The Necessary Hunger Page 2

  And who's to say it isn't? Over the years coaches and parents have encouraged kids to participate in sports on the grounds that sports build character. I've always thought it was more accurate to say that they show it. You live the way you play. A kid who blows an easy layup in the last few seconds of a close game is going to choke ten years later on the witness stand. A kid who can kick a field goal to win the state football championship could be trusted to land a plane in a tornado. If there is something to be known about a person, it will become evident on the court, or on the field. People with no experience in competitive sports don't understand how revealing they can be. Or how serious. Anyone who thinks traders on Wall Street are under pressure should try shooting a free throw in a packed gym with the game on the line.

  When I saw Raina play that day, saw the way she stamped her foot against the floor in a stubborn refusal to give up, I knew my own devotion to basketball was just a shadow of what I was witnessing then. She played the game the way that it was meant to be played—as if her life depended on it. And she seemed driven by some need, or struggle, or fundamental resolve, that preceded the basketball and made it possible, and that I could never have accurately explained or described except to say that I myself didn't have it. The immediate effect of this resolve was that her team came back from ten points down that day to beat the top seed, which had finished second in the state the year before. Two days later, in the semifinals, her team would lose to the team we went on to beat for the championship, but that day, the day of the first-round games, was Raina's. As I sat at the scorers' table watching her team celebrate at midcourt, I wondered about the guts and will that had led to that improbable charge from behind. And later, when I noticed her strong, broad cheekbones, her suddenly hesitant step, the shy grin that flashed out of that smooth coffee-with-cream face, I wondered about the person who owned them.

  Although Raina might have said I never made a fool of myself over her, I was a better judge, and I know that I did. I was fifteen when I met her, and at the beginning of an awkward phase that would last for roughly another decade, but I managed, somehow, to stumble my way into her life. We had some friends in common through summer league and the Amateur Athletic Union; through them I'd find out what game or party she planned to attend and then show up at it myself. My main source of information was Stacy Gatling—a high school teammate of Raina's who played on my spring league team that year. She was, like us, a lover of women, or as we put it, "in the family." Within a week of the beginning of spring league she informed me that Raina had a girlfriend, an older girl named Toni, and gave me her opinion of the calm, cool way I tried to deal with my attraction for her teammate.

  "She knows you like her, Nance," Stacy told me in the middle of a game one day while we were both warming the bench. "It's fuckin obvious. You act like a fool around her."

  "Shit," I answered. "Shit."

  "Stop trippin, girl," she said. "It's all right. You know she don't want you, so just play it cool. She likes you, though, so don't mess the friendship up by actin all crazy and shit."

  I hadn't known that Raina was spoken for, although I'd heard that she was gay. It was one of the great ironies of gossip that all the paranoid straight players who talked incessantly about who was gay actually did us the service of helping us find each other. That was how Stacy had heard about me, and I her. Anyway, Stacy went on to tell me that Raina's relationship with her girlfriend, Toni, was extremely rocky, or as she put it, "drop-dead hella intense." This didn't surprise me, although I didn't say so. You live the way you play.

  I would say that each love has a moment when it makes a mark on your poetic consciousness, when it rearranges the way you see both the love itself, and through it, your entire life. For me that mark was made the next July, when Raina and I, and a hundred other recruits, headed off to a nearby college to attend Blue Star. In theory Blue Star was a basketball camp, an instructional week, but in truth it was a glorified meat market—and it would become more so, in the next few years, as the popularity of women's basketball grew. That summer, two or three hundred vultures from colleges all over the country sat perched on one side of the stands and watched us, the main attraction, numbered and thrown onto the court like performing animals. Blue Star was big business, invitation only; we got free basketball shoes from Converse and a navy-and-red camp T-shirt that would unravel after the first time we washed it. Although we were all under great pressure to perform well and raise our stock with the scouts, the most important event of that week, for me, had nothing to do with basketball. On the second-to-last evening, after our afternoon games, Raina enlisted me to scoot back up to the dorms with her to beat the crowd for dinner. It was seven o'clock by then and still light outside, although the sun was low and muted. We took a shortcut and started through what looked like a little patch of woods, but after the initial clump of trees we stumbled into a clearing that wasn't visible from the road.

  "Holy shit," said Raina softly, and I knew that all plans to be early for dinner were out the window. She walked off toward the little pond that was tucked into a corner of the clearing. Green and yellow stalks were shooting out of the water, and a few ducks sat communicating in the middle. All the greenery was darker than it might have been in broad daylight, as if the moisture from the insides of things had been pushed out to the surface, so that everything assumed a richer color. I followed Raina from maybe twenty feet behind, watching her steps get smaller as she got closer to the edge of the water. The grass extended halfway up her legs, and her thin shoulders rolled back as she turned her head to look at something.

  "Nancy," she said without turning, "come here."

  I worked my way toward her through the long yellow grass. A few feet in front of us were a bunch of ducklings, little brown balls of feather and fur. They were waddling around, bumping into each other, peeping, falling down. I turned to look at Raina and she was staring at them, eyes bright as if lit from within.

  I felt, suddenly, that I was intruding on something, and backed away. She didn't seem to notice. She just kept standing in the grass, motionless, and as I stood there watching Raina watch the ducklings, it just hit me. Boom. I couldn't have explained what it was that moved me so much; all I knew was that the sight of Raina absorbed in something, oblivious to me and to everything else, touched off such a tangled surge of imagination, pain, and desire that I had to take a few steps away from her to keep from falling over. It was as if something had cracked in me, had opened up, suddenly, into some other place I knew nothing about.

  So it was ironic, to say the least, when my father leaned forward at summer league the next week and asked about the gorgeous, straight-backed woman sitting in front of us in the bleachers. A few weeks later he asked Raina's mother out for dinner, and Claudia blinked a few times and said yes. I figured they'd go out once or twice maybe, and that would be it. It wasn't. Even after it became clear, though, that there was really something going on between them, it took awhile to register with me. Part of it was that my dad had dated several women since my mother left when I was six, and I had learned not to have expectations. Also, I rarely saw them together—they tended not to spend much time at our place. And of course it was just too strange to consider the fact that my father was dating the mother of the girl I liked.

  My father, Wendell, like me, was large. Twenty-three years before he'd been the only Asian named to the All-State high school football team, at linebacker. He got his optimism and sense of humor from his father, who was a shopkeeper before his internment during World War II, and a gardener after it. His size came from his unusually tall mother, and also from consuming—as he put it—"lotsa meat." Now he was a math teacher and assistant football coach at a high school a few miles from our house. My father was a popular teacher—kids came to talk to him about their problems, and he gave his players rough bear hugs when they did something good on the field. He was the kind of cheerfully macho big man who could get away with crying, which he did every year at his football
banquet, and at home, during Eight Is Enough. He was thrilled to have an athlete for a daughter. The first time I beat him at one-on-one, the summer I turned twelve, he slapped me on the back and gave me a beer and moaned about getting old. Claudia said he was adorable. I didn't know about that. But when I looked at other people's fathers, or at least the few who were around, I knew that I was luckier than most.

  I finally realized that his relationship with Claudia was serious when it occurred to me that he was almost never home. Normally, even when he was seeing someone, he wouldn't take her out very often. He blamed finances, claiming that it was too expensive to pay for a babysitter and then dinner for two; instead, he'd invite the woman over, cook dinner for her, and then all three of us would watch a rented movie. Occasionally, the woman would spend the night, and my father would look embarrassed in the morning. He'd never stay over at her place. The woman would eventually get tired of this arrangement, accusing my father of being cheap, antisocial, or completely unromantic. I didn't think that this was accurate or fair.

  The truth was, he didn't want to leave me. I'd been his main companion since my parents got divorced, his sidekick, his second-in-command. When I was younger, we'd watch cartoons together—usually Bugs Bunny or the Road Runner—and if I left and went to a friend's house, he would watch them by himself. After I beat him at basketball, though, he started taking me to bars. We'd go to Gardena, a Japanese-American town, where it didn't matter that I was almost a decade from legal because the bartenders were all his friends. My father believed in the redemptive power of heartfelt talks with strangers. He taught me always to tip the bartender well, and never to drink cheap beer.

  After he met Claudia, though, he started going out more, and leaving me at home by myself. From the way he'd behaved with past women, I'd expected him to make a big production out of presenting her to me, but he didn't; he was too far gone to care. He and Claudia went out to movies and dinner and basketball games, and he'd even spend the night at her apartment. I'd never been jealous of my father's girlfriends—his priorities had been so obvious—and I wasn't jealous of Claudia, either, but for an entirely different reason. I was sixteen by the time he met her, old enough to drive, and it was easier to have my own social life when my father wasn't around. With his attention taken up by Claudia, I could stay out later, have friends over, spend more time alone. Sometimes, though, he'd still go through the motions of asserting parental control. "You are grounded," he'd say after I'd broken some household rule. Then he would leave for the weekend.

  Raina didn't seem too rattled by our parents' relationship, either. We ran into each other at college games and high school tournaments throughout the fall and winter of our junior year, but we didn't often refer to our parents' romance and only acknowledged that it existed when one of us asked the other to give the corresponding parent a message. "Ask my dad to pick up some cereal on the way home tomorrow," I'd say, or, "Tell him his friend Kenneth called." The novelty of it, the irony, soon wore off for both of us, and their relationship faded quickly into everyday life. There was something I noticed about the way children of divorce dealt with their parents' postmarital love lives—we never got our hopes up about anyone new, but on the other hand, we were never surprised.

  They moved in on the third Sunday of August 1986. Although my father and Claudia had taken Raina and me out to dinner a month before to tell us this was happening, I didn't really believe it until they showed up that morning with a U-Haul full of their stuff. I was both annoyed and thrilled about the move—drunk with the idea of seeing Raina more often, but unhappy about sharing the house. I had no idea what Raina thought; she didn't talk much, to me or to anyone else. When I'd seen her at parties, there'd always been people around her, but they'd kept a respectful distance. I intended to do the same, as much as possible. Raina seemed poised, mature, in control of herself—completely out of my league.

  The day they moved in, Raina and I helped bring boxes in from the truck, while our yellow Lab, Ann (after Ann Meyers, the first woman to try out for an NBA team), stood ears-up on the driveway, supervising. Occasionally a neighbor would stop by to help, and look at Claudia and Raina curiously, interested in the spectacle of two black women moving into a Japanese household. There were a couple of people too—not people we were close with—who glared at my father disapprovingly, but they were the same ones who had always looked at us with vague suspicion and disapproval, so I tried not to pay them any mind. My more immediate concern, after I'd accepted that they were really staying, was what Claudia and Raina thought of the house. It had always looked, to me, like a huge cardboard box—it was exactly the right color, and the crumbling stucco gave it a rough, unfinished feel. The garage faced the front, but we didn't use it for the car, because the door was cracked so dramatically, the fissures running from ground to roof, that you couldn't lift it without it breaking into pieces. Our driveway was a network of small, interwoven cracks, like a flat expanse of bone-dry earth. The two shrubs by the front door reached up toward the sun halfheartedly, as if uncertain that they wanted to grow. Claudia watched all of the moving activity from the chair my father had set up for her on the scraggly front lawn. He'd told her to "take it easy," although she was muscular and fit and could probably have lifted as much as we jock types. "No problem at all," he gasped from under a large box. He was still trying hard to impress her.

  Our place was big for that section of Inglewood—two stories and three bedrooms, one of which my father had used as a study. It had been cheap when he'd bought it in the midseventies, a time when—as its first owner, a white man, had put it—the neighborhood was starting to "turn." We'd moved there right after my parents' divorce because he'd wanted to escape the white suburb where my mother had insisted we live—a place that I, too, had hated, because the kids there hated me—and go back to a place more familiar to him, more like the racially mixed, working-class neighborhood in Watts where he'd grown up in the fifties and sixties. My mother had stayed behind in Redondo Beach, eventually marrying a white lawyer whose bully son had beaten me up on a regular basis. She was horrified by my father's choice of neighborhood. Inglewood, when we moved there, was already quite poor, but things had gotten worse in the next ten years, after the economic benefits that Reagan had promised, instead of trickling down, trickled out. At first, our neighborhood had also been more mixed, but gradually, the whites, Asians, and Latinos had moved on to other places, leaving a bunch of black families, and us.

  I didn't sleep much the week that Claudia and Raina moved in. At night I lay rigid, eyes open, pondering the facts that there were two more people in the house, and that Raina was just on the other side of the wall. Daytime was awkward—we were all overly conscious of each other, and careful, especially my father, who ran around the house like a mad scientist tending to his wildest experiment. Raina, meanwhile, was friendly to my father and me, but distant, as if she were a temporary guest who had to be tolerant of us because we were putting her up for the night. My father didn't seem to notice because he had his hands full with Claudia. She often worked late at her job in the circulation department of the Los Angeles Times, but when she was home he floated around, grinning, as if he couldn't believe she was gracing our house with her royal presence. He'd bring her roses he'd bought from stoplight vendors, and serve her breakfast in bed in the morning. She indulged this behavior patiently, but she was obviously flattered. "I can't remember the last time a man spoiled me this way," she said. "I'm sure it won't last for long."

  As for me, I moved around in a constant daze. I kept bumping into things, and was amazed to find that solid objects—tables, chairs, the dog—didn't dissolve right there in front of me. I tried to touch the image I saw in the mirror of a tall person with light brown skin and permed shoulder-length hair, and was surprised when my fingers encountered the cold, hard glass instead of that stranger's flesh. I sat down immediately upon entering the house and usually anchored myself in a chair for the rest of the night. That way, I knew, I
couldn't hurt myself. People react to wonderful news and disastrous news in the same general manner—joy or sorrow does not immediately register on their faces; they are in such a state of shock that it takes them awhile to absorb the information. Going through that first week with Raina in my house was like hearing a huge piece of dramatic news over and over again—the fact of it was constantly hitting me, but whether it was wonderful or disastrous I still didn't know.

  And how did I act around our two new housemates? Like a spectator, mostly. I realized that despite all the time I'd spent thinking about her over the last year and a half, I knew almost nothing about Raina and even less about her mother. I pictured Raina, vaguely, as a strong, intense person, but I had no idea who she really was. So I just watched her. She and Claudia didn't battle like most mothers and daughters I knew, nor did they have the amiable but nonintimate coexistence of my father and me. They seemed close, and according to Stacy, Claudia even knew that Raina was gay. This was inconceivable to me—I would sooner have become a cheerleader than talk to my father about my love life. But I realized Stacy was right, because Claudia obviously knew about Toni ("Are you going out with Toni tonight?" she'd ask, or, "What should I say if Toni calls?"). And it was a good thing she did too, because it looked like Toni was causing some problems in her daughter's life.