She's Got Next

by Melissa King

  We sat down on a couch together. The quiet morning room, a shushing cook who kept reminding everyone not to wake the guests sleeping upstairs, and the fleeting nature of the weekend made the situation ripe for confidences, and we soon fell into a discussion about men. Her theories were based on empirical evidence gathered from a subject named Harold, while my own findings were more generalized, but our dialogue was well balanced and informed.

  “Thoughtless!” she spat.

  “Selfish!” I hissed, after careful consideration.

  “Stupid! Dumb stuff that made me just look at him and say, ‘Have you lost your fool mind?’ And oh my lord, he was such a whiner. This was a man who had been in and out of prison. Six-foot-three and two hundred and fifty pounds. Got scars all over his body. And he would always be saying, ‘Angel . . .’ (that’s what he called me, Angel) . . . ‘Angel, baby, my back hurts.’”

  She drew out the words, squinted her eyes, and wrinkled her nose in an elaborate nasal whine.

  “Yeah, that’s just how he talked,” she continued, building steam. “‘Aaaangel, my baaaack hurts.’ So I bought him some of that Heet. You know, H-E-E-T, Heet? And I put some of that on him. Now, he just had scars all up and down his body” (Floris moved her hand lightly along her shoulder and arm and looked away from me, as if she had recaptured for a moment the feeling of touching him). “This big tough guy, right? Well, I put that Heet on him, and all he could say was, ‘Owwww! That buuuuurnnnns!’”

  I snorted, rolled my eyes.

  “So then I started saying to him all the time, ‘Honey, can I rub your back?’ or, ‘Do you want an aspirin?’ or, ‘Should I make you a doctor’s appointment?’ and he’d say, ‘Nooooo, nooooo, Angel, that’s okay.’”

  She breathed what was evidently one of the man’s long, woeful sighs.

  “Finally, I learned just to go into my Stepford Wife mode, and when he’d start whining about his back, I’d say, ‘Honey, would you like a glass of wine?’ And he’d say yes, that would be nice, and I don’t know what the wine had to do with his back, but he’d quit his bitchin’ then.”

  I conjured up a memory of some boyfriend or another. It was fuel. “God!” I said. “It’s like you have to shut off a part of your brain to deal with them! It’s like, how old are you, five? What am I, your mother? And you know what else? I’m sick of all this ‘make him a better man’ crap. It’s . . . it’s like . . .”

  I paused, searching for the right word to express the nuance of my feelings.

  “Stupid!”

  Harold the 250-pound wimp had died a year earlier, in the passenger’s seat of Floris’s car. Since the accident, Floris had been busy putting the slip on a bad case of survivor’s guilt by running marathons, taking belly dancing classes, planning a trip to Brazil, and attending basketball camps.

  Floris had a way of turning every subject back to Harold, or the accident.

  “It was a Friday afternoon,” she said from out of nowhere, her voice soft and distant, “just a Friday afternoon, and we were having a conversation, you know, about not much of anything. We weren’t battling, thank God, and then it happened, it just happened, and I couldn’t do anything but sit there and watch him go.”

  Most of the time I get uncomfortable when someone starts crying. The worst is when people are interviewed on television, standing in front of their burnt-down house or talking about somebody dying. I feel sorry for them, but more often than not, when I see people crying, it feels dramatic, not real, as if they’re not sure they feel the way they think they’re supposed to, with everybody watching. Floris wasn’t like that. Her tears just came, and she wiped them off her face with the palm of her hand and kept talking, casual and thoughtless as waving off a fly.

  The other campers were beginning to stream in for breakfast, and as the first-thing-in-the-morning sounds of plates and silverware and groggy conversation filtered in, Floris suddenly started giving me advice, like she needed to and had to hurry.

  “Well,” she said, “if you can find one that’s half-decent, and if there’s a little passion, and if he loves you, you might as well hang on to him, because they’re all going to drive you crazy anyway.”

  “So give up on finding a mature adult?”

  “Oh please, yes, forget all about that.”

  Floris’s eyes got liquidy again when she laughed, and she seemed so fragile and determined it was a little hard to look at her.

  “The thing about Harold was, he loved me. One time he said to me, ‘Angel, you’re so beautiful, why don’t you dress yourself up more?’ He wanted me to wear some of these ridiculous white hot pants he saw. I looked at him and thought, Anybody crazy enough to want to see my old ass in a pair of hot pants deserves to be loved. That man, he loved me.”

  Never Too Late provided the services of a coach-EMT who led us in stretching exercises and then stood on the sidelines all day, ready to spring into action at the first hint of injury or heart attack. In lieu of any such emergencies, stretching was the most active part of the EMT’s day, and he took this job seriously.

  After thirty-five minutes of contorting ourselves into various positions, we were lying on our backs with our right feet pulled over our heads when Steve hollered, “At the guys’ camp, this is the point where I usually made a joke about the Kamasutra! But I’m not gonna say it this time!”

  Toni issued a disapproving snort while the rest of us giggled.

  We began our day with shooting. Steve gave us all kinds of tips about our feet, our eyes, our elbows, our fingers, and then he told us to choose one of his tips and concentrate only on that one thing as we shot around in pairs. He went around to everyone on the court, quietly asking each of us, “What are you thinking about?”

  When he got to Rhonda, the social worker from New York, she said, “Making the shot!” Steve’s jaw clenched a little at her attempt to be cute. Trying to make the shot was exactly what we weren’t supposed to be thinking about.

  Then we started in on the star drill, which high school teams often use to warm up in front of the crowd before games. Leslie and Steve began by showing us how to do the convoluted thing as we stood on the sidelines with “oh shit” looks on our faces. After they demonstrated, we got going, having not much of a choice other than to give it a try. We screwed up like crazy at first, but the weird thing was, before we knew it, we were doing it right, moving in and out of four different lines and passing several basketballs to the people we were supposed to. From above, we must have looked like a well-disciplined team, and we didn’t even know how we were doing it, which I guess was the point.

  Floris got hit upside the head with the ball and passed to the wrong person and got in the wrong lines until she dropped out, saying she needed to watch for a little while. I knew how she felt.

  The same thing happened to me one time when I tried to line-dance at a country western bar. I kept bumping into people and messing everyone up, and once that starts happening, believe me, you can’t think about anything other than getting the hell off the floor.

  Floris never jumped back into the star drill. She just stood by herself as the rest of us reveled in doing something we thought we couldn’t. After it was over, we broke for lunch, and Steve told us to eat well, because when we came back, we’d be working on the motion offense, “a good little play for leagues or pickup games.” He took off running and beat us back to the lodge.

  The motion offense drill works like this. One girl starts with the ball, and her two nearest teammates screen away on another teammate’s defender. Then the girl with the ball passes, and the drill repeats from the new position.

  It sounds simple enough, but it was even more confusing than the star drill. I used to do it a million years ago in high school, so I remembered the basics. Floris didn’t even attempt this one, and I worried about her a little as she watched from the sidelines. I was afraid that, standing over there by herself, she’d start wondering what the hell she was doing at the camp, and her life would catch up with he
r. It wasn’t like I thought she should be wondering that, but I knew I would have.

  Shannon, a thirty-nine-year-old cross trainer from Connecticut, was a defender in the drill, and she kept stealing passes, even though the defense was supposed to be there just for position. Steve would say, “Let’s not steal the passes right now and just let them get used to the offense okay please,” and then the ball would go around a few times and Shannon would just forget and steal it again, like some crazy thoroughbred race dog who won’t stop chasing the rabbit.

  Later, when Shannon was on offense, she had no idea where to go, and I noticed Steve’s jaw clench again as he reexplained the drill to her.

  Finally, it was time to scrimmage. We were supposed to incorporate everything we’d learned that day into our game, but when I got out there, I acted sort of like Shannon. I forgot about the motion offense and started running around all over the place, not setting screens and not posting up.

  The only thing I’d recaptured was the feeling of pandemonium, and it hit me that I needed to stop being so hell-bent on doing my own thing every minute, trying to earn respect by sweating more than anyone else, by being different. This time, unlike the layup drill, I didn’t fall into being my fifteen-year-old self. Instead, I saw her running around all skinny and pell-mell, making Coach Danner’s jaw clench. Sure, he was a colossal a-hole, but from this new vantage point, it looked like my game and my life had been burdened by too many accidental rebellions I had no chance of winning.

  That night, we campers went out to dinner at a nice restaurant in town. I sat by Floris, and she told us all about her recent Internet dates, how she’d ditched one guy for being sappy and sending her flowers after their first encounter. If she was that finicky, I wondered, how did Harold the hypochondriac ex-con wino ever get in with her? I suspected it must have involved some lying.

  Lana sat across the table from me. She was a super-fit fifty-year-old with three teenage girls. The more wine she drank, the more she talked about leaving her husband ten years earlier, and how she regretted it, even though he’d been cheating on her and she couldn’t stand him.

  “It’s been so hard,” she said. Then she looked at me, the single, younger but about-to-be-too-old-for-choices one across the table, and again I got the feeling of urgent advice being thrown to me.

  “It doesn’t matter where they put that thing, so just don’t even think about it,” she said.

  I was taken aback by the disgust in her voice, but that didn’t prevent me from wondering if she was right.

  Toni had skipped dinner, and I wondered if Steve was a little relieved, with her talent for sniffing out differences between our camp and the mens’.

  For a couple of hours we drank too much and talked too loud, we had trouble with the pepper mill, we ordered dessert, and by the time our waitress started dropping hints that it was time to go, the oldest camper was snoozing on one side of me, and Floris was staring sadly at her coffee cup on the other. Had we been at the restaurant as mothers or wives or professionals, I’m sure we’d have been quite civilized, but we were on reprieve from adulthood, with all its guilt and disappointment, even as the oldest among us said so urgently, Settle, settle, settle . . . settle for what’s not hard and never burden yourself with the foolishness that it’s all supposed to mean something.

  The last day of camp ended at noon, and after practice, Steve had us gather around in a circle to hear his final comments on being pickup-worthy.

  “You gotta look like a player when you’re out there trying to get in. Take a few shots, dribble around with authority. Don’t go in there like this,” he said, taking off and shooting a lay-up in a herky-jerky leg-kicking push-the-ball sort of way that was the counterpart of throwing like a girl, “or nobody’ll pick you.”

  Then Steve had us get in a circle, look at the person next to us, and think of one positive thing about that person’s game, and one thing that person needed to work on.

  “Do you do this at the guys’ camp?!”

  Steve looked at Toni and said, actually, uh, no, he didn’t, but he thought he might give it a try here with us.

  She heaved a disgusted sigh.

  Floris complimented Shannon for being aggressive and getting all those steals during the motion offense drill. A lot of the weekend had been lost on her, I guessed, but I hoped the fierce women back in D.C., knowing nothing of her traumas, would let her in anyway.

  Then we all scattered back to our lives as grown adult women yearning to move and play as well as we could, each of us deciding between resignation and saying no to our own brand of what didn’t feel like living, each of us dealing with what was and wasn’t too late, each of us hoping the game we loved would love us back, at least every now and then.

  Sidelines

  TRUTH WAS, in my mid-thirties, it really was getting too late to be hovering around the court, looking for a game with teenage boys. It wasn’t that I was more likely to get hurt, or that I couldn’t play, or that I didn’t enjoy the game, but that I might get laughed at or ignored. It wasn’t that I had less courage, but that so much more of it was being required.

  I was only beginning to notice my brain’s growing collection of basketball memories kept, filed, accessed, learned from, guessed about, and mythologized. Without realizing it, on the courts and in the parks surrounding them, I’d been searching for clues to the mystery of how to live.

  Like this college-age girl I saw one time helping a little kid learn how to play. She was in the lane, teaching the kid about defense and ball handling, encouraging him to shoot and telling him how great he was doing. The college girl wore cute basketball clothes, with current sweats and a crop top, and she looked appealing. She wasn’t glancing at the door or the clock every two minutes; she was content to be doing what she was doing. She looked like a player, too, someone who could hang, someone who might get in a game after a while, but it was okay if she didn’t, too. You just knew that girl deflected shit like Teflon.

  This was the life fantasy that pulled me toward a preliminary phone call to find out about coaching at the local Boys and Girls Club. I was put right through to the volunteer coordinator.

  “You played some?” he asked me.

  “Well, yes,” I said, “in high school, and I still play pickup ball when I get the chance, but I don’t have any coaching background, or even much experience with—”

  “You’ll be fine. There’s not much to know, really, at this level. How about fourth-grade girls?”

  Before I got off the phone, I was a coach, and a few weeks later, I was at a coaches’ meeting, notepad and pencil in hand, ready to jot down tips on preferred offenses for ten-year-olds. But no hints or structure or philosophy were provided; we simply picked up our list of players, game schedule, and practice times and signed an agreement that we wouldn’t cuss or otherwise be bad examples. Then we were dismissed.

  I’m not sure what I expected, but I left in some mental distress, with my first practice in two days. On the way home, I stopped by the bookstore and bought a copy of Great Basketball Drills for Baffled Parents. Later that night, settling into bed with Baffled and a highlighter, I began to wonder what the hell I was thinking, trying to be a coach, a contributing member of the community and everything, a grown-up. I didn’t have much experience with any of that.

  I called all the girls’ parents on the phone before our practice, and through these conversations I discovered that there were a surprising number of “gifted little athletes” on my team. That was good, I thought, the more GLAs the better.

  I also spent an embarrassing amount of time putting together my coaching look. I didn’t want to dress too much like the girls, and I didn’t want to look like their moms. The most successful lady coaches I’d ever paid any attention to were Pat Summitt of the UT Volunteers, prancing around in front of the bench with her business suits and high heels on, and Coach MacRae, the only lady coach we faced in my high school district. Coach MacRae had worn the same polyester Russell gea
r as the men coaches. She had a gray crew cut and won a lot of games, and many citizens said she was a “morphodite.” They said that was fine and all, but why did she have to run the score up on everybody?

  I finally threw on Gap sweatpants and a T-shirt and placed around my neck the shiny new whistle that Bill the boyfriend had bought me for the occasion. He’d even had it engraved with the year and my initials. As I walked into the gym wearing my whistle and carrying a notebook with my practice outline, I may have vaguely resembled a coach, but what I felt like was a poser.

  I had come an hour early to spy on some other practices. Two teams were there, using the side goals. The first team had ten players and three coaches, and they were running drills: passing, dribbling, shooting lay-ups, and taking jump shots. They looked smooth, competent, relaxed, like a real team, and the coaches, in their slick, nylon athletic pants, looked like real coaches.

  On the other side was one chubby, balding coach whose six players stood in three pairs passing balls back and forth. They were practicing at the hoop farthest away from the bleachers, where I sat listening to three mothers complain about the exorbitant price of lots in town, the maintenance on their SUVs, and all the gymnastics, tae kwon do, and piano lessons their kids had to be driven to.

  One of the mothers asked me if I had a kid out there, and I told her, no, I was actually the coach of the next team, fourth-grade girls, at eight.

  “Practice at eight o’clock at night?!” the woman demanded. “For fourth-graders?!”

  I felt a knee-jerk guilt and mumbled something about being assigned the time.

  Another of the mothers was yelling toward the court at her very short, uncoordinated, and inexperienced daughter, alternately screaming at her to relax or look at so-and-so coming in the gym.