State

by Melissa Isaacson

  I figured she hadn’t had time, and I was too embarrassed to give it back to her. It wasn’t until days later, as I flipped through it a little more thoroughly, that I recognized the blue marker and the neat cursive on page 127, under the headline STUDENT APATHY INCREASES and above a picture of an empty classroom.

  Missy—Thanks to all of you this page does not apply to girls’ basketball. Besides basketball, you’re quite a girl—don’t allow anyone to discourage you—keep your enthusiasm and that “little girl” quality—you can be 40 and still have it. Don’t judge others too quickly and don’t make decisions too quickly. Above all, be patient with me and all of my “meanness.” I enjoy working with you and look forward to camp. Enjoy the summer, work at b-ball—grow in your jump—it may someday match the size of your heart! Fondly, Mrs. Mulder.

  P.S. Stay hungry.

  I closed the book and opened it again slowly. This time, I noticed something I had not seen before. Mrs. Mulder had written on a page with several color photographs of a sunset, a snowy path through a forest, a boat cutting through fog, and a red rose in full bloom with water droplets on its petals.

  In that familiar blue marker, she had drawn an arrow pointing to the rose. And next to the arrow she wrote: “A very special picture.”

  CHAPTER 8

  Dark Secrets

  BEING A 15-YEAR-OLD in the summer of 1977 meant I could work as an assistant counselor at Lincolnwood Recreation Day Camp, but I couldn’t be paid. It meant I had friends who could drive, but no one had cars. It meant that it was going to be a long summer, and it meant that with Connie seemingly a million miles away in Morton Grove and Shirley in New Jersey visiting her relatives, there was no one to play basketball with every day as I had planned.

  Apparently, Shirley was not much happier. In her latest letter, she described in painful detail how her family’s car broke down on the way to New Jersey. But if that was supposed to cheer me up, it did not. Her next paragraph detailed the “mansion” she was staying in with four floors and 10 bedrooms and a backyard 10 times the size of hers. But she did say she was bored stiff and had no friends, so that made me feel a little better.

  Shirley never talked too much about these trips east she made every summer, seemingly against her will. The mansion was her grandfather’s house; her mother’s father was an importer of children’s clothing. The community in which she was ensconced was basically the entire Sephardic Jewish population of Brooklyn. They came to Deal, New Jersey, every summer, a tight-knit group that looked after one another and cared about each other, a group where the women cooked and shared recipes, got their nails done, and shopped for shoes while their husbands provided for all their basic needs and much more. Mostly, their income came from importing and exporting, and mostly, like Shirley’s grandfather, it was in the garment business.

  It was a world where the husbands made exotic buying trips to Hong Kong while their daughters had great figures and wore high heels to the pool and did not go to college for, surely, they would just get married anyway. And it was a place where Shirley’s parents hoped Shirley and her older sister, Denise, eventually would find a suitable (read: rich) husband.

  Shirley knew all about her parents’ intentions, but while the other girls in New Jersey were busy applying makeup and talking about which shoes to buy, she worked as a cook’s helper at a summer camp, played one-on-one whenever she could get up a game, and worried that the rest of us were working harder than she was.

  “I swear I’m all excited for b-ball already,” she wrote to me in August. “Maybe it’s because I haven’t played too much. I played a boy (15 yrs. old and good) and I beat him but it was close and I should have wiped him. But nevertheless, I AM HUNGRY.”

  We were hungry, too. Well, some of us, anyway. Connie and I were signed up for Niles West’s two-week basketball camp, but we were a little concerned that Diana and Bridget were not. What we didn’t know was that Diana was doing missionary work for the Mormon Church with her family that summer and that Bridget’s parents told her they couldn’t afford to send her to camp.

  Mrs. Mulder, wanting to spend more time with her family, handed over the basketball camp reins to Mr. Schnurr and made periodic visits. Connie and I could have stayed there all day instead of the couple of hours we had each morning, savoring the time we had with Mr. Schnurr. Besides, any extra time in the gym was still considered a treat, and despite our best intentions, it was pretty much the only time we ever got to play together that summer.

  I rode my bike the five miles from my house to Niles West, then went back to work at Proesel Park for my assistant counselor duties. After basketball camp ended, both of us went back to work full-time—me as a counselor and Connie, who had turned 16 in January, as a waitress at a restaurant in Morton Grove. With Connie not having a driver’s license and with both of us working, we may as well have been on separate coasts.

  And so we had to be content to give each other daily phone reports on our progress. Connie worked the playground and Morton Grove Community Center hard, while I shot on our backyard hoop and picked up games with male camp counselors whenever I could, which frankly did not do me a lot of good unless I could find miniature camp counselors. In between, I set up folding chairs in the backyard, as I had done since I was eight, and tried to work on dribbling with my nondominant hand. I was a good ball handler, could dribble through most any press, and was great at dribbling through my legs, which would work out wonderfully if that opportunity ever presented itself in a game and Mrs. Mulder would not promptly remove me from the team for trying it. But I was still weak going to my left side, and any defender who had any head at all could exploit that, as my brothers had been telling me for years.

  Peggy had something to work toward as well, and suddenly the body to work with. After spending the last part of the season on the varsity roster for practice purposes, she was now 5-10 and among the tallest girls we had coming back next season. Her mom, noticing the newfound enthusiasm in her daughter and looking for something to keep her busy, took note of an advertisement for Badger-Sloan basketball camp in the church bulletin.

  Ed Badger was the head coach of the Chicago Bulls, and former Bulls great Jerry Sloan was doing part-time work as a scout and struggling to find a niche after his career was ended prematurely by a knee injury the season before. Their camp was in Angel Guardian Gym, where the Bulls practiced on the city’s North Side, and it took Peggy, her mother, and Peg’s friend Holly Andersen, an incoming Niles West freshman, three bus transfers to get there from Morton Grove.

  Charming but run-down, Angel Guardian was once the site of one of the largest orphanages in Chicago. To Peggy, it may as well have been Chicago Stadium, and she trembled in Sloan’s presence the first time they met. One of the most intense competitors in the history of the game and a future Hall of Fame coach, Sloan, unbeknownst to most, had grown up in a tiny southern Illinois town where he played on a grade-school team with three girls, and he now had a soft spot for female athletes. Sloan felt bad because the girls were the best players on their team but had to settle for becoming cheerleaders and pom-pom girls when they got to high school.

  Peggy and her mother walked into the gym and found Sloan.

  “All I have is $20 with me,” Peg’s mom told him while Peggy cowered by her side, “but I get paid next week. Is there any way I can pay you in installments?”

  Sloan looked down at Peggy, eyes narrowed. “Do you want to play ball?” he asked. Peggy felt as though Sloan could see right through her. Since she had made JV last year, she knew her game was improving, but she also knew she needed to work harder if she wanted to make varsity next season.

  “Very much,” she stammered.

  “Well then, forget the money,” he said. “Get out there.”

  But Peggy’s mom had another small problem. “I don’t get off work until five,” she told Sloan. “Can she sit in the gym for an hour until I pick her up?”

  Peggy flushed. How much more could her mother emba
rrass her? “Don’t worry,” said Sloan, “I’ll take her home.”

  That day, Peggy and Holly rode home in Sloan’s Lincoln Town Car, and Peggy thought it was a limousine. By the end of the summer, she had met his wife, shot hoops with his kids in their driveway in suburban Northbrook, about 20 minutes from Peg’s house, and for all intents and purposes, found herself another family.

  I loved Jerry Sloan. So did my mom. We were Bulls fans, of course, as most Chicagoans were, and you could not help but admire Sloan’s aggressive style of play. We also thought he was adorable. But mostly, Sloan was the guy no player wanted to have guard him, and no one dove for loose balls or took charges like Sloan did. That was the way he played, and it was the way he expected those whom he coached to play, whether they were men or teenage girls. I had been to Angel Guardian Gym to watch the Bulls and Sloan practice while he was still playing, but I had no idea he had a girls’ camp or maybe I would have signed up, too. It was Peggy’s secret. And Jerry was Peg’s new hero.

  But Peg had a few other secrets.

  She lived on the second story of a four-family two-flat in Morton Grove with her mother and two brothers, Al and Michael. Her mom worked as a secretary and didn’t own a car. That much I knew. A lot of other things, I did not. When Peg’s freshman English teacher, Mr. DuBois, joked one day to the class, “You know you’re old when you start reading the obituaries,” Peggy grimaced.

  She had been scanning the obits since she had learned to read at age six. Every day she looked for her father’s name, praying that he had died.

  If anyone ever asked, she would tell them her father was dead. She considered her stepfather, Ted Japely, to be her father anyway, so she figured she was only half-lying—Ted had died of leukemia when Peggy was six. Her biological father, Al King, had been diagnosed as schizophrenic. The day she was born, Peggy’s mother, Mary, called him at a bar to tell him she was going into labor. He told her he didn’t have time to go to any hospital.

  One day when Peggy was seven or eight, her father dressed up as a priest and showed up at St. Monica’s, the Catholic school Peggy and her brother Al attended in Chicago.

  “It’s Al King—it’s Al King!” Peggy screamed to her brother. “He’s here.”

  They didn’t call him “Dad” but “Al King” because he was like a character to them. A monster. Peggy’s brother Al asked the nuns if he and his sister could go inside and practice their handwriting, and once inside, Peggy told her teacher, “That’s my father out there.”

  “Yes, that’s right, that’s Father King,” the nun replied.

  “No, no, that’s Al King,” Peggy said frantically. “Call my mother at work.”

  After that, Mary made sure that Peggy and her brother stayed at the convent after school every day until she could pick them up, which only enhanced their reputation as outsiders. Once, in second grade, Peggy was with some girls in the neighborhood when she saw her father sprinting past, four cops in full pursuit.

  “Isn’t that your dad?” the girls asked as she shrunk in embarrassment.

  “No, I don’t think so,” said Peggy as the police tackled him to the ground and threw him into the paddy wagon.

  He had been stalking the family ever since Mary took her kids and fled when Peggy was a toddler. For four or five years, until the family moved temporarily to Colorado, where Mary would meet Ted Japely, Al King would regularly track them down, often breaking in windows and beating in doors in the middle of the night. Once, in a drunken rage, he lined up the whole family against a wall, waved a gun in their faces, and told them he was Hitler, they were dirty kikes, and he was going to kill them all.

  Often, they would manage to call the police, and eventually her mother filed a restraining order. But Al King’s brother was a sergeant in the Chicago Police Department, and as fast as Mary had him hauled in, his brother would get him out. Not surprisingly, Peggy did not mention any of this to the kids at school.

  As much as I wanted to work in all the basketball I could, summers were about counseling, umpiring, and playing softball. Lincolnwood had just started participating in a traveling softball league, and though I wasn’t yet 16, I played with the 16- to 18-year-old team. So did Barb Atsaves, who was only 14 and turning out to be a great basketball and softball player.

  In between, I decided to take a free CPR class at the Lincolnwood police station. Since I was the only kid, I got a lot of stares, and I took mental notes on all the others in my class for my weekly letters to Shirley. I told her about the cute paramedic who taught the class and about the woman who drooled on the CPR dummy right before I was supposed to put my mouth on it. I also told her about the course unexpectedly paying off shortly after I completed it when I found myself performing mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on my mother on our kitchen floor.

  I think I took the class because I subconsciously knew my mom was not well. She had had numerous surgeries on her arm, but she had also had a few scares with low blood sugar and took medication to control a case of borderline diabetes. More than once, ambulances were dispatched to our house for one thing or another—a fainting spell or, in the case of that summer, after she had passed out and stopped breathing when her blood pressure inexplicably plummeted.

  My father was surprisingly calm in emergency situations, but he did not know how to perform mouth-to-mouth and I did. As they wheeled my mother out, a blanket barely concealing her nightgown, kids I had never even seen before, on bikes and on foot, crowded around the ambulance for a peek as I yelled at them to stop rubbernecking and get the hell away.

  I didn’t share the episode with anyone but Shirley. And it wasn’t something even my family discussed much. It was just another unfortunate hospitalization that we hoped would end quickly.

  My relationship with my mother was so close it was telepathic. And my brothers and sister used to say it was my mother’s fault I cried at the briefest of separations—once when she was only in the next aisle at Shoppers World, a 30-second span that nearly sent me to therapy. But the truth was, I didn’t want to leave my mom. We shared a love of Barbra Streisand and Dionne Warwick, as well as of Robert Redford, James Garner, Mary Tyler Moore, and Walter Payton. And above all, we shared a humorous outlook on most everything.

  She understood me, and I her. Once, my sister, Susie, distraught that I was showing no proclivity for girl things, stole me away to the bathroom, dressed me up, and slathered me with makeup. I was five. “She looks like a hooker,” my mother said when she saw me, my brothers collapsing with laughter as I ran back outside where I belonged.

  Routinely, I would come home to find Shirley or other friends sitting at our kitchen table, talking and laughing with my mom. She wasn’t trying to be our friend—she despised the very notion of the buddy mom. She was just naturally funny, warm, and loving, and kids found her easy to talk to.

  She was a storyteller and even as her usual sharpness began to dull, she fell back on old standbys that held up through the years. As a little kid, her stories enthralled me, and whether I was snuggled next to her in bed or walking with her to the grocery store because she couldn’t drive, I would listen and laugh and grip her good hand a little tighter as we crossed Devon Avenue on the way to the Jewel.

  “Please, you have to promise,” she would say to me, gesturing to one senior citizen or another bundled up on a street corner on a sweltering afternoon. “I know, I know,” I would reply. “No sweaters in the middle of summer. Promise, I won’t let you.”

  My mother would also tell me about how my father was “rich” growing up, an accusation to which he took great offense for some reason. In truth, anyone who didn’t run from landlords trying to collect the rent was considered rich to my mom, and tales of her childhood were always part tragic, part hilarious. Like when she told me of renting one pair of roller skates with her best friend, Rhea, for seven cents an hour—four cents from her and three from Rhea “because she was really poor,” my mom would say. “Her father was on relief.”

  Pretty muc
h limited to one doll and one roller skate for entertainment when she was growing up, my mother told me of the day her father gave her a goldfish for a pet. They placed it on the windowsill in the kitchen until one afternoon, boiling in the hot sun, the fish “jumped out of the bowl, out the window, and committed suicide,” my mom lamented.

  “Committed suicide?” I asked, horrified.

  “It was the Depression,” she deadpanned.

  My mother loved sports, but she did not come by her fan role naturally. One day, wanting to impress my brothers and their friends, she came into the room while they were watching a football game on television and casually mentioned that she had read a very interesting article at the beauty shop written by a woman who knew so much about football, it almost sounded as if she played.

  “Her name is Fran Tarkenton,” my mom said proudly.

  Tarkenton, of course, was the star quarterback of the Minnesota Vikings. And a man.

  My brothers and their friends howled with laughter, and my mom scurried out of the room after telling them it wasn’t nice to make fun of a mother. But from then on, she made a point to be the most astute and devoted sports fan in the house, going from season to season with the Bulls and Bears and White Sox and, of course, the Niles West girls’ basketball team.

  My parents went to my softball games in the summer, but it was the promise of winter, normally a dark, dreary time in Chicago and a sad time at home with reminders of snowblowers and a general dislike of the cold, that consumed them. Each basketball game was an event to anticipate, live, and relive. If life’s demands kept my mother and father from attending every event of my siblings in earlier years, they were not about to miss any more at this stage of their lives. More than that, watching us play seemed to give them a second wind, a diversion from my mom’s physical pain, my dad’s melancholy, and the feeling that their increasing forgetfulness was becoming a problem.