I found four square inches of bench to dump my gym bag on and quickly stripped, stuffing my jeans into the bag and putting on my faded uniform. I adjusted the socks and tied the high-lacing shoes.
Diane put an arm around me. “You’re looking good, Whitey, like you still could move around if you had to.”
We looked into the mirror. While some of the current Tigers topped six feet, at five-eight I’d been the tallest one on our team. Diane’s afro was about level with my nose. Black and white, we’d both wanted to play basketball when race fights were a daily disruption in hall and locker room. We hadn’t liked each other, but junior year we’d forced a truce on the rest of the team and the next February we’d taken them to the first statewide girls tournament.
She grinned, sharing the memory. “All that garbage we used to put ourselves through seems mighty trivial now, Warshawski. Come over and meet the reporter. Say something nice about the old neighborhood.”
The Herald-Star’s Joan Lacey was the city’s only woman sports columnist. When I said I read her stuff regularly she smiled with pleasure. “Tell my editor. Better still, write a letter. So how do you feel putting on your uniform after all these years?”
“Like an idiot. I haven’t held a basketball since I left college.” I’d gone to the University of Chicago on an athletic scholarship. The U of C offered them long before the rest of the country knew that women played sports.
We talked for a few minutes, about the past, about aging athletes, about the fifty percent unemployed in the neighborhood, about the current team’s prospects.
“We’re rooting for them, of course,” I said. “I’m anxious to see them on the court. In here they look as though they take conditioning much more seriously than we did twenty years ago.”
“Yeah, they keep hoping the women’s pro league will revive. There’re some top-notch women players in high school and college with no place to go.”
Joan put her notebook away and told a photographer to get us out on the court for some shots. We eight old-timers straggled out to the gym floor, Caroline worrying around us like an overzealous terrier.
Diane picked up a ball and dribbled it behind her, under her legs, then bounced it to me. I turned and shot. The ball caromed from the backboard and I ran in to get it and dunk it. My old teammates gave me a ragged hand.
The photographer took some pictures of us together, then of Diane and me playing one-on-one under the net. The crowd got into it a little, but their real interest was on the current team. When the Lady Tigers took the floor in their warm-up suits, they got a big round. We worked out a little with them, but turned the floor over to them as soon as possible: this was their big night.
When the girls from visiting St. Sophia came out in their red-and-white sweats, I slid back to the locker room and started to change back to my civvies. Caroline found me as I finished tying my neck scarf.
“Vic! Where are you going? You know you promised to come over to see Ma after the game!”
“I said I’d try, if I could stay down here.”
“She’s counting on seeing you. She can hardly get out of bed she’s in such bad shape. This really matters to her.”
In the mirror I could see her face flush and her blue eyes darken with the same hurt look she used to give me when she was five and I wouldn’t let her tag along with my friends. I felt my temper rise with twenty-year-old irritation.
“Did you arrange this basketball farce to manipulate me into visiting Louisa? Or did that only come to you later?”
The flush deepened to scarlet. “What do you mean, farce? I’m trying to do something for this community. I’m not a la-di-da snot going off to the North Side and abandoning people to their fate!”
“What, you think if I’d stayed down here I could’ve saved Wisconsin Steel? Or stopped the assholes at USX from striking one of the last operating plants around here?” I grabbed my peajacket from the bench and angrily thrust my arms into it.
“Vic! Where are you going?”
“Home. I have a dinner date. I want to change clothes.”
“You can’t. I need you,” she wailed loudly. The big eyes were swimming with tears now, a prelude to a squawk to her mother or mine that I was being mean to her. It brought back all the times Gabriella had come to the door-saying “What difference can it make to you, Victoria? Take the child with you”-so forcibly it was all I could do not to slap Caroline’s wide trembling mouth.
“What do you need me for? To make good on a promise you made without consulting me?”
“Ma isn’t going to live much longer,” she shouted. “Isn’t that more important than some stupid-ass date?”
“Certainly. If this were a social occasion, I would call and say excuse me, the little brat next door committed me to something I can’t get out of But this is dinner with a client. He’s temperamental but he pays on time and I like to keep him happy.”
Tears were streaming across the freckles now. “Vic, you never take me seriously. I told you when we were discussing this how important it would be for Ma if you came to visit. And you completely forgot. You still think I’m five years old and nothing I say or think matters.”
That shut me up. She had a point. And if Louisa was that sick, I really ought to see her.
“Oh, all right. I’ll phone and change my plans. One last time.”
The tears disappeared instantly. “Thanks, Vic. I won’t forget it. I knew I could count on you.”
“You mean you knew you could make another end run around me,” I said disagreeably.
She laughed. “Let me show you where the phones are.”
“I’m not senile yet-I can still find them. And no, I won’t sneak off while you’re not looking,” I added, seeing her uneasy look.
She grinned. “As God is your witness?”
It was an old pledge, picked up from her mother’s drunk Uncle Stan, who used it to prove he was sober.
“As God is my witness,” I agreed solemnly. “I just hope Graham’s feelings aren’t so hurt, he decides not to pay his bill.”
I found the pay phones near the front entrance and wasted several quarters before running Darrough Graham down at the Forty-Nine Club. He wasn’t happy-he had made reservations at the Filagree-but I managed to end the conversation on a friendly note. Slinging my bag over my shoulder, I made my way back to the gym.
2
St. Sophia gave the Lady Tigers a tough ride, leading through much of the second half. The play was intense, much faster paced than in my basketball years. Two starters for the Lady Tigers fouled out with seven minutes left, and things looked bad. Then the toughest Saint guard went out with three minutes left. The Tigers’ star forward, who’d been penned in all evening, came to life, scoring eight unanswered points. The home team won 54-51.
I found myself cheering as eagerly as anyone. I even felt a nostalgic warmth for my own high school team, which surprised me: my adolescent memories are so dominated by my mother’s illness and death, I guess I’ve forgotten having any good times.
Nancy Cleghorn had left to attend a meeting, but Diane Logan and I joined the rest of our old team in the locker room to congratulate our successors and wish them well in the regional semifinals. We didn’t stay long: they clearly thought we were too old to understand basketball, let alone have played it.
Diane came over to say good-bye to me. “You couldn’t pay me enough to relive my adolescence,” she said, brushing my cheek with her own. “I’m going back to the Gold Coast. And I’m definitely staying there. Take it easy, Warshawski.” She was gone in a shimmer of silver fox and Opium.