We Ride Upon Sticks

by Quan Barry

  “They still play at Worcester?” says an incredulous Heather Houston.

  “Location location location,” says Cory Y.

  Coach Peters is already turning to head into the field house, her coaches flanking her, a stack of binders and clipboards in their arms. “Bring in the nets when you’re done,” she says, but we can’t tell if she’s talking to the 2019 Danvers Women’s Field Hockey Team or to us.

  “How about some penalty shots?” says Jen Fiorenza.

  “Really?” says Abby.

  “You and me. Five apiece,” says Jen.

  “Crush her, Mom,” says August. Her twin nods.

  Mel Boucher puts her helmet back on and staggers into the net. We circle up to watch. Thirty years ago in Worcester, regulation play ended with the score tied at two goals apiece. We went into a fifteen-minute overtime period, and when it was still tied after that, we launched into ten minutes of sudden death, first team to score wins. The night was dragging on, the moon a deformed ball, our fingers numbed. The refs kept looking at their watches. They got paid by the game, not the hour. At the end of sudden death, the rules say if no team has scored, it moves to a shoot-out. So that’s how it happened. The whole season came down to a series of penalty shots, each team choosing five players to take one shot apiece directly on net.

  Today we stand on the twenty-five just like we did that night in Worcester. Jen Fiorenza steps up to the line. Penalty shots in field hockey are like penalty shots in soccer. Dumb luck accounts for most of it. Before the player even takes the shot, the goalie has to make a determination which way she’s going to dive and commit to it all the way. Consequently, it becomes a mind game. The shooter trying to fake out the goalie, the goalie trying to read her.

  Mel Boucher whacks her padding hard with her stick. We can hear her blast out three long breaths. That night in Worcester as she made her way into the net, we all whacked her in her padding for luck, in the cold her breath streaming out her helmet.

  Today Jen manages to get two past Mel. Not bad. That night in Worcester, Greenfield won the toss and elected to go first. Between their five players they scored twice. Our first three shooters all missed—AJ and both Corys. We needed two goals to tie and force another round of shots. It had been decided that Abby would go last. Both she and Jen needed to score, or the season was over. Jen took a deep breath. Her bald head shining like a beacon in the stadium lights. It was her and her alone standing there. In a way, she was as naked as the day she was born. Then she gripped her stick and slammed the ball in the net.

  This afternoon Abby steps up to the line. She’s using one of her daughters’ sticks. It’s a fiberglass composite. In our day, everything was wood. “Sorry, my friend,” she says to Mel Boucher, who whacks herself again in the chest. Then smooth as Abby Organics Apple Butter, Abby Putnam nets all five.

  Elle Putnam smacks her mother on the ass. “Putnam pride,” she yells. “Don’t fuck with us.” Abby doesn’t admonish her daughter. After all, when you’re right, you’re right. She simply nods, high-fives her twins.

  * * *

  —

  By 1692, Putnam Pride had seen nineteen people strung up, one man pressed to death, and several others dead after rotting away in jail. So it’s kinda funny that Abby Putnam ended up marrying a fellow Putnam, albeit a kindly 9-to-5 accountant type turned CFO of Abby Organics who’d grown up in the wilds of Florida and didn’t even know the difference between a Putnam and a Porter (the Putnams’ 17th-century geopolitical enemy). Maybe she did it so her daughters would have her last name. After all, why be born into a famous family filled with generals and assorted pushers and shovers, then get married and be nominally demoted?

  Of the pushers and shovers, arguably the most famous Putnam ever was little twelve-year-old Ann Jr. Ann Jr. was a busy little beaver. Her accusations in part were responsible for the deaths of fourteen people including church matriarch Rebecca Nurse. Her mother, Ann Sr., even got in on the act, taking her cues from her daughter and her daughter’s young friends by claiming she herself had been tormented by spirits and that the rapid deaths of her sister and her sister’s three children were all the work of darkness. Thomas Putnam, Ann Jr.’s dad, had lawsuits going against half his neighbors. It was all about land and influence. Thomas Putnam wanted Salem Village to break off from the wealthier, more industrial Salem Town—because, uh, freedom!—and when Salem Town finally allowed Salem Village to hire its very own minister, he made sure the Reverend Samuel Parris sided with the Putnams in all things Putnam. (To this very day there’s still a section of Danvers called Putnamville!) The Reverend Parris knew who buttered his bread. He went so far as to claim there was a devilish conspiracy among the faction of villagers who refused to pay his salary. These words would come back to bite him in the arse when many of those same villagers ended up dead.

  Lots of things came back to bite lots of people in lots of arses. In 1706, seven years after both her parents died, leaving her to raise her nine siblings, Ann Putnam Jr. stood up in the Salem Village Meeting House and asked for forgiveness from both god and man. Imagine putting yourself out like that! Say what you will, the girl had guts. If you were a young girl in the winter of 1692 with nothing to look forward to but marriage in a world that believed in the devil, what would you have done? More than three hundred years separate the trials of Ann Putnam Jr. from her descendant Abby Putnam-Putnam. The Saturday after missing the penalty shot that lost us the state championship, Abby Putnam gathered us, her teammates, in the woods out by the reservoir just east of Putnamville to claim that her hands had been cold, that she couldn’t feel her fingers, that she’d simply missed, case closed, please forgive her, et cetera.

  “Bullshit,” yelled Jen Fiorenza. With her newly bald head, she looked like an alien life-form from Star Trek: The Next Generation. She sat cross-legged on the hard December ground, smoking a cigarette and sucking on a Blow Pop. Her smoke smelled faintly fruity but there was nothing fragrant about her anger.

  It was late, a few minutes to midnight. You could feel the electricity in the atmosphere, the kind that comes from dry frigid air that makes your wool mittens crackle when you rub them together, the static a shade of blue. Most of us had spent the day after losing to Greenfield lazing around in our pajamas. We’d passed the night at Girl Cory’s, popping open a few bottles of bubbly from her stepdad Larry’s wine cave. None of us got drunk. Mostly the bubbles just took the edge off the feeling of suddenly having nothing to do.

  “You’re right,” Abby said quietly.

  “I knew it,” said Jen.

  “I missed that shot on purpose.” We gasped. Julie Minh grabbed her crucifix as if to cover Jesus’ delicate ears.

  “Why?” asked AJ Johnson.

  Abby did a few jumping jacks before answering. Technically winter was still more than a week away but it was seriously cold. “All season long you guys said Emilio made you do this, Emilio made you do that.” She glared at Little Smitty. “He made you pull a gun on two of our classmates.” Little Smitty shrugged and grinned because who doesn’t love a rascal? Next, Abby looked in Julie Minh’s general direction. “He made all of us destroy property just because somebody’s chest got willingly thumbed.” We’d never seen Julie Minh blush before—Sue Yoon didn’t even know Asian people could. Abby shook her head. “I’m done,” she said. “There is no Emilio, there never was. There’s just us.”

  “But we stunk so bad at Camp Wildcat,” protested Heather Houston. Her words surprised us. She’d always been the most skeptical, the one most likely to be voted Most Likely to Pop Your Bubble and Enjoy Doing So.

  “Maybe once Mel dug in, we all did,” Abby theorized. “Maybe it was all just about having each other’s backs.” We pondered this, each of us in our own orbit. “Isn’t that what being a team is all about?” You could hear her ideas forming as she spoke. “Nobody else believed in us, but we did. Or maybe we didn’t. Maybe tha
t was the problem. Emilio was just a crutch.”

  “You mean like Dumbo with his magic feather that makes him fly,” said Sue Yoon.

  “It’s possible,” AJ Johnson said slowly, as if doing the math. “Once back in October, I took my piece of the sock off for a whole two weeks. It was giving me a rash,” she explained.

  “Yeah,” admitted Becca Bjelica. “I mostly only wore it on game days.”

  “See?” said Abby. “If Emilio’s magic were real, there’s no way I could’ve missed that shot. It would’ve gone in no matter what, and then we’d be stuck doing whatever Emilio wanted for the rest of our lives.”

  “Then how did I get to be prom queen?” asked Julie Minh.

  “You worked your ass off all season long sewing that totally radical tux in the Home Ec room,” said Girl Cory. Plus, you’re non-threateningly cute. Nobody wants a real queen for a queen, she thought, but she didn’t put this forward, at least not to all of us.

  “Listen,” said Abby. “Back during the whole witch trial thing, my great-great-great-great-whatever claimed all kinds of stuff, like that her neighbors were the instruments of the devil. And people ended up dead.” She took off her winter jacket. “From here on out, I’m only going to put my money on things I can see,” she said. “And that’s us. I believe in us.” Then she took off her Izod turtleneck.

  We only had a small fire going that night, one the once-and-future Cory Young fed with dryer lint as she’d learned to do in Boy Scouts. In the December cold Abby stood there before us shivering in her bra like so many women through the ages standing naked before their accusers. Without further ado, she untied her part of the blue tube sock still knotted around her arm, the thing ratty and frayed. “So yeah. I missed on purpose,” she repeated. “Nothing made me do it. Just little ole free me, and I’m enough.” Then she threw it in the fire, picked up her clothes, and marched off. Through the leafless trees, the waning moon tittered, a prankster slapping her knee at having pulled one over on all of us.

  * * *

  —

  Out on her back deck, Cory G. presses a button and voilà! We’re cooking with gas. It’s early evening. The stars are starting to make their appearance. Tonight it’s their night. In the coming total dark, the stars will be brighter than even they ever thought possible. There’s no rehearsal dinner, no Jack and Jill party, just us. Tomorrow Mel Boucher will finally become legal when she marries Tom, her paramour of thirty years, this man otherwise known as Coach Mullins, who still sports a crazy beard, though now three decades later it’s considered hipster cool.

  Their love story is actually pretty unremarkable. It turns out Coach Mullins was twenty-four in 1989, six years older than Mel. We always were bad at guessing adult ages. The first time that certain je ne sais quoi sparked between them was when they randomly ran into each other in Spencer Gifts where they were both buying battery-powered handheld fans for UNH sports camp. In the aisle of edible panties, Mel says she could hear a small voice in her head telling her he was the one.

  “Now that I think about it,” she says, “maybe the voice was coming from my neck.”

  Either way, in the Internet age, Mel and Tom have built an empire selling novelty products. Stuff like fidget spinners and bumper stickers that say things like NO BABY ON BOARD. After all these years together they finally decided to get hitched when their seven-year-old granddaughter started asking questions. As we said earlier, sometimes you can’t know something isn’t going to be another icky story until thirty years sail by without incident.

  As we sit eating hot dogs and soy dogs and every conceivable dog along the protein-dog spectrum, we chat about old times. Sue Yoon tells us Emilio Estevez has never been to Danvers. “Two years ago I was at the Golden Globes after-party,” she says. “My left boob fell out of my Calvin Klein. Emilio’s standing there drinking an Evian. Some guy in his entourage yells, ‘Man down.’ I was like, ‘Have you ever been anywhere near Salem, Mass?’ ” Sue shakes her head. “He did say he once ate an Italian ice at Revere Beach.”

  We eat, we drink, we compare pictures of our kids, our cats, our lovers, the new lanai we had built on our house; eventually we catch up on what the old football crew is up to. (Rumor has it Log Winters is a three-term congressman from New Hampshire; his co-captain, Brian Robinson, who Little Smitty caught in the middle of an assignation in the woods, is happily married to the new king of aboveground swimming pools, Reed Allerton (they have two beautiful twins, Summer and Autumn); Sebastian Abrams, who even in the ’80s never knew the inside of a closet, competed as Claire Voyant on the eighth season of a certain drag TV show (Claire sashayed away after flubbing the lip-synch to Cher’s “If I Could Turn Back Time.”)) The stars wheel themselves through the sky, the time for their close-up nearing. Cory G. has rented us a limo, one of those gaudy SUV types. It pulls up at eleven. We bring the champagne with us. Evan the body man stays behind. “Be good,” he says, “and if you can’t be good, don’t get photographed.”

  The limo drops us off where we need to be, and we make our way into the woods. The path is different, wider and more like an actual trail where people maybe run or walk their dogs. Cory Y. starts the fire. For kindling she uses pages from our old high-school yearbook featuring photos of her former self. A set of Bluetooth speakers appears. AJ Johnson syncs it to her phone, and the night fills with our old pal Janet Jackson—who’s in her mid-fifties!—letting us in on a little secret that still holds true:

  This is a story about control—

  My control. Control of what I say, control of what I do.

  And this time, I’m gonna do it my way.

  Cory Y. is the first to get naked, her Kate Spade mini-dress off and thrown on a bush. We try not to look, but we do anyway, her rounded breasts beautiful in the moonlight, her body a blessing. And when we see what’s going on between her legs, we don’t give it another thought, because as women we know genitalia don’t define who we are. On our team of sisters, she’s one of us, always has been, always will be, cock or no cock. It’s none of the world’s business.

  Fifteen minutes to midnight the fire is raging, the rest of us in various states of undress. Heather Houston pulls out a mason jar of distilled water with a few crystals in it and sets her intention. Five minutes to midnight Becca Bjelica throws a fire blanket on the flames. We crane our necks skyward. For a moment you can see the edge of darkness sitting on the lip of the moon, the darkness waiting to overrun the light. This is the story of our lives. Joyously the rest of our clothing comes off. A solid band of blue tattooed around each and every one of our arms where a certain blue tube sock used to live.

  From out of the darkness figures arising, a ghostly army: our mothers, our daughters, our sisters, our friends joining us in our dance—there’s Coach Butler with her bad knees, her trucker’s cap, Marge who just this past spring at the age of eighty-one has finally gone to play for the head coach in the sky—all of us naked as the day we were born, each of us a candle in the darkness, because while the moon is our soul sister, unlike her we are no one’s reflection—we shine in dark places by the light of our own being.

  Hit the earth three times with your stick. Lift your eyes to the hole in the night. Remember that darkness simply requires another way of seeing. Be your own light. And just like that, you’ll find yourself everywhere instantly. Field field field, one of us thinks. Hockey hockey hockey, we reply. There are so many things to say in the language of our kind, but really, nothing more needs to be said.

  Author’s Note

  While I have tried to be as accurate as possible regarding all place names as well as the history surrounding Danvers and the Salem Witch Trials, please know I have taken liberties with weather, days of the week, and the phases of the moon, among other things. Additionally, this is a comic work and does not reflect the tremendous gratitude I feel for the hardworking men and women of the Danvers public schools—who educat
ed me and instilled a deep love of the arts—and to the Danvers Police, for their competence and kindness. Aside from some well-known historical and public figures, any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental—with the exception of our much-beloved coach Barb Damon (1937–2019 (“Look Out for #1!”)). What is 100% factual: the 1989 Danvers Falcons Women’s Varsity Field Hockey Team was, is, and will always be totally awesome.

  Permissions Acknowledgments

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

  Farrar, Straus and Giroux and Faber and Faber Ltd: Excerpt from “This Be the Verse” from The Complete Poems of Philip Larkin by Philip Larkin, edited by Archie Burnett. Copyright © 2012 by The Estate of Philip Larkin. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux and Faber and Faber Ltd.

  HarperCollins Publishers and Faber and Faber Ltd: Excerpt from “The Hanging Man” from The Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath, edited by Ted Hughes. Copyright © 1960, 1965, 1971, 1981 by the Estate of Sylvia Plath. Editorial material copyright © 1981 by Ted Hughes. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers and Faber and Faber Ltd.

  Kobalt Music Publishing America, Inc.: Excerpt from “Control,” by Janet Jackson, Terry Lewis and James Harris. Reprinted by permission of Kobalt Music Publishing America, Inc.

  Reservoir Media Management, Inc. and Capizzi Music Company: Excerpt from “Monster Mash,” written by Robert Pickett and Leonard Capizzi. Copyright © 1962 by Gary S. Paxton Publications (BMI)/Reservoir 416 (BMI). Administered by Reservoir Media Management, Inc. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Reservoir Media Management, Inc. and Capizzi Music Company.