A Spectator’s Notebook

Kris Vervaecke

A native of Nebraska, Kris Vervaecke is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She has published essays and stories in literary magazines and in books such as Of Mothers and Sons: Women Writers Talk about Having Sons and Raising Men (2001), The Healing Circle: Authors Writing of Recovery (1998), and Writers on Sports (1998), where this essay appeared.

When I was a girl, I played brutish softball on hot summer days in a cow pasture with the other girls in the neighborhood, a neighborhood which was actually a scattering of a few houses outside the city limits of Omaha. These were homes inhabited almost solely by females: There was the widow Edgerton and her daughter, the Hellerman twin girls, the Kosinsky girl, two Martin girls, and three Vervaecke girls, of which I was the oldest. The Hellerman, Kosinsky, Martin, and Vervaecke fathers were gone all day and most evenings, some not returning even at night, except for Mr. Hellerman, who created a kind of father emergency for the rest of us by rolling into their driveway Monday through Friday evenings at 5:30 sharp. (Nancy Kosinsky’s father did sometimes drink at home instead of out, which created another sort of father emergency, because he’d dress up in his Shriner’s outfit and ride roughshod over everyone’s lawns in his little Shriner’s jeep, shearing through my mother’s canna bed, sending up humiliations of red petals.) We envied the Hellerman girls, but the other mothers said that Mr. Hellerman was a very nice man, but not a man’s man—a distinction I found confusing, along with the implication that a real woman would want a man’s man.

No mother or father or brother ever came down to the pasture to coach or referee our games, so we girls were left to our own devices. Mary Hellerman and I were always the captains of opposing teams; no one challenged this arrangement because it was understood that the whole point of the game was to build tension between Mary and me until we had no choice but to lay down our bats and balls and injure each other.

The pretense for our fights was an alleged infraction of the rules, which were crudely drawn, like the diamond, in the rising dust. Mary would accuse me, or I’d accuse her, and our shouts (“You cheater! You fat, ugly liar!”) would bring us close enough to smell each other. The Herefords would lift their heads in mild interest; the other girls would draw near. Then we’d sharpen our taunts until one of us landed the first slap. I still remember the satisfaction of smacking Mary’s bony, sunburned arm. And the coarseness of her long brown hair, coated with sweat and dust, sticking to my fingers as I pulled it. She was several inches taller than I, which allowed me to punch her stomach. Her mother never seemed to make her cut her fingernails, so Mary left long furrows down my arms. Blood! What a thrill and relief it was to see it bubbling up through our sultry sleep of resignation and resentment.

Later some boys moved into the neighborhood, and most of the girls retreated inside to talk about them on the telephone. I played baseball and football with the boys: They were stuck halfway out of nowhere, too, and so they needed me and sometimes even weeny-armed Mary, to play. These games were also primitive, tackle-and-roll-in-the-cow-dirt affairs. Then, one January afternoon during my eighth-grade year, running laps around the gymnasium for seventh-period coed gym class, I broke out in a sweat. Perspiration spread under the sleeves of my prison blue uniform like twin maps of Texas, and, quite abruptly, it mattered to me that my corporeality was revealing itself so grossly in the presence of boys. In panic and humiliation, I plastered my arms to my sides, slowed down to a trot, and became a girl.

5

It would be years before it dawned on me that a game might be more than a prelude to a fight, more than a release from preadolescent boredom. Through the eyes of my daughter and sons, who play in school and community league sports, I began to see a game as a sustaining drama dreamed up by the will and the scarcely imaginable possibilities of the body. And although I see that the game claims vital parts of their imaginations, I can never experience it in the same way.

Driving home from work, I catch part of a radio quiz show:

Game Show Host: Question number one. Who won the 1991 Super Bowl?

buzz!

Male Contestant: The New York Giants!

Host: Sorry. I’m afraid that’s not the right answer.

Male Contestant: But it is! The Giants beat the Buffalo Bills, 20–19, in Tampa Stadium!

Host: Sorry! Who won the 1991 Super Bowl?

buzz!

Female Contestant: I don’t know, and I don’t care!

Host (also female): Yes!!! That’s correct!!! [bells ring and whistles sound.] Yeah!!! Congratulations!!!

I’d be a whiz on that show. Although I grew up in the Nebraska vortex of Big Red football and should be capable of being swept up by my nation’s preoccupation, even as a kid, I was too embarrassed. I hated it when everybody was supposed to dress in red, gather around the television set, and feel excited. Or maybe it is closer to the truth to say that I was embarrassed to find that it was over watching a football game that the passions of others were aroused, while I, who was usually the one to go around feeling things, could not manufacture even a fleeting rivalrous impulse toward the state of Oklahoma, a wind-worn, sun-dulled place much like the place I lived.

Years later, after living on the West Coast, I returned to Nebraska, showing up one autumn Saturday to do some research at the university library. In my characteristically oblivious way, I had failed to find out whether there was a home game, and so it took two hours to make my way through the traffic in Lincoln, and, finally parked, through the throngs of hoarse, red-polyester-suited people to the library door.

Where I found the door locked and library closed, because it was a Big Red Saturday.

Fortunately for me and my prejudices, my kids—Ben, Emily, and Andrew—were never interested in playing football. Basketball’s their game, and sometimes soccer, or tennis. They run track and practice martial arts. When Ben went through a Dan Quayle phase when he was fifteen—deciding that when he was grown he would abandon the income bracket to which his mother belongs and possibly even vote Republican—he took up golf, practiced every day for an entire summer, and won the city championship for his age division. For a few moments, he was a kind of celebrity, at least to some sweet old men we ran into at the grocery store. I was proud of him, but he was already discarding the polo shirts he’d begun wearing and letting his golf clubs gather dust. He started paying more attention to politics and environmental policy and thinking about what he wanted to do with his life. I suspected it was closely listening to Republicans that soured him on golf, but I can’t say for sure, because I wanted only to listen and observe, not pry. Sports has been one of the ways he’s defined and differentiated himself, stretched far beyond and past his mother, surprising her with the slam dunk.

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10

For me, the experience of raising children has no equivalent in terror and love. For long stretches of years as a single parent, I’ve watched as the game dreamed up my sons and daughter, giving them things I could not, letting them shed, for the game’s duration, grief, rage, loneliness, or boredom, and allowing them to take on skill and cunning, filling them with inspiration and determination, sometimes awe.

December 1987. At ten years old, a stubby little blond boy, Ben sits in rapt attention during any game, understanding it intuitively, committing himself wholly. At a Kansas Jayhawks basketball game, I take him down to the court so he can watch his team jog into the locker room. We are so close to their immense, shining bodies that, as Milt Newton trots past (he’d scored eighteen points and accomplished several steals), Ben is able to scoop up, into his cupped palm, a few drops of Newton’s sweat. For a moment, Ben holds his breath, staring down at his glistening palm. Then he straightens and begins carefully applying the sweat to his own skin, up and down his arms, patting it into his very pores.

August 1992. Over speed bumps so pronounced you need a forty-thousand-dollar vehicle to get to the other side with your teeth intact, I wind up the narrow road to the country club, to which we don’t belong, to pick up Ben after his eighteen holes. He is nowhere to be seen. It’s 105 degrees, and so I get out of the car, with my book, and settle myself under the stingy shade of an ornamental tree next to the parking lot.

“Mom!” I hear Ben say. “What are you doing?”

“Well, I’m just waiting for you,” I say, bewildered.

15

“Get up! Get up!” he says.

After we’re settled in the car, I ask what’s wrong.

He struggles, not wanting to hurt my feelings. Wiping sweat from his forehead, he then passes his hand over his eyes.

“Sitting in the grass?” he finally reproaches, a bit incredulous. I don’t get it. “Mom, my God, you looked like a hippie!”

August 1995. Everything has been loaded into the car: clothes, photos of the family members and the dogs; Ben’s iguana (“Jay”) is resting securely among the rocks in his aquarium, wedged, in the backseat, between the lifting equipment and the reference books I insist he take. We’ve hugged and cried and said everything there is to say about his going off to college. He does not want me to drive to the university with him, not this time; we’ve already done this for parent orientation and his enrollment in the honors program. He says he’ll look like a baby if his mom helps him move into the dorm.

20

“One more thing before I leave,” he says. “Mom, will you watch this with me?”

He slides Michael Jordan’s Air Time into the VCR, and, sitting together on the couch, we endure the strains of the background music massacred by the worn-out sound track on our VCR. As we watch Jordan’s volitant performance, his pure, vibrant grace and athleticism, the way, under pressure, his quotient of joy increases—he fakes, spins, and drives through, dunking over the head of somebody who’s at least seven feet tall—Ben says, “I get chills, Mom, I really do.”

Unsophisticated? My son, whose father died, as Jordan’s did a few years ago, a senseless, violent death: What spiritual toll does that exact on a child? What does he understand the body to mean, knowing his father’s body was robbed of life?

I remember his martial arts phase, which followed the Republican golf phase, all the demonstrations I attended of Filipino, Korean, and Chinese stylized fighting: Ben whirling nunchuks, throwing and catching knives, breaking the requisite boards and bricks. At home, when his sister or brother or the dog came up behind him, he’d leap up and chop the air, spinning off an instantaneous dramatization of his charged, secure masculinity. Then he’d get down on the floor to reassure the startled dog. “It’s okay, baby,” he’d croon. “Benny would never hurt you.”

He doesn’t need a role model, exactly, isn’t interested in the personal or moral failures of athletes, isn’t drawn to their celebrity. Instead he needs the example of pure jubilation in the body, the triumph of spirit, strength, determination, and talent.

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25

I teach at a small liberal arts college thirty miles from where I live, a Division III school with an active athletic program. While the college cannot offer athletic scholarships, many of the students are there primarily to play sports, and it is their athletic not scholastic achievement that inspires the college to find sufficient financial aid for them to attend. These are mostly white kids from farms, or towns such as Beebeetown, Mechanicsville, Altoona, Correctionville, or What Cheer, Iowa. (I listen closely as my students tell me the names of their towns, hoping for an ironic inflection, but I’m always disappointed.) Some of the students are fairly bright, but, because they were stars of their high school classes—football, wrestling, basketball, track, or golf—they haven’t read any books.

I don’t mean that they haven’t read many books, or that they haven’t read the great books. I mean that, except for comic books, they haven’t read even one book, that is, you know, sitting down, opening a book, and reading it, beginning sentence to the next, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, all the way to the end. They’ve simply been passed from one class to the next without doing the work.

“Do we really have to read the whole thing?” they ask me plaintively, as we begin the first book on the syllabus.

Because my children and I live in a university community that insists on higher educational standards than most (although, believe me, these standards are nothing to boast about), by the time my children were in fifth grade they could read and write better than most of my college freshmen. Because my children attend a public school where, although there are drugs and skirmishes and occasionally weapons, there is a reasonable expectation of safety and order and the opportunity to be educated, they will be able to compete with their academic achievements, not a reverse layup or three-point shot. They are fortunate because games are play for them. On the other hand, because my children are not particularly gifted athletes, they’ve not had the playing time or attention from coaches that their more talented or parent-coached peers have had. All three of them need those things, not because they will bring glory to their schools, but because we all need joy in our physicality. When I travel to a school in Altoona or someplace like it to attend one of my daughter’s basketball games, at first I’m distracted by my awareness that this town is one of countless others where we’re failing to sufficiently educate some, if not many, of the children. Then I pick a spot in the bleachers several rows behind where her team will sit and wait for my daughter to come jogging in.

As Emily bounces onto the floor in her green-and-gold uniform, her eyes scan the crowd to meet mine. She’s always happy before a game, and now, a few minutes before the whistle, she’s luminous with excitement. The girls warm up, shoot, huddle, then go to the bench. Emily’s one of the shorter girls, but she moves fast. I take inordinate pride in the fact that it wouldn’t occur to her to go out for cheerleading. Sometimes when I pick her up after practice, ready with food she can stuff into her mouth, she cannot contain her exuberance: “Mom, I swear to God! We worked so hard, it was the most fun I’ve had in my entire life!” Sometimes, watching them practice, I think back to our cow-pasture softball and wish, well, that Mary and I had learned to play the game.

30

The girls are on the sidelines, waiting for the game to begin. I look at Emily’s golden brown head among all the other bright heads with their French and cornrow braids (the girls braid each others’ hair as they ride the bus to the game). The whistle blows, the ball’s in play; the air is filled with shouts and squeaking shoes and the bouncing of the ball. Each time there is a substitution of players I watch my daughter’s slender back lift with hope then go slack with disappointment. Unlike most of the other parents, I do not give a damn whether West High’s teams win State or anything else; I want all the kids to have their playing time. The game wears on; West High is once again kicking butt. Not until the last minute or two of the game, when her team has maintained a twenty-point lead over the second half, do Emily and several other girls get to play.

She maintains her composure until we get in the car, then crumples in humiliation. Once we’re on the highway, forty miles to home, freezing rain coats our windows, but I can’t see well enough to find a safe place to pull off. I drive with trepidation over the slippery road, through the foggy darkness, while Emily cries so hard it sounds as though she will break apart. “Mommy, I’m such a failure!” she weeps. At first my attempts to comfort her only increase her misery, so I shut up. I’m left to listen and worry about the road and think my resentful thoughts. I remember all the years in elementary school when she was “benched” in the classroom—left to do bulletin boards for the teacher—because she’d already mastered what was being taught. I think about the studies that suggest that girls who compete in athletics are far less likely to drink or take drugs or become pregnant.

To make myself feel better, I remember her thirteenth birthday, when she was the high scorer on her team with nineteen points. I can still see her dribbling the ball down the court, passing, rebounding, shooting, so far from any self-consciousness about her body it was as though the game had dreamed her up, supplying her with a body that moved as though sure of itself and its momentary grace.

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One of Ben’s names for his younger brother, Andrew, is “Trancer.” Years ago, when Andrew played outfield in Little League, he often faced away from the batter in deep contemplation, and it was only with difficulty that his coach or I would pull his attention away from his thoughts and redirect it toward the real danger he might be smacked in the back of the skull by the ball.

“Andrew, get your head in the game!” the coach would holler, but Andrew never actually did. It worked out better when he went out for track. Long-distance running gave him plenty of time to think. Until recently, I thought the last thing he’d ever want to be was a jock.

35

July 1996. A Saturday morning, the window open while I work at home, bringing in the breeze fragrant with freshly cut grass and the steady thump thump thump of the basketball on the driveway. Andrew, who has just turned fourteen, bounces a ball in order to think. Two hours might pass in bouncing and shooting hoops before he appears in the office, as if from a dream, to tell me what’s on his mind.

He wanders in wearing a wrinkled T-shirt and shorts, barefoot, his dark hair mussed. I’m surprised again by how graceful and muscular he is, how tall—five-foot-ten last time I measured him—but it seems possible that he’s grown another inch since I fed him breakfast.

He plops down on a chair next to mine. Up close there’s a little acne and a few whiskers, new this year, and the chickenpox scar on his cheek from when he was three.

“Hi, Mom.” Here’s something familiar: It’s obvious he hasn’t gotten around to brushing his teeth. He’s lost in thought. “I love you, Mom,” he says absently.

“I love you,” I say, patting his rather huge and hairy knee, adding, “You look like a derelict.”

40

He registers this and looks pleased.

Then he wakes up, turns toward me, says in a voice heavy with portent, “Tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow,” I say cheerfully, because this is my role: to refute the objections he’ll make because he’s scared to go to the two-week writing scholarship workshop that begins the next day.

“It’s going to suck! They’ll treat us like babies, probably make us go to bed at ten o’clock!”

This will be the first time he’s been away from home for two weeks, one of the few times he’s ever been away, even to stay with family. Three summers ago, when he stayed at my mother’s, he got so homesick he went on a hunger strike so that he could come home. Since that time, he’s grown a foot, his voice has dropped an octave, and his shin bones are as thick as the beef bones we buy for the puppy to chew.

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“Oh, I doubt it,” I say. “They chose you based on your manuscripts and test scores, so they know you’re not babies.”

“Yeah,” he says. “But I bet everybody will already know each other except for me.”

“They come from all over the state, so I don’t know how they’d already know each other.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t care,” he says, sounding satisfied. “They’re probably all a bunch of nerds, anyway.”

“Probably.”

50

“What do you think?” he asks, pushing up the sleeve of his T-shirt, revealing what I can genuinely describe to him as an amazingly well-developed biceps.

“Wow,” I say, trying to take in the irony—or anti-irony—that all that grunting and weight lifting in the basement had been in preparation for a smart kids’ workshop.

The next day I drive him to the university where the workshop will be held; after the three-hour orientation, I am to return to drive him to the dorm. At the appointed time, I pull into the parking lot. There is a cluster of girls at the shelter, surreptitiously watching the boys playing basketball. I scan the crowd of boys as they jump and shoot, and four times I think spot my son, but from this distance and with the sun in my eyes, I can’t discern Andrew from the others. As I step out of the car to go look for him, he opens the passenger door.

“Mom!” he says. “Get in the car!”

His face is flushed, jaw set. Someone might see me, confirming the rumor he has a mother.

55

“How was it?” I ask, backing out.

“It sucks,” he says. “We’re on such a short leash. we have to go to bed at ten o’clock! And the boys are like all into role-playing games, though some of them are pretending to be intellectuals. It sucks so bad you wouldn’t believe it. The books they go around recommending to each other are like science-fiction stuff they think is great literature.”

“That’s too bad,” I say.

“It might be okay, though,” he says. “Some of the kids are pretty cool.”

“That’s good,” I say, noticing the lovely cumulus between us and the enormous sky.

60

“One kid asked me what kind of game system I have, and I said, ‘Game system?’ And he said, ‘You know like Sega or Super Nintendo,’ and I said, ‘Game system? I don’t play game systems.’”

“You really shut him off,” I say.

“Well, I didn’t really shut him off,” he says, hedging.

Trailing him down the hall of the dorm where he’ll live for the next two weeks, I watch as he nods to the other boys. As he unlocks the door to his room, he whispers, “Nobody I couldn’t take if I had to,” and grins before giving me the briefest and most furtive of hugs good-bye.

Over the next two weeks, he phones only once, and, in a breezy tone, tells me he’s having, definitely, the best time of his life. My friend who lives across the street from the dorm and has promised to spy on my child, reports that every evening Andrew’s out shooting hoops with the R.A. and a couple of the other scholarship guys.

65

In the remarks at the closing ceremony, Andrew’s muscles emerge as a kind of theme, and, in the final ritual of parting, each kid autographs my son’s manly biceps.

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When I mention to Ben that I’m writing an essay about sports, he looks stricken. “I don’t think that’s a good idea, Mom,” he says, honesty overriding tact. “I mean it’s not something you can read about and understand in that way. You have to have a feel for it, an intuition. You have to love it.”

“I’m not pretending to love it,” I say a bit defensively.

Is there anything about sports I love?

Closing my eyes, I remember swinging my bat and solidly hitting the ball, the shudder of the connection a physical exultation traveling down my arm. I remember tossing the bat aside, and, as though suddenly released into the wild, racing through the shimmering heat, toeing each dried cow pie base and sliding into home.

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I remember running hard, free of ambivalence, of pity. I remember the powdery dirt and the minty smell of the weeds and the unreasonable beauty of the sky.

“Mom,” someone is calling. “Mom!

I open my eyes.

“You’re as bad as Andrew,” Emily informs me. “Why are you just sitting here?”

“I was remembering when I was a kid, playing softball.”

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“Oh, my gosh,” she says, mildly exasperated, “playing in the dirt with your friends doesn’t count, Mom. I thought you were going to write about when I was the high scorer on my basketball team with nineteen points. On my thirteenth birthday, remember?”

“When did I say I was going to write about that?”

“You didn’t, but I told you you should. It was so awesome. We were playing Southeast, the gym was packed, and everybody from Northwest was yelling my name. I kept throwing the ball up there, and it kept going in. My team was pounding the floor, yelling ‘Em-i-ly!’ Then I did a layup, and it won the game. Don’t you remember?”

“Of course, I remember.”

“Well, all right then,” she says, satisfied. “That’s the story to tell.”