Scholastica Choi, five-foot-ten at age thirteen, was our reluctant center. Her primary ambition was to be valedictorian of the eighth grade and her secondary ambition was to be the first Korean-American president of the United States. Sports were not in the mix. Despite Coach Jenkins’s urging, and often his screaming at her directly, she hated getting hit and simply would not go beneath the basket. Never deigning to get back on defense, Scholastica bided her time midcourt. Her play was the three. Arms raised, knees bent, ever ladylike, she released the ball at a fifty-degree angle with textbook follow-through, watching it drop through the net in the perfect parabola she loved to draw on the blackboard during math. Each afternoon she practiced that shot. With her long hair and saintly expression, Scholastica resembled the Virgin Mary. Not the blonde, blue-eyed Lady of Knock on our refrigerator calendar, but a true Los Angeles Virgin.
Especially after ripping off a three to place a game forever out of reach.
Coach, however, was frustrated by the waste of those long arms, that rebounding potential. He said it was on me to make her go inside.
My mother bought a mat which she spread each morning on the patch of bare floor by my parents’ bed. That’s where she did her stretches. Breath of Fire. Happy Baby, Warrior, Corpse. She absented herself more often from the Saturday night parties, leaving my father to confess to his friends she was out at a yoga class. Those nights, she came home late, bypassing the party, going straight to bed, lying still and silent, awake beside me, her skin smelling of weird incense. I scrunched my eyes shut, pretending sleep.
During the week, the two of them fought in the bedroom with the door shut. It wasn’t him: it was her, full of spite. After the fights, my mother disappeared and my father sat on the couch, sullen, and watched TV.
I didn’t like the beach. My skin burned and never tanned. My mother was the same but never minded—she loved the heat of the sun.
Since Scholastica wouldn’t go into the paint and play center, Junie was our rebounder, the one to box out, pluck the ball from the glass, and swing elbows to protect our lead. Her job was to force the ball once again to the basket, or, if we were on defense, to hurl the ball to our end so Callie could do her thing. Dark-skinned Junie, her hair shaved close in the back of her skull, was the most muscular girl I had ever seen. She loved to scrap and liked picking fights with me, daring me with hard eyes to do something about it. Like those girls on Venice. She racked up lots of fouls.
She didn’t live in the neighborhood. Coach Jenkins knew her mother and somehow got her into our school.
Some weekends I stayed at the Jenkins’s house, a chance to sleep on a real mattress instead of a fold-out couch. Sometimes Junie was there as well. For breakfast, Mrs. Jenkins made jook with dried plums and ginger. In the afternoons, Callie’s parents took turns barbequing on an industrial steel drum cut in half. Coach Jenkins’s thing was ribs, though mostly he supervised, barking orders at his sons, rangy boys who played hoops at Loyola, making them scurry round the backyard with roasting pans half-full of water. Other weekends Mrs. Jenkins made kalbi, which needed only five minutes of grilling after a nighttime of marinating in big plastic tubs. She said the secret ingredient was a lukewarm can of flat Dr. Pepper.
Callie’s baptismal name was “California.” It was in California her parents had found each other.
At mealtime, Coach Jenkins jotted down ideas on a little notebook. He had been scouting the teams we might meet in the tournament, analyzing their strengths and weaknesses. Our strength was our stamina and mental toughness, he said. One gives rise to the other, see. We would outrun them.
My mother moved to an apartment in Venice Beach. More than anything else, she said, she needed to be alone. My father told me it wasn’t her fault, it wasn’t his fault, it wasn’t my fault.
Mary Crawford‘s short stories have appeared in many literary journals, including Confrontation, Green Mountains Review and Carolina Quarterly (Online).
