Fire Sale

1 Remembrances of Things Past

Going back to South Chicago has always felt to me like a return to death. The people I loved most, those fierce first attachments of childhood, had all died in this abandoned neighborhood on the city’s southeast edge. It’s true my mother’s body, my father’s ashes, lie elsewhere, but I had tended both through painful illnesses down here. My cousin Boom-Boom, close as a brother-closer than a brother-had been murdered here fifteen years ago. In my nightmares, yellow smoke from the steel mills still clouds my eyes, but the giant smokestacks that towered over my childhood landscape are now only ghosts themselves.

After Boom-Boom’s funeral, I’d vowed never to return, but such vows are grandiose; you can’t keep them. Still, I try. When my old basketball coach called to beg, or maybe command me to fill in for her while she dealt with cancer surgery, I said “No,” reflexively.

“ Victoria, basketball got you out of this neighborhood. You owe something to the girls who’ve come behind you to give them the chance you had.”

It wasn’t basketball but my mother’s determination I would have a university education that got me out of South Chicago, I said. And my ACTs were pretty darn good. But as Coach McFarlane pointed out, the athletic scholarship to the University of Chicago didn’t hurt.

“Even so, why doesn’t the school hire a substitute for you?” I asked petulantly.

“You think they pay me to coach?” Her voice rose in indignation. “It’s Bertha Palmer High, Victoria. It’s South Chicago. They don’t have any resources and now they’re on intervention, which means every available dime goes to preparing kids for standardized tests. It’s only because I volunteer that they keep the girls’ program alive, and it’s on life support as it is: I have to scrounge for money to pay for uniforms and equipment.”

Mary Ann McFarlane had taught me Latin as well as basketball; she’d retooled herself to teach geometry when the school stopped offering all languages except Spanish and English. Through all the changes, she’d kept coaching basketball. I hadn’t realized any of that until the afternoon she called.

“It’s only two hours, two afternoons a week,” she added.

“Plus up to an hour’s commute each way,” I said. “I can’t take this on: I have an active detective agency, I’m working without an assistant, I’m taking care of my lover who got shot to bits in Afghanistan. And I still have to look after my own place and my two dogs.”

Coach McFarlane wasn’t impressed-all this was just so much excuse making. “Quotidie damnatur qui semper timet,” she said sharply.

I had to recite the words several times before I could translate them: The person who is always afraid is condemned every day. “Yeah, maybe, but I haven’t played competitive basketball for two decades. The younger women who join our pickup games at the Y on Saturdays play a faster, meaner game than I ever did. Maybe one of those twenty-somethings has two afternoons a week to give you-I’ll talk to them this weekend.”

“There’s nothing to make one of those young gals come down to Ninetieth and Houston,” she snapped. “This is your neighborhood, these are your neighbors, not that tony Lakeview where you think you’re hiding out.”

That annoyed me enough that I was ready to end the conversation, until she added, “Just until the school finds someone else, Victoria. Or maybe a miracle will happen and I’ll get back there.”

That’s how I knew she was dying. That’s how I knew I was going to have to return once more to South Chicago, to make another journey into pain.