Touching Rim

My mom knows nothing about basketball.  She never even went to any sports games until I was a kid and made her come to soccer – my first team sport, though I don’t do it anymore.  I decided I should get really really good at one thing, not be half-assed at two, so I quit soccer.  Now, it’s basketball only.  The first time I got a buzzer beater, in Pee-Wee ball, she called it a “buzzer basket.” No kidding.  I tell her not to cheer because she yells the wrong things at the wrong time, embarrassing me.  Last game, she yelled, “Go Portland!” which is where we used to live.  Ten years ago.  She apologized, but I asked her, nicely, to go back to being quiet.

Since I turned thirteen, I do everything I can to build my strength and skills for basketball.  I lift weights, run track, cross-country, still do tennis for the footwork – which she started teaching me when I was six, the only athletic activity she ever participated in as a kid.  (She said she took dance her whole life, but to me, that doesn’t count.) Of course I got way better than her super fast, so now, if she can get a game off of me, she’s lucky.  Usually, I just cream her, 6-1-, 6-0.  Still, I know she likes to hit that ball hard at me; I can see the killer instinct in her eyes from the other side of the net.  She never gets me, of course, but I can tell it’s her way of getting out her anger.  I’m not the easiest kid in the world, but not the most difficult either.  And since there’s only me – the “spoiled only child of an older single mother,” as she describes us – then at least she only has one other person to deal with.

Most of my friends have dads.  I don’t.  I know his name – some French bunch of sounds I can’t pronounce – but he’s never been in our lives.  By his own choice, in my mother’s words – a “nice” way of putting it, instead of saying that he doesn’t give a shit, which he definitely doesn’t, or I’d know him, right? But I’m used to not having a dad.  What bugs me is not having someone to practice with.  My mom bought me a hoop for the backyard.  She drives me everywhere.  She buys me decent basketball shoes, though not the ones I really want, which cost too much, and balls, and tape, and basically whatever I need.  She says, “That’s what I can do for you, honey.  I’m not an athlete.”

Which is a colossal understatement.  She’s a total book person.  English professor.  Writer.  Artist.  Nothing to do with sports.  She writes and reads and paints and walks – her sole concession to the idea she needs to use her body for something other than thinking.  Last year, she bought a membership at the club for both of us and then never went.  My mom’s short and chubby, but not obese.  I ask her to practice with me, or shag balls, and sometimes she’ll say okay, but you can tell she hates it by how slowly she moves.  Like that organic maple syrup she insists on buying that takes five hundred years to come out of the container.  God! I’ve never seen anyone move as slow as her.

At least she knows she’s ignorant about everything that has to do with sports.  When I told her my friend Donna’s mom does chest passes with her every night before bed – fifty of them – she started laughing.  LAUGHING.  I was nearly crying, because I was jealous both Donna’s parents are athletes – both in the Olympics for different sports – and they do EVERYTHING to help her and her sister be better athletes.  They’re transferring to a school with a better state basketball record.  My mom apologized for laughing when she saw how upset I was; “I was trying to picture myself doing fifty chest passes in your bedroom, and I just couldn’t do it.  I’m too klutzy.”  She’d probably break the lamp.

Truly, she’s an amazing klutz, and breaks things often.  (I always wonder if her ballerina history is a big lie, though she’s basically a truth-teller, so it must be one of those Before-Me parts of her life that isn’t very interesting.) At least I don’t take after her side of the family physically.  She says I’m just like my dad in terms of his comfort in his body and how he moved: “long and lean and graceful” is what she tells everybody.  She says she never in a zillion years expected her child to be an athlete, and is only now beginning to understand what it means since it’s obvious I’m serious about sports.  My father wasn’t an athlete; supposedly he suffered from really bad asthma as a kid and so never did sports.  What a wuss! So, she says, this athlete stuff is all mine – not from her family and not from my so-called father’s family either.

Mom says her own family was anti-sports, especially Grandpa, who I met when I was one but don’t remember at all.

I guess my grandpa, who was really short, like her (5 feet!) was a brilliant guy – that’s the word she uses for him – and all his ability was in his brain.  She says he didn’t think people who had to use their hands or bodies for a living were very smart, or not as smart as people who only use their heads.  She says this is because he had to escape from Nazi Germany, and then from Communist China, and he was only able to do those things because he managed to strategize how to get out of those places.  This was all before he came to America at forty.  I tell her you need to know strategy for sports too, but she always gives me this look, staring over her owl-glasses, that says, “C’mon.  Do you really think figuring out how to get a ball in a hoop is the same as escaping for your life from a government that wants to kill you?”

Of course it’s not the same thing.  But all because I’m lucky enough not to live in a time where being Black and/or Jewish will get me killed, doesn’t mean that everything less than escaping the Nazis is trivial, right? Recently, after her being alone for a million years, which is to say, my whole life, she gets a boyfriend.  He’s Black, he’s smart, he plays basketball.  Suddenly there’s this guy I can talk to about strategies, drills, shooting techniques, ball handling, etc., who understands the game from the inside out.  He played in college and would have gone on to the pros, I bet, if he hadn’t suffered a knee injury.   It was almost like she’d purposely picked him out of all possible boyfriends to compensate for my not having a dad in the first place, and in the second, her not understanding basketball.  This guy is book-smart too.  He has a Master’s.  (Not a Ph.D. like her, but I think she doesn’t hold it against him.  I hope not, anyway.)

It’s summer, and I’m thinking great! Now I have someone to play with and talk ball with, but it turns out his knee is still really bad – he actually limps – and lives three hours away, and they’re always breaking up.  Unfortunately, my middle school coach isn’t very good.  He’s a decent history teacher, but what he knows about ball technique could fit in my i-Phone case.  Seriously.  He’s an example of someone with brains but no athletic abilities, as far as I can tell.

Donna’s moving.  Mr. Boyfriend’s visits have gotten rarer and rarer, so I don’t have much competition or help to become a better ball player – beyond the financial kinds of things my mother offers, like going away to basketball camp, which, believe me, I’m not rejecting or anything.  The high school coach says if I keep practicing really hard, I’ll for sure make varsity my first year.  So he’s letting me play with his team over the summer.  My mom says she’s happy for me, and since she turns red when she tries to lie, I know she was telling the truth.  As long as I keep getting all As, which is not hard, since our school is so tiny and easy, I’ll keep her happy.  She says Grandpa always insisted to her and her siblings, “You have to be at the Top of Your Class!” She never was, she says.  She was near it, but not the best.  Supposedly, when she and my aunt and uncle were grown-ups, Grandpa denied ever having said that, but the point is, I AM at the top of my class.  And just three inches from touching rim.