Gimme Everything You Got

by Iva-Marie Palmer

  My back hit the dry grass with a thump, and I made a sound that was like a gulp in reverse. Bobby was on the ground next to me in an instant.

  He pushed the rope of my ponytail out of my eye and gasped. “Oh no, I’m so sorry,” he said.

  I couldn’t speak, with the wind still knocked out of me, but I moved my head a millimeter in each direction, as if to say, “Don’t worry about it.” But I was worried about it. I couldn’t talk, and my voice and breath felt caught in my throat. I inhaled through my nose, welcoming the oxygen.

  “We have to get you to the nurse,” he said, helping me up. “Thank God we’re on school grounds.”

  With his arm around my waist, he led me through the school—it was mostly empty, though the distant strains of band practice carried down from the choral room and mingled with the squeak of shoes from boys’ basketball practice, which had started last week. We headed toward the nurse’s office.

  “Shit, she’s not here this late,” he said, setting me down on the vinyl bench where I’d once lain down through a bad bout of menstrual cramps. “Hold on.” He rooted through the cabinet, came back to peer at me, grimaced, shut the cabinets, then opened the small icebox under the nurse’s desk. He produced an ice pack, which he wrapped in a paper towel and handed to me. I pressed it to my swelling eye.

  “I can’t believe I did that. Are you okay? Can you talk? Do you think I should take you to the hospital?”

  I stood up. He was so nervous, I couldn’t help but feel worse for him than I did for myself and whatever had happened to my eye.

  “I’m fine,” I said, regaining my voice, or a croaking version of it. “Really. I think you should go back out there and elbow everyone as hard as you can in the eye, because then we’ll all know we can take a hit. It was the right move.”

  Bobby laughed. A good, deep, generous laugh that warmed the drafty room. I didn’t know how the first sentences I’d uttered after regaining my ability to speak were somehow the exact right thing, but I was apparently getting more comfortable around Bobby.

  “Okay, let’s go suggest it,” Bobby said, waiting for me by the door. I liked that he said “let’s.” I walked out in front of him as he locked up the office. In the hall, he motioned for me to pull the ice pack away from my eye. Gingerly, I lifted it. Bobby drew a sharp breath.

  “It’s bad, isn’t it?” I said.

  “Do you want to find a mirror?” he asked.

  “No, I like surprises.”

  He laughed again and smiled at me, with eyes that were—was his gaze wistful? Or did I want it to be? “You really are something else.”

  I knew it didn’t mean he was falling in love with me, but I’d remember it as feeling that way.

  When I emerged onto the field again, the entire team was clustered near the fence, waiting for us.

  “She’s not dead,” Tina said, jogging out to me and throwing an arm around my shoulder. “Shit, that was scary.”

  “Can you talk?” Joanie asked, coming so close to my face that with my eye covered, it looked like there were two of her.

  “How bad is your eye?” Dawn said. “That was a hard hit.”

  “Don’t remind me,” Bobby said.

  “Did you check her vitals?” Dana asked him, ever making a checklist.

  “Do you even know what that means?” Lisa teased her.

  “Like, her heartbeat and like, what if she’s dizzy? Are you dizzy? Could you have a concussion? Did you hit your head? What year is it? Who’s president?”

  “I’m not dizzy. I fell on my back. It’s 1979 and Jimmy Carter is president but people say not for much longer. And thanks for asking.” She was annoying, but she was thorough.

  I pulled the ice pack away from my face. Everyone gasped.

  “Okay, I’m canceling practice tomorrow,” Bobby said. “I want you all rested for Saturday and I think I need a day to recover from that.” We started to head for our jackets and bags, but he held up a finger. “But first I have an announcement.”

  The word “announcement” gave us all pause. Tina looked up from working out a nasty knot in her cleats. Marie stopped midway through shrugging on her jacket. A look of concern traveled from player to player, like a wordless game of telephone.

  “I didn’t know what was going to happen when I took on this team. I just hoped I’d be lucky enough to find some hardworking, good players,” he said. Under the light, each time he exhaled it sparkled. The ice pack, which had started to soften against my face, seemed to tighten as a gust of wind slipped by. “I was more than lucky.”

  Was? Was he going to tell us this was it for soccer?

  “And sometimes, when a great group of players is lucky enough to find each other, they’re also lucky enough to have a great leader among them. A captain. We have one, but we don’t know it yet.”

  He looked right at me.

  “I want her to know this has nothing to do with me clocking her in the eye,” he continued, “and everything to do with the fact that she not only pushes herself as hard as anyone—and that’s saying something—but she also wants, more than anything, to push this team to the next level.”

  I was as frozen as the ice pack against my face.

  “Susan Klintock, if you want the job of captain, I think we’d all agree you’re more than up to the task.” He was looking at me like he’d gotten down on one knee to propose marriage. And I would have said yes.

  “Me?” I said, my eyes widening, which just made the left one hurt again.

  The team erupted into cheers.

  “I’d love to,” I told them.

  And that’s how the day I got my first black eye became the best day of my life.

  Twenty-Six

  My mom wasn’t happy about my black eye. Which, okay, it would be a stretch to imagine anyone’s mom being thrilled to see her kid come home with a puffy, purplish encroachment surrounding his or her eyeball, but my timing for a facial atrocity was also lousy.

  After answering her initial questions, which were all variations on “What the hell happened?” with my answers all being a variation on “It was an accident,” she rooted through the freezer to find a bag of frozen peas that she alternately pressed to my eye and removed to see if the discoloration had magically disappeared. “What are we going to do?” She huffed out a sigh.

  “Hide me from polite society?” I offered.

  “Very funny,” she said. “We’re lucky Polly’s such a nice person, or she’d think we did this on purpose to ruin the wedding photos.”

  “I doubt she’d think we did this,” I said, taking the peas from her as I sat at the kitchen table for a dinner of baked beans and cut-up hot dogs. I thought of Joe’s fondness for the meal and decided not to be disgruntled that captains of the football team probably got celebratory steaks. But then I hadn’t mentioned that I’d been given the captain spot yet.

  “Well, we need to make sure Polly’s not blindsided by this,” Mom said, letting out a grim laugh at her unfortunate pun. “She’ll be nervous enough for her big day.”

  I scooped six beans and one hot dog slice onto my spoon. It was a good ratio. Maybe this wasn’t the worst meal. “Don’t you think it’s a little weird that you’re this concerned about Polly having a nice wedding day? Shouldn’t you be at least kind of amused by my wrecked face spoiling the harvest dream?”

  Mom’s face suggested this was not amusing. “What kind of hypocrite would I be if I divorced your father so I could pursue a better version of myself but spent all my time angry that he’s trying to be a better version of himself?”

  “Is he, though?” I asked, thinking of my dad’s posture on the couch as he watched the Bears game. He didn’t seem any different.

  “I think he is. I just think it’s more subtle.” She sat down next to me and put down two glasses with two ice cubes in them, then poured a tiny bit of whiskey into each one. “That eye’s going to start to hurt. This will help you sleep.” We clinked glasses. I took the tiniest sip, the way she did. Th
e only alcohol I’d drunk was stuff like beer and the schnapps at our team party, some sips of church wine with Candace, never whiskey. A radiant, warm burn bloomed under my chest, like if a Red Hots candy had exploded next to my heart.

  “It’s good,” I said. Not the taste, but the fact that it fuzzed up my insides.

  “And it’s not only for the black eye,” Mom said. “I owe you an apology. I shouldn’t have said what I did about things being easier for you than they are for me, like I was jealous.”

  “It’s okay,” I said, surprised she was broaching this topic.

  “Drink your whiskey, young lady, and let me talk.”

  I laughed at that, and took another small sip.

  “I know, for one, that it’s not easy for you—at most, it’s a little less hard. And I wish it were easier. I suppose what I said came from thinking it should have never been so hard in the first place. Did you know that until a few years ago, I couldn’t even apply for a credit card on my own? When your dad and I first bought this house, it needed a new washer-dryer. We looked at the catalog, we picked one,” she said. Now she took a sip of her whiskey and went to retrieve a can of Cheez Balls from the counter. “Anyway, we decided I’d go to the store and open a credit card to pay for it. When I told the salesman at Sears, he laughed in my face. I needed my husband to cosign my application, like I was too dumb to understand what I was getting into. With a Sears credit card.”

  “And that’s why you divorced dad?”

  “No! He was as appalled as I was. I’d always been the one who handled the finances at home. But applying for these jobs, it just brings back all the same frustrations. It feels like all these people, they’re already thinking that a man would be better at the job before they even know me.”

  “Why are you doing it, then?” I dipped a hand into the Cheez Balls.

  “Because if I quit trying now, I’ll always know it’s because I was afraid of being hurt and disappointed,” Mom said. “And I know hurt and disappointment are survivable feelings.”

  “But what about all the time you put in?”

  “It’s a commitment, sure, but I’d rather risk it not working out than knowing I gave up because I was too scared.” She gently pulled the bag of peas away from my eye. “It’s kind of like your black eye. It looks like hell, but I bet you still want to play.”

  “Yeah, I do,” I said. “They made me team captain tonight.”

  “Wow, captain,” Mom said, and held her glass up. “Sounds like a toast is in order.”

  We clinked on it.

  Friday, Mom called me in sick from school. I phoned Tina in the morning to tell her what was happening, so she wouldn’t worry. “Tell everyone I’m fine. I look like Apollo Creed fucked me up, but I’m fine. I have to do last-minute wedding stuff.”

  Mom had had plans for a while to head out of town for the weekend, to see some friends in Michigan—her way of avoiding the wedding hubbub. I was still letting her assume the game on Saturday was against another girls’ team, not St. Mark’s. She had enough to worry about.

  I was meeting Polly at Wieboldt’s Friday afternoon to pick makeup for the wedding; then I was spending the night at their condo. I had a duffel bag with both my soccer gear and my pajamas, and Polly had my dress and wedding shoes, which I’d bring with me to the game. Tina had promised to drive me to the banquet hall where the ceremony would be; Joe was meeting me there after Rachel’s recital.

  When we got to Wieboldt’s, Mom parked instead of dropping me off. She took a shopping bag out of the back seat and said, “I want to give something to Polly.”

  “You’re weird, Mom,” I said.

  “I know.” She waited for me and we walked into the store together.

  Polly was waiting by the makeup counter. She wore a cream mohair sweater that girls at my school would have killed for, over matching cream pants. When her eyes landed on my eye, she put a hand to her mouth and dashed toward us. “Susan, what happened?”

  “I’m so sorry,” Mom apologized on my behalf. “If I’d known soccer was so rough, I’d have told her not to play right before the wedding.”

  Polly took my face in one of her cool hands. “You did this playing soccer? Wow. You are one tough cookie,” she said. She smiled at Mom. “I can’t be mad at that.” She turned my face from one side to the other and I let her. Maybe it was a good thing I’d decided to be nice to her from the get-go. She was impossible to piss off.

  “Well,” she said, clapping her hands together. “We’re in the right place. We’ll get some concealer and no one will be the wiser. Did I ever tell you I used to sell Avon?”

  “I bet you were the top seller,” Mom said. She pulled a wrapped box from the shopping bag and extended it to Polly. “A wedding gift.”

  Polly flushed. She touched the bow and met Mom’s eyes. “You didn’t have to,” she said. “This is so thoughtful.”

  Mom waved her off. “It’s a gravy boat,” she said. She reached into her bag again and this time emerged with a book, Creative Visualization, which I’d seen lying around our house. This copy was new. “And I wanted to give you this, too. I read it last year, and I’ve been telling all my friends about it.”

  On hearing the word “friends,” a tear came to Polly’s eye—also made up in shades of cream and gold. “I love it,” she said, clutching the book to her chest. “Though not in my wildest imagination would I have thought my new husband’s ex-wife would want to be my friend.”

  She hugged my mom tightly, and my mom hugged her back. “You’re an amazing woman, Dierdre,” Polly said.

  I saw a tear slip from my mom’s eye, too. “So are you,” she said.

  If my mom and my stepmom could get along, maybe there was hope for me and Candace. We were talking, but not really talking. She didn’t know about me being team captain, and I didn’t know what was going on with her and George. But maybe two women who approached how to be a woman in completely different ways didn’t have to feel like threats to each other.

  “Ms. Jeffries, is this the girl whose colors I’m doing?” A brisk woman in a belt that appeared to be suffocating her waist took my shoulder and turned me around, kind of roughly. She gasped. “Oh my God, her eye. How am I supposed to do colors for someone with an ugly shiner?”

  Polly gave the woman a prim smile that somehow conveyed that the woman better watch it. “Well, it’s a good thing she’s so beautiful. Isn’t it?”

  It seemed clear, then, that in my parents’ noncliché of a divorce situation, I could be a cliché, or I could appreciate that I’d been the one in a million picked to win the child-of-divorce lottery.

  Twenty-Seven

  Since my last visit, Polly had outfitted the condo’s second bedroom with a new queen-sized bed for me, a small desk that looked out the window, and a poster of a Manchester United soccer player. “I went to the little shop in Evergreen Park that sells British imports, and that was all they had,” she said. “But you can decorate however you want. Your Dad and I are hoping you might want to stay overnight more often.”

  “It’s perfect,” I said, looking forward to telling Joe about what was sort of a punk rock move on Polly’s part. My dad probably hated the poster.

  I was keyed up thinking about the game, but eventually the clean scent of the soft sheets lulled me to sleep, and I didn’t wake up until my alarm went off at seven. I dressed in my soccer gear and took both my duffel bag and the garment bag containing my bridesmaid dress that was hanging on the closet door. I neatly put the heels and the new Estée Lauder makeup bag in with the rest of my stuff.

  Polly was already up and had a breakfast of toast and eggs laid out for me. “I couldn’t sleep,” she said. “Is that your uniform? It’s cute. Who’s your game against?”

  “Actually . . . St. Mark’s . . . the boys’ school,” I said. It felt a little wrong to tell her when I hadn’t told Mom, but Polly had asked outright. What if lying to a bride on her wedding day was bad luck? I explained how I’d challenged Ken.


  “Wow,” Polly said, nodding as she took a slow sip of her coffee. “This Ken sounds like a real jerk.”

  She paused, and I was so nervous she’d tell me I couldn’t possibly go head-to-head with a bunch of angry boys on the day of her wedding. She put her coffee down on the counter and crossed the kitchen toward me. She took away my plate with one hand and put her other hand on my shoulder. “Sounds like you need a bigger breakfast if you’re going to kick their asses.”

  We’d agreed to meet at the gate outside the field a half hour before the game. Everyone was even earlier than that, and everyone was nervous.

  “Are you sure we should be doing this?” Dana asked me.

  “We can’t call it off now,” I said. My captain voice was my normal voice, just louder. “They’d call us chickens.” That seemed worse than anything else they’d called us.

  I pushed through the gate, aware of my teammates behind me.

  The stands were empty. We’d obeyed Bobby’s request not to risk the game or his job by spreading the word—and really, I didn’t expect people who saw us challenge St. Mark’s at the party to remember it had happened or believe the game would actually occur—but I thought maybe someone would show. At the very least, some assholes from St. Mark’s who wanted to heckle us. I wished Joe was there, but I thought it was nice that he didn’t blow off his sister for me.

  “There were more people at our Wisconsin game,” Joanie said, squinting toward the bleachers as if she might have missed spotting a crowd.

  “Next game, we’ll tell everyone to come. But this is still a big deal, audience or not,” Wendy said.

  “Yeah, I feel . . . strong,” Marie said. “Or maybe it’s just that all my anger converted itself to muscles.”

  “Like the Hulk?” Sarah said.

  “I guess, if he had to put up with more assholes,” Marie said.

  “Whoa,” Tina said, as we stepped onto the field. St. Mark’s soccer field—or pitch, as Joe would remind me—was only used for soccer, not football or anything else, and it had benefited from the expensive tuition the school charged. Even though there’d been some cold nights the last few weeks, the grass here was summer green, and the white lines on the field were crisp and new. “Did we die and go to heaven? Because I was hoping for a beach.”