Three Story House: A Novel (12 page)

A girl approached them. “Miss Freeman,” she said, and then dropped her voice too low for Lizzie to hear. Rosa May put up her hand indicating to Lizzie that she’d be right back and escorted the girl back to a classroom. Returning, she explained that the girls were divided by age and that they spent ninety minutes on homework and then ninety minutes on extracurricular activities. “This group has been playing basketball, but I’m tired of basketball. I can only use five at a time and it isn’t easy for all the girls—the ones who are shorter or struggle physically. It’s no good for them.”

Rosa May’s voice had a musical quality that made Lizzie think of choirs. She talked about why she’d started the program and the risk the girls were at for teen pregnancy. “I know what you’re going to ask: How do we know who’s at risk?”

Lizzie hesitated, thinking Rosa May would answer her own question, but the pause in the conversation became uncomfortably long and finally Lizzie ventured, “All of them?”

“That’s right,” Rosa May said, pausing at a closed door. “The reason T. J. had you call me is that what I want, what I’ve wanted from the beginning, is a way to get these girls active. Not to be blunt, but I want to exhaust them, leave them with not enough time or energy to get into trouble.”

“Active,” Lizzie echoed, looking at her knee. She needed that too.

“Can you coach girls who hate running?”

“We’ll find out,” Lizzie said.

“Let’s say you can because I need you.” Rosa May opened the door with a flourish. Inside were two dozen girls all looking glumly at textbooks or scratching in composition notebooks with chewed- up pens. “Meet your team.”

A week later, the question of whether she could coach still echoed in Lizzie’s mind. For the first three days of her new job, it rained. This meant that after homework had been completed, she was forced to stay with the girls in a portable classroom where they watched soccer games on tape, talked about the rules of soccer, and engaged in team-building and confidence-boosting activities (which were worksheets dropped off by a harried Rosa May). On the fourth day the rain ceased, but after walking the grassy field next to the community center where the outreach program was housed, she deemed it too wet to play. On the fifth day, the girls set fire to a trashcan of crumpled paper.

They’d been working on goal setting and Lizzie had made the mistake of crumpling a piece of paper and using her left knee, juggling it in the air several times before letting it fall and then kicking it into the wastebasket as if it were a ball. The girls erupted into hoots and calls for her to do it again. When she refused, they tried on their own to mimic her motions. Most of them weren’t any good, but a few of them managed to juggle their pieces of paper more than once. Neela, who had short, flat-ironed hair that stuck out from her head like cedar shingles, particularly impressed Lizzie. But she’d lost control and she’d had to raise her voice and demand that the girls pick up their missed shots and return to goal setting. It had seemed such a simple exercise. What is your goal for today? What is your goal for tomorrow? Lizzie had been thinking about her goals and was erasing what she’d written down as her goal for a year from now when she smelled the smoke.

She looked up. Two girls in the back were smirking at her, and the rest of the class had their heads bent toward their papers. The two in the back were already pregnant. They weren’t far enough along to show, but they’d made a point of telling her on the first day. Well, one of them made the point of telling her. Sonja had waist-length black hair and wore hoop earrings that were nearly larger than her face. The other girl, Drayden, didn’t speak, but she made faces that were the equivalent of texting abbreviations—WTF and LOL seemed to be her favorites.

“My papa thinks I should play soccer,” Sonja had said, winding her long hair around her hand. “But Drayden and I can’t do that sort of physical stuff now, well, you know.”

“I’m pretty sure you can,” Lizzie had said, putting her hand on the girl’s lower back and escorting her to a seat. There’d been women on the national team who played right up until they gave birth. Kelly had been four months pregnant during one of the World Cup games. She didn’t share this with the girls: she’d always worked harder at their age for coaches who held themselves apart.

Neela, her favorite, told her about the fire. “There’s smoke,” she’d said, turning her head away from the side of the room where the fire had been lit. The flames had started to catch when she said this. Lizzie steadied her knee and walked quickly toward the fire. She picked up the basket with both hands and dropped it in the classroom sink just before its plastic bottom melted. She turned on the water and ashes floated up around her face. She rubbed at it and then turned to face the girls.

Drayden covered her mouth and then doubled over in laughter, pointing at Lizzie.
LMFAO,
Lizzie thought. Then Sonja curled her lips in a smile, and said in an attention-drawing voice, “You’ve got a little something right here.” She moved her hand to indicate that the little something covered Lizzie’s entire face.

In the bathroom, she saw that the ashes from the fire had left charcoal smudges all across her cheeks and forehead. The girls had too much energy. Lizzie had been too tired at their age to think about setting fires or talking back to her teachers. The thought again occurred to her that she wasn’t at all qualified to be responsible for so many lives. What were her skills? What did other women who left soccer do with their lives? A few of them got married and started having kids right away—having put that part of their life on hold earlier. Some of them, the starters from that first year when women’s soccer captured the nation’s attention, brought their little girls to practices or demonstration games. These mothers made Lizzie wary. She couldn’t decide whether they were teaching their children about who their mother used to be or what the children were expected to become.

There was a knock on the door and Rosa May entered. “They giving you a hard time?”

Lizzie wiped the last of the charcoal from her face and shook her head.

“I can’t have you quitting on me already. Those girls have already run off our basketball coach—they’ve got me out there and I can’t even dribble. Besides, it’ll look bad on our grant renewal if there’s no consistency.” Rosa May smoothed her eyebrows with her index finger. She kept her hair short and wore large earrings and pantsuits. She spoke the girls’ language in a way that Lizzie did not. Growing up in Memphis, Lizzie was familiar with the divide—people like Lizzie lived out east. These at-risk girls didn’t live in any one place in particular, but they tended to keep to a certain neighborhood—Orange Mound, Glenview, Hollywood. They moved from apartment complex to apartment complex as relatives were evicted for not paying rent, or an uncle whose name was on the lease went to prison, or great-grandmothers died and none of the relatives could agree on who would live in a house that was too ramshackle to be worth selling. She wasn’t sure which of these neighborhoods T. J. and his family had lived in, but it hadn’t been east.

“They’ll be getting restless,” Rosa May said by way of a prompt.

“To hell with field conditions. I’m taking them outside,” Lizzie said, thinking that after the recent rainstorm, there’d be precious little that would catch fire. “It’s wet, but maybe a little mud will do them good.”

“Feel free to hose them off afterward,” Rosa May said.

“Oh, I wouldn’t,” Lizzie said before realizing that Rosa May had been joking.

The descent into silence when she returned to the room told Lizzie that the girls had been talking about her. None of the girls looked ready to practice; most of them had remembered to wear tennis shoes, but of course they were all untied with their laces dragging on the floor. She put two fingers in her mouth and let out a piercing whistle that had most of the girls covering their ears. “We’re going outside,” Lizzie said. “Lace up.”

They grumbled. Outright refusal erupted with several girls flopping themselves down onto the grass the moment they stepped outside the community center’s double doors. Lizzie set the ground rules. They were going to run drills. Everyone was to participate. If someone didn’t participate, they’d run the drill until everyone did. A few of the girls lying on the grass got up. Sonja, Drayden, and the heaviest girl, Coraline, didn’t. Lizzie put them through their first drill, which basically involved jumping. They drew an imaginary circle around themselves and then she had them jump from the center of the circle to points on the invisible circle as if it were a clock.

Lizzie did it with them, knowing she needed to strengthen her legs.

“Get up, Sonja,” one of the girls yelled after the third time Lizzie drilled them. The weather was cool and Lizzie felt they could do this until their time together ended without a water break. She’d promised them a water break once everyone did the drill.

Sonja rolled onto her back, the laces on her shoes still defiantly untied. “She can’t make us do this. She ain’t got power.”

This was the way they talked to each other, dropping articles and deliberately taking up colloquial speech patterns. If Rosa May were out here, she’d move toward Sonja in a way that said she was going to beat the crap out of her if she didn’t get up. The difference was that they’d laugh at Lizzie if she tried that.

But Lizzie had been a part of all sorts of teams. She’d been a thirteen-year-old girl and she remembered the insecurities, coupled with the dawning realization that adults truly couldn’t force you to do anything. What Lizzie knew that these girls didn’t was that a coach’s ability to manage egos was as important as her ability at a particular sport. She considered what she knew about Sonja and Drayden. The other holdout, Coraline, hadn’t gotten up from the ground and as Lizzie tried to work out a way to manage Sonja, she knelt next to the larger girl and explained in a low voice that if she wasn’t comfortable hopping from one point to another, she could step. Coraline looked at her sideways and without acknowledging their exchange, lumbered to her feet.

“Again,” Lizzie called, explaining that the numbers would be out of order this time.

“Y’all are idiots,” Sonja said, looking at her nails. Drayden covered her mouth and snickered. LOL, thought Lizzie.

“Three o’clock,” Lizzie called, and then before they had time to think about what Sonja said, “Five o’clock”

Drayden was one of the taller girls; thinking she was the right size for playing goalie, Lizzie called out to Whitney, who was also tall. “Look at Whitney’s reach. She’s going to make a fine goalie. I don’t think anyone can jump higher.”

A few of the girls straightened their backs and put enough spring in their next jumps that they nearly fell over. “Six o’clock,” Lizzie called.

From behind her, Lizzie heard Rosa May’s rich voice. “You don’t think Drayden’s taller? I thought she’d be a natural at goalie.”

God bless that woman,
Lizzie thought. Drayden sat up, knitting together her eyebrows and pursing her lips.
There it was,
Lizzie thought, WTF
or maybe more accurately “the fuck you talking about.”
That was how Lizzie would have said it if she were one of these girls, if she were Rosa May and had grown up in Orange Mound.

Instead, she kept up the pace of the drills, and called, “Round Four.” More than one girl told Drayden to get up off her butt. “We’ll go odds forward and then evens backward.”

With the grace of a puma, Drayden rose to her feet, stretching up to her full height, which Lizzie would have guessed was close to six feet.

Coraline, who was huffing and out of breath, pushed herself and actually hopped during the first two numbers. Lizzie smiled and continued calling out even numbers. Drayden made a point of not waiting until Lizzie called a number, but jumped to her own rhythm and finished about thirty seconds ahead of the other girls.

The next round, nearly all the girls shouted at Sonja to get up and join them, but it wasn’t until Drayden nudged her with her foot that Sonja rose. A collective murmuring of thanks rippled through the girls, and Lizzie called out the numbers on the imaginary clock at a rapid pace.

Lizzie told the girls to go get some water and meet her back there in five minutes. She warned any girl who was late that she’d have to run an extra lap for every second she was late. “I think I’ll work with them outside from now on. Rain or shine,” Lizzie said to Rosa May.

“You ever going to let it get around that you used to be something more than nothing in the soccer world?”

“These kids don’t care about that,” Lizzie said.

“Maybe not,” Rosa May said, “but they might start caring about it.”

The truth was that Lizzie didn’t want to talk about it because it made her feel like a failure. She stammered some statistic to Rosa May about how much more successful girls who played sports were. The way Rosa May’s face pinched up made Lizzie think she already had a familiarity with that subject. She wasn’t going to let the issue of Lizzie’s semi-celebrity status go.

“Maybe we should talk about why you’re keeping my brother at arm’s length.” Rosa May didn’t appear to ever shy away from tough subjects. “He’s not showy with his affection, but he likes you and I don’t think the occassional brunch is what he’s looking for.”

“How can I get in a relationship? I could be gone in a few months if the renovation and kneehab goes the way it’s supposed to.”

“Not being the right time is the worst excuse for not starting something up. You’re ending it before it even begins.”

Not knowing what to say, Lizzie changed the subject. “It’s hard to believe they’re already pregnant,” Lizzie said.

Rosa May arched her eyebrows. “Who told you that?”

Lizzie started to explain and then realized that Dray and Sonja had wanted an excuse to get them out of practice and thought that claiming to be knocked up would do it. Rosa May laughed and then stepped back as the girls returned before their five minutes were up. Lizzie stretched her knee a bit before walking with them around the perimeter of the community center’s field. “Are you sure you should do that?” Sonja asked her, falling in step with Lizzie. “I Googled you.”