The one packed tightest into her uniform might have been Lily Goldring, our leading free-throw shooter, but the permed hair and extra chin made it hard to be sure. I thought Alma Lowell was the black woman who had spread far beyond the capacity of her uniform and had her letter jacket perched uneasily on her massive shoulders.
The only two I recognized for certain were Diane Logan and Nancy Cleghorn. Diane’s strong slender legs could still do for a Vogue cover. She’d been our star forward, co-captain, honors student. Caroline had told me Diane now ran a successful Loop PR agency, specializing in promoting black companies and personalities.
Nancy Cleghorn and I had stayed in touch through college; even so, her strong square face and frizzy blond hair were so unchanged, I would have known her anyplace. She was responsible for my being here tonight. She directed environmental affairs for SCRAP—the South Chicago Reawakening Project where Caroline Djiak was the deputy director. When the two of them realized the Lady Tigers were going into the regional championships for the first time in twenty years, they decided to get the old team together for a pregame ceremony. Publicity for the neighborhood, publicity for SCRAP, support for the team—good for everyone.
Nancy grinned when she saw me. “Yo, Warshawski—get your ass moving. We gotta be on the floor in ten minutes.”
“Hi, Nancy. I ought to have my head examined for letting you get me down here. Don’t you know you can’t go home again?”
I found four square inches of bench to dump my gym bag on and quickly stripped, stuffing my jeans into the bag and putting on my faded uniform. I adjusted the socks and tied the high-lacing shoes.
Diane put an arm around me. “You’re looking good, Whitey, like you still could move around if you had to.”
We looked into the mirror. While some of the current Tigers topped six feet, at five-eight I’d been the tallest one on our team. Diane’s afro was about level with my nose. Black and white, we’d both wanted to play basketball when race fights were a daily disruption in hall and locker room. We hadn’t liked each other, but junior year we’d forced a truce on the rest of the team and the next February we’d taken them to the first statewide girls tournament.
She grinned, sharing the memory. “All that garbage we used to put ourselves through seems mighty trivial now, Warshawski. Come over and meet the reporter. Say something nice about the old neighborhood.”
The Herald-Star’s Joan Lacey was the city’s only woman sports columnist. When I said I read her stuff regularly she smiled with pleasure. “Tell my editor. Better still, write a letter. So how do you feel putting on your uniform after all these years?”
“Like an idiot. I haven’t held a basketball since I left college.” I’d gone to the University of Chicago on an athletic scholarship. The U of C offered them long before the rest of the country knew that women played sports.
We talked for a few minutes, about the past, about aging athletes, about the fifty percent unemployed in the neighborhood, about the current team’s prospects.
“We’re rooting for them, of course,” I said. “I’m anxious to see them on the court. In here they look as though they take conditioning much more seriously than we did twenty years ago.”
“Yeah, they keep hoping the women’s pro league will revive. There’re some top-notch women players in high school and college with no place to go.”
Joan put her notebook away and told a photographer to get us out on the court for some shots. We eight old-timers straggled out to the gym floor, Caroline worrying around us like an overzealous terrier.
Diane picked up a ball and dribbled it behind her, under her legs, then bounced it to me. I turned and shot. The ball caromed from the backboard and I ran in to get it and dunk it. My old teammates gave me a ragged hand.
The photographer took some pictures of us together, then of Diane and me playing one-on-one under the net. The crowd got into it a little, but their real interest was on the current team. When the Lady Tigers took the floor in their warm-up suits, they got a big round. We worked out a little with them, but turned the floor over to them as soon as possible: this was their big night.
When the girls from visiting St. Sophia came out in their red-and-white sweats, I slid back to the locker room and started to change back to my civvies. Caroline found me as I finished tying my neck scarf.
“Vic! Where are you going? You know you promised to come over to see Ma after the game!”
“I said I’d try, if I could stay down here.”
“She’s counting on seeing you. She can hardly get out of bed she’s in such bad shape. This really matters to her.”
In the mirror I could see her face flush and her blue eyes darken with the same hurt look she used to give me when she was five and I wouldn’t let her tag along with my friends. I felt my temper rise with twenty-year-old irritation.
“Did you arrange this basketball farce to manipulate me into visiting Louisa? Or did that only come to you later?”