Page 19 of Spectacular Things
Visualize to Realize
“Again!” Coach yells from the eighteen-yard line through a pelting rain.
As usual, Cricket is waiting for her mom, and so Coach makes use of the time by running her through extra drills.
Paying for her mother’s tardiness in the form of this additional exercise, Cricket allows her irritation to distract her.
She lets in three easy grounders before Coach summons her over, Cricket’s socks audibly sluicing with every step.
“Has anyone ever talked to you about visualization?” Coach asks. The wet soccer balls are as cooperative as greased piglets, and Coach has silently watched Cricket grow frustrated. She is used to the ball obeying her touch, a cooperative coconspirator in her aims. Not today. And where is her mom?
“Visualization?” Cricket repeats, trying out the word.
“I don’t think so?” Through the aggressive rain, she glances up at Coach, whose dirty blond hair is several shades dirtier now that it’s sopping wet.
Most of her teammates—and all their moms—have crushes on Coach, but not Cricket.
He strikes her as a moody Muppet: tall and gangly with long arms that seem to go everywhere when he’s yelling at the refs on the sideline of their games.
But one on one, he’s always patient, so even if Cricket doesn’t think he’s cute, she understands why her teammates doodle his initials in the back of their notebooks.
“Okay, cool, so before you strike that ball,” Coach begins, “envision where you want it to go in your mind’s eye.” Using his laces, he flicks another ball up into his hands. “But also picture the arc you want the ball to take, how you want it to land, and at whose feet.”
“But no one’s here,” Cricket says, pointing out the obvious. Every single one of her teammates, with their responsible, two-parent households, have already been scooped up, driven home, and fed a warm, home-cooked meal by now.
“That’s the point of the exercise,” Coach says. “Envision you’re playing goalkeeper in a match, the ref blows the whistle, and you’ve got six seconds to clear the ball. Who do you see out there?”
Cricket looks out and sees their best forward. “Annabelle Fischer,” she says.
“Let it rip. Put it right at her feet.”
Cricket takes a breath, approaches the ball, locks her ankle, leans over, and looks out at her target—there’s Annabelle, her long French braid chasing after her legs.
“Nice!” he shouts, jogging over to Cricket with his hand raised for a high five. “See how the visualizing helps?”
Cricket nods. She’s pretty sure she’s always visualized where to put the ball without necessarily knowing that what she was doing had a name.
“So a lot of athletes incorporate visualization into their training,” Coach says. “It’s like a meditation, with a goal in mind, to prime their brain and body for when the moment presents itself.”
“Cool,” Cricket says through chattering teeth. She looks past Coach at the headlights pulling into the parking lot, the windshield wipers waving frantically to convey her mother’s message to hurry up, they need togo.
Spotting the car, Coach salutes Liz Lowe, and she responds with a double blink of the high beams. “Give it a try tonight,” he tells Cricket, who is already halfway across the field.
The water bottle in her blue Stallions bag bangs against her hip as she runs, but her mother still rolls down her window to yell, “Let’s go, Cricket Lowe! Move those wheels!”
And even though she’s already sprinting, the sound of her mother’s voice pulls her like a lasso, and the knowledge that Coach is watching makes Cricket lift her knees higher in a one-woman performance of athletic excellence.
She is the best goalkeeper in the league and the fastest player on her team.
“Can I drop you on Main Street and can you hand me that shirt behind you?” Liz asks by way of greeting as she zips out of the parking lot before Cricket has clicked her seatbelt.
They both understand that Liz is running so late that she will need to go straight from the Stallions’ practice field to Primo Bistro.
For this very reason, Liz keeps her black server’s apron and several metal hangers of dry-cleaned white shirts in the back seat of her car.
As she zooms toward town, Liz blames her tardiness on Mr. Trott, who interrogated Liz about his molars before inquiring into her marital status.
“Typical,” Cricket says with a sigh.
“Typical,” Liz agrees. “Okay, get ready to run.”
Normally, Cricket wouldn’t mind the mile-long walk from Primo, but she’s already freezing and this rain won’t relent. Despite the ten full-field sprints she just did at the end of practice and the fact that she’s still wearing her cleats, Cricket decides to run.
With each step toward home, Cricket feels the unforgiving sidewalk wear down the studs of her boots.
This pair needs to last her all season, and she hates that they’re taking such abuse as she makes a left on Main Street and charges the steep hill on Lavender Avenue, registering that the crashes of thunder are growing closer and closer together.
Her left knee hurts and Cricket knows she will pay for this concrete mile on the soccer field, her studs failing her the next time she tries to make a hard cut, a sharp turn.
How could she have left her sneakers in Hilary’s mom’s car? What was she thinking?
Then again, Cricket argues, if she were Hilary, it would have been fine to leave her shoes in her mom’s car, because Hilary’s mom, like every other parent of her Stallions teammates, picks up and drops off.
Only Cricket is expected to ask around for rides.
Only Cricket is forced to be prodigiously organized with all of her gear at all times.
Only Cricket is squinting through the pelting rain and running uphill between harrowing jags of lightning after a grueling practice, after a long school day, because only Cricket is expected to step up if she wants to play soccer at the most elite level.
For everyone else on the team, the time required to be a Stallion—weekday practices, holiday-weekend tournaments three states and five hours away—is the sacrifice.
But for Cricket, that time devoted to honing her craft is the reward, and it comes with responsibility.
She rounds the corner and sees her house a block away.
Cricket sprints like her life depends on it, like every naysayer is chasing her, telling her she isn’t fast enough, good enough, to become who she needs to become, which is an exceptional goalkeeper, an Olympic athlete, a World Cup winner.
By the time Cricket opens her front door, it’s impossible to distinguish rain from sweat as it drips off her fingertips and she shouts her sister’s name from the threshold.
“Coming!” Mia yells, appearing behind a stack of folded bath towels she’d thrown in the dryer when she heard the rain, saw the clock, and did the transportation math.
“These are still warm—take one now so you don’t get pneumonia but then shower and get into dry clothes—and I made chicken noodle soup. ”
“Extra carrots?” Cricket asks.
“Extra carrots,” Mia answers because she knows a keeper is only as good as her eyesight.
That night, Cricket is too tired to tackle the reading homework for English so instead she lies in bed and practices visualization.
First, she does what Coach suggested and imagines making a great save before clearing the ball up to Annabelle, who goes on to score.
But then Cricket imagines herself wearing the official kit of the U.S.
Women’s National Team and playing for a packed stadium at the World Cup.
As she waves to the crowd, she sees Coach, and Mia, and her mom, all cheering for her in identical Lowe jerseys, but someone keeps saying her name, and that’s when Cricket wakes up to the smell of fried garlic and her mother’s hand on her cheek.
“You were smiling in your sleep,” Liz whispers, beaming as she unties her black server’s apron and sits on the edge of the bed. Cricket nods, still smiling.
After Liz leaves to brush her teeth, Cricket closes her eyes for another round of visualization.
This time, she sees a future in which her mother quits her job at the restaurant—and at the dental office—and spends her days being the mother of superstar goalkeeper Cricket Lowe.
She doesn’t work a single night of the week.
And when Cricket comes into town, Liz picks her up on time and drives her all the way home.
At the next Stallions practice, Coach asks Cricket if she had any luck with the visualization. When she answers yes, Coach throws his head in the direction of Annabelle, who is at the far end of the bench, solemnly applying deodorant. “You gonna get her a goal and yourself an assist on Saturday?”
Cricket nods. “Among other things.”
“Oh yeah?” Coach asks, amused. “What else did you visualize?”
In her mind, Cricket clicks through the gallery highlights: the perfect playing fields, the sensation of stopping an unstoppable shot, the stadiums full of screaming fans, the locker rooms full of lifelong friends, the game-winning saves, the trophies, the sponsorships, hoisting up a World Cup with her teammates and bending down to receive an Olympic gold medal around her neck, the seven-figure contracts, the celebratory press conferences, the tropical vacations she’ll take her mom and sister on, the big house she’ll buy for the three of them to live in together, with a chef and a swimming pool and the original poster of Steve Prefontaine hanging in a gilded frame in their fancy dining room, right next to an orange Wheaties box with Cricket’s face on it, because she’s going to become the best goalkeeper in the world.
“Cricket?” Coach asks again. “What else did you visualize?”
“My life,” Cricket says, grinning as she pulls up her socks. “It’s gonna be awesome.”