One Life Read online

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  Three days after the game in Chicago, the Seattle Reign played the Washington Spirit at a stadium in Maryland. As I was changing, Laura quietly came up and told me that the owner of the Washington team had decided to play the national anthem while we were still in the locker room, to deny me the possibility of kneeling. “That is fucking wack-ass,” I said, and burst into laughter. It seemed cowardly and dishonest, the worst possible way to deal with someone with whom you disagree. It also signified the beginning of a new phase, in which strangers swearing at me online was replaced by a worse phenomenon: people being polite to my face while trying to defuse my actions behind my back.

  By “people” I mean the US Soccer Federation. Once they saw what was happening, they tried to shut down my protest. The strangest thing about this was dealing with something people of color must feel all the time: the out-of-body experience of having one’s basic reality denied. Every time I opened my mouth to talk about kneeling, or racial injustice, or police brutality, it was as if a chorus within the soccer world popped up to say: That isn’t happening, and the real crime is you disturbing the peace by even suggesting it. In fact, those who disagreed seemed to be saying: Not only is your protest illegitimate, but the anger directed toward you isn’t happening either, or at least people aren’t angry for the reasons you specify. I couldn’t get used to this. I understood that people were mad; I even understood, thanks to my dad’s dalliances with right-wing views, that people can be manipulated into blaming the wrong people for their problems. What I couldn’t understand was how anyone with half a brain or conscience could argue that there wasn’t an issue here worth protesting, or that action soon taken against me by the Soccer Federation was anything but an attempt to quiet me down.

  The beginning of the end came on a Thursday evening in mid-September. It was the first time since kneeling that I’d played with the national team, on a very different stage from that of a league game, with higher stakes and a bigger audience—around ten thousand that night, in the stadium in Columbus, Ohio. It was an international friendly against Thailand and, as always, we were the favorites, ranked number one in the world to Thailand’s thirty-two. Before the game, Jill Ellis, the national coach, had been asked what she thought of my kneeling and said something vague about being “team first,” which, while it wasn’t a ringing endorsement, hadn’t struck me as particularly ominous. In pleasant 70-degree weather, the anthem started to play. I dropped to one knee.

  I didn’t play the first half. In the second half, when I came in off the bench, a noise started to emanate from the crowd that, since it rose every time I received the ball and diminished every time I passed it, soon became unmistakable: booing. Three days later, in a friendly against the Netherlands in Atlanta, it would be much, much louder. (It figures; it was the South.) But that game against Thailand was critical in terms of the effect I believe the booing had on my coach. For Jill, the sound coming from the bleachers that night in Ohio was, I suspect, her first real taste of what had been going on in the wake of my kneeling. From that moment on, my relationship with her was in serious trouble.

  Tunnel vision is a prerequisite for most professional athletes. Just as when you take a penalty kick in front of fifty thousand people—the ambient cheering settles into white noise—it turns out that the sound of ten thousand people telling you to go fuck yourself can also blend into a solid mass possible to ignore. I wasn’t disturbed by the booing that evening, nor during the game in Atlanta. If you want to be an asshole and boo social justice, I thought, go ahead, be my guest. But while we won 9–0 that night—a good result even by our standards—it would be my last celebration on the field for some time. After the game, US Soccer released a statement saying it expected players to stand for the anthem. The day after that, Jill told me she wasn’t starting me in the game in Atlanta. A few weeks later, I was told by Jill not to dress for two national team games, guaranteeing I wouldn’t set foot on the field, and with the exception of a training camp I attended in November, I wouldn’t be invited to train with the team again that winter, or the following spring. In early 2017, the US Soccer Federation formally banned players from kneeling during the anthem.

  This should have been the worst time of my life. I was in the wilderness with no team, no training camp, and no workable relationship with my coach. And while I was still technically a team member—Jill hadn’t fired me, yet—what does that mean when you’re not even invited to train, let alone to play? My career as a national team player was shattered. I was out in the cold with no obvious path of return. And yet, as my agents discussed the possibility that I might never play for my country again, I didn’t feel despondent at all. I felt ignited. Everything in my life had been leading to this.

  At the post-game press conference after I first knelt in Chicago, I hadn’t rehearsed what I was going to say. I didn’t need to. Still red-faced from playing, I said I had knelt in support of Colin and to start what I hoped was a more thoughtful conversation about race. It was a show of solidarity and, I said, a way to broaden the conversation about racial injustice to people who, to put it politely, might find me a less threatening messenger than Colin.

  It was something else, too. I wasn’t just familiar with the politics behind Colin’s protest; I felt them, in my own way. “I know what it means to look at the flag and not have it protect all of your liberties,” I said. “It was something small that I could do.”

  1

  COUNTRY LIFE

  Mrs. Walmart didn’t like me. I was seven years old, dressed like a boy, and in a moment of rashness had stuck out my tongue at her. It wasn’t my first offense; I’d had a few red cards for talking in class and a note had gone home to my parents. My mom knew I could be boisterous—there was no question about that—but she wasn’t convinced I was the only party at fault. Mrs. Walmart was a crotchety teacher, and I was a whippersnapper, and so my mom volunteered to come in as a class parent. This way, she could keep an eye on me and assess whether I was being picked on by my teacher or was simply being obnoxious.

  The latter was a definite possibility. I was an emotional kid in first grade, with no idea how to handle those emotions. A funny thing about twins is that they can switch personalities. You don’t mean to; it just happens. One of you takes one position and the other, instinctively, will balance things out. In junior high, I would be the quiet one trailing in Rachael’s wake, but in grade school it was the other way around. All through kindergarten (which our mom made us repeat, until she felt Rachael was ready to move up a grade), I’d answered for my sister in class and I was just as outspoken at home. Our grandpa had nicknames for us both at that age—I was Ma Barker to my sister’s Sweet Muffin.

  Part of my loudness was temperament, but there was definitely a practical side to it, too. We were a large, rambunctious family and you had to raise your voice or no one would hear you. By the time Rachael and I were born in 1985, our oldest brother, Michael, had moved out to live with his dad in San Diego, but that still left CeCé, who was fifteen and had been living with my parents since she was eleven; Jenny, eight; and five-year-old Brian; plus a series of extended family members who came and went over the years. Right after we were born, my mom’s sister Melanie and her daughter, Aleta, lived with us for a while. When we were in high school, my grandpa Jack moved in. And much later, my parents took in Austin, Brian’s son, and raised him from babyhood.

  This is what my parents do—they look after people. My mom, Denise, since forever—she is the second eldest of eight children and the oldest girl, with parents who were both alcoholics—and my dad, Jim, from the age of thirty, when he married my mom. She was twenty-three when they started dating and came with a lot of baggage: a bitter ex-husband, two young children, a dying mother out in Nevada, and a soon-to-be orphaned nine-year-old sister, who needed somewhere to live. It was a lot for a thirty-year-old bachelor to take on, particularly one who was struggling professiona
lly. When my parents met, my dad had been living in San Diego for ten years and had worked as a commercial fisherman, a car salesman, the owner of a flatbed truck, and a crane operator. My mom, meanwhile, had been a waitress, a dental assistant, and a clerk at a shipping company, and at that point was mainly caring for her mom.

  A lot of guys in my dad’s shoes would have run for the hills. There was nothing in his background that prepared him for my mom’s family, a huge Catholic clan—my mom has thirty-two first cousins, and that’s just on her mom’s side—that had lived through some pretty tough times. Her dad, who had been in the army, was verbally abusive and highly critical of his kids, and, at least toward the boys, sporadically violent. He was also serially unemployed. Growing up in San Bernardino, the family was frequently broke, and while my mom’s mom was a coper, she was often put in the impossible position of trying to raise eight kids on a waitress’s salary.

  My dad, by contrast, was raised in a stable middle-class home by a stay-at-home mom and a firefighter dad. He had one brother, which is why, perhaps, he was so drawn to my mom’s large family. Far from being alienated by the mess and the noise, my dad found it wonderfully warm and inviting. My parents have a lot in common—both moved to Southern California from other parts of the country as kids. Both had fathers who were veterans—my paternal grandfather had fought in France in the Second World War, and my mom’s dad was a veteran of the Korean War, which, looking back, explained some of his behaviors. Long after the fact, my mom and her siblings realized he probably had undiagnosed PTSD.

  Both my parents are easygoing, generous, hardworking people with a kooky sense of humor. But most of all, they place a high value on family. My mom never says no when someone needs a bed for the night; my dad is a shirt-off-his-back kind of guy. After the disappointment of Bill, my mom’s first husband, who could be slightly too much like her dad for comfort, her siblings fell in love with my dad, and for a while the refrain when someone needed help in the family was “Call Jim!” After my parents married and had Brian, it seemed natural to them to move up to Redding, to be near my mom’s sisters. A year after they moved they had Rachael and me.

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  Everyone assumes there is a special bond between twins and there is, although it’s not quite the way people like to imagine. Rachael and I don’t read each other’s minds. And we don’t really finish each other’s sentences. Of all our siblings, we don’t even look the most alike—I probably look more like Brian, or at least I did as a kid. Still, the twin relationship is unique. The very fact that I refer to myself as “we” a lot of the time is weird when you come to think of it. (We also call ourselves “wombmates”—sorry.) Rachael was the firstborn, and after she came out like clockwork, the doctors had a brief panic about how long I was taking. To get me out, they had to give me a mighty push; my mom’s sister Wendy, who was there for the birth because our dad had the flu and couldn’t be in the delivery room, likes to say the effects of that push are still being felt.

  Having a twin is like having a mirror. Rachael is my built-in ally, my sounding board, the safety net I always know is 100 percent secure. For the first seven years of my life, before we were separated for first grade, she was barely out of my sight. And no matter how much we fought, when one of us was in trouble, the other always leapt to her defense. When we were toddlers, Rachael was put in her crib as punishment for touching a hot stove, and when my mom looked in on her a few moments later, there I was, lying on the floor, holding her hand through the bars like someone consoling a prisoner.

  Our house was out in Palo Cedro, a tiny semirural community to the east of Redding, with stunning views of the mountains. I can be a bit dismissive of Redding these days. It’s a town of ninety thousand people at the top of the Sacramento Valley, an annoying two-hour drive from the Sacramento airport, and—unless you’re into tattoo parlors and breweries—with nothing much to do when you get there. The summers are too hot (when my mom was heavily pregnant with us, she waddled around in a 115-degree heat wave) and the winters too cold, and while it’s beautiful country, with great outdoor sports and hiking, Redding itself is unremarkable. All the same, I love it. It’s full of good people, most of whom I disagree with about politics, and it’s still the place I think of as home.

  And there’s no question that, as a corner of the world to grow up in, it was amazing. Our house on Oak Meadow Road was typical of the properties in that area, a blue-painted, four-bedroom ranch, situated on three acres and set way back from the road. We had cats and dogs. Our neighbors had horses and sheep. There was a creek around the bend and an empty field across the street, all of which we were free to roam until dinnertime, when my mom would stand in the yard, put her two index fingers in the sides of her mouth, and whistle to call us back in.

  We had freedom, with boundaries. (I once made the mistake of lying low and ignoring my mom’s end-of-the-day whistle, something I never did again.) After endless games of hide-and-seek, laser tag, and hours spent catching crawdads in the creek with our cousin Stevie, we ran back to the house, where it was often my dad who made dinner. No one talked about “gender roles” in those days, at least not in Redding, but my parents, who both worked, were unusual in how they took care of the family. My dad did more outdoor stuff and my mom more indoor stuff, but overall they divided things pretty equally—my mom getting us up and ready for school in the morning; my dad, after a long day on the construction site, doing dinner, bath, and bedtime while my mom pulled a late shift at Jack’s Grill.

  One night a week, my dad would yell, “Rake-out!” to which we would all scream, “We hate rake-out!” “Rake-out” meant clearing out and eating all the leftovers from the fridge, and if we hated it, tough. There was no way my parents were going to throw away food and there was no way we could opt out of dinner. On the nights my mom hadn’t already left for the restaurant, we’d sit around the table as a family. (I remember CeCé telling me she’d never had a TV dinner before she left for college and was so excited to try one.) Dinner was an important time, a chance for everyone to share details of their day, and to laugh and joke together.

  We fought, too, of course. Especially in big families, everyone thinks they had it the hardest. My sister Jenny likes to remind me that when she and CeCé were small, our mom used to make them weed the yard—“even though Mom never planted anything!”—which, when Rachael and I came along, we were spared, to howls of “It isn’t fair!” And I like to remind her of the time she was babysitting us when we were five, and she dragged me across the floor when I was being stubborn (read: kicking her shins), and accidentally popped one of my arms out of its socket, nearly depriving the United States of a future star winger. As the youngest in the family, Rachael and I got away with a lot based on cuteness and the fact that, long after infancy, we were still referred to as “the babies.” But there were still bigger kids up the food chain who could boss us around.

  I didn’t mind being the youngest. Even as a child, I could give as good as I got. What I struggled with in early childhood was, oddly, not being bossed around, but being consoled. If I was angry, hurt, or upset, the last thing in the world I wanted was for someone to witness my injury. I would scream and howl and run to my room, where I would stay until I had figured out how to calm down. Very occasionally, CeCé could tempt me out by knocking gently on the door and saying, “Meggy, are you OK?” But generally I didn’t want consolation.

  All kids cry. But the sheer rage I felt when I lost control of my emotions was something else. It’s where my nickname Ma Barker came from, and even now I’m not sure what was going on. When Rachael was upset, she wanted to be soothed right away. But for me, the most embarrassing thing in the world was to lose my composure in front of people. These days, I’m almost impossible to embarrass, and I wonder if those early years of self-consciousness somehow acted as an inoculation. On some level, I understood I had to get a handle on myself and learn how to metabolize disappoi
ntment, frustration, and anger—all things that, twenty years later, I would encounter every day on the soccer field.

  To other members of the family, of course, I was simply a pain in the ass. “Nise needs to get a handle on that kid” was one of the phrases that made its way back to my mom from one of our more distant relatives, but she was unmoved. “They are who they are,” she said of her kids, and told everyone I was fine and to leave me alone. Sure enough, twenty or thirty minutes after a meltdown, I’d come out of my room and climb into her lap.

  Both of my parents accepted all of us kids just as we were. I don’t mean they were lax about discipline. My mom hates bad language, for example, and (poor thing, she’s horrified by this now) would occasionally wash out our mouths with soap if we cursed. But in all the ways that matter, she and my dad were liberal, supportive parents, with no fixed ideas about how we should act or who we should be.

  My mom wasn’t fazed when Rachael was too shy to speak up in kindergarten, didn’t freak out when I screamed and ran to my room, and after spending a few days in my first-grade classroom with Mrs. Walmart, she decided nothing was really amiss. Above all, she was calm when, at the age of five, I announced that I wanted to cut my hair short like Brian’s and wear only boys’ clothes from then on. I loved my twin, but my brother, who was five years older than us, was everything I wanted to be: funny, clever, cheerful, popular, outgoing, and good at all sports.