Of course, the whole town shows up for the game. They pack the stands, husbands in their collared shirts, athletic shorts, and visors and caps sporting colleges they did not attend (A frequent occurrence: you ask a reed-thin, bespectacled man about his time at Duke—he wears a baseball cap on which is emblazoned a declarative “Go Blue Devils,” sans exclamation point—and he promptly corrects, “I went to Rutgers”), wives in their shin-length khakis, thin v-necks, and ivory converses (white is too white to dirty, one mother once educated me), grandmothers filling the lower row of plastic benches and rubbing their crosses between their fingers while the grandfathers stalk the periphery, scoping the exits and the court with weathered hands clasped behind their backs, and you think to yourself, this is the portrait of exurbanite Catholicism.
In the center of New Jersey—“Central Jersey,” most denizens will politely amend, myself included—Hillsborough is perfectly situated to accommodate an unsettled identity. To the near northwest lies wooded oblivion, the Appalachian Trail running through the uppermost corner, to, at least, invoke the fervent religiosity and strict communal codes engendered by rural isolation, to flavor this breed of Catholicism with a scintilla of heady dogmatism, and, yet, close enough to the New York metropolitan area—and Princeton University, for that matter—to justify puffed-up pretensions to secular intellectualism. This is cool Catholicism, this is nonchalant Catholicism, this is Catholicism that talks open-mindedness and free speech and inalienable, God-given human rights, but balks at the whisper of “politics.” Here is the land of cradle Catholics who had their first exhilarating taste of skepticism in the dimly lit basement of weekly Catechism before trying on that sleek agnosticism, freshly Confirmed, and, soon, embracing steadfast atheism after attending a New England liberal arts college. Here is the land of “Love thy neighbor” car-stickers and devout Dunkin’-drinkers and fitness fanatics and “don’t you dare forget Sunday morning mass” proto-ecclesiastics. Here is the land of basketball games in churches.
Context: This is a basketball game in a church. Better context: I am the coach of the fifth- and sixth-grade girls’ Catholic Youth Organization (CYO) basketball team at Mary, Mother of God (MMOG). Run by Catholic Charities (CC)—as you may guess now, Catholics love their acronyms—a national voluntary organization committed to providing social services to those most in need, CYO basketball provides opportunities for rambunctious Catholic youth to find community, get exercise, and, naturally, display their faith in the most vigorous of activities—sports. Every winter to early spring a new basketball season begins, daughters and granddaughters crowding into old courts, lacquered hardwood peeling and the smell of the Holy Ghost (perhaps, the anointing oil for Ash Wednesday aging in the supply closet next to the basketball racks) always there, lingering in the olfactory periphery. Exposed blue and white beams snake across the ceiling, criss-crossing at perfect right angles and all instinctively funneling towards a plastic Crucifix mounted next to an electronic scoreboard desperately in need of repair, its segments of LED lights flashing in quick, sporadic intervals such that, if you look long and hard enough, you might glimpse a flash of GOD. The basketball court itself is connected to the main church building; a wooden door couched behind faded plastic statues of the Nativity scene—the Three Wise Men, Mary and Joseph, a couple of shepherds, and baby Jesus all arranged in height order—leads to the chapel. (Sometimes, when practice is lagging and the girls are especially tired and distracted and I am thinking about the soft, deliberate sinking of a La-Z-Boy, I let them sneak into the chapel, their giggles filling the dark, empty space as they crouch behind pews and columns while playing hide-and-seek).
You do not need to know how to play basketball, hell, you do not even need to like playing basketball, to be on a CYO team. This is participation sports at its finest. In fact, most girls are either too uncoordinated or too religious to consider, much less try out for, any recreational or travel league—besides, their parents want them to be more involved and active and conscientious Catholic youth and what better way than embodying that saintly fortitude and benediction on the court. Indeed, sportsmanship and discipline are the ostensible tenets that guide CYO basketball: have fun, work hard, and recognize that we are all children of Christ waiting to shed our mortal coil and join in His eternal love. Sounds pretty neat to me: Bona fide spiritual enlightenment with the swish of a free throw. Practice is low-commitment, every Tuesday and Thursday evening for one hour filled with an assortment of drills, the girls in their baggy, athletic shorts and gray, polyester T-shirts that they borrowed from their older brothers, using all their might, shoulders cocked back in concentrated strain, to heave the ball into the air, its trajectory a shaky arc that just kisses the bottom of the net, then they shuffle to their neon pink draw-string bags strewn across the sideline and take a long, loud swig from their reused plastic water bottles as a certain ennui infuses the sweat-thick air, legs and arms moving in rote, mechanistic ways until we are all automatons, spinning and spinning in absolute disinterest or some spiritual trance. Then, practice ends and we all grab our things and shuffle into the gray night, me to my car, a 2014 Camry spattered with dirt specks, rain streaks, and bird shit, and the girls to their fathers or mothers or grandmothers or grandfathers or brothers or sisters or family friends or neighbors or babysitters and, you realize that the whole town has been to this place, at least once, us wearied shepherds for the children.
Of course, this is the romantic (the religious, perhaps?) in me speaking. If CYO basketball occupies any portion of the exurbanite Catholic consciousness, it is not really the late-night pick-ups, the gleaming, oblong sideview mirrors and the warm sheen of parental responsibility—it is the game itself. We travel across New Jerseyland: St. Francis in Clinton, St. Patrick in Flemington, St. Margaret in Bridgewater, a compendium of saints, hagiographies on hagiographies. A certain tenseness settles over us when we enter a new gym, a new saint’s domain—it is fear, yes, but also an ineffable recognition that there is something more, something bigger than us that, whether real or artificial, pulls us into predestined combat, a flighty, sudoric skittishness that has our hearts pumping and our hands clenched and our eyes anxiously trained on the other team, surveying their warm-up drills, cataloging the best players, the threats, and the weak links, and mulling over who will guard who and will the referees be in our favor and do we have a fighting chance. When the whistle blows, we line up along the sideline, military-like, hands clasped behind our backs; when the whistle blows again, we usher ourselves to center court and circle ourselves around the line and the referee whips out a cross sheathed inside his black-pants-pocket and a solemn silence descends upon the masses; when the referee kneels down, we all follow in dazed suit, bringing our hands together and proceed, in staccato-like fashion and in a monotone monophony, to offer a choppy “Our Father,” some voices wavering on the “art,” adding the “t” a beat later, some voices concentrated, steadfast in their devotion, and some voices not really a voice, a breathy mouthing, an anticipatory glance at the scoreboard, an impatient sigh of can we just get this over with and start the game, and then we play.
We usually lose—but, that’s not the point, a sagacious, coachly aphorism will soothe after, as if from a disembodied voice, when we all huddle together, panting and a little angry, and then players will find their respective spectator and get the soothing they really need (an ice cream). Games are usually like this, an ephemeral burst of energy, a blip in the system, where we might actually care and then the game ends and the fatigue, the disappointment sets in and then we go home and then we do not care any more and we forget that it ever happened—games are usually like this, yes, except one game. The Game. This Game.
Now, a pot-bellied man saunters over to where I stand along the baseline. His name is Pat Anders, and he is balding quite a bit, his hairline a perfect parabola and his remaining hair smoothed flat like tangential lines (he is a math teacher at the middle school and his son plays on the varsity high school basketball team, so he knows a thing or two about ball and he puppeteers his players with geometric precision) and, as he opens his mouth to speak, I get a whiff of vanilla, and I think back to a few hours ago, smoking flavored-cigarettes on a dewy Saturday morning and musing about the potential turn-out and the surprisingly good weather, blabbering nothingness in middle-aged, manly camaraderie, and now, here he is again, wearing a too-tight zip-up jacket sporting the ensign of the enemy, and maybe I want to punch him, draw some blood first before the real fighting begins.
A brief account of this rivalry: St. Joseph’s, the only other Catholic church in Hillsborough, is located in Millstone, one of those small-fry villages that gets eaten up by the larger surrounding town—absorbed into the school system, the demographic surveys, the state maps that shade in the different townships. Millstone is a more mountainous region; the flat farmlands of Hillsborough give way to undulating, rocky hills covered with a thick forest and deep ravines with shallow rivers. During the spring and summer, mosquitos burst forth from their larvae pods that float on the rivers and terrorize the hikers that had dared to venture deeper into the woods. St. Joseph’s sits, in Millstone-fashion, atop a hill that overlooks the aptly named Hillside Road, a winding, one-lane road that slinks with the natural, mountain terrain; as you drive along the bends, the church emerges, sun-like, from behind the thick, oak canopy, its cross-spire piercing the sky. Since the beginnings of CYO basketball in Hillsborough, MMOG has played St. Joseph’s, a comfortable championship win for MMOG in ‘08, a quarterfinal pummeling by St. Joseph’s in ‘12, a mid-season match-up that went to a nail-biting overtime in ‘19. Over the years, a rivalry was born that brought MMOG and St. Joseph’s into increasingly tense and passionate competition; meet-ups became local phenomena, the Catholic families of Hillsborough and Millstone piling into cramped gyms on Saturday mornings like a second mass. It is a catharsis of sorts—the composure demanded of Sunday sublimated into sporty fanaticism. Today is no different. A potential energy pulses in the crowd, children fidgeting in their seats, mothers toying with hair ties wrapped twice tightly around their wrists, fathers pacing up and down the bleachers; the crowd itself is divided neatly down the middle between the navy blue sea of MMOG fans and the charcoal black of St. Joseph’s, an invisible, strained, yet, dangerously porous line ready to snap, spill-over.
Pat Anders is not a particularly nice guy. He converted to Catholicism in his twenties after he married his late wife; a silver cross hangs loosely around his neck and settles definitively on his chest; he does not take it off. He has a gruff exterior—despite his sizable stomach, faint lines of the corded muscle of his biceps press up against his zip-up and, you know, this man can throw a mean hook—a grayed expanse on his lower neck is the only remainder of a now-removed tattoo (a bear, he might have told me), and he walks with such decisive direction that you cannot help but maintain a consistent radius around his center. His voice is baritone, thick, always on the edge of scolding. He has coached St. Joseph’s girls basketball for the past three years and he is a self-professed lover of God, first, and lover of sport, next—he has lost only twice against MMOG, both in the past year against me during my first year of coaching. Naturally, then, he has a score to settle. I am not a particularly “driven” guy. I coach CYO basketball because, for some reason, I go to church and, for some other reason, I volunteered when Patricia Clary, the mother of my daughter’s classmate and Catechism teacher, sparked up conversation about my previous escapades in D3 basketball and slowly (but surely; there was an intended endpoint to her affability) intimated that there was, oh, yes, a vacancy in desperate need to be filled of the coaching sort, and isn’t it nice to encourage the youth and be a guiding presence, and, of course, it is low-commitment; I do not think as much about motivations as I do about investment—how much time, how much energy, how many headaches—and some part of me did miss the anxious thrill of competition and I had time, energy, and a surprising dearth of headaches, so why the hell not, the economics of it all.
Pat Anders, that pompous show-off, is now palming a basketball, flexing his fingers and appraising its firmness and fullness and asking me if we need to try out some new basketballs as the bleachers slowly fill up and my MMOG players are shuffling timidly over to where I stand, and, Jesus, Pat, if you want to change the ball, then change the ball. My MMOG players are a hodge-podge of skills and talents. There is Theresa, a short, bespectacled (goggles on the court) girl who does all the sports—basketball in the winter, softball in the spring, volleyball in the fall, a dose of personal running in the summer—and who is, unsurprisingly, nimble and, unsurprisingly again, our main ball-handler. There is Margaret (Maggie); she is tall, muscled, prone to aggressive frustration, who, perhaps, has enjoyed throwing a discreet elbow or two in the direction of an exposed temple when the other team crowds a bit too close. There is Lucy, a waifish thing, who obviously does not want to be here. There are Nya and Nia, quiet, steely-eyed twins who only pass to one another. There is Jordan, who loves Jesus and, in his name, only takes and, luckily, will make three-pointers. There is Penny, who likes running; there is Kennedy, who likes walking; there is Chloe, who likes drinking water and sitting on the bench tying and re-tying her shoelaces and avoiding eye contact with me.
After they put down their bags and water bottles and put on their basketball shoes, they all circle around me, awaiting instruction. I direct them to the baseline and have Theresa lead some warm-up stretches—lunges, toe-grabs, skips and gallops, sprints to the half court and back—while I spot the two referees walk into the gym. They are ready to go, their pin-striped shirts ironed flat and nice beneath their twin black windbreakers. They are the usual pair. Gary and Louis, two sixty-ish-year-old volunteer referees who went to college together and, after, joined the army together and now spend most of their days running a cash-only landscape business together. They might live together. I see them around sometimes, dawdling in the grocery store or sauntering in the park when I go on mid-morning jogs. They approach me and I offer the obligatory, cordial handshake, ask about their day, butter them up with some amicable small-talk and soon stupid Pat Anders joins me too to get in on this buttering action and soon us four are all laughing at absolutely nothing funny. The referees have two chairs next to the storage closet where they can sit, rest, prepare, strategize and gossip. As Gary and Louis go to take their seats, Mary—yes, Mary—the program director for all CYO sports at MMOG is finicking with the scoreboard controls, which keeps turning on and turning off, GOD fading in and out of existence, while Jerry, the custodian, a hefty and garrulous man, is scrubbing violently at one supposed wet spot on the court, which he keeps replenishing unconsciously with his sweat. Mary finally gets the scoreboard working and puts ten minutes on the timer—“ten minutes ‘til game time,” she rigidly informs me and Pat—and the nervousness sets in, the crowd getting more and more antsy, more hungry, and my girls cannot catch a goddamn basketball for their life as they do some passing drills and, shit, we might be screwed. I look over at the St. Joseph’s girls and, double shit, there is one big girl lumbering about, her hand seems to nearly touch the bottom of the backboard when she reaches up. She has two, tight Dutch braids braided pin-straight down the back of her head and her shorts are rolled up in that professional, means-business kind of way. Pat walks past me and gives a cocky, “got a new one,” and the clock goes to zero.
When a CYO basketball game officially starts, a few things happen. First, as I mentioned earlier, we circle up to prayer: this is Jordan’s responsibility, who zealously and, with the loudest voice, leads an “Our Father” and, to boast some home-court spirit, a “Hail Mary.” Second, players and the coaches from both teams shake each other’s hands in a display of good faith and sportsmanship, though if we squeeze a little harder than necessary, who can really tell. Third, each team goes back to their respective benches and huddles together, where the coach, that is, me, will offer some words of encouragement—“have fun,” “play hard,” and (to Maggie) “be kind”—and pair off the players. I assign Maggie to guard the new, big girl on St. Joseph’s and have Theresa on their main ball-handler, a lanky girl who moves fast but in a deceptively slow and deliberate way; the other starters, Nya, Jordan, and Penny, pick up the rest of the girls. Then, those five step back onto the court with the five from St. Joseph’s and the girls find one another, pointing at who they are guarding, staking ownership. Let me pause here and say: there is something intoxicating about man-to-man defense. You are responsible for one opposing player and that player is your player, and you are in each other’s space, sharing breath, tracking each other’s movement, a vicious cycle of predator-and-prey. Indeed, in man-to-man, you have to be excellent readers. An angled foot, a darting eye, a twitch of the finger is an interpretive posture, it means something is being planned, that a decision has been made and you have to discern what it is and react right. Uncoordinated, unmotivated, and otherwise untalented, I will make sure that my girls are excellent readers. Fourth, and finally, the tip-off: two girls, crouched and poised, the basketball hovered enticingly, like meat, in the air, and then it was tossed up and all hell breaks loose.
There is nothing as chaotic as the first few seconds of a basketball game. The ball touches one hand, then deflects off another, and finds its way into the hands of Theresa and everyone is disoriented for a moment, trying to determine what way to turn and who to guard and what is the point of all this anyways and then the rush of clarity, an epiphany of sorts, scrambling to get in the right spot, match-up, get on the balls of your feet, and, above all else, do not let the enemy score. The other four MMOG players run down ahead of Theresa and get in position: Maggie and Nya down below next to the hoop, and Jordan and Penny scoping the perimeter of the three-point line. The clock starts counting down from eight minutes. Things are a little shaky at first. Penny keeps running in a circle, into the paint and out of the paint, while Jordan keeps glancing self-consciously at the stands where her father sits in stern judgement, arms-crossed, and Nya is looking at the bench at Nia and Maggie already looks like she wants to sucker punch “big girl.” Theresa is dribbling but not moving anywhere and that’s not good, because we look like little statues out there, posing in our separate worlds, so I shout at Penny to actually run in a direction towards the ball and that gets something going. Penny zips up next to Theresa, who passes it to her and then runs to where Penny was originally, and that spurs Jordan into movement, who gets the ball from Penny, and all three braid across the top of the key, bringing the St. Joseph’s girls into a dizzying jumble until Theresa spies the gap and slips towards the net, ram-rod straight in her determination and heaves it up and, yes, there it goes. A 2 appears on the scoreboard and the crowd erupts, feet stomping on the bleachers and hands thrown up in arrogant celebration.
St. Joseph’s now has the ball with “lanky girl” dribbling it up the court. Theresa is ready to meet her at half court. Just as “lanky girl” crosses the half court line, Theresa is on her, hands waving aggressively in her face and “lanky girl” gets that annoyed look on her face, the disgusted pinching of her brows accompanied by a side-eye and slight grimace, and she leans her body down and pushes into Theresa, surging past and into the paint where “big girl” and Maggie are having their own little battle of sorts, each trying to elbow each other out of the way, and then “big girl” gets the upper hand, thrusting her waist in front of Maggie and boxing her out and waving her hand, getting “lanky girl’s” attention who pistons the ball into “big girl’s” hand and, there it is, the score is now tied, 2-2, and the crowd groans. Stupid Pat Anders claps his hands in that unnecessarily loud and drawn out way, palm meeting palm and fingers meeting fingers in a slow, deliberate union which emits a barking punch, and stupid Pat Anders looks my way and offers a taunting salute.
Thus the first half of the game proceeds—neck-and-neck. MMOG is up then St. Joseph’s evens the score, then St. Joseph’s will go up and MMOG will rally back. The crowd is getting rowdier and rowdier and the bleachers are starting to shake at a constant rattle and Pat and I have devolved to giving each other the not-so-subtle stink eye and my players are getting a little bit rougher out there, trading sneers and insults under the breath and light pushes, and the referees are starting to huff, the whistles blowing more frequently and louder with each passing foul called, and the tight game is funneling towards some ineffable pitch and is the scoreboard getting brighter and both referee whistles blow, silencing and slicing the air, and it is now half time. As the MMOG team trots over to the bench, we let out an unconscious, collective exhale. Chloe has closed her eyes and is snoring softly on the bench.
Mary plays with the scoreboard controls again and twenty minutes appear on the scoreboard. I tell my girls to get a nice swig of water and to squat down and circle up behind our chairs. Mary is saying something to Pat, gesticulating with public relations enthusiasm, before she turns toward me and saunters over. She is an older woman, “just turned 40” she’ll jocularly tell everyone, graying hair pulled back in a tight, disciplined ponytail which swings aggressively when she walks. She is wearing one of those collared button-up dresses, too fitting around the waist to be overly modest, but cinched up snug to the neck to ward off the judging eyes of the ladies of MMOG—this, of course, means that said ladies, desperate to spice up their wardrobe in a reasonable, god-fearing way, always ask Mary where she got such a nice outfit and she will happily, if not a little arrogantly, share. Consequently, Sunday mass has become a Kohl’s catalog, pews upon pews of forest green cashmere sweaters and deep maroon fitted dresses. Now, Mary has her hands on her hips and shaking her head in advance before she lets out a little sigh. “Not hearing good things,” she vaguely chastises. “Not good at all.” Mary loves hedging—it’s a little dance we usually do at games like these. “Pat’s telling me that some girls on his team are not hearing nice things from your girls.” She looks at me expectantly. “You know our commitment to sportsmanship here.” She looks at me expectantly again, but this time emphasized with a cross of her arms. “Better see some improvements for the next half. Keep the game clean. We’ve talked about this before.”
Ah, yes, capital-S Sportsmanship. Maybe I should have said this earlier: MMOG and St. Joseph’s does not have a pretty track record. Where regular CYO season games are a monotonous trudge, trying to energize my players to muster up some fighting spirit, games against St. Joseph’s have the tendency to descend into spiritual warfare. Insults are traded, elbows are thrown, blasphemy is lobbed with worrying ease—all while God surveys above from his perch on the cross. We become rancorous shells of ourselves, rabid little dogs panting at the chance to prove our love of God, and the game becomes a life line: you lose, you die. What room for sportsmanship is there when your salvation is at stake?
Still, if Mary wants me to speak sportsmanship, I will speak sportsmanship. The execution of the perfect halftime pep-talk is an art. A coach must strike the perfect balance between encouraging and disciplining, between empowering and critical. You have to temper their spirits, not break them, so that they might be remolded into a second-wind of energy and belief. For, yes, I do need to tell Penny that she cannot run and hold the ball at the same time—“that’s a travel, remember”—and, yes, I do need to tell Nya and Nia that they have to pass the ball to other people—“that’s called being a ball-hog, girls”—and, yes, I do need to tell Maggie that throwing a punch will get her kicked out of the game—“that’s called assault, Maggie, and we do not do that here”—and, yet…I look into their tired but hungry eyes and I look at the tied scoreboard and I look at the crowd of MMOG fans bustling around the gym, younger siblings running laps up and down the court and older siblings reading books or typing on their phones and grandparents laughing with each other and parents fixing their caps or visors or sunglasses, and I look at the cross hanging as if floating above the whole gym and, shit, we have to win, we just have to.
A brief detour: across the way, in the lobby of the gymnasium, the concession stand is overrun with patrons. If CYO is a volunteer league—coaches do not get paid to coach and players do not play to play—it is certainly not a broke league. How to find the funds: look no further than the concession stand, the hallowed sanctum of Catholic sports fanatics. A Promised Land of abundance contained on a bent plastic table: wheat (Lay’s Potato Chips, Sour Cream & Onion in particular), figs (Smart Popcorn), grapes (Skittles), olives (Hershey Chocolate Bar, milk chocolate), and (Gatorade of all flavors). During halftime, fans will gather around that plastic table, hands raising in preparation for divine deliverance of fish and bread, mothers pawing at their jegging pockets for a 5-dollar (the Promised Land is cash only) and awe-struck little girls and boys cooing at the snacks, making grabby hands and attempting to surge forward only to be thwarted by a stern grasp of the shoulder by fathers. Jordan’s parents usually run the concession stand. They are involved parents, to say the least: they co-teach a third-grade Catechism course (they have, however, been unofficially accused—as in, gossip among the kids—of spewing anti-climate change rhetoric), her mother Janet will read the first liturgy at mass and her father John will collect the offerings with a long-stemmed wooden basket, gently tapping people on the shoulders until they shovel out whatever spare change they have on their person. Janet and John command the concession stand with directorial ease. Janet collects the orders and John collects the money, Janet delivers the snacks and John delivers the change, input output. Such perfect synchronization can withstand even the most unruly of crowds, taming ravenous saints into docile patrons.
Two minutes now left on the clock; halftime is almost over. I rally my players with one last hoo-ray (“Let’s kick their asses. Do not repeat this to your parents.”), and we jog over to our seats. The crowd takes their place back on the bleachers, snacks in hand. Slowly, the competitive spirit returns: I see Pat Anders bring the St. Joseph’s girls over to their seats and they are smiling those stupid smiles and, god, I cannot wait to wipe those smiles off their faces. Gary and Louis walk back in from the cramped store room that is transformed into a referee refuge during games; mops and brooms and floor cleaner is cleaned out and traded for a large, orange Gatorade water jug and a cardboard box of white rags for them to wipe off their sweat. Mary is sitting primarily behind the scoreboard controls. She puts another eight minutes up on the scoreboard for the third quarter. All actors are prepped and then the game resumes. Unlike during the first half, where everyone took a minute to re-orient themselves and get into the right basketball headspace, MMOG and St. Joseph’s came out swinging. Theresa, of course, scores the first basket (a heave from just inside the three-point line), which St. Joseph’s immediately responds to with a lay-up from “lanky girl.” As we trade points, a certain anger descends upon the gymnasium. We get rougher out there, our faces red and rigid, and the crowd is no longer cheering in that good-natured way, encouraging their children to “just play hard,” and is, instead, turning on one another, shooting daggers at one another, and I feel the whole gym about to implode and, fuck, this is no longer sportsmanship; this is war.
I see the whole chain of causality as it plays out. It is Maggie who, predictably, throws the first punch. “Big girl” is being particularly unforgiving, keeping Maggie from getting the ball, and Maggie, naturally, is not having that. While she might have graced “big girl” with a hidden shove or two in the first half, she wants to up the ante now. When “big girl” deals another push, Maggie snaps. Let me draw the tableau: her hand clenched, arcing backwards with an untamed fury, legs twisted to generate the most possible power, for Maggie is efficient and singular with her anger, and face trained on her target, predatory eyes, and her braided hair swinging up in Medusa-like spirals, and, if I did not portend the awfulness that was about to follow, I might have had the time to aesthetically enjoy this mythological scene. Her fist connects—“big girl’s” cheek ripples in that cartoonish way—and all hell breaks loose. Maggie and “big girl” are on the floor, trading blows, and Theresa feels vindicated enough to pick her own battle with “lanky girl,” so now there are four prepubescent girls throwing fists, and stupid Pat Anders is marching over to me and, oh boy, am I going to get in on the action too and, shit, I am, because as he nears, I have a prophetic vision of grabbing the St. Joseph’s logo on his zip-up and shaking him, and the crowd is going crazy too, chocolate bar and chip-bag wrappers wadded up into bullets and shot at opposing fans, who wield their emptied plastic water bottles like swords and someone’s grandfather is yelling something blasphemous and the stands and whole gymnasium is shaking.
Everything is shaking. The referees Gary and Louis are shaking their heads and blowing their whistles, but their whistles make no sound. The concession stand is probably shaking, so is the referee refuge. The ordered heads of the Nativity Scene are shaking with disappointment. The chapel that is connected to the gym might be shaking. The lacquered wooden floor is shaking and the exposed rafters are shaking and the scoreboard is shaking and I am shaking Pat Anders and my whole field of vision is shaking, everything is shaking that it is a blur of pixelated images or a watercolour canvas, the basketball hoop blending in with the gray concrete walls and my MMOG players blending into his St. Joseph’s players until we all, we coaches and we players and we fans and we air and we light, are joined into one big mass of color, one big shaking mass of color, and there is ringing in my ears, such a nice ringing, or maybe not a ringing but a singing, the harmony of voices, and I say plural because it is like layers of sounds on layers of sounds, is strangely instrumental and the ceiling is still shaking until a small crack appears, a crack that keeps growing bigger and wider until light spills out, a beam of light that washes the whole place in gold, shimmering gold, and we are still yelling and screaming or, now, crying, yes, we are crying the whole place is crying with light light spilling out of our mouths light spilling out of our hands hands raised hands raised to hands raised to hands raised to do what
Jesus comes down. It is a loud bang. He lays on the court, arms and legs splayed in a tense repose on His wooden cross, His face contorted in pain and the wood is a little dark, as if wet, streaks down His cheeks. I realize that I have Pat Anders in a headlock and he has two fingers poised above my eyes as if prepared to squash down and that is not good, so we release each other and soon the whole place relaxes, bodies settling as if being released from some stupor, and we are all looking at Jesus, who has come down and is now laying on the court. Where He was originally, hung up next to the scoreboard, is now a vacant white spot, streaks of dark brown dirt impressed onto the painted concrete. Jesus must have been up there a long time. Next to the vacant spot, the scoreboard is going crazy, the LED lights flashing in sporadic intervals, a kaleidoscope of brightness. Mary is the first to approach Jesus. She gently picks Him up and cradles Him, carrying Him over to his table with the scoreboard controls as if he weighs nothing and sets him down on top of it. The whole place is quiet. We can hear the student choir practicing from inside the church. Sounds like “Hosanna.” Mary grabs a microphone from beneath her chair. She speaks into it, her voice hard and firm, “The game is over.”
There is a kind of joy, an exuberance. Everything is light. There is a sterile, clean smell, a familiar smell. No one is speaking. The St. Joseph’s girls shuffle over to Pat Anders, his zip-up creased where I had my hands, and collect their things. The MMOG girls shuffle over to me and we all grab our stuff, draw-string bags and water bottles and Chloe’s untied shoes that have somehow migrated over to the referee refuge, and we make our way towards the exit of the gym. Families meet up with their children and head to their cars. A grandmother is clutching the cross hanging around her neck. Gary and Louis pat me on the back as they leave. They have already changed out of their referee uniforms and are now sporting old CYO t-shirts, their windbreakers tied around their waists. Jerry, the custodian, stands at the door, wishing people as they leave that they have a good day. Mary stays inside. She turns off the scoreboard. I walk outside the gymnasium doors. It is all noon and, yet, there is darkness in the sky, but not that bad, ominous type of darkness. This is a cool darkness, a comforting darkness, that streaks in between the clouds and that wars against the sun that refract right off the cross at the pinnacle of MMOG’s dome.
As I stand outside, Pat Anders sidles up next to me. He asks me what else I have planned for today. I tell him the usual: that I need to do some weeding in the garden (it ain’t going to take care of itself, that’s for sure) and that I need to bring over some pasta to my mother’s and that Susie is going to drop off Willa later and we are going to have family dinner and a family movie and a family sleepover. Pat says that that sounds nice. Pat says that he and his wife are thinking about going out tonight, somewhere fancy, and that he also has some grading he needs to complete, might watch a game—it’s conference playoff season and Pat is one of those Duke fans who did not go to Duke—and might have a nice drink or two and, God, I cannot envision ever hating this man. We shake hands, and Pat says “see you tomorrow” before he heads for his car. I do as well. As I sit in my car, I touch the Saint Christopher medal that my mother gave me—“for travelers like you who may not know where home is but who will need the protection to find it,” she had told me when she had bestowed it. I turn on the car and leave the church.
There is something satisfyingly geometric about driving through Hillsborough. I live outside the town center, way deep in our agricultural wilderness past the acres of cornfields and the apple orchards and dairy farms. This ruralness creates a sort of geometric grid that only becomes visible when you drive fast enough where, as your speed increases and crests, the plow lines and tractor trails, moving so fast in the window, merge and morph into a coordinate plane, and you are simply driving through lines upon lines upon lines and, there, you get a glimpse of the connectedness of it all—the whole world mapped onto space and time while you are only a trivial speck passing through, a sightseer, a rubber-necker, but, still, part of the whole cosmos. I drive by a dairy farm. Amendment: A cosmos that smells like manure. I slow down as I approach my house, a small and old ranch-style that is in desperate need of redone siding. My newly planted hydrangeas are just starting to bud, a little violet peeking from behind its green casing, and the white wooden fence, which is peeling real bad, looks perfectly crisp in the afternoon light. Susie and I bought the house over a decade ago. She left her mark on the Japanese Maple that sits incongruously in the front yard next to the ancient, mighty oaks.
The last thing of the day, of course: a waiting game. I tidy up the place, putting away dry dishes and doing another load of laundry and making up the bed in Willa’s room. I look through my shelf of DVD movies in the basement, making a mental note of what she might want to watch and putting those selections aside. I do some yardwork—mulching, mowing the lawn, watering my very rudimentary garden—and then do some housework—dusting, vacuuming (twice, for good measure), and prepping for dinner. When four o’clock rolls around, I hear the soft crunch of my gravel driveway. Susie comes in through the front door with Willa in tow. My girl is here, and she is smiling. Willa loves school and she loves dogs and she loves dancing, especially in her bedroom here with my father’s record-player scratching out some “oldies but goodies,” as she calls them, and she really, really loves sitting outside at dusk and trying to predict the exact time that the sun sets and, I always think to myself, she knows what it means to breathe. After Susie and I chat for a bit and then she leaves, Willa and I get ready for dinner. As I am making up her plate—chicken nuggets and some baby carrots, per usual—Willa asks me about the game. “Did you win?,” she says exactly and she is looking at me like I could say anything and it could mean everything and, God, it feels like the words are running out of reach. It feels like believing in something.