He took her to a room off the office and showed her the rest of it: the jacket; the underplastron, which was a half-vest worn under the jacket to protect the underarm and the side of the fencer’s chest nearest their opponent; the glove; and the hard plastic chest protector. And then the foil, with its perfect balance and its pistol grip. He handed her one and she weighed it, pushed its tip into the floor and felt the blade tense and bend.
“Go ahead,” Arthur said, holding his fingers like a gun and thrusting them out.
She extended her arm and leaned forward, twisted her wrist around, made a circle in the air. It was so light, so comfortable in her hand.
“Yeah?” said Arthur, smiling, nodding. He rummaged through shelving in the large closet space for pieces of equipment to fit her, and said, “These are yours as long as you’re here.”
A sort of pride bloomed in her cheeks and the backs of her hands.
***
Later, at Arthur’s suggestion, she sat cross-legged on the floor with a mask in her lap and watched the others practise. She saw how beautiful it was: a weaponized dance, improvised and ecstatic. The floor thumped with footfalls, white silhouettes racing back and forth in unison as though joined by invisible girders.
“Distance,” Arthur called to the fencers, “remember your distance!”
On the nearest piste, Evelyn was fencing Domenic. Domenic was short and powerful-seeming, with no hair, but flecks of grey in his stubble, and round cheeks. He smiled with the warmth of a church on a winter night. Evelyn was sharp-featured, but not unfriendly, with light brown hair that looked dry and crinkly, a slight wave to it as it swept back into its ponytail.
Beforehand, Claudia had watched them gear up to fence with electronic scoring. They plugged wires into the backs of their lamé vests, wires which led back to pulley wheels suspended from the ceiling, then looped back to the scoring unit: a rectangular box, the size of an open lectern bible, with a square cluster of lights at either end. They tested the gear by pushing the points of their foils into each other’s torsos. Then they donned their masks, stood on their respective on-guard lines with their heels together, saluted with something like chivalry, and crouched into their stances.
Arthur, who stood off the piste near the centre line, said, “Fence.”
Domenic charged first, his wide, bouncy thighs hammering faster than Claudia’s eyes could see. He went up on his toes and exploded forward like a crane, but Evelyn deflected his blade, spinning it to her side, then jabbed her foil into Domenic’s chest just below his mask, the foil curving until it was nearly bent double. The cluster of lights nearest her end flashed, and the bible buzzed its little sermon. Arthur held up his right fist, the hand nearest to her. “Pointe,” he said in a clumsy French accent. “Excellent parry riposte, Ev.”
The fencers crouched back into their on-guard positions.
“En garde,” said Arthur. “Prêt. Allez.”
Domenic jolted forward again, bouncing like a Super Ball, leaning forward, feigning jabs, leaning back. Evelyn backed up, sliding one foot and then the other, until she was nearly against the end line. She thrust defensively, a bit desperately. Domenic weaved his head back and to the side, before dropping low and lunging forward, propelling his foil into Evelyn’s stomach. The lights, and the buzz. Arthur’s left fist in the air. They walked back toward the centre line, Evelyn with her head hung a bit, her ponytail tufted out behind her.
Domenic scored the next five points. Then the alarm on Arthur’s phone buzzed, meaning they’d been at it for three minutes, and they both stopped cold.
Arthur said, “Okay, salute.”
The two stood again at their guard lines with their heels daintily pressed together at right angles. They then tucked their masks into the crooks of their left arms, held their foils first up to their noses, then swept them down and away, and finally walked forward to exchange an awkward left-handed shake at the centre line.
“Grab some water,” Arthur said, and they reached for bottles at the base of the column supporting the scoring box. “Ev, okay, great bout. Your lunge was great. I want you to watch your recovery. Keep it small, keep it controlled. Overall, good.”
“I was on my heels too much,” she said. “I couldn’t generate any priority.”
“Okay, how were your feet? Domenic’s older than you, and he’s breathing harder. Look at him, he’s huffing and puffing. What does that tell you? How are you going to beat him?”
“More footwork,” said Evelyn, her tone rising; a test balloon.
“More footwork,” said Arthur.
There was a jagged physical sensation in Claudia’s chest. The compass rose of her heart swung around, recalibrating. She was in bright company, feeling the sweaty sense of inclusion, a combative conviviality.
Hung on the wall, above the foils and masks, were four heraldic crests: wooden shields painted in blocks of red, white, yellow, black. Anonymous iconography suggesting loyalty to a team or nation she had never known. In that nation, citizenship required willingness and effort, and actions were recognized.
Claudia had found a home.
***
She ate little that night, her body tense and vibrating with new information. Since January she’d been trying to answer just one question: could she be happy alone?
Prêt. Allez. Parry, riposte, parry, lunge, point.
She ordered a cord of firewood the next day, and two weeks later, when it came tumbling out of the delivery truck’s tilting bed and onto her gravel driveway, she stacked it herself.
***
The snow came early that year. It began when it got dark on Halloween night, the incandescent light in that part of town bestowing a strange violet haze, glittery and kind of frothy. Claudia got a little lost to herself looking at it out the window of the Fresh Start. It was a Monday, and the air smelled like chocolate.
Ten minutes before her shift was done, the door rang its bloopy electronic tone—she’d have preferred an actual bell, but the owner liked this doodad, which also counted the number of times the door opened—and Evelyn from the fencing club came in, unwrapping a scarf from her face and shaking snow out of her hair.
“Claudia,” she said. “Hey!”
“Oh, hey, Evelyn,” said Claudia, “how are you?”
“A bit low, you know? Could use a coffee before I get going over there.”
“You change nights at the club?”
“No, I’m there two nights a week. Sometimes three, if I can do it.”
“No trick-or-treating tonight?”
“No. It’s just me, so nothing like that.”
“Yeah, me too.”
“You should come in an extra night. Mondays are good.”
“Maybe I’ll do that.”
“So, this is where you work, huh?”
“This is me.”
Evelyn took in the mint-green tabletops, the off-off-white counter, the foggy plate-glass windows, the three patrons, and the one other employee, a grad student named Leanne, who relieved Claudia three nights a week, and in whom Claudia saw herself from fifteen years earlier.
“Looks like a nice place to work,” said Evelyn.
“A profoundly rewarding career choice,” said Claudia.
“Oh, whatever. I’m twenty-eight and I work in a call centre,” Evelyn said, and laughed.
“Same difference, I guess.”
“I guess.”
“Coffee. You want it to go?”
“You know what, maybe I’ll sit a minute.” She took the nearest chair, pulling it from beneath the table that Claudia had wiped down just a moment earlier.
Claudia picked up the coffee pot with the black rim and filled a mug to within a quarter inch of the lip. Evelyn then tore open two sugar packets and, pinching them together, poured the contents of both into the cup.
“So, fencing twice a week,” Claudia said. “That’s a commitment.”
“It used to be five.”
“Seriously?”
“It
was kind of my thing.”
“I guess it must have been. I can’t do anything five times a week. I mean, I show up here, but only because I have to.”
“I had it in my head that I was gonna make it to the Beijing Olympics. I’m goal-oriented. If I couldn’t make Beijing, I was gonna be in London. Or die trying, I guess.”
“Did you?”
“Nope. Wrecked my knee falling off a bike. Guy opened his door and I went right into it. Surgery. It was a mess. I didn’t pick up a foil, didn’t put on a mask, for eight years.”
“Jeez. But you went back to it.”
Evelyn nodded. “You know how maybe there’s one thing in your life where you feel like you have some control? I guess it was that. I had to go back to fencing so the rest of my life wouldn’t feel so scattered.” She looked away from Claudia, down at her mug. She picked it up and blew on it, had a scalding sip, then tore the foil off the top of a little cup of two percent milk and poured it into the coffee.
“I don’t think I have that one thing,” said Claudia, still holding the coffee pot aloft, her other hand on her hip.
“I didn’t know I had it until I didn’t have it.”
“Maybe I should start getting rid of things until I figure out what I have.”
“Ha! Maybe that’ll work!” Evelyn took a long sip of her coffee.
“You want more?”
“Nope. Gotta go. I have to go fence some teenage boys now. If you come Mondays, I can fence you instead.” She laughed again.
“If only to spare you from that fate.”
“Seriously,” said Evelyn. She stood and put a toonie on the table. “That cover it?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay. Thanks. See you Thursday night?”
“You will.”
And Evelyn was back out into the snowy night, trudging across the street and into the old brick building.
***
That night, while the snow continued to fall, a black bear tripped the motion-sensor floodlight outside the back door of Claudia’s cabin. The bear, likely in a state of panic—round and shiny, it would soon be going into hibernation—had found its way into some food scraps in the garbage, in the shed she’d mistakenly and uncharacteristically left unlatched.
Claudia pulled aside her curtains and watched its long claws tearing through the flimsy dark green bag. Then she lay back in bed listening to it grunting and banging. Continued listening, after it stumbled away, to the great silence, the snow still falling and insulating the world. It hummed below, throbbed slightly—she could feel it—but the snow muffled any noise.
In the morning, she had to brush aside nearly a foot of snow to find the trash the bear had left behind, and in the end she missed some of it; it would have to wait until the spring. In fact, she could hardly see any evidence that the bear had even been there. The ground was soft and white, and all its tracks were gone.
***
The winter settled in more deeply, and Claudia continued to train. She stuck with her Thursday-night classes, when the blueberry smell blanketed the town, but came for a few Mondays, too. Mostly she fenced the teenage boys, though she did face Evelyn when circumstances allowed it. Some classes, she spent a half-hour fencing herself, practising her lunge against one of the padded columns where Arthur had illustrated strike points on an opponent’s torso with five small Xs made of white tape.
In the New Year, minutes before a class was to begin, Arthur took Claudia into his office and sat her in a chair before a desk.
“Wanted to show you something,” he said. “I notice you sticking close to Evelyn, and I think that’s great. She’s exactly the kind of person you should be learning from.”
Claudia had, before Christmas, indicated to Arthur a desire to test for her yellow armband—the next level up from the white beginner’s stripe. Since then, Arthur had been speaking to her in terms of role models and good lessons and generally suggesting that she conceive of some sort of arc to her training and fencing goals.
Arthur shook a computer mouse, and the monitor on his right blinked on. He began clicking through folders. “Yup. Here.” He turned the screen toward her.
Evelyn, in the photo, was beneath an opponent’s strike, so low to the ground it was as though she’d found a hidden trough. Her left leg was splayed out straight behind her, the foot gently resting, instep to the ground. Her right leg was drawn up tight to her chest and planted so firmly it appeared to have roots. Her foil was in the shape of a comma, like it had corkscrewed through the air to find the tiny exposed spot on her opponent’s flank. The photo was framed in such a way that you could see the scoring system lit up to record Evelyn’s hit.
“Look at that,” said Arthur. “This is what I want you to aspire to. The form. Look at the power. This is the payoff for her training. Look at the strength.”
“Was this from before she hurt her knee?”
“She tell you about that?”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah, probably not long before. She was ranked. She tell you that?”
“No.”
“Didn’t think so. She’s not much of a self-promoter.”
He faced the screen and stared silently for a moment, almost glassy-eyed. Feelings of leonine pride bumped visibly in his chest. “The form,” he said, “the lower body. The lower body is magnificent here. Everything’s where it should be.”
“That’s beautiful,” agreed Claudia.
“That’s it,” he said. “Stick close to Evelyn. Do what she does. That’ll teach you more than I can. That’s all I wanted to say.” He turned the monitor back toward himself and stared hard at the photo for another minute.
Claudia stood, left the office, and went across the dark floor to where she’d left her bag. She began preparing for class. Arthur asked her to lead the warm-up, and she felt no nerves. Only later did she consider what this meant: that she felt comfortable among them. She led them in the run, and the stretching up to the ceiling, and in pogo-hopping around the gym, the sweeps, and the wind sprints. She called out in the language in which she was gaining fluency, and all the bodies moved in response.
After a talk at the whiteboard on conditioning and on the fine points of the parry four, they left their foils on the floor and practised leaping into a lunge, starting at the end line and jumping forward as far as possible to land on one leg, the other held out behind them in a straight line. They balanced there, head raised to look forward, arms airplaned out to their sides, feeling their thighs burn and shake until Arthur released them. Then they did the other leg. Claudia anticipated, with some happiness, the warm ache she would feel in her legs as she lay alone in bed that night.
After that, they all picked up equipment and walked to pistes, to pair off and begin practice bouts. And just as Claudia lowered her mask, preparing to fence a boy named Miles, Arthur called to her.
“Claudia, come get suited up to fence electric.”
The only other fencer suited up for electronic scoring, with the silver lamé over her white jacket and breeches, was Evelyn.
Claudia understood that, at this point, winning wasn’t the goal. Still, she felt a twinge of nerves. She held the younger woman with new regard now, with such reverence and esteem for who she’d been. That photo, Claudia thought, was fucking marvellous.
Evelyn helped her thread the body wire down the sleeve of her jacket, and then to slip on the lamé and plug it all in. They tested the scorer with their foils, and then they saluted and stood on guard.
We are martial and consecrated, Claudia thought, engaged in this beautiful combat.
They danced across the piste, feet thundering, their blades clanging with such lovely sounds.
Claudia scored an early point when Evelyn missed a heavy lunge and left herself vulnerable a beat too long. All Claudia had to do was poke Evelyn’s chest, with as much effort as tacking up a photo with a pushpin. It surprised them both. Claudia could only just see Evelyn’s eyes through their masks’ screens, but she sensed anger in
them. Anger not at Claudia, but at herself, for such a lapse. Failure to recover after a missed attack. Basic stuff, even Claudia knew. And she’d seen Evelyn fence enough to know that she was in for a barrage of attacks now. Evelyn didn’t play it safe when she was cornered.
Evelyn kicked up her footwork, her blade movement. She came out of the en garde position in a flurry of metal. Claudia decided she would do her best to weather it, and no more. She was still in awe. There would be no shame in being defeated by her hero.
Claudia listened to their footfalls, to the soft squeaking of the pulley wheels, to the buzzing of the scoring bible, and to Evelyn’s soundings, grunts and sighs in response to her own efforts.
Evelyn tested Claudia’s blade with a number of teasing taps, then struck quickly for the navel, but Claudia retracted her hips and flew her feet out backwards so that Evelyn’s foil found only the empty air. Claudia tried a short, quick attack then, but was parried. The women traded offensive pushes, ping-ponging between the warning lines, but then Evelyn grew furious and Claudia could not even see her blade.
“Halt. Four-one,” Arthur said, pointing at Evelyn. “Prêt? Allez.”
Evelyn flew at her again, and before the three-minute buzzer had time to sound, the score was nine to one.
Arthur called “Halt!” for the last time. Both women removed their masks, saluted, and stood with their shoulders heaving. That was all, for a moment. Just breathing. Then they moved toward one another and shook their left hands.
Evelyn smiled and said, “You’re good, Claude, you did good.”
Claudia, who’d now spent a year deciding her own truth, chose to believe her.
***
That night, Claudia found the bottom of a bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon. It was hellishly cold out, and the stars were hard and clear over the trees and the silver snow. She shovelled logs into the stove as the roof of her cabin popped and groaned. The fire was hot, maybe unsafely so, and she wore only a camisole and fleece leggings. She could feel the heat on her reddened arms and chest. The stereo throbbed with Taylor Swift.
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