Spitfire

by Evan Balkan

  Caroline expected this from the men, with their folded newspapers and cigarettes and their cheap hats and blazers. But from the women, too? Shouldn’t there have existed some feminine bond that oozed encouragement? One lady, right across the row from her on the trolley, actually scowled. She was a young woman, no older than Caroline’s own mother, and they locked eyes for a moment before Caroline, as was her place and station as the younger, had to look away.

  The disapproving looks threatened to overpower her excitement altogether. And Caroline needed that excitement, needed the adrenaline to pump her up. Because when it left, a nagging sense of doubt remained in its wake. And that was the last thing she needed. If she was honest with herself, she harbored enough doubt just below the surface to last her a lifetime.

  As the trolley approached the shadow of the hulking Sports Center building, it was almost too much to bear. She realized now that she’d failed to fully consider the reality of what was ahead, despite the blatant stares of her cowardly fellow citizens. Sure, she knew intellectually that she’d be the only girl. But what that meant, and what was in store for her because of that fact—that was something she had simply failed to absorb or examine. Now was the moment of truth.

  She realized that it was primarily the sense of duty she felt she had to her father that kept her going, that prevented her from pulling the trolley cord way too early, skipping the stop, and heading right back home. Trying out for a boys’ hockey team was actually a terrifying prospect.

  It would be so much easier to do what other girls her age were doing. She should be dismantling any thoughts of rebellion or lack of convention and simply slot herself into the well-worn grooves of expectation. She should finish school, find a man, get engaged, get married, have children, keep a home, and take her place in the carousel of the American Dream. Why should it be different for her? Why did she do the things she did? She had no answers to those questions—no answers apart from some vague notion that pursuing crazy dreams was something her father would want for her.

  “You can do anything you want to do,” she recalled him telling her, and when she looked at that stick and saw the Clippers logo there, well, it felt as if her father was sitting there next to her on the trolley. And that was enough to sustain her as she headed into the building and presented herself at the tryouts.

  The reaction was predictable enough. Everyone stopped and stared at her. At her. She was a she. Here, at a tryout for a hockey team. Some of the boys gawked. Others laughed outright. When the coach spotted her putting on her skates, he removed the whistle from his mouth and scrutinized her, saving his longest appraisal for her hair.

  “This for real?” he asked.

  Somewhere, from deep inside, in a voice she hardly recognized as her own, she managed, “Yes, sir. This is for real.”

  By way of response, the coach flashed an amused grin and then blew the whistle. “Everyone on the ice,” he shouted.

  All the kids, two dozen of them, spilled onto the rink. It was like a funnel and they bumped into one another. Caroline took a hit and tipped on the edge of her skates, threatening to topple before righting herself with a flail of her arms.

  “Sorry,” came a deep voice, and then a boy’s outstretched arm reached for her, steadying her.

  With his help, she regained her balance. “It’s okay,” she said, but really she felt like she was going to throw up. Nerves. “I’m okay,” she repeated, more for her own convincing than for his.

  And then she looked up and recognized his face. At least she thought she recognized it. She stared at him. Yes, there was something in the face, in the eyes. She definitely recognized him. But from where?

  “Caroline Panski,” the guy said through a big smile. “I should have known.”

  She just looked at him.

  “Alan Petrauskas,” he said.

  Alan Petrauskas! The creep who hit her on the pond. The idiot she walloped the day she found out her dad died. The jerk who beat up Joseph and then disappeared afterward. The absolute living scum. A feeling of disgust rose up in Caroline’s chest. Bad enough she had to prove herself to a bunch of idiot boys, but to think Alan Petrauskas would be one of them. Ugh.

  “Let’s go, boys,” the coach bellowed. “Line up. Far side. Skates and sticks up!”

  Getting reacquainted, as distasteful as it would be, would have to wait.

  The first exercises were easy enough—one line feeding pucks to the other, one-timer shots after receiving the pass, then switch lines. Caroline did well enough. Cross rink passes were a piece of cake, and one-timer shots were no problem, either. She failed to get solid contact on most of them, but she never whiffed, as several others did. Alan, she noticed, was terrific. He wound up and got solid wood on every slapshot, sending each hurtling into the netting. His only miss clanged against the post.

  Next came sprints from blue line to blue line, back and forth, with no indication of when they might rest. Chest heaving, sweat soaking her hair, Caroline could feel the burn in her legs, the throbbing of her feet in her skates. She couldn’t help but notice Alan excelled here, too. He was the first one to the far line, first one back, again and again until he’d actually lapped several of the other players. Little wonder; he must have been pushing six feet tall with broad shoulders and a jaw both squared and dimpled. Sweating copiously, his hair had fallen in dark cords across his forehead. He was breathing heavily when coach finally called for a water break. One of the boys dry heaved into a trash can, but within moments, Alan looked ready to take to the ice again.

  But the coach hadn’t called them out yet and as the players chugged their water and tried to recuperate, one of the boys, a mealy-mouthed kid with a constellation of pimples across his cheeks, pointed to Caroline’s stick and laughed.

  “Look at that thing. Ain’t even a real stick.” Practice had been so intense to that point that none of the other boys had any real opportunity to home in on this easy mark. But now, it proved irresistible. “That thing is flimsy,” one of them said. “Let me see that,” said another as he yanked it out of Caroline’s hands.

  A fiery shiver shot up her spine. She had long ago, in some deep intractable way, mentally morphed her very own father onto the face of the Clippers captain on her stick. They looked nothing alike, of course, the old grizzled sea captain and her handsome young father. But, still, to see him manhandled this way, mocked and ridiculed, it was too much. She blinked away the blind fury clouding her vision and made a move for her stick. But she was too late. Alan already had the stick in his hands.

  “That isn’t yours,” he said to the twerp who took it away. “Besides, it’s pretty cool,” he added, handing it back to Caroline.

  No one dared challenge Alan, who had already established himself as the leader of the team. Caroline didn’t know what to do or say. She had once loathed Alan, but he’d clearly gone through a transformation. Was that what military school did to you? He was, apparently, polite—and gorgeous. What on earth had happened to him?

  Still, Caroline hadn’t forgotten how much of a jerk he’d been in the past, so she took her stick back without saying thanks. There was little time for expressions of gratitude in any case. The coach ordered everyone back onto the ice for more drills. It went on this way for another hour before the coach called it quits and told everyone to come back tomorrow if they hadn’t had enough.

  Caroline took her time leaving the ice. She sat down and leaned against a wall, watching the boys slowly make their way off the ice. They were too gassed to say anything else, each boy apparently too tired to worry too much about a girl. Besides, while she was far from the best, she clearly wasn’t the worst, either.

  “Coming back tomorrow?” Alan asked as he skated past.

  Caroline nodded, but didn’t look up. Unconsciously, she rubbed her fingers back and forth over her stick’s Clippers logo.

  When she got home, Caroline dropped her equipment next to the door and slumped into the big red chair. Mrs. Panski leaned out of the
kitchen, and said, “Get washed up. Supper’s ready,” and then disappeared back into the kitchen.

  Caroline dragged herself out of the chair to the dinner table. She didn’t say a word during the meal. She even nodded off once.

  “What’s the matter?” Mrs. Panski asked.

  “I’m exhausted.”

  “Well then, finish up and get on to bed.”

  Caroline took her dishes into the kitchen, pushed in her chair, and dragged herself upstairs. She barely made it through brushing her teeth and hair before she collapsed into bed, too exhausted even to crawl under the sheets and blankets. She was grateful for the exhaustion. It allowed her mind to go blank, which was a very good thing. When everything was reduced to the physical, it meant that nothing else got through. The physical—muscles, tendons, bones—she could rely on. It was all the other stuff that got in the way and made life messy.

  Later, Mrs. Panski tugged on the sheets and blankets, untangled them, and pulled them up over her still-sleeping daughter. Then she bent and kissed Caroline on the head and turned out the light.

  WHERE THERE HAD BEEN two dozen or more kids at tryouts the day before, on the second day there were fewer than twenty. From the moment she got out of bed, Caroline had felt the soreness from her toes to her shoulders, but some twelve hours of sleep had healed the minor aches and pains, and after moving around a bit, she’d worked out the worst of the kinks. Besides, the soreness felt good. It felt like she was doing something real again.

  But once she was out on the ice, replaying the drills from the day before, executing the same moves, putting the same pressures on the same points—quick twists and turns and “ankle-breaker” drills—she could feel every inch of herself, and every inch hurt. She even considered quitting once, when a tight twitch in her left calf embedded itself in her muscle and burrowed deep, almost into the bone. It was a subterranean hurt, a bottomless bruise that she knew would not work itself out anytime soon.

  It would be easy to quit. She could blame it on the muscle bruise. It would be easy to convince herself that she’d given it her best shot, that she didn’t see it through because, after all, her calf betrayed her. She could tell herself, in all honesty, that it wasn’t due to lack of effort.

  But quitting was more difficult than carrying on. She wished it wasn’t that way, but it was. She’d shut down most of the previous year, and now that her switch had been turned back on, she wasn’t ready to turn it back off.

  “You all right?”

  Caroline looked up from kneading her calf to see Alan standing over her.

  “Yeah. I’m all right,” she said and promptly stood and hopped back on the ice. She skated over to take her turn in line for a drill where two players raced into the corner to dig out a puck. She wasn’t sure why she’d said she was okay. She wasn’t. It hurt. Bad. But she didn’t want to tell Alan that. She didn’t want him to know.

  It had been over a year since they’d been out on the pond together, and yet, in some palpable way, she was still fighting out there. But fighting something different now, something she didn’t quite understand. Back then, it was all so obvious. Alan was a creep and he deserved to lose his teeth. But now? She found that she wanted to impress him, show him what she was made of. But this time, it was for very different reasons.

  During the first break, the two of them sat on the far end of the bench, the other players congregated nearer the midlines.

  “Is it a cramp?” he asked, after observing her limp off the ice.

  She shrugged. “I guess so.”

  They were both silent awhile, still breathing heavily from the exertion.

  “So, where did you disappear to?” she asked finally, deciding that it was too much effort to stay mad at him. Clearly, he was a different person now, and he was trying to be nice.

  “You mean after you knocked out my tooth?” He smiled as he said this, which allowed her to smile at the recollection, too. Besides, she could see he had a mouth full of teeth, in two perfect rows. The little nugget that had loosed itself from his gum and skittered across the ice must have been one of the last of his babies. “I went to Nottingham Academy, up in Aberdeen.”

  She’d heard he’d gone to military school and guessed that Nottingham must be the name. “Why would you do that?” she asked.

  “Not much choice in the matter.”

  “Oh.”

  “I was pretty mad at my dad at first. All the way up there. Took two hours on the bus. I couldn’t believe we were still in Maryland. But it was good for me.”

  “You got to keep playing hockey, obviously.”

  “We have a great rink up there. I was captain of the team last year.”

  “You’re really good.”

  “You’re not so bad yourself.”

  Caroline smiled.

  But it was short-lived. Soon they were back out on the ice, and that familiar old burn followed.

  That night there was no time to think about Alan and his transformation. Her aching toes were barely under the sheets and her head barely on the pillow before Caroline passed out cold. This was the pattern each night of the week, and the time progressed with Caroline moving through it increasingly zombie-like.

  Each day she woke, pulled herself through breakfast, hauled her gear along the trolley line—she was no longer conscious of the stares, choosing to ignore them and too tired to care anyway—arrived at the Sports Center, ignored Coach’s malevolent smile, and then hit the ice in yet another seemingly impossible turn. It was the sort of numb otherness she imagined her father might have faced in combat, a strange combination of switching off your brain and moving through the world on autopilot, relying on reaction and instinct even as your senses were sharply attuned, hyper-aware even.

  She swore that on the trolley ride she could hear the crackle of the electric wires, smell the peppermint chewing gum from other riders, feel every solitary little bump and ruffle on the line, continuing even after she got off, feeling each pebble on the sidewalk. It was the same thing out on the ice. A whoosh of air from a passing player felt like a burst. Whispered grunts turned into shouts. Slight brushes of an opponent’s jersey felt as if someone had thrown a soaked woolen sweater at her, landing with a hard thud against her aching body.

  And then it was over, just at the very moment, it seemed, that her body was ready to give up and her toes threatened to explode from pain. Then, she did the trolley trip in reverse, staggered up the stoop to her house, dropped her gear by the front door, and slumped into the red chair. Each night, her mother poked her head out of the kitchen and registered Caroline’s presence—“Oh, you’re home. Well, get washed up”—and Caroline dutifully did, a machine fit now only to take orders.

  She managed her way through dinners, head on her hand, ignoring Sam, ignoring the world, ignoring her taste buds even, mechanically shoveling in the food, for she was ravenously hungry, but failing to register any of it, before falling into bed to do it all again the following day.

  And then, amazingly, somehow, the final day of tryouts arrived. She’d lasted the entire week. In fact, she realized as she ate breakfast that morning, she actually felt better physically than she had since day one. She’d done her best and would have no regrets. And yet this wasn’t some silly lark. This wasn’t a situation in which she could pat herself on the back for a job well done, knowing she hadn’t made the team but proved some point anyway, a shout to the world that a girl could do whatever a boy could. No, she deserved a slot on the team.

  And when she arrived on the last day Caroline saw that only sixteen of the boys remained. And there would be at least fifteen roster slots, if not sixteen, meaning maybe everybody would make it. After practice, Coach announced that the posted list with final cuts would be hanging outside his office door. “Get cleaned up,” he said, “And then check your assignment.”

  Caroline was confident as they made their way to Coach’s office. She even joined the boys in lighthearted banter and joshing, ribbing one of the guys for
his whiff when they practiced penalty shots. And, it seemed, the boys had accepted her. They appeared to have forgotten she was a girl, or they finally didn’t care. Suddenly, the prospect of making the team, of having survived the weeklong ordeal, had equalized them all. Such pettiness as gender wasn’t part of the deal. Plus, in looking at the numbers, they all knew they’d be offered a roster spot anyway, secure in the knowledge that for three nights a week for the next few months, they would be back here, practicing with the squad. They’d be hockey players.

  At first, she couldn’t decipher the looks on the boys’ faces as they scanned the list. Then she recognized it. It was a look of consideration. It looked, in some weird way, not all that different from the awful expressions the army men wore when they came to tell her about her father.

  At first, there surfaced a strange ripple of protection. They literally shielded her from seeing the list before some unspoken current between them made them step aside, allowing her to move through them almost like some grim receiving line. And then they were all standing behind her, watching as it dawned on the girl—she was a girl again now; no one could forget that, not ever—that hers was the only name not on the list.

  The boys seemed to dissolve, fizzle away. It was just her now, standing alone in the hall outside the coach’s office.

  She bit back the tears, aware that crying would only provide Coach with confirmation of his decision. Then she pulled herself together, and, hesitating just a moment, banged her fist on the door.

  The door flung open, and there he stood, whistle still dangling around his neck. He stared at her, and Caroline stared back, a silent showdown.

  “Can I help you, Panski?”

  There in the bowels of the Sports Center, a hideous cinder block office like a jail cell, Caroline Panski, not yet thirteen years old, demanded an explanation.

  He told her to come in, have a seat. The office smelled terrible, due to the disgusting, sodden-end cigar he had clutched between his teeth. He didn’t even bother to remove the revolting thing from his mouth as he talked.