We Ride Upon Sticks

by Quan Barry

  * * *

  —

  Like the Cowboys and Lions on TV, every Thanksgiving the Danvers Falcons football team went up against the Gloucester Fishermen at 10:00 a.m. sharp, snow or shine. This year we were looking to squish the fish at home, though most likely we would get squished, because so far that season the football team had racked up only a single chalk mark in the win column, a victory involving a lucky break against Winthrop, the break being the Vikings’ star quarterback’s wrist. Though we hadn’t seen Coach Mullins since the Topsfield Fair, we could now sleep easier at night, knowing that with the win, he would not be asphyxiated by his own facial hair.

  Restful sleeping aside, Thanksgiving morning only four of us from the field hockey crew schlepped out to Deering Stadium in the bright November cold to watch Log Winters and his bandmates get gutted by the Fishermen 28-2. There was something doubly pathetic about your only points coming from a safety.

  “At least it wasn’t a shutout like last year,” said Abby Putnam. In honor of Thanksgiving, she was eating cranberry sauce straight out of the can.

  “Why does football get such a big crowd?” wondered Becca Bjelica. Only the usual parental suspects had showed up at our last two playoff games, though our crowd size was slowly increasing the closer we got to Worcester.

  “Tradition,” said Sue Yoon. “Plus there’s nothing else to do on Thanksgiving.” It was true. These were the days before stores like Ann & Hope and Lechmere got replaced by Target and Walmart, before the movie theaters opened Thanksgiving afternoon and everyone in retail had to work basically nonstop through the stampedes of Black Friday all the way to New Year’s.

  Tradition! Little Smitty thought-sang à la Fiddler on the Roof. Everyone knows you do football in the morning, then pig out.

  Thank god for Emilio! We all nodded in agreement. Little Smitty wasn’t talking much as it hurt to move her face, but with us, it didn’t matter, all of us wired up via our blue armbands like a game of telephone but without the tin cans. Despite the football team’s blowout, we were glad she came. The cold air was doing the Contusion good, all of our faces numb from the November wind.

  “See you Saturday at our photo op?” said Becca Bjelica.

  We groaned and nodded, both horrified and secretly thrilled by Larry Gillis’ crummy idea that the whole team should gather in our prom dresses and get our picture taken somewhere inside the Gillis family mansion while gripping our field hockey sticks. Even the girls who weren’t going to the prom, like Heather Houston and AJ Johnson, had promised to be there, the non-promgoers planning on just wearing black. Little Smitty gave us a thumbs-up. She and the Contusion would be there too, stick in hand.

  Back at home, she didn’t bother to change out of her sweats. It was another day without a shower as the Contusion was hot water averse. This year there was much to be thankful for in the Smith household. Thanks to the Contusion, Little Smitty would be allowed to roam the festivities without having to put on a dress or comb her hair or even make pleasant conversation with relatives she saw only on Thanksgiving, Christmas, and possibly Easter. The Contusion had written her a hall pass allowing her to be her true foul and ill-tempered self, to let it all hang out in a household normally filled with sunshine and lollipops. Who knew she had so much to let hang out?

  Thanksgiving at Smith Farm also saw the last of Berta. It seemed like only yesterday when Berta, the almost-four-hundred-pound pumpkin the family farm had grown, came in second at the Topsfield Fair’s giant gourd competition. In a way, Berta, like syphilis, was the gift that kept on giving. And giving. People didn’t realize it, but disposing of a four-hundred-pound pumpkin was almost as onerous as growing it. The Smiths had been hard at work demolishing Berta bit by bit ever since taking home the second-place ribbon. Like a fallen tree, Berta couldn’t just be thrown in the compost. You had to cut her up into small compostable pieces. On more than one occasion Little Smitty had donned the family face mask (oh, the irony!—for that, she wore a face mask, but for field hockey…) and fired up the chain saw, doing her part to disassemble the giant gourd.

  Now here at last was the last of Berta smoldering on the Smith family sideboard, the smell of cinnamon lacing Berta’s smooth pumpkin flesh. Little Smitty could feel her mouth watering as her mood went even further south. It was almost unbearable watching the whole Smith family tree including assorted extended relatives and their guests tuck into the cornucopia of goodness, plates colorfully heaped with the riches of the earth. And what was she of the blue and swollen face eating this Thanksgiving? Plain spaghetti. Even meatballs were too much for the Contusion.

  Bob Smith raised a glass in the air at the head of the table. “Another season is behind us, and the most important thing we harvested this year, as always, was the milk of human kindness.” At the other end of the table sat his loving wife, Jennie, beaming like the goddamn sun itself.

  Little Smitty had never realized how sappy it all was. The toasts, the cloth napkins, the annual argument about the differences between yams versus sweet potatoes, the little girls in red velvet dresses, the boys in clip-on bow ties, patent leather everywhere, the faint autumnal smell of the barnyard every time someone opened the back door. Little Smitty sat at the kids’ table in her ratty old sweats drinking a Budweiser that she’d poured into an empty can of Coke, the subterfuge sucked up through a straw. She and her sister, Debbie, still sat at the kids’ table due mostly to their size. Their cousin Doug, who went to the University of Maine and was 6'4", had been sitting at the adults’ table since seventh grade.

  This year, Doug brought along his first-year college roommate, a native Californian named Brad. Little Smitty had never met a Brad before. To her way of thinking, Thanksgiving in California was probably a dinner eaten while barefoot, involving salmon and an afternoon of surfing.

  “What happened to your face?” Brad asked point-blank. He was sitting next to her at the juncture where the two tables were pushed together, the adults on high, the kids sitting as if coloring at the Playskool table in a pediatrician’s waiting room. Consequently, from her plastic kiddie chair, Little Smitty found herself peering into Brad’s armpit. Despite the smorgasbord of food, his plate was filled with only Three-Bean Surprise, a fact that the whole Smith family was too polite to comment on, figuring it was a Californian thing.

  “Muh ace?” Little Smitty mumbled, genuinely caught off guard. For once, she wasn’t being sarcastic. She really didn’t know what he was talking about. All day long nobody had mentioned it. Ever since it happened, the whole world was trying to act as if the Contusion didn’t exist. Some of her relatives tried to avoid looking at her all together, but when forced to, they gave her a big broad grin as if all were well and she didn’t look like the victim of a beehive attack who got into a car accident on the way to the hospital. Each morning her dad still assigned her chores; she still helped her mother gather eggs and count the chickens at the end of the day before shutting the coop, everyone acting like everything was hunky-dory. As Little Smitty was learning, often the milk of human kindness resulted in the sludge of everyday denial. Of course, silence had its privileges. For long stretches at a time, she could forget that she looked like the love child of the bride of Frankenstein and the Elephant Man.

  What nobody wanted to admit: after all was said and done and the Contusion had come and gone, the chances of Little Smitty’s face being right as rain were slim to none. When the swelling went down, they’d all step back and see what the tide brought in, what the lay of the land would look like for the rest of her life, what mark of Cain would be stamped upon her for all eternity, this once-sunny girl whose personality had changed over the course of the summer until now even her body bore the physical proof of this transformation.

  Yet here was this total stranger, a Californian, no less, openly studying her injury as if appraising a diamond. She could see it in his eyes, the thing that would carry her through stormy seas no
matter what the tide brought in: the Contusion made her interesting. Out of the mouths of Brads! Suddenly, she saw a path opening before her, a path that would lead through the rest of her life. The path telling her to just run with it. No makeup. No hiding. She had never really been a Smith anyway, all sunshine and lollipops. She had simply been acting the way the world said girls were supposed to act. Ladylike. Conversely, Emilio had decanted her true self. Yes, it was Emilio who had led her to this moment, to the Red Unicorn’s high stick blasting her face. From here on out, the Contusion and whatever aftermath It wrought would help her find her true people.

  “She got hit with a field hockey stick,” said Debbie on her behalf.

  “Gnarly,” said Brad.

  When Brad put a hand directly on one of her young cousins and pushed him (playfully?) out of the way so that Brad could get the last piece of pecan pie, Little Smitty felt a window crack open in her chest the way she sometimes cracked open the bathroom window to let out whatever she’d been smoking, only this time, something was leaking in.

  “Yoo ant to see muh abbit?”

  “I’m game,” said Brad. He nudged her in the ribs. “Get it? Game?”

  Without putting on their coats the two of them went out the kitchen and headed to the barn. It wasn’t cold enough to blanket the horses, but they could see the animals’ breath scrolling out of their large oval nostrils. The rabbit warren was located up a set of stairs in the hayloft where the temperature was slightly warmer, the heat from the bigger animals rising up into the rafters.

  “What is it?” asked Brad as Little Smitty pulled a small white oblong of fur out of the cage.

  “A baby angora,” she said, pronouncing it clearly despite the pain involved in the effort. “This is Luke Skyhopper.”

  Brad stroked the rabbit’s ear with his middle finger. “Luke looks like you forgot to throw in a dryer sheet.” He held his hands out in front of him like someone waiting to be handed a human baby. As she stood watching Brad gingerly hold the thing she loved most in this world, Little Smitty felt the window in her heart break as if someone had thrown a baseball through it.

  “Ut re yoo doing Atoordee?” she said.

  “Saturday?” he said. She nodded. “Nothing,” he replied, gently rubbing Luke Skyhopper against the side of his head until both his and the rabbit’s hair crackled with static electricity.

  For the first time since the Red Unicorn, Little Smitty smiled, though it didn’t look like any emotion most of us would have recognized.

  * * *

  —

  We began to arrive at White Arbor, Girl Cory’s glorious house on the hill, around five o’clock. The white palace on Summer Street was something of a landmark. There were always rumors going around town about who lived there. Before Larry Gillis bought it, people used to say it belonged to Robert Redford. Bert and Ernie were standing out by the street where the long driveway started. Ostensibly they were there to help us pull in with our parents and our dates, but Summer Street was just two lanes, and it was super easy to make the turn and drive on up, so they were basically just expensive lawn ornaments. They were probably charging Larry their overtime rate, maybe even time and a half, but it didn’t matter. Probably Larry just wanted them out front to make the whole thing look like something important was going down.

  Three stretch limos were parked in the circular drive at the top, all of them also rented and paid for by Larry. Each one could’ve probably fit twelve easy-peasy, so we really didn’t need three, but Larry was all about excess. The limos were so shiny we were reflected in their glossy black paint as we passed by, a river of miniature girls and boys like an ancient frieze depicting a procession of the gods. One of the assistant photographers took a series of candids of us reflected in the limos. From what we could tell, this one photographer’s only job was to document the taking of the official portrait.

  We showed up with our parents and our dates, our parents just tourists with their own cameras strapped around their necks, though again, since Larry had hired a wedding photographer and his team, there really wasn’t much for our parents to do except stand around and try not to wonder where the time had gone, their babies growing up so fast, blah blah blah.

  For thirty minutes we didn’t know where to look as we tried not to blink. It was excruciating. We weren’t sure who felt stupider. The boys looming at our shoulders, corsages in hand, looking us in the eye as they slo-mo slipped the elastic bands around our wrists again and again until it looked just right; our parents, who had nothing to do but try to take up as little space as possible while feeling poor and wondering why this total stranger had paid for three stretch limos when there was absolutely nothing wrong with the family Taurus; the ones among us like Heather Houston and AJ Johnson and Sue Yoon, who weren’t going to the prom, instead opting to spend the night together at AJ’s; or those of us who were indeed going to Caruso’s Diplomat over in Saugus on Route 1 to eat beef, chicken, or salmon, our hair a mile wide, our dresses a mile wider, all of us with our sticks gripped in our fists along with our satin clutches.

  When a deeply battered yellow Town & Country minivan pulled up, its back window duct-taped together, and a familiar-looking face got out, we all held our breath. We watched as Brunet Mark ran around to open the passenger-side door. Then everyone gasped, including the photographers. Internally all of us on the Emilio party line began shouting things like, hell yeah! and work it! Heather Houston chiming in with an ave regina!

  The head photographer shot a whole roll as Julie Minh made her entrance into the foyer. She was an ’80s prom dream, like something straight off MTV. The girl had put her G periods to good use. Years later, when asked by our daughters to describe the most perfect prom look ever, this was all we could come up with, as the most perfect prom look ever defied words:

  It was sleeveless.

  It involved a satin cummerbund.

  It was, in fact, a tuxedo.

  And it was purple.

  We didn’t ask Julie Minh what had gone down earlier at her house when she’d debuted the look to her mother, but it was obvious that the Kalings weren’t standing around White Arbor feeling dumb like the rest of our folks. Later, we heard through Heather Houston’s mom that Mrs. Kaling had tried to sprinkle holy water on her daughter, afraid that she’d been possessed, which maybe wasn’t too far from the truth.

  Julie Minh’s majesty aside, our own dresses were magical in their excessiveness. Ave the ’80s! The only thing bigger than our hair was our outfits. Most involved huge tiered petticoats under a floor-length gown, rivers of satin and taffeta. Maybe someday we would look back at our choices and sadly shake our heads, but prom night ’89, that day seemed like it would never come. And the colors! Turquoise and orange. Hot pink and green. Salmon and fire-engine red. Girl Cory’s gown was wedding-cake white and encrusted with tiny crystals; each time she moved it was like watching snow fall as it glitters in the moonlight. Jen Fiorenza’s dress was bubble-gum pink but with an added feature. The entire front panel all the way down to her waist was made of lace, much of it strategically located so you technically couldn’t see her nipples, but everything else was pretty much on display. Bogs Bjelica found himself wishing he could have convinced Becca to wear a traditional oplicko, but he teared up, thinking how American his daughter looked in her chartreuse strapless mermaid silhouette, for which she had plenty of assets to hold it up.

  “Okay, a picture with just the ladies,” said the photographer. Our dates wandered off to sample the spread Larry had catered. Bert and Ernie were already loading up their plates, Bert’s unibrow as if he’d somehow rolled it in breadcrumbs.

  We got in formation, arranging ourselves on the wide staircase, an army of Audrey Hepburns at the end of My Fair Lady. Furtively we looked around, trying to size up one another’s dates. Abby’s Bobby Cronin was stuffing himself with deviled eggs. Bobby was someone we could no longer look at
without wanting to knee him in the balls. Brunet Mark was there with bells on, so to speak. The guy hadn’t gone to his own prom, so this was a first for him, and his excitement was obvious. Girl Cory had deigned to go with Richard Wolf, arguably the handsomest senior at the Prep and captain of the lacrosse team, which meant he was a total douchebag. Becca Bjelica was there with a new boyfriend du jour, some kid named Barry, who so far had only made it to second base but was deeply thankful for every second he spent there. Jen Fiorenza’s plan of going with Beverly soccer phenom Robby Branson of Camp Wildcat ankle-spraining fame fell apart when Robby allegedly came down with mono. The other plan involving swim captain Reed Allerton had never really gotten off the ground despite Boy Cory’s best efforts. Now, for appearance’s sake only, Boy Cory was her date instead. All night the Claw tried to keep as much space as possible between the two of them, which was just fine with Boy Cory. Mel Boucher, a trailblazer in the net, was also a trailblazer off the field, as she had decided last minute to go stag, just a girl and her Splotch. And who was this shaggy-haired fellow named Brad who had shown up with Little Smitty? In time, we learned he was also a college man and a Californian to boot. Based on those two descriptives alone, we decided that Little Smitty had won in the Best Date category, but the evening, as they say, was still young.

  Thanks to the Contusion, the photographer made sure to angle Little Smitty in such a way that her new facial friend wasn’t visible. We all stood on the winding staircase brandishing our sticks in the air, a horde of pillaging Vikings fresh off the boat.

  “Say cheese,” said Larry Gillis, who was also recording everything with his five-hundred-pound camcorder.