongest race, in a high school track meet. People are watching from the bleachers. I’m ahead, running easily, feeling like I’ll never have to slow down, but after a few laps, everything starts to feel heavy. It’s like the air, the entire atmosphere, is pushing all its weight down on me. I feel my body begin to yield to the pressure, and I gradually fall forward, until finally I have no choice but to use my knuckles to skip along the ground like a monkey, still struggling to keep up, not having much of a chance, obviously, against all the bipeds.

  Don’t ask me what the hell it all means. But it’s pretty different from that weightless basketball dream I told you about, the one where I’m flying through the air and no one can stop me.

  I guess running was like an uncomplicated, predictable man, the one who makes you feel oppressed by his always being there, doing the right thing, the one you take for granted. Basketball is the Tricky Dick, the guy who always knows what to say and is never where he’s supposed to be, the half-willing one always disappearing, leaving you too soon and with something to think about, pining for the next time. I’ve never gotten over basketball.

  After practice, Leslie, Rhonda, Lynn, and I went for pizza. Rhonda was in her thirties, a native New Yorker working as a social worker in Boston, and Lynn was a fifty-five-year-old nurse from Connecticut who had recently gotten a law degree.

  Leslie had either played or coached basketball her whole life, and she was successful, too: her high school girls’ team had just won the state championship. She told funny stories, she was articulate and friendly, and when you talked to her, she looked at you like she was really paying attention.

  The nurse and the social worker fell easily into conversation.

  “You’re with a needle exchange program?” Lynn asked Rhonda. “Are you allowed to serve minors?”

  Rhonda said no, she didn’t work with kids, and she discussed some of the reasons for a while.

  I could feel the floor being handed over to me.

  “How long have you been doing that work?” I asked Rhonda.

  She told us, and when the next pause came, Leslie, chewing, jumped as if she’d been called on in class.

  “So, Rhonda,” Leslie said, “you find that you don’t work with kids very much then?”

  If the substance wasn’t there, the professional demeanor was. Leslie nailed the courteous and interested tone of voice, the facial expression, the handling of her fork. Something about her talent for quick study made me suspect she found it a little unfathomable, watching all us attorneys and nurses and social workers and copy writers pay $450 for three days’ worth of bouncing balls off our toes and saying, “Wait, now, tell me again, which foot goes first?”

  At practice, when Steve said, “Show ’em, Leslie,” she would dribble backwards and forwards, her head up, her body leaning over slightly, her nondribbling arm in front of her protecting the ball, bouncing low and snappy, natural as jumping to a grasshopper as Steve would shout, “Yes! Now that’s what ball handling looks like!”

  Hearing Steve tell us all about how dribbling is supposed to look made me think about how, when you’re playing pickup ball and don’t have refs, everyone knows when somebody travels. When it happens, the players on the other team say, “Whoa!” and “All right now,” or they slap themselves on the forehead like they can’t believe it, letting everyone know they saw the walk. A really honest, serious type of player—someone like ol’ Fair Guy at Reed Park back in Santa Monica—might stop in mid-drive and throw the ball off to the side before anyone can say anything, because he felt himself carry it even before everyone else saw. He knows what traveling feels like.

  Sometimes you can’t say exactly what the traveler did with his feet and hands and the ball. The violation may be obvious, but sometimes it’s a matter of effect, and you only know it looked like a travel, so it was. To be good at basketball, you have to see, and do, the whole without necessarily understanding all the parts. Maybe the great players can operate on both levels.

  Steve had also told us how confidence looks. “Don’t stand over there waiting to get in a game looking like this,” he said, dribbling high and out of control, like the ball was a dog pulling him along by the leash. Watching him, it seemed unlikely, in one and a half days, that we would get around to all that Zen stuff the brochure talked about.

  Lynn recalled the days when she played high school ball. Back then, girls played half-court with six players, three guards on one end and three forwards on the other, because they were considered too delicate to run up and down the court.

  Lynn said she’d cried when she watched the first WNBA game. Then she told us about how she went with a friend her age to shoot baskets sometimes. Two little boys had approached them recently, sized them up, then challenged them to two-on-two. When Lynn told about it, you could tell she’d been a little honored to be asked, like a real player.

  That night, when I went back to my room, I found my roommate, Gloria, in one of the beds, awake and taking notes about the night’s practice in a little memo pad. She stopped writing to talk, and within a few minutes, I’d learned that Gloria was a forty-year-old photographer from Boston who lived with her partner, Lucy.

  Gloria was polite, soft-spoken, and earnest. She struck me as intellectual, with her note taking and horn-rimmed glasses and tight smile.

  Something about being alone in a room with Gloria’s methodical East Coast lesbian mildness transformed me into the wildeyed southern overly heterosex
ual loudmouth I’m usually not. I don’t know what got into me, but I started acting like this girl my brother used to date, a squeaky well-intentioned armornament who smelled like perfume and new clothes every day. The girlfriend always arrived at my mother’s house with an enthusiastic greeting of the dog. She’d shriek, “HI LITTLE BABY SWEET GIRL HOW ARE YOUUUUU BOO BOO BOO BOO!?” her voice so high it sounded like she’d been freebasing helium and speed. My mom’s spitz, having spent the day alternately dozing and staring at the front door waiting for it to open, said hello to the girlfriend by peeing on the floor in excitement, every time. Mom would always say, “Don’t talk to her like that!” but the girlfriend couldn’t help it. She’d just forget and do it again the next time.

  In college, I thought of some sorority girls as the kind that made dogs pee. A group of them would see another group of them going to class, and they would block the sidewalk and stop everyone else from walking while they caught up after not having seen each other for the last fifteen minutes, screaming, “HEYYYY HOW ARE Y’ALL OH MY GOD LOOK AT YOU YOU’RE SO TAN IS THAT A NEW BACKPACK?!” and I always thought about what if they just peed right there on the sidewalk.

  All poor Gloria wanted to do was write in her memo pad, and I burst into her space with all my having so much fun and everyone being so nice and I just couldn’t wait until tomorrow. She was too polite to do anything other than give a half-smile and nod, but she never really put her pencil down.

  At six-thirty the next morning, I went down to breakfast. One other camper, Floris, was up and getting breakfast, too. Floris was a fifty-year-old black woman with a short tasteful natural and beautiful hands. She hadn’t played much basketball, and she’d told us during our first meeting how she’d been watching a group of young women play back home in D.C. They were fierce, she said, and she wanted to get good enough to dare going out on the court with them.